Sight of Proteus

by Charles Sheffield

  "A natural mistake on your part, but my fault. Not John Larsen, Mr. Wolf. Robert Capman. Welcome to our company."

  While Bey was still struggling to grasp the implications of what he had heard, the other spoke again.

  "I am pleased to see that you are none the worse for the form-change that you went through on the way here. May I ask, how long did it take you to realize what had been done to you?"

  "How long?" Bey thought for a few moments. "Well, I knew I'd been changed as soon as I became conscious in the tank, and I knew it had to be something that affected the senses the moment I saw the Sun. It looked as though it had been Doppler-shifted towards the blue, by a big factor—and I knew that couldn't be real. The ship was heading away from the Sun, not towards it, and in any case it wasn't going that fast. I didn't catch on then, though, and I still didn't catch on when I noticed that the sound of the ship's engines seemed to be at the wrong frequency. Not too smart. But when I saw Jupiter, as we swung by, Io was going into occultation. As I was watching it, I realized that it looked to be happening fast, much faster than it ought to. Physical laws are pretty inflexible. So, it had to be me. It was a subjective change in speed. I had been slowed down."

  The Logian form of Capman was nodding slowly. "So just when did you understand what had happened?"

  "Oh, I suppose it was about ten minutes after I came out of the tank. I should have caught it sooner—after all, I already knew all about Project Timeset. Ever since we found your underground lab, I've been expecting to meet forms that have been rate-changed the way that I was. I can't have been thinking too well when I first came through the form-change."

  The Logian was nodding his head now in a different rhythm, one that Bey had learned as the alien smile. "You may be interested to know, Mr. Wolf, that I made a small wager with Betha Mestel, before I left Pearl. She asserted that you would take a long time to realize what had been done to you. She thought you would understand it only when you read it out of the data banks that had been loaded on the ship. I disagreed. I said that you would achieve that realization for yourself, and I bet her that it would happen within two hours of your leaving the form-change tank."

  Capman rubbed at the swollen boss below his chest with a tri-digit paw. "The only thing we did not resolve, now that I look back on it, is any mechanism by which I might collect the results of the wager. It is three months now since Betha Mestel passed on to Dolmetsch the stabilization equations. She is well on her way out of the System, and should not be back for several centuries. She could afford to make her bet with impunity."

  The appearance and structural changes were irrelevant. It was still the same Robert Capman. Bey was convinced of it, and realized again the insight of Capman's remark, soon after their first meeting; the two of them would recognize each other through any external changes.

  Before Bey could speak again, a vivid flash of color lit up the screen in front of the console on the other ship.

  "One moment," said Capman. He faced the transmission screen and held his body quite still. For a brief second, the panel on his chest became a bewildering pointillism of colored light. It ended as suddenly as it had begun, returning to a uniform grey. Capman turned back to face Bey.

  "Sorry to cut off like that. I had to give John Larsen an update on what has been happening here. He wanted to know if you had arrived yet. He's very busy there, getting ready for atmospheric entry, but he wants to set up a standard voice and video link and talk to you."

  "What sort of link do you have with him? I saw John change the color of his chest panel, but always one color at a time. You did it with a whole lot of different color elements."

  Capman nodded, head and trunk together. "That was for rapid transfer of information. I didn't want to take much time to explain to John what we are doing. Burst mode, we've been calling it. We found out about it soon after John changed, but I wanted to use it as a special method of communicating with him, so we kept quiet about it. It handles information thousands of times faster than conventional methods."

  "Are you being literal, or exaggerating the rate?" asked Bey, unable to imagine an information transfer rate of hundreds of thousands of words a minute.

  "I'm not exaggerating. If anything, I'm understating. I suspect that this is the usual way that Logians communicated—they only used speech when they were in a situation where they could not see each other's chest panels. It's a question of simple efficiency of data transfer. The Logian chest panel can produce an individual, well-defined spot of color about three millimeters on a side, like this."

  On Capman's chest panel, an orange point of light suddenly appeared, then next to it a green one.

  "I can make that any color, from ultra-violet through infra-red. The Logian eye can easily resolve that single spot, from a distance of a couple of meters. That was probably the natural distance apart for typical Logian conversation. Each spot can modulate its color independently, so."

  The pair of points changed color, then for a moment the whole panel swirled with a shifting, iridescent pattern of colors. It returned quickly to the uniform grey tone.

  "I ran the color changes near to top speed there. It's very tiring to do that for more than a few seconds, though John has held it for several minutes when he had a real mass of information to get to me quickly. Now, you can do the arithmetic. The panel on my chest is about forty-five centimeters by thirty-five. That lets me use roughly sixteen thousand spots there as independent message transmitters. If he were here, John could read all those in directly. His eyes and central nervous system can handle that data load. If we were in a real hurry, he'd come closer, and I could decrease the spot size to about a millimeter on a side—just about the limit. The number of channels goes up to over a hundred thousand, and each one can handle about the same load as a voice circuit. That would be hard work for both of us, but we've tried it to see what the limits are."

  Bey was shaking his head sadly. "I knew there had to be something strange about the com system that you put in the tank back on Earth—there was no reason for it to have such a big capacity. But I never thought of anything like this."

  "You would have, if we had used it much. It was one of the things that worried me when John was using that mode to send me information when I was on Pearl: would somebody notice the comlink load and start to investigate it? I don't think anyone did, but as you well know there is really no such thing as a completely secret operation. You always need to send and store data, and sometime that will give you away. John tried to be careful, but it was still a danger."

  Bey sat down on the bench next to the communicator screen. "I don't know who could have discovered you. I tried to guess what was happening, and I think I know a part of it—but it's only a part. I assume that John knows the whole story?"

  "He deduced it for himself, within a couple of days after assuming the Logian form. His powers of logic had increased so much that I couldn't believe it at first. Now, I have observed it in myself also."

  There was another flicker of light from the screen in front of Capman.

  "John will be in voice communication in a couple of minutes," he said. "He's very busy making the last minute checks on the ship."

  "I heard you say he would be making atmospheric entry. Surely he can't survive on Saturn? The form he is in was designed for Loge, and I assume that he's still in that."

  "He is—but don't worry. The ship he's in has some special features, as does this one. You can see his ship from here, if you look ahead of you. He's already in the upper atmosphere, and the fusion drive is on."

  Bey looked at the forward screen. A streak of phosphorescence was moving steadily across the upper atmosphere of the planet. As he watched, it brightened appreciably. The ship was moving deeper into the tenuous gases high above Saturn's surface. In a few minutes more, ionization would begin to interfere with radio communications. Bey felt a sense of relief when the second channel light went on, and a second image screen became active.

  The
two Logian forms were very similar, too similar for Bey to distinguish by a rapid inspection. However, there were other factors that made identification easy. The second figure was festooned with intravenous injectors and electronic condition monitors. It raised one arm in greeting.

  "Sorry I couldn't stay up there to greet you, Bey," said John Larsen. "We're working on a very tight entry window. I want to descend as near as possible to one place on the planet. We've calculated the optimum location for low winds and turbulence."

  "John. You can't survive down there."

  "I think I can. We have no intention of committing suicide. This ship has been modified past anything you've ever seen before. It will monitor the outside conditions, and keep the form-change programs going that will let me adapt to them. The rate of descent can be controlled, so that I can go down very slowly if necessary," John Larsen's Logian form sounded confident and cheerful. "Well, Bey, you've had a while to think on the way out here. How much of it have you been able to deduce?"

  Bey looked at the two forms, each on their separate screens. "The basic facts about what's been going on for the past forty years. Those are fairly clear to me now. But I don't have any real idea of motives. I assume you know those too, John?"

  "I do. But if it's any consolation to you, I had to be told them. I don't think they are amenable to pure logic."

  "I agree," cut in Capman. "You would have to know some of Earth's hidden history, before you can understand why I would rather be thought of as a murderer than have the truth known about the experiments. I am curious to see how far your own logic has taken you. What do you know about my work?"

  "I know you're not a murderer—but it took me long enough to realize it. I understand all four of your projects now. Proteus was the basic space-going forms, and Timeset was the form that allows a change of rate for the life process. I knew about them four years ago. I assume that Lungfish is Betha Mestel. She's about to go out into a new living environment—interstellar space. How long will she be away?"

  Capman shrugged. "We are not sure. Perhaps two or three hundred years. She was always an independent spirit. She will return when she feels that it is useful for her to do so. Pearl was arranged to be completely self-contained. Fusion powered internal lighting takes care of the illumination for the algal tanks when sunlight is too weak for growth—and Betha has a supply of the Logian virus, in case she becomes bored with the potential of her present form and wants to try a change."

  "I hope I'm around to see her come back," said Bey. "I now think that's a real possibility. You know, John, I didn't follow my first instincts when you told me about that liver in Central Hospital. My first thought was that it must have come from a very old person, one so old that he had not been given the chromosome ID. That would have made him over a hundred, and I decided that no one would use a hundred-year-old liver for a transplant. Then we got an age estimate from Morris in the Transplant Department, and that showed a young liver. That seemed to be the end of the original thought. But it wasn't. Correct?"

  "It was not." Capman nodded. "As usual, your instincts were good."

  "The only project we haven't accounted for was Project Janus," went on Bey. "I should have realized that you gave your projects names that told something about the work you were doing. And Janus was the two-faced god, the one who could look both ways. You had developed a form-change program that could 'look both ways' in time. It could advance or reverse the aging process. The liver we found was from a very old person, who had undergone age reversal as a result of your work. Right?"

  Capman's big eyes were hooded by their heavy lids. He was reliving another period of his life, rocking slowly back and forwards in his seat. He nodded. "It was from an old person. Worse than that, it was from an old friend. I could not prevent some of those experiments ending in failure."

  Bey was looking on sympathetically. "You can't blame yourself for the failures. Not everything can succeed. I assume that all the people who were used in those experiments were your old friends? But they knew the risks, and they had nothing at all to lose."

  Capman nodded again. "They had all reached a point where the feedback machines could not maintain a healthy condition. They had a choice. A conventional and rapid death, or the chance to risk what remained of their lives in the experiments. As you know, the compulsions we used to achieve form-change were extreme, but even so they did not always work. Let me assure you, the knowledge that their deaths were inevitable did not lessen the loss. When someone died in the experiments, I had killed an old friend. There was no escape from that feeling."

  "I can understand that. What I can't follow is your reluctance to share the burden. No one who understood your work would have blamed you for what you were doing. Your friends were volunteers. This is the piece I can't follow. Why did you choose to keep everything a secret—even after your first discovery? Why was it necessary to have a hidden lab, away from the Earth?"

  Capman was still nodding, slowly and thoughtfully. He sighed. "As you say, Mr. Wolf, that is the key question. In a real sense, I did not make that decision. I am known to the System as a mass murderer, the monster of the century. It is not a role I sought; it was forced upon me. I could even argue that the real villains are Laszlo Dolmetsch, or Betha Melford. But I don't believe it."

  "Betha Melford? You mean Betha Mestel?"

  "The same person. I tend to call her by the name she had before her bond with Mestel."

  "What did you think of her, Bey?" broke in Larsen. "You must have met her on Pearl."

  "I did. I think she's marvellous, and I can't help wondering what she looked like before the form-changes. Betha Melford. Is she related to the Melfords?"

  "She is Ergan Melford's only surviving heir. Every form-change royalty that BEC collects contributes two percent to Betha." Capman paused again, briefly carried into the past. "The merger with the Mestel fortunes made her the single most influential person on Earth, but she always knew the importance of keeping that hidden."

  "And now, she has given all that up?" asked Bey.

  "She did that a number of years ago. Betha is almost a hundred and thirty years old, and when we embarked on the age reversal experiments she had no way of knowing if she would survive them. Her financial interests are managed by a small group of people, on Earth and in the USF."

  "Including you?"

  Capman nodded. "Including me—and also including Dolmetsch. I told you that there are pieces of history that you need before you could hope to really know what has been going on. None of that has ever been written down. My own involvement began soon after I came back from studies in Europe, when I was still a student. I had just begun work at the Melford Foundation . . ."

  Chapter 24

  "There you are Robert. I wondered where you were hiding away."

  The woman was tall and elegantly dressed, with grey-streaked dark hair piled high on her head. She emerged from the tightly-packed crowd of people and came over to the young man standing uncertainly in the corner of the room.

  "I'm sorry," she went on. "I talked you into coming here, then I walked out on you before I'd had the chance to introduce you to the one person I really wanted you to meet."

  "I've been all right, Betha."

  "Yes, standing on your own here in the corner. You don't even have a drink."

  "I don't drink."

  "I know that, Robert. You need one as a defense mechanism, until you learn what to do with your hands. Come on. I'm going to get you with someone you can actually talk to. I know you think all the rest of them here are just parasites. They are, too—but I'm old enough not to let it show."

  She led the way back through the noisy crowd of people, out through the double doors that opened onto a wide terrace. Beyond that lay the calm, rolling lawns of the Melford estate. Sitting on the terrace wall, and staring out across the grounds, was another young man, scarcely as old as Robert Capman.

  "Robert," said Betha. "This is Laszlo Dolmetsch. You two will hate each o
ther at first, but you have to get to know one another."

  The other had swung around at the sound of her voice. He scowled, a deep frown on the sloping forehead that rose above the deep eye sockets and big, beaky nose.

  Betha Melford shook her head. "You two deserve each other. Neither one of you has the faintest idea of the social graces. Ah well, you'll learn. I'm going back inside now. Come and look for me when you can't stand each other's company any longer."

  Robert Capman looked at her uncertainly, as she turned in a swirl of natural silk and headed back in through the heavy doors. The other youth was looking just as uncomfortable. Capman advanced to the edge of the terrace, and sat down on the low wall.

  "Any idea what all this is about?" he said guardedly.

  Dolmetsch shook his head. "Not unless you're in econometric models. My father has known Betha for years, but she was the one who talked me into coming here tonight. She said it would be interesting." His tone was bitter. "So far, she's been dead wrong. That lot in there don't have the brain of a sponge, between them."

  "I know. Look, have you ever worked in form-change theory? I thought that's what Betha meant when she said we should talk to each other."

  "Never." The other's voice showed a quickening of interest. "It does have some relevance to what I'm doing, though. I'm developing a method of estimating the effect of technological changes on social systems. You know, usually a technological change happens, and it produces a social change that no one ever expected. Like the printing press, or the automobile—they led to social change, even though they were introduced as just technical inventions."

  "Like the telephone, or the computer."

  "Right." Laszlo Dolmetsch nodded vigorously. "Or like form-change. You see, if I'm right, that's a technological instrument that will produce the biggest social changes ever—and that means it has to be handled really carefully. Look, do you understand catastrophe theory?"

  "Sure. I've had to re-parameterize it for the biological work I've been doing, but the theory is all the same."