Proteus in the Underworld Read online

  "It's absolutely awful."

  "Not for the king. And Heaven is stable, at a hundred thousand people. It could go on that way for another couple of centuries. I'm not sure I'd say the same about the structure of society on Mars or Ceres. All right, enough of the fun stuff. Time we got on with the Carcon Colony. How much do you already know about it?"

  "I know when the colony was started, in 2112. I know that its founders set out to create combined organic and inorganic beings, carbon-silicon fusions that would use both human and machine intelligence. I know what the results look like."

  "That it? What about history and social habits?"

  "Those weren't in the Office of Form Control data bank."

  "Then you know nothing." Aybee started to stalk Sondra, circling menacingly around her chair. "The colony moved into the Belt back in 2112, but for nearly a century they just futzed around getting nowhere. They tried to make carcon melds, but there was one slight snag: they all kept dying. Then they had bit of luck. Ever hear of Jonathan Watanabe?"

  "Why, yes. He worked for the Office of Form Control, a long time ago. He's used in the training courses as a dreadful warning."

  "You know what he did?"

  "I know what the record says." Sondra was becoming more cautious. She had a lot to learn when it came to off-Earth activities, and Aybee seemed to take a special joy in playing Gotcha! "He ran up big debts and started dabbling in illegal forms to make money. Then he got caught."

  "Wrong. He got found out, but he never got caught. He made it away from Earth and hid in the Belt—and ended up in the Carcon Colony. Turned out he was just what they needed, because he was able to add modern form-change methods to the carbon-silicon combines. After a few hundred failures and deaths—no big deal, the Carcons were used to that—he hit on the right trick. He made the first successful Carcon intelligence. Happy ending, right?"

  "If you say so." It was clear to Sondra that there was more to come.

  "Trust me. Happy ending for the Carcons, and even happier ending for BEC. You know the ground rules for a successful form?"

  "Better than you do: viable, stable, and legal. I'd add that in my opinion a really successful form must have a decent life-ratio, but that's not a formal requirement. If people want to burn out fast, like the avian forms, that's their choice."

  " 'Specially out in the colonies, where everybody's wacky to start with. Anyway, Jon-boy did his thing and hit two out of three. His Carcons have a normal human life expectancy and they're not an illegal form. But they sure has hell aren't stable. Leave 'em out of a form-change tank for a few days and bingo!, you've got an expensive sort of fertilizer. But form-change dependence is no big deal, when you can always buy more tanks and make sure everybody has one whenever they need it. And it's real good news for BEC—a ton of sales from one small colony."

  "How many Carcons are there? How many form-change tanks are you talking about?"

  "Rather a lot. There's maybe fifty thousand Carcons— nd at least that many tanks." Aybee grinned as though he had just brought Sondra especially good news. "You're going to have real fun out there. You're on your way to form-change paradise."

  * * *

  On the way, and shortly about to encounter paradise at first-hand. Sondra was poised at the entrance lock while the crew of the Serendip hovered around, grinning with anticipation. It was not their first run to the Carcon Colony with an unfledged Earthling as passenger.

  This time they were due for a disappointment. Sondra stood calmly waiting for the lock to operate, fortified by the knowledge that Aybee, in an attempt either to prepare or disgust her, had shown her one after another of the Carcon forms. Not just the successes, either. There had been plenty of misses even after Jonathan Watanabe had his technique under control, and those failures loomed large in Aybee's catalog of yuckies.

  The lock opened. Sondra stared, gulped, and looked away. The ship's crew won. There was a world of difference between viewing a Carcon form in the display volume of an imager, and facing the living, breathing reality.

  There had been recent advances—if that was the word for it—in Carcon forms. The man waiting for her at the lock was naked, with no sign of hair on either head or body. His arms and legs carried the odd bulges that she had noticed on the first images she had seen, back on Earth. But in addition to that the whole body surface was covered with bright points of silver, as though thousands of small studs had been hammered into it. The eyes were also bright, silvered, and empty of all expression. The effect was of a human-shaped robot, over which a human skin had been draped and attached by thousands of tiny bolts.

  "Dearborn Female? Terran Office of Form Control?" The voice, cool and expressionless, helped Sondra to regain her self-possession.

  "That's right. I am Sondra Dearborn."

  "Good. I am Shoals Male. I am eager to cooperate with you. Do you have questions before you proceed to the form-change tanks?"

  Aybee had warned her: she would not be given a free run within the Carcon Colony. It was hard to imagine that they might have any secret worth stealing, but the Carcons disagreed.

  "I have two questions. First, is the equipment that you use at this colony made by BEC, or are there other manufacturers?"

  She did not spell out what that meant, but anyone hearing the question would know what she was getting at. Was this genuine BEC hardware, with all its warranties and guarantees and detailed testing? Or was it a rip-off of BEC equipment, with who-knew-what shortcuts and compromises in design and manufacture.

  Shoals stood silent for a long time. Sondra noticed that he lacked eyelids, but a transparent membrane flickered up and down over his naked eye surfaces every few seconds.

  "The equipment used with the feral forms that were sent to Earth was all manufactured by BEC," he said at last. "It is new, and it is still covered by warranty."

  He had not explicitly answered Sondra's question. There must be at least some pirated designs around in the Carcon Colony, but the only equipment she really cared about was the genuine BEC article.

  "And the software?"

  "That used with the feral forms was also provided exclusively by BEC."

  "None of your own, developed by the colony itself?"

  "None of our own is used until the end of the first year."

  In other words, not until long after the humanity test on a form was over and done with. Sondra's task had suddenly become orders of magnitude easier. With only standard BEC hardware and software involved, she would not have to worry about whatever strange form-change deviations were practiced to create a form like Shoals'. She felt a moment of huge elation. She knew the BEC systems intimately. In just a few hours of work, she would know exactly what had happened and be ready to go home successful.

  "I would like to see complete records of the birth of the feral forms. I would also like to see all form-change records from the time of first tank entry. Raw data, as well as reduced evaluations. Is that going to be a problem?"

  Shoals was scowling at her. "I am confused." The skin of his forehead wrinkled upward, emphasizing the absence of eyebrows. "You talk as though two different data sets might be involved. Surely you know that all Carcon births take place within a form-change tank?"

  * * *

  She had not known. Sondra started in to work on the form-change records with Bey's words reverberating as a loud inner voice. You have to go the colonies and see things at first-hand.

  The only problem with such advice was that Bey had left out a key variable. It was one that would never have occurred to Sondra, either. Carcon Colony visitors from Earth were rare. In colony terms she was the oddity, the interesting freak that people wanted to stare at.

  While she struggled to analyze data sets and concentrate on complex computer displays, scores of Carcons wandered by just to gawk. They ranged in age from infants, dragging their mobile form-change tanks along behind them, to beings so changed and augmented that Sondra could not even guess at their ages. The prizewinner for o
ddity was a being of indeterminate gender, who seemed determined to explore the inorganic limit of humanity. Arms and legs were steel-and-silicon prostheses, while the torso was a pleated barrel-shaped tube that breathed vertically. The chest section moved up and down with each breath like an upright concertina. The Carcon stood close to Sondra. It stared at her in apparent curiosity, with eyes compound and crystalline in a shiny cranium of plastic metal.

  Strangeness all around. Everywhere—except in the records that she was analyzing. After four hours of work the frustration began. The Carcons were peculiar enough for the most eccentric taste, but their form-change equipment could not be more normal. The tanks that had been used to administer the humanity test to the feral forms were a standard BEC model. The seals were unbroken, indicating that they had not been opened since the day they were shipped from an Earth production plant.

  Sondra had next examined the software programs that had been used, reviewing both the intermediate data outputs and the code itself. She had found nothing out of the ordinary, using her own programs or the one that she had received from Bey himself.

  The situation was as clear as could be. Sondra reviewed her results:

  ✔ two births, odd-looking but not much more so than a thousand others born in the Carcon tanks within the past few years.

  ✔ a humanity test, delivered routinely when the subjects were two months old.

  ✔ clear passage of the test, without even a suggestion in its results of a marginal case.

  ✔ total failure, after that first success, to interact in any way with form-change programs.

  ✔ increasing evidence, day after day, that the forms were not merely non-human, but wild, vicious, and dangerous.

  The Carcons, eager to proceed as soon as possible with the modifications needed for any form they would consider satisfactory, had been a little more impatient for results than another group might have been. But that was a detail. If the births and tests had taken place on Earth itself, or anywhere else in the system, the same failure of the humanity test would have been recorded by now.

  Sondra didn't like to admit it, but she had reached a dead end—already, so soon after her arrival. The problem was not the peculiarity of the data trail she had followed at the Carcon Colony. It was the normalcy that was so frustrating. The remoteness of the independent colony, which led to the feeling that procedures and events would be different here, was an illusion. So far as the purposive form-change needed for the humanity test was concerned, the same results would have been obtained anywhere.

  Sondra hated to think about what came next. All this way, after her loud insistence to Denzel Morrone that the journey was absolutely necessary to solve the mystery of the feral forms. And then all the way back, without even a suggestion of an answer.

  Worse than Denzel Morrone would be Bey Wolf. He wouldn't harangue her and gloat over her, the way Denzel would. But his quiet nod would in many ways be harder to take than any number of harsh words. She could imagine that nod now, and interpret it—"Just as I suspected. Second-rate brains, she'll never solve it!"

  Sondra was suspecting the same thing herself. Somewhere, somehow, she was missing a key insight. Her only hope was that the next stop on her flight path, at the Fugate Colony, would provide it. After what had happened with the Carcons, Sondra didn't have much confidence in that prospect.

  CHAPTER 11

  On the road again; and not sure where it would lead.

  Bey stood within the link zone during the final spasm of transition, and wondered. Trudy Melford had urged him to return as soon as possible to Mars and investigate the surface forms. And here he was, reporting for duty just like any other brain-washed BEC employee.

  But what had prompted him to quote to Jarvis Dommer an arrival time one day later than he planned to travel?

  Bey could answer that, after a fashion, except that his reply had a great big hole in it—or rather, a hundred thousand holes.

  The standard Earth/Mars comparison cliche, still trotted out by USF politicians after centuries of use, was the area logic. Earth is largely a water world. Mars is a smaller planet, but it has as much land area as Earth.

  Bey had been puzzled by that statement the first time that he heard it. What did total land area have to do with anything? No one on Earth lived at the summit of Mount Everest, just as no one on Mars lived on top of Olympus Mons. No one on Earth lived out on the surface at the North or South Pole. Still less would a sane person try to reside at the Martian poles, where most of the snow was solid carbon dioxide and midsummer was a cold winter's day in Antarctica, minus air. In any case, land area was almost irrelevant. Humans inhabit three dimensions, not two, and a large planetoid like Ceres, suitably re-structured in its interior to provide thousands of habitat levels, could in principle be the home of more people than lived on Earth.

  The colonists on Mars had known all this. With the aid of their machines they had worked not the harsh surface, but the more tractable interior. It was not difficult for the tunneling machines to connect the gas-filled hollow pockets of subsurface Mars so that chamber led to cave led to cavern. After a century of work, a gigantic, multiply-connected, hundred-thousand node network of living space had been created: Old Mars, fully navigable only with the help of a computer.

  The exit point for the Melford link lay close to the surface, above most of Old Mars. Bey, emerging from Immigration, stood motionless and stared around him. There were plenty of people greeting arrivals from Earth, but none showed any interest in a plainly-dressed and silent visitor.

  That ought to be enough to prick the bubble of curiosity that had brought him early to Mars. Somewhere within the convoluted maze beneath his feet he might find red-beard, the man who had tracked him from Melford Castle to the Mattin Link entry point. But more realistically Bey would not find the man, no matter how hard he searched. The population of Old Mars was tiny by Earth standards, just a few millions—but a million is a big number. Examine the ID of each resident, one after another, and you would be at it for months. And as Bey knew from his work on illegal forms, there were plenty of people in the deep Underworld whose ID's were, to put it charitably, unreliable.

  Bey placed the light knapsack that formed his entire luggage on one of the benches of polished synthetic that lined the link exit chamber. He sat down next to it. He was not happy. His vaunted intuition had led him badly astray. What was he going to do now? Back on Earth, he had made two assumptions: that anyone who had knowledge of his movements during his previous visit to Mars would have just as good information now; and if they had been eager to talk to him then, they would still be just as keen.

  One of his assumptions was not valid. No one in the chamber was taking the slightest bit of interest in him. On his last visit Bey had been favored by the presence of Trudy Melford herself, so all the staff had been falling over themselves to offer assistance and advice. Today he was a nobody. He had not invoked the power of the Melford name, and so he was on his own.

  Bey leaned back. The bench molded itself to his body. He wondered. What other benefits came to you when you were smiled on by the Empress? Was Trudy Melford's smile just the grin on the face of the crocodile, moments before the jaws gulped you down? Bey recalled a furious Sondra, glaring at him and shouting: "That fancy form she was using, and those sexy clothes. She was stalking you, couldn't you tell? If I hadn't arrived when I did . . ."

  It was a good thing Sondra had not been at Melford Castle with Bey, to see Trudy's tight-fitting and brief costume and the warm look in those startling blue-green eyes, or to hear the tone in Trudy's voice when she told him that the castle was "just as private as you want it to be."

  Bey lolled on the bench, musing on the memory. He lacked the energy to find an auto-car to take him again to the castle. Half an hour passed before he was finally lifted out of his daydream by a loud clatter of footsteps. The man with the red beard had come running into the chamber. He skidded to a halt by the information board about twenty yards away
from Bey and bounced nervously up and down on the balls of his feet. He was scanning the entries. His shoulders slumped when he saw that the link transition had been completed a while ago.

  Bey walked across to stand beside him.

  "You're late," he said quietly.

  The man turned. "Yes, I am. I was delayed by the—" He stopped and stared open-mouthed at Bey. "Behrooz Wolf! I thought I'd missed you."

  "I hung around. Who are you?"

  "My name is Rafael Fermiel." After a few awkward seconds the man held out his hand and smiled at Bey.

  Bey grinned back at him. He had never been more pleased to see anyone. He didn't know who Rafael Fermiel was, or what he might want, and for the moment he didn't particularly care. What mattered was that Bey's hunch as to what would happen if he came to Mars had been right after all.

  Bey regarded Fermiel fondly while he waited for the next step. He knew that in spite of everything that the form-change machines could do in the way of body maintenance, the urge to sin changed as a person got older. Some sins, like lust, often vanished completely.

  Maybe. But in Bey's own case, he suspected that the Sin of Pride would be with him undiminished until the day he died.

  * * *

  "We seem to be going downward." Bey had assumed they would be heading for the surface and a meeting with the new forms who now lived there.

  "Certainly we are." Rafael Fermiel nodded as the auto-car they were riding glided its way around a steeply descending curve. "Did you imagine that we might be going up? We will be heading all the way to the deep Underworld, where you will meet with the most important party on this planet."

  "Trudy Melford?"

  It was the wrong thing to say. Rafael Fermiel lifted his nose in the air, as though he had suddenly encountered a bad smell. "No! Gertrude Zenobia Melford represents all that is wrong with Mars. In the long-term future of the planet she is of no importance. I am aware that she brought you here, and that she wishes you to work for her. However, in the next few hours I hope to persuade you that such an action on your part would be a great mistake. There is a higher cause."