Proteus in the Underworld

CHAPTER 8

Sondra’s mood had changed on her way back to the Office of Form Control. Her meeting with Bey Wolf, or maybe it was her spat with Trudy Melford—had been the final straw. She steadily became more and more angry. She was going to prove she was as good as anyone, in BEC or out of it, when it came to solving form-change mysteries. As for Denzel Morrone, with or without his permission she would head for the Kuiper Belt just as soon as she could arrange a flight. She would do it with her own savings, and on her own time, and to hell with the office.

She did not go to headquarters as she had originally intended, but hurried instead to the apartment that she shared with two other Form Control employees. The place was supremely disorganized—as usual—and locating the must-have items for her trip took a little time. She was still hunting and cursing when her partners in messiness walked in.

“Well?” Gipsy and Dill came into the bedroom and perched on the high stool by the dressing table. They were testing an experimental multiform and had finally reached the stable commensal stage that preceded body cross-over. The combined form watched Sondra as she pawed through a big pile of freshly-laundered clothing, heaped randomly on the floor. “So tell us. How was he?”

“What do you mean?” Sondra knew from the question that Gipsy was speaking, even though the commensal was in Dill’s body. Dill herself must be in dormant mode. “How was who?”

“That’s what me and Dill are waiting for you to tell us. Who?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, come off it, Sondra. All of a sudden you get secretive with your friends about what you’re doing. You disappear for days at a time without telling anybody, then you come back all wild and woolly like you just spent a weekend with Tarzan. Go look at yourself in a mirror. You’re flushed and straggled and wiped out. If that doesn’t spell s-e-x, I don’t know what does.”

“You’ve got it all wrong.” Sondra thought for a moment She had not told anyone where she was going, but they had known it anyway. Denzel Morrone had reached her easily enough. Secrecy was a waste of time. “I’ve been to visit Behrooz Wolf. Twice.”

“Really?” Gipsy eased Dill’s body off the stool and walked over to help Sondra assign the underclothes to their right owners. “The Great Bey himself. We always thought you were kidding when you said he was one of your relatives. I repeat the question with even more interest. How was he?”

“If you’re thinking along your usual one-track, I have no idea. We did nothing but talk about the problem that I’ve been assigned at the office.”

“The mystery problem that you can’t talk about to us. Hmm. But you talk to Wolf or you think you talk. Let me remind you of something. Studies in Form Control, Lesson Three: A human being is at least ninety-eight percent subconscious mind and at most two percent conscious mind. The conscious two percent spends much of its time trying to explain, after the fact and in logical terms, what the ninety-eight percent subconscious mind decided to do and did. Speech is a function of the conscious mind. It is impossible for the whole transfer of information during a meeting of two humans, or even the bulk of such transfer, to be limited to speech alone. You think you just talked, but from the look of you Wolf did a whole lot more to you than that.”

Sondra had never been too impressed with that particular section of the training course, and Gipsy hadn’t quoted it correctly; but she could not forget those intense final few minutes on Wolf Island. “He’s not at all the way you’re thinking. He’s old.”

“How old?”

“Middle seventies, according to his file.”

“And he’s dropped his form-conditioning?” Gipsy suddenly sounded horrified. “That’s suicide.”

“I don’t think so. He looks like he takes regular sessions in the tanks. He’s strange, but he’s not crazy.”

“Then he’s good for at least another fifty years. Plenty of mileage left in him once you get him going.”

“Don’t be crude. Anyway, you don’t understand. He doesn’t look old, his form is maybe thirty and very fit. But he acts ancient. Cold, and remote and superior, and sort of turned off.”

“Maybe women turn him off.” Gipsy went wandering across toward the message center as though she had lost interest in the conversation; but one eye was still on Sondra. “Maybe he prefers men.”

“No way!” Sondra raised her head and glared. “I’m sure he doesn’t.”

“Well, if you’re that sure.” Gipsy seemed pleased with herself as she bent over the center. “There’s still hope. Hey, don’t you ever check for messages? You’ve had one waiting here for hours.”

“From Bey Wolf?” Sondra had not even thought about messages when she rushed in.

“Dream on. It’s from the boss. Wonder what dear Denzel wants with you. Like me to call it out?” They knew Sondra’s code, just as she knew theirs. “Sure. Go ahead.”

Sondra moved to Gypsy’s side, waiting for the message to be recalled. Typical of Morrone, it was in written rather than oral form.

“The bastard! The absolute bastard.”

“What has he done?” Gipsy could hear rare rage in Sondra’s tone. The message meant nothing to her.

“Screwed me.”

“Since it’s Denzel Morrone, I know you’re being metaphorical. Screwed you how?”

“First he refuses me permission to go out to the Kuiper Belt, says it’s not necessary. Now he turns around and blames me because I haven’t already been.”

“Covering his ass. See there, he says he had a query from the Planetary Coordinators. Standard creepy-Denzel operating procedure. What are you going to do?”

“Head for the Kuiper Belt and the colonies. But first—”

“Watch it, Sondra. Don’t throw your job away.”

“It’s all right. I’m not going after Morrone—that slimy scum can sit and fester until I’m ready to talk with him. But I need help, big-time. Before I leave I have to take one last shot at Bey Wolf.”

“We’ll help you pack.” The hands and head of the commensal gave a sudden twitch. Dill was awake and had joined the group. “Mm. Looks like I arrived just in time-before you do your usual trick and run off with all my clean underwear.”

“I don’t know why you worry, Dill.” Sondra started to throw bits and pieces into a travel bag. “By the time I get back you should be through body crossover. You won’t be my size then—Gipsy will.”

One last shot at Bey Wolf. It felt more and more that way when Sondra reached Wolf Island and found it deserted.

She had contacted Bey’s message center, just as he had told her to, but only a machine had answered. And when she arrived at the lonely beach after a top-speed flight from the Cocos Islands link point, only the two hounds greeted her.

Sondra grabbed her travel bag and her thin brown satchel of data records and headed along the jetty. Before leaving the apartment she had downloaded everything on the new form-change problem and booked a rapid transit to the Carcon Colony. In less than fourteen hours she had to be at the spaceport and heading for orbit.

She peered at the two mastiff hounds as they gamboled about her on the beach. Something looked different about them. Or about one of them.

“Here, Janus! Good dog.” Sondra grabbed the hound by the collar and made a closer inspection of its underbelly. Hadn’t both dogs been male on her previous visits? But those nipples told a different story. Janus was now. certainly a bitch.

Well, it didn’t prove much. Sex-change didn’t imply form-change experiments; it could be done easily and routinely with pure chemical treatments. Sondra headed on up the beach.

His house when she reached it was silent and deserted. It was also unlocked and open, as though Bey was either somewhere inside or had stepped away for a few minutes. Just when she urgently needed to see him.

She called his name at the front door. No response. She went inside and called again. After a few more minutes of waiting and prowling the main floor she helped herself to a drink and a sandwich-it felt like days since she had eaten.

Still no sign of him.

Maybe he was in his basement lab. Retired or not, he certainly spent a lot of time there, and it might be pretty well sound-proof. Feeling like an intruder-but even more impatient and annoyed at the owner’s absence-Sondra descended to the house s lower levels. There she confirmed the impression of her earlier visit: the basement’s form-change tanks had seen some odd modifications, surely put in by Bey, but they were as sophisticated as you would find anywhere. Unfortunately there was no sign of the man himself.

She returned to the main floor and went back to the message center. The lights were blinking. One of the messages would be from her. Maybe one of the others would tell where Bey was, and when he would be back. She reached out one hand, then stood dithering. She had no right in the world to read Bey Wolfs private mail. But time was short, and she couldn’t afford to waste it.

A difficult decision was avoided when the machine became active without any touch from her. She found herself staring at Beys startled image on the display.

The surprise was mutual. Sondra pressed the transmission button and started to explain why she was inside Bey’s home, but before she was halfway through he cut her off. He didn’t sound impatient. Just super-furious.

“Wait there,” he snarled. “And don’t touch anything else in my house!”

It was an order, not a suggestion. Sondra opened her mouth for a second try at explanations and found that he was gone. As his image faded she made a quick check for the point of origin of the call. The reply was a stream of unfamiliar numbers. Bey was making a call from a point outside the whole communication system. He could not be anywhere on the land surface of Earth, or within its oceans.

Wait, he had said. But for how long? Where was he? She had to be on her way to the Carcon Colony in just a few hours.

Sondra grabbed the brown satchel of data records and went back to the terminal. Bey’s order not to touch presumably did not apply to general computer access. She loaded her new data from the colony and began to study it.

The story was by now familiar. A new-born infant, strange in appearance even by colony standards, but given as always the benefit of the doubt (some of the system’s finest minds had emerged from the womb looking like teratomas). The standard humanity test, and its successful passage. And then the horror, as the supposed human was shown to be pure animal, incapable of reason, incapable of learning, capable only of savagery.

Sondra peered at the most recent failure. This one did not look like a ferocious beast. It was placid and unresponsive, dull and unmoving. Staring at it she was able to ask a question that the horror of the other two failed forms had blanked from her mind. Here was a non- human result of human couplings. Random mutation would always produce such a genetic mistake from time to time; but what were the odds of such a result? If it were more common here than elsewhere in the system, the problem lay in the physical environment of the colonies, forcing mutations faster than elsewhere. She pulled the statistical data files and made the comparison. The mutation rate was indeed unnaturally high.

But that merely created two mysteries in place of the original one. Why were mutation rates higher in these colonies, leading to the birth of non-human babies? And then, if that could be explained, why were the humanity tests passing those non-human creatures, insisting that they were in fact fully human?

Sondra struggled on, comparing the Carcon Colony records with those of other colonies. Once she got into the swing of it the work was surprisingly interesting. She was amazed when she heard the outer door slide open and looked up to find that more than three hours had passed since she sat down.

It could hardly be Bey—only a few hours ago he had not been anywhere on Earth. She jumped up and hurried through to the entrance hall.

It couldn’t be Bey; but it was. He was glaring at the table with its leftover food and dirty crockery.

“Nice to see you made yourself at home.”

She had intended to give instructions to the cleaners to take the dishes away, then forgotten to do it. “I’m sorry. I had to come. There’s been another one—Carcon Colony again.”

“So you said.” Bey hardly seemed even mildly interested.

“You know what I told you last time you were here. Go out to the Kuiper Belt. My advice hasn’t changed—and don’t bother trying to show me what the failed form looks like this time, because I told you that externals are useless.”

“I’m heading for the colony in just a few hours. I’m not on Wolf Island to talk about the new form.”

“So why are you here?”

“To ask you to do what only you can do. I want you to make a call to Robert Capman on Saturn. What’s happening in the colonies might be just the beginning. Suppose that it spreads and affects form-change everywhere?”

“I don’t think that will happen.”

“You have fewer facts about it than I do.”

“My opinion isn’t based on fact. It’s based on intuition— what’s left after fifty years of facts have all evaporated.”

“Intuition can be wrong. One quick call, it would be so easy. Won’t you please call Capman?”

“No. I’ll do something better.” Bey walked across to the message center and sat down at it. After a few moments of interaction he turned to glance over his shoulder at Sondra. “I’ll warn you, you might not like some of what you are going to see and hear.”

The two-way record of an earlier call was being drawn from memory, appearing split- screen in the display volume. The right side was Bey Wolf himself, in profile. The other showed a chamber filled with swirling greenish-yellow gas.

Sondra guessed it, even while the chamber was still empty. “You already called him!”

“Right. I had an hour to kill at the last link point before I could fly back to the island. Here he comes.”

The general appearance of the figure who emerged from the green mist in the left side of the display was familiar to Sondra, as it was to everyone in the solar system. She stared at the broad skull, dominated by the Medusa of ropy hair, the jeweled eyes with their nictitating membrane, and the wide, fringed mouth. Below it sat a massive, wrinkled torso, with a smooth central panel that changed constantly in color and could be used to send or receive data to another Logian a thousand times as fast as any human transfer. The arms jutting from the heavy shoulders were powerful, long, and triple-jointed.

Sondra had read and heard a lot about the Logians. But like most humans she had never met one. With the whole of Saturn off-limits and the Logian forms showing no interest in living anywhere else, Bey Wolf was a rare exception in his Logian experience and his access. Sondra did not even know how deep the Logian forms lived within the atmosphere of the gas giant planet, and she suspected that the information was available only to a chosen few.

The great grey-skinned figure sat down and bobbed its head forward, in what Sondra knew to be a Logian smile. “Hello, Bey. It has been a long time. I received your call just minutes ago. Something interesting, you said.”

“Possibly.” The icon of Bey in the display volume sounded more cautious than Sondra had ever heard him. She could not tell one Logian from another, but the other shape in the split viewing volume could only be the transformed Robert Capman. “It is unusual enough that at least I thought you might want to hear about it. Problems with the humanity tests.”

“Ah.” The broad head nodded. “We have certainly seen that before. Continue, if you will.”

“I’m going to edit. Stop me if at any point you want more details.” Bey in the display volume leaned back and started to talk. After a few seconds Sondra realized that she was hardly understanding a word. He was employing a cryptic, compressed vocabulary that seemed to reject discussion of specific form-change in favor of a general definition of envelopes of the physically possible.

Whatever he was saying, it apparently went down well with Robert Capman. The Logian form offered not a word of comment until Rey was finished And then what he did say seemed to Sondra to come from a wholly unexpected direction.

“Describe to me the individual who has been assigned to resolve the problem.”

(Rey, standing at Sondra’s side, shrugged. “You won’t like this bit, Sondra.”)

The icon of Rey Wolf seemed startled by the question as it replied: “Her name is Sondra Dearborn. She has a decent theoretical background, but very limited practical knowledge. By conventional measures she is not much above average intelligence, although I realize that neither you nor I place much stock in that parameter as a useful guide to achievement.”

“Do you give her high marks in any field?”

“If we agree that stubbornness is a field for which marks can be given, yes. She is also young, hard-working, and enthusiastic. And she cannot be suborned.”

“Do you believe that the last fact is relevant?”

“I do. And I believe that it was not realized by her superiors when she was assigned to the case. I also believe that they had no idea that she would seek help from me.”

“Do you know what that implies?”

“I do.”

“Intriguing.” Capman was rubbing at his ropy locks. “Most intriguing. This is not relevant to the present discussion, but on some future occasion I would like to meet Sondra Dearborn.”

Sondra had sat up rigid when she heard her own name mentioned, and the last comment made her shiver. To meet with Robert Capman, the senior deity of form-change! She had found it hard to evaluate some of the other exchanges she was hearing, but it was clear that Bey was telling Capman something he did not want to say outright.

Capman’s next words seemed to confirm it. He had allowed his head to sink onto the great chest, and his eyes were covered by a milky membrane. “As you know very well, Logians do not interfere in human affairs. For good reason.”

“I understand.”

“And I cannot break that rule. I will tell you only what I believe you already know: your intuition has not led you astray. This is a problem which owes less in its origin and its solution to natural events than it does to human actions. And that is all I will say.”

“It helps.”

“To confirm, rather than to inform.” The Logian sat straighter and his head bobbed forward. “And now, are you ready to change to a superior form and come to work with me on Saturn?”

The icon of Bey Wolf smiled and shook its head. “Not yet. Maybe someday.”

“The usual answer. Very well.” Capman stood up, moving easily in spite of his great mass. “It was good to hear from you again. Have you ever looked into the early history of the theory of elliptic functions? If not, you might want to do so. It would possibly enlighten you. Farewell.”

The Logian figure nodded and stepped away into the mist. A starred icon in the display region showed that communication had been terminated.

To Sondra, the final comment had been even less intelligible than Bey’s remarks. After looking forward for so long to hearing from Robert Capman, she felt bitterly disappointed.

“Is that all we get?”

“It’s more than we have any right to expect. You heard Capman and you know the Logian policy: they realize they are far smarter than humans, but they refuse to do our thinking and decision-making for us because they say it’s bad for the human species. He was already stretching it in what he told us.”

“He didn’t tell us one thing!—not that I could understand.”

“Wrong. He went out of his way to give us information. I think I got most of it.”

“Why did he say he wants to meet me?”

“There I’m as puzzled as you are. That’s one thing I didn’t understand at all. I’ve got to think about it.”

“And what was that weird comment about studying the history of elliptic functions? It had nothing to do with anything.”

“It didn’t seem to. But I believe he was revealing far more to us than he should have.”

“Elliptic functions are some sort of math. Are they something else, too?”

“Not that I know of. That’s not the point. Capman was giving an important clue, sure as I’m standing here. You just have to learn how to interpret it.”

“I can’t do anything—I head for orbit in just a few hours.” Sondra glanced at the clock. “In fact, I should be leaving right now. Can’t you work on this while I’m gone?”

“I admit that I’ll certainly think about it—I’ve been doing that ever since I spoke to Capman, I can’t help myself.” Bey turned off the display unit and began to call other files from storage. “But let me point out again what I’ve told you over and over: this is your project, not mine. I have other things to do.”

“But you’ll be here if I need to talk to you?”

“Probably not. I think I’ll be on Mars.”

“Working for Trudy Melford?”

“That, and doing some other things.”

“You’re selling out!” Sondra felt a hot rush of anger, fierce and inexplicable. “You’re going to be just like everyone else and let that bitch Trudy Melford own you body and soul.”

“Body if I get lucky. Soul I doubt. Look at it that way if you want to.” Bey quietly went on working at the terminal.

His calm was almost more maddening to Sondra than her own strange anger. “You won’t help me—because I can’t afford you!”

“Exactly right.” Bey lifted his head and gave her a cool stare. “You can’t afford me, Sondra, and Trudy can’t afford me, and nobody can afford me. Because I’m not for sale. And I am helping you, ungrateful as you seem to be.” Bey turned from the terminal with a program card in his hand. “This is a diagnostic routine of my own devising. It is better than anything you will find in the library of the Office of Form Control. Use it on the form-change programs in the Carcon Colony. My bet is that you will find the source of the problems there is a simple software malfunction.”

Sondra took it without a word.

“Second,” went on Bey, “I can be reached on Mars, or anywhere else, by using Wolf Island as a relay point. My access code is written on the same card. Third, you will find on the same card your introduction to a Cloudlander called Apollo Belvedere Smith. He is currently working in the Kuiper Belt. Aybee is an old acquaintance of mine. I strongly recommend that you visit him before you go to the Carcon or Fugate colonies. My letter asks him to help you.”

Sondra looked at the card she was holding. “Why are you doing all this for me?”

That stimulated Bey’s biggest sign of emotion since he had seen the dirty dishes. He growled at her, “Make up your mind, Sondra Wolf Dearborn. You keep insisting that you are my long-lost relative. Do you want me to help, or don’t you?”

“I do. I need help. Thank you, Bey.” Sondra had to force the words out. Her own feelings were too complex to fathom. It is impossible for the whole transfer of information during a meeting of two humans, or even the bulk of such transfer, to be limited to speech alone. “I am grateful for the help, really I am. But I have to go now, or I’ll never make the shuttle. And thank you for the introduction, too.”

To add a final touch to her confusion, he was now smiling at some private joke. “Maybe you should wait until you meet Aybee before you thank me for that.”

“Why? what’s wrong with him?”

“Wrong? Nothing at all. Aybee is a genius in mathematics and physics. A good guy, too.” Bey beamed at her. “The rest, I think I’ll let you find out for yourself.”