“That’s irrelevant. Handsomeness is easy; all it takes is a little while in a form-change tank.”
“Very true. If person wishes to make such a change. I certainly did not, and you had a similar reaction when it came to modifying your own appearance to match an Outer System form. However, there is a more important point here. Although the man Mary Walton ran off with could have picked an appearance that appealed to her, he would have had to do so in advance of meeting with her on that lunar cruise.”
“I see where you’re heading. You are questioning that he was from the Outer System?”
“More than that. Mr. Wolf, our citizens do not indulge in lunar cruises. To us, it would have as much attraction as a tour of Old City would offer the average Earth person.”
“But some people might do it. Just to be different.”
“They might.” Manx looked away, refusing to meet Bey’s eyes again. “But they did not. I have rather more information than I have so far revealed to you. Before I left our Earth Embassy, I checked all our visitors to Earth-Moon space for the previous four years. There was no one from the Outer System who went on a lunar cruise. Whoever Mary Walton met, he was not from our federation.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“With no more than a speculation. I have of course no direct evidence—”
“Talk, man! I can stand it.”
“I do not think you will find your Mary in the Cloud, even if you plan to look for her there. The most likely person to have offered a false identification and to be interested in Earth-Moon space as a possible source of energy needs would be a renegade.”
“You mean a rebel? An inhabitant of the Kernel Ring?”
“Precisely. The inhabitants of the Ring practice a curious coexistence. Rebel outposts are scattered here and there through its whole volume, side by side with peaceful settlers, energy prospectors, and free-space Podder colonies. The Ring admits every form of oddity, every human shape attainable by the form-change equipment. You should look there.”
“For someone who works in the high-gravity environment around shielded kernels. Someone whose unmodified appearance is more like mine than yours.”
“You follow my thoughts admirably.” Manx moved the cursor on the display to delineate the annulus of the Kernel Ring. “Here. To conclude, it is my opinion that Mary Walton is not to be found anywhere in the Outer System. She is here. In the Halo, almost certainly somewhere in the Kernel Ring itself.”
“Shacked up with a damned outlaw.”
“I’m afraid so. A dangerous man, Mr. Wolf, who recognizes the sovereignty of neither my federation nor your own. A man who would not hesitate to kill either of us. Mr. Wolf! Do you hear me?”
Bey was no longer listening. As Manx moved the cursor across the display, a familiar figure had appeared on top of it. He was sitting cross-legged, riding the little blue arrow and waving jauntily out at the two men. His song sounded a little different but was still just beyond comprehension.
The scarlet suit was brighter than ever. The expression on his grinning face was more than usually smug. Forget that hope, it said. It takes a lot more than a move to the Outer System to get rid of the Dancing Man.
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.
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.”