Mining the Oort (2 page)

"Can we see where they live?" he asked.

"Well, we can walk by their section," his mother said, after a moment's thought. "We haven't been invited in, though." But when they got to the Earthie quarter, a level down from the—slightly—risky top sections of Sunpoint, there wasn't much to see. It looked pretty much like any other part of the city, just another corridor, though conspicuously marked diplomatic area. Loud music was coming out of it, though. That was certainly strange; people didn't trespass on other people's hearing, did they? It did not look any grander than the corridor that held the DeWoes' own borrowed cubicle—not from the entrance, anyway—though Dekker did notice something strange about it. A dozen small rectangles of patterned, colored fabric hung from sticks in the walls. "They're pretty," Dekker said, to be polite.

"They're
flags
," his mother explained. "The one with the red stripes, I think that's the flag for America." And as they walked back to their own place she startled him by telling him that, down that corridor, the Earthies had private rooms for each person, as well as such other unimaginable luxuries as bathtubs and even
pets
. "Two of the Earthie families have cats," his mother sniffed when they were back in their own quarters, "and Tinker says there used to be a parrot, but it died." And when he asked how the Earthies could afford such wanton waste, she said somberly, "Earthies can afford
anything
, Dekker. Especially because, you know, we're the ones who'll be paying for it."

"Oh, right," he said, enlightened. "The Bonds."

"The Bonds," Tinker Gorshak growled from the doorway, surprising Dekker, who hadn't known he was there. "Earthies and the Bonds," he said, moving his mouth as though he wanted to get rid of the words.

He wasn't alone, either. A little kid was hanging on one of Tinker's legs, thumb in his mouth, staring at Dekker. "This is my grandson, Tsumi," the old man said proudly. "We came by to see if you needed any help. You boys are going to have fun together, Dek."

Feeling his mother's eye on him, Dekker put out his hand to shake the kid's. He pulled it back quickly; it was the one Tsumi had had in his mouth, and it was still spit-wet, but Tinker, not noticing, went back to his subject. "The Earthies say they're here to supervise their investments, but they're really tourists. They came to watch the fireworks show! And we're paying a thousand cues a day for each one of them. Do you know what cues are, Dekker? Their money.
Hard
money."

Dekker's mother shook her head at him. "Dekker knows what currency units are, Tinker," she said.

"And does he know that we have to borrow the goddam things
from
them, so we can use the funds to pay for them? Because they don't want the things we have, here, you know. What they want has to come from Earth, and it has to get paid for in Earth currency units."

Gerti DeWoe sighed. "Tinker," she said, half joking, "I think you need docility training more than the kids do. Anyway, as long as you're here, let's get some work done. Help me get everything put away."

That didn't take long for the refugees from Sagdayev—even with Tinker's pesty little grandson getting in the way—since they didn't have many possessions to stow. The funny thing was, Tinker told them, that all over Sunpoint the locals were engaged in the same activity. The refugees from Sagdayev thought it was pretty comical that the Sunpointers should be worrying about the comet impact for themselves. There could be no doubt that Sunpoint City was far enough away to be safe from even ground tremors. Mars was too old to suffer much seismic activity, even when some tens of millions of tons of cometary material smashed onto its crust. All the same, since the refugees were guests of Sunpoint City, it was only good manners to help their hosts. So they all turned out to get everything battened down, books off the shelves, walls braced, breakables stowed away, and to help emergency crews practice damage control with sealant in case the outside walls sprang a leak.

The trouble with everybody being busy was that Dekker had to be busy, too. Not with anything
useful
. With
baby-sitting
. It was Tinker's idea, but Gerti DeWoe endorsed it. "Of course you can keep an eye on Tsumi," she said reasonably. "You'll be a big help. Tinker's got all he can do, and so does Tsumi's father." So did she. She didn't say that, but she didn't have to, so Dekker resigned himself to the company of the brat.

The trouble was that the brat wasn't interested in showing Dekker around Sunpoint City, which could have been interesting. He wanted Dekker to play with him, and Dekker got pretty tired of playing little kids' games. Tsumi didn't even want to use the virtual-reality hoods, or at least not the kinds he was old enough to be permitted, although it was a heaven-sent opportunity for kids. With everyone else so busy, most of the time the hoods were idle. The brat wouldn't sit still, either.

Nearing desperation, Dekker suggested, "How about reading a book?"

"A book." Tsumi sneered. "Screw books. If you want a book, you can have mine." He fumbled in his belly pouch and pulled out a book cartridge. "This is old butt-face's idea of a good book," he said, throwing it at Dekker. "I didn't want this crap. I wanted a book about
war
."

Dekker caught the book and turned it over. Its tide was
The
Adventures
of
Huckleberry
Finn
, and according to the jacket it was written by somebody named Mark Twain. "Don't be an idiot," he told the boy. "Who wants to read books about war?"

"I do. You see wars, don't you? In the eights-and-up docility? So if it's all right for you, why for Jesus' sake can't I read about them?"

"Because you're too young."

"That isn't
fair
," Tsumi said spitefully. Well, Dekker thought, maybe it wasn't. But it wasn't his fault. He hadn't made the rule that the under-eights couldn't see war clips and, come to that, it wasn't fair for him to be stuck with this nasty little piece of work all day, either. His mother had been wrong, Dekker decided. Maybe old Tinker Gorshak did need some docility training, but
nobody
needed it more than his grandson.

Then the world's pressures eased for Dekker, because suddenly it was time for Tsumi's actual docility class; because, of course, it never mattered how busy things got or how little spare time anyone had. There was
always
time for docility training, because the world, the
worlds
, had long ago passed the point where they could survive their own internal stresses without something like it.

Dekker, at eight, didn't have to attend the little kids' class. Once he had succeeded in getting Tsumi in the room he was free. He found a quiet place to sit. He took out the book Tsumi had thrown at him and thumbed the "start" button to see what it was going to be like.

He hadn't hoped for much. But as the words flowed across the screen, he glanced at them, then read them more attentively, and then was hooked.

When he was finally permitted to return Tsumi to his grandfather's care, Dekker kept the book. As time allowed he read in it, marveling at such outré concepts as "slaves" and "guns" and, perhaps most of all, "rivers." When he came to the part where Huck feigned his own suicide—suicide!—to escape from his drunken father's beatings—beatings!—he went back and reread it twice to make sure he was understanding what the author meant to say.

So Dekker was not the only boy in human history whose father hadn't particularly cared for him.

Dekker tried to regard that as a comforting thought, but it wasn't.

Every night on the flat screens there were pictures of the approaching comet, a big, dirty snowball, ten kilometers through.

Its temperature was no longer at the icy cold of its birth out in the almost-interstellar Oort cloud, because it had already swung around close to the Sun to slow itself down before climbing back out to intercept Mars. It was warming up. Some of its gases were making its spectacular tail, and even its core was growing fuzzy.

Watching the thing grow on the news screens didn't satisfy Dekker. It was not anything like being up on the surface itself, in facemask and thermal suit. So when Dekker's mother was detailed to go outside to help secure the city's all-important solar power cells, Dekker invited himself to join the work party. The brat would certainly not be there. It was going to be fun to be out with the workers, even though Tinker Gorshak would be there, too.

5

Mars isn't entirely without water. But neither is the sand of the Sahara Desert, if you are willing to work hard enough to get the bound water of crystallization out of the sand grains, and if you're content with a tiny reward. Most of the accessible water Mars has is frozen in the polar ice caps—much good may that do anyone. There's also a certain amount of water that is frozen in mud, under the surface caliche, but it stays there because the distant Sun isn't able to heat the surface enough to melt much of it out; Mars gets only about half Earth's sunshine. Some parts of Mars are marked with the evidence that there once was real flowing water there, namely such scarring as floodplains, and the dendritic riverbeds called lahars. Perhaps streams once did flow in the lahars, when some brief volcanic flurry melted some of that frozen mud and forced it to the surface, so that it flowed downhill until it evaporated into the parched air. It doesn't do that anymore. When people first came to Mars some of them tried to melt out the icy mud under the hardpan. If, they thought, you could drive out some of those volatiles you could increase the density of the atmosphere, which would warm things up, which would help drive out more volatiles. Or, to put it in another way, if you had some eggs you could make ham and eggs, if you had some ham.

6

The grotesque, rusty landscape of Mars was the only landscape Mars-born Dekker DeWoe had ever known. He would not have tried to tell anyone it was beautiful. Few youngsters think of such things as the beauty of a landscape in the ordinary course of their lives, and Mars was very ordinary to Dekker. He found the scenery he lived in unsurprising and, actually, quite homey.

Going out with the work party onto the rubbly plain was a welcome break from the tunnels of Sunpoint City, especially since Tsumi Gorshak hadn't been allowed along. Tsumi's grandfather Tinker, though, kept getting on Dekker's nerves. Tinker insisted on
helping
. Every time Dekker picked up one edge of the great sheets of protective film, Gorshak materialized beside him to lend a hand, grinning silently through the faceplate of his suit. Dekker hated that. The old man treated him as though he were a
child
.

Dekker generally spent a lot of time trying to stay away from Tinker Gorshak, and it wasn't only because of his pesky grandkid. Tinker had faults of his own. To begin with, he was an old, old man. He was nearly forty in Martian years, or over seventy by Earth's standards; after all, he even had grandchildren. Tinker Gorshak was, in fact, one of the very earliest Martian settlers. For that reason, Dekker had a certain amount of respect for Tinker, but he was wary of the man, too, because he knew why the old man was always trying to be his friend. Gorshak kept on doing things for the boy—taking him along on survey trips, or to check the slow growth of the crystal mushroom plantations; bringing him little presents of apples and strawberries as the aeroponic crops grew in the hothouses; asking him how he was doing at school. Dekker wasn't flattered. He didn't want Gorshak's gifts, and he didn't think Gorshak specially cared about how he was doing. What Tinker Gorshak actually wanted was to marry Gertrud DeWoe, and Dekker really didn't want his mother getting married again—even if his father had been actually dead instead of only divorced.

What made it hard to rebuff Gorshak's offers of help was the fact that, although Dekker did his best in struggling with the covers for the photovoltaic cells, the job really called for adult muscles. It required wrestling huge sheets of film over the long mirrors and the troughs of photocells that turned the sunlight into electrical power. It was also, the people from Sagdayev muttered to each other, pretty much a waste of time. True, it was only common sense to protect your power supplies. If anything happened to the photovoltaic cells, the city of Sunpoint would be in desperate trouble. But what could happen to them? No pieces of the comet would stray so far as to destroy Sunpoint City's mirrors. There might well be some hellish huge dust storms, but those were always a problem on Mars, and every deme's photovoltaic arrays had survived plenty of dust storms before.

So Dekker wasn't much help to the suited, sweating men and women unfurling the great film sheets, and it didn't make things easier when he could hardly keep his eyes on the ground because so much was fascinating in the sky. There was the great comet itself, its glowing, milky tail spreading almost from horizon to horizon even in the bright midday sunshine. Even more exciting for the boy from the back hills, there were the skinny spiderweb cables that stretched up to invisibility where the Skyhook did its work of lifting capsules from surface to orbit.

It was also true that the heat of the Martian day sapped much of what strength Dekker could muster for the job. Where Sunpoint sat on the Martian equator, in the middle of this summer day, the temperature was over twenty degrees Celsius. When Dekker dropped his end of a sheet for the third time, Tinker Gorshak hand-signaled to him angrily, and his mother came over and pressed her facemask against his own.

"Better give it up, Dekker," she advised, her voice thin and faint. "Go find something else to do. We'll finish this without you."

Dekker signaled agreement gladly enough. There was indeed something else that he preferred to do, and he had only been waiting for the chance.

Deceitfully, he started back in the direction of the city lock, craning over his shoulder to see what the work party was doing. When he was sure they were too busy to be bothering with him anymore, he changed direction, hurried along in the shelter of the mirrors, and headed out for the open plain.