Mining the Oort (29 page)

Dekker's "virtual" self had paused in front of a sealed door—like every entranceway in the station, capable of being instantly locked airtight m the event of catastrophic loss of pressure. Willy-nilly he entered and looked around him. A young woman was asleep in a kind of infant's car seat, her knees partly drawn up, her arms folded across her waist.

Dekker studied the room critically. It was small, certainly, but not damagingly so. It was not nearly as small as the ship's stateroom he had occupied on the way to Earth—and not, really, much smaller than the room he had shared with his mother back in Sagdayev. A Martian could be quite comfortable in a room like that, he thought—until the tour took him to another room, minutely more spacious, where there were two of the "beds" strapped side by side to a wall, and the voice explained that these were "conjugal" quarters.

How nice it would be, Dekker thought, if he had someone to be conjugal with on the station. Not Ven Kupferfeld, of course; that was out of the question. But there surely were other women there.

The rest of the tour was less entertaining—perhaps because the woman was hovering on the edge of his thoughts again. It was instructive, of course. He got his first real understanding of just what it took to keep a handful of controllers functioning several hundred million kilometers from the nearest other human being. What it took was everything a human being might need for survival: alarm systems, automatic safety features, communications networks to tie everything together, kitchens, toilets, "relaxation" rooms with virts and game boards and places just to sit and talk—and, of course, the juice to make it all grow: the power plant, which consisted of a pair of constantly working Augensteins that were devoted to producing heat, rather than thrust, and so generated magnetohydrodynamic electricity to run the station's systems.

Even that wasn't everything. There was the mushroom farm of antennae that sprouted from the outer skin of the station; there were the "fixbots," the little
 
spotter-ship-like repair vessels that circumnavigate the external shell when one of those indispensable dishes developed a glitch; and there was the sick bay—almost a small-scale hospital, because some kinds of medical emergencies couldn't wait for the two-week trip to the nearest planet. Co-Mars One and Two weren't just space stations. They were miniature cities that simply happened to be nowhere near any kind of solid ground.

They were also too complicated to take in in a single dose, and Dekker cut the feed long before the tour was finished. He didn't take the helmet off. He thought for a moment, then took a look at the base station out in the Oort—not very like the Co-Mars stations, but not very different, either, except in the fact that half the crews were going out on comet-tagging missions into the cloud itself. He sampled a Mars orbiter—almost identical to the Co-Mars stations, he thought—and then, out of nostalgia and longing, peered at a revolving virtual globe of Mars itself.

It would be a long time before he got there again, he thought.

He took a quick look at the repeat from the Co-Mars training tank, just to make sure nothing had changed. Nothing had, of course. Even that pesky little 67-JY was plainly in sight, now well out from its perihelion and climbing back up toward Mars. Or at least he hoped it was Mars. Could it be possible that it was going to be hijacked to the farm satellites?

He turned the set off and removed the helmet, not much more at ease than when he had started . . . and was astonished to find that he had a visitor.

Annetta Bancroft was watching him from her perch on the low divider that separated this workstation from the next.

"I wondered who was in here," she said. "I had an idea it might be you, but I didn't know if you were ever going to come out of that."

He didn't have a response for that. "Sorry if I worried you, Bancroft."

"Oh, come on, Dekker. I'm not your instructor anymore. We've known each other a long time, haven't we? Besides, we may well be working together in another month. Try again. What's my name?"

"Annetta. Well, Annetta, it's nice to see you," he said politely, as a prologue to saying good night.

She stopped him as he was about to rise. "What've you got to rush off to? You know, you don't look as though you're having much fun these days, Dekker. Is it because Ven Kupferfeld has her hooks into you?"

"Of course not!"

"Meaning it's none of my business? Well, maybe it isn't. Only I wonder what it's going to be like if the two of you get sent to Co-Mars Two together." He shrugged. "Because I expect to be there, too," she added, "and if there's trouble for anybody it makes trouble for everybody."

That reminded him of his conversation with Shiaopin Ye. "Right. The Law of the Raft."

Surprisingly, she nodded. "That's a Martian thing. You said something about it at that party, when we were kids."

"I did?"

She laughed. "I didn't say you were
coherent
, Dekker. That little rat Evan got you pretty wasted, didn't he? Serves him right; he married that stupid bitch he was showing off with, and they can't stand each other. But I looked it up afterward; it comes from a book by Mark Twain." She slipped off the low wall and took his arm, walking him toward the door. So tell me," she said, craning her neck to look up into his face, "how do you think you'll like Co-Mars Two?"

"Is it definite I'll be going there?"

She grimaced. "As definite as anything gets until it happens, I guess. Is that what you wanted to do?"

"No. I wanted the cloud."

"Well, I don't blame you—the pay's better, for one thing. If you can stand the loneliness. So will you try to get out of the Co-Mars?"

"No," Dekker said, realizing that he had just made a decision, then impelled to supply reasons for it. "Co-Mars is the most important place. Somebody has to make sure the comets get to Mars on a trajectory that the orbiters can handle, and I'll be glad to be one of those people."

"Spoken like a true Martian. Only," she added seriously, "it could be a mistake, you know. Martians don't usually make it in the Co-Mars stations."

He stopped short and glared down at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Don't jump on me, Dekker, it's a statistical fact. Do you know that two out of three of the Martians that were on Co-Mars Two were in the batch that just got sent down? Don't ask me why. For Earthies it was only about one in ten. Maybe that's just coincidence, but that's bad odds and it's a fact. I didn't make it up. You can look the records up yourself."

"You're no Martian," he pointed out, "and you got sent down."

"That was a whole other thing! I was in an accident," she said harshly. "Don't get nasty with me, Dekker. I've got my own troubles."

"Yes, I know, Annetta. Rich people always think they've got troubles, even if they don't really know what trouble is."

She frowned at the tone of bitterness in his voice, then relented and almost laughed. "I'm not rich, love. You're living in the past."

"But back in Sunpoint City—"

"Back in Sunpoint City," she said patiently, "my father was CEO of a major bank and trust, but that was then. He didn't shift the investments fast enough, and the bank fired him. That was years ago." She wrapped her arms around her breasts, shivering; they were standing in the open, and the breeze coming down from the mountaintop was cold.

"Was it the Bonds?"

"You bet your ass it was the Bonds. He should've got the bank out of them before anybody else; then it was getting too late. So now you know why I've been working for Oortcorp the last four or five years. You Martians cost me my happy little rich-girl life, so it's only fair you should pay me back." She shivered again. "Dekker?" she said. "I kind of like talking to you this way, but it's goddam cold here. Can't we go somewhere else?"

He considered the question. "Where?"

"My rooms're just up the hill," she offered. "I've even got some beer."

Dekker had never been in the permanent staff headquarters before. He wasn't sure why he was there now, either. If a Martian woman had invited him to drink a glass of beer with her in her room back in Sagdayev because it was cold outside—assuming there had been a cold, windswept place to stand anywhere around Sagdayev—he would have understood that the invitation was to be taken at face value. Here, maybe not. After all, Ven Kupferfeld's very similar invitation had turned out to be for considerably more.

So he kept his mouth shut and his options open. Anyway, it was an interesting experience. The building they quartered teachers and staff in had once been another of those resort hotels that Oortcorp had taken over. It was still more ornate, in an old-fashioned kind of opulence, than anything else in Dekker's personal experience. When he walked in with Annetta Bancroft, he half expected someone to ask for his ID. Surprisingly, no one did, not even a remote voice behind a surveillance camera. There didn't even seem to be a surveillance camera. Two or three people were sitting in a corner of the lobby, drinking coffee and chatting; they didn't even look up at Dekker and Annetta as they came in.

As Annetta led him toward elevators he saw another couple of instructors wearing helmets and bodysuits in a little room off the main lobby, off no doubt on some full-body virtual-reality trip, and a woman bent over an origami model by the side of a fountain. None of them looked up, either.

Annetta spoke to no one, not even to Dekker. She led the way down a corridor on the fifth floor and pressed the palm-pad at her door. When it opened she motioned Dekker inside and closed it behind them.

He looked around. Larger than the quarters in the co-Mars stations, but smaller than the rooms he shared with Toro Tanabe. A lot less neat, too. There was a bed, and it was only sketchily made, a spread pulled lumpily up over pillows, and it was covered with skirts and jeans. "I was going to spend the evening sewing my clothes," she said.

He didn't sit. He walked over to the window and glanced out at the mountainside, falling away below them toward the distant lights of Denver. Even above the city skyglow the half-dozen nearest comets were already brightening the sky. As she waved him to a chair and opened the refrigerator he said, "Don't they give instructors better rooms than this?"

She looked at him narrowly, then laughed. "I keep forgetting that Martians say what they think," she said. "I could've had better, if I'd wanted to pay for it. But this is just until they pass me to go back to Co-Mars Two." She handed him a beer and sat down at the end of a little couch. "I hear you don't get along with Jay-John Belster," she said conversationally.

"Should I?" he asked, annoyed by the fact that everybody on this world seemed to know a great deal about what he had considered his private life and therefore sparring with her.

"Come on, Dekker, this is your old pal Annetta talking to you. To answer your question, yes. You should get along with Belster, and with Ven Kupferfeld, even if you don't want to boff her anymore, and in fact you really ought to try to get along with everybody, because that's your Law of the Raft, isn't it?"

That stung a little. "I don't think Belster cares about getting along with everybody. I don't think he cares about anything that doesn't do some good for himself."

"Do you think I do?"

He considered the question. "I don't know you well enough to have an opinion," he said.

She didn't dispute it. She picked up the blouse and held it to the light, then began to repair a seam. "I hate this," she said. "I hate being poor. Tell me what you don't like about Jay-John."

"Why?"

She shrugged, and bit off a thread. "He and I are friends. He's poor, too."

He couldn't help laughing. "So you're friends with everybody who's poor?"

"No," she said, not smiling, "just with the ones who are willing to do something about it."

"Do what? Belster's a violent man, Annetta. I can't help thinking—"

She waited, and when he didn't finish the sentence she nodded. "I think I get it. You don't like dishonest and violent people."

"That," Dekker said, "is an accurate statement."

"And you've got the idea that Jay-John is up to something criminal. Probably you think Ven is, too. Do you also think I'm part of it, Dekker?"

"How the hell do I know?"

She studied him for a moment, then sighed. "Oh, shit, Dekker," she said, "I know what's bothering you. You think Jay-John should be a Boy Scout because he's Martian. You don't want to believe that a Martian could be doing anything crooked."

"Not just crooked! I don't like the way he talks, or Ven, either, a lot of the time."

She sighed. "I guess they had more hopes for you than I did, Dekker."

He scowled at her. "What kind of hopes are you talking about?"

"Well, hopes that—never mind. Just hopes. Look, Dekker. Suppose you're right. Suppose there's some sort of criminal activity going on. What would you do about it?"

"Why—why, I don't know. It depends on what it is."

"But if it was violent, you'd feel obliged to stop it, wouldn't you?"

"Of course," he said, surprised.

She was grinning now. "I'm sorry, Dekker," she said. "It's just that you're so
Martian
. Anyway, you're partly right. There is something, and it's against the law, only you won't do anything about it. When you're poor, and you don't want to stay poor, you have to take some shortcuts. That's what we do. Do you want to hear what the shortcuts are?"

He considered that for a moment. Then, honestly, "I don't know if I do."

"Well, I know, so I'm going to tell you. What we do is sell information to people who want it—information, for instance, about what the tests are going to cover. Do you think that's wicked of us, Dekker? I don't. I think we're just trying to get even with the system that screwed us up."

He set his beer down in indignation. "Hell, Annetta! It's not just some prep-school course here! If you're letting people pass who don't really know what they're doing, you're endangering the whole project—not to mention actual human lives!"

She shook her head. "Wrong. I've been there," she reminded him. "Once you start work on a control station you've got the old hands standing over you for the first month, watching you like hawks. Anything you don't know when you got there, you're going to learn before they let you handle anything yourself. So there's your conspiracy, Dekker," she finished. "And now why don't you just go back to your dorm and get a good night's sleep? Because you can't blow the whistle on us, you know."