Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

That human children will breathe the air of this New Earth, and sit at ease beside its flowing rivers …

Its flowing rivers. Bey was sure that the crew of the Terra Nova had known nothing of the deep caves of Mars, had never imagined a Mars Underworld of simulated Earths like the ones that he had just seen.

Their vision had been of the surface. Its flowing rivers. Bey saw again in his mind’s eye the old, dried-out watercourses and jagged, rusty rocks, the desolate wilderness beneath a thin, dry atmosphere and a diminished sun. But on that frigid red desert, without life- support equipment, stood a handful of long-legged bipeds. How did Mars appear to them, the new forms that Trudy Melford had shown him?

Bey tried to make the mental shift of viewpoint, to look on Mars through other eyes. He was still struggling when he became aware that everyone else at the long table was sitting patiently waiting. And he was less than a third of the way through reading the text of the Declaration.

“We know what you must be thinking, Mr. Wolf.” Rafael Fermiel spoke softly and sympathetically. “You have seen our work, creating the ecosystems for New Earth within Mars. On your last trip you visited the surface, and saw our progress in the Mars conversion process. Day-to-day changes are too small to notice, but the atmosphere constantly thickens and every year holds a little more water vapor. Had you gone farther north, you would have seen temporary pools of surface water near the cometary fragment impact points. The goals of the Declaration are being realized. Full terraforming will one day be completed. But there are complications.”

“The new surface forms?” Bey had made no promise of secrecy to Trudy Melford.

“Exactly. Not so much their existence and present numbers as their implications. There are powerful groups on Mars who insist that the new forms point the direction of the future. ‘It is far easier to change humans,’ they tell us, ‘than planets. Why not do as the Cloudlanders and Colonies do, and adapt form to setting?’ We know and reject those arguments. We also believe that the most powerful voice in those dissenting groups is the newest one, and the one with most to gain from the use of form-change.”

“She employed me to help her.”

“We know that, too. We assume that you are the creator of the new surface forms, and we do not blame you for accepting a new and novel assignment in your chosen field. You could not have known its implications. Also, we do not ask you to deceive or betray Trudy Melford. We ask rather that you resign from her staff—and work with us.”

“Doing what?” Bey glanced along the double line of intent faces. “I know of nothing I could do that would be useful to you.”

“We will gladly give you whatever Trudy Melford is paying you, to do nothing.” Rafael Fermiel sounded desperate.

“You have no idea how much she is paying me.” Bey was on sure ground with that—he didn’t know himself, and he didn’t really care.

“Mr. Wolf, money is not an issue.” Beulah Cresz spoke up from the far end of the table. “Whatever she is giving you, we can more than match it.”

“More than match Trudy Melford? She’s the richest woman in the solar system.”

But the others were all nodding assent. “Take our word, Mr. Wolf,” Fermiel said. “Our available resources at least equal those available to BEC.”

“I am flattered that you place so high a value on my services.” Bey leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “But I can’t give you an immediate answer. I need time to think about all this.”

That was the understatement of the century. Trudy and BEC, suggested as the developers of the surface forms? Although Trudy denied it, and insisted that the forms were nothing to do with her, it made both technical and economic sense. She had access to the right equipment. She had more than enough money to fund experiments indefinitely. And BEC would benefit most if Mars were not terraformed to look like a new Earth.

But if that were true, why bring someone all the way to Mars, to investigate those same forms? Bey’s mind was on fire with paradoxes and conjectures.

“Of course you need time,” Rafael Fermiel was repeating. “We have no intention of rushing you to a decision. Like the original framers of the Declaration, we have learned to operate on a time-scale of centuries rather than days or weeks. Take as much time as you need. And if you want to discuss this further, with us or even with Ms. Melford, we understand. From everything that we have heard about you, you are an honorable man.”

Bey nodded. He was hardly listening. A few weeks ago he had been happily unemployed, a retired man pottering about on his own private business. Now everyone seemed to want him.

He hadn’t changed. So what had?

And he knew one other thing, from half a century of experience. When a whole lot of people wanted you, it was almost never for your benefit.

Rafael Fermiel offered to drive with Bey to Melford Castle. Bey refused. He needed an opportunity for private thought.

He promised to be in touch with Fermiel “soon,” without specifying what that meant. And as the autocar snaked its way up from the deep Underworld he leaned back, closed his eyes to the endless succession of caverns and tunnels that rolled past him, and turned the pieces of the puzzle over in his mind.

The trick, as always, was to ask the right questions. Do that, and clarification would usually follow.

So. Question One: Why did Trudy Melford suddenly want him to come to Mars, when she had not contacted him in the three years since he left the Office of Form Control?

Answer: To explore the surface forms. It was the obvious reply, but it did not feel like the right one. Particularly if, as the Old Mars council insisted, Trudy and EEC were themselves the agents behind the development of the new forms. Accept, then, that Bey lacked the information to answer the question.

Try Question Two: Were the new surface forms on Mars indeed a BEC/Melford product?

Answer: Trudy had suggested that they were not, but her statements were suspect. There was no way for Bey to determine the truth without more data. In particular, he had to examine the forms directly. From such an examination he was pretty confident that his own knowledge of BEC’s work would tell him at once if their labs had been involved.

Note, then, an action item: he needed to meet the surface forms as soon as was feasible.

Question Three: Was the Old Mars policy council/or real? Bey struggled to phrase that vague thought more precisely. He had been exposed to some of the real power centers of the solar system. Movers and shakers all had a certain ineluctable feel to them, an unpleasant electric force that ran through their meetings like an underground current. Robert Capman had it. Laszlo Dolmetsch had it. Cinnabar Baker had it. On the other hand, they also had the ability to turn it off when it suited their purposes. Did the current Old Mars group possess that hidden engine?

If they did, it was amazingly well-disguised. Bey had received rather the opposite impression, of a rather old-fashioned and ineffectual historical society, obsessed by a nostalgia for distant ancestors and an old vision of Mars as Bey suspected it would never be.

The original framers of the Mars Declaration could not be blamed for that. In their time the science of form-change had been in its infancy, so the only way they could imagine the human habitation of Mars was through the planet’s transformation to suit human needs. However, from what Bey had read of that tough-minded early group, if form-change had been available they would have grabbed it with both hands and run with it as a perfect tool for colonization.