The glass partition was beginning to darken, the lights to fade. “What were they?” Bey asked.
“Many things. Five days ago I saw a woman, many kilometers high and dressed all in red. She had long brown hair. Her clothes were the clothes of Old Earth, and she carried a basket. She was striding across the collection layer in ten-kilometers paces. She wore a white peaked bonnet, and beneath it her face was the face of a madwoman.”
“A white bonnet and scarlet dress?” Wolf jerked upright and reached out a hand. The partition was almost black. The ceiling lights were dim glows of red.
“No more,” the white-garbed man said. His voice had risen in pitch and volume. “Our records will be available to you. You can see what came to the farm during the last year, what was sent from it. You can read what our people saw. But there can be no more direct contact. Good luck.”
“One more question,” Bey said. He was moving urgently toward the black glass. “It’s terribly important.”
But the room was dark again. There was no sound from the other side of the wall.
When the deadly strike came, each visitor to the Sagdeyev farm was in a different part of the habitation bubble. Officially, it was to allow them to eat alone. In practice, each had deliberately sought privacy.
Bey had been dumbstruck by the farmer’s last words, to the point where he was hardly thinking at all. A brown-haired female, dressed in scarlet, carrying a basket and with a white bonnet on her head—that was his Mary, Mary Walton, exactly as she had looked in The Duchess of Malfi. Bey had seen it in live performance five times and in recording another dozen.
A coincidence of dress? If so, it was too improbable a coincidence for him to accept. But if anyone were to see such visions of Mary, it surely ought to have been Bey himself—not some reclusive farmer, someone who had no idea what she was looking at. Bey sat with his head buzzing, too perplexed to feel hungry or thirsty. Somewhere on the periphery of his mind he knew that one of Aybee’s comments on entropy was vitally important. Those ideas had to be integrated with the appearance of the Negentropic Man and with elements of Bey’s own knowledge of form-change theory. But that synthesis had to wait until thoughts of Mary no longer obsessed him. The temptation to seek her was growing, even though his idea that she was tied to events on the farm was probably self-deluding.
Aybee Smith had not noticed that Bey was off in his own world, but it did not take him long to realize that talking to Bey at the moment was a waste of time. Aybee went off to a terminal and tested the farmer’s offer. The final promise had been genuine; all the farm records had been made available to the visitors. Aybee set out to make a chronology of every external interaction recorded in the previous year and then to correlate that with the hallucinations and the anomalies in form-change performance. There were many hundreds of entries, but Aybee had lots of time. He never slept much, and if necessary he would plug along at the job for the next twenty-four hours. Like Bey, he relished intellectual challenge more than anything else in the world. He felt alert, fresh, excited, and confident.
Leo Manx felt none of those things. He had been awake for two full days. He had hoped to sleep on the trip to the farm, but Aybee had insisted on coming along, and then had hardly stopped talking through the whole journey. The hi-probe quarters were too cramped to hide away in, and Aybee had been too loud to ignore. He had gone on and on about signal processing and signal encoding until Leo was mentally numb. Bey’s hallucinations, according to Aybee, must have been single-frame inserts, patched into a general signal but coded specifically to Wolf’s personal psychological profile and comlink. No one else would notice the signal, even if he or she was watching the same channel as Bey. And it would be simple to make the single-frame inserts self-erasing, so even if Wolf tried to play them back on a recording, there would be no sign of them.
Now, at a time when Leo would have welcomed a nap, he could not get Aybee’s latest comments out of his head. He rubbed at his aching temples and stared at the notes he had made.
“The entropy of the whole universe is increasing,” Aybee had said. “But that doesn’t mean that the entropy of everything in it must be increasing. In fact, life has the opposite effect. It increases regular structure—nonrandom phenomena—at the expense of disorder. Life is always negentropic. It reduces the entropy of everything that it comes into contact with. So everybody, and everything living, is negentropic in that sense.”
“But the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the one you were quoting earlier—”
“Says that entropy tends to a maximum in a closed, isolated system. It tells you nothing about open systems, ones that exchange energy with others. That’s us. We don’t live in isolation. The Sun and the stars are constant sources of energy, and every living thing in the Solar System uses energy to create order at the expense of disorder. In the thermodynamic sense, you and me and the Wolfman and Fern are all negentropic.”
“How about the other meanings of entropy? Do they make more sense for a Negentropic Man?”
“Considered in terms of information theory, the information in a message decreases when the entropy of the signal becomes less. A noisy communications channel is negentropic so far as the signal is concerned. If that’s what the Negentropic Man does, we’re not seeing signs of it. The reported random error rate for signals received in the Inner and Outer Systems doesn’t seem to have changed at all. If it did, people would be getting jumbled, gibberish messages all the time. And if that had happened, I would have heard about it.”
“And your fourth form of entropy?”
“That’s associated with the power kernels. Any black hole has a temperature, an entropy, a mass, and maybe an electrical charge. If it’s a kernel, a Kerr-Newman black hole, it also has rotational energy and a magnetic moment. And that’s all it can have—no other physical variables are permitted. A kernel sends out random particles and radiation according to a process and a formula discovered a couple of centuries ago. What it emits only depends on the kernel’s mass, charge, and spin. For a small black hole—billion-ton, say—the emitted energy is up in the gigawatt range. That’s what the kernel shields are for, to stop that radiation. The entropy depends on the mass of the black hole, but I think we can rule out this one. If Wolf’s Negentropic Man were dealing with kernels, he’d have to be a superman. Nobody could live for a second inside the shields. All you find in there are sensors, data links, and spin-up/spin-down equipment for energy storage and generation. Here.” He had thrust a data cube into Manx’s hand. “What I’ve been saying is all basic stuff. You’ll find it explained here.”
Leo had taken the cube. Sitting alone in an outer chamber of the habitation bubble, he had played it through twice. It was beginning to make some sense, considered as a set of abstract statements. But it had little to do with the capering man who had haunted Behrooz Wolf. Manx peered at the cube, closed his eyes for a moment or two, and was asleep before he knew he was near to it. All thoughts of entropy vanished. He dreamed that he was far from here, again on Earth, again roaming the old Chehel-sotun temple in Isfahan. But this time he was in free-fall, unhampered by that crushing gravity. He could not have chosen a more welcome dream.
Sylvia Fernald had the greatest need for total privacy. She was talking to Cinnabar Baker through a hyperbeam link. It was voice-only, hugely expensive to operate, and there was still an annoying thirty-second line delay before a reply could be received.