In the back of his mind Aybee had already decided that a new and first-rate intellect must have arisen in the rebel communities of the Kernel Ring. That was the only way to explain something as radically different as the new ship. But once inside and looking around, he was forced to drop even that idea. Too many things were new and unfamiliar. Out of a dozen different internal systems, he could identify and explain maybe half of them. And those few hinted at something that Aybee had been groping his way toward for the past four years, a new landscape just beyond the horizon.
Aybee had a clear image of current science, of its peaks and valleys and gray clouded areas where theory failed. Technology advanced constantly, but it depended on models of the physical world that were often centuries old. It advanced by ignoring the foggy regions, those places where deep understanding had not been achieved and where the subtle paradoxes lurked. Aybee had charted those anomalies. It was shocking to find the misty curtain suddenly blown aside and a new world stepping forth in full-blown glory.
Gudrun had no such worries. She sat down confidently at the control board and began to follow the simple sequence of instructions provided by the panel’s prompting. The new ship did not seem to amaze her, but Aybee recalled the description of the Outer System Navy: a system designed by a genius to be run by idiots. And when he thought of the level of genius needed to come up with a whole system so different from anything he had ever seen, his skin crawled with excitement.
Five days. That was how long he would have to explore everything and find out how it all worked. Aybee had been dreading so long a trip with Gudrun, but now he wished that the travel duration were double. His usable time would almost certainly be much less than five days. Gudrun would insist on talking—or worse—for part of it, and she also wanted him in a form-change tank, wasting more precious hours.
Even while she was finishing the command sequence to move them out of the cargo hulk and on their way, Aybee was thinking hard. What he needed was a complete reversal of roles: Gudrun absent and Aybee free to explore the ship. How could he manage it?
Cinnabar Baker would have solved that problem in a moment. With stakes so high, Gudrun had to be out of action for the duration of the journey. One blow would do it; then the disposal of a corpse or the confinement of an injured body to the medical unit.
Aybee had plenty of brainpower. The idea that Gudrun could be killed or injured occurred to him at once. She had finished the control sequence and had moved to the communications unit. As she crouched before the panel with the headset shielding any of his actions, he picked up a heavy data storage case and moved to stand directly behind her. It would take only a moment, a single strike to the unprotected skull.
Now!
Aybee stared the possibility full in the face—and blinked. For the first time in his life he was forced to face one of his own limitations: He was not particularly fond of Gudrun, but regardless of logic and motivation he could not harm her physically.
He put down the case and stared at her in total frustration. At the same moment, she swiveled around in her chair to look up into his face. Her expression was curious, somewhere between cold and startled. Aybee could visualize a five-dimensional knotted manifold and manipulate its topology in his head, but he could not read that human countenance. If he had, he would have recognized a look of fear.
“I’ve been in touch with headquarters,” Gudrun said after a few moments. “I said we’ll be on our way any moment now.”
Aybee nodded. It hardly seemed like a universe-shattering revelation.
“And I’m afraid we can’t do the things we’d planned,” she hurried on. “There have been changes. I have urgent work to do on the journey, so you’ll have to occupy yourself as best you can. Don’t come in here.”
Without another word she went through to the aft part of the cabin and slid the door closed. Any child could see that something had happened to upset her very much.
But if Aybee was a child, he was the little boy who had suddenly been given the run of the candy store. He stared after Gudrun for all of ten seconds, until he heard a high-pitched whirring from somewhere beneath his feet. A new mechanism had come into operation.
Aybee felt no acceleration, but he suspected he might be hearing the drive. It was easy enough to test the idea. The McAndrew propulsion system produced a faint sparkle of eldritch light as high-speed particles collided with the occasional hydrogen atoms of free space. He went across to the port and peered out.
And gasped. There was no pinpoint twinkle of drive interactions. Instead, the whole starfield had been replaced by a tangled rainbow of color, rippling across his field of view.
From that moment, Aybee forgot all about Gudrun for many hours.
Chapter 22
Behrooz Wolf claimed to have no conscience. He denied having brains. What he had in place of both, he said, was a little voice that whispered in his ear, urging him to take actions that his natural indolence discouraged.
That voice was interfering with his work. What he wanted to do was solve the mystery of the demon of form-change, that impossible chimera that could live in the radiative inferno inside a kernel shield and send a stream of misdirection through the computer system to the rest of the harvester. And if it could do it to form-change, he realized, it could do it to everything else. It was the key to wholesale delusions and impossible sensor messages. Even the Negentropic Man himself, and Mary’s visitation, and failed mass detection systems. Something had allowed that cometary fragment to crash undetected into the Sagdeyev space farm.
That was what he wanted to do: to work on technical problems. So why was he wandering the interior of the Marsden Harvester seeking a woman whose last name he had not at first remembered?
It could only be the dreams; persistent, chaotic images that came in the middle of deep sleep. He saw flashes of Mary in indescribable danger and of vague menace creeping toward her. He heard cries of fear and pleas for help.
Or was it Sylvia that he saw? The visions blurred and faded, one face flowing to another, as he watched. And were they dreams, or were they messages, like the first one he had received from Mary? When he woke he was never sure what he had experienced. All that remained was the feeling of urgency.
Bey wandered on. He was looking for Andromeda, but Andromeda who? Leo Manx had never heard of her. Bey went to the central data bank and asked for a complete listing of all the Andromedas—Diconis, that was the name he had been groping for, but the computer offered only a general location within the harvester. She was a woman with no permanent partner and no particular job. Bey started with the dining area where they had met and widened his sphere of search from there.
His new form had a stamina level inferior to that of his Earth body. After seven hours of roaming the harvester’s corridors, asking for a woman everyone seemed to know and no one was able to locate, he was wilting. He needed food. He gave up his search, headed for the nearest dining area—and found Andromeda Diconis.
He dropped the idea of food and filled a jug with purple-red wine when he saw her. He did not expect to enjoy the meeting—So why am I doing it? he asked himself. She was alone, dressed in a cleverly cut garment that suggested body curves where there were none. He had to hurry, since she was carrying a tray of food and about to enter a dining cubicle. He grabbed his jug and a cup, hurried that way, and crowded in after her.