Proteus in the Underworld (16 page)

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 it—"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.

CHAPTER 11

On the road again; and not sure where it would lead.

Bey stood within the link zone during the final spasm of transition, and wondered. Trudy Melford had urged him to return as soon as possible to Mars and investigate the surface forms. And here he was, reporting for duty just like any other brain-washed BEC employee.

But what had prompted him to quote to Jarvis Dommer an arrival time one day later than he planned to travel?

Bey could answer that, after a fashion, except that his reply had a great big hole in it—or rather, a hundred thousand holes.

The standard Earth/Mars comparison cliche, still trotted out by USF politicians after centuries of use, was the area logic. Earth is largely a water world. Mars is a smaller planet, but it has as much
land area
as Earth.

Bey had been puzzled by that statement the first time that he heard it. What did total land area have to do with anything? No one on Earth lived at the summit of Mount Everest, just as no one on Mars lived on top of Olympus Mons. No one on Earth lived out on the surface at the North or South Pole. Still less would a sane person try to reside at the Martian poles, where most of the snow was solid carbon dioxide and midsummer was a cold winter's day in Antarctica, minus air. In any case, land
area
was almost irrelevant. Humans inhabit three dimensions, not two, and a large planetoid like Ceres, suitably re-structured in its interior to provide thousands of habitat levels, could in principle be the home of more people than lived on Earth.

The colonists on Mars had known all this. With the aid of their machines they had worked not the harsh surface, but the more tractable interior. It was not difficult for the tunneling machines to connect the gas-filled hollow pockets of subsurface Mars so that chamber led to cave led to cavern. After a century of work, a gigantic, multiply-connected, hundred-thousand node network of living space had been created: Old Mars, fully navigable only with the help of a computer.

The exit point for the Melford link lay close to the surface, above most of Old Mars. Bey, emerging from Immigration, stood motionless and stared around him. There were plenty of people greeting arrivals from Earth, but none showed any interest in a plainly-dressed and silent visitor.

That ought to be enough to prick the bubble of curiosity that had brought him early to Mars. Somewhere within the convoluted maze beneath his feet he might find red-beard, the man who had tracked him from Melford Castle to the Mattin Link entry point. But more realistically Bey would not find the man, no matter how hard he searched. The population of Old Mars was tiny by Earth standards, just a few millions—but a million is a big number. Examine the ID of each resident, one after another, and you would be at it for months. And as Bey knew from his work on illegal forms, there were plenty of people in the deep Underworld whose ID's were, to put it charitably, unreliable.

Bey placed the light knapsack that formed his entire luggage on one of the benches of polished synthetic that lined the link exit chamber. He sat down next to it. He was not happy. His vaunted intuition had led him badly astray. What was he going to do now? Back on Earth, he had made two assumptions: that anyone who had knowledge of his movements during his previous visit to Mars would have just as good information now; and if they had been eager to talk to him then, they would still be just as keen.

One of his assumptions was not valid. No one in the chamber was taking the slightest bit of interest in him. On his last visit Bey had been favored by the presence of Trudy Melford herself, so all the staff had been falling over themselves to offer assistance and advice. Today he was a nobody. He had not invoked the power of the Melford name, and so he was on his own.

Bey leaned back. The bench molded itself to his body. He wondered. What other benefits came to you when you were smiled on by the Empress? Was Trudy Melford's smile just the grin on the face of the crocodile, moments before the jaws gulped you down? Bey recalled a furious Sondra, glaring at him and shouting: "That fancy form she was using, and those sexy clothes. She was
stalking
you, couldn't you tell? If I hadn't arrived when I did . . ."

It was a good thing Sondra had not been at Melford Castle with Bey, to see Trudy's tight-fitting and brief costume and the warm look in those startling blue-green eyes, or to hear the tone in Trudy's voice when she told him that the castle was "just as private as you want it to be."

Bey lolled on the bench, musing on the memory. He lacked the energy to find an auto-car to take him again to the castle. Half an hour passed before he was finally lifted out of his daydream by a loud clatter of footsteps. The man with the red beard had come running into the chamber. He skidded to a halt by the information board about twenty yards away from Bey and bounced nervously up and down on the balls of his feet. He was scanning the entries. His shoulders slumped when he saw that the link transition had been completed a while ago.

Bey walked across to stand beside him.

"You're late," he said quietly.

The man turned. "Yes, I am. I was delayed by the—" He stopped and stared open-mouthed at Bey. "Behrooz Wolf! I thought I'd missed you."

"I hung around. Who are you?"

"My name is Rafael Fermiel." After a few awkward seconds the man held out his hand and smiled at Bey.

Bey grinned back at him. He had never been more pleased to see anyone. He didn't know who Rafael Fermiel was, or what he might want, and for the moment he didn't particularly care. What mattered was that Bey's hunch as to what would happen if he came to Mars had been right after all.

Bey regarded Fermiel fondly while he waited for the next step. He knew that in spite of everything that the form-change machines could do in the way of body maintenance, the urge to sin changed as a person got older. Some sins, like lust, often vanished completely.

Maybe. But in Bey's own case, he suspected that the Sin of Pride would be with him undiminished until the day he died.

* * *

"We seem to be going
downward
." Bey had assumed they would be heading for the surface and a meeting with the new forms who now lived there.

"Certainly we are." Rafael Fermiel nodded as the auto-car they were riding glided its way around a steeply descending curve. "Did you imagine that we might be going up? We will be heading all the way to the deep Underworld, where you will meet with the most important party on this planet."

"Trudy Melford?"

It was the wrong thing to say. Rafael Fermiel lifted his nose in the air, as though he had suddenly encountered a bad smell. "No! Gertrude Zenobia Melford represents all that is
wrong
with Mars. In the long-term future of the planet she is of no importance. I am aware that she brought you here, and that she wishes you to work for her. However, in the next few hours I hope to persuade you that such an action on your part would be a great mistake. There is a higher cause."

Bey wasn't much into higher causes. "If she didn't give you my name, then who did?"

"I am not at liberty to discuss that." Fermiel refused to look at him. "However, let me assure you that your abilities have been described by that individual in the most complimentary terms. See there, Mr. Wolf." Fermiel nodded ahead. "We are now approaching the real Mars. Not the barren wilderness of the outer surface, nor the unnatural import from Earth of Melford Castle, but the true heart of this planet. Prepare to be amazed."

Bey recognized a deliberate change of subject when it was pushed in his face. If Fermiel was hoping to make a convert to his cause he was going about it in a very strange way. Bey was tempted to tell him to go to hell, explain that he had been recruited unsuccessfully by better men than Rafael Fermiel, and demand to be taken back to the link exit point.

But if he did that, he might never find out what was going on. And he did have most of a day to kill before he was expected at Melford Castle.

Go with the flow.

Bey leaned back in his seat, stared out of the car's front window, and waited to be astonished. He was not optimistic. Mars had been explored by humans and machines for two centuries and permanently settled for three-quarters of that period. The surface forms that Trudy had shown him seemed to be new, but what could be radically different about a maze of caves and tunnels?

The car had continued its steady descent. It was emerging into the biggest caverns that Bey had seen so far on Mars, running its way along a black-top road that might have been found in a million places back on Earth. High above, in the roof of the cave, three artificial suns mimicked the solar spectrum.

The air was warm and humid. Standing water covered the level fields that stretched out on both sides of the road toward the distant cave walls. Bey saw a handful of smart supervisor machines, rolling along by the narrow irrigation canals that marked the field boundaries. They were monitoring the work of thousands of small laborer robots, who in turn were tending countless millions of narrow green stalks that poked up from the shallow water. There was no sign of people.

"Rice." Rafael Fermiel glanced smugly at Bey as he spoke. "Grown in the traditional way. It is alternated through the growing season with legumes and root crops."

Bey nodded. He was beginning to wonder if there had been a bad case of mistaken identity. He was a form-change specialist. He could think of nothing less likely to interest him than a guided tour of mud farming.

The auto-car went rolling on, back into another connecting tunnel. They were still descending, deeper and deeper into the Underworld. The atmosphere was noticeably more dense. A shimmering heat haze hung in the air of the next cavern that they entered.

The black-top road and the multiple artificial suns were here again, but everything else had changed. The surface of this cave was bare broken rock and fine white sand. Jutting upward here and there were occasional stunted bushes and fat, spiny cacti. Bey saw no animals, except for one bird like an outsized crow that flapped slowly away from the moving car on lazy black wings. He glanced at Fermiel. The other man nodded in a satisfied way. The car rolled on.

And on.

By the eighth and last cave—a turbulent body of water, with a strong wind blowing salt spray across the narrow causeway that they were crossing—Bey understood. He had seen steaming wild jungle, desolate high veldt, salt ocean, gloomy moss-strewn swamp, hot desert, scrubby tundra, carefully-tailored agriculture, and bare snowy hills. Every cave was different. Every cave had its own balanced ecosystem. Every cave appeared empty of human life.

"Well?" Fermiel was staring expectantly at Bey.

"It's very interesting. It's a long time since I've really followed what's happening on Mars, but I had no idea—"

"Everything you have seen is recent. Twenty years ago, each one of these deep caves was nothing but unbreathable air and dark, empty rock."

"Which makes what you have done even more surprising." Bey stared ahead as the auto-car left the cave, accelerating sharply up the steep gradient of an unlit tunnel. He felt his ears pop at the change of pressure. He swallowed hard. "But I still don't understand why you showed this to me. I realize that you are simulating a variety of Earth ecosystems, but if you know my specialty you also know that I can't offer better comments on the caves than any casual tourist."

"I know. Do not worry about it. That is not why we wished to meet with you."