Mining the Oort (10 page)

So Dekker did listen, in alarm, then disbelief, then anger. A pale young man in a pale pink sweater protested that it was humanity's destiny in the long run to settle every piece of real estate that
could
be settled, so why not Mars? Then a darker, older, bearded man scoffed, "That's the kind of airy-fairy thinking that started the Oort project going in the first place." And Boldon DeWoe, grunting irritably to himself, snapped the set off and limped to the refrigerator for another beer.

Dekker followed him over. "What the hell was that all about?" he demanded.

His father shrugged. "You heard. It's what I've been trying to tell you. If you're going to get into the academy, you'd better do it now, because there are a lot of people who want to cancel the whole project."

"They can't do that!"

Boldon DeWoe considered that proposition for the length of time it took him to get back to his chair and sit down again. "No," he said at last, "they probably can't. At least I think they can't. But not for the reasons you think, Dek. I think they'll keep it going because they just have too much invested in it already, and they won't want to write it all off. But they can cut back, slow it down—"

"That's stupid!" Dekker flared.

"Sure it is, boy. Did I ever say Earthies weren't stupid? But it's a real possibility, so you can't fool around. You have to take the psychological test in a few weeks, and that's in Denver, so you're going to have to get everything you can out of the school here as fast as you can. What does that mean, Dek?"

"It means I have to study."

"Right. Now I want to watch the ball game."

He switched on the set again and started to put the earpiece for private listening in place, but Dekker tarried. He was remembering the expression on his father's face as he looked at the Martian scenes. He ventured, "Dad?"

His father dislodged one earpiece to hear his son. "Is there something you don't understand?"

"No, I just wanted to ask you. Why didn't you come back to Mars, after . . . ?"

His father gave him a hard look. "After I got hurt, is that what you mean?"

"Why didn't you?" Dekker persisted.

His father made a gesture of annoyance. "Hell, Dek. What would I do on Mars?"

"What do you do here?" Dekker asked, pressing his luck.

This time Boldon's look was actually angry. Then slowly it evolved into a grin when he decided it was a fair question. "Since you ask, I'll tell you. Here on Earth is where I have to be. This is where I draw my pension—"

"They'd give it to you on Mars, wouldn't they?"

"They'd give it to me in Martian funds. Here I get it in cues. Do you know the difference?"

"Sure I do."

"Then don't ask dumb questions." He hesitated, then added, "And there's another reason. Here I have repair shops handy, too."

"Repair shops?"

"They call them hospitals, but—" He slapped at his thigh. "—it's all electronics here, Dek, and when the system goes out they have to open it up and take the components out and fix them. Yes, they have repair shops on Mars, too, but they have to import the components from Earth. That means they have to be paid for in cues. I may not be much use anymore, Dek, but I don't want to be a liability, either. And anyway, here's where I've got my friends." He put the plug decisively back in his ear to show that the conversation was over.

Dekker couldn't let it go at that. "When you say 'friends,'" he said obstinately, "what you mean is drinking buddies, right?"

His father took the plug out of his ear again and studied Dekker's judgmental face. "You think I stay here just so I can drink up my pension without anybody interfering, is that it?" He waited politely for a response before going on, but Dekker was mute. "What I mean by 'friends,'" his father said then, "is people who can help us. Both of us, Dekker. I do drink, that's true. But drinking buddies are better than no friends at all when you don't have any future."

"You
could
have a future!"

His father shook his head. "I'm afraid not, Dek. You'll have to have it for both of us.

16

The tall, skinny Martian physique works fine on Mars, but a lot less well on Earth. What makes the difference is gravity. The Martian who comes to Earth suddenly discovers that he has an extra forty or so kilograms to carry around with him—all the time—and his body's musculature isn't up to it.

So the muscles are built up with polysteroids. That's easy enough. But then the muscles can exert more force than the bones they are attached to can withstand, so to keep the skeleton intact the bones have to be built up with more calcium. That works, too, but more slowly; so while the skeleton is becoming denser and more rigid the long bones of the legs, particularly, need to be scaffolded from outside: thus the leg braces. But then there are other problems. Those new muscles demand more oxygen, so while the bone marrow is making more red corpuscles an extra couple of liters of whole blood are pumped in to tide them over. Then there's the heart itself. It has to work harder in order to move all this extra blood around. A whole array of beta blockers and stimulants are needed to help the heart do its new job.

And then, when all this has been done, the result is a body that has been beefed up, but still remembers its birthplace conditions. It tires. It slows down. What they say is true: It's easy enough to take the boy out of Mars, but you can never, ever, take Mars out of the boy.

17

What Dekker was good at wasn't worrying. It was working, and he worked. He worked at the courses that made no sense to him, even English history and "political science," whatever that was. He put the shocking thought of the possible cancellation of the Oort project out of his mind, and when his first grades came in on the text screen in his father's apartment he was pleased, and slightly astonished, to discover that he had placed third in the class.

His father, on the other hand, only nodded. "You've been working hard and studying hard," he pronounced. "What did you expect? Only bear down a little harder on the math, because it has to look good."

"What has to look good?" Dekker asked, but his father already had the earplugs in and was turning on the Nairobi-Jo'burg soccer game. Dekker went back to his studies.

The only thing he really worried about was how his classmates would react to this new Martian kid, this new
white
Martian kid, placing above twenty-nine of the thirty-two of them. As it turned out, they didn't seem hostile at all. Afira Kantado, the young woman who was fourth in the class—that is, the one who would have been third if Dekker hadn't preempted her place—did give him one short, surly look when the grades were posted. But the others congratulated him, joked with him, or didn't talk about it at all, which he liked best.

The jokes they made were about his accent, but Dekker had that long since squared away. He wasn't the one who talked funny.
They
talked funny, because—Mr. Cummings had told him, when they chatted for a moment before class one day—that was the perfectly natural way one spoke when one came of parents who had attended good schools. "Good schools," Dekker discovered, were limited to two: a pair of universities named "Oxford" and "Cambridge." The reason these young people were in this prep school was that as soon as they graduated most of them, too, would be off to complete their educations in this "England" where the "good schools" were.

Learning these things made Dekker feel better. When he also discovered that these students were about the brightest Nairobi had, he didn't feel quite so worried about comparisons with Martian students.

The other thing Dekker began to learn was that not all black was the
same
black. In his original, parochial view, all Earthies had been just Earthies; from his father he had learned that these particular Earthies were identified as Kenyans; now he found that even Kenyans thought of themselves more fractionatedly still. About half the boys, and almost all the girls, considered themselves what they called "Kikuyu," while the handful of tall, weedy, almost Martian-looking ones were called "Masai." Even that wasn't all, because there were a handful who came from other "tribes."

Dekker had to have that word explained to him. A tribe was not at all, Dekker discovered, the same thing as a deme. Tribes were a matter of genes, not location. Surprisingly, you continued to be part of your tribe even if you moved to some other tribe's deme.

All that astonished Dekker greatly. What did it matter what your relatives were?

But it seemed that it did matter, although except for the fact that the Masai were of pleasingly stretched-out proportions compared to the Kikuyu, Dekker could not distinguish between one tribe and another. The Kenyans all could, though. Infallibly, A fair proportion of the "citizenship" classes, as the shove-and-grunt sessions were properly called, were devoted to the subject, Mr. Cummings invariably beginning by reminding all the students that it didn't matter what tribe their ancestors had come from, they were all not only equal but, really, the
same
.

He got challenged on it, too. Afira Kantado raised her hand and pointed to Dekker. "He's not the same," she said.

"Of course he is, Kantado," Mr. Cummings said patiently, "or at least you should act as though he were." She looked unconvinced, so the teacher explained. "You know what the basis of good citizenship is. You don't have to like any other person. If you have bad feelings, that's all right. It's perfectly natural for you to dislike another person. The important thing is that you must always
keep
your
resentments
to
yourself
—except in these sessions, of course. If you let the hostilities and angers out in the outside world, that's when conflicts start—and violence—and, in the long run, it could even lead to wars. We don't want that, do we? So we must—DeWoe? Did you want to say something?"

Dekker had his hand up. "That isn't the way we do it on Mars," he pointed out.

There was a faint sound from the class, almost a titter. Mr. Cummings gave them a warning look. "No, of course it isn't, DeWoe," he agreed. Different places have different customs. I understand on Mars the thrust is to make you
like
each other, isn't it?"

Dekker frowned. "Not 'like,' exactly. There are plenty of people I don't particularly like. But we have to trust each other, and care for each other—we have to make sure everybody's being treated fairly. Like—" He had been going to say, "like the Law of the Raft," but changed his mind in the middle of the sentence."—like we're all
family
."

Mr. Cummings nodded tolerantly. "I suppose that's quite important on Mars, where the conditions are so much more—severe. And of course it would be even more so under even harsher conditions, would it not? For example, DeWoe, you're planning to go out into the Oort cloud to work. Why don't you tell the class what it's like out there?"

"I've never been there," he objected.

"But your father has. He must have told you stories about it."

The fact was, he hadn't. But Dekker was not prepared to admit that in public, so he did his best. "Out in the Oort," he said, "it's like Mars, only tougher. You can't throw your weight around. You can't afford to be jealous of somebody else, or try to get an advantage over him. You have to try to understand how the other person feels."

"It sounds good to me," Walter Ngemba put in, not bothering to raise his hand.

"It sounds
stupid
," Afira Kantado commented. "What about sex?"

"Sex?" Dekker repeated, trying to imagine what sex had to do with docility—or "citizenship."

"You keep saying 'him.' What about men and women? Don't they ever have two men loving the same woman?"

"Oh," said Dekker, relieved, "that. That's no problem. A man takes a duty wife—or a woman takes a duty husband—and they live together as long as they both want to. Then they stop."

One of the Masai had a hand up, snickering. "When your old man was in the Oort, did he have a duty wife?"

Dekker answered hotly, "My father
has
a wife. She's my mother. What would he want another wife for?"

Half a dozen hands went up then, over grinning faces. Mr. Cummings shook his head. "This is a very interesting discussion," he pronounced, "but the period's over. We'll resume it at our next session if you like—but now, good afternoon to you all."

As they clumped together at the door, Walter Ngemba touched Dekker's arm and said consolingly, "I'm sorry about that chap Merad. It's just that he's Masai, you know."

Dekker looked at him in surprise. "I thought everybody was supposed to be the same."

"Oh, everybody is. Even Masai. It's just that they are so, well,
uncivilized
, sometimes. But, look, I've had a thought. Have you got anything planned for the weekend? Because my father said he'd be delighted to have you come have a look at our farm."

"Farm?"

"Our family place. It's out in the Rift Valley. Can you come?"

It was a surprise, but a very pleasing one. "Why, sure. Thanks," Dekker began. Then second thoughts occurred to him. "I do have a lot of studying to do—"

"We can study together; we've got a lot of the same subjects, you know. Do you need to ask your father?"

Need to? "Not exactly," Dekker said.

"Well, talk to him about it. I expect he'll be out there waiting for you, won't he?"

But, as it turned out, that particular afternoon Boldon DeWoe wasn't. There was no sign of the little trike. As Dekker stood uncertainly on the sidewalk, looking up and down at the traffic, the Peacekeeper woman hurried over to him, putting her phone into its pouch and looking concerned.

"You're Dekker DeWoe, aren't you? Well, I've got a message for you. You have to go pick up your father at the Sunshine Shabeen."

"The what?"

"It's a bar," she explained. "Do you know where it is? It doesn't matter; you'll have to take a taxi anyway and the driver will know. All the drivers know the Sunshine Shabeen."

She turned to blow a peremptory blast on her whistle and, before Dekker could ask any questions, a cab swooped over out of the traffic screen. Yes, the driver certainly did know where the Sunshine Shabeen was. Then all Dekker had to worry about was whether the few cues on his amulet were going to be enough to pay the bill.