Proteus in the Underworld

CHAPTER 12

Real-time conversation with the Kuiper Belt colonies was out of the question. The round- trip delay from the Carcon Colony, for example, was more than a day and a half even if the party at the other end responded at once. Bey didn’t have that much time, and anyway he didn’t know who to call. His best bet was a kernel-to-kernel connection with Aybee, working through the Rini net.

The only trouble with that was the unpredictable nature of the linkages. Despite Aybees best efforts to pin down the sources of uncertainty, response time still varied between seconds and weeks.

Bey set up a top priority six-node routing, Melford Castle to Mars link to Earth link to Earth-orbit, then kernel to kernel on Rini Base and into Aybee’s personal line. He initiated the message transmission. Then there was nothing to do but stare at the clock and wonder how long he would sit there before he gave up.

It felt like hours. It was actually less than six minutes before Aybee’s glowering face appeared in the display volume in front of Bey.

“Hey, Wolfman. What’s all this stuff about a high-priority chatline? You’re too cheap to pay for that level of service.”

Bey glanced at the monitor. The message had zipped through every node in a few seconds. Almost all the delay had been waiting for Aybee’s reply. “Assume I’m not paying for this call myself. What kept you?”

This time the reply came in a couple of seconds.

“I’m a busy man. The fate of the whole Outer System depends on my unceasing labors.” Aybee grinned. “Actually, I was on the pot. Got to keep the priorities in order. Anyway, what you want? Keep it short, because I really do have lots of work.”

“Did you brief Sondra Dearborn?”

“Better believe it. If she took it all in, she knows as much about the colonies as I do.”

“Have you heard from her since she left?”

“Not a thing. Was I supposed to?”

“I’m wondering if she got to the Carcon Colony all right, and what she found there.”

“I can check that for you easy enough. The transportation data bank for the Kuiper Belt will tell me who’s where.” Aybee paused, studying Bey’s image on his display. “Look, if there’s something funny going on here you might as well tell me now an’ get it over with.”

“I don’t know of anything going on that you don’t know already. But I don’t feel good about this. I was the one who told Sondra that she had to go to the colonies. I said she had to be there to find out why things are passing the humanity test that should be failing it. As for why I don’t feel good … ” Bey shrugged.

It was a weak and unpersuasive answer, but Aybee was nodding sympathetically. “It’s the wee, wee witch. The one who sits on your shoulder when you have a really tough problem to solve, and whispers in your ear, why not try this? I don’t know about you, but I never ignore her.”

“Well, she’s telling me that I should never have let Sondra to go out to the colonies alone.”

“It wasn’t just you, Wolfman. Sondra told me that her boss said the same thing to her.”

“If you knew Denzel Morrone, you wouldn’t take much comfort from that.” Bey studied Aybee’s intent face, and finally realized why he had called. “Would you do a favor for me—a big favor?”

“Probably. I’m known through the whole Outer System as a gullible idiot. What do you want this time?”

“I’d like you to take the fastest Rini ship in the fleet and zip on out to the Fugate Colony. Get there, if you can, as soon as Sondra.”

“Probably can’t do it that fast. She might be there already. What am I supposed to do when I get to Fugate Central? Protect her? I mean, the average Fugate citizen probably masses two hundred times as much as me, and I’m a theoretical physicist, not a professional bodyguard. Obviously I could beat ’em all up easy enough”—Aybee flexed a long, skeletally thin arm, and a tiny knot of muscle appeared at his biceps—“but then they’d complain formally, and I know you don’t want that.”

“If anything does happen, it won’t be official. I don’t expect you’ll need to do a thing. Just the fact that you are there, watching, should be enough to protect her.”

“Yeah. Or else I’m a witness, so Sondra and I both get killed.” Aybee shrugged wide, bony shoulders. “All right, Wolfman. I got a million things to do here, but I’m a sucker. I’ll do it. But can I ask you something personal?”

“Nothing ever stopped you before.”

“Are you having it off with Sondra?”

“Certainly not! What the devil put that into your head? She’s related to me, and anyway she’s fifty years younger than I am. I’m too old for that sort of thing.”

“Yeah. Sure. But to coin a phrase, nothing ever stopped you before. What am I supposed to tell her when I get there? She won’t be expecting me, and if she’s nothing special to you it’s weird for you to be trying to protect her. Come to that, why aren’t you on your way to the Fugate Colony, yourself?”

It was typical Aybee, asking a question so simple and obvious that anyone could ask it—yet no one did. And asking the right question usually clarified everything.

“I think Sondra might run into trouble out in the colonies, but I feel absolutely sure that the problem didn’t start there. I need to focus on the real cause. That’s somewhere here, in the Inner System.”

“I’ll believe that. The closer you get to Sol, the more trouble you run into. But what about my other question. What do I tell Sondra?”

“Tell her—” Bey swore internally. “Tell her I am worried about her, but say you don’t know why.”

“You are worried about her. Fine. Very persuasive. Are you sure you’re not having it off with her? All right, all right.” Aybee pushed his hands, palm outward, toward Bey. “I’ll tell her. Is that it?”

“Yes,” Bey paused. Aybee’s finger was on the disconnect “No, wait a minute. One other question on the same subject What do you know about elliptic functions?”

“The same subject!” Aybee’s eyebrowless forehead wrinkled. “Wolfman, you could sure have fooled me.”

“I know. I felt the same way when I heard it. But if I understand anything at all about Robert Capman, it has to be relevant. Listen.”

As Bey summarized his conversation, Aybee sat totally still and silent. At the end he shook his head. “If Capman says it, you hafta take it seriously. He’s still wearing a Logian form?”

“He was when he talked to me.”

“Then you have to assume he’s a lot smarter than you. Hell, he’s even a lot smarter than me. Maybe he’s so smart, he thinks he’s helping you when he isn’t. Elliptic functions!”

“What do you know about them?”

“I know so much that I don’t know where to start. Wolfman, we’re talking here about a whole major branch of mathematics. There are scores of books and treatises and thousands of papers, all about elliptic functions. I can name a dozen great mathematicians who worked on the subject—Legendre, Abel, Jacobi, Weierstrass, Cayley, Riemann, Hermite, Poincarй—and that’s just the pure theory, without even getting into applications. Did I mention Kronecker—and Gauss, too, of course, though he didn’t publish what he had discovered—”

“Capman didn’t just say ‘elliptic functions.’ ”

Aybee had been in full stride. At Bey’s interruption he stopped and stared. “Then what did he say?”

“What he actually asked me was if I had ever looked at the early history of the theory of elliptic functions. Does that make a difference?”

“All the difference in the world. It means we don’t need to worry about work done after about 1830. And it means something else, too.” Aybee paused, and sat frowning at nothing. “You sure that Capman said elliptic functions, and not elliptic integrals’?”

“Quite sure. Though I hardly know the difference.”

“Well, shame on you. Let’s get you educated. The whole business started out by people trying to find the length of an arc of an ellipse. That gives you a certain sort of integral, and naturally it’s called an elliptic integral. A mathematician called Legendre spent a good chunk of his life writing down bunches of related sorts of integrals, and reduced them to three basic forms. He had done all that pretty much by about 1810.

“But he never saw to the bottom of the problem, or realized that he was studying it the wrong way round. Nor did anyone else at the time—except maybe Gauss, he had this horrible habit of discovering major stuff and putting it in his notebooks, then keeping quiet about it until somebody else came up with the same results. Then he’d say, look here, boys.”

“That sounds a bit like Apollo Belvedere Smith.”

“Could be. Easy to hate a guy like that, eh? Anyway, about 1820 along comes a younger mathematician called Abel. He dies of starvation and tuberculosis when he’s twenty-six years old—which isn’t as bad as it sounds, ’cause mathematicians usually do the good stuff in their early twenties and geeze along for the next century. Anyway, before Abel kicks it he finds the right way to handle elliptic integrals. He inverts the problem. Switches the roles of independent and dependent variables, if you want to get technical. That inversion of outlook starts the whole theory of elliptic functions off and running.”

Aybee paused to frown at Bey. “I may be wrong, but I get the feeling that you’re not overjoyed to hear all this. There’s lots more.”

“I’m sure there is. And I know you’re going to be disappointed and disgusted to hear that it all makes about as much sense to me as if you were singing folk songs in Cloudland Chinese. Let’s keep the rest of the inversion story until I’m feeling smarter.”

“I won’t hold my breath for that. Don’t you at least want to hear about elliptic modular functions, and how Hermite used them to solve the general quintic equation?”

“Naturally. There’s nothing in the whole universe I’d like better—after you get back from the Fugate Colony, and we know that Sondra is all right.”

“Some people got a one-track mind. Okay, I’ll go check her out. One more thing, Wolfman, then I’m on my way.” Aybee waited, his finger once more on the disconnect, until he had Bey’s full attention. Then: “Are you really hanging out close to home because you’re having it on with Trudy Melford?”

He grinned horribly. His finger stabbed down and he was gone, before Bey had time for even one cuss word.

Bey decided that he ought to talk with Aybee more often. The Cloudlander was rude and uppity, but a conversation with him was as good as a tonic. Also, it always clarified Bey’s own thoughts. Aybee had put his finger on a basic question: Why was Bey here, and not out in the Carcon and Fugate Colonies?

One part of the answer was his insistence that he was retired. He had his own interests, his private projects. Why should he become involved in Sondra’s problem?

That logic did not satisfy. After all, he had allowed himself to be drawn to Mars by Trudy Melford, when he had plenty of work to do back on Wolf Island. And he could not blame Trudy for everything. She had brought him here the first time, but he had only himself to thank for today’s meeting with the Old Mars council.

He knew what was happening, even if he did not want to admit it Maria Sun had warned him: Watch that bump of curiosity. I can see it swelling from here. Somewhere, deep inside, he knew that he was involved in the unfolding—or concealment—of a major mystery. People and events were being manipulated. If that included Bey himself, or even if it didn’t, he had to know how and why.

Bey placed a call to Trudy using the castle’s internal communicator. There was no reply—not even an invitation to leave a message. He went to the elevator, intending to ride it down to Trudy’s floor. The controller refused to obey him, sliding by the assigned destination as though that level did not exist Bey returned to the fifth floor. As before, it was deserted. He tried to walk down the flight of steps that had led him on his first visit to Trudy’s dressing- room. The stairwell was blocked by a Roguard, which gently and mutely refused him entry.

He returned to the elevator and rode it all the way up to the twelfth floor. That was accessible with no problem. So was the suite he had occupied on his last visit The decor still displayed the misguided attempt to match Bey’s personal tastes.

The good news, for the moment, was that it was empty. He would try to find out later what was going on with Trudy. For the moment he wanted a working data terminal and access to his own information sources.

He hesitated for a moment when the service asked him if he needed an encrypted line. Twelve hours earlier he would have thought it unnecessary within Melford Castle. Now he was not so sure. Finally he called for a scrambled signal that could be decoded only with his personal key.

Then the difficult part began. He had to convert thoughts, some of them vague and tentative, into queries specific enough for a semi-smart information system to be able to handle them.

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.