Proteus in the Underworld (12 page)

"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 Gipsy's side, waiting for the message to be recalled. Typical of Morrone, it was in written rather than oral form.

From: Headquarters, Office of Form Control.
To: Sondra Dearborn.
Subject: Failure of humanity test.
My office received news four hours ago of another unfortunate situation in the Carcon Colony. Offspring successfully passed the humanity test but was proved non-human by its subsequent behavior. This is, as you know, the third such failure, others having occurred in the Carcon and also in the Fugate Colony.
Earlier today I received a query from the United Space Federation via the Planetary Coordinators, asking why there has been no on-site investigation of this case. That question seems very appropriate. It is two months since the case was assigned to you. Why have you not visited either the Carcon or the Fugate Colony in person?
I look forward to your prompt reply and explanation.
It will form part of your official record with the Office of Form Control.
—Denzel Morrone, Office Head

"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, bigtime. 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 gambolled 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.

The 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 Wolf's 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 Bey's 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 loll 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."