Charles Sheffield - Sight of Proteus

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SIGHT OF PROTEUS
Proteus #1
Charles Sheffield
Customer Reviews
Among Sheffield's best work, October 30, 2002
Reviewer:
At his best, Sheffield fits in the category with Larry Niven in that Sheffield
is able to deliver a fully developed world driven by several far-sighted
predictions of where technology and need will drive mankind. Sheffield seems
to produce his very best material when he writes solo and (frankly) when he
writing 20 years ago.
"Sight of Proteus" fits both those parameters, and in my opinion is among the
two or three best that Sheffield ever produced. The story is based in a world
where changes to the human form can be ordered from a public catalog - and of
course the darker underworld where prohibited changes can be obtained.
In an over-populated world where underground scientists are willing to push
the envelope of human form and evolution, this novel broke new ground pushing
the "what if?" question related to human potential. I have the paperback in
its 1978 edition and it has a permanent place in my SF collection.
Top of Form
Just proves again what a genius he is., April 15, 2000
Reviewer:
Its the first book in a series of three. Some real good advanced
biothechnology,intristing lead charecter,good plot. He really took his time
and thoght about all kinds of human forms. Get the trilogy,if you know whats
good hard science fiction is.
Contents
BOOK 1
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
BOOK II
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
BOOK 1
"Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his
wreathed horn."
CHAPTER 1
The new fall catalog had arrived that morning. Behrooz Wolf, like millions of
others, had settled in for an evening of browsing and price comparison. As
usual, there were many variations on most of the old forms, plus an intriguing
set of new ones that BEC was releasing for the first time. Bey keyed out the
catalog displays, studying the images and .the prices and occasionally marking
a form for future reference.
After about an hour his interest began to fade and his attention wandered. He
yawned, put down the catalog, and went to his desk in the corner of the room.
He picked up and looked through a couple of texts on form-change theory, then,
restless as ever, leafed through his casebook. Finally, he picked up the BEC
catalog again. When the phone buzzed, he gave an instinctive mutter of
annoyance, but the interruption was a welcome one. He pressed the wrist
remote.
"Bey? Put me up on visual, would you," said a voice from the wall screen.
Wolf touched his wrist again, and the cheerful, ruddy face of John Larsen
appeared on the wall holo. Larsen looked at the catalog that Bey was holding
and smiled.
"I didn't know that was out yet, Bey. Tomorrow's the official release date. I
haven't had the chance to see if mine has arrived. Sorry to call you at this
hour, but I'm still over here at the office."
"No problem. I couldn't get too interested in this, anyway. It's the same old
irritation. The forms that appeal the most need a thousand hours of work with
the machines, or else they have a lousy life ratio."
"-or they require a whole mass of computer storage, if they're anything like
last spring's releases. How are the prices?"
"Up again, and you're quite right, they need more storage, too. Look at this
one, John." He held up the open catalog. "I already have a billion words of
primary storage, and I still couldn't begin to handle it. Four billion words,
or you shouldn't think of ordering it."
Larsen whistled softly. "That's certainly a new one, though. It's the closest
thing I've ever seen to an avian form. What's the life ratio on it? Bad, I'll
bet."
Wolf consulted the tables in the catalog and nodded agreement.
"Less than 0.2. You'd be lucky to last ten years with it. You might be all
right in low-g, but not otherwise. In fact, there's a footnote that says it
can achieve flight in a lunar gravity or less. I suppose they're hoping for
USF sales."
He closed the catalog.
"So, what's happening, John? I thought you had a date-why the midnight oil?"
Larsen shrugged. "We've got a mystery on our hands. I'm baffled, and it's the
sort of problem you thrive on. Do you feel up to a trip back to the office
tonight? You're the boss, but I'd really like to get your opinion."
Wolf hesitated. "I wasn't planning to go out again. Can't we handle it over
the holo?"
"I don't think so. But maybe I can show you enough to persuade you to come
over here." Larsen held out a sheet so that it could be seen on the
holoscreen. "Bey, what do you make of this ID code?"
Wolf studied it carefully, then looked back at Larsen questioningly. "It seems
normal enough. Is it somebody I'm supposed to know? Let me just check it
through my percomp."
Larsen watched in silence as Wolf entered the digits of the chromosome ID code
that had replaced fingerprint, voiceprint, and retinal patterns as the
absolute identification method. The link from his personal computer to the
central data banks was automatic and almost instantaneous. When the response
came, Wolf frowned at it for a moment, then looked in annoyance at John
Larsen.
"What's the game, John? There's no such ID in the central files. Is it one
that you made up?"
"I wish it were, but it's nothing so simple."
Larsen reached behind him and picked up a printed report.
"I told you, Bey, this is a strange one. I had a call about three hours ago
from a medical student. This afternoon, he was over in the transplant ward of
Central Hospital when a liver transplant case came in. He's been taking a
course in chromosome analysis, and he'd missed one of the lab sessions where
they were supposed to try the technique out on a real case. So he had the idea
of doing an ID check on a sample from the donor liver-just to see if he had
the technique correct."
"That's illegal, John. He can't have the licenses to use that equipment."
"He doesn't. He did it anyway. When he got home, he fed the ID code into
central files and asked for donor identification and matching. The files
couldn't produce a match."
Bey Wolf looked skeptical-but intrigued. "He must have made a measurement
error, John."
"That was my first reaction. But he's an unusual young man. For one thing, he
was willing to call us, even though he knew he might get in trouble for doing
the ID analysis without proper permission. I told him he must have done
something wrong, but he said he'd done it three times, twice the usual way and
once with a shortcut method that he wanted to try out. It came out the same
each time. He's sure that he handled the technique correctly and didn't make
any mistakes."
"But there's no way to fake a chromosome ID, and every human being is listed
in the central files. Your student is telling us that he tested a liver that
came from a person who never existed."
John Larsen looked pleased. "That's what I wanted to hear you say. It was my
conclusion exactly. Well, Bey? See you over here in an hour or so?"
The evening shower was over, and the streets were once again a wild, colorful
chaos. Bey left his apartment and worked his way over to the fastest slide
way, threading through the mass of people with practiced ease. With the
population over fourteen billion, crowding was normal, night or day, even in
the most affluent parts of the city. Wolf, preoccupied with Larsen's problem,
scarcely noticed the throng that surrounded him.
How could anyone have escaped the chromosome typing? It was performed at three
months, right after the humanity tests-and it had been that way for a century.
Could the donor be old, a dying ancient? That was ridiculous. Even if the
donor wanted it that way, no one would use a century-old liver for a
transplant operation. Bey's thin face was puzzled. Could it be that the donor
was an off-worlder? No, that wouldn't explain it either. The IDs for people
from the United Space Federation were all separately filed, but they were
still in the records at the central data banks. The computer response would
have been delayed a little, but that was all.
He was beginning to feel the old mixture, a tingle of excitement modulated by
a fear of disappointment. His job in the Office of Form Control was a good
one-he didn't know of a better. But although he had been highly successful in
it, somehow it was not completely satisfying. Always, he felt that he was
waiting for the big challenge, the problem that would stretch his abilities to
their limits. Maybe this could be the one. At thirty-four, he should know what
he wanted to do with the rest of his life-it was ridiculous still to be full
of the heart searching of adolescence.
In an attempt to suppress his illogical sense of anticipation and to prepare
his mind for the problem ahead, Bey keyed his communication implant and tuned
to the newscast. The familiar beaked nose and sloping brow of Laszlo Dolmetsch
appeared, directly stimulated on his optic nerves. The people and the slide
ways were still faintly visible as a ghostly superimposed image-the laws
forbade total exclusion of the direct sensory feeds. The early slide way
deaths had taught that lesson.
Dolmetsch, as always, was holding forth on the latest social indicators and
making his usual pessimistic prophecies. If the concentration of industry
around the Link access points were not lessened, there would be trouble ...
Bey had heard it all before, and custom had staled the message. Sure, there
were instabilities in the social indicators-but that had been the case ever
since the indicators were first developed. Bey looked again at Dolmetsch's
profile and wondered about the popular rumor. Instead of using form-change to
diminish that great beak, the story went, Dolmetsch had increased it-to become
an unmistakable figure anywhere on Earth. That he certainly was. Bey could not
remember a time when Dolmetsch had not been a prominent prophet of doom. How
old was the man now? Eighty, or ninety?
Bey mentally shrugged and switched channels. He had to return to the real
world for a moment, to move quickly out of the way of two red-coated medical
emergency staff hurtling at top speed along the fastest slide way, then he
skipped through the other news channels. Not much there. A mining accident on
Horus, so far from most Solar System activities that it would take months for
relief to reach it; a promising discovery of kernels out in the Halo, which
meant fortune for some lucky prospector and more free energy for the USF; and
the perennial rumor of a form-change that would give immortality to the
wearer. That one cropped up every couple of years, regular as the seasons. It
was a tribute to the continued power of wishful thinking. No one ever had any
details-just the vaguest of hearsay. Bey listened scornfully and wondered
again how people could pay attention to such a flimsy prospect. He switched
back to Dolmetsch-at least the old man's worries were comprehensible and had a
solid basis of fact. There was no doubt that the shortages and the violence
were barely under control, and the population, despite all efforts, was still
creeping upward. Could it ever hit fifteen billion? Bey remembered when
fourteen had seemed intolerable.
The crowds surging along the slide ways didn't seem to share Wolfs worries.
They looked happy, handsome, young, and healthy. To people living two hundred
years earlier they would have seemed models of perfection. Of course, this was
the west side, closer to the Link entry point, and that helped. There was
plenty of poverty and ugliness elsewhere. But forget for the moment the high
prices and the mass of computer storage that was needed. BEC-the Biological
Equipment Corporation-could fairly claim to have transformed the world, that
part of the world, at least, that could afford to pay. Here on the west side,
affluence was the norm and use of the BEC systems a sine qua non.
Only the general coordinators shared Laszlo Dolmetsch's view of the problems
in keeping the economic balance of the world. Earth was poised on a knife edge
of diminishing resources. Constant subtle adjustments, calculated by
application of Dolmetsch's theories, were needed to hold it there. Every week
there were corrections for the effects of drought, crop failures, forest
fires, epidemics, energy shortages, and mineral supplies. Every week the
general coordinators watched the indices for violence, disease, and famine and
waited grimly for the time when the corrections would fail and the system
would run amok into worldwide slump and economic collapse. In a united world,
failure of one system means failure of all. Only the off-Earthers, the three
million citizens of the United Space Federation, could cling to their shaky
independence-and the USF watched the economic indicators at least as closely
and nervously as any Earth-based coordinator.
As he neared his goal, Bey Wolf kept an automatic eye open for illegal forms.
Makeup and plastflesh could hide a great deal, but with the Office of Form
Control he had been specially trained to see past the outward form, through to
the shape of the underlying body structure.
Here, on the public slide ways, the chances of running into an outlawed form
were small-but Bey still had occasional nightmares about the feline form he
had spotted less than a mile from here two years earlier. That had cost him
two months out of action, in the accelerated change and recovery room of the
Form Control Hospital unit.
As he made the transitions back to the slowest slide way, he noticed again the
large number of rounded Elizabethan foreheads on the people he was passing.
That had been a minor special of the spring catalog but it had turned out to
be a big hit. He wondered what the fall attraction would be-dimples? saber
scars? an Egyptian nose?-as he printed into Form Control and went up to
Larsen's office on the third floor.
As Bey Wolf was climbing the stairs, a few miles east of him a solitary
white-coated figure dialed a vault combination and stepped through into the
underground experiment room, four floors below City level. The face and figure
would be familiar to any scientist. It was Albert Einstein-Einstein at forty,
at the very height of his powers.
The man made his way slowly down the long room, checking the station monitors
at each of the great tanks. Most received only a few seconds of attention and
the occasional adjustment of a control setting, but at the eleventh station he
halted. He examined the outputs closely, grunted, and shook his head. Several
minutes passed while he stood motionless, deep in thought. At last he
continued his patrol and went on into the general control area at the far end
of the room.
Seated at the console, he called out the detailed records for the eleventh
station and displayed them on the screen. Then he was again silent for many
minutes, twisting around his forefinger a lock of his long, graying hair as he
bent over the displays of feed rates, nutrient mixes, and other vital
indicators. The program-swapping records occupied him for more long minutes,
but finally he was finished. He emerged from his concentration, cleared the
screen, and switched to voice recording mode.
"November second. Continued deterioration in tank eleven. Response intensity
is down by a further two percent, and there is a renewed instability in the
biofeedback loops. Change parameters were recalibrated tonight."
He paused, reluctant to take the next step. At last he went on.
"Prognosis: poor. Unless there is improvement in the next two days, it will be
necessary to terminate the experiment."
He sat for a moment longer, visibly shaken. At last he stood up. Moving
quickly now through the dimly lit room he reset the monitors at each station
and switched on the telltales. He took a final look around the room, locked
the vault, and entered the elevator that would take him back to ground level.
More than ever now, the face was that of Einstein. Over the warmth, intellect,
and humanity was etched the pain and torment of a man who worried and suffered
for the whole world.
CHAPTER 2
John Larsen, still fresh-faced and cheerful despite the late hour, looked at
Bey closely when he came in.
"Late nights don't seem to agree with you," he said. "You look tired. Been
neglecting your conditioning program again?"
Wolf shrugged and involuntarily blinked his eyes several times.
"It shows, does it? I was born a bit myopic, you know. If I don't work out
regularly, I get eyestrain. I'll have a full session on the bios-first thing
tomorrow."
Larsen raised a skeptical eyebrow. Bey was famous for his "tomorrow"
statements. He claimed he had inherited subtlety and shrewdness from his
Persian mother, along with tenacity and attention to detail from his German
father. But from his Persian side had also apparently come a gift for extreme
procrastination. Bey swore that there was no word just like manana in the
Persian language-there were a dozen related words, but none of them had that
degree of urgency. His tendency to delay didn't seem to extend to his work. He
was highly effective there. Dark-haired, dark-complexioned, of medium height
and build, he had an uncanny ability to efface himself totally and disappear
into any crowd-a useful talent for an investigating agent in the Office of
Form Control.
Larsen picked up a typed sheet from his desk and offered it to Wolf.
"There it is. The signed, sworn statement of Luis Rad-Kato-that's the medical
student. It has the whole story. Gives the time, tells just what he did,
quotes the liver ID, and shows where he filed his results in the data banks."
Wolf took the paper and glanced over it. "I suppose you already pulled the
records on this out of Central Data to make sure he filed it the way he said
he did?"
"Sure. I did that as soon as I received his report. It was still held in the
scratch file. I'll read it out again for you."
He dialed the entry code, and the two men waited as the data search was
performed. The wait lengthened. After a minute or so Larsen frowned in
perplexity.
"There shouldn't be this much delay. The response last time I checked was
almost instantaneous. Maybe I goofed on the access code."
He hit the priority interrupt key and reentered the code. This time the
message light blinked on, and the display screen filled:
ENTRY CODE DOES NOT CORRESPOND TO ANY RECORD IN FILES.
CHECK REFERENCE AND REENTER.
"Damnation. That can't be right, Bey. I used that same code less than an hour
ago."
"Let me have a go. I know the supervisor entry codes for that area of central
storage."
Wolf, much more at home with computers than Larsen, took over the console. He
entered the control language statements that allowed him access to the
operating system and began to screen the storage files. After a few minutes
work he froze the display.
"This is the area, John. Look at it-talk about bad luck! The data dump shows a
hardware malfunction in the medical records section, less than an hour ago. A
whole group of records has been lost-including the area where the file we want
was stored. They were all erased when the system went down."
Larsen looked miserable. He shook his head in disgust.
"It was a lousy time for it to happen, Bey. Now the whole thing will be a pain
to follow up. We'll have to call Central Hospital and ask for a new check on
the liver transplant ID. They won't like that, but if we reach Dr. Morris in
the Transplant Department, he'll probably arrange to do it for us."
"Tonight?"
"No." Larsen looked apologetic. "It can't be done. It's almost eleven now, and
Morris works the day shift. We won't get any action until tomorrow. The best I
can do is call and leave a stored request for the morning."
He sat down at the video link and prepared to call the hospital, then paused.
"Unless you want to go over in the morning and check it in person? We'd
actually get faster action that way."
Wolf shrugged. "Might as well. Tonight's shot anyway. Let's leave it all until
tomorrow."
Larsen was still apologetic. "It must have been a million to one chance,
losing the record we wanted like that."
"More than that, John. The scratch record is copied into a master file, soon
after entry, so that there's always a backup copy. The accident must have
happened before they could get the copy for permanent storage. I've never even
heard of such a thing before-it must be a one in a billion rarity, maybe one
in a trillion."
He wore a thoughtful and dissatisfied expression as they went together into
the still-crowded streets.
"I've had no dinner, and I broke a date to follow through on this thing," said
Larsen. "Do you know, I haven't been outside the office for a minute since I
arrived this morning. What's new on the slide ways?"
Wolf looked amused. "If you mean women, as you usually do, I wasn't looking
too much on the way over. I saw a couple of new ones this afternoon,
though-styles straight from old Persia. Fantastic eyes. It would be nice if
they caught on and came into fashion."
They merged into the slide walkers. Like most members of Form Control, Wolf
and Larsen were wearing simple forms, close to those given by nature. Years of
form-change training, reinforced by the chilling exposure to the outlawed
forms, made form-change for pleasure or entertainment a doubtful attraction to
them. It took an intriguing form indeed to tempt them to experiment. The
biofeedback machines in the Office of Form Control were used for work and for
health, almost never for cosmetics. Before Bey went to bed he took a short
program on his own equipment for his myopia, and resolved to take a more
complete physical overhaul-tomorrow.
CHAPTER 3
The meeting was running well over its scheduled one hour. That happened often.
Every year the list of petitioners grew longer, and every year the committee
had to weigh more factors in deciding the new legal forms.
Robert Capman, committee chairman, looked at his watch and called the meeting
again to order.
"We're late, ladies and gentlemen. This must be our final decision for today.
Turn, if you please, to the description of the twentieth petition. Perhaps I
can summarize it for you in the interests of speed.
"The basic form is mammalian aquatic. You will see that fourteen variations
are also being applied for in simultaneous petition. The developer of the
forms points out that one of these variations has a life ratio a little better
than 1-about 1.02, to be more precise. This could translate to an extension of
a couple of years on a user's life span. BEC has already stated that they
would be willing to handle this form and all its variations as Type 1
Programs, fully certified and supported by BEC warranties. Could I now have
your comments, please."
Capman paused. He had a gift-part instinct, part experience-that allowed him
to control the pace of the meeting completely. There was a stir at the far end
of the long table.
"Yes, Professor Richter. You have a comment?"
Richter cleared his throat. He was a lean, fastidious man with a neat black
beard. "A question, really. I notice that the basic form can supposedly be
reached with less than two hundred hours of machine interaction. I know that
the main external change, apart from the skin and eyes, is just the addition
of gills to the human form, but that interaction time seems to me to be too
little. I question its accuracy."
Capman smiled and nodded. "An excellent point, Jacob. I had the same thought
myself when I reread this petition."
Richter warmed to the praise in Capman's voice.
"However," continued Capman, "I now believe that the statement is accurate.
This petitioner seems to have achieved a real breakthrough. As you know, a
form is usually reached with less effort when it corresponds to one somewhere
in our own genetic history."
Richter nodded vigorously. "Indeed, yes. I have always thought that to be the
reason why the avian forms have proved so difficult to realize. Are you
suggesting that the petitioner has developed a form that relates to our own
descent?"
"I believe so. More than that, in his application he points out a new use of
form-change. Since the number of hours of machine interaction seems to
correlate directly with a form's closeness to human genetic heritage, our own
remote history can actually be explored through systematic form-perturbation.
Whenever we suspect that a new form lies close to the line of our own species
development, we should look for the perturbations that decrease machine
interaction time. Those changes will generally take us closer to our
evolutionary path. Thus this petitioner has not only contributed to the
present science of metamorphosis, he has also given us a new tool to examine
our own evolutionary heritage."
There was a stir of excitement around the table. Capman rarely offered
personal comment on a petition. He left it to the committee to make their own
evaluation and recommendation. His praise carried weight. The approval for the
use of the new form was swiftly given, and the ecstatic petitioner received
the formal congratulations of the committee.
He left in a blissful daze-with good reason. Adoption of his forms by BEC as
Type I Programs made him an instant millionaire, in either Earth riyals or in
USF new dollars.
As soon as he had gone, Capman called the meeting once more to order.
"That concludes the consideration of petitions for today. There is, however,
still one extraordinary item of business that I want to bring to your
attention before we leave. We cannot resolve it now, but I urge you to think
about it in the weeks until our next meeting."
He motioned to one of the minutes secretaries, who handed him a pile of thin
folders, which he distributed to the committee members.
"These contain some details of an unusual petition request that we received
last week. It has not been through the conventional screening process, because
after a quick look at it I judged that we should consider it directly in this
committee. It has a life ratio close to 1.3."
There was a sudden hush. Committee members who had been straightening their
papers before leaving stopped and gave Capman their full attention.
"The petitioner does not emphasize this," went on Capman, "but the extensive
use of this form could increase the average life expectancy to almost one and
a half centuries. The appearance of the form is outwardly normal. The changes
are mainly in the medulla oblongata and the endocrine glands."
At the far end of the table, Richter had again raised his hand.
"Mr. Chairman, I urge great caution in discussing this form anywhere outside
this committee. We all can guess the public reaction if people see a chance to
increase their life spans by thirty percent. It would be chaos."
Capman nodded. "That was going to be my next point. There is still another
reason why this form must be handled with special care. As many of you may
know, I also serve as consultant and technical adviser to the general
coordinators. It is in that role that I am most worried by this petition. The
widespread use of any form with a life ratio this high could eventually push
the population of Earth up above twenty billion. We could not support such a
level. If Dolmetsch is correct, we are already crowding close to the absolute
limit of population stability."
He closed his notebook.
"On the other hand, I'm not sure that we have the right to suppress any
petition for such arguments. The petitioner presumably knows his legal rights.
I would like to get your opinion on this next month, after you have all had
time to think about it.
"The meeting is now adjourned."
He smiled his thanks at the participants, gathered his papers, and hurried
from the room. After the other committee members had also left, the minutes
secretaries remained to clear up and compare notes. The junior of the two
skipped through his recording, then compared it with the written transcript.
"I show one clean acceptance," he said, "two conditional acceptances subject
to further tests, two more to be continued with sponsored research grants. If
my count is right, that leaves us fifteen outright rejections."
"Check. Funny, isn't it, how the percentages seem to run about the same each
time, no matter what the petitions are?" The blond girl tried an experimental
flutter of her eyelashes and a pout of the lips. Getting the form of the
Marilyn variations was fairly easy as far as the outward shape was concerned,
but the mannerisms took lots of practice. "There, how was that?"
"Not too bad. You're improving, but you're not there yet. I'll let you know
when you have it perfect. Look, do you think we should make any special notes
on the rejected forms? There's at least one that might be worth a comment."
"I know. The petitioner who tried to develop the wheeled form? I don't know
what we could put in the transcripts. 'Widespread and ill-concealed laughter
from the committee members'? They had a hard time controlling themselves, the
way he was hopping and rolling all over the room. It's probably better to say
nothing. I wonder why somebody would go to all that trouble to make a complete
fool of himself."
"Come on, Gina, we both know why."
"Oh, I guess you're right. Money will always do it."
Of course.
... would you like to be rich, really rich? Then why not develop a new form
to catch the public fancy? You will get a royalty from every user ...
It sounded easy, but it was not. All the simple forms had been explored long
before. The change specialists were driven all the time to more exotic and
difficult variations. Any proposal had to pass the stringent requirements of
the petition board, and only one in a million hit the jackpot.
... BEC will sell you a low-cost experimental package. It includes everything
that you need to create your very own form-change program ...
Few of the enthusiasts signing up for form-change experiments worried about
the fine print at the end of the contract:
... BEC takes no responsibility for reduced life expectancy, physical damage,
or unstable physical-mental feedback resulting from form-change experiments
made with BEC equipment ...
For the one in a million lucky or clever enough to hit on a really successful
form, there was still a hidden catch: the form would have to be marketed
through BEC. The royalty was factored into BEC's prices, and they made more
than the developer.
The statistics were seldom publicized. Licensed form-change experimenters: 1.5
million. Living millionaires from new form inventions: 146. Deaths per year
directly attributed to form-change experiments: 78,000.
Form-change experiment was a risky business.
The minutes secretaries didn't realize it, but in the final petition board
they saw only the cream of the crop-the ones that could still walk and talk.
Less than one in fifty made it to the board. Many of the failures finished in
the organ banks.
"We should include a summary on the humanity-test proposal, Gina."
"I guess so. I sketched out a short statement while they were still debating
it. How about this? 'The proposal that the humanity test could be conducted at
two months instead of three months was tabled pending further test results.'"
"I think it needs a bit more detail than that. Dr. Capman pointed out what an
argument the present humanity test caused among the religious groups when it
was first introduced. BEC had to show success in a hundred thousand test cases
before the council would approve it."
He skimmed rapidly through the record. "Here, why don't we simply use this
quote, verbatim, from Capman's remark? 'The humanity tests remain
controversial. Unless an equally large sample is analyzed now, showing that
the two- and three-month test results are identical, the proposal cannot be
forwarded for consideration.' "
They were both much too young to remember the great humanity debates. What is
a human? The answer had evolved slowly and taken many years to articulate
clearly, but it was simple enough: an entity is human if and only if it can
accomplish purposive form-change using the bio-feedback systems. The
definition had prevailed over the anguished weeping of millions-billions-of
protesting parents.
The age of testing had been slowly pushed back to one year, to six months, to
three months. If DEC could prove its case, the age would soon be two months.
Failure in the test carried a high penalty-euthanasia-but resistance had
slowly faded before remorseless population pressure. Resources to feed babies
who could never live a normal human life were simply not available. The banks
never lacked for infant organs.
Gina had locked her recorder. She pushed back her blond hair with a rounded
forearm and threw a smoldering look at her companion.
"Still not quite right," he said critically. "You should droop your eyelids a
bit more and get a better pout on that lower lip."
"Damn. It's hard. How will I know when I'm getting it right?"
He picked up his recorder. "Don't worry. I told you before, you'll know from
my reaction."
"You know, I ought to try it on Dr. Capman-he'd be the ultimate test, don't
you think?"
"Impossible, I would have said. You know he only lives for his work. I don't
think he has more than two minutes a day left over from that. But look"-only
half joking-"if the hormones are running too high in that form, I might be
able to help you out."
Gina's response was not included in the conventional Marilyn data base.
The telltales on the experiment stations glowed softly. The only sounds were
the steady hum of air and nutrient circulators and the click of the pressure
valves inside the tanks. Seated at the control console, the lonely figure
looked again at the records of experiment status.
It had been necessary to abort the failure on the eleventh station-again the
pain, the loss of an old friend. How many more? Fortunately, the replacement
was going very well. Perhaps he was getting closer, perhaps the dream of half
a century could be achieved.
He had not chosen his outward form lightly. It was fitting that the greatest
scientist of the twenty-second century should pay homage to the giant of the
twentieth. But how had his idol borne the guilt of Hiroshima, of Nagasaki? For
that secret, he would have given a great deal.
CHAPTER 4
The unexpected loss of the data set containing the unknown liver ID had nagged
all night like a subliminal. By the time Bey Wolf reached the Form Control
offices his perplexity was showing visibly on his face. As they set off
together for Central Hospital, Larsen mistook Wolf's facial expression for
irritation at being called out on a wasted mission the previous night.
"Just another hour or two, Bey," he said, "then we'll have direct evidence."
Wolf was thoughtful for a moment, chewing at his lip.
"Maybe, John," he said at last. "But don't count on it. I don't know why it
is, but it seems that whenever I get involved in a really interesting case,
something comes along and knocks it away. You remember how it was on the
Pleasure Dome case."
Larsen nodded without comment. That had been a tough one, and both men had
come close to resigning over it. Illegal form-changes were being carried out
in Antarctica as titillation for the jaded sexual appetites of top political
figures. Starting from a segment of ophidian skin picked up in Madrid, Wolf
and Larsen had followed the trail little by little and had been close to the
final revelation when they had suddenly been called off the case by the
central office. The whole thing had been hushed up, and left to cool. There
must have been some very important players in that particular game.
While the slide ways transported them toward the hospital, both men gradually
摘要：

SIGHTOFPROTEUSProteus#1CharlesSheffieldCustomerReviewsAmongSheffield'sbestwork,October30,2002Reviewer:Athisbest,SheffieldfitsinthecategorywithLarryNiveninthatSheffieldisabletodeliverafullydevelopedworlddrivenbyseveralfar-sightedpredictionsofwheretechnologyandneedwilldrivemankind.Sheffieldseemstoprod...

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