Sight of Proteus

by Charles Sheffield

  "Follow the directions on this as they come up. It will take you to Doctor Morris' office. Return it to me when you leave, please. To get back here, all you have to do is press 'Return' and it will guide you to the main lobby."

  As Larsen took the director, Wolf leaned over the desk and asked, "William Shakespeare?"

  The receptionist stared at him in astonishment. "Why, that's quite right. Not one visitor in ten thousand recognizes me, though. How did you know? Are you a poet or a playwright yourself?"

  Wolf shook his head. "I'm afraid not. Just a student of history, and very interested in faces and shapes. I assume that you get a positive feedback from that form, or you wouldn't be using it. Has it helped a lot?"

  The receptionist wrinkled his high forehead in thought, then shrugged. "It's too soon to tell. I'd like to think it's working. I thought it was worth a try, even though I know that the form-change theorists are sceptical. After all, athletes use the body forms of earlier stars for their models, so why shouldn't the same method work just as well for an artist? It was a hassle changing to it, but I've decided to give it at least a year. If I don't see real progress in my work by then, I expect I'll change back to my old form."

  Larsen looked puzzled. "Why not stay as you are? The form you have now is a good one. It's—"

  He stopped abruptly in response to a quick kick from Bey, below desk-level. He stared at Wolf for a second, then looked back at the receptionist.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I seem to be a bit dense this morning."

  The receptionist looked back at him with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. "Don't apologize," he said. "I'm just surprised that either of you could tell. Is it all that obvious?" He looked down ruefully at his body.

  Bey waved his hand. "Not at all obvious," he said reassuringly. "Don't forget we're from the Office of Form Control. It's our job, we're supposed to notice forms more than other people do. The only thing that tipped me off was your manner. You still haven't adjusted that totally, and you were behaving towards us more like a woman than a man."

  "I guess I'm still not completely used to the male form. It's more difficult than you might think. You can get used to the extra bits and the missing bits in a few weeks, but it's the human relationships that really foul you up. Some day when you have a few hours to spare, I could tell you things about the adjustment in my sex life that other people find hilarious. Even I laugh at it now—mind you, I never saw the humor at the time."

  Wolf's own interests extended to anything and everything and quite overshadowed his tact. He found that he couldn't resist a question. "People who've tried both usually say they prefer the female form. Do you agree?"

  "So far, I do. I'm still learning to handle the male form properly, but if it doesn't pay off in my writing, I'll be very pleased to change back."

  He paused and looked at the panel in front of him, where a cluster of yellow and violet lights had suddenly started a mad blinking.

  "I'd like to talk to you about your job, sometime, but right now I have to get back to the board. There's a stuck conveyor on the eighth level, and no mechanics there. I'll have to try and borrow a couple of machines from Parthenogenetics two floors down." He began to key in to his controller. "Just go where the location director tells you," he said vaguely, already preoccupied completely with his problem.

  "We're on our way. Good luck with the writing," said Wolf.

  They went over to the elevators. As they continued up to the fifth floor, Larsen could see a trace of a smile on Wolf's thin face.

  "All right, Bey, what is it? You only get that expression when there's a secret joke."

  "Oh, it's nothing much," said Wolf, though he continued to look very pleased with himself. "At least, for the sake of our friend back there I hope that it's nothing much. I wonder if he knows that for quite a while there have been theories—strong ones—that although the face he is wearing may have belonged to Shakespeare, all the plays were written by somebody else. Maybe he'd be better off trying to form-change to look like Bacon."

  Bey Wolf was a pleasant enough fellow, but to appeal to him a joke had to have a definite twist to it. He was still looking pleased with himself when they reached the office of the Director of Transplants. One thing he hadn't mentioned to John Larsen was the fact that a number of the theories he had referred to claimed that Shakespeare's works had been written by a woman.

  * * *

  "The liver came from a twenty-year-old female hydroponics worker, who had her skull crushed in an industrial accident."

  Doctor Morris, lean, intense and disheveled, removed the reply slip that he had just read from the machine and handed it to John Larsen, who stared at it in disbelief.

  "But that's impossible! Only yesterday, the ID tests gave a completely different result for that liver. You must have made a mistake, Doctor."

  Morris shook his head firmly. "You saw the whole process yourself. You were there when we did the micro-biopsy on the transplanted liver. You saw me prepare the specimen and enter the sample for chromosome analysis. You saw the computer matching I just gave you. Mr. Larsen, there are no other steps or possible sources of error. I think you are right, there has been a mistake all right—but it was made by the medical student who gave you the report."

  "But he told me that he did it three separate times."

  "Then he probably did it wrong three times. It is no new thing to repeat a mistake. I trust that you are not about to do that yourself."

  Larsen was flushed with anger and embarrassment, and Morris, pale and overworked, was clearly resentful at what he thought was a careless waste of his precious time. Wolf stepped in to try and create a less heated atmosphere.

  "One thing puzzles me a bit," he said. "Why did you use a transplant, Doctor Morris? Wouldn't it have been easier to re-develop a healthy liver, using the bio-feedback machines and a suitable program?"

  Morris cooled a little. He did not appear to find it strange that a specialist in form-change work should ask such a naive question.

  "Normally you would be quite right, Mr. Wolf. We use transplants for two reasons. Sometimes the original organ has been so suddenly and severely damaged that we do not have time to use the re-growth programs. More often, it is a question of speed and convenience."

  "You mean in convalescence time?"

  "Certainly. If I were to give you a new liver from a transplant, you would spend maybe a hundred hours, maximum, working with the bio-feedback machines. You would need to adjust immune responses and body chemistry balance, and that would be all. With luck, you might be able to get away with as little as fifty hours in interaction. If you wanted to re-grow a whole liver, though, and you weren't willing to wait for natural regeneration—which would happen eventually, in the case of the liver—well, you'd probably be faced with at least a thousand hours of work with the machines."

  Wolf nodded. "That all makes sense. But didn't you check the ID of this particular liver, before you even began the operation?"

  "That's not the way the system works." Morris went over to a wall screen, and called out a display of the hospital operational flow. "You can see it easiest if you follow it here. When the organs are first taken from their donors, they are logged in at this point by a human. Then, as you can see, the computer takes over. It sets up the tests to determine the ID, checks the main physical features of the donor and the organ, fixes the place where it will be stored, and so on. All that information goes to the permanent data banks. Then, when we need a donor organ, such as a liver, the computer matches the information about the physical type and condition of the patient with the data on all the available livers in the organ bank. It picks out the most suitable one for the operation. Everything after the original logging-in is automatic, so the question of checking the ID never arises."

  He came back from the wall display and looked questioningly at Wolf, whose face was still thoughtful.

  "So what you're telling us, Doctor," said Bey, "is that you never have any orga
ns in the banks which didn't have an ID check made when they first entered it?"

  "Not for adults. Of course, there are many infant organs that don't have their ID's filed. Anything that fails the humanity tests is never given an ID—the computer creates a separate file in the data bank for the information about those organs."

  "So it is possible for a liver to be in the organ banks, and yet have no ID."

  "An infant's liver, from a humanity test failure. Look, Mr. Wolf, I see where you're heading, and I can assure you that it won't work." Morris came to the long table and sat down facing Wolf and Larsen. He ran his hand over his long jaw, then looked at his watch. "I have things that I must do, very soon, but let me point out the realities of this case. The patient who received the liver, as you saw for yourself, was a young adult. The liver we used on her was fully-grown, or close to it. I saw it myself at the time of the operation. It certainly didn't come from any infant, and we would never use infant organs except for children's operations."

  Wolf shrugged his shoulders resignedly. "That's it, then. We won't take up any more of your time. I'm sorry that we've been a nuisance on this, but we have to do our job."

  They rose from the table and turned to leave. Before they reached the doorway, a grey-haired man entered and waved casually to Morris.

  "Hi, Ernst," he said. "Don't let me interrupt you. I noticed from the visitors log that you have people in from Form Control, so I thought I'd stop by and see what's happening."

  "They were just about to leave," said Morris. "Mr. Wolf and Mr. Larsen, I'd like to introduce you to Robert Capman, the Director of Central Hospital. This is an unexpected visit. According to the hospital daily scheduler, you have a meeting this morning with the Building and Construction Committee."

  "I do. I'm on my way there now." Capman gave Wolf and Larsen a rapid and penetrating look. "I hope that you gentlemen were able to get the information that you wanted."

  Wolf smiled and shrugged. "Not quite what we hoped we'd get. I'm afraid that we ran into a dead end."

  "I'm sorry to hear that." Capman smiled also. "If it's any consolation to you, that happens to us all the time on our work here."

  Again, he gave Wolf and Larsen that cool and curiously purposeful look. Bey felt a sudden heightening of his own level of attention. He returned Capman's measured scrutiny for several seconds, until the latter abruptly nodded at the wall display and waved his hand in farewell.

  "I'll have to go. I'm supposed to be making a statement to the Committee in four minutes time."

  "Problems?" asked Morris.

  "Same old issue. A new proposal to raze Central Hospital and put us all out in the green belt, away from the tough part of the city. They'll be broadcasting the hearings on closed circuit, if you're interested, Channel twenty-three."

  He turned and hurried out. Wolf raised his eyebrows. "Is he always in that much of a hurry?"

  Morris nodded. "Always. He's amazing, the work-load he tackles. The best combination of theorist and experimenter that I've ever met." He seemed to have calmed down completely from his earlier irritation. "Not only that, but you should see him handle a difficult committee."

  "I'd like to." Wolf chose to take him literally. "Provided that you don't mind us staying here to watch the display. One more thing about that liver." His tone was carefully casual. "What about the children who pass the humanity tests but have some sort of physical deformity? You did mention that you use infant organs in children's operations. Are they taken from the ones who fail the tests?"

  "Usually. But what of it?"

  "Well, don't you sometimes grow the organs you need, in an artificial environment, until they're the size you want for the child?"

  "We try to complete any repair work before the children can walk or speak; in fact we begin work right after the humanity tests are over. But you are quite correct, we do sometimes grow an organ that we need from infant to older size, and we do that from humanity-test reject stock. However, it's all done over in Children's Hospital, out on the west side. They have special, child-size feedback machines there. We also prefer to do it there for control reasons. As you very well know, there are heavy penalties for allowing anyone to use a biofeedback machine if they are between two and eighteen years old—except for medical repair work, of course, and that is done under very close scrutiny. We like to get the children away from here completely, to prevent any accidental access here to form-change equipment."

  Morris turned to the display screen and lifted the channel selector. "I suppose that I should admire your persistence, Mr. Wolf, but I assure you that it doesn't lead anywhere. Why, may I ask, do you lay all this emphasis on children?"

  "There was one other thing in the report from Luis Rad-Kato—the medical student. He says that he not only did an ID check on the liver, he did an age test, too. The age he determined was twelve years."

  "Then that proves he doesn't know what he's doing. There are no organs used here from child donors. That work would be done over at Children's Hospital. Your comment to Capman was a good one—you are trying to pursue this whole thing through a dead end. Spend your time on something else, that's my advice."

  While he was speaking, the display screen from Channel Twenty-three came alive. The three men turned to it and fell silent.

  * * *

  "From choice, I wear the form of early middle age."

  Capman, in the few minutes since he had left the Transplant Department, had found the time to remove his hospital uniform and don a business suit. The committee who listened to him were wearing the same colorful apparel, and appeared to be composed largely of businessmen.

  "However," went on Capman, "I am in fact quite old—older than any of you here. Fortunately, I am of long-lived stock, and I hope that I have at least twenty more productive years ahead of me. I am also fortunate enough to be blessed with a retentive memory, which has made my experiences still vivid. It is the benefit of that experience that I wish to offer to you today."

  "On his high horse," said Morris quietly. "He never goes in for that sort of pomposity when he's working in the Hospital. He knows his audience."

  "My exact age is perhaps irrelevant," continued Capman. "but I can remember the days before 'Lucy's In The Water' was one of the children's nursery songs."

  He paused for the predictable stir of surprise from the committee. Larsen turned to Wolf.

  "How long ago was that, Bey?"

  Wolf's expression mirrored his surprise. "If my memory is correct, it is very close to a century. I know it was well over ninety years ago."

  Wolf looked with increased interest at the man on the screen. Capman was old. 'Lucy's In The Water', like 'Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosy' long before it, told of a real event. Not the Black Death, as in the older children's song, but the Lucy massacre, when the Hallucinogenic Freedom League—the Lucies—had dumped drugs into the water supply lines of major cities. Nearly a billion people had died in the chaos that followed, as starvation, exposure, epidemic and mindless combat walked the cities and exacted their tribute. It was the only occasion in four hundred years when the population had, however briefly, ceased its upward surge.

  "I remember the time," went on Capman, "when cosmetic form-change was unknown and medical form-change was still difficult, dangerous and expensive; when it would take months of hard work to achieve a change that we can manage now in weeks or days; when fingerprint and voiceprint patterns were still in use as a legal form of identification, because the law had yet to accept the elementary fact that a man who can grow a new arm can easily change his larynx or his fingertips."

  Wolf frowned. The audience that Capman was addressing seemed to be lapping it up, but he was almost certain that the speaker was indulging in a little artistic license. The first developments Capman was referring to had begun even further in the past than the Lucies. In a sense, they had begun way back in the nineteenth century, with the first experiments on limb regeneration of amphibians. Many lower animals could re-grow a lost limb. A m
an could not. Why?

  No one could answer that question, until two fields, both mature and well-explored in themselves, had come together in a surprising way in the 1990's: biological feedback, and real-time computer control.

  It was already known in the 1960's that a human could use display feedback devices to influence his own involuntary nervous system, even to the point where the basic electrical wave rhythms of the brain could be modified. At the same time, computer-controlled instrumentation had been developing, permitting electronic feedback of computed signals continuously and in real time. Ergan Melford had taken those two basic tools and put them to work together.

  Success in minor things came first, with the replacement of lost hair and teeth. From those primitive beginnings, advances had come slowly but steadily. Replacement of lost fingertips was soon followed by programs for the correction of congenital malfunctions, for the treatment of disease, and for the control of the degenerative aspects of aging. That might have been enough for most people, but Ergan Melford had seen far beyond that. At the time that he had founded the Biological Equipment Corporation, he already had his long-term goal defined.

  The dam broke on the day that Melford released his first general catalog. Programs were listed for sale that would allow a user to apply the biological feedback equipment to modify his appearance—and all the world, as Melford well knew, wanted to be taller, shorter, more beautiful, better proportioned. Suddenly, form-change programs could be purchased to allow men and women to be what they chose to be—and BEC, seventy-five percent owned by Ergan Melford, had a monopoly on the main equipment and programs, and held all the patents.

  On the screen, Capman continued to build his case. "I remember, even though most of you do not, the strange results of the early days of form-change experiments. That was before the illegal forms had been defined, still less understood. We saw sexual monsters, physical freaks, all the repressions of a generation, released in one great flood.

  "You do not remember what it was like before we had an Office of Form Control. I remember it well. It was chaos."