Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

Easy ones first.

What are the financial resources available to the Old Mars policy council?

When the answer came, Bey sagged in disbelief. The council was shown as the source of funding for the whole Mars terraforming activity. For over a quarter of a century it had paid for the purchase of thousands of Outer System cometary fragments, including their delivery to precisely defined target areas on the surface of Mars. As an incidental expense it had funded the space-borne security system that blew to atoms anything with the wrong final trajectory.

Next question, then.

What is the source of Old Mars funding?

That drew a blank from the information system. There was nothing in the files.

So try a different one: Did Trudy Melford and EEC—Bey stopped before the question was fully framed. The beginning of the terraforming effort had preceded Trudy’s move to Mars by over twenty years. More than that, it went back to a time long before Trudy had inherited control of BEC. She couldn’t be the sponsor.

How about the surface forms? Were they the result of an investment by Trudy, either on her own behalf, or as an investment by BEC?

He might be able to check that—if the Melford Casde information service would permit him. It called for access to the local data bank, particular to users within the castle, but that should be routine.

Bey felt his way along, relying on the fact that Trudy would expect him to make use of local entry. He had been dealing with restricted data bases for half a century, and this one was nothing special. Five lock levels, and it was done.

The surprise was the place where he finally found himself. He was sitting deep within a data hierarchy that delimited the BEC empire. Only a real insider ought to be allowed here.

Was that another Trudy Melford carrot—a lure, designed to draw Bey in deeper yet?

Accident or design, there were far more data pointers than he expected or needed. The temptation to browse here, deep within the secret heart of BEC, was great.

Too great, for someone of Bey’s temperament. He began to cross-index, wandering up and down the data branches. One key structure told of BEC failures, providing full chapter and verse for forms too awful to mention outside the BEC inner circle. Another lead wormed him into a bank of EEC’s most precious commodities, new commercial forms that would not be announced for a decade or more. Bey found pointers there to new avian forms, to piscine forms, even a deep penetration into the hidden (and forbidden) invertebrate arena. The latter structures had been so long separated by evolution from the vertebrate branch that common thought patterns were usually considered non-existent BEC was now about to question that. Bey itched to examine the details of the actual form-change programs, and learn the approach that was being used. It had to be something radical and ingenious.

After a few minutes he leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. He could happily spend days—weeks—wallowing in the BEC data banks.

But not today. Bey made the ultimate sacrifice, and turned his back on the temptation of the new BEC forms. He set up a data search on a handful of specific key words: Mars surface, aerobic tolerance, temperature tolerance, oxygen compression and storage methods, and radiation tolerance. He found the usual C-forms, developed for in-space use, along with form experiments for the Europan deep ocean. But there was nothing relevant to Mars.

He varied parameters half a dozen times, with the same negative results. If BEC and Trudy had any knowledge of the surface forms, their own private data bases lacked that information. They suggested that no human form had been developed able to survive unaided on the surface of Mars.

Bey would have said the same thing, a few weeks ago. But he had seen them with his own eyes.

Maybe the data system was telling Bey more than he was asking. If you want to solve the puzzle of the Mars surface forms, you must go to the surface and investigate. It was Bey’s own form of inversion; his advice to Sondra, turned back on him.

And it was good advice in both cases.

Bey sighed. Data base interaction was pleasant and addictive. At the moment it was a denied luxury.

Time to stop playing, and do some real work.

He retraced his steps, ascending at each stage to operating system level and wiping out the evidence of his presence within the data base. When that was completed he switched off the terminal and headed for the long spiral escalator that would take him up to the surface of Mars.

Trudy had made herself inaccessible to him. She could hardly complain if he accepted that fact and went on with the job that he had been brought here to perform.

Bey had said nothing good about Sondra’s brains, but he had given her top marks for stubbornness.

She clung to that thought. She needed every scrap of obstinacy that she could muster, just to persuade herself to keep going.

All the way to the Fugate Colony she had warned herself to expect an environment stranger than anything she had found with the Carcons. They, whatever their oddities, had retained standard human size. That bond with Earth would vanish, the moment that the ship’s docking was complete and Sondra eased forward into the main Fugate entry lock.

She had been advised to remain in a suit all the time that she was in Fugate territory. Now it was easy to see why. As new air hissed into the lock she found herself floating within a foggy chamber whose nearest wall began to drip with moisture. The atmospheric pressure rose to twice Earth normal. Her suit informed Sondra that the outside temperature was 33 degrees Celsius-almost blood heat. The chamber’s far walls, at least fifty meters away, were soon barely visible through thick swirls of mist.

But Earth had its fogs, too, and its hot, steamy jungles. Sondra’s sense of alienation came not from heat or humidity, but from scale. She stared around her and felt dwarfed and diminished. By Fugate standards she was insignificant, a mouse who had strayed into a human house. The lock was automatic and that was just as well. The manual controls were fifteen meters up, far above her head, and in an emergency she would need to use her suit’s jets and fly to reach them.

She headed for the far side of the chamber. As the lock cycled and its inner door slid open, Sondra for the first time saw her reception committee.

She had spoken to them on her trip through the Belt from the Carcon Colony, but it had been a low-capacity line with sound-only communication. The Fugate voices, two of them, proved easy to understand and yet not quite right in their timbre. Slightly thin, slightly fluting, they did not seem to be a local accent, understandable in a colony established a century ago and living in relative isolation from the rest of the solar system. It was something else, something that Sondra could not put her finger on.

And now, looking at the two great forms floating in front of her, it became obvious.

Examining the Fugate that had been shipped to Earth orbit, Sondra had known very well that it was a baby and that the adult Fugates must be a lot bigger. But that was an intellectual understanding. Confronting the reality was far different.

The two forms waiting beyond the airlock were not wearing suits, and their clothing was limited to a blue tunic that covered only the main torso. Sondra estimated that it was at least seventy feet from the top of the thinly-haired heads to the bare feet and stubby pink toes. The arms and legs were short in proportion to the body, which was in turn dwarfed by the head and thick neck. The heads themselves were pear-shaped, dominated by the bulging cranium. Even so, the mouths that now smiled a greeting to Sondra must be at least six feet across. There was no way that such lips, tongues, and vocal chords would produce the same range and type of sounds as the midgets of Earth.