Proteus in the Underworld p-4

by Charles Sheffield

  In fact, when they first emerged into another chamber Sondra assumed that it was another agricultural plant. There was a similar lattice of vast cubical tanks, the same interstitial array of ribbon lights.

  Then the difference hit her. She gasped. These were tanks all right—form-change tanks. Thousands of them, enormous, each large enough to hold a Fugate.

  “For adults only, of course,” said the combination of deep rumble and its thin, high- pitched modulation. The tanks that will be of most interest to you are the ones employed in humanity tests. They are located in the children’s creche section, which follows Earth convention and has been placed well away from here, on the other side of the world.”

  “But so many!” Sondra waved her arm at the array, trying as she did so to make a rough estimate of numbers. The tanks were far too numerous for her to actually count them. “How many? I mean, why so many?”

  It was hard to read expressions on faces so large and so near that her eyes could not take their features in all at once. The Fugates were frowning, in either annoyance or perplexity. The woman held Sondra even closer, until every separate pore and bristly hair was visible on her plump cheeks.

  “So many? Is this many? We do not think the number of tanks excessive to our needs. With our current population, and a session for each person every two days … ”

  She went on speaking, but Sondra had moved to an internal space where no external sound meant anything. Every two days. A session in the form-change tanks, every two days. That was something Aybee had not mentioned—probably had not even known, although he had given her similar data for the Carcons. It made physiological sense. Those huge bodies, so far from human normal, would be enormously difficult to stabilize in that form. Blood flow, internal temperature control, digestion, breathing, circulation—a hundred body variables would have to hold values wildly far from those natural in humans.

  The Carcons and the Fugates, so different in so many ways, had one important thing in common: The continued existence of their colonies depended on the availability of form- change equipment all the time. And that meant they were critically dependent on BEC; or else—far more likely—they were employing pirate form-change equipment to avoid that dependency. The Carcon representative had pretty much admitted that they did use illegal equipment, although he had assured Sondra they did so only after a child was one year old.

  At the time Sondra had felt sure that he was telling the truth. Now she felt just as sure that he had been lying. The Carcons and the Fugates were surely using cheap form-change tanks, suspect in both hardware and software. Despite EEC’s best efforts to wipe out such patent violators, rip-off manufacturers for cut-price form-change equipment kept popping up all over the solar system. But then—Sondra felt her first twinge of doubt. It made sense for a colony to use cheap pirated equipment as long as they had no trouble with it. But the Carcon Colony had now encountered two cases where a supposedly human baby who had passed the humanity test later proved to be non-human. Would any group be stupid enough to keep using the same flawed equipment, when it would be so easy to put it aside and use only tanks that had never given trouble?

  It ought to be easy enough to answer that question. “The tanks employed in the humanity tests—you said they are over on the other side of the colony. Could you take me there? Immediately.” Sondra’s body had gone rigid, and the Fugate holding her must have noticed. Both of them were peering at her in surprise. She had to offer at least a word of explanation for her frozen silence. “I’ve just had an idea,” she stumbled on, “an idea as to what might be causing the problem with the failed form.”

  Two giant heads were nodding in unison. “We will go at once,” said the man. The Fugate woman was already moving, her massive body setting a pace across the chamber that Sondra could never have matched. “Can you give us some idea what you think is happening?”

  They deserved the truth, but Sondra was not ready to give it to them. Suppose she was wrong? She didn’t think she was, but it would be awfully embarrassing to accuse the Fugates with no real evidence.

  “I think it may be the signal multiplexer. That device mixes and unmixes the multiple input data streams to and from the computer. If it were to go wrong, there could be a recursive signal to the main decision algorithm, and that would create a resonance in the purposive feedback loop.”

  She was spouting gibberish, pure and simple. But when Sondra looked up at the Fugate woman’s face she saw that the hurrying giant was nodding respectfully.

  If anything, that confirmed Sondra’s suspicions. When waffle like that, made up and delivered off-the-cuff, was enough to snow the Fugates, a real professional salesman of junk form-change equipment would find this colony an easy mark.

  Or maybe not. The man, close behind, was speaking. “We did not arrange for our own form-change staff to be present for the initial meeting with you. As you will surely understand, there are questions of ego and self-esteem involved here. Our own people failed to discover the problem, but they were not happy with the idea that an outsider should be brought here, all the way from Earth. Not even when that outsider comes from die famous Office of Form Control. But when we tell them that you have almost certainly identified the source of our problems, they will surely be more than willing to work with you. Just tell us when you need their assistance—at once, perhaps?”

  Sondra felt goose bumps break out on her skin. What combination of ignorance and arrogance had allowed her to assume that the Fugates lacked specialists in form-control, even though they were too big to work directly with the equipment? It was sheer blind luck that the people with her now had not seen right through her flim-flam.

  “Not at once.” Sondra’s throat felt tight, and she had to clear it a couple of times before she could continue. “Better let me have a look at the equipment by myself before we pull anyone else in on this.”

  “There will also be engineers from BEC, arriving here in a few days for routine machine maintenance. If you need help at that point … ”

  “We’ll see.” BEC engineers, too. With so many form-change machines in use, regular visits from them would be natural. But maybe they had not seen the tank that produced the wild form. The Fugates would presumably not be willing to ask BEC employees to service pirate equipment that violated the company’s own patents.

  Sondra’s rapid ride through the interior of the Fugate world would in other circumstances have caused her to marvel, and many times to ask her bearer to slow down. In the century since its first colonization, the home of the Fugates had been subjected to vast internal reconstruction. Sondra was whisked through a series of great chambers carved in the interior of the planetoid, each with its own carefully-planned functions. Some, like agriculture, form-change, and nanoculture, were easy to understand. Others had a tantalizing mixture of the familiar and the strange. The presence of half a dozen kernels in one great room indicated that it was the main energy-producing center for the colony; but why so many kernels, when one ought to suffice? And why were the kernels’ triple shields all linked together, to form a matrix of interlocking dumbbells?

  She saw and wondered, but with only half her mind. The other half was already rehearsing the task that lay ahead. She was mentally taking apart form-change equipment and running a detailed history of its use for the past year. Few people not directly involved in form-change realized that the control computer for every tank maintained a log of all executed instructions and every piece of subject bio-feedback measurement. It took years of experience to read efficiently that avalanche of raw data. Bey Wolf would probably do it twenty times as fast as Sondra, and might be able to skip whole sections of data because he could see at a glance what they were doing. But Sondra would get there eventually, no matter how long it took her.

  “If we agree that stubbornness is a field for which marks can be given … ” Bey Wolf was going to learn that it was.

  They were finally at their destination. Sondra knew it the moment that they entered
a chamber, smaller than any she had seen so far, and she took a first look at its contents. These were form-change tanks, enormous by Earth standards, but still tiny compared with the others that she had seen in the Fugate Colony. They were designed to hold babies between one and two months old. That was the critical age, the time of the humanity test. Pass, and you were defined as human; fail, and you soon ceased to exist. Somewhere close by stood the chamber where failures of the humanity test were absorbed into a general organ pool.

  “Stop for a few moments, just here.”

  At Sondra’s command, the Fugate woman paused on the threshold of the chamber.

  Long ago, Bey Wolf had instituted general procedures to be followed in the Office of Form Control. Proceed from the general to the specific. Before beginning the detailed work, make an overall sanity check.

  Sondra did a quick count. Twenty tanks. But according to the red tell-tale on each, all were empty. That did not seem right “You have no children taking the humanity test at the moment?”

  “Indeed we do. They are in the next chamber.” Maria Amari was moving again, returning through the great sliding door and along a short corridor to enter another room. “Since we have some extra capacity, we judged it better to avoid the tanks in the room where the problem arose. Recent tests have all been given here.”

  Sondra ran her eye over the array of form-change tanks and made a quick calculation. There were twenty more units here, with twelve in use at the moment. The humanity test was currently being administered to a dozen babies, and it lasted about two days. So say, six a day, which meant roughly two thousand a year. Assuming the same failure rate as the rest of the solar system, of less than one in ten thousand births, that would be consistent with a stable population of a couple of hundred thousand people-and that was the stated size of the Fugate Colony. What Sondra was seeing was adequate to the task of the humanity tests, with plenty of extra capacity to take care of natural peaks and valleys in the birth rate.

  “All right. Let’s go back to the other room. I’d like you to put me down at the tank which produced the feral form, if you know which one that is.”

  “We do indeed.” The woman’s thin voice sounded mildly reproachful. “Naturally, that tank was marked as off-limits as soon as we realized that a problem had occurred in it. We will not use it again until we are sure that there is no danger of another malfunction.”

  Sondra felt another moment of uneasiness, a touch of cold doubt at the base of her brain. The Fugates were doing everything right, behaving exactly as she would have behaved herself in the same situation. Her glib assumption, that this was just a question of using flawed equipment and then lying about it, felt less and less plausible. But if it wasn’t that …

  The Fugate woman had placed her down gently by the side of one of the great tanks, next to its controller. Sondra saw, to her relief, that it had the size and shape she was most familiar with from her training back on Earth. She knew exactly how to operate it, how to open it, how to take it apart.

  She moved to examine the controller’s settings, then realized that the two Fugates showed no signs of leaving. They stood motionless and were watching her attentively.

  Maybe it was simple curiosity. Maybe they had been told to stay close to Sondra and watch everything that she did. Maybe they had been told to stay close to her, and make sure that she didn’t do some particular thing. Maybe …

  “If I have to take the tank controller apart I’m going to be faced with some very delicate operations. I might be able to do the work in my suit, but it would be much quicker and easier to work without it. Is there any way that this room can be taken to Earth-ambient conditions?’

  Part of what Sondra said was simple truth. Things would go quicker and easier if she didn’t have to keep her suit on. More than that, though, there was at least a little personal insecurity. If she screwed up and had to repeat some step three or four times, did she really like the idea of an audience?

  And there was a final reason. The Fugates would surely find Earth conditions hard to take. If they stayed, it would have to be for some compelling cause—such as, they had something to hide from Sondra.

  The man and woman were looking at each other. Sondra thought she read uncertainty on those great faces, huge and distorted as the floating balloons of an Earth parade.

  “We can certainly make this chamber self-contained,” said Mario Amari at last “We can also change the general environment here to match any conditions that you desire.”

  “Except that we do not know,” the Fugate woman continued, “we do not know what changes to make for you. According to everything that we have heard, Earth is not a single environment. We understand that temperature and humidity and atmosphere vary widely from place to place, and from time to time.”

  Naturally there was uncertainty. Sondra realized that no Fugate had been to Earth—or would ever go there. The gravity of Earth would crush those soft bodies. Even lying down, the weight of the torsos would compress their lungs and make them unable to breathe. The Fugate colonists might survive in water, buoyed like Earth’s own largest fishes and sea mammals, but the land surface of Earth was forever closed to them.

  “I can specify a set of standard physical parameters in which I can operate most efficiently. However”—time for Sondra to learn where she really stood—“I suspect that you would not find those conditions well suited to your own comfort.”

  “That is of secondary importance.” Mario Amari’s reply came without hesitation. “Our presence is in no way essential. We are here only to be of service to you, in any way that we can, and if you do not need us we will leave. Tell us when you would like us to return.”

  “I don’t know. It may take me a long time and I would rather work alone. Is there food and drink close by?”

  “Certainly.” Maria Amari waved a huge arm. “We passed a supply area two rooms back, small enough for use by someone in your form.”

  It was more evidence of frequent visitors to the colony.

  More possibilities that someone from outside had tampered with form-change hardware or software. Sondra could hardly wait to get her hands on the equipment.

  “But we need to know your environmental preference,” Maria went on. “We will arrange that it be created within this chamber as soon as possible.”

  Which would guarantee privacy. No Fugate colonist was likely to relish an Earth-normal environment Sondra listed the standard operating temperature, pressure, and humidity for the Office of Form Control, and watched Maria and Mario Amari as they drifted out of the room. There was nothing in their actions to suggest that they were reluctant to leave. The woman even seemed rather relieved. Once she had released Sondra from the safe confines of her hand she had never seemed quite at ease. They said they had both volunteered, but it must be a bit hard to serve as tour guide and general factotum for a being small and fragile enough to be destroyed with a single accidental move of hand or foot The chamber door sealed with a hiss of hydraulics. Within seconds, Sondra’s suit monitors showed that the external temperature and pressure were falling. She waited, spending the next few minutes examining the exteriors of all the form-change tanks in the room. Every one was the same model. Every one was outsized by Earth standards, but it bore the BEC logo. That didn’t mean too much. If a pirate manufacturing company was willing to steal the BEC patents, it would not hesitate to steal the company’s trademark, too.

  The real test came inside the controller, in the details of hardware and software. To Sondra’s knowledge, no one had ever managed to duplicate those exactly.

  Conditions within the chamber were still changing, but they were close enough to their final values for Sondra to dispense with her suit. She eased out of it, picked up her portable test kit, and went across to the tank identified by the Fugates as the one where the feral form had passed its humanity test. She took a deep breath. This was it. Somewhere within this tank’s controller lay the exact evidence as to why humanity had been affi
rmed where none existed. Either she would understand the problem, and return vindicated to Earth; or she would fail to find an answer, and everyone—Bey Wolf, Denzel Morrone, Trudy Melford, Robert Capman—would be provided with the confirmation of her inadequacy.

  Sondra ran the standard diagnostics for the tank’s computer. It was no surprise to find that the unit passed every one; the Fugate engineers would certainly have done that test as soon as they realized that something had gone wrong. Sondra went to the next level. She removed the cover of the controller and exposed the hardware.

  Again, there was the EEC logo. There, too, was the BEC serial number, indicating that the unit had been fabricated on Earth. The date of BEC final inspection which and performed the inspection. Sondra checked that ID with her test kit. It was a valid one, still operating in the inner system. Either this was genuine BEC hardware, or some pirate had achieved a level of forgery new to the Office of Form Control.

  Sondra moved to the next and more difficult step. If there had been later tampering with the original BEC hardware, traces of that would certainly remain. Subtle traces, but the Office of Form Control had developed a whole suite of delicate tests for just such manipulation.

  There were forty-two diagnostics, of steadily increasing complexity and difficulty of associated analysis. Sondra began to work through the tests, patiently recording every result in the test kit. The first one showed normal unit operation. Second test: normal; third test …

  After seven hours of continuous work she was finished. She paused, moved across to her suit, and took a stimulant pill and a drink of water. She sat on the floor, to stare at the tank and its controller.

  Nothing. No sign of malfunction, no abnormalities. The BEC hardware appeared to be performing exactly as it had been designed to perform. She had found no sign of tampering. The original seals, applied when the unit left BEC, seemed unbroken. This was genuine BEC equipment, exactly as it had been provided from the BEC factory.