As Sondra left Morrone’s office and began the eighty-floor drop chute descent toward ground level she reviewed the meeting. Using Wolfs name had been a disaster. Bey obviously had no idea how much his successor resented his fame. But in spite of that, Sondra had not been given an actual refusal She would certainly do what Morrone suggested and find out more about the Carcon Colony. She had been assuming that it was just another of the thousand small groups who populated the Kuiper Belt and the Halo. Apparently there was something more to the colony than she had realized.
“Strange territory, strange people,” Bey Wolf had said. How strange? And strange how?
As she reached the ground floor, Sondra noticed something else. More and more of the staff she passed looked like male and female versions of Denzel Morrone. Apparently his internal campaign for an Office of Form Control identity that went well beyond clothing was succeeding.
Sondra had been born on Earth. She had been given a rather standard planetary education, which meant that she knew a great deal about the Inner System out to Pluto, and less and less about the rest of Sol’s retinue as the distance from the Sun increased.
She had spent tourist time on Mars and Ceres and cruised the Europan deep ocean. She had flown past the off-limits planet of Saturn, with its Logian forms busy on projects beyond the comprehension of any human. She had visited the moons of Uranus, and in derived reality aboard a deep submersible she had watched the Ergatandromorphs, constructed synthetic forms, as they worked on the Uranian Link deep within their mother planet.
And there her first-hand experience ended. Beyond the Inner System, in order, came the Kuiper Belt, the Kernel Ring, and the vast extended region of the Oort Cloud. Cloudland, diffuse and under populated (by Inner System standards, not by its own) reached out to a full third of a light-year from the Sun. Beyond that, and last of all, came the Dry Tortugas. Those arid, volatile-free shards of rock marked the edge of Sol’s domain and shared their gravitational allegiance with other stars.
Sondra knew that the regions were all different, with their own inhabitants and customs and life-styles. The Kuiper Belt almost qualified as part of the Inner System. It was a collection of planetoids and cometary fragments, orbiting from the distance of Persephone, only fifty times Earth’s distance from the Sun, to about six times that far. The inhabitants of its numerous colonies preferred to wear the forms of the Inner System, rather than the skeletal and elongated shapes of the Cloudlanders.
Or at least, most of them did. Sondra, connected to the Form Control general data bank, watched in astonishment as numerical, descriptive, and pictorial information flowed in about the Carcon Colony.
The Carcon Colony (employ directed hyper-trail reference OP/M), a contraction of Carbon- silicon Colony, was established in 2112. Its founders rejected the philosophical dualism that separates carbon-based intelligences (e.g. humans, Logians) from silicon intelligences (e.g. computers, Ergas; employ directed hyper-trail reference HI/AI). They argued that the path of evolution dictates a direct synthesis of the two forms, and they set out to create that synthesis within their own persons and progeny. The assignment of functions, both physical and mental, was to be made on the basis of efficiency, not prior prejudice or historical roles. The resulting organisms are true Cyborgs, although the residents of the Carcon Colony reject this designation, preferring to use the term Optimorphs.
Sondra followed the trail keys and found before her the Optimorph image bank. The displayed entities were not, as she had expected, a bizarre mixture of elements-human trunks, maybe, with mechanical arms and legs and glittering inorganic eyes. They were superficially human. But the torsos and heads bulged in strange places.
The skulls had foreheads that came far out over the eyes.
Limbs possessed what looked like second joints between shoulder and elbow, and between hip and knee.
It would take a long time to study the contents of the hyper-bank in the detail that they deserved. Sondra began to download the descriptive and pictorial data for later analysis.
It was a task that could be done without much concentration. As she worked another thought came drifting into her head. The Carcon Colony used form-change equipment, but its needs were likely to be very different from the standard applications on Earth. Different how? That knowledge was surely vital to anyone trying to solve the problem of the feral form.
So why hadn’t anyone before Bey Wolf mentioned to Sondra the importance of knowing just what went on in the Carcon Colony?
She was beginning to worry about that question when the display that she was using suddenly went blank. An interrupt appeared in place of the Carcon Colony index and grabbed her attention.
TO: OFFICE OF FORM CONTROL, EARTH HQ. (ADDED INTERNAL OFFICE ROUTING: SONDRA DEARBORN)
FROM: FUGATE COLONY.
SUBJECT: ANOMALOUS FORM.
REPORT TO OFFICE OF FORM CONTROL: NEWBORN 06:21, USF STANDARD DATE. HUMANITY TEST APPLIED, 8:23. TEST PASSED, 8:24. CONTROLS FAILED SAME DATE 8:24 UPON EMERGENCE FROM TESTING TANK. MAXIMUM GEE TRANSFER HAS BEEN MADE TO EARTH, SHIPMENT TO HQ OFFICE OF FORM CONTROL, ON 8:25. ARRIVAL EARTH ORBIT 8:27. WARNING: THIS FORM CANNOT BE TAKEN TO THE SURFACE OF EARTH. IN ADDITION, FORM MUST BE HANDLED AT HIGHEST LEVEL OF SECURITY. IT IS DANGEROUS. FOUR COLONY MEMBERS WERE ATTACKED, TWO WERE INJURED.
Sondra hardly read the rest of the message. She was receiving it through a high-level override of her standard communication channel. That, along with the office’s internal routing, implied something else: responsibility for sorting out the problem with this form, like the feral one that she had shown to Bey Wolf, would be hers.
The new form was being dumped right into her lap.
She cringed at that particular mental image, even as another thought rushed in: now not even Denzel Morrone could point to the wild form as an isolated, unique, never-to-be- repeated incident.
Sondra felt out of her depth. Just when she was hoping to understand the Carcon Colony, a new form and a new place had been thrown at her.
At least she had heard of the Carcon Colony—vaguely—before the first form appeared; but what and where was the Fugate Colony?
Sondra resisted the urge to dash off to Transportation and seek the most rapid way of getting to space. The new form would not arrive at Earth orbit for another twenty-four hours. And this time she intended to know a lot more about its origin before she was forced to confront it.
Fugate Colony. History, location, size, inhabitants.
Sondra remained at her terminal and set the data trail.
While the key words were being pursued and the information collected, she had time to wonder again about the value of her training. Two years ago her doctorate in form-change theory, with its dissertation on the Capman C-forms and the Wolf multiforms, had seemed the perfect preparation for a career in the Office of Form Control. Now it appeared useless. Particularly in view of the information that was flashing onto her display.
The Fugate Colony was established by the followers of the psychologist and physician Reuben Mikhlin.
Mikhlin argued that (1) the size of the human brain at birth produces a head that is almost too wide for the birth canal; (2) there is a tendency for babies to be born prematurely to reduce this problem; (3) thus the actual size of a baby’s brain is less than it should be; (4) the human brain would continue to increase in size if it were not constrained by the birth process and by the rigid bone structure of the skull; (5) an increased mature body size would be required to support the larger brain size (employ directed hyper-trail for GIANTISM); (6) large body sizes can be supported only in a low-gravity or water environment.