The Cluster Councils retained the power of appointing
the local governors, but aside from that the newly-opened worlds of the
Edge were completely under their own rule. Some of the more vocal
critics of the Local Autonomy System had dubbed it instead the
Indigenous Corruption System; it was by now a fairly standard nickname
in the outworlds.
The system made for a wide-open frontier--bustling, wild, hectic, and
rich. For the worlds of the Edge were untamed worlds, raw and
forbidding, and the policy of the Councils was calculated to attract the
kind of men who not only could but would open these frontiers. The
roustabouts, the low drifters of the spaceways ... men who were hard and
strong from repeated knocks, who were looking for a way to work or fight
their way up. The lean and hungry of the outworlds.
Rynason glanced across the table at Manning. He was neither lean nor
hungry, but he had that look in his eyes. Rynason had been around the
Edge for years--his father had travelled the spacers in the commercial
lines--and he had seen that look on many men, in the fields and mines,
in the spaceports, in the quickly-tarnished prefab towns that sprang up
almost overnight when a planetfall was made.
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