Its small size was a surprise. In the Inner System, a few hundred sets of orbital elements covered everything significant. The vast majority of planetoids were uninhabited and likely to remain so, except for mining operators. Travel to any of the interesting destinations took one to a body at least tens of kilometers across, with an associated population center. There would be thousands of people there at minimum, if not the billions of Earth, the hundreds of millions of Mars, or the tens of millions of Europa and Ceres.
That Sylvia would come so far to arrive at a body with a handful of people was perplexing to Bey. However, it might also make his own task easier. He was seeking Sylvia, but beyond that he had another motive. He sought the trail that would lead him onward to the right location in the Kernel Ring and the Negentropic Man himself. Whatever lay there, it was an improbable end point for Sylvia’s travels.
There was little point in trying for an inconspicuous arrival. Space radar systems would have marked his progress and projected his arrival time when he was millions of kilometers away. Bey ignored the manual controls and allowed the docking to proceed automatically. He did not put on a suit. He was not being overconfident, nor was he a fatalist. Any dangers would derive from humanity rather than nature, and they would call for intelligence, not speed or strength.
The lock opened. He drifted through and found himself in the middle of a fairy tale. The interior of the body had been converted to a single chamber hundreds of meters across. Its vaulted walls were painted in red and white and gold, and vast murals reached up to the domed ceiling. Unencumbered by gravity, needle spires and slender minarets rose bright from the outer surface next to Bey, and lacy filaments arched between them.
He looked instinctively for signs of a kernel and headed for it right across the central chamber. No matter that he had spent much of the past week brooding on the impossible possibility of a demon inside a kernel shield, some indestructible, pachydermous, and unimaginable end product of infinite form-change that would bask and bathe in the radiation sleet within the shields. Never mind that thought. There would be a local gravity field near a kernel, and he yearned for it, even if it were a weak one—Earth habits died hard.
As he approached the outer kernel shield he was struck by a shocking thought. In his fascination at the sights within the lock, he had missed a central mystery. He could see almost the whole of the body’s interior, and although a dozen machines were visible, there was no sign of another human being. Had he come all that way on a wild chase that would end on a deserted pleasure sphere? He knew such things existed, created as the hideaways of wealthy and reclusive individuals of the Outer System. They were maintained by their service machines, patiently awaiting the arrival of their owners, and for ninety-nine days out of a hundred they were uninhabited. If no one at all was there, his journey would have been a complete waste of time and effort.
Down on the kernel’s shield Bey saw another oddity. Amid a riot of free-growing plants, a little bower had been created using a woven thicket of plaited vegetation to form a living roof and walls. The sight gave him an irrational shiver of premonition along his spine.
“Sylvia?” His voice was unsteady. Logically, he had no idea what came next, but the dark recesses of his hindbrain knew it already. He floated on down toward the kernel’s shield. “Sylvia,” he repeated. “Are you there?”
A sudden giggle came from the inside of the bower, and a curly-haired head peeked out past the tangled leaves. “Bey? Oh, my word. What have you done to yourself?” The laugh came again, this time full-throated. “ ‘Bottom, thou art translated.’ You’re so long and thin—and no hair! I knew it; you let them put you in one of your horrible form-change machines.” It was Mary, moving out to meet him and filling his arms. “Oh, Bey, you’re here at last. It’s so good to see you again.”
The questions had tumbled through Bey’s head one after another. How had Mary known he was coming? How had anyone known he was coming? That information was supposed to be a close secret. Why was Mary here? Where was Sylvia? Mary had recognized him instantly, despite his changed form, but how had she been able to do that?
He thought everything and at first asked nothing. Mary was a drug that had lost none of its strength. She still ran through his veins. He felt light-headed with unreality.
“Right here,” she was saying. Bey found himself led by the hand into the little bower and seated on a rustic bench fabricated to resemble aged and knotted wood.
It was typical of Mary that she felt no need to explain anything, and just as typical that she wore a costume equally alien to both the Inner and Outer Systems. Her print dress of faded dark purple flowers on a pale gray background belonged to another century. It fit perfectly with the bower and with the woven basket hanging over the end of the bench. She was wearing a hint of flowery perfume, light and fresh. Mary was playing a part—but which one?
“How did you know I was coming here?” Bey forced himself to ask that question, and at the same moment had a suspicion of the answer. He had told Leo Manx to tell no one—but did Leo have that much self-control? All it might have taken was one short conversation with Cinnabar Baker, and for Leo telling Baker was still second nature.
Mary was smiling at him as sunnily and possessively as if they had never parted. He thought for a moment that she had ignored his question, but then she said, “It’s just as well for you that I learned you were heading this way, and better yet that no one else saw the message before I could take care of it. Otherwise you’d have found an armed guard waiting instead of me.” She snuggled against him and laughed when she found that her head touched not his shoulder but halfway down his chest. “Oh, Bey, I’ve been taking good care of you. I changed all the messages that were going to you. If it weren’t for me, you’d have been dead or crazy long since.”
Bey had learned long ago that Mary did not lie. If her answers failed to match the real world, that was only because her perceptions of reality were so often awry. She had been protecting him, or at least she believed she had.
“What happened to Sylvia Fernald? She was supposed to be here.” He was rewarded with a frown of disapproval.
“I know all about her. The two of you have really nothing in common.”
“That’s not true.” Bey half agreed with Mary, but he felt the perverse need to defend Sylvia. “We have lots in common. She’s educated. She saved my life—twice. We get on well together, and she’s a—a nice, kind woman,” he ended lamely.
“ ‘Be she meeker, kinder than, Turtle-dove or pelican, If she be not so to me, What care I how kind she be?’ They used to be your lines, Bey. Have you changed that much?”
“I came here to find her, Mary.”
“I know. And I came here to stop you searching anymore. I know where she is, and she’s safe enough. But you don’t want to go looking for her. It might put you in danger.”
“From whom?”
Mary shook her head. Bey knew exactly what she meant. She would not lie, but she would refuse to speak. They had slipped into the old relationship, just as though Mary had left Earth—and Wolf—no more than an hour before.
“I won’t stop looking,” he went on. “There’s more at stake here than me or Sylvia. The whole system is coming unglued. That has to be stopped.”