Proteus Unbound Read Free

of fashion. He wore his natural form, with minor remedial changes. That made him a rarity. More and more, the people on the slideways all looked the same as one another. It was—soothing? No. Boring. After a few minutes he keyed in his implant to receive the communication channels.
    He had a lot of news to catch up on. With his retreat to Old City and his subsequent spell in the form-change tank, he had missed a minor political battle over optimal population levels, the BEC release of a spectacular new avian form, a revised species preservation act that applied to all of Earth, impeachment of the head of the United Space Federation on charges of corruption, and a heated new exchange of insults between the governments of the Inner System and the Outer System concerning energy rights in the Kernel Ring.
    He had also, though this was not news, missed seventy-five days of a perfect summer. But why count time when he no longer had a job? The purposive feedback process could do no more than respond to his will so there was no doubt that he wanted to live, deep inside. But for what?
    "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable . . ." And at that very moment, before the familiar words could complete themselves in his mind, the madness began again. The slideways and the scene from the news broadcasts darkened as another image was overlaid on them.
    The Dancing Man. He was back. Dressed in a scarlet, skintight suit, he came capering across Bey's field of vision. He danced backward with jerky, doll-like movements of his arms and legs. There was curious music in the background, atonal yet tonal, and the man was singing in a tuneful, alien manner that sounded like Chinese. In the middle of the overlain field of view, he paused and grinned out directly at Bey. His teeth were black and filed to points, and his face was as red as his suit. He spoke again, seeming to ask a question, then waved, turned, and danced backward out of the field of view.
    Bey shivered and put his hand to his head. He had heard Hamming's words underneath Old City, but the colonel had been wrong. Mary's loss had been desperately painful; he thought of her every day, and he would carry her holograph with him always. But something else had driven him over the edge to seek the solace of the Dream Machine: conviction of his own growing insanity.
    Since the Dancing Man had first appeared, he had checked every possible source of the signal. No one else could see it—even when he or she was viewing the same channel as Bey. Every test for outside signal had proved negative. He had mimicked the Dancing Man's speech, all that he could remember of it, and had been told by specialists in linguistics and semiotics that it corresponded to no known language. Worst of all, when Wolf went into recording mode, the signal vanished. It was never there to be played back. Physicians and psychiatrists were unanimous: the signal was generated within Bey's own head. He was suffering "perceptual disturbance" of a "severe and progressive form, intractable and with a strong negative prognosis."
    In other words, he was going crazy. And no one could do a damned thing about it. And it was getting worse. At first no more than a scarlet spot on the scene's horizon, the Dancing Man was getting steadily closer.
    And the ultimate irony: as long as he and Mary had lived together, he had been concerned with her sanity, her mental stability! He had been the impervious rock against which the tides of insanity would break in vain.
    Wolf saw that he had reached his destination, the deep-delved embassy of the Outer System. He fled for the express elevators—". . . then will I headlong run into the Earth; Earth gape. Oh, no, it will not harbor me . . ."—and plunged down, down, down, rejecting his own frantic thoughts and seeking the cool caverns of underground sanctuary.

CHAPTER 3
    "I fled him down the nights and down the days,
I fled him down the arches of the years.
I fled him down the labyrinthine ways
Of