Proteus in the Underworld

CHAPTER 20

The absolute certainty that she knew the answer had supported Sondra all the way in on the long return trip from Samarkand to Mars. Even Bey’s cryptic reply to her message had not worried her, though she did wonder what he meant by the last part of it: “I have other business on Mars that I must complete in advance,” it said. “Start the meeting without me if you have to—but whatever you do, don’t finish without me. I’ll be bringing visitors.”

Now, on the last stage of the journey, nervousness came rushing in. What real evidence did she have? Very little, and she was about to take on one of the most formidable forces in the solar system. She had better have her arguments in order.

The autocar was creeping its way into the courtyard of Melford Castle. Didn’t the very fact that Trudy Melford had agreed to meet prove that Sondra was right? She had offered no reason for wanting a private session with Trudy. The BEC staff member who took the message had seemed astonished that she dared to ask for it on the way from Samarkand—and dumbfounded when he contacted her after her arrival on Mars, to tell her that Trudy had said yes, they could meet in her private chambers.

The knowledge of where she was added to Sondra’s uneasiness as the elevator slid silently up from the courtyard and halted at the fourth floor of Melford Castle. For a century and a half this building had been the power center of the greatest economic force in the solar system. And the woman waiting for her as the elevator door opened formed the absolute hub around which all that power revolved.

Trudy Melford wore a long, severe dress of black, unrelieved by any form of decoration. She nodded once to Sondra and turned to lead the way back through a long hallway to a dark-paneled office. Sondra slowly followed. There would be no formal niceties or offers of bogus hospitality at this meeting.

Trudy gestured to Sondra to sit in a brocaded upright chair at a polished cherrywood table and placed herself in another one on the opposite side. “You think you have something to say of interest to me?” Dark eyebrows raised. “Very well. My time is valuable, so I would appreciate it if you will be as concise as possible.”

“Your time is valuable. But you can spare enough time to make trips all the way out to Samarkand, in the Kuiper Belt.” Sondra saw the frown on the other woman’s face. “I’m sorry, if I am to be concise that is not the place to begin. Let me start where I started: with a problem assigned to me by my superiors in the Office of Form Control.

“At certain colonies in the Kuiper Belt, babies were born which after a couple of months took the humanity test. The humanity test in the Belt is no different from anywhere else in the solar system. A baby passes and is pronounced human if and only if it is able to interact with purposive form-change equipment.

“In this case, however, there was something wrong. Three babies passed the test, but it quickly became clear that they should have failed. What I have been calling the ‘feral forms’ were not human. The humanity test, after a hundred and fifty years of successful use, was failing. I was told to find out why.

“Do you have any questions about this?”

Trudy Melford was listening intently, elbows on the table, her chin resting on her closed fists and her face impassive. She shook her head. “I am here only to hear what you have to say.”

“We’ll see. Anyway, I discovered nothing useful in my examination of the forms, or of the data concerning them, when I was on Earth. So after I had consulted Bey Wolf I headed out to the Kuiper Belt to see things at first hand. Did you know, by the way, that I tried to persuade him to work with me on this problem? And he refused, because you had lured him here to work for you.”

“I have an important form-change project on Mars, one well-suited to Behrooz Wolfs unique abilities.” Trudy’s face gave away nothing.

“An inconveniently timed project, from my point of view.” Sondra realized that the two of them were still fencing, although the flashing rapiers remained out of sight. “So I went to the colonies alone. I learned even before I arrived that the colony mutation rates are naturally higher because of increased radioactivity. That would give more humanity test failures than usual, but it doesn’t explain at all why things that should have been failing were passing.

“I had no answers. So I dug into the actual form-change equipment, both hardware and software. Know what I found?” Sondra studied Trudy’s impassive face. “I think you do know. I found nothing. The hardware was genuine BEC equipment with the original seals unbroken. The software showed no signs of tampering, and it checked out down to the last binary branch.”

Sondra paused and turned as she heard footsteps behind her. It was Bey Wolf. And in spite of his message, he was alone.

On the other side of the table Trudy was standing up, her face pink. “Bey!” She looked right through Sondra. “I didn’t expect you. I’m sorry, but at the moment I can’t—”

“It’s all right. I’m part of the same meeting.” Bey nodded to Sondra and sat down next to her. “Don’t let me interrupt. Just carry on.”

Carry on—if she could. Sondra stared at Trudy. Could anyone blush on demand? Maybe Bey Wolf produced strange effects on both of them.

“I was just saying that both the software and the hardware out in the colonies was perfect on the form-change equipment that produced the humanity test anomalies. So where did that leave me? I had run out of all the reasonable explanations.”

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Bey waved his hand. “Sorry, sorry, it’s a bad habit that I don’t seem able to kick. Keep going. This time I promise I’ll keep quiet.”

Sondra was beginning to wish he had not shown up. Her job was hard enough, without random interruptions. Where was she?

“I had to take what I had found to its logical conclusion. The hardware was exactly as it had been delivered from BEC. The software was error-free. There was only one other possibility: the hardware had a hidden flaw when BEC delivered it. It had been produced that way in the BEC factory. And knowing the BEC quality control procedures, that told me the change must have been deliberate.”

Sondra paused and waited. This was the point where Trudy should stand up and object. BEC’s reputation for two centuries of reliable delivery was on the line. The other woman remained silent. Trudy was certainly tense, but it was the tension of someone who was also waiting. Sondra had to continue.

“But of course, a deduction that makes no sense and explains nothing is just as bad as no deduction at all. Why would BEC—or anyone—want creatures to pass the humanity test that should have failed it? I didn’t have an answer. There didn’t seem to be an answer.

“Then I wondered if maybe the target was not the colonies, as it seemed to be at first sight. Maybe the target was the humanity test. It has to be infallible, or it is useless. If it can fail three times, people would argue, who knows how many more times it might fail?

“That seemed to lead to a bigger mystery than the one that I started with. Why would anyone possibly want the humanity test to be called into question?

“And there I stuck, until it was suggested that I invert the problem.” Sondra glanced at Bey. He looked as though he was about to speak, but he placed a hand over his mouth and waved at her to continue.

“Thanks, Bey.” Sondra turned again to Trudy Melford. “Invert the problem, and what do you get? Not that non-humans are taking the humanity test and passing it, but maybe that humans are taking the humanity test and failing. It’s an awful thought, some poor human baby, taken and disposed of in the organ banks. But that is what would happen.

“Or that is what would usually happen. There might be very special circumstances, under which someone with great money and influence could take a baby who had failed the humanity test and destroy all evidence that the test had ever been given. Of course, there would still be a problem. What would the parent do with the baby? The child could officially no longer exist. He would be unable to interact with form-change equipment, otherwise he would have passed the humanity test. And it would not be enough simply to establish a false identity for him. He would still be discovered, because form-change is used routinely through the whole solar system.

“But it is not used everywhere. There are a few places, like the Samarkand colony, where form-change equipment is not only not used, it is banned from use. Naturally, such a colony also rejects any suggestion that humanity depends on form-change equipment. A child could grow up there, without fear of discovery. That child’s parent could visit,” Sondra met Trudy’s eye. “If she had sufficient wealth, she could visit as often as she chose. Suppose that Errol Ergan Melford, the infant son of Gertrude Zenobia Melford, did not drown four years ago in the Aegean Sea before he had the chance to take the humanity test. Suppose that he had taken it—and he had failed. Suppose that he is alive today, and living in the Samarkand colony. And suppose that his mother has a long-term goal, of doing something that only the Empress of BEC could do: changing form-change equipment, to cast doubt on the humanity test itself—so that one day her son might return and lead a normal life in the inner system.”

This was the crucial moment, the place where Sondra was afraid that Trudy would dig in her heels. All she had to do was scoff, deny everything, and ask for hard evidence. Sondra had none, and she knew she was not likely to get any. Errol Ergan Melford’s tracks were four years old and surely thoroughly covered, while Trudy was free to travel anywhere in the solar system that she chose to go. She was under no obligation to explain her visits to Samarkand to anyone.

Sondra waited, suddenly sure that her trip to Mars had been for nothing. But Trudy did not act either annoyed or defensive. She seemed pleased, and she was actually smiling.

“Suppose that I agree with you, Sondra, and tell you privately that everything you have said is correct? You are not recording this—I am sure of that, because you were scanned on your way into Melford Castle. So what do you propose to do now?”

It was the last answer in the world that Sondra had expected. She glanced helplessly at Bey. Trudy seemed to be admitting everything. But she was also telling them: So what if I did what you say? You can’t do a thing to me.

And she was right. As soon as Sondra returned to Earth she was going to be fired or assigned to a basement-level job with nothing to do with feral forms. And even if Bey became involved, the Samarkand colonists would never cooperate with Earth’s Office of Form Control for anything.

“I don’t know what I will do.” Sondra felt she might as well be honest. No matter what happened, she had been given the satisfaction of solving the problem.

“That’s a good, honest answer.” Trudy’s attitude to Sondra seemed to have changed completely since the accusations were put out on the table. There was no sign of resentment as she went on, “Look, I know that if you don’t produce an answer accepted by the Office of Form Control, your career will suffer. But I have influence there, and I’ll make sure that it doesn’t happen. All right? Is that all right with you, too, Bey?”

“That part of it is fine.” Bey’s eyes were hard to see, his gaze directed down to the table- top. “And Sondra, you did a great job sorting out what has been going on in the Kuiper Belt. But some of us know that it’s not quite the whole story.”

Trudy’s smile froze. “What do you mean?”

“Let’s start with easy things.” Bey turned to Sondra. “I have to say this with you present, even though I know you won’t like to hear it. Trudy is right. She can certainly make sure that your career won’t suffer at the Office of Form Control; because Trudy happens to have Denzel Morrone thoroughly in her pocket. Right, Trudy?”

“You have no reason to say that.”

“Which is not quite the same as a denial. Morrone is on the take from BEC, and he has been for years. He has to go, Trudy, and quickly. You have to help me make that happen. The head of the Office of Form Control can have faults—God knows, I proved that often enough—but being for sale isn’t one of them.”

“Lots of things go on in BEC at the detail level that I don’t know about. Why do you think I had anything to do with Morrone? I’ve never even met the man.”

“Maybe; but he had to do something specific for you. You knew that there were going to be problems with the humanity test, because you had arranged them. So you passed the word to Morrone, probably through Jarvis Dommer—a hint from you goes a long way in BEC—that someone junior and inexperienced was to be assigned to the feral form problem.

“Morrone picked you, Sondra. Just a couple of years out of graduate school, not much practical experience of form-change and little knowledge of the Kuiper Belt.”

Bey lifted his head and stared at Trudy. “And you, Empress, you agreed with his choice. He didn’t pick Sondra for what she might do, you see, he picked her out for what he didn’t think she could possibly do. Morrone doesn’t have the whole picture, I feel sure of that, but he knew that Sondra was supposed to see so far and no farther. You do have the whole picture. You thought that Sondra would probably find nothing, in which case the humanity test would become increasingly suspect. At the very worst, if she was extra smart or became extra lucky, she might realize that you had been making visits to Samarkand, and draw some conclusions from that. You were prepared for it.

“But there was one piece of information that neither you nor Morrone had at first. You didn’t realize when she was selected that Sondra Dearborn was related to Behrooz Wolf, and she might try to drag me in to help her.

“And now here’s the funny thing: I wouldn’t have helped Sondra at all—I had already told her to go away and solve her own problems—if you hadn’t heard that she had been to see me, and become nervous. You decided to be double safe and tuck me safely out of the way here on Mars. But you tried a little bit too hard. I began to ask myself, why am I being recruited? What can I do that a BEC employee can’t do? And if I’m valuable, why now and not three years ago when I first retired from the Office of Form Control? It seemed like too much of a coincidence, Sondra and you appearing on the scene at just the same time. So I became a little bit more interested in what Sondra was doing.”

Trudy was not smiling at all. Her blue-green gaze was fixed on Bey’s face with a total and fixed intensity. Sondra, watching both of them, suddenly understood Trudy’s expression. The Empress of BEC, a senior force of the solar system, was frightened.

“And then your BEC people got into the act.” Bey sighed and shook his head. “It’s an old, old story, one I suffered with myself for half a century. Your employees try to do what they think you want done, but they only know half the facts. So they do things you later wish they hadn’t done. Jarvis Dommer—I feel sure it was his work—somehow guessed that you were worried about Sondra. He arranged for her to have an ‘accident’ out on the Fugate colony. Since it was supposed to be an accident it couldn’t be made foolproof, and Sondra was smart enough to survive. But it was more evidence, proof to me that we were close to learning something that you really didn’t want learned.”

“I didn’t intend for anything bad to happen to Sondra. I didn’t even know anything was going to happen.” Trudy Melford stared at them across the table. “Believe that, Sondra, if you believe nothing else. As for your accident, Bey, I had nothing to do with that, either.”

“You don’t surprise me. There’s a problem with people like Dommer, who only really work for money. So long as you are paying them top rate, they are good, loyal employees. But the moment some other group offers them more, they automatically work for them and not for you.”

“I pay Jarvis Dommer very well—ridiculously well.”

“But someone was willing to outbid you. My bet is that the Old Mars team got to Dommer. They thought—wrongly—that I was behind the surface forms, and they decided it would be cheaper to put me out of circulation than buy me.”

“Rafael Fermiel?”

“No. I’m not sure I can even suggest the name. By the way, Fermiel should be arriving here in just a few minutes. He was doing something for me, then he’ll be along. Georgia Kruskal, too, the designer and leader of the Mars surface forms. So I’d better press on.

“I was out of the picture for a while, sitting in a form-change tank recovering from my own ‘accident.’ I didn’t know anything about Samarkand until Aybee Smith told me that Sondra was going there, and why. Then I dumped the transport records. I found that sure enough, you had been making trips out there, yourself. But you know what, Trudy? You were a little bit careless. You didn’t fix the old transport records. They show that you visited Samarkand only during the past year. That’s not long enough if Errol Ergan Melford had been out there for four years. I added that to my own set of puzzles.

“The list was starting to grow. Let me give you another item or two on it: If you are really interested in the surface forms, and I believe you are, why weren’t you all for them and deadly opposed to the Underworld? Yet when we talked about it you came across as neutral, telling me that you didn’t play politics—when it’s BEC’s main stock in trade and everybody knows it. And here’s another puzzle for you: Why did you move BEC Headquarters to Mars? I know what you told me, that it was simple economics. But I did a little of my own digging. I found that the Planetary Coordinators on Earth were willing to give BEC a deal every bit as good as the one that Mars offered. You didn’t need to move—didn’t need to, at least, for the reason that you gave. What other possible reason could there be, for such a major undertaking? You had to move all the records, the business, the castle itself. Is there any single explanation that could cover the whole list?”

“Get it over with, Bey.” Trudy Melford was nothing like an Empress now. Her lips were trembling and her face was set and bloodless. “I know that you know. Just tell me what you want.”

“I can’t do that yet.” Every few seconds Bey was glancing impatiently toward the door.

“You mean won’t. Don’t play with me, Bey Wolf. I’m not a mouse.”

“And I’m not a cat, Trudy. I don’t enjoy hurting people.”

“You don’t even have to tell me what you want. I’ll give you everything. Everything I possess if you’ll keep what you know to yourself.”

“I can’t do that, either. Damnation, where are they? Trudy, if I’m right it may not be as bad as you think—”

“It couldn’t be.” Trudy leaned forward until her head rested on the smooth table top. “You have no idea what I think—how I feel.”

Sondra had watched in total amazement. She had little idea what Bey was talking about, but in a few minutes she had seen Trudy Melford change from the Empress of BEC, a regal woman in full control of herself, to a pathetic lump of misery. In spite of herself, the sympathy swelled inside Sondra. She went around to Trudy’s side of the table, sat down next to her, and took her hand. And then, at what should have been a very private moment, in came a chubby red-bearded stranger, bounding along on the balls of his feet.

“Done,” he said to Bey. “Took a bit longer than I expected, but you were exactly right.”

“Where is he?”

“Outside.”

“What the devil’s the point of having him out there before we’ve seen him? Bring him in, Fermiel.”

“Sure.” Red-beard bounced away again, leaving Sondra wondering what could possibly come next. “Come on, Trudy.” Bey was speaking again, almost chiding, “You can’t let him see you like this. It would upset him.”

“He’s here?” Trudy Melford straightened up at once, staring wild-eyed about her. “But how—how did you find out what he looks like and where he was? Nobody should know that, except me and a few people in the Underworld.”

“There is far more to a person than external appearance.” Bey paused. Rafael Fermiel had entered again leading a small blond child. The boy took one look around the room and ran to Trudy Melford’s arms.

“Mummy!”

Bey gazed at Trudy and the little boy with curiosity and huge satisfaction as they hugged each other. “Sondra, I don’t think the two of you have met. I feel sure that there is an official Mars name, which Trudy can tell us, but let me use his Earth name. Allow me to introduce you to Errol Ergan Melford.”