Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

One of his assumptions was not valid. No one in the chamber was taking the slightest bit of interest in him. On his last visit Bey had been favored by the presence of Trudy Melford herself, so all the staff had been falling over themselves to offer assistance and advice. Today he was a nobody. He had not invoked the power of the Melford name, and so he was on his own.

Bey leaned back. The bench molded itself to his body. He wondered. What other benefits came to you when you were smiled on by the Empress? Was Trudy Melford’s smile just the grin on the face of the crocodile, moments before the jaws gulped you down? Bey recalled a furious Sondra, glaring at him and shouting: “That fancy form she was using, and those sexy clothes. She was stalking you, couldn’t you tell? If I hadn’t arrived when I did … ”

It was a good thing Sondra had not been at Melford Castle with Bey, to see Trudy’s tight- fitting and brief costume and the warm look in those startling blue-green eyes, or to hear the tone in Trudy’s voice when she told him that the castle was “just as private as you want it to be.”

Bey lolled on the bench, musing on the memory. He lacked the energy to find an auto-car to take him again to the castle. Half an hour passed before he was finally lifted out of his daydream by a loud clatter of footsteps. The man with the red beard had come running into the chamber. He skidded to a halt by the information board about twenty yards away from Bey and bounced nervously up and down on the balls of his feet. He was scanning the entries. His shoulders slumped when he saw that the link transition had been completed a while ago.

Bey walked across to stand beside him.

“You’re late,” he said quietly.

The man turned. “Yes, I am. I was delayed by the—” He stopped and stared open- mouthed at Bey. “Behrooz Wolf! I thought I’d missed you.”

“I hung around. Who are you?”

“My name is Rafael Fermiel.” After a few awkward seconds the man held out his hand and smiled at Bey.

Bey grinned back at him. He had never been more pleased to see anyone. He didn’t know who Rafael Fermiel was, or what he might want, and for the moment he didn’t particularly care. What mattered was that Bey’s hunch as to what would happen if he came to Mars had been right after all.

Bey regarded Fermiel fondly while he waited for the next step. He knew that in spite of everything that the form-change machines could do in the way of body maintenance, the urge to sin changed as a person got older. Some sins, like lust, often vanished completely.

Maybe. But in Bey’s own case, he suspected that the Sin of Pride would be with him undiminished until the day he died “We seem to be going downward.” Bey had assumed they would be heading for the surface and a meeting with the new forms who now lived there.

“Certainly we are.” Rafael Fermiel nodded as the auto-car they were riding glided its way around a steeply descending curve. “Did you imagine that we might be going up? We will be heading all the way to the deep Underworld, where you will meet with the most important party on this planet.”

“Trudy Melford?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Rafael Fermiel lifted his nose in the air, as though he had suddenly encountered a bad smell. “No! Gertrude Zenobia Melford represents all that is wrong with Mars. In the long-term future of the planet she is of no importance. I am aware that she brought you here, and that she wishes you to work for her. However, in the next few hours I hope to persuade you that such an action on your part would be a great mistake. There is a higher cause.”

Bey wasn’t much into higher causes. “If she didn’t give you my name, then who did?”

“I am not at liberty to discuss that.” Fermiel refused to look at him. “However, let me assure you that your abilities have been described by that individual in the most complimentary terms. See there, Mr. Wolf.” Fermiel nodded ahead. “We are now approaching the real Mars. Not the barren wilderness of the outer surface, nor the unnatural import from Earth of Melford Castle, but the true heart of this planet. Prepare to be amazed.”

Bey recognized a deliberate change of subject when it was pushed in his face. If Fermiel was hoping to make a convert to his cause he was going about it in a very strange way. Bey was tempted to tell him to go to hell, explain that he had been recruited unsuccessfully by better men than Rafael Fermiel, and demand to be taken back to the link exit point.

But if he did that, he might never find out what was going on. And he did have most of a day to kill before he was expected at Melford Castle.

Go with the flow.

Bey leaned back in his seat, stared out of the car’s front window, and waited to be astonished. He was not optimistic. Mars had been explored by humans and machines for two centuries and permanently settled for three-quarters of that period. The surface forms that Trudy had shown him seemed to be new, but what could be radically different about a maze of caves and tunnels?

The car had continued its steady descent. It was emerging into the biggest caverns that Bey had seen so far on Mars, running its way along a black-top road that might have been found in a million places back on Earth. High above, in the roof of the cave, three artificial suns mimicked the solar spectrum.

The air was warm and humid. Standing water covered the level fields that stretched out on both sides of the road toward the distant cave walls. Bey saw a handful of smart supervisor machines, rolling along by the narrow irrigation canals that marked the field boundaries. They were monitoring the work of thousands of small laborer robots, who in turn were tending countless millions of narrow green stalks that poked up from the shallow water. There was no sign of people.

“Rice.” Rafael Fermiel glanced smugly at Bey as he spoke. “Grown in the traditional way. It is alternated through the growing season with legumes and root crops.”

Bey nodded. He was beginning to wonder if there had been a bad case of mistaken identity. He was a form-change specialist. He could think of nothing less likely to interest him than a guided tour of mud farming.

The auto-car went rolling on, back into another connecting tunnel. They were still descending, deeper and deeper into the Underworld. The atmosphere was noticeably more dense. A shimmering heat haze hung in the air of the next cavern that they entered.

The black-top road and the multiple artificial suns were here again, but everything else had changed. The surface of this cave was bare broken rock and fine white sand. Jutting upward here and there were occasional stunted bushes and fat, spiny cacti. Bey saw no animals, except for one bird like an outsized crow that flapped slowly away from the moving car on lazy black wings. He glanced at Fermiel. The other man nodded in a satisfied way. The car rolled on. And on.

By the eighth and last cave—a turbulent body of water, with a strong wind blowing salt spray across the narrow causeway that they were crossing—Bey understood. He had seen steaming wild jungle, desolate high veldt, salt ocean, gloomy moss-strewn swamp, hot desert, scrubby tundra, carefully-tailored agriculture, and bare snowy hills. Every cave was different. Every cave had its own balanced ecosystem. Every cave appeared empty of human life.

“Well?” Fermiel was staring expectantly at Bey.

“It’s very interesting. It’s a long time since I’ve really followed what’s happening on Mars, but I had no idea—”

“Everything you have seen is recent. Twenty years ago, each one of these deep caves was nothing but unbreathable air and dark, empty rock.”

“Which makes what you have done even more surprising.” Bey stared ahead as the auto- car left the cave, accelerating sharply up the steep gradient of an unlit tunnel. He felt his ears pop at the change of pressure. He swallowed hard. “But I still don’t understand why you showed this to me. I realize that you are simulating a variety of Earth ecosystems, but if you know my specialty you also know that I can’t offer better comments on the caves than any casual tourist.”