Current accommodation allotment on Earth: one hundred cubic meters per person. Bey thought of that and wondered why the Outer and Inner Systems were arguing over rights to the Kernel Ring. From what Manx was saying, there was no way that the average Cloudlander would ever be comfortable with the “cramped” life-style in the Ring and no way that the average Earth dweller would be able to accept so much empty, frightening space.
“The argument is over energy, but surely there are more than enough kernels for everyone?”
“I wonder about that myself,” Manx said. “And there is an element of presumption that leaves me uncomfortable. Both the Inner System and the Outer System governments assume that they could, if they wished, displace the present rulers of the Kernel Ring. I am not sure that is the case. Have you heard of a leader called Ransome, and of Ransome’s Hole?”
“Black Ransome? According to Earth’s newscasts, he’s just fiction.”
“If they believe that, they have never left Earth. I know of a half dozen prospectors working the Halo who have lost cargo to Black Ransome. Some have lost ships, also. It is a reasonable speculation that some have lost their lives, too, and are in no position to report anything. At any rate, true or not, the Outer System seethes with rumors about Ransome. Ships found empty and gutted, cargoes taken, crew and passengers ejected to empty space.”
“If he’s such a problem, why don’t you send a force in to take care of him?”
Manx waved at the displays. “Find him, and maybe we could do it. His base is as much a mystery as he is. Ransome’s Hole—or maybe it’s really Ransome’s Hold; everything about him is hearsay—is supposed to be somewhere in the Kernel Ring. But where? You’re talking a volume of space thousands of times as big as the whole Inner System. And if we found him, I’m not sure any force that we sent in would win. Ransome’s Hole is supposed to have its own defense system, able to handle anything we could throw at it. And he might have allies. The whole Halo is a melting pot, the place that anyone can flee to if they find civilization intolerable.”
“Or we find them intolerable.” Bey bent to the high-resolution sensors with new interest. Was one of those spots of light, disappearing fast behind the speeding ship, some huge, well-armed base of rebel operations? And what else was down there, hidden in the darkness? Perhaps some lost colony of ancient doctrines, vanished from the rest of the system. “Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties.” Who had said that? One of the Victorians.
“Black Ransome,” Bey said, looking up. “Where did he come from, the Inner or the Outer System?”
“We don’t even know that much. He must have plenty of energy, because he never takes the kernels from the ships. But where does he get his food supplies, or his other equipment? We just don’t have answers to those questions.”
The Kernel Ring was fading behind them. Leo Manx turned off the displays. Bey saw that he was holding the polished black cylinder of an enhancement recall unit and smiling in what looked like anticipation.
“And we will find nothing about Ransome here, Mr. Wolf. We are past the region where the ship is in danger of attack. So we can now proceed to possibly more productive work. When you are ready…”
I met her at an open-air historical event, seven years and four months ago, when there was an exhibit of Old Earth animals. It was the first time they showed results of breeding back successfully beyond the Cretaceous, and the big extinct forms had attracted a lot of interest.
I say I met her, but that is at first an overstatement. I was in an overview booth, with half an eye open for illegal forms—not much chance of that; I hadn’t seen one for years—when I saw her, though she was too far away for me to speak to her. But my eye picked her out at once.
No, it’s not that I was attracted to Mary Walton at that point, not at all. I was puzzled by her. I had been in the Office of Form Control for more than half my life, and one thing that I had learned to do, whether I wanted to or not, was to monitor for anomalies. It was an unconscious act with me, and it’s more than half the trick to spotting an illegal form.
In Mary’s case, I knew there was something peculiar, though it certainly wasn’t something illegal.
It was this. As you can see, I choose to hold my own appearance to about age thirty, but that’s unusual on Earth. Most people like to look between twenty and twenty-five, with twenty-two the most popular age. Now, sometimes you will get older people who don’t like that idea. They want to separate themselves from the real youngsters for some activities, and they spend at least part of their time in a form corresponding to age forty or fifty—even more, though people over sixty are very uncommon, unless they have other problems and drop the use of form-change treatments altogether. You saw the results of that when you picked me up in Old City.
Mary Walton was wearing the form of a woman between forty-five and fifty and dressed in the clothing style of a woman of that age, but I could tell from other indicators—eye movement, laughter, body posture—that she was actually a lot younger than she looked. It intrigued me. Why would anyone deliberately choose a form older than her true age?
While I was watching her, we had a minor problem with staffing, and I had to look elsewhere. But as soon as I could, I went to the place where I had last seen her, next to the big enclosure with the gorgosaurus in it. She was still there—trying to climb into the enclosure. If she had succeeded… The animal was carnivorous, four meters tall, two tons in weight.
I arrived just in time to drag her clear. And to arrest her. And then to introduce myself.
She told me she was an actress; she was doing it for publicity. I suppose I knew, right from the first moment, that she was crazy. Insane, hopelessly unaware of reality.
It made no difference. Others will say that Mary was not conventionally attractive, that she deliberately chose to look exotic and a little peculiar. When she was living a part—she didn’t act parts, she lived them—she might form-change to any age and do anything she felt fit the character. Some of them were strange, sometimes disgusting.
As I say, to me it made no difference. From the first moment she looked down at me from the fence, when I had hold of her leg and I was pulling her back by her long gray skirt, I was lost. I was spoiling her publicity plan, but she didn’t look annoyed. She grinned down at me, with her head on one side and that ridiculous round gray hat with a feather in the side of it, and the blond curly hair pushing out underneath it—she was naturally fair, though she preferred parts that made her a brunette. And then she let herself go limp, and she came rolling off the fence in that old-fashioned gray cloth dress and knocked me flat to the ground.
I was smitten even before I got up, and I knew it, but I wouldn’t have done one thing about it. I have never been able to let people know how I feel. I have rationalized that, to the point where it does not usually bother me. Often, I insist it is a virtue. But not this time. I wanted Mary, but Mary was an unattainable prospect.
It wasn’t just my inability to speak. I knew, even if she didn’t, that I was three times her age. That alone should have made the whole thing impossible. Not for Mary. I didn’t realize it at the time, but things like that made no difference at all to her. She was so much in her own world, and that world was so far from reality, that age wasn’t even a variable. When she did find out how old I was, she just said, “Well, that means I’ll have at most fifty years of you, instead of a hundred.”