Mining the Oort (24 page)

They pulled up in a parking lot among a group of buildings Dekker had never seen before. "What is this?" he demanded, looking around.

"They tell me it used to be a ski lodge once, until the project took the whole hill over. You can still see the towers of the lift." She waved at a line of metal structures that marched up the mountain, still there though their cables and seats were long gone. "This is where I live."

Where she lived was an apartment that looked down the mountain toward distant Denver. It was a spectacular view. "Make yourself comfortable," she ordered, and disappeared in another room.

Her apartment was twice the size of DeWoe's family home—not the little cubbyhole his widowed mother had taken when her son went off to the Oort, but the spacious two-room suite Dekker DeWoe had grown up in. "It's what they used to call a condo. My grandfather gave it to me," she explained, opening a bar. She had changed into a blouse and skirt, and looked even prettier than before. She gestured. 'That's him on the mantel."

The mantel was more interesting than the grandfather, because it was over a real
fireplace
, a place where combustible materials could be
burned
inside the house! But when DeWoe looked at the picture he was startled. "Why is he wearing that odd suit?" he asked.

The girl paused in handing him a drink, as though considering whether he really belonged in her room. Then she relented. "My grandfather was a general," she explained. "That was his uniform."

"'Uniform,'" DeWoe repeated, tasting his drink, half of his mind wondering why a "uniform" had to be so ornate, the other half testing the strangeness of the liquor—it was full of flavors, smoky and deep and sweet.

"All people in armies wear uniforms, Dekker. It's how they show that they're soldiers. Of course, they don't do it any more. Granddad was out of work for the last thirty years of his life when they did away with all the armies. He was a fine man, though. He had time on his hands, and he took me a lot of places."

"Is he the one who took you to Africa?" Dekker asked curiously.

She hesitated. "Well, one of the ones. The first one, anyway. My father was a wimp, but Grandy Jim made up for it. He took me to a lot of places." She straightened the picture fondly. "Africa was the best," she said.

She seemed to want him to ask why, so he did. She gave him a secret sort of smile. "I don't think I know you well enough to tell you that yet. Are you hungry?" When Dekker admitted he was she said, "Then give me a hand."

The woman not only had living space enough for two families, she had food enough for six in her chiller, and she set out enough for almost that many on her table. "I usually eat here," she said, as though Dekker hadn't guessed that already. "Is that all right?"

Dekker grinned and nodded, munching his sandwich—it was guinea pig, with peppers and oil, and a berry wine to wash it down.

"It's Martian food, isn't it? I thought you'd like it."

Dekker's grin came back, this time at the thought that she'd planned all along to invite him here—why else would she have stocked the kind of thing they ate in the demes? Of course, second thoughts told him, he wasn't the only Martian in the class. He didn't like those second thoughts, though.

She was eating as heartily as he. Between mouthfuls she was saying, "If it hadn't been for Grandy Jim, I wouldn't have any of this; my idiot of a father lost all his money. I'm as poor as you are, Dekker."

"That's too bad," he offered, not meaning to be taken seriously.

He wasn't. She grinned back at him. "Oh, it hasn't been all that bad, and the traveling was fine. Grandy didn't just take me to the tourist places. We went to Gettysburg, and Volgograd, and the Normandy coast, and all kinds of other places. He loved old battlegrounds, Granddad did, and I guess I got to love them a little bit myself. As a little girl I wanted to be a general, too, when I grew up, but—"

She stopped there, looking at him thoughtfully. "Do you think that's strange?" she asked.

He shrugged uncomfortably, since he did.

"It's old-fashioned, anyway," she admitted. "But you're a little
 
old-fashioned yourself, aren't you, Dekker?"

He thought about how to answer that, and picked the simplest way. "I'm a Martian," he said.

She nodded. "And Jay-John Belster says you're a good one. You want your planet to have everything that's coming to it, don't you? That's nothing to be ashamed of, Dekker."

Dekker, who had never once thought of being ashamed of anything connected with being a Martian, and was not pleased at having been rated by Jay-John Belster, said only, "No, it isn't."

"The other thing Belster says about you is that your mother's a big shot on Mars."

Her tone had changed, and it made him uncomfortable. "She's a senator, yes. I suppose that's about as big as you get on Mars, but of course Mars isn't that big a place—yet."

"But you'd like it to be big, wouldn't you?"

"Well, hell, Ven! Of course I would! Why do you think I'm here?"

She didn't answer that. "I guess," she said, "it's tough being a Marian—I mean, when you're so poor, and most people here are so rich. I mean—" She gestured around her condo. "—I'm a pauper, the way people like your buddy Tanabe think of it, and yet I've got a lot more than you do. Do you ever resent all that?"

The woman asked odd questions, he thought. He tried to find an answer that wouldn't hurt her feelings and settled on "It doesn't seem fair, I guess. Martians work a lot harder than you people do, and we don't have as much to show for it."

That seemed to satisfy her. She changed the subject. "Why does your ear look that way?"

"It's a transplant. My original one got frostbitten."

She reached out dreamily to touch it. Her touch felt good. "But you do have all your other parts?" she asked. When he nodded, she lifted her glass in salute. And a moment later, to Dekker DeWoe's astonishment, she stood up, lifted her skirt and pulled it off over her head.

What she wore underneath was a different version of what he had seen when they tried on skinsuits, skimpy and almost transparent and prettily ornamented with hearts and flowers. "Well?" she asked, gazing at him in a businesslike way. "Are you going to show me how your parts work?"

"Well, sure," DeWoe said, because that was obviously the answer she expected, and not at all unlike what he had been thinking of himself. It took him by surprise, that was all. And then very quickly both of them were naked and in each other's arms in Ven Kupferfeld's soft, springy bed, the warm strength of her solid little body astonishing him all over again, before they got around to kissing each other for the first time.

The copulation was like all other copulations, infinitely different and always the same. As far as DeWoe's experience could let him judge, their intercourse was successful. Certainly it lasted adequately long, by any reasonable standard. Certainly it relieved all those tensions and cured all those aches for him, and the sleepy way she hugged him when they had spent all they had to spend indicated satisfaction on her part, too.

They didn't talk much afterward. She was actually asleep when, not much later, DeWoe got up, dressed, and quietly let himself out.

In the parking lot he looked wistfully at her little hydrocar, but of course he would have to get back without it. No matter. The exercise would probably be good for him. He paused before beginning the long climb to look up at the sky. It was a clear night on the slope of the mountain, with Earth's few stars almost washed out by the quarter moon, but it was bright with streaks of light from the comets on their way to rejuvenate Mars. They were a pleasing sight to Dekker DeWoe, who was well pleased with the world in general just then. One huge comet spread like a splash of liquid silver across half the sky, and there were a dozen more distant ones, but mostly fully tailed, plainly visible.

"And that," said Dekker to himself, "is what it's all about." And hardly minded the long, uphill climb back to the dormitories.

By the time he had reached the cluster of dormitory buildings his Martian muscles and Martian bones had seriously begun to mind, though.

Not that it wasn't worth it. Satisfaction long delayed was satisfaction enhanced; the copulation had only confirmed, not dulled, the notion that had been growing in Dekker's mind that copulating with Ven Kupferfeld was perhaps something that would be worth doing over and over again.

Perhaps even for the rest of his life.

What Dekker was beginning to wonder was whether he could possibly be "in love." It was an interesting question. It—almost—made the long walk home go quickly.

He wasn't entirely sure what the diagnostic signs of that condition were supposed to be. He was pretty sure he didn't have
all
of them, anyway. For instance, it wasn't that he thought Ven Kupferfeld was the only possible woman in all the worlds for him. It wasn't even that he thought she was perfect. Or, really, anywhere near it; for the woman certainly had some freakish attitudes toward life—generals! battlegrounds!—and Dekker had no doubt that there was a whole lot of the interior person of Ven Kupferfeld that she had not exposed to him, however entirely she had offered him her physical body.

All the same, as he limped into the lobby of his dormitory he was joyous. Not overjoyed. Not carried away; not ready to slay dragons for the woman, or pine if she lost him, but at least joyed.

He was surprised to find that the lobby wasn't as quiet as it usually was on a weekend night. A new class was coming in. A couple of the first-phase trainees were still shouldering their bags to their new dormitory rooms, looking around wide-eyed and curious. Dekker, as a third-phase old hand, beamed tolerantly at them and opened the door to his room.

It was dark. Toro Tanabe was gone for his weekend in Danktown, and before Dekker was far enough into the room for the lights to come on he stumbled over a package just inside the door.

The package was for him.

It was from the Colorado Rehabilitation Center. A note was sealed to its outer wrappings, with his name and address on it, and what it said was that the Colorado Rehabilitation Center was pleased to forward to him, as next of kin, the effects of his late father, Boldon DeWoe. The package contained some clothing, some toilet articles, and a letter.

There was not much imaginable else that could have driven the thought of Ven Kupferfeld out of Dekker's mind.

He sat on the edge of the little couch in the common room for a long time, with the letter in his hand, though he wasn't really thinking about his father's letter—he was thinking about his father. He was thinking about the sad, ruined man who had chosen to live the wreck of his life where no one he cared about could see, and about the way the world could have been if Boldon DeWoe had not had his accident out in the Oort.

Dekker didn't cry. He might have. He would not have been ashamed. He simply was feeling something deeper than he had often felt before, and, although there was sorrow, there was also peace.

He read his father's letter one more time. It said:

My very dear son Dekker:

Since it looks as though I'm dying they are letting me write this. What I want to tell you is that I'm sorry I didn't come back. I wanted to. I wanted to watch you grow up, and I wanted to be with your mother. I just wasn't man enough to face pity.

I don't have any right to give you fatherly advice, but I'm going to give you some anyway. Do your best to take care of your mother. Stay away from Marcus and all the other people like Marcus, because they are sick. Or maybe they're just evil; I can't tell the difference. And the most important thing: Please don't envy the Earthies; above all, don't try to be like them.

I wish I'd been a better father to you, Dek. You deserved better.

Your father

And there was a PS that said: "Take care of Brave Bear. I'm glad you kept him. I would have given you more if I could.

28

It was the Oort miners—the spotters, the snake handlers, the launchers—who considered themselves the most important part of the project, because they were the ones who started each comet on its long drop from the cloud to impact. That was as far as they went, though. Their original course programming merely aimed the thing in the general direction of the Sun.

That was close enough, for the first three or four years. Then each incoming needed to be caught and corrected, and that was even harder . . . or, at least, hard in a quite different way.

The comets came in from the Oort on a thousand different headings, and all of them were wrong. The right heading was the one that would take it close to the Sun at perihelion—close enough to get maximum deltas from the Sun's gravity, but not so close that the Sun's heat boiled too much of its mass away—and on just the right heading so that it would come away from the Sun on a trajectory that led to Mars. That was the tricky part.

That was the part that was taken over by the control satellites in the co-Martian orbits. They analyzed the trajectories for each incoming comet, and they commanded the burns that would correct those trajectories. It wasn't a onetime deal. At every point along the comet's long fall it needed to be tended, and nursed ever closer to the optimal Sun-swing insertion. As many as five hundred course corrections were necessary to fine-tune that important moment when the Sun's pull would wrench the comet out of its original course and put it squarely in the plane of the ecliptic, at the same time slowing it through the right burns at the right fraction of a second so that it would creep up on Mars at just the right point in Mars's orbit.

That was what the students learned in Phase Four. Some said it was the most important phase in the course. Others—notably the ones in the stations orbiting Mars, as well as the ones in the Oort itself—said it wasn't, but, really, they were all right. There were no parts of the hard, long job of guiding a comet from Oort to Martian impact that were not important.

29