Proteus Unbound Read Online Free PDF

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