Proteus in the Underworld

by Charles Sheffield

  That price, for travel around Earth, was nothing compared with the cost of maintaining a link with one vertex on Earth and the other on Mars. Trudy Melford, with a profligate disregard of expense that still amazed Bey, had been holding a link open for her personal use and convenience for more than three years.

  How could she—or anyone, no matter how rich— possibly afford it?

  Bey had part of his answer when he arrived in Chetumal, at Trudy's North American terminal point. He had linked in to the Yucatan on the east-bound route, traveling via Northern Australia, the Marianas, Johnston Island, and Portland, watching the sun flicker from horizon to horizon and morning turn to night in less than two minutes.

  The people at each link stage were what he had learned to expect, nervous and harried guardians of goods too precious and too short-lived to be entrusted to conventional modes of travel. The cubes of bright red contained near-empty space. At their heart sat proprietary algorithms, embodied in microchips too small to see. The yellow lead containers held high radioactives, imprisoned behind their triple shields. Most urgent of all were the nano-flasks, their contents changing and evolving a thousand times as fast as their surroundings. The people who carried those also moved in more than real time, aware that a delay of half an hour could destroy their priority and the chance of a successful patent.

  But at the Earth/Mars link point, all that changed. Travelers wore exotic forms and recreational clothing. They carried little or no luggage, and no commercial materials. There were scores of them, all apparently known to each other, and all chatting about earlier link trips that they had made to Mars. They had converged quietly and confidently on the Mars staging point, coming from all parts of Earth.

  Bey studied them while he waited for the incoming link to operate. At last he realized what he was seeing. These were the super-rich of the Inner System, day-trippers who were using Trudy Melford's link to Mars not because of need, but to make a statement. A one-way link would consume the lifetime earnings of a normal person. These travelers did not need to go to Mars. They merely wanted to emphasize their own wealth and status. Trudy Melford could set the price of the link as high as she chose;—and this group would compete to pay it.

  They glanced at Bey and dismissed him. Their expressions said that he was not one of them, and therefore he was a nobody. It would have required a character more saintly than Bey's to feel no satisfaction when the incoming link door opened and a dozen BEC employees emerged, ignored the beautiful people, and converged deferentially on him.

  "All ready for Mars, Mr. Wolf?" In spite of Bey's warning to Trudy Melford, the leader of the BEC group was Jarvis Dommer. He was grinning like Jumping Jack Flash, just as though he personally was responsible for Bey's presence at the link point.

  Bey nodded. "I'm ready." He could hear the intrigued whispers from the glitterati around him: "Who is he?" "They said his name is Wolf." "He's someone really important." "He must he traveling incognito using a new form."

  The whole group walked forward into the link transition area. They fell silent, waiting. The air pressure of the ante-chamber had already been cycled slowly down to an oxygen-rich mixture at half a standard atmosphere, exactly what they would encounter when they emerged within the boundaries of Old Mars. Before he left Wolf Island, Bey had also briefly entered a form-change tank. The adjustment needed to feel comfortable in Mars gravity was a tiny one.

  If Bey had been less experienced he might have believed he could make it without the use of form-change equipment at all. Purposive form-change was no more than the machine reinforcement of human will. Why bother with the hassle of computer feedback and mechanical equipment, when it ought to be possible to do everything by pure mental power?

  Maybe it was; but over many years Bey had investigated scores of Secret Masters, sages who claimed to have a command of form-change without the use of equipment. Every one had proved to be a lunatic, a charlatan, or both.

  The tension in the link transition chamber was mounting. The wall display flickered the last part of its count-down. There was a long final second, while the display showed zero and nothing appeared to be happening. Then came a dizzying instant as the link transition was performed. The chamber walls seemed to blur and shimmer. Ambient gravity dropped instantly to Mars equatorial, thirty-six percent of Earth standard.

  Everyone swallowed hard, then smiled at each other. That gravity change was the indisputable proof that they were now on Mars.

  There was one more moment of drama. To Bey's surprise, Trudy Melford herself was waiting outside the link transition point. She nodded to everyone who was emerging, as though she knew them all personally, but it was Bey whom she moved to and took by the arm. He received a special smile. Bey heard his own name coupled with Trudy's by the people around them.

  "Ready to go?" It was not a question. Already she was leading Bey toward the Mars immigration area. She was wearing the same form as at their meeting on Wolf Island, but this time her dress was less conventional, a lacy white veil that floated around her body like gossamer in the lower gravity and thinner air.

  Bey thought she looked terrific. He said nothing.

  In his case the formalities had been disposed of in advance. He was whisked away to a long, sleek open car before any other arrival had been offered a first entry document. With Dommer in front and Trudy seated snugly at Bey's side in the cramped rear, the balloon-wheeied vehicle went snaking through a long, winding tunnel that steadily ascended.

  It had been twenty-five years since Bey's last visit to Mars. According to all reports the place had changed beyond recognition; but he had a pretty good idea where he must be.

  Two hundred years ago the first colonists had burrowed in close to the equator, down past the sterile rubble of the regolith until they were deep enough to tap the underlying permafrost. That had yielded ample supplies of water, enough to discourage much exploration and settlement close to the ice-caps of the frigid Martian poles. When a hot summer afternoon on the equator was already fifteen degrees below the freezing point of water, why seek out colder places?

  Then the colonists and their machines had gone deeper yet, to explore the natural caverns that riddled equatorial Mars. The pockets had been discovered during the first seismic survey, early in the twenty-first century. The results of that analysis had been greeted with skepticism. Some of the caverns showed on the instruments as ten kilometers across and three hundred meters high. The tunneling colonists confirmed those readings, and learned that the cathedral heights were sustained by pillars and buttresses of igneous rock. They set their excavation machines to work, connecting the caverns by a system of branching tunnels far below the stark and frozen surface. The result was Old Mars, where everyone lived. It nowhere came closer to the surface than one kilometer, and in places the Underworld ranged as deep as seven. But no matter the depth, the populated caverns and burrows never strayed more than one degree—sixty kilometers—north or south of the Martian equator.

  And few people saw any reason at all to wander the surface, which called for simple suits but elaborate precautions.

  Cold. Arid. Airless. Everything up there was better done by smart machines, comfortable under the steady stars in an atmosphere that was still no more than one-fiftieth of the density of Earth's, and lower yet in oxygen and water vapor. Even the tourists, interested mainly in sight-seeing, confined their attention to the vast grottoes, natural and excavated, of the deep interior. Sunlight was piped in, conducted along loss-less fiber optic bundles to emerge as new miniature suns in cavern ceilings. "Rain" emerged from those ceilings at carefully planned (but seemingly random) intervals. The grottoes had become lush and magnificent, reduced-gravity jungles more riotous than any found on Earth.

  With all of this, who needed—or wanted—the surface?

  Not Trudy Melford, if Maria Sun could be believed. Melford Castle had been re-located to the Mars Underworld, three or more kilometers down. But now Bey learned that this was not the case. The castl
e sat only one kilometer deep, as close to the surface as anyone was likely to go. It was also in the extreme north by Martian settiement standards, situated in a previously-empty natural grotto almost seventy kilometers from the equator. The link entry point sat much deeper, ten kilometers closer to the equator.

  The castle's location offered another couple of small mysteries for Bey to ponder. If Trudy Melford wanted to explore new forms in the Mars Underworld, why not choose a deep location close to them? She surely had enough money to put her home anywhere that she wished. But she had picked a bleak spot that was by Martian standards far from the comforts and company of civilization, and farther yet from the Underworld. She must have been forced to install her own air compressors and light pipelines, and then grow the vegetation to make the Melford grotto hospitable rather than merely habitable. The committee that controlled the living space of Old Mars should be paying Trudy, rather than the other way round.

  The car they were in followed its own programmed route. Their course wound its way through a maze of well-lit tunnels and broad highways. Bey felt the decrease in air pressure and knew that they were steadily ascending. He saw a handful of other cars and occasional cargo barges, but no settlements. They did not pass through any large grotto or agricultural cavern. Apparently Trudy controlled a private road between Melford Castle and her link entry point.

  After her first warm greeting she had not spoken to him. She surely knew that he had not been to Mars for a long time, and understood that he needed time to adjust to the changes. But with the car's snug seating it was impossible to avoid more physical forms of contact. Bey was aware of her hip and warm shoulder, touching his. Her dark hair gave off a faint scent of roses. Jarvis Dommer, up in front, looked straight ahead and was mercifully silent—the result, Bey suspected, of direct orders from Trudy. If she was the Empress of BEC back on Earth, how much more was that the case here on Mars, where the controls on her actions were fewer?

  For the past couple of minutes the tunnel had been steadily widening, changing from a two-lane highway to a broad plain of dark rock forty or fifty meters across. A row of floor lights now marked the car's path. The walls and roof of the chamber were far-off and no longer visible.

  Then the road illumination ended. The car's lights also dimmed and faded to nothing. Bey was suddenly in limbo. The car's motor was inaudible, but he had the feeling that their forward motion was slowing. He felt a hand on his, and heard Trudy's soft voice in the darkness beside him, "Melford Castle, Bey Wolf. Welcome. I hope that you will choose to remain here for much longer than one day."

  It had been carefully staged, of course—whether for him alone, he could not tell. A diffuse light appeared, high and far-off. At first it was like the glow of an Earth sunset, soft-edged and tinged with red. As the car moved steadily forward the light strengthened and changed, to become the white blaze of Mars noon. Bey knew that it was exactly that—piped light, carried in to form a new sun in a cavern roof high above them.

  Still there was no sense of scale. That came only when they had moved another half kilometer and Bey could see what lay ahead. Melford Castle had been transported from the Yucatan peninsula stone-for-stone. Walls of white limestone glimmered now in front of him, shining in a light bluer than they had ever seen on Earth. The atmosphere of Mars was thickening—slowly—but the short wavelengths of the solar spectrum still came through here far more strongly than they had ever been seen in Castle Melford's original setting.

  Bey had never visited the castie, but he had heard of the eccentric tastes of Ergan Melford, founder of BEC and amateur architect. The topmost blue-and-gold octagonal spire of the fourteen-story, hundred-and-fifty room mansion stretched ninety meters above the castle's foundation. The light source in the roof of the Melford cavern shone high above that.

  Bey looked, measured with his eye, and decided that he was in an open space maybe two hundred meters high and two and a half kilometers across. The transformation of the grotto had begun, but obviously it had far to go. Thin lines of greenery petered out a few hundred meters from the castle walls. Beyond them hundreds of machines were at work converting bedrock to fertile soil by seeding it with bespoke bacteria and algae. For at least another few years, oxygenated air must be brought into the cavern—at a price—from supply points deeper in Old Mars.

  The car was easing its way silently forward, on a road that in its final hundred meters was bordered by sweet-smelling bushes. It led straight to an arched entrance to the castle itself. And there, in an English-style interior courtyard of cobblestone floor and red brick walls, the car stopped. Jarvis Dommer at once jumped out and disappeared through a wooden door that led inside the ground floor of the building.

  Trudy climbed out more slowly and turned to Bey. "Are you tired or hungry?"

  He realized that it was only the third time that she had spoken to him since his arrival on Mars. He had to pause and think about the answer to her question. With so many time zone shifts he had little idea what his own biological clock was doing. But improbable as it seemed, less than three hours ago he had been sitting in his living-room on Wolf Island, eating breakfast and staring out at the calm waters of the Indian Ocean.

  "Not tired. Or hungry. Suffering from sensory overload, maybe."

  "Do you want to rest?"

  "That's not why I came to Mars."

  "Good. Dommer will find a couple of suits." She saw his expression. "Don't worry, they're not for you and him. They are for you and me."

  "That's not what was worrying me. What's this about suits? I didn't think we would need them. Why should we wear suits in the Underworld?"

  "No reason at all. But we're not going there." Trudy's blue-green eyes glittered. "We're going up, Bey, not down—up and up, all the way to the surface."

  CHAPTER 7

  "I assume it's safe?"

  Even shielded by a kilometer or more of rock and twelve hundred kilometers of distance, Bey had felt (or imagined) a planetary surface in massive tumult. Soon it would be much closer.

  "Safe as can be. Nothing hits this near to the equator. But it's still spectacular. Wait and see." Trudy stood a step in front of Bey on the spiral escalator, built in oddly-connected discrete segments, that bore them steadily up through a wide shaft in the compacted rubble of the regolith. They had ridden a little rail car to the foot of the escalator direct from Melford Castle, and put on their suits at a way station halfway up the kilometer-long rise. The lock of that station signaled a sharp change in outside conditions. According to Bey's suit indicators the temperature was now twenty below zero and the pressure had dropped to forty millibars. Three hundred meters more, and they would be at the surface.

  Bey had asked his question about safety more from curiosity than real fear or discomfort. The suits were lightweight, but for all practical purposes foolproof. He had also been in far stranger and more threatening environments than the surface of Mars—even if that surface had now become one of the most active in the solar system, rivaling Io's sulfur-spitting vulcanism.

  The vibration at his feet was certainly not imagined. It brought signals that did not carry well in air so thin. When they emerged onto the surface Bey took one glance at the rising sun to orient himself, then turned north-west.

  "Other way." Trudy placed gloved hands on his shoulder and spun him around, just in time to see one to the south. A ball of fire came flaming across the southern sky from west to east. It vanished from sight in twenty seconds. One minute later a brighter flash of crimson light lit the south-eastern horizon. The sky in that direction already glowed with incandescent streaks and plumes.

  "Now the other." She had Bey's arm and was turning him again, this time toward the north. "Get ready for the quakes, they come every few minutes."

  A second fireball ripped the northern sky, again traveling from west to east. Before it could pass out of sight the shock of an earlier impact was arriving. A surface wave came rippling in from the south and shifted the ground beneath Bey's feet in a d
ouble up-and-down that had him swaying and sent the rubble-strewn desert into new patterns of cracks and small fissures.

  Bey hardly followed the trajectory of the second object. The ground beneath your feet was not supposed to move like that. He felt much less safe.

  "That was a big one." Trudy still had her hand on his arm, steadying him. "Close to maximum size, at a guess."

  Which meant it was about a hundred meters in diameter; a rough-edged chunk of water ice, dirtied throughout with smears of ammonia ice, silicate rock and metallic ore, had smashed into the surface and vaporized on impact.

  "What's the energy release?" Bey felt a second, smaller ripple of movement.

  "About a thousand megatons, for one that size."

  Like a really big volcanic explosion back on Earth. Bey was watching events that were equal in energy to several Krakatoa eruptions—except that these were happening every few minutes rather than every few decades. It was the hail-storm of the Gods, with hailstones the size of Melford Castle hitting the ground at forty kilometers a second; and mortal humans, not gods, were responsible for it.

  The chunks of ice had been on their way for a long time. Even with a strong initial boost the journey in from the middle of the Oort Cloud, a quarter of a lightyear out, took a comet fragment at least thirty years. And even with the most precise direction by the Cloudlanders during the first phase of the trajectory, a fragment's fusion motor usually needed a small corrective burn as it came closer to Mars. The specification was a tight one: tangential impact along a due west-to-east line of travel, striking between latitudes twenty and twenty-five degrees north or south of the equator. The thin atmosphere of Mars ablated a little from the bolide, but most of it would make it all the way to the surface and strike at over forty kilometers a second.