Mining the Oort (11 page)

They weren't. Dekker had to rummage in his father's pockets to find the money to pay the driver, and then enough to pay him again to take the two of them back home. His father was no help. His father was snoringly drunk and impossible to rouse. He was almost impossible to move, too, and Dekker certainly couldn't have managed the task by himself.

Fortunately there were two bulky Peacekeepers waiting outside the shabeen, and when they'd had a look at tall, skinny Dekker they did the job for him.

What surprised Dekker was that that was all they did. Once they had shifted Boldon DeWoe into the waiting cab the larger of the Peacekeepers wished Dekker a good night. They turned away, although they certainly would have been within their rights to do things far more severe. When Dekker saw the caked blood and snot around his father's nose he had no doubt that the old man's behavior had been
very
antisocial.

Yet the Peacekeepers hadn't arrested him.

That was a puzzle, but Dekker had other things on his mind. Unfortunately there were no handy Peacekeepers at the apartment building, nor did the sulking cab driver show any interest in helping. Even more unfortunately, a light sprinkling of rain had driven the stoop loungers indoors, and Boldon DeWoe, shriveled though he was, was more than Dekker could manage up the front steps.

Then he heard a voice from above: "Hi there, down below!" When he looked up it was their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Garun, leaning out the window. "Just hang on there a sec, please. I'll get Jeffrey and Maheen to give you a hand with your dad."

Jeffrey and Maheen showed up in a matter of seconds, huge, good-natured, quick to lug Boldon DeWoe up to the apartment and even lay him down on his bed. "He'll be right enough if you just cover him over and let him sleep it off, chum," one of them advised as they left.

Dekker did as instructed. Jeffrey and Maheen clearly had more experience in these matters than himself, and anyway there didn't seem any need to do anything else. After he had thought that out, Dekker looked considerably at the refrigerator, then abandoned the thought of making a meal. Instead, he pulled out his lesson cartridges arid began to study.

He was doing calculus exercises—though he didn't know what he would ever need to know calculus for, when pocket math machines were always available—when he heard a knock on the door.

It was Mrs. Garun again, this time bearing a covered pot of soup.

"I thought you might like a bit of something to eat," she said apologetically. "Your dad, too, when he wakes up. The lads said he was probably gone for the night, but whenever it is you can just heat a dish up for him."

"Thank you," Dekker said, lifting the lid and sniffing. It was some sort of killed-animal and vegetables, and actually it smelled very good.

Mrs. Garun tarried for a minute. "He's a good man, your father," she said, wiping her hands on her apron. "It's a shame he got hurt that way in the Oort."

"Thank you," Dekker said again, for lack of a more appropriate response, but the woman hadn't finished.

She hesitated, then said in the tone of a confidence, "You know, Dekker, I thought once I might go out there myself."

That startled Dekker, and the expression on his face made her laugh. "Oh," she said good-naturedly, "I didn't always work in the billing department for the electric company. When I was young I had bigger ideas, you know. I studied engineering at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and I thought terraforming Mars from the Oort was the biggest, most wonderful idea anybody ever had—only, of course, then I married Mr. Garun, and he didn't want me to go off without him. So I did the next best thing."

She looked expectantly at Dekker, who said, guessing, "You went to work for the electric company?"

"Oh, no, not that. I mean about the Oort. I decided to help the project my own way. So when Mr. Garun died I put the insurance money into Oort bonds." She untied and retied her apron meditatively before she added, "Only the things have been going down a bit lately, haven't they?"

"I really don't know much about financial things," Dekker apologized. "We don't have that sort of thing on Mars."

"Well, I know you don't. Only—it's a bit of a worry, isn't it? I hate to sell and take a loss. On the other hand, what's the future going to be? I wouldn't care to wake up one morning and find I was penniless." Then she smiled at him. "What keeps my spirits up is young people like you, Dekker, giving up everything to go out there and make it work. God bless you. And, please, if there's anything you need, just knock on my door!"

When Mrs. Garun was back in her own apartment, Dekker ate the soup thoughtfully. It was in fact very good, though he couldn't recognize exactly what species of killed-animal had gone into it, but he was conscious of a faint bad taste in the back of his mouth. The taste wasn't the soup. It was something quite different, and worse.

He looked in to make sure his father was still sound asleep. Then he rinsed the dish and took out the latest communication from his mother to track down something she had said.

Gerti DeWoe hadn't missed a week, expensive as keeping in touch from Mars was; she was there on his screen every Thursday, always looking tired but alert, always with little bits of news: Tinker Gorshak was sick, Tinker was better; they've started the new windmills on the slope over Sagdayev, and that was good because the dust storms had been fierce lately and the photovoltaic farms were always getting covered over; she'd been asked to represent Sagdayev again at the all-deme parliament in Sunpoint City—Dekker shook his head in continuing surprise at that; his mother a
politician
? Tsumi Gorshak had been cautioned for cutting his docility classes. And the import budgets were cut again.

That was the part he was looking for. He played it over twice. The reason cues were short, his mother said, was that they'd had to postpone the new issue of the Bonds, because the Earthie financiers had informed them that the market was temporarily too "soft."

Dekker scowled at that. Why were these Earthies always making trouble about the Bonds? A deal was a deal, wasn't it? Everybody had known from the very beginning that the Bonds would not pay off until the Oort project was complete—or complete enough, anyway, for Mars to start growing the crops that would produce the cues to meet the payments. So why did the price keep going up and down—or, actually, mostly just down?

It made no sense to him. And it wasn't just Mars that was hurt by these financial tricks; decent Earthies like Mrs. Garun were feeling the pinch, too.

Dekker yawned and tried to put these impossible questions out of his mind. He turned off the screen and crawled into bed, dropping his clothes to the floor. His father's snoring was less raucous now, though Dekker was perplexed to hear an occasional low rumbling sound that mixed with it sometimes, and definitely did not come from Boldon DeWoe. Dekker lay on his back with his eyes open, thinking about Mrs. Garun, thinking about his mother—then, almost drifting off to sleep, thinking about his parents, trying to recapture the memory of when all three of them lived together, before his father went off to the Oort. Dekker was nearly sure his parents had been happy. The question had never seemed to come up, but they
acted
happy enough, and his mother had definitely cried when Boldon DeWoe left. So what had gone wrong?

A huge boom from outside interrupted his thoughts. Startled, Dekker limped naked to a window to look out.

The gentle rain had become a storm, violent and electrical. Great flashes of violet-white light sliced through the black sky, making the city's buildings stand out in black silhouette. The distant rumbles had become sharp cracks of thunder that rolled and crashed, and the rain pelted down violently. It wasn't just rain, either. Some of the droplets bounced away as they struck his windowsill, and Dekker realized with astonishment that he was looking at the thing they called "hail."

And everything he saw was oddly shimmering—the streets, the two-hundred-meter towers downtown, the creeping car lights along the road—because it was wet.

There was a marvel! Everything
wet
. Wet with profligately wasted water, falling from the sky. Unplanned and unforced, perhaps even sometimes undesired. Torrents of it. Making the streets and building roofs shine as they reflected the lightning.

This, Dekker thought wonderingly, was what it was all about. This was what Mars would be some day, when the last Oort comet had dropped its final blessing of water and gases onto the old planet and made it young again. It would all be worth it, then. Dekker promised himself it would: all the sacrifices, like Mrs. Garun's; all the pain, like his father's; all the work—like his own . . .

Then an especially loud crash made him jump, and a moment later he saw a reflection in the window and turned.

His father was there, leaning on the back of a chair, holding a sheet over his broken body.

"Are you all right?" Dekker asked.

His father was silent for a moment, as though researching the answer. Then he said, "Sure. Are you the one who brought me home?" Dekker nodded.

"That's all right, then," his father said. It wasn't an expression of regret for having needed to be carried home, and it certainly wasn't any kind of an apology. But it was all Boldon DeWoe had to say on the subject. He went on gazing silently at the rain.

Dekker remembered Mrs. Garun's advice. "Do you want some soup?"

"Christ, no. Old lady Garun's been around? Nice of her, but no."

It was as good a chance to talk to him as Dekker was going to get, and there were things Dekker had been wanting to talk to him about. He cleared his throat. "Dad," he said, beginning with the less important thing, "Walter Ngemba invited me to come to his father's farm this weekend."

His father turned painfully to look at him. "Ngemba," he repeated thoughtfully. "His father's the plantation owner, out in the Mara?"

"I told him I'd come."

Boldon DeWoe gave a small acquiescent shrug. "You might as well, Dek. You've been looking pretty tired; you could use the rest. Anyway, the Ngembas are the kind of people it might be useful to know."

Dekker took a breath and got to the more important one. "They were asking about you in school today."

His father looked wary. "You were talking about me?"

"Well, more or less. They were talking about living in the Oort, and duty wives—and things like that—and, well, it made me wonder something," Dekker said. "About you and Ma. You never came back home after your accident, Dad. Don't you ever miss your wife?"

His father looked at him without expression. "Do you know how badly I got hurt?"

"Well . . . not exactly. Pretty badly, I guess."

"Badly enough." His father stared out at the rain for a moment, "I guess your mother didn't want to talk about it," he said at last "It was dope, Dek. You can't dock a spotter ship when you've been doing drugs, so there was a crash. You know what it's like in a spotter ship? You're practically part of the ship; your suit fits right in to fill all the space there is, and you don't get out of the suit until you get back. So when the bow of the ship crumpled it got my legs and the lower part of my body, and I pretty nearly died. Well, I did die. My heart was stopped by the time they got me out, and they had a hell of a time bringing me back. It didn't help the lock much, either—they gave me a hard time about that. It could have cost me my pension, but I guess they figured I was paying enough anyway, the way I am. Oh," he said, noticing Dekker's appalled look, "yes, Dek, it was me that did it. I was the pilot that was doing drugs."

"But we don't
do
that!"

His father looked very weary. "No, we don't," he agreed. "Not at home. I never did before, but it's different out in the Oort. You're out there spotting, weeks at a time, all by yourself. And other people do it. They do it a lot here on Earth, and some of them take the stuff with them wherever they go."

"But—"

Dekker swallowed the rest of that particular "but." He shook his head—not in reproach, or not just in reproach, but principally in sorrow and shock. It took him a moment to remember what it was that he wanted to know.

"But you could have come home," he said.

"I didn't think so, Dek."

"Because you were, well, embarrassed, yes, I understand that. But didn't you miss your—" The word would have been "family," but pride got in Dekker's way. "—your wife, anyway?"

His father looked at him for a moment before he said, "What would I do with a wife now?"

By Friday the storm was long gone, the sky was cloudless, and the African sun hotter than ever. If Dekker DeWoe had thought Nairobi was sweltering hot, as indeed he had, when he reached the Masai Mara he discovered a whole new order of heat.

It didn't hit him right away. Walter Ngemba had a private plane waiting on the outskirts of the city. They drove out to it in the long, blue limousine, the pilot touched her cap as they strapped themselves in, and the plane took off for a private landing strip at the foot of a mountain. The strip didn't look like much of an airport, and it wasn't. It was nothing but a thousand meters of hardtop scratched out of the sparse brush, a wind sock that hung listlessly from its pole, and nothing else at all. There wasn't even a shed to protect a waiting passenger from the sun's rays. There weren't any waiting passengers, either. There was nothing but scrub and bare, dry soil. After the bustling streets of Nairobi, with their crowds of human beings, the place looked almost homelike to Dekker DeWoe. Even almost Martian.

"Look over there," Walter Ngemba said. He leaned over Dekker's shoulder—he had politely let Dekker take the copilot's seat, since there wasn't any need for a copilot in the tiny plane—and pointed to something like a large bug that was sliding across the scrub toward them. The thing was trailing a cloud of dust. "That's our ride coming. And, see, there's our compound, up there on the hill past the watering hole."

Dekker couldn't see anything that could be called a compound. He couldn't see much of anything at all, the way the plane was banking and twisting, not unless the quick glimpse of scarlet rectangles among the blotchy dun of the landscape was the roofs of buildings. Dekker wasn't really spending much effort on looking, either. He was busy clinging to his seat, because this aircraft was no ponderous Martian dirigible. The thing swerved and darted. The pilot had already buzzed the strip once—apparently to scare away something that moved in the brush beside the strip—and then spun around in a tight curve to make her landing.