Proteus in the Underworld

CHAPTER 18

The scene was much as Sondra had imagined it in conversation with Aybee: Bey on Mars, lying waiting in the ornate bed. Trudy Melford, scantily-clad and breathless, hovering over him.

But there were certain major differences. Trudy’s arms and legs were bare, because that was her standard Martian day outfit. She was panting hard because she had run up eight flights of stairs rather than wait a few seconds for an elevator. And although Bey was waiting, it was not for anything that Trudy might do.

He was trussed and wrapped like a mummy, with swathes of bandages on his left arm, leg, head, and chest; a pair of annoying tubes ran into his nostrils, a line of electrodes nestled along the back of his neck, IVs dripped into his good arm, and catheters had been inserted into body locations that he preferred not to think about It was depressing to feel like this, and be told that he was doing well. He was waiting impatiently for the medical equipment, clucking and countering at his bedside, to take a closer look and refute that optimistic assessment “I downloaded from your message center.” Trudy sat on the other side of the bed from the robodoc, her breasts still heaving disturbingly. “Nothing important. You should certainly stay at the castle until you are fully recovered. I can bring the best medical services in the solar system to you right here.”

Bey reached out his right hand and picked up the little message transfer unit that Trudy had dropped carelessly onto the bed. Her definition of important might not coincide widi his.

“Did you find out what happened?”

“We’re not sure.” Trudys blue-green eyes met Bey’s for a moment, then darted away. “It looks like an accident the whole bottom section of the escalator had been removed for routine service. There should have been a notice that warned of scheduled maintenance.”

“There was. I ought to have been more careful.”

“Not really. There’s no way that the escalator should ever have been running. The machines always stop it during repairs. Someone had to start it again, deliberately. I said, it looked like an accident; but I don’t believe it was.”

“Then what was it?”

“Sabotage.” Trudy’s gaze came back to meet Bey’s. “A deliberate attempt to kill you.”

“I’m not worth killing. In any case, no one knew that I was up there on die surface. Not even you, until the machines hauled me back to the castle.”

“That’s not true. At least one person did.” Trudy gestured to the message unit. “You’ll hear it on that. There’s a call from Rafael Fermiel, asking you to contact him, in his words, ‘as soon as you return from your trip to the surface.’ How did he know you were going there?”

“I don’t think he did. He assumed it, because he and his policy council think that I designed those surface forms myself. You know Fermiel?”

“Everyone on Mars knows him. He is the leader of the Old Mars faction—the Old Mars fanatics. If they had their way there would be no form-change in the Underworld except for necessary medical repairs. They believe that the surest way to make sure that the Mars surface environment will become a close copy of Earth is to forbid radical form-change here. If Fermiel thinks you are the designer of the surface forms, then he has a motive to kill you. We also know that he expected you to visit the surface.”

No form-change in the Underworld. Bey’s aching head spun with that thought. It had implications. And more fanatics. It occurred to Bey that Mars was full of them, Georgia Kruskal and Trudy Melford and now Rafael Fermiel. Might Bey be one himself, and not even know it?

“Fermiel tried to recruit me. He doesn’t have a reason to kill me, at least until I say no to his offer.”

As a deliberate attempt to force a strong reaction from Trudy, it was a failure. She smiled. “He tried to recruit you? How strange. What does he have to offer you that I don’t?”

“Safety, maybe. You haven’t told me how someone could have entered Melford Castle and rigged the escalator.”

“I don’t know that yet. But I will.” The blue-green eyes hardened. “Believe me, I will. You’ll be safe here.”

She knows who did it. Or at least she suspects. “If Rafael Fermiel is so against what you want to do, why not oppose him and the Underworld openly?”

“I can’t do that. Neither I—nor BEC—is in the business of planetary politics.”

Wrong answer. With Trudy’s interest in the surface forms she ought to be a fervent New Mars supporter and a strong opponent of Old Mars. Why wasn’t she? She said the Old Mars group were fanatics, but she did nothing to oppose their efforts. As for the suggestion that BEC did not play politics, when BEC had done it so cleverly and consistently for two centuries.

Bey was getting ideas, swimming vaguely around the base of his brain; he had a lot of thinking to do and he could not do it. The pain-inhibitor electrodes running along his neck from the fourth to the sixth cervical vertebrae did not interfere with the thinking process; BEC’s best engineers had certified that fact. But how did they know? Who had ever been able to measure the quality of thought, to say how the processes that went on in the brain of a Darwin or a Newton was different from the normal?

Bey struggled to sit up. “You tell me you are not in the business of politics. Well, neither am I. And I don’t want to find myself in the middle, when I choose not to be. I’ve made up my mind. I want to head back to Earth.”

“You can’t! You’re too sick.”

“Let me be the judge of that. What I need is a form-change machine and repair programs tuned to my own body. The best place for those is Wolf Island. That’s where I’m going.”

Bey had been testing again, and this time it worked. For just a second he saw the other side of the Empress. Trudy’s face filled with an iron determination, the fixed stare of a woman who was operating under total compulsion. Then it was just as quickly gone. She was smiling at him, sweetly and sympathetically.

“I know how you must feel. You’ve had a terrible experience here at the castle, and you don’t trust my word that it won’t happen again. So go home to where you are comfortable. Go to Wolf Island, use your own form-change machine, and recuperate.”

She didn’t quite tell Bey there was no place like home, but he would not have been surprised if she had. In spite of that brief moment of a different look, she radiated warmth and concern.

And then he felt vulnerable, more like a sacrificial lamb than the wolf of his name. Trudy could buy or sell him a thousand times over, he had known that before ever he met her. Now he realized that she could also sweet talk and cajole and beguile him—and he liked it. He could resist money, but could he resist the rest? Flattery never failed. If a woman would re-make her whole body into a form attractive to you, that ploy worked even if you saw through it. Even if you were convinced that she was doing it for her own motives, part of you still responded. Trudy was more dangerous than he had realized, smart enough to know when she should hold on and when she should let go.

“But promise me one thing.” She leaned closer and ran gentle fingers around Bey’s jawline. Her soft, concerned voice was like another physical caress—probably all the excitement that he could stand in his present condition. “As soon as you feel well enough to receive a visitor, let me know. I’ve been planning a surprise for you for a while, but this certainly isn’t the time for it. I want you at your best. Just tell me when.”

Bey had been gone from Wolf Island for only five days, but when he returned it felt like an alien place.

Part of that was surely the change in him. He had left in good physical condition, except for the slight natural myopia that a routine form-change session would have fixed. He returned a wreck, wearing a mechanical exoskeleton provided by the Martian robodoc. It allowed him to walk and carry things while keeping his own broken arm and leg completely still, but at the price of turning him into a clanking metal-and-plastic automaton that had Janus and Siegfried growling and snarling until the hounds were close enough to the jetty to catch his scent. And even with the pain-inhibitors still on his neck he ached all over and had trouble thinking. He couldn’t wait to get to the basement lab and into a form-change machine.

There were other changes, though, that were not in him and which he could not ignore. Jumping Jack Flash had the run of the island when Bey was away from it, but usually he stayed inside the house. It was clear when Bey got there that the chimp had been feeding himself and the two dogs regularly, but there was no other sign of him.

Bey hobbled out into the fierce afternoon sunlight. He called “Flash! Flash!” as loudly as he could, but it was another five minutes before the pygmy chimp came wandering along, walking almost upright on the paved path from the island’s rocky center. Instead of the usual greeting, jumping up to Bey and perching on his shoulder, Jumping Jack Flash stood and surveyed him with brown, sad eyes.

“Is it this?” Bey gestured with his right arm at the exoskeleton. “I don’t like it any better than you do. Come on. Let’s see how quickly I can get myself back to normal.”

The three animals trailed quietly along behind as he went back into the house and descended to the basement level. He went into the lab and inspected the control panel for his preferred form-change tank. He knew what he wanted—the fastest repair program that he could stand. He also knew the risk of that. Once before he had used a form change that went far outside the envelope of accepted programs. It had almost killed him, and would have done so if someone else had not found his unconscious body. This time there was no one around to perform that favor.

He turned, and found the three animals still there, watching closely. He shook his head.

“Not you in the tank this time, my friends. Me.”

They understood his body language if not his words. The two dogs flopped to their bellies on the smooth tiled floor, while Jumping Jack Flash approached and lifted his hand to run a rough knuckle under the exoskeleton and along Bey’s jawline.

Bey reached up and gripped the chimp’s hand. “First Trudy, and now you. But at least I know that you don’t have a hidden agenda.” Bey studied the glowing brown eyes and serious face. “Or I think you don’t. It’s a shame you can’t speak, Flash. And you’re so close. Maybe if we humans hadn’t come along and taken over, in a few million years … ”

Bey went back to his programming of the form-change machine. So close, so very close. It was far more than the ninety-nine percent of common DNA. Four hundred years ago, long before DNA had been dreamed of, almost a hundred years before Darwin, the great Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus had made up his mind. He didn’t dare to say that humans and chimps belonged in the same genus, because that would have created a religious fire-storm. Humans were supposed to be special, God-created, unique. But Linnaeus had confided his own true feelings in a letter to a friend:

“I demand of you and of the whole world that you show me a generic character to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none, and I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But if I had called man an ape or vice versa I would have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics.”

You couldn’t work with chimps for more than a week or two without sharing Linnaeus’s opinion. The line was hard to draw. But somehow, the form-change equipment could do it. No chimp had ever managed a form-change. Bey began to set up the final parameters for his own program. Maybe it was the purposive element that the chimp could not manage. The thoughts of a chimp—there was no doubt that Jumping Jack Flash had thoughts—were probably foggy and imprecise, a more extreme version of Bey’s own muddled thinking when the electronic pain-inhibitors were doing their job. Successful form-change implied a basic capability for precision of thought.

That insight pulled Bey himself to a higher state of alertness. If his brain was operating at half-power, he had to be extra careful in setting up form-change sequences. He went over everything again, slowly and carefully. Only when he had made every check that he could think of did he turn again to the animals.

“Six days, and I’ll be out of the tank again. All right? You have plenty of food and plenty of water. Flash, save a few of the papayas for me. I noticed there were lots of almost-ripe ones when I was coming up from the beach, and I know what a glutton you are.”

He climbed laboriously into the tank. His exoskeleton had been designed for slow, linear movement, and climbing was not on the list of recommended activities. Getting the skeleton off was even harder work. Bey struggled free and dropped it in a heap outside the tank rather than neatly disassembling it.

The pain-inhibitors at the nape of his neck came off last. Bey almost screamed when their action ceased. With the help of the exoskeleton he had moved as no man with multiple broken bones should ever move, and now he was paying for it. He made the interior connections of the tank one-handed, with trembling fingers. When he was finally done he swung the heavy door to and sealed it. His last sight of the animals showed that they were still outside and silently watching.

He leaned back, waiting for the program to begin. He was proposing to do in six days what normal protocols would do in seventeen. His remedial program was safe enough, not pushing the limits in any area. It would even suppress all traces of conventional pain while it was operating.

Unfortunately, there was such a thing as unconventional pain—pain deep down at the individual cell level; pain as the body’s operating parameters took an excursion far from normal to regions of internal temperature and chemical imbalance that meant death without the help of a form-change tank’s careful monitoring and adjustment of hormonal and nutrient levels; pain beyond belief or description.

As that pain began, Bey asked himself why he was doing this—why wasn’t he taking the standard seventeen day route? What was the rush?

That was when he realized, for the first time, that something would be waiting for him when he emerged. Something of thought, some analysis that would need every scrap of his brain-power undimmed by pain inhibitors. For such thought he needed to be in top physical condition. But thought about what?

It was intuition again; intuition in its most maddening form, offering strong opinions and even orders without allowing the logical mind any justification or argument.

Bey lay back in the tank and allowed deep pain to wash him away on its tide. When that tide came back in, maybe he would finally learn the reason for his suffering.