Proteus in the Underworld Read Free Page B

the jetty and began the long journey north; but the brooding obsidian hill remained in Sondra's memory, long after the island itself had vanished into the night.
    Wolf watched the little vessel as it disappeared into the fading line between sea and sky. As the day ended, his work could begin. The bees in one of the hives had swarmed that morning. He had followed them up the rocky central hill of Wolf Island and carefully noted the location of the tight swarmed cluster. Now with the temperature dropping and the bees somnolent it was time for the next step.
    Bey retraced his path up the hill with an empty container and a monofilament cutter. When he returned he was carrying the swarm, undisturbed and in the precise order in which it had been created. He had learned on his previous tries that it was not enough to follow the normal beekeeping practice of shaking the bees of the swarm into the container. For his plans, order seemed to be vitally important.
    He went back into the house and descended two levels from the main floor. The lab that he came to had been cut from the solid basement rock of Wolf Island. Bey had not lied to Sondra. He did need solitude—for the freedom from vibration and noise that it provided, and for the absence of inquisitive neighbors which remoteness guaranteed. What he was doing was not illegal, but it was certainly the sort of thing that might raise eyebrows.
    Bey suspended the swarm of bees above a table, from which it could be moved directly into any one of the waiting form-change tanks, Once the swarm was in position he paused. Even with the aid of his miniaturized servos, what came next was going to be infinitely tricky and tedious. He was not going to enjoy the next twelve to fourteen hours. He had to attach tiny optical fibers for biofeedback control to every bee in the swarm, then network the result into the computer so that responses were possible on both the individual and the composite level.
    No point in waiting. The work could not be split into shifts, it had to be done in one long session. The sooner he began, the sooner he would be able to rest. Bey sighed, adjusted the microscope, and settled to his task. It called for great care but little brain work. He had plenty of time to think, and to wonder again if he really knew what he was doing.
    The idea behind his new work derived from the multiform theory that Bey himself had invented four years earlier, for the creation of human composites. Now he wanted to take it far beyond the point that anyone else—Sondra Dearborn, or even the workers at the Biological Equipment Corporation—would believe possible. The use of biological form-change for humans was two hundred years old, widespread, and almost universally accepted. The corollary, that humans and humans alone could achieve such interactive form-change, was embedded so deeply in society that it had become the definition of humanity itself.
    Sondra, like Bey himself, was too young to remember the great humanity debates. She accepted their final outcome as a necessary and inevitable truth.
    What is a human? The answer, slowly evolved and at last articulated clearly, was simple: an entity is human if and only if it can accomplish purposive form-change using bio-feedback systems. That definition had prevailed over the anguished weeping of billions of protesting parents. The age of humanity testing had been pushed back, to one year, to six months, to three months. Failure in the test carried a high price—euthanasia—but resistance had slowly faded in the face of remorseless population pressure. Resources to feed babies who could never live a normal human life were not available.
    And in time the unthinkable had become the unquestionable. The validity of the humanity test had been established beyond doubt over the years, by attempts to induce form-change in everything from gnats to whales to daffodils. Every one had been unsuccessful.
    Now Bey was questioning the unquestionable. The