Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

“Wait there,” he snarled. “And don’t touch anything else in my house!”

It was an order, not a suggestion. Sondra opened her mouth for a second try at explanations and found that he was gone. As his image faded she made a quick check for the point of origin of the call. The reply was a stream of unfamiliar numbers. Bey was making a call from a point outside the whole communication system. He could not be anywhere on the land surface of Earth, or within its oceans.

Wait, he had said. But for how long? Where was he? She had to be on her way to the Carcon Colony in just a few hours.

Sondra grabbed the brown satchel of data records and went back to the terminal. Bey’s order not to touch presumably did not apply to general computer access. She loaded her new data from the colony and began to study it.

The story was by now familiar. A new-born infant, strange in appearance even by colony standards, but given as always the benefit of the doubt (some of the system’s finest minds had emerged from the womb looking like teratomas). The standard humanity test, and its successful passage. And then the horror, as the supposed human was shown to be pure animal, incapable of reason, incapable of learning, capable only of savagery.

Sondra peered at the most recent failure. This one did not look like a ferocious beast. It was placid and unresponsive, dull and unmoving. Staring at it she was able to ask a question that the horror of the other two failed forms had blanked from her mind. Here was a non- human result of human couplings. Random mutation would always produce such a genetic mistake from time to time; but what were the odds of such a result? If it were more common here than elsewhere in the system, the problem lay in the physical environment of the colonies, forcing mutations faster than elsewhere. She pulled the statistical data files and made the comparison. The mutation rate was indeed unnaturally high.

But that merely created two mysteries in place of the original one. Why were mutation rates higher in these colonies, leading to the birth of non-human babies? And then, if that could be explained, why were the humanity tests passing those non-human creatures, insisting that they were in fact fully human?

Sondra struggled on, comparing the Carcon Colony records with those of other colonies. Once she got into the swing of it the work was surprisingly interesting. She was amazed when she heard the outer door slide open and looked up to find that more than three hours had passed since she sat down.

It could hardly be Bey—only a few hours ago he had not been anywhere on Earth. She jumped up and hurried through to the entrance hall.

It couldn’t be Bey; but it was. He was glaring at the table with its leftover food and dirty crockery.

“Nice to see you made yourself at home.”

She had intended to give instructions to the cleaners to take the dishes away, then forgotten to do it. “I’m sorry. I had to come. There’s been another one—Carcon Colony again.”

“So you said.” Bey hardly seemed even mildly interested.

“You know what I told you last time you were here. Go out to the Kuiper Belt. My advice hasn’t changed—and don’t bother trying to show me what the failed form looks like this time, because I told you that externals are useless.”

“I’m heading for the colony in just a few hours. I’m not on Wolf Island to talk about the new form.”

“So why are you here?”

“To ask you to do what only you can do. I want you to make a call to Robert Capman on Saturn. What’s happening in the colonies might be just the beginning. Suppose that it spreads and affects form-change everywhere?”

“I don’t think that will happen.”

“You have fewer facts about it than I do.”

“My opinion isn’t based on fact. It’s based on intuition— what’s left after fifty years of facts have all evaporated.”

“Intuition can be wrong. One quick call, it would be so easy. Won’t you please call Capman?”

“No. I’ll do something better.” Bey walked across to the message center and sat down at it. After a few moments of interaction he turned to glance over his shoulder at Sondra. “I’ll warn you, you might not like some of what you are going to see and hear.”

The two-way record of an earlier call was being drawn from memory, appearing split- screen in the display volume. The right side was Bey Wolf himself, in profile. The other showed a chamber filled with swirling greenish-yellow gas.

Sondra guessed it, even while the chamber was still empty. “You already called him!”

“Right. I had an hour to kill at the last link point before I could fly back to the island. Here he comes.”

The general appearance of the figure who emerged from the green mist in the left side of the display was familiar to Sondra, as it was to everyone in the solar system. She stared at the broad skull, dominated by the Medusa of ropy hair, the jeweled eyes with their nictitating membrane, and the wide, fringed mouth. Below it sat a massive, wrinkled torso, with a smooth central panel that changed constantly in color and could be used to send or receive data to another Logian a thousand times as fast as any human transfer. The arms jutting from the heavy shoulders were powerful, long, and triple-jointed.

Sondra had read and heard a lot about the Logians. But like most humans she had never met one. With the whole of Saturn off-limits and the Logian forms showing no interest in living anywhere else, Bey Wolf was a rare exception in his Logian experience and his access. Sondra did not even know how deep the Logian forms lived within the atmosphere of the gas giant planet, and she suspected that the information was available only to a chosen few.

The great grey-skinned figure sat down and bobbed its head forward, in what Sondra knew to be a Logian smile. “Hello, Bey. It has been a long time. I received your call just minutes ago. Something interesting, you said.”

“Possibly.” The icon of Bey in the display volume sounded more cautious than Sondra had ever heard him. She could not tell one Logian from another, but the other shape in the split viewing volume could only be the transformed Robert Capman. “It is unusual enough that at least I thought you might want to hear about it. Problems with the humanity tests.”

“Ah.” The broad head nodded. “We have certainly seen that before. Continue, if you will.”

“I’m going to edit. Stop me if at any point you want more details.” Bey in the display volume leaned back and started to talk. After a few seconds Sondra realized that she was hardly understanding a word. He was employing a cryptic, compressed vocabulary that seemed to reject discussion of specific form-change in favor of a general definition of envelopes of the physically possible.

Whatever he was saying, it apparently went down well with Robert Capman. The Logian form offered not a word of comment until Rey was finished And then what he did say seemed to Sondra to come from a wholly unexpected direction.

“Describe to me the individual who has been assigned to resolve the problem.”

(Rey, standing at Sondra’s side, shrugged. “You won’t like this bit, Sondra.”)

The icon of Rey Wolf seemed startled by the question as it replied: “Her name is Sondra Dearborn. She has a decent theoretical background, but very limited practical knowledge. By conventional measures she is not much above average intelligence, although I realize that neither you nor I place much stock in that parameter as a useful guide to achievement.”

“Do you give her high marks in any field?”

“If we agree that stubbornness is a field for which marks can be given, yes. She is also young, hard-working, and enthusiastic. And she cannot be suborned.”