Proteus Unbound (4 page)

CHAPTER 5

Kernel
(def.): A Kerr-Newman black hole, i.e., a black hole that is both rotating and electrically charged. Kernels are found in nature only in the
Kernel Ring
(q.v.) between the Inner and Outer Systems. They range in mass from a hundred million to ten billion tons.
—Webster's New World Dictionary

At the end of the seventh day Manx began to push for a different approach. He had switched off his recorder and was glaring impatiently at Bey Wolf.

"I suppose you imagine that you are cooperating with me? You are not. I ask you for a full, detailed account of your relationship with Mary Walton, something I must have if I am to help you end your hallucinations. What do I get?" He tapped the recorder. "Monosyllables. Two- or three-sentence descriptions of complex interactions. Evasion. Obfuscation. Equivocation. Deliberately or not, you are prevaricating."

"I'm sorry. I don't like to talk about emotional matters. Particularly
those
emotional matters."

"Of course you don't. No one does, unless they have quite different mental problems. But if there's to be any progress you have to give me information.
Detail
. As much of it as you can. I perceive that you will not do so with simple question-and-answer techniques."

"So we're stuck?" Bey sounded more relieved than upset.

"No, we are not. With your permission, I want to put you into an enhanced recall status."

"That's illegal."

"Not in the Outer System. We have no statutes against self-incrimination."

"Barbaric."

"Perhaps we have less need of them. Stop trying to change the subject by inciting an argument. Will you allow me to induce an enhanced recall state, or will you not?"

Wolf looked at him warily. "For how long?"

"If I could tell you that, I might find it unnecessary. A couple of days, maybe more."

"Then I'll miss the transit of the Kernel Ring you want me to see." It was a weak argument, and Bey knew it. Leo Manx was slow but persistent, like the turtle he sometimes resembled, and he would not give up easily.

"That crossing will occur tomorrow. Is it agreed, then? After we complete the transit, we will move to enhanced recall technique. If the idea still makes you uncomfortable, we can begin with direct reporting, then proceed to stimulated and dream sequences."

Bey nodded. At best it felt like a stay of execution.

* * *

The transit of the Kernel Ring was an anticlimax. Even with the highest magnification the ship's sensors could provide, the Halo was no more than a scattering of misty dots of light. The unshielded kernels themselves gave off large amounts of energy, gigawatts for even the most massive and least active, but they radiated at wavelengths too short for the human eye to see. The shielded kernels were, by design, invisible. It was difficult to imagine people living in that emptiness, still less that it was the home of ruthless pirates, savages who might come boiling up from the darkness to take over cargo or passenger ships as they made their out-of-ecliptic transit from the Inner System to Cloudland. Least of all could Bey imagine Mary, his lively, cosmopolitan Mary, enduring that waste of nothingness.

"You see with an Earthman's distorting perspective," Manx said in answer to Bey's skeptical reaction. "To you, the Halo is nearly empty. To me, or to anyone from the Outer System, it is packed with life and energy."

"You use an odd definition of 'packed.' "

"Do the calculation for yourself. There are millions or billions of people living in the Halo—we have no idea how many, since there is no central government there. Compare it with the Outer System. We are about fifty million people, and we know that we are grossly underpopulated. We will be for centuries. Naturally, we crowd together, most of us close to the harvesters, but were it not for the help of our self-reproducing machines, we could not exist. If we spread out evenly, each person in the Outer System would have a region sixty times as big as the whole of your Inner System to move around in. By comparison, the Halo is packed. It teems with life. Much too crowded for us."

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."

How do you reply to something like that?

If you are a wise man, you don't even try. You grab the chance—it only comes once—and make the most of it.

That first day, I began to arrest her. She talked me out of it in about two minutes and took me home to her apartment. I never left.

I had no idea at the time how sick in the head she was. That emerged little by little, as we came closer. Maybe it was a lot more obvious to others than to me. I always had the blinders on—I still do. When an old friend of mine, Park Green, came to visit from the Moon, we went to see one of Mary's performances. I asked him what he thought of it, and he shook his head and said she was good but he could see the skull beneath the skin. I hated him for that, and I never told Mary; but he was right.

That might have been the thing that limited her as an actress. She could play high drama, or artificial, mannered comedy, or broad farce—she was a wonderful comedienne, but she didn't much care for those parts. What she could not portray were simple people, because there was nothing simple inside her that she could build on. It limited her. She was always busy, always working, but in the end I know that she was disappointed with her reputation.

You know, I honestly believe that I was good for Mary. In our years together she never had to go for official treatment. There'd be times when she went nonlinear, and when that happened I'd drop everything I was doing and stay with her constantly. And she'd come out of it. But those times became more and more frequent, and more and more severe.

When she suddenly told me, without a day's notice, that she was going off for a lunar cruise, I was delighted. Mary was always at her best when she had a new environment to learn, something fresh to challenge her. She was becoming more and more upset by crowds—an odd omen for an actress, but I didn't read it. The Moon would offer plenty of peace and a change of pace.

She went. She called once—to say that she was not coming back; she was heading for the Outer System. And that was all.

I just about came apart.

Four months later the Dancing Man appeared for the first time. And I came apart completely.

* * *

Bey lay back in his chair and looked up at Leo Manx. "Well?"

"Good." Manx was examining his records. "Very good."

"You have enough?"

"Goodness, no." Manx was incredulous. "This is a
start
—the first iteration. Now we can perhaps begin to learn something about you and your relationship with Mary. Give me another couple of days. Then it may be time to worry about your little dancing friend."