Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

It took a little while to see the human figures, struggling along in the middle distance. They were bare-headed and poorly-clad, pushing their way through drifts that already came to their mid-thighs. As the imager zoomed in on them Sondra could see the blue and white of frozen fingers, the starved, twisted limbs that would barely support their owners.

“Gathering fallen wood,” Aybee said softly. “Completely unnecessary, of course—Heaven uses kernel and fusion power, like everyone else in their right minds. But the king is a stickler for tradition. There have to be peasants and wood gatherers, and there have to be a few deaths from freezing now and again. That way everyone at the top will know how well- off they are and appreciate the king’s bounty. Heaven is a wonderful place to live, see—provided that you’re king and queen and live in a palace. Being a courtier isn’t quite so good. Fail to kiss the king’s ass in the right way, and next thing you know you’re stuffed into a form-change tank. You come out short, sick, crippled, and outside, begging in the snow for shelter and a meal.” He glanced slyly at Sondra. “Still think it would be a great place to live?”

“It’s absolutely awful.”

“Not for the king. And Heaven is stable, at a hundred thousand people. It could go on that way for another couple of centuries. I’m not sure I’d say the same about the structure of society on Mars or Ceres. All right, enough of the fun stuff. Time we got on with the Carcon Colony. How much do you already know about it?”

“I know when the colony was started, in 2112 that its founders set out to create combined organic and inorganic beings, carbon-silicon fusions that would use both human and machine intelligence. I know what the results look like.”

“That it? What about history and social habits?”

“Those weren’t in the Office of Form Control data bank.”

“Then you know nothing.” Aybee started to stalk Sondra, circling menacingly around her chair. “The colony moved into the Belt back in 2112, but for nearly a century they just futzed around getting nowhere. They tried to make carcon melds, but there was one slight snag: they all kept dying. Then they had bit of luck. Ever hear of Jonathan Watanabe?”

“Why, yes. He worked for the Office of Form Control, a long time ago. He’s used in the training courses as a dreadful warning.”

“You know what he did?”

“I know what the record says.” Sondra was becoming more cautious. She had a lot to learn when it came to off-Earth activities, and Aybee seemed to take a special joy in playing Gotchal “He ran up big debts and started dabbling in illegal forms to make money. Then he got caught.”

“Wrong. He got found out, but he never got caught. He made it away from Earth and hid in the Belt—and ended up in the Carcon Colony. Turned out he was just what they needed, because he was able to add modern form-change methods to the carbon-silicon combines. After a few hundred failures and deaths—no big deal, the Carcons were used to that—he hit on the right trick. He made the first successful Carcon intelligence. Happy ending, right?”

“If you say so.” It was clear to Sondra that there was more to come.

“Trust me. Happy ending for the Carcons, and even happier ending for BEC. You know the ground rules for a successful form?”

“Better than you do: viable, stable, and legal. I’d add that in my opinion a really successful form must have a decent life-ratio, but that’s not a formal requirement. If people want to burn out fast, like the avian forms, that’s their choice.”

“Specially out in the colonies, where everybody’s wacky to start with. Anyway, Jon-boy did his thing and hit two out of three. His Carcons have a normal human life expectancy and they’re not an illegal form. But they sure has hell aren’t stable. Leave ’em out of a form- change tank for a few days and bingo!, you’ve got an expensive sort of fertilizer. But form- change dependence is no big deal, when you can always buy more tanks and make sure everybody has one whenever they need it. And it’s real good news for BEC—a ton of sales from one small colony.”

“How many Carcons are there? How many form-change tanks are you talking about?”

“Rather a lot. There’s maybe fifty thousand Carcons—and at least that many tanks.” Aybee grinned as though he had just brought Sondra especially good news. “You’re going to have real fun out there. You’re on your way to form-change paradise.”

On the way, and shortly about to encounter paradise at first-hand. Sondra was poised at the entrance lock while the crew of the Serendip hovered around, grinning with anticipation. It was not their first run to the Carcon Colony with an unfledged Earthling as passenger.

This time they were due for a disappointment. Sondra stood calmly waiting for the lock to operate, fortified by the knowledge that Aybee, in an attempt either to prepare or disgust her, had shown her one after another of the Carcon forms. Not just the successes, either. There had been plenty of misses even after Jonathan Watanabe had his technique under control, and those failures loomed large in Aybee’s catalog of yuckies.

The lock opened. Sondra stared, gulped, and looked away. The ship’s crew won. There was a world of difference between viewing a Carcon form in the display volume of an imager, and racing the living, breathing reality.

There had been recent advances—if that was the word for it—in Carcon forms. The man waiting for her at the lock was naked, with no sign of hair on either head or body. His arms and legs carried the odd bulges that she had noticed on the first images she had seen, back on Earth. But in addition to that the whole body surface was covered with bright points of silver, as though thousands of small studs had been hammered into it. The eyes were also bright, silvered, and empty of all expression. The effect was of a human-shaped robot, over which a human skin had been draped and attached by thousands of tiny bolts.

“Dearborn Female? Terran Office of Form Control?”

The voice, cool and expressionless, helped Sondra to regain her self-possession. “That’s right. I am Sondra Dearborn.”

“Good. I am Shoals Male. I am eager to cooperate with you. Do you have questions before you proceed to the form-change tanks?”

Aybee had warned her: she would not be given a free run within the Carcon Colony. It was hard to imagine that they might have any secret worth stealing, but the Carcons disagreed.

“I have two questions. First, is the equipment that you use at this colony made by BEC, or are there other manufacturers?”

She did not spell out what that meant, but anyone hearing the question would know what she was getting at. Was this genuine BEC hardware, with all its warranties and guarantees and detailed testing? Or was it a rip-off of BEC equipment, with who-knew-what shortcuts and compromises in design and manufacture.

Shoals stood silent for a long time. Sondra noticed that he lacked eyelids, but a transparent membrane flickered up and down over his naked eye surfaces every few seconds.

“The equipment used with the feral forms that were sent to Earth was all manufactured by BEC,” he said at last. “It is new, and it is still covered by warranty.”

He had not explicitly answered Sondra’s question. There must be at least some pirated designs around in the Carcon Colony, but the only equipment she really cared about was the genuine BEC article.

“And the software?”

“That used with the feral forms was also provided exclusively by BEC.”

“None of your own, developed by the colony itself?”

“None of our own is used until the end of the first year.”

In other words, not until long after the humanity test on a form was over and done with. Sondra’s task had suddenly become orders of magnitude easier. With only standard BEC hardware and software involved, she would not have to worry about whatever strange form- change deviations were practiced to create a form like Shoals’. She felt a moment of huge elation. She knew the BEC systems intimately. In just a few hours of work, she would know exactly what had happened and be ready to go home successful.