Proteus in the Underworld Page 11

  "Terrible. Where was the father?"

  "Wrong question. You mean, who was the father. Trudy wasn't saying, and as far as I can tell no one ever found out."

  "Any suggestions?"

  "Sure. Sperm bank."

  "The old Melford tradition."

  "Right. Keep the line pure, don't admit outsiders into the family. That's another reason you shouldn't get ideas." Maria was studying him. "What's happening, Bey? You've gone cross-eyed."

  "That's because I finally am getting ideas. Not the sort you think, either. Thanks, Maria."

  "Any time. Now I need sleep. Be careful, Bey. You're playing out of your league."

  "I'll remember that."

  As Maria vanished, Bey wondered what league she put him in. The league of cynical opportunists? The league of retired, over-the-hill form-change specialists? The league of nostalgic, backward-looking literature buffs?

  Certainly not the Trudy Melford super-rich beautiful-people power-players league. Still less the league of love's young dreamers. Maria might cast Bey in many roles, but that of Trudy Melford's soul mate was not one of them.

  He remembered Maria's earlier comment. Whatever Trudy wants . . .

  Except, maybe, the one thing that she had wanted most. And Bey could in no way see himself as a baby substitute.

  What did Trudy want from him?

  CHAPTER 10

  Civilization ends at Ceres.

  Or should that be Saturn, Pluto, or Persephone? It all depended how deep you lived within the solar system. But when you came this far you'd better stop having thoughts like that—or at the very least, keep them to yourself. Out here, the inhabitants of the Outer System tended to see things the other way round.

  Sondra glanced at the ship's indicator board. All the familiar worlds of the inner system lay far behind. She was moving into the unknown—to her—region of the Kuiper Belt, three hundred and some astronomical units from the Sun, where a really "large" habitable object was a celestial peanut no more than fifty kilometers across and had a mass maybe one ten-millionth of the Earth. The preferred forms of the region were as alien to Earth humans as their preferred habitats. Half the hundred passengers on the hi-vee vessel Serendip had entered the form-change tanks before breakout from Earth orbit. They were intending long stays in the Kuiper Belt, or even farther off in Cloudland, and they wanted to make their personal form adaptation as soon as possible.

  Sondra watched the first of them as they emerged from the tank compartment, and wondered again if she was really suited to a job in the Office of Form Control. As a specialist she ought to be comfortable with and sympathetic to all legal forms; but the Cloudland standard, with its skinny elongated torso and arms and diminutive legs like a cross between a stick insect and a starved giant albino ape, left her profoundly uncomfortable. The hairless, eyebrow-less head on the stalk of a neck didn't help. But no one else seemed to notice.

  By the time of the docking with Rini Base it was Sondra herself who seemed the oddity. Everyone else on board had changed, with the exception of the crew who would fly the circuit of the Belt and then head back for the inner system. Sondra noticed the stares of the other passengers as she disembarked and peered around her looking for Apollo Belvedere Smith.

  Bey Wolf had described him to Sondra before she left. Typical of the man and his twisted sense of humor, Bey had not bothered to point out that his striking description would fit every second person in the entry lobby. Sondra stared around in bewilderment, until a great, gangling figure appeared from nowhere at her side.

  "Hey! You gotta be Sondra Wolf Dearborn." He was grinning down at her, white teeth and deep-set brown eyes in a skeletal face. "You're little and fat enough, I'll admit that, but you don't look nothing like the Wolfman. Thought you're supposed to be his relative?"

  "Distant relative. I presume you are Apollo Belvedere Smith?"

  "Presumed correct. 'Cept everybody calls me Aybee." He was staring at her now with even more interest. "Distant relative, eh? Well, that explains a lot. Come on."

  "A lot about what? Where are you taking me?" Sondra hurried after him, uneasy in a gravity field that varied at every point.

  "Gotta educate you, the Wolfman says." Aybee glared at her, as though questioning whether that was possible. "Teach you stuff about the Kuiper critters you'll never find in books. Well, there's lotsa that. You'll see."

  If the Rini Base was anything to go by Sondra was seeing it already. That changing gravity field, she knew, could only be the product of kernels, the shielded black holes that formed the home of the Rinis after whom the base was named. According to Bey, Aybee Smith had actually been the first person to understand that the Rinis were a living and intelligent life-form, inhabiting the bizarre and unreachable interior of the kernels. Rini Base (RINI—Received Information Not Interpretable, the human first impression of the inscrutable life-form) had been established specifically to study them. It held the system's biggest concentration of kernels, communication finks, computer hardware, and raw brains. Looking around her, Sondra could understand hardly anything of what she was seeing.

  "Don't let it get to you, Wolfgirl." Aybee had noticed her confusion. "No need for you to cotton any of this. You're not staying here, you're heading first thing in the morning for Meatland."

  "The Carcon Colony . . . meat? I thought they favored inorganic components . . ."

  "They do. I mean meatheadland. I've looked at the results of their work. Useless. All right!" Aybee had somehow navigated his way through an incredible jumble of equipment to an open space where an empty desk and chair sat in isolated splendor. "Here we are—my office."

  "No computer? No data tap?"

  "No way. They're crutches for people whose heads don't work right." He motioned Sondra to a seat, while he prowled up and down. "We'll use a display when the time comes. First, though, tell me how old Wolfman is doing."

  "He's doing fine." Sondra gave the conventional reply, then had second thoughts. "Except that he really isn't He retired, you know."

  "I heard that. Bad deal. You shouldn't have let him."

  "I had nothing to do with that."

  "Glad to hear it. He's not an idiot, you see, like most people."

  "You're not the only one with that opinion. Gertrude Melford thinks so, too."

  "Trudy, the one and only."

  "You know about her? Anyway, she's trying to hire him."

  "What for?"

  "I hesitate to speculate." Sondra bit back her next catty remark. "But I don't think retirement's good for Bey. He's acting old now, really ancient since he left the Office of Form Control."

  "Physically old? You been wearing him down?"

  "Mentally old."

  "No worries. Don't let him fool you. He does that on purpose. His mind's as young as yours—and I bet it works a whole lot better. But I got a question for you. What's the Wolfman have to say about me?"

  "He says you're brash, arrogant, opinionated, and insensitive."

  "Ah." Aybee smiled beatifically. "That was the old me. Before I had sensitivity training."

  "But for some strange reason he seems to like you."

  " 'Course he does. Why wouldn't he? Just a mo, though, I have to do one thing before we get down to your business. Got a personal call waiting."

  Aybee sat down on top of the desk and fiddled with a dark band on his left wrist, while Sondra wondered what she was supposed to do now. He'd said it was a personal call, but she had nowhere to go. She stared around at the jumbled piles of cabinets and cables that formed the barrier of his office, and decided that it was his own fault if she overheard private discussions. She heard a discreet buzz of comment from the wrist set, then Aybee's loud reply.

  "Sure, Cinnabar. I did it already. It's on the way."

  Cinnabar? If that was Cinnabar Baker, Sondra was impressed. Baker was the most powerful person in Cloudland. And Aybee Smith was on an easy first-name basis with her. What else about Aybee was Bey allowing Sondra to find out for herself?


  "Sure, she's right here." Aybee winked at Sondra. He seemed to have his own idea of a private conversation. "I told you she was coming. That's why I'm gonna be incommunicado for a few hours." And then, after an inaudible comment from the other end, "I dunno, he never told me. The usual reasons, I guess. You know the Wolfman and his bimboes, seems he's as bad as ever."

  Bimboes. Sondra didn't bother with the rest of the conversation. She sat and seethed, waiting until Aybee fiddled again with the band on his wrist and she heard the beep of a severed connection.

  "Is that what Wolf told you?" She was up out of the chair and standing right in front of him. "That I'm a bimbo? That he and I are—are sexual partners?"

  "Hey, don't get your knickers in a twist. The Wolfman never said one word like that. Never even hinted at it."

  "So why did you say it? 'Wolfman and his bimboes!' You and your sensitivity training."

  "Don't knock the training. Maybe it don't work for everything, but it sure works for some things. The Wolfman never said one wrong word, never talked about you—but I listen to what you say, and the way you say it. That means more than the words."

  "Bullshit! I never said a thing."

  "All right, all right." Aybee held up his arms, enormously long and thin. "You never said a thing, agreed. Forget I spoke. We got work to do. Can't do it when you're up in the air."

  "I am not up in the air." Sondra made a tremendous effort and lowered her voice to a normal speaking level. "Aybee, I came here to do a job and I am going to do it. I'm not going to let innuendos and insults put me off. We can start as soon as you are ready. But we'll do it with one rule."

  "You name it."

  "No more talk about me and Behrooz Wolf, okay? No matter what you imagine we're doing and not doing."

  "No problem. You got it. To work, Wolfgi"—he saw the danger signal just in time—"Sondra. I promise you, by the time you leave here you'll know more than you want to know about the Carcon Colony."

  * * *

  Aybee's promise was easy to keep. Long before the Serendip went spiraling out around the Belt toward the independent colonies, Sondra had decided that she knew far more than she ever wanted to know about the dreadful Carcons.

  "Carcon horribilis," in Aybee's phrase. His coaching had a special style that took some getting used to. Always he said it clearly, always he said it fast, and always he said it once. At first that wasn't too bad, because what he was offering was more like a refresher course. Sondra had heard most of it before.

  "Except you were probably told it with an Earthside spin." Aybee wouldn't sit down. He prowled backward and forward, never looking once at the imaging area where a sequence of tutorial materials would appear for a few seconds and then flash off. "There's a Cloudland joke for you. It shows an Earthling's view of the solar system."

  The imager displayed a cartoon. A substantial Earth sat at the center of the frame, its continents clear and labeled. Next to it, quite a bit smaller, sat Mars, Ceres, and the moons of Jupiter. Saturn was a little misty ball with a Logian head sticking out from the mist. Far away at the edge of the image area, sketched at about a tenth the size of Ceres, little vague patches were labeled "Kuiper Belt," "Kernel Ring," and "Cloudland."

  "Whereas if you drew it to physical scale it would look like this."

  The cartoon changed. At first sight Cloudland filled the whole scene, a vast spherical array of tiny dots. The Kernel Ring sat at the center, a little flat torus only a tenth as wide as Cloudland. The Kuiper Belt lay within that, a tenth as small again. Finally the planets of the solar system, everything from Mercury out to Persephone, formed a little bright dot at the very center.

  "But empty space isn't the important thing." Sondra felt obliged to protest. "It's people that count. The whole Oort Cloud is nearly empty."

  "You bet. Let's hope it stays that way." Aybee was a true Cloudlander. "Now, you'll notice one other thing. In neither the Earthside nor the Cloudland view of things do you see the independent colonies. They're little, unimportant to the big guys. But that's where you're going, so they're important to you. Let's take a look at 'em."

  The imager was gradually zooming in. The outer parts of Cloudland vanished from the edge of the image volume. The zoom continued, and soon the Kernel Ring was gone. The Kuiper Belt filled the screen, another donut shape with Rini Base marked as a dot on its inner left edge.

  "The independent colonies." A blurred patch appeared on the right hand side of the Belt. "Independent why? Because they fight to stay that way? Nope. Independent, because nobody in either the inner or the outer system wants to lay claim to a bunch of worlds inhabited by raving loonies. We'd both rather disown 'em."

  "Aybee, they can't all be crazy."

  "Maybe not, but they come close. Trust me. I've been there. There's nearly three hundred independent colonies, three fifty if you count the far-gone ones who won't even talk to anyone else in the system. You only need to know about a couple of them, but you should see one or two others to get the flavor. I'll save Carcons and Fugates 'til last. Here's a goodie for you to start with. Be thankful you won't be visiting the Socialists."

  The imager displayed the interior of a hollowed planetoid. A pink caterpillar stretched its way along most of the inner surface. It took Sondra a few seconds to realize that the segments of the caterpillar were individual humans, bloated in body and with each one's arms and legs partially absorbed into the next section. Their heads were atrophied except for the very front segment, where a huge naked cranium with bulging white eyes swiveled on a long stalk of a neck.

  "The Wolfman developed multiforms," said Aybee. "He was smart and he did it right. This shows what happens when you're dumb and do it wrong, try to use regular form-change methods to achieve form fusion. I give the Socialists another ten years. There there'll be no more problem."

  "They'll give up?" Sondra felt nauseated.

  "Never. The Socialists are all true believers. They'll exercise their right to die. There used to be eighty thousand of them. Now they're down to about twelve hundred."

  "That's terrible."

  "Nah. It's evolution. Non-survival of the unfittest. Evolution never quits, even in the independent colonies. Their multiform dies off from the back. See?"

  It was obvious once it was pointed out. At the tail end of the caterpillar the bodies were shriveled and brown and the heads had almost disappeared.

  "Mind you," Aybee went on cheerfully, "the Socialists haven't done bad by independent colony standards. Some of the real losers went dodo-bird inside five years from colony formation. Not this next lot, though. They've been around for a long time. How'd you like to live in Heaven?"

  Another image was already on the display. It showed a great hall, filled with gaudily-dressed men and women who whirled and swayed to the sound of a stately waltz provided by a score of musicians on a dais at the side of the room. Laughter and animated chatter competed with the music.

  "Happy, healthy, and rich." The display zoomed in on one couple, a man and woman a head taller than everyone else. "Especially the king and queen." Aybee glanced across to see Sondra's reaction. "What do you think? Look like a good place to live?"

  "It looks like a great place if you like dancing and ceremony. Which I don't."

  "Good for you. Me neither. But most people do. They think it's the way Heaven ought to look. This one was started a century and a half ago by Tomas Dicenzo. He was a religious leader back on Earth who used Biblical arguments to prove to his followers that by definition Heaven and Earth had to be in different places, so an off-Earth colony out in the Kuiper Belt could actually become Heaven. Tomas was an honest, well-meaning man, and he was lucky enough to lead his flock to a big planetoid rich in volatiles and metals. Under his rule the place was probably as close to Heaven as people ever get. It was a couple of generations after his death before his descendants turned the succession into a monarchy. Then they introduced the Divine Right of Kings. Notice anything odd about them?"

  Sond
ra was studying the scene closely. She noticed that one of the musicians had a withered leg, and another was peering near-sightedly at the music. "They don't seem to use form-change equipment."

  "Hey, that's pretty good for a quick look. Maybe you are the Wolfman's relative after all, and not a—" Aybee coughed. "Actually, they do use form-change, but it has to be consistent with their social standing. Notice that the king and queen are taller and better-looking than anyone else, and the courtiers are bigger and healthier than the musicians. Appearance has to fit pecking order. Even so, nobody is really sick or deformed and miserable." There was a flicker of movement behind Aybee, and the display changed to become a blur of white. "Inside the palace, that is. It's not so good outside. This particular King of Heaven really likes winter. Keeps it year-round in the colony."

  Sondra was looking out across a bleak plain that seemed absolutely flat and endless. ("Curvature optics," Aybee added. "Infinite depth and flat field effects. Pretty neat trick on something only forty kilometers across.") The plain was thickly covered with snow, from whose untouched surface leafless trees jutted black against a white sky. More snow was falling, in big, soft flakes.

  It took a little while to see the human figures, struggling along in the middle distance. They were bare-headed and poorly-clad, pushing their way through drifts that already came to their mid-thighs. As the imager zoomed in on them Sondra could see the blue and white of frozen fingers, the starved, twisted limbs that would barely support their owners.

  "Gathering fallen wood," Aybee said softly. "Completely unnecessary, of course—Heaven uses kernel and fusion power, like everyone else in their right minds. But the king is a stickler for tradition. There have to be peasants and wood gatherers, and there have to be a few deaths from freezing now and again. That way everyone at the top will know how well-off they are and appreciate the king's bounty. Heaven is a wonderful place to live, see—provided that you're king and queen and live in a palace. Being a courtier isn't quite so good. Fail to kiss the king's ass in the right way, and next thing you know you're stuffed into a form-change tank. You come out short, sick, crippled, and outside, begging in the snow for shelter and a meal." He glanced slyly at Sondra. "Still think it would be a great place to live?"