Proteus in the Underworld

CHAPTER 6

It was thirty-three hours since Bey had slept. He watched Sondra’s departure, lifting off safely into dark afternoon rain clouds; and then he returned to his bedroom to rest. Or pretend to. He lay staring at the ceiling, while the overhead displays flickered in spiraling colored patterns designed to soothe and relax. One touch of his right hand to the control panel by the bedside would take a more direct step. He would be eased into programmed sleep.

His hand remained at his side. Too many mysteries; they were creeping around the base of his subconscious mind. He needed to name and catalog them before he could relax.

Begin with Sondra. He had checked her records at the Office of Form Control. She had done extremely well in everything theoretical, but her practical experience was woefully inadequate. And she was very junior. He would never have given her an assignment as difficult as a failure of the humanity test in a remote and unfamiliar location. The Carcon and Fugate colonists were notoriously tough on outsiders. Without help her chances of success were low indeed.

But she was seeking help—his help, as a family member. Had someone else counted on that? Did someone in the Office of Form Control already realize that she and Bey were related when she was assigned to the case? That was unlikely. The connection lay so many generations in the past. Bey had noticed that her name in the official files was Sondra Dearborn, not Sondra Wolf Dearborn. She had identified herself to Bey as a fellow Wolf only because she was trying to enlist his support.

But if no one had known of their relationship when the project was assigned to her, it was Bey’s guess that this was no longer the case. Sondra was now tagged as a Bey Wolf relative—with whatever that implied.

What else? He had told her to come and see him without telling anyone else in the Office of Form Control. But certainly someone had learned of her latest visit, because Denzel Morrone had known enough to send a message to Sondra here, on Wolf Island.

Mystery, or trivial incident? Bey had asked her not to talk about her visit-but he had not told her to keep it secret. A crucial distinction.

One person who had surely not known that Sondra would arrive on Wolf Island was Trudy Melford. Her surprise had been genuine. But how much else of what she had to say was true? If Bey’s instincts were good for anything, Trudy held a whole hand of cards that she was not willing to show—until he did what she wanted, and went to Mars. Perhaps not even then.

Did she need him all that much? Bey had little false modesty, but he doubted that his skills exceeded the combined talent available within the Biological Equipment Corporation. Trudy surely had her own hidden agenda, of which he must form a part.

Bey reached for the control panel at the bedside. Not for programmed sleep, not quite yet. He inserted the silver card that Trudy Melford had given him into the transportation module. Here at least she had not been deceiving him. The return showed huge available credit, beyond the number of digits that the machine could display. Bey instructed the module to arrange for a maximum-speed link from Wolf Island to Mars beginning in fourteen hours, with money no object. He asked for feedback only if Trudy balked at the cost.

At last he closed his eyes. He knew he would sleep now, and without the need for any program.

Had Sondra Dearborn or Trudy Melford been present in the room he would not have thanked them. But he should have. For if one thing in the world pleased Bey Wolf more than any other, it was the delicious sense of anticipation provided by new and perplexing questions.

Earth’s permanent link system composed an exact twenty entry points, located close to the vertices of a regular dodecahedron. It had been conceived by its creator, Gerald Mattin, as an instantaneous and energy-free system of transportation in flat space-time. Practical details had ruined that dream. Earth was not a perfect sphere, so the vertices were slightly off their ideal locations; space-time near Earth’s surface was slightly curved. Travel through the Martin Link was still effectively instantaneous, but it came at a price.

That price, for travel around Earth, was nothing compared with the cost of maintaining a link with one vertex on Earth and the other on Mars. Trudy Melford, with a profligate disregard of expense that still amazed Bey, had been holding a link open for her personal use and convenience for more than three years.

How could she—or anyone, no matter how rich—possibly afford it?

Bey had part of his answer when he arrived in Chetumal, at Trudy’s North American terminal point. He had linked in to the Yucatan on the east-bound route, traveling via Northern Australia, the Marianas, Johnston Island, and Portland, watching the sun flicker from horizon to horizon and morning turn to night in less than two minutes.

The people at each link stage were what he had learned to expect, nervous and harried guardians of goods too precious and too short-lived to be entrusted to conventional modes of travel. The cubes of bright red contained near-empty space. At their heart sat proprietary algorithms, embodied in microchips too small to see. The yellow lead containers held high radioactives, imprisoned behind their triple shields. Most urgent of all were the nano-flasks, their contents changing and evolving a thousand times as fast as their surroundings. The people who carried those also moved in more than real time, aware that a delay of half an hour could destroy their priority and the chance of a successful patent.

But at the Earth/Mars link point, all that changed. Travelers wore exotic forms and recreational clothing. They carried little or no luggage, and no commercial materials. There were scores of them, all apparently known to each other, and all chatting about earlier link trips that they had made to Mars. They had converged quietly and confidently on the Mars staging point, coming from all parts of Earth.

Bey studied them while he waited for the incoming link to operate. At last he realized what he was seeing. These were the super-rich of the Inner System, day-trippers who were using Trudy Melfords link to Mars not because of need, but to make a statement. A one-way link would consume the lifetime earnings of a normal person. These travelers did not need to go to Mars. They merely wanted to emphasize their own wealth and status. Trudy Melford could set the price of the link as high as she chose—and this group would compete to pay it.

They glanced at Bey and dismissed him. Their expressions said that he was not one of them, and therefore he was a nobody. It would have required a character more saintly than Bey’s to feel no satisfaction when the incoming link door opened and a dozen BEC employees emerged, ignored the beautiful people, and converged deferentially on him.

“All ready for Mars, Mr. Wolf?” In spite of Bey’s warning to Trudy Melford, the leader of the EEC group was Jarvis Dommer. He was grinning like Jumping Jack Flash, just as though he personally was responsible for Bey’s presence at die link point.

Bey nodded. “I’m ready.” He could hear the intrigued whispers from the glitterati around him: “Who is he?”

“They said his name is Wolf.”

“He’s someone really important.”

“He must be traveling incognito using a new form.”

The whole group walked forward into the link transition area. They fell silent, waiting. The air pressure of the ante-chamber had already been cycled slowly down to an oxygen-rich mixture at half a standard atmosphere, exactly what they would encounter when they emerged within the boundaries of Old Mars. Before he left Wolf Island, Bey had also briefly entered a form-change tank. The adjustment needed to feel comfortable in Mars gravity was a tiny one.

If Bey had been less experienced he might have believed he could make it without the use of form-change equipment at all. Purposive form-change was no more than the machine reinforcement of human will. Why bother with the hassle of computer feedback and mechanical equipment, when it ought to be possible to do everything by pure mental power?

Maybe it was; but over many years Bey had investigated scores of Secret Masters, sages who claimed to have a command of form-change without the use of equipment Every one had proved to be a lunatic, a charlatan, or both.

The tension in the link transition chamber was mounting. The wall display flickered the last part of its count-down. There was a long final second, while the display showed zero and nothing appeared to be happening. Then came a dizzying instant as the link transition was performed. The chamber walls seemed to blur and shimmer. Ambient gravity dropped instantly to Mars equatorial, thirty-six percent of Earth standard.

Everyone swallowed hard, then smiled at each other. That gravity change was the indisputable proof that they were now on Mars.

There was one more moment of drama. To Bey’s surprise, Trudy Melford herself was waiting outside the link transition point. She nodded to everyone who was emerging, as though she knew them all personally, but it was Bey whom she moved to and took by the arm. He received a special smile. Bey heard his own name coupled with Trudy’s by the people around them.

“Ready to go?” It was not a question. Already she was leading Bey toward the Mars immigration area. She was wearing the same form as at their meeting on Wolf Island, but this time her dress was less conventional, a lacy white veil that floated around her body like gossamer in the lower gravity and thinner air.

Bey thought she looked terrific. He said nothing.

In his case the formalities had been disposed of in advance. He was whisked away to a long, sleek open car before any other arrival had been offered a first entry document. With Dommer in front and Trudy seated snugly at Bey’s side in the cramped rear, the balloon- wheeled vehicle went snaking through a long, winding tunnel that steadily ascended.

It had been twenty-five years since Bey’s last visit to Mars. According to all reports the place had changed beyond recognition; but he had a pretty good idea where he must be.

Two hundred years ago the first colonists had burrowed in close to the equator, down past the sterile rubble of the regolith until they were deep enough to tap the underlying permafrost. That had yielded ample supplies of water, enough to discourage much exploration and settlement close to the ice-caps of the frigid Martian poles. When a hot summer afternoon on the equator was already fifteen degrees below the freezing point of water, why seek out colder places?

Then the colonists and their machines had gone deeper yet, to explore the natural caverns that riddled equatorial Mars. The pockets had been discovered during the first seismic survey, early in the twenty-first century. The results of that analysis had been greeted with skepticism. Some of the caverns showed on the instruments as ten kilometers across and three hundred meters high. The tunneling colonists confirmed those readings, and learned that the cathedral heights were sustained by pillars and buttresses of igneous rock. They set their excavation machines to work, connecting the caverns by a system of branching tunnels far below the stark and frozen surface. The result was Old Mars, where everyone lived. It nowhere came closer to the surface than one kilometer, and in places the Underworld ranged as deep as seven. But no matter the depth, the populated caverns and burrows never strayed more than one degree-sixty kilometers-north or south of the Martian equator.

And few people saw any reason at all to wander the surface, which called for simple suits but elaborate precautions.

Cold. Arid. Airless. Everything up there was better done by smart machines, comfortable under the steady stars in an atmosphere that was still no more than one-fiftieth of the density of Earths, and lower yet in oxygen and water vapor. Even the tourists, interested mainly in sight-seeing, confined their attention to the vast grottoes, natural and excavated, of the deep interior. Sunlight was piped in, conducted along lossless fiber optic bundles to emerge as new miniature suns in cavern ceilings. “Rain” emerged from those ceilings at carefully planned (but seemingly random) intervals. The grottoes had become lush and magnificent, reduced-gravity jungles more riotous than any found on Earth.

With all of this, who needed—or wanted—the surface?

Not Trudy Melford, if Maria Sun could be believed. Melford Castle had been re-located to the Mars Underworld, three or more kilometers down. But now Bey learned that this was not the case. The castle sat only one kilometer deep, as close to the surface as anyone was likely to go. It was also in the extreme north by Martian settlement standards, situated in a previously-empty natural grotto almost seventy kilometers from the equator. The link entry point sat much deeper, ten kilometers closer to the equator.

The castle’s location offered another couple of small mysteries for Bey to ponder. If Trudy Melford wanted to explore new forms in the Mars Underworld, why not choose a deep location close to them? She surely had enough money to put her home anywhere that she wished. But she had picked a bleak spot that was by Martian standards far from the comforts and company of civilization, and farther yet from the Underworld. She must have been forced to install her own air compressors and light pipelines, and then grow the vegetation to make the Melford grotto hospitable rather than merely habitable. The committee that controlled the living space of Old Mars should be paying Trudy, rather than the other way round.

The car they were in followed its own programmed route. Their course wound its way through a maze of well-ht tunnels and broad highways. Bey felt the decrease in air pressure and knew that they were steadily ascending. He saw a handful of other cars and occasional cargo barges, but no settlements. They did not pass through any large grotto or agricultural cavern. Apparently Trudy controlled a private road between Melford Castle and her link entry point.

After her first warm greeting she had not spoken to him. She surely knew that he had not been to Mars for a long time, and understood that he needed time to adjust to the changes. But with the car’s snug seating it was impossible to avoid more physical forms of contact. Bey was aware of her hip and warm shoulder, touching his. Her dark hair gave off a faint scent of roses. Jarvis Dommer, up in front, looked straight ahead and was mercifully silent—the result, Bey suspected, of direct orders from Trudy. If she was the Empress of BEC back on Earth, how much more was that the case here on Mars, where the controls on her actions were fewer?

For the past couple of minutes the tunnel had been steadily widening, changing from a two-lane highway to a broad plain of dark rock forty or fifty meters across. A row of floor lights now marked the car’s path. The walls and roof of the chamber were far-off and no longer visible.

Then the road illumination ended. The car’s lights also dimmed and faded to nothing. Bey was suddenly in limbo. The car’s motor was inaudible, but he had the feeling that their forward motion was slowing. He felt a hand on his, and heard Trudy’s soft voice in the darkness beside him, “Melford Castle, Bey Wolf. Welcome. I hope that you will choose to remain here for much longer than one day.”

It had been carefully staged, of course—whether for him alone, he could not tell. A diffuse light appeared, high and far-off. At first it was like the glow of an Earth sunset, soft- edged and tinged with red. As the car moved steadily forward the light strengthened and changed, to become the white blaze of Mars noon. Bey knew that it was exactly that—piped light, carried in to form a new sun in a cavern roof high above them.

Still there was no sense of scale. That came only when they had moved another half kilometer and Bey could see what lay ahead. Melford Castle had been transported from the Yucatan peninsula stone-for-stone. Walls of white limestone glimmered now in front of him, shining in a light bluer than they had ever seen on Earth. The atmosphere of Mars was thickening—slowly—but the short wavelengths of the solar spectrum still came through here far more strongly than they had ever been seen in Castle Melford’s original setting.

Bey had never visited the castle, but he had heard of the eccentric tastes of Ergan Melford, founder of BEC and amateur architect. The topmost blue-and-gold octagonal spire of the fourteen-story, hundred-and-fifty room mansion stretched ninety meters above the castle’s foundation. The light source in the roof of the Melford cavern shone high above that.

Bey looked, measured with his eye, and decided that he was in an open space maybe two hundred meters high and two and a half kilometers across. The transformation of the grotto had begun, but obviously it had far to go. Thin lines of greenery petered out a few hundred meters from the castle walls. Beyond them hundreds of machines were at work converting bedrock to fertile soil by seeding it with bespoke bacteria and algae. For at least another few years, oxygenated air must be brought into the cavern—at a price—from supply points deeper in Old Mars.

The car was easing its way silently forward, on a road that in its final hundred meters was bordered by sweet-smelling bushes. It led straight to an arched entrance to the castle itself. And there, in an English-style interior courtyard of cobblestone floor and red brick walls, the car stopped. Jarvis Dommer at once jumped out and disappeared through a wooden door that led inside the ground floor of the building.

Trudy climbed out more slowly and turned to Bey. “Are you tired or hungry?”

He realized that it was only the third time that she had spoken to him since his arrival on Mars. He had to pause and think about the answer to her question. With so many time zone shifts he had little idea what his own biological clock was doing. But improbable as it seemed, less than three hours ago he had been sitting in his living-room on Wolf Island, eating breakfast and staring out at the calm waters of the Indian Ocean.

“Not tired. Or hungry. Suffering from sensory overload, maybe.”

“Do you want to rest?”

“That’s not why I came to Mars.”

“Good. Dommer will find a couple of suits.” She saw his expression. “Don’t worry, they’re not for you and him. They are for you and me.”

“That’s not what was worrying me. What’s this about suits? I didn’t think we would need them. Why should we wear suits in the Underworld?”

“No reason at all. But we’re not going there.” Trudy’s blue-green eyes glittered. “We’re going up, Bey, not down—up and up, all the way to the surface.”