Proteus in the Underworld

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, eyebrowless 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 links, 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’s 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 moment, 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 Aybees loud reply.

“Sure, Cinnabar. I did it already. It’s on the way.”

Cinnabar? If that was Cinnabar Balcer, 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?”

Sondra 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?”

“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 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 Gotchal “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—and 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 racing 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 beings so changed and augmented that Sondra could not even guess at their ages. The prizewinner for oddity 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: “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.