“But if the wrong people were inside it—” Bey began. He stopped. Cloudland was so far from the Inner System in awareness of security measures; he could talk to Sylvia forever, but he doubted if she would fully understand him. Was that why a handful of rebels from the Kernel Ring could cause such chaos in the Cloud?
The failure to understand went both ways. Bey had been briefed on the Sagdeyev space farm, but somehow he had reduced it in his mind to a size that he could comprehend. A farm suggested solidity, intensive activity, compact production. The reality was so insubstantial that he felt they had arrived nowhere.
The farm was a monomolecular collection layer two billion kilometers across. Its crop had been seeded hundreds of parsecs away and thousands of years earlier, conceived in the fiery heart of supernovas and blown free by the same explosions. The harvest had drifted through space for millennia, borne on the winds of light pressure, until random galactic airs carried the precious atoms to the Cloud. Most of them would drift on until the end of the universe, but a few would encounter and be held by the electrostatic charge of the collection layer. For them, aggregation could finally begin.
It was slow and selective work. The farm was interested only in the heavy elements, metals and rare earths and noble gases. It winnowed billions of cubic miles of space to find their invisible traces.
The machines that monitored the farms needed no central processing facility. They could carry hundreds of tons of material with them, accumulating steadily until there was enough to ship to the harvesters. The humans, frailer creatures, needed more. At the center of the collection layer sat the habitation bubble, three hundred meters across. In it dwelt the score of people who had made the farm their home. Two of them were dead.
“Don’t expect them to meet us,” Sylvia said as their ship docked at the outer edge of the bubble. “In fact, don’t be surprised if we don’t meet anyone in all our stay here. The farmers avoid strangers, and that includes me as well as you. They know we’re here, and they appreciate our help. They just don’t want to see us.”
“Suppose we need to talk with them about the form-change problems?”
“We’ll probably do what they do themselves—use a communications link.” Sylvia led the way to the bubble interior, meandering along silent corridors that spiraled down through the concentric shells of the bubble. Everywhere was deserted, without even maintenance equipment. If Sylvia had not told Bey that there were people there, he would have believed the farm to be derelict.
Sylvia was heading for the kernel at the center of the bubble, but on their way they passed an area that was clearly an automated kitchen. Bey realized that he had not eaten since they left the harvester. During the whole trip to the farm he had been either unconscious or too preoccupied to consider food. He paused.
“Once we get to the form-change tanks we’ll be in for a long session. Can we grab something here?”
He was starving. He headed for the dispensing equipment without waiting for her answer and placed an order. He did not bother to study the menu. Food in the Cloud was nothing like Earth fare, and he did not much care what he was given. When his dishes appeared, he went across to the seating area and waited for Sylvia.
She was a long time coming. When she finally arrived, she sat angled away from him. Her tray held a modest amount of food and a large beaker of straw-colored fluid. She stared at the liquid for a long time, then finally took a little sip, grimaced, and swallowed.
“Is it bad?” Bey lifted up a piece of food and sniffed it suspiciously. It looked like bread and smelled like bread. “Maybe we worked the machine wrong.”
“No.” Sylvia turned and gave an apologetic shake of her head. “The food is fine. The drink, too. But I’ve not eaten a meal with someone else for years. It’s not a law or anything, but we don’t do it, you know, except with a partner. Go ahead and eat, and please excuse my rudeness. I’ll be used to this in a minute.”
Not just hairy and unpopular; his habits were disgusting, too. Bey put down the bread he was holding. “I’m the one who should apologize. I knew Cloudland customs, but Leo Manx and I ate together all the time on the way to the Outer System. I didn’t even think of it here.”
“Leo was specially conditioned for the assignment. But really, it will be all right. It will. Watch me.” She speared a yellow cube on her fork, squinted down at it in front of her nose, and put it stoically into her mouth. She chewed for a long time before she finally swallowed. “See! I did it.”
After a moment Bey began to eat his own food. “Is it all right if we talk while we eat? Or would that be too much?”
“Of course. I would prefer it.”
Bey nodded. So would he. The food was pretty terrible, bland and flavorless. Good thing I couldn’t order the meal I’d really have enjoyed, he thought to himself. Come to Earth, Sylvia, and let me introduce you to a broiled lobster. “I wanted to ask you about Ransome,” he said after a minute of silent chewing.
“I don’t know all that much.”
“But you knew enough to recognize him. Back in the Inner System, most people don’t even believe there is a Black Ransome. And Leo Manx told me that he’s a mystery figure. If he’s such an unknown quantity, I don’t see how you could possibly have recognized him.”
“Ah.” Sylvia stopped eating and laid down her fork. She had managed only three small mouthfuls. “I wondered when you would get around to that. Did Leo tell you about my background?”
“A little.”
“Paul Chu?”
“He did mention that. But only to say that you and Chu used to be partners, and he disappeared on a trip to the Kernel Ring. His ship was attacked, and he was taken prisoner.”
“That’s the official version, and I don’t dispute it. But I don’t believe it.” Sylvia paused. She was not sure she wanted to talk about her personal history with Bey Wolf. She would rather talk than eat, but he might misunderstand her reasons.
“Paul and I lived together for nearly three years,” she went on. “Most people who knew us thought it was permanent—I’m sure Leo thought that. But it wasn’t. We argued like hell, all the time. If Paul were around now, I don’t think we would be together.”
“I heard from Leo Manx that you were planning to have children.”
“No. That’s Leo’s wishful thinking. He’s such a sympathetic type, he likes to think the best of people. He may have heard Paul and me talk about having children, a long time ago—but even when we were splitting up, we never disagreed in public.”
“Why did you fight?”
“Not what you might think. Not sex. Politics. I’m sure you suspect I’m not friendly to Earth and the Inner System. I’m not. I believe that you are like parasites—and not even smart ones. You’ve failed the first test of a successful parasite: moderation. You wiped out parts of your own habitat—the passenger pigeon and the dodo and the whale and the gorilla and the elephant. Thanks to you, half the species on Earth have become extinct in less than a thousand years. Humans may be next.”
“I agree, and I’m as sorry about it as you are.” Bey looked at her earnest face. She was angry, but that made her an easier companion. The cold, wary Sylvia was more difficult to deal with. “You sound pretty extreme about it.”
“Extreme! Me? Bey Wolf, you don’t understand. I’m a moderate. Everyone in the Cloud feels the way I do about Earth and the Inner System. We learn it when we’re little children. But most of us would never do anything to harm the people of the Inner System. It’s just a few fanatics who want to go a lot further than general dislike. Paul was one. He hated the Inner System and everything you stand for. One year before he disappeared, he joined an extremist group that talked seriously about starting a war between the Inner and Outer Systems. Paul told me their ideas and asked me to join. I told him they were all crazy.”