Bey struggled to stand upright, to lean away from Mary. She was staring at him, holding him, her eyes wide and her face close to his.
“Bey! Can you hear me?”
Grim, grinning king. Ransome is gone, Ransome is gone. The words drifted through Bey’s mind. Ransome’s head was dissolved, faded to black. Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget… Bey tried to nod, failed, and felt his legs lose all their strength.
“Bey!” The voice was Mary, his Mary, infinitely sorrowful and far away. “I’m here.” He could no longer see her. He tried to grip her hand, but as he did so, all feelings withered from his fingertips.
Mary, dressed in white and strewing flowers. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. As he watched, she grew, thinned, paled, became Sylvia, frowned at him in disapproval. Too little, Bey Wolf, too hairy. Hideous. Without warning her features flowed and became those of Andromeda Diconis. Her lower lip was full, her face flushed with passion, her red hair—red hair? Mary’s hair, Mary’s husky voice saying, “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned,” a pale face beneath flowing dark hair and an elaborate headdress. He had seen that costume before, many times.
Bey’s mind was a chaos of quantum states, transitions without warning or control, words and fragmented images intertwined.
I am dying, Egypt, dying; only I here importune death awhile, until of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips. In his mind be heard Mary speaking, saw again the cotton robe, the dark coiled hair, the tall headdress, and he fought against her grasp. But you’re not, Mary. I’m the one that’s dying. I have a rendezvous with death, at midnight on some flaming hill. But that’s not quite right, I’m remembering wrong. And this isn’t Earth. I’m dying here, far from Earth. Far from eve and morning, and yon twelve-winded sky.
I was always sure that I would die on Earth. In the evening, at the end of some perfect summer’s day. Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me.
He felt Mary’s arms tightening around him, holding him in the world. Then that sensation too was going. In the end there was nothing left, nothing to hold on to. The whole universe was blinking out of existence.
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall And universal darkness buries all.
Bey was gone.
Chapter 29
“Nothing endures but change.”
Bey had fought hard against it, but the pressure was at last irresistible. He was driven up, reluctantly up—up to life, up to consciousness, up to discomfort, up as firmly and finally as a cork in a tidal wave.
He washed ashore to wakefulness, and for a while he lay with his eyes closed, rejecting the world. But he could not block out the sounds. Close to him was a clogged, asthmatic wheeze, the rattling breath of a human being close to death.
After two minutes Bey could stand it no longer. He allowed his eyes to open and at once came fully awake.
Perched on the open door of the form-change tank, no more than six inches from his face, stood Turpin. The crow’s head was tilted to one side, and its beady black eyes glared unblinkingly at Bey. It again produced a dreadful groaning wheeze and followed it with a gurgling cough.
That was echoed by a more distant throat clearing. Ten feet beyond Turpin sat Leo Manx, his face angry and reproachful. When he saw that Bey’s eyes were open, he nodded. “At last. Good. I will inform the others.”
He stood up and hurried out before Bey could ask the first of his dozens of questions.
Perhaps it was just as well. Bey could not speak. He leaned forward in the tank and coughed his lungs clear of dark, clotted phlegm as Turpin shuffled out of the way with a squawk of rage.
By the time he could breathe, Manx was back with Aybee.
Aybee stared at the spotted floor in front of Bey. “You got me here to see that? Gross, Leo. Extremely gross.”
Bey ended a final coughing fit. “How long?” he asked. “How long was I—” He ran out of air.
But he already had some idea of the answer. A trip from the Outer System took weeks. If he and Leo were in the same room, a long time had passed. Even before he saw Leo, Bey knew that he had been in the tank for an extended session. He could feel it in the mutability of every cell.
“Thirty-six days.” Aybee looked accusingly at Bey. “Sleeping your head off, Wolfman. And you missed all the fun.”
“You were in desperate shape,” Manx said. “The form-change that you did… unmonitored… most ill advised—”
“I know. I’m supposed to be dead. You caught Ransome?”
“No.” Leo Manx was still looking annoyed. “He got clear away. We have no idea where he went, where he is, what he’s doing. Naturally, we’re still looking.”
“Mary?” Bey’s wind had gone again, and he was wheezing. He suddenly realized where Turpin had found the inspiration for that tortured breathing.
“She’s here.” Aybee paused, then caught the next question in Bey’s look. “On Ransome’s Hole, I mean. We’re still on the habitat.” He grinned. “Us and more people than I ever wanted to see in my life. Everybody you ever heard of is here.”
“Answering our message?”
“Yeah, and another one I sent a bit later. That one pulled ’em here in droves. Sylvia’s about ready to go into hiding. Hey, can you walk better than you talk? If so, you can see for yourself why things are running wild.”
“I can walk.” Bey considered the prospect. “Maybe.”
“Then let’s do it. You have to see this for yourself.”
Bey stood up, almost toppled over, and realized as he did so that he was back in his old Earth shape. “How the devil…”
“Mary Walton,” Aybee said. “She didn’t really know how to do it, but when you collapsed, she grabbed and stuffed you any-old-how into a form-change tank. Set you up short and hairy—the way she knew best. Just in time, too. Sylvia saw the monitors when she got there. Five more minutes, you’d have been fertilizer.”
“That’s what I feel like.” Bey slowly followed Aybee out of the room, allowing his body to drift along in the low gravity. So Mary was there, and so was Sylvia. Between them they had dragged him back from the edge.
He was glad to be alive. But no one else seemed too pleased. “What’s making Leo so angry?”
“He was locked up for a week. He blames you.” Aybee was leading the way into the central communications area. “Cinnabar’s even madder. Sit down there.”
Bey looked slowly around. He had sat in this chair before. He remembered coming here with Sylvia and Aybee—just. He must have been far gone.
“Why are they mad?”
“They’ll tell you.” Aybee was not listening. He was at the console, his long body tight with excitement. “Lock in and hold on to your skull. We’re going on-line.” He spoke into the vocoder. “RINI connect. Identification: Apollo Belvedere Smith. Reference: Anomalous signal generation, defined in session 302. Query: What is status?”
He turned to Bey. “Takes a few seconds. Far as I can see, that’s for encoding and decoding at this end. Their replies are instantaneous. Someday we’ll know how.”
“Whose replies?”
Before Bey could get an answer the screen was filling. The words on it echoed through the lock into Bey’s ears.
THIS ACCESS POINT CONTINUES. ALL OTHER SIGNAL GENERATION TERMINATED no equivalent. QUERY: STATUS OF ANGULAR MOMENTUM CHANGES?