Free Proteus Unbound by Charles Sheffield Page A

focused hyperbeam toward a destination deep in the Halo.

CHAPTER 9
    "You can run, you can run, just as fast as you can,
You'll never get away from the Negentropic Man."
—crèche song of the Hoyle Harvester

    Cloudland ships were easy to recognize: hydrocarbon hulls, bracing struts of carbon fiber, transparent polymer ports.
    Necessity and nature had set the rules. The bodies of the Oort Cloud provided a limited construction kit, little but the first eight elements of the periodic table. Metals were in particularly short supply. Rather than dragging them up the gravity gradient from the Inner System, the Cloudlander fabricating machines had learned to improvise. Less than one-tenth of a percent of the ship that would carry Bey Wolf and Sylvia Fernald to the Sagdeyev space farm was metal, and that fraction would be reduced again in the new models.
    Wolf was trying to hold a conversation with Sylvia Fernald as they prepared to leave, but it was difficult going. Two days earlier she had been friendly and at ease with him. He had known it, and so had she. They were strangers, but they had hit it off together in the first few minutes, comfortable with each other's work style and attitude. He had been pleased at the prospect of working with Fernald—Sylvia, she had asked him to call her that before the first informal planning meeting ended. But today . . .
    Today he had been wringing words out of her, one by one. "This looks as though it will only hold two people. What about Leo Manx, Sylvia? I thought he was planning to come with us."
    "He changed his mind." Her voice was expressionless. She was staring at the fine black hairs on his forearms and refusing to look him in the eye.
    Was that it? His appearance? When he had arrived at the Opik Harvester, Bey had been wearing the long-sleeved, long-legged style of the Inner System. Today he had adopted the scanty uniform of the Cloud-landers, and his physical differences were more apparent. The widespread use of form-change equipment had allowed Earth people to get used to pretty much anything. But the people he had seen on the harvester were all very similar, limited thin or fat variations on a single body type.
    She had turned to check fuel and supply status and was bending low over the panel. He moved closer to her, reaching out a muscular arm and stealthily comparing it with her pale, smooth limb. She sensed he was near her and spun around.
    "What are you doing?"
    "Nothing." Bey wondered why he sounded guilty and why her cheeks were flushed. If she stayed that jumpy for the whole trip, it was going to be an unpleasant twenty-four hours. The one accommodation shortage in Cloudland was found in their transit vessels. The McAndrew drive was fine, but the inertial and gravitational forces were balanced only in a small region on the ship's main axis. Bey and Sylvia would share that space, a cylindrical cabin about seven feet across. Standoffishness would be hard. Sylvia herself was close to seven feet tall.
    They were making final preparations for departure, running a countdown together with awkward formality, when Aybee hurried in.
    "Good. Thought mebbe I'd missed you."
    "Four minutes more, you would have." Sylvia did a poor job of hiding her relief. "Are you coming with us?"
    "No way." Aybee looked around the little cabin in disgust. "I need space , room to shine. You'd have to fold me double to get me in here. It'll be cozy enough with just you and the Wolfman."
    The tense atmosphere went right by him. He was swinging a square satchel up from his side and opening the clasps. "Talked to old Leo again, and this time we got the problem right. First time, he asked me, How can you track down an input video signal that nobody else can see? I said, Hey, I'll tell you five ways to do that, but I can't tell you which one's being used without more information."
    "Three minutes," Bey said. "Or we'll have to start over with a new countdown."
    "Loads of time." Aybee pulled from the satchel a