Proteus in the Underworld Page 15

  Was that another Trudy Melford carrot—a lure, designed to draw Bey in deeper yet?

  Accident or design, there were far more data pointers than he expected or needed. The temptation to browse here, deep within the secret heart of BEC, was great.

  Too great, for someone of Bey's temperament. He began to cross-index, wandering up and down the data branches. One key structure told of BEC failures, providing full chapter and verse for forms too awful to mention outside the BEC inner circle. Another lead wormed him into a bank of BEC's most precious commodities, new commercial forms that would not be announced for a decade or more. Bey found pointers there to new avian forms, to piscine forms, even a deep penetration into the hidden (and forbidden) invertebrate arena. The latter structures had been so long separated by evolution from the vertebrate branch that common thought patterns were usually considered non-existent. BEC was now about to question that. Bey itched to examine the details of the actual form-change programs, and learn the approach that was being used. It had to be something radical and ingenious.

  After a few minutes he leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. He could happily spend days—weeks—wallowing in the BEC data banks.

  But not today. Bey made the ultimate sacrifice, and turned his back on the temptation of the new BEC forms. He set up a data search on a handful of specific key words: Mars surface, aerobic tolerance, temperature tolerance, oxygen compression and storage methods, and radiation tolerance. He found the usual C-forms, developed for in-space use, along with form experiments for the Europan deep ocean. But there was nothing relevant to Mars.

  He varied parameters half a dozen times, with the same negative results. If BEC and Trudy had any knowledge of the surface forms, their own private data bases lacked that information. They suggested that no human form had been developed able to survive unaided on the surface of Mars.

  Bey would have said the same thing, a few weeks ago. But he had seen them with his own eyes.

  Maybe the data system was telling Bey more than he was asking. If you want to solve the puzzle of the Mars surface forms, you must go to the surface and investigate. It was Bey's own form of inversion; his advice to Sondra, turned back on him.

  And it was good advice in both cases.

  Bey sighed. Data base interaction was pleasant and addictive. At the moment it was a denied luxury.

  Time to stop playing, and do some real work.

  He retraced his steps, ascending at each stage to operating system level and wiping out the evidence of his presence within the data base. When that was completed he switched off the terminal and headed for the long spiral escalator that would take him up to the surface of Mars.

  Trudy had made herself inaccessible to him. She could hardly complain if he accepted that fact and went on with the job that he had been brought here to perform.

  CHAPTER 13

  Bey had said nothing good about Sondra's brains, but he had given her top marks for stubbornness.

  She clung to that thought. She needed every scrap of obstinacy that she could muster, just to persuade herself to keep going.

  All the way to the Fugate Colony she had warned herself to expect an environment stranger than anything she had found with the Carcons. They, whatever their oddities, had retained standard human size. That bond with Earth would vanish, the moment that the ship's docking was complete and Sondra eased forward into the main Fugate entry lock.

  She had been advised to remain in a suit all the time that she was in Fugate territory. Now it was easy to see why. As new air hissed into the lock she found herself floating within a foggy chamber whose nearest wall began to drip with moisture. The atmospheric pressure rose to twice Earth normal. Her suit informed Sondra that the outside temperature was 33 degrees Celsius—almost blood heat. The chamber's far walls, at least fifty meters away, were soon barely visible through thick swirls of mist.

  But Earth had its fogs, too, and its hot, steamy jungles. Sondra's sense of alienation came not from heat or humidity, but from scale. She stared around her and felt dwarfed and diminished. By Fugate standards she was insignificant, a mouse who had strayed into a human house. The lock was automatic and that was just as well. The manual controls were fifteen meters up, far above her head, and in an emergency she would need to use her suit's jets and fly to reach them.

  She headed for the far side of the chamber. As the lock cycled and its inner door slid open, Sondra for the first time saw her reception committee.

  She had spoken to them on her trip through the Belt from the Carcon Colony, but it had been a low-capacity line with sound-only communication. The Fugate voices, two of them, proved easy to understand and yet not quite right in their timbre. Slightly thin, slightly fluting, they did not seem to be a local accent, understandable in a colony established a century ago and living in relative isolation from the rest of the solar system. It was something else, something that Sondra could not put her finger on.

  And now, looking at the two great forms floating in front of her, it became obvious.

  Examining the Fugate that had been shipped to Earth orbit, Sondra had known very well that it was a baby and that the adult Fugates must be a lot bigger. But that was an intellectual understanding. Confronting the reality was far different.

  The two forms waiting beyond the airlock were not wearing suits, and their clothing was limited to a blue tunic that covered only the main torso. Sondra estimated that it was at least seventy feet from the top of the thinly-haired heads to the bare feet and stubby pink toes. The arms and legs were short in proportion to the body, which was in turn dwarfed by the head and thick neck. The heads themselves were pear-shaped, dominated by the bulging cranium. Even so, the mouths that now smiled a greeting to Sondra must be at least six feet across. There was no way that such lips, tongues, and vocal chords would produce the same range and type of sounds as the midgets of Earth.

  The smiles did a little to establish a more comfortable feeling. Sondra smiled back at them, not sure that they could see her face through the foggy visor of her suit. She lifted her arm and waved. They ought to be able to follow her movements all right because their eyes were not that much bigger than hers, tiny compared with their heads.

  She felt as much as heard a peculiar rumbling, at the same time as a familiar female voice spoke in her suit receiver. "Welcome to Fugate, Sondra Dearborn. We are Maria and Mario Amari. If you would like to begin work at once, the equipment that led to the anomalous result of the humanity test is waiting. If you would prefer to rest before you begin, a special area has been prepared for you."

  Normal Fugate speech from those great vocal chords was not subsonic for Sondra, but it was close to it. The female Fugate was using a frequency converter, which must also have been in operation when she spoke to Sondra on board the ship. It presumably worked both ways, lowering the pitch of Sondra's voice to a standard Fugate range.

  But the woman—think of her as a woman. Maria Amari is human, as human as you are—was coming closer, and continuing: "Or, if you prefer it, we will arrange for you to see something of this world before your work begins."

  The urge to blurt out "No way!" was close to overwhelming. Sondra wanted to do her work and then leave as soon as possible. Only the knowledge that background information about the Fugate Colony and the general life-style there could be important allowed her to grit her teeth, nod, and reply, "I would be honored to be shown your home."

  Before she could change her mind, a stubby-fingered hand big enough to enfold her whole body was reaching forward. "If you do not object, this is the easiest way for you to travel. If you wish to observe without being observed, this is also by far the best way."

  No matter how alien the Fugates were in appearance, they certainly understood human psychology—hers as well as their own. Sondra nodded and snuggled down into the soft hand. The index finger close to her head was about three feet long. The whirls of fingerprint on the final joint were those of a normal human finger, written a dozen t
imes larger.

  Sondra had not said anything in reply, but the Fugates must have seen the nod of her head. She was suddenly in motion. It was an oddly comfortable ride, although she knew that with one sharp contraction of the muscles in the hand that held her, her insides would be squeezed out like tomato paste from a tube.

  "We were chosen to meet with you." Mario Amari spoke for the first time since Sondra's arrival. To Sondra's ears, the male Fugate sounded no different from the female, a bass rumble she felt more than heard. "Chosen, because we were judged typical of our colony in both body and mind. But we would like you to know that we also volunteered to meet with you. Our own efforts to solve the mystery of a human who is clearly not human have not progressed. We need someone far more familiar than we with the failures of the form-change process. Your willingness to come here is much appreciated."

  Sondra nodded again. Now she felt like a real fake. Change theory, yes. But when it came to the analysis of problem forms she could think of dozens with better practical experience. And that was just within the Office of Form Control. BEC must have scores, if not hundreds, of more experienced people working for them.

  Why weren't they here, since their company's equipment was involved?

  Before Sondra had time to pursue that thought they were out of the first chamber and entering what must be one of the main agricultural centers of the colony. A huge cubic room, a kilometer or more on a side, was filled with a three-dimensional lattice of smaller cubical tanks, thousand after uncountable thousand of them. The six faces of each tank were of transparent material, glass or plastic, and the tanks were complexly connected by meter-thick tubes emerging from the center of each face.

  A second lattice, offset from the array of tanks, contained ribbon illuminators. Each one streamed with hellish light, an eye-damaging blue actinic glare that penetrated every cubic centimeter of every tank. The single-celled organisms who filled the cloudy interiors seemed to thrive on it. They were greenish-black in color, designed to drink in every available photon and use its energy to convert simple nutrients to high-level food materials. Like the Cloudlanders, the Fugates took their food from single-celled organisms, avoiding the unnecessary and wasteful step of a food chain to the multi-celled forms of a traditional Earth diet.

  Sondra wondered if exposure to that short-wavelength deluge of light might be the cause of the mutations leading to the creation of the feral form. She threw that thought away before it had even taken root. Even if the Fugates had not planned for their own protection, the worst that the radiation bath might do was to produce skin cancer, and even that was unlikely given the thick epidermis of the two Fugates she had seen.

  In any case, there were few Fugates within the monster room. She saw only three of them, far-off in the foggy distance. The workers and caretakers of the agricultural center were not humans, but machines. There were many thousands of them and they did not operate at the same scale as the Fugates. None bigger than a rabbit, they went scurrying along the lines of tanks, reading tank temperatures and chemical balance, tightening connections, and adjusting connector tube positions.

  The Fugates took no notice of them, nor the machines of the Fugates, except to remain well out of the way of the giant visitors. The machines were not smart enough to talk. Had they been able to do so, Sondra felt sure they would have agreed that the Fugate supervisors were nothing but a pain—quite unnecessary, and a hindrance to good, efficient machine operations.

  That prompted another thought, this one about form-change tanks. It was obvious that the Fugate tanks would be on a monstrous scale, with monitors, feedback attachments, and nutrients built large enough to serve their twenty-five meter occupants. But the physical plant in the tanks was really the trimmings, the necessary peripherals. The true heart of a form-change tank remained its computer hardware and its associated unique software. And those, assuming that they were BEC equipment rather than pirated versions, meant that they were designed to be serviced and repaired by humans, closer to two meters in length than twenty-five.

  Put that another way: the three-foot digits enclosing Sondra in their cozy embrace might be able, with difficulty, to remove the cover from a form-change controller. But they would no more be able to manage the delicate work of changing form-change functions than Sondra could sit down and weave a spider's web.

  They had almost reached the far end of the agricultural center. The single Fugate they had passed, a woman even larger than the one who carried Sondra, took little notice of them. She raised one hand in casual greeting, rumbled something that was not translated by the frequency converter, and went on her way. It was doubtful that she even saw Sondra.

  "Shall we continue, Sondra Dearborn?" The Fugates had paused, and Sondra found herself lifted toward a great questioning face, its expanse of brow creased by six-foot horizontal lines of query. "If you would prefer to rest. . ."

  "Let's keep going. I'd like to see more." The colony was totally different from any place that Sondra had ever been, yet she was feeling more and more at home there. For the first time, she felt that she understood the central dogma of form-change: "Humanity is defined not by appearances. It is defined by actions."

  (Bey Wolf was not there to offer his personal point of view. "The central dogma of the Office of Form Control adds one more sentence. Be kind, be polite, be nice—and watch out for the nasty surprise.")

  The two Fugates were proceeding without hesitation, out of the agricultural plant and on through a corridor wide enough to pass a fair-sized space freighter. Sondra had noted long ago, on her first examination of the Fugate data base, that the colony occupied one of the largest planetoids in the Kuiper Belt. Occupied it, and needed every cubic meter of space. A Fugate could reasonably claim to need for comfort a thousand times as much living space as the average Earth human. Presumably a thousand times as much food, too, to go with their mass. A middle-sized Fugate weighed as much as a big Earth whale, and had the same nutritional needs.

  In fact, when they first emerged into another chamber Sondra assumed that it was another agricultural plant. There was a similar lattice of vast cubical tanks, the same interstitial array of ribbon lights.

  Then the difference hit her. She gasped. These were tanks all right—form-change tanks. Thousands of them, enormous, each large enough to hold a Fugate.

  "For adults only, of course," said the combination of deep rumble and its thin, high-pitched modulation. "The tanks that will be of most interest to you are the ones employed in humanity tests. They are located in the children's creche section, which follows Earth convention and has been placed well away from here, on the other side of the world."

  "But so many!" Sondra waved her arm at the array, trying as she did so to make a rough estimate of numbers. The tanks were far too numerous for her to actually count them. "How many? I mean, why so many?"

  It was hard to read expressions on faces so large and so near that her eyes could not take their features in all at once. The Fugates were frowning, in either annoyance or perplexity. The woman held Sondra even closer, until every separate pore and bristly hair was visible on her plump cheeks.

  "So many? Is this many? We do not think the number of tanks excessive to our needs. With our current population, and a session for each person every two days . . ."

  She went on speaking, but Sondra had moved to an internal space where no external sound meant anything. Every two days. A session in the form-change tanks, every two days. That was something Aybee had not mentioned—probably had not even known, although he had given her similar data for the Carcons. It made physiological sense. Those huge bodies, so far from human normal, would be enormously difficult to stabilize in that form. Blood flow, internal temperature control, digestion, breathing, circulation—a hundred body variables would have to hold values wildly far from those natural in humans.

  The Carcons and the Fugates, so different in so many ways, had one important thing in common: The continued existence of their colonies depended
on the availability of form-change equipment all the time. And that meant they were critically dependent on BEC; or else—far more likely—they were employing pirate form-change equipment to avoid that dependency. The Carcon representative had pretty much admitted that they did use illegal equipment, although he had assured Sondra they did so only after a child was one year old.

  At the time Sondra had felt sure that he was telling the truth. Now she felt just as sure that he had been lying. The Carcons and the Fugates were surely using cheap form-change tanks, suspect in both hardware and software. Despite BEC's best efforts to wipe out such patent violators, rip-off manufacturers for cut-price form-change equipment kept popping up all over the solar system.

  But then—

  Sondra felt her first twinge of doubt. It made sense for a colony to use cheap pirated equipment as long as they had no trouble with it. But the Carcon Colony had now encountered two cases where a supposedly human baby who had passed the humanity test later proved to be non-human. Would any group be stupid enough to keep using the same flawed equipment, when it would be so easy to put it aside and use only tanks that had never given trouble?

  It ought to be easy enough to answer that question.

  "The tanks employed in the humanity tests—you said they are over on the other side of the colony. Could you take me there? Immediately." Sondra's body had gone rigid, and the Fugate holding her must have noticed. Both of them were peering at her in surprise. She had to offer at least a word of explanation for her frozen silence. "I've just had an idea," she stumbled on, "an idea as to what might be causing the problem with the failed form."

  Two giant heads were nodding in unison. "We will go at once," said the man. The Fugate woman was already moving, her massive body setting a pace across the chamber that Sondra could never have matched. "Can you give us some idea what you think is happening?"