Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

The two Fugates were proceeding without hesitation, out of the agricultural plant and on through a corridor wide enough to pass a fair-sized space freighter. Sondra had noted long ago, on her first examination of the Fugate data base, that the colony occupied one of the largest planetoids in the Kuiper Belt. Occupied it, and needed every cubic meter of space. A Fugate could reasonably claim to need for comfort a thousand times as much living space as the average Earth human. Presumably a thousand times as much food, too, to go with their mass. A middle-sized Fugate weighed as much as a big Earth whale, and had the same nutritional needs.

In fact, when they first emerged into another chamber Sondra assumed that it was another agricultural plant. There was a similar lattice of vast cubical tanks, the same interstitial array of ribbon lights.

Then the difference hit her. She gasped. These were tanks all right—form-change tanks. Thousands of them, enormous, each large enough to hold a Fugate.

“For adults only, of course,” said the combination of deep rumble and its thin, high- pitched modulation. The tanks that will be of most interest to you are the ones employed in humanity tests. They are located in the children’s creche section, which follows Earth convention and has been placed well away from here, on the other side of the world.”

“But so many!” Sondra waved her arm at the array, trying as she did so to make a rough estimate of numbers. The tanks were far too numerous for her to actually count them. “How many? I mean, why so many?”

It was hard to read expressions on faces so large and so near that her eyes could not take their features in all at once. The Fugates were frowning, in either annoyance or perplexity. The woman held Sondra even closer, until every separate pore and bristly hair was visible on her plump cheeks.

“So many? Is this many? We do not think the number of tanks excessive to our needs. With our current population, and a session for each person every two days … ”

She went on speaking, but Sondra had moved to an internal space where no external sound meant anything. Every two days. A session in the form-change tanks, every two days. That was something Aybee had not mentioned—probably had not even known, although he had given her similar data for the Carcons. It made physiological sense. Those huge bodies, so far from human normal, would be enormously difficult to stabilize in that form. Blood flow, internal temperature control, digestion, breathing, circulation—a hundred body variables would have to hold values wildly far from those natural in humans.

The Carcons and the Fugates, so different in so many ways, had one important thing in common: The continued existence of their colonies depended on the availability of form- change equipment all the time. And that meant they were critically dependent on BEC; or else—far more likely—they were employing pirate form-change equipment to avoid that dependency. The Carcon representative had pretty much admitted that they did use illegal equipment, although he had assured Sondra they did so only after a child was one year old.

At the time Sondra had felt sure that he was telling the truth. Now she felt just as sure that he had been lying. The Carcons and the Fugates were surely using cheap form-change tanks, suspect in both hardware and software. Despite EEC’s best efforts to wipe out such patent violators, rip-off manufacturers for cut-price form-change equipment kept popping up all over the solar system. But then—Sondra felt her first twinge of doubt. It made sense for a colony to use cheap pirated equipment as long as they had no trouble with it. But the Carcon Colony had now encountered two cases where a supposedly human baby who had passed the humanity test later proved to be non-human. Would any group be stupid enough to keep using the same flawed equipment, when it would be so easy to put it aside and use only tanks that had never given trouble?

It ought to be easy enough to answer that question. “The tanks employed in the humanity tests—you said they are over on the other side of the colony. Could you take me there? Immediately.” Sondra’s body had gone rigid, and the Fugate holding her must have noticed. Both of them were peering at her in surprise. She had to offer at least a word of explanation for her frozen silence. “I’ve just had an idea,” she stumbled on, “an idea as to what might be causing the problem with the failed form.”

Two giant heads were nodding in unison. “We will go at once,” said the man. The Fugate woman was already moving, her massive body setting a pace across the chamber that Sondra could never have matched. “Can you give us some idea what you think is happening?”

They deserved the truth, but Sondra was not ready to give it to them. Suppose she was wrong? She didn’t think she was, but it would be awfully embarrassing to accuse the Fugates with no real evidence.

“I think it may be the signal multiplexer. That device mixes and unmixes the multiple input data streams to and from the computer. If it were to go wrong, there could be a recursive signal to the main decision algorithm, and that would create a resonance in the purposive feedback loop.”

She was spouting gibberish, pure and simple. But when Sondra looked up at the Fugate woman’s face she saw that the hurrying giant was nodding respectfully.

If anything, that confirmed Sondra’s suspicions. When waffle like that, made up and delivered off-the-cuff, was enough to snow the Fugates, a real professional salesman of junk form-change equipment would find this colony an easy mark.

Or maybe not. The man, close behind, was speaking. “We did not arrange for our own form-change staff to be present for the initial meeting with you. As you will surely understand, there are questions of ego and self-esteem involved here. Our own people failed to discover the problem, but they were not happy with the idea that an outsider should be brought here, all the way from Earth. Not even when that outsider comes from die famous Office of Form Control. But when we tell them that you have almost certainly identified the source of our problems, they will surely be more than willing to work with you. Just tell us when you need their assistance—at once, perhaps?”

Sondra felt goose bumps break out on her skin. What combination of ignorance and arrogance had allowed her to assume that the Fugates lacked specialists in form-control, even though they were too big to work directly with the equipment? It was sheer blind luck that the people with her now had not seen right through her flim-flam.

“Not at once.” Sondra’s throat felt tight, and she had to clear it a couple of times before she could continue. “Better let me have a look at the equipment by myself before we pull anyone else in on this.”

“There will also be engineers from BEC, arriving here in a few days for routine machine maintenance. If you need help at that point … ”

“We’ll see.” BEC engineers, too. With so many form-change machines in use, regular visits from them would be natural. But maybe they had not seen the tank that produced the wild form. The Fugates would presumably not be willing to ask BEC employees to service pirate equipment that violated the company’s own patents.

Sondra’s rapid ride through the interior of the Fugate world would in other circumstances have caused her to marvel, and many times to ask her bearer to slow down. In the century since its first colonization, the home of the Fugates had been subjected to vast internal reconstruction. Sondra was whisked through a series of great chambers carved in the interior of the planetoid, each with its own carefully-planned functions. Some, like agriculture, form-change, and nanoculture, were easy to understand. Others had a tantalizing mixture of the familiar and the strange. The presence of half a dozen kernels in one great room indicated that it was the main energy-producing center for the colony; but why so many kernels, when one ought to suffice? And why were the kernels’ triple shields all linked together, to form a matrix of interlocking dumbbells?