Proteus in the Underworld (14 page)

"You're not Trudy Melford. It was apparently a freak accident. Not out in the Belt or Cloudland, either, where accidents are supposed to happen. Here on Earth, of all places. Trudy and the kid and a couple of nurses were on vacation aboard one of the Melford auto-yachts, cruising around the islands in the Aegean Sea. The weather was good, sea a flat calm. Trudy was up on deck, the baby in a carrycrib next to her. Safe as you could get. Except there was a minor sea-floor quake a few kilometers away from the yacht. Not enough to be called dangerous, but enough to cause a big swell with no warning. The yacht rolled, the crib slid across the deck and tipped over the rail. Trudy and one of the nurses saw it happen, they jumped in after it. Got the crib, got the blanket. But no baby. Never found the body."

"Terrible. Where was the father?"

"Wrong question. You mean,
who
was the father. Trudy wasn't saying, and as far as I can tell no one ever found out."

"Any suggestions?"

"Sure. Sperm bank."

"The old Melford tradition."

"Right. Keep the line pure, don't admit outsiders into the family. That's another reason you shouldn't get ideas." Maria was studying him. "What's happening, Bey? You've gone cross-eyed."

"That's because I finally
am
getting ideas. Not the sort you think, either. Thanks, Maria."

"Any time. Now I need sleep. Be careful, Bey. You're playing out of your league."

"I'll remember that."

As Maria vanished, Bey wondered what league she put him in. The league of cynical opportunists? The league of retired, over-the-hill form-change specialists? The league of nostalgic, backward-looking literature buffs?

Certainly not the Trudy Melford super-rich beautiful-people power-players league. Still less the league of love's young dreamers. Maria might cast Bey in many roles, but that of Trudy Melford's soul mate was not one of them.

He remembered Maria's earlier comment.
Whatever Trudy wants . . .

Except, maybe, the one thing that she had wanted most. And Bey could in no way see himself as a baby substitute.

What
did
Trudy want from him?

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, eyebrow-less 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 finks, 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 meat
head
land. 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 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 mo, 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 Aybee's loud reply.

"Sure, Cinnabar. I did it already. It's on the way."

Cinnabar? If that was Cinnabar Baker, 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."