Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

She saw and wondered, but with only half her mind. The other half was already rehearsing the task that lay ahead. She was mentally taking apart form-change equipment and running a detailed history of its use for the past year. Few people not directly involved in form-change realized that the control computer for every tank maintained a log of all executed instructions and every piece of subject bio-feedback measurement. It took years of experience to read efficiently that avalanche of raw data. Bey Wolf would probably do it twenty times as fast as Sondra, and might be able to skip whole sections of data because he could see at a glance what they were doing. But Sondra would get there eventually, no matter how long it took her.

“If we agree that stubbornness is a field for which marks can be given … ” Bey Wolf was going to learn that it was.

They were finally at their destination. Sondra knew it the moment that they entered a chamber, smaller than any she had seen so far, and she took a first look at its contents. These were form-change tanks, enormous by Earth standards, but still tiny compared with the others that she had seen in the Fugate Colony. They were designed to hold babies between one and two months old. That was the critical age, the time of the humanity test. Pass, and you were defined as human; fail, and you soon ceased to exist. Somewhere close by stood the chamber where failures of the humanity test were absorbed into a general organ pool.

“Stop for a few moments, just here.”

At Sondra’s command, the Fugate woman paused on the threshold of the chamber.

Long ago, Bey Wolf had instituted general procedures to be followed in the Office of Form Control. Proceed from the general to the specific. Before beginning the detailed work, make an overall sanity check.

Sondra did a quick count. Twenty tanks. But according to the red tell-tale on each, all were empty. That did not seem right “You have no children taking the humanity test at the moment?”

“Indeed we do. They are in the next chamber.” Maria Amari was moving again, returning through the great sliding door and along a short corridor to enter another room. “Since we have some extra capacity, we judged it better to avoid the tanks in the room where the problem arose. Recent tests have all been given here.”

Sondra ran her eye over the array of form-change tanks and made a quick calculation. There were twenty more units here, with twelve in use at the moment. The humanity test was currently being administered to a dozen babies, and it lasted about two days. So say, six a day, which meant roughly two thousand a year. Assuming the same failure rate as the rest of the solar system, of less than one in ten thousand births, that would be consistent with a stable population of a couple of hundred thousand people-and that was the stated size of the Fugate Colony. What Sondra was seeing was adequate to the task of the humanity tests, with plenty of extra capacity to take care of natural peaks and valleys in the birth rate.

“All right. Let’s go back to the other room. I’d like you to put me down at the tank which produced the feral form, if you know which one that is.”

“We do indeed.” The woman’s thin voice sounded mildly reproachful. “Naturally, that tank was marked as off-limits as soon as we realized that a problem had occurred in it. We will not use it again until we are sure that there is no danger of another malfunction.”

Sondra felt another moment of uneasiness, a touch of cold doubt at the base of her brain. The Fugates were doing everything right, behaving exactly as she would have behaved herself in the same situation. Her glib assumption, that this was just a question of using flawed equipment and then lying about it, felt less and less plausible. But if it wasn’t that …

The Fugate woman had placed her down gently by the side of one of the great tanks, next to its controller. Sondra saw, to her relief, that it had the size and shape she was most familiar with from her training back on Earth. She knew exactly how to operate it, how to open it, how to take it apart.

She moved to examine the controller’s settings, then realized that the two Fugates showed no signs of leaving. They stood motionless and were watching her attentively.

Maybe it was simple curiosity. Maybe they had been told to stay close to Sondra and watch everything that she did. Maybe they had been told to stay close to her, and make sure that she didn’t do some particular thing. Maybe …

“If I have to take the tank controller apart I’m going to be faced with some very delicate operations. I might be able to do the work in my suit, but it would be much quicker and easier to work without it. Is there any way that this room can be taken to Earth-ambient conditions?’

Part of what Sondra said was simple truth. Things would go quicker and easier if she didn’t have to keep her suit on. More than that, though, there was at least a little personal insecurity. If she screwed up and had to repeat some step three or four times, did she really like the idea of an audience?

And there was a final reason. The Fugates would surely find Earth conditions hard to take. If they stayed, it would have to be for some compelling cause—such as, they had something to hide from Sondra.

The man and woman were looking at each other. Sondra thought she read uncertainty on those great faces, huge and distorted as the floating balloons of an Earth parade.

“We can certainly make this chamber self-contained,” said Mario Amari at last “We can also change the general environment here to match any conditions that you desire.”

“Except that we do not know,” the Fugate woman continued, “we do not know what changes to make for you. According to everything that we have heard, Earth is not a single environment. We understand that temperature and humidity and atmosphere vary widely from place to place, and from time to time.”

Naturally there was uncertainty. Sondra realized that no Fugate had been to Earth—or would ever go there. The gravity of Earth would crush those soft bodies. Even lying down, the weight of the torsos would compress their lungs and make them unable to breathe. The Fugate colonists might survive in water, buoyed like Earth’s own largest fishes and sea mammals, but the land surface of Earth was forever closed to them.

“I can specify a set of standard physical parameters in which I can operate most efficiently. However”—time for Sondra to learn where she really stood—“I suspect that you would not find those conditions well suited to your own comfort.”

“That is of secondary importance.” Mario Amari’s reply came without hesitation. “Our presence is in no way essential. We are here only to be of service to you, in any way that we can, and if you do not need us we will leave. Tell us when you would like us to return.”

“I don’t know. It may take me a long time and I would rather work alone. Is there food and drink close by?”

“Certainly.” Maria Amari waved a huge arm. “We passed a supply area two rooms back, small enough for use by someone in your form.”

It was more evidence of frequent visitors to the colony.

More possibilities that someone from outside had tampered with form-change hardware or software. Sondra could hardly wait to get her hands on the equipment.

“But we need to know your environmental preference,” Maria went on. “We will arrange that it be created within this chamber as soon as possible.”

Which would guarantee privacy. No Fugate colonist was likely to relish an Earth-normal environment Sondra listed the standard operating temperature, pressure, and humidity for the Office of Form Control, and watched Maria and Mario Amari as they drifted out of the room. There was nothing in their actions to suggest that they were reluctant to leave. The woman even seemed rather relieved. Once she had released Sondra from the safe confines of her hand she had never seemed quite at ease. They said they had both volunteered, but it must be a bit hard to serve as tour guide and general factotum for a being small and fragile enough to be destroyed with a single accidental move of hand or foot The chamber door sealed with a hiss of hydraulics. Within seconds, Sondra’s suit monitors showed that the external temperature and pressure were falling. She waited, spending the next few minutes examining the exteriors of all the form-change tanks in the room. Every one was the same model. Every one was outsized by Earth standards, but it bore the BEC logo. That didn’t mean too much. If a pirate manufacturing company was willing to steal the BEC patents, it would not hesitate to steal the company’s trademark, too.