How do you reply to something like that?
If you are a wise man, you don’t even try. You grab the chance—it only comes once—and make the most of it.
That first day, I began to arrest her. She talked me out of it in about two minutes and took me home to her apartment. I never left.
I had no idea at the time how sick in the head she was. That emerged little by little, as we came closer. Maybe it was a lot more obvious to others than to me. I always had the blinders on—I still do. When an old friend of mine, Park Green, came to visit from the Moon, we went to see one of Mary’s performances. I asked him what he thought of it, and he shook his head and said she was good but he could see the skull beneath the skin. I hated him for that, and I never told Mary; but he was right.
That might have been the thing that limited her as an actress. She could play high drama, or artificial, mannered comedy, or broad farce—she was a wonderful comedienne, but she didn’t much care for those parts. What she could not portray were simple people, because there was nothing simple inside her that she could build on. It limited her. She was always busy, always working, but in the end I know that she was disappointed with her reputation.
You know, I honestly believe that I was good for Mary. In our years together she never had to go for official treatment. There’d be times when she went nonlinear, and when that happened I’d drop everything I was doing and stay with her constantly. And she’d come out of it. But those times became more and more frequent, and more and more severe.
When she suddenly told me, without a day’s notice, that she was going off for a lunar cruise, I was delighted. Mary was always at her best when she had a new environment to learn, something fresh to challenge her. She was becoming more and more upset by crowds—an odd omen for an actress, but I didn’t read it. The Moon would offer plenty of peace and a change of pace.
She went. She called once—to say that she was not coming back; she was heading for the Outer System. And that was all.
I just about came apart.
Four months later the Dancing Man appeared for the first time. And I came apart completely.
Bey lay back in his chair and looked up at Leo Manx. “Well?”
“Good.” Manx was examining his records. “Very good.”
“You have enough?”
“Goodness, no.” Manx was incredulous. “This is a start—the first iteration. Now we can perhaps begin to learn something about you and your relationship with Mary. Give me another couple of days. Then it may be time to worry about your little dancing friend.”
Chapter 6
“Entropy is missing information.”
“Entropy is information.”
“Entropy is leftovers.”
One quarter of the way to the edge of the Oort Cloud; that did not sound too far. Call it twenty-six thousand astronomical units and it became more substantial. Call it four trillion kilometers; it was then an inconceivable number, but no more than a number.
To appreciate the distance from Earth to the Opik Harvester, it was necessary to have direct sensory inputs. Bey Wolf looked back the way they had come and searched for the Sun.
There it was. But it was the Sun diminished, Sol with no discernible disk, Sol dwindled to the bright, brittle point of Venus on a frosty Earth night.
“The element of fire is quite put out. The sun is lost, and earth, and no man’s wit, can well direct him where to look for it.” Bey, still staring back the way they had come, took no comfort from the old words and longed for the cozy familiarity of the Inner System. At his side, Leo Manx was looking the other way, scanning the starfield ahead.
“Eh-hey! There we are! Ten more minutes, we’ll be home.” The Cloudlander had already shed his loose travel suit in favor of a pale yellow one-piece. His hairless arms and legs stuck out from it like the limbs of a gigantic and excited cricket. “There, Mr. Wolf. See it now? The harvester!”
He spoke as of a first sighting, but he had already pointed out the Opik Harvester to Bey an hour before, as a dark spot occulting a tiny patch of stars. But as the clumsy bulk drifted closer, glimmering with feeble surface lights, his excitement was increasing.
Bey followed the pointing finger. For eyes conditioned by the constraints of gravity, the shape of the harvester was difficult to comprehend. A dozen spheres clustered loosely to form a central grouping, but their coupling was done by the invisible bonds of electromagnetic fields, and the configuration constantly changed. Long, curving arms cantilevered away from the central nexus, reaching out to bridge a gulf that had no end. The final silver girders and antennae of those arms grew gradually thinner and less substantial, fading so slowly into void that their terminal points could not be seen.
According to Leo Manx, the big middle sphere was roughly twenty miles across. Bey could not verify that. It was impossible to gain any sense of scale from the harvester’s main features. The whole structure had been built by self-replicating machines of widely differing sizes and had been designed to be run by them. Humans had been late arrivals, occupying the harvesters only when the final step of life-support systems had been added.
The ship’s McAndrew drive had been switched off two hours earlier, ending the signal silence introduced by the ionized plasma that propelled it. The communications unit had at once begun to scroll and chatter, urging Wolf and Manx to join a meeting that was already in progress.
Manx, happy to be back in “decent” gravity, watched Wolf’s clumsy movements for a few seconds as they disembarked, then grabbed him by the arm. “Hold tight. You can practice later.” He towed a weightless Bey along a succession of identical corridors, all unoccupied and showing no signs of human presence.
“Almost ninety thousand people,” Manx said in reply to Wolf’s question. “The harvester is a major population center of the Outer System. About ten million service machines, I imagine, though no one keeps count. They make whatever new ones they decide they need; it has been that way since the first ones were sent here from the Inner System. I’ve sometimes wondered what the machines would have done if people had never arrived in the Cloud. Would they have eventually downed tools and quit, or would they have found some other justification for continuing to modify the Cloud? If there were no humans to use the biological products of the harvesters, would the machines have found it necessary to invent us?”
To Bey’s relief, they had reached a region of noticeable gravity. He was not too keen on the other implications of that—a shielded kernel had to be somewhere near, and that much pent energy made him uncomfortable. But it was nice to have an up and a down again, even if it was only a twentieth of a g. He followed Leo Manx through a final door and into a long room with a curved floor.
Three Cloudlanders were sitting at a little round table, each dressed uniformly in a lemon-colored one-piece suit.
Wolf at once recognized the woman facing him. Given the frequency with which she appeared on Earth newscasts, it would be hard not to do so. Cinnabar Baker was one of the three most powerful people in the Outer System and a scathing critic of everything that happened closer to the Sun than the inner edge of the Cloud. Her cheerful appearance belied her reputation. There was presumably the thin, gravity-intolerant skeleton of the Cloudlander within her, but in Baker’s case it was well covered. She was a vast, smiling woman, maybe two hundred kilos in mass, with flawless, pale skin. Her hair was thin and close-cropped, revealing the contours of a well-shaped and delicate-looking skull. The clear eyes and fine skin tone gave evidence of regular use of form-change equipment.