Mining the Oort (12 page)

By the time the plane had slowed at the end of the runway the buglike vehicle had reached the strip. It turned out to be a hovervan, with a tall, skinny Masai woman jumping out of the driver's seat to open the door for them.

That was when the heat really hit.

This wasn't Nairobi's dank air, it was parched and toasting. It was Dekker's opinion that if he had to stay out in this bake-oven for more than minutes, his brains would coagulate, like a cooked egg. He didn't have to, though. The interior of the van was air-conditioned, and as soon as the woman had closed the door on them she hurried over to help the pilot carry their bags to the van's luggage compartment.

Walter paid her no attention. He rummaged in the van's little chiller for a moment and produced a couple of beers. "Welcome to Ngemba country," he said, lifting the can in a toast. "I hope you don't mind if we take the hover; I'm afraid it makes the dust a good deal worse, and lord knows the dust's bad enough anyway, but we won't bounce our kidneys around so much on the game trails. Did you see the lions?"

Lions. Dekker thoughtfully sipped the beer, trying to remember just what strange creatures he had seen. Along the way up from Nairobi Walter had been nudging him every few minutes, pointing out the window at elephants, giraffes, and grazing animals of a dozen kinds, all previously known to Dekker only from pictures. But lions? "I don't think so," he said. "When was that?"

"Now, of course," said Walter, pointing. "They're right over there. Don't you see them?" And not more than ten meters away, in the shade of a clump of thorny bushes, half a dozen large, tawny cats were peering incuriously out at them.

The hairs on Dekker's forearms sprang to attention. "Jesus," he said.

And said it many times again, though mostly under his breath, over the next twenty-four hours or so. First appearances had been all wrong. The Ngemba "farm" was a
very
un-Martian place.

Simply physically, being on the Ngemba farm was an ordeal for Dekker. The heat was blinding out in the open air, and the air-conditioning next to freezing inside. What was more, the main house was dismayingly full of stairways that had to be climbed and descended. Psychologically the strain of being there was even greater. Dekker's ideas of spaciousness, already revised upward from his Martian standards, expanded again as he began to grasp the size of the Ngemba household. There was a dining room and a breakfast room, there was a "morning" room and a "sun" room, and there was a library. Dekker couldn't help looking startled when they came to the library. It was full of books. Not the kind of book cartridges Dekker was used to dealing with.
Real
books, printed on paper and bound in cloth or leather, great heavy things that lined all four walls of this very large room. "Yes, the old gent's a great reader," Walter said indulgently. "A touch old-fashioned, too, wouldn't you say? Of course, he doesn't just spend his time reading; this is where he manages his investments, too."

Dekker looked around wonderingly. "How?"

Walter grinned and touched a keypad. One whole row of what had seemed to be the spines of books slid away and revealed a bank of screens. "Direct channels to all his brokers," he said proudly. "I won't turn them on, though; he'd go through the roof if he caught me playing at them. He buys and sells securities." Then, when he saw Dekker's expression, "You do know what securities are?"

"Like the Bonds?"

"You mean the Oortcorp bonds? Well, yes, those are securities, but there are all different kinds. Common stocks, preferred stocks, double-dips, self-liquidating debentures—good lord,
I
don't know what they all are. Father's most active in futures right now, I think." Walter sighed. "Oh, you don't know what futures are. Well, you sign a contract. It says that maybe six months from now you'll sell some securities at a certain price, and some other chap signs the contract with you to buy them then."

"How do you know what the price will be in six months?"

"Well, that's the tricky part, isn't it? Maybe you don't. Maybe you guess wrong, and then you're stuck. The good guessers make money—like the old man."

"It sounds—" Dekker had been about to say "stupid" but revised his intention. "—complicated," he finished.

Walter laughed. "No offense, Dekker," he said, "but Martians just don't understand the market, do they? But come, I haven't shown you the game room yet."

All in all, there had to be at least thirty rooms in the rambling main house, to be shared only by Walter; his younger sister, Doris; and his parents—his parent and stepparent, actually, the slim and youthful Gloria Ngemba being his classmate's father's second wife. And, of course, their
many
servants, all in one curious uniform or another. Dekker did not succeed in counting the servants. However many of them there were, their number wasn't relevant to the space-to-occupant ratio, anyway, since Dekker discovered that the servants had their own fairly spacious quarters—at least by Martian standards—down past the vehicle shed and the repair shop.

It was a close decision for Dekker as to which of these new categories of living beings was the more grotesquely strange: the wild animals roaming around loose out in the Mara, or the servants that populated the Ngemba compound. Nothing on Mars, or even in Nairobi, had prepared him for either. Nor had he been prepared for the problems of "dressing for dinner"—why would anyone put on special clothes just to
eat?
—or for Mr. Theodore Ngemba.

He didn't meet Mr. Theodore Ngemba at once. Mr. Ngemba was unavoidably detained by business matters, and so Dekker was welcomed to the estate by the two female members of the family, the beautiful Gloria, the teenage Doris, both in riding habits and smelling faintly of the horses from which they had just dismounted. He was escorted to his rooms—rooms!—by a servant, and then immediately taken for a walk around the grounds by Walter.

Dekker appreciated the courtesy. He didn't appreciate the exercise. Most of the walking was up and down steps, because the compound was at the top of a small hill. "To keep the animals out," Walter explained. "Not that most of them would come near us anyway, but some of the buffalo are pretty stupid."

Not all the animals were kept out, though. In the rose garden three gardeners were repairing damage done by some of the invaders—"Baboons," Walter explained—and leaping through all the shrubbery were little, long-armed furry things that Walter said were called colibri monkeys. By the swimming pool a tall Masai wearing a thing like a white nightgown patrolled the area with a slingshot; his job was to keep the monkeys away from the water, "Oh, damn," Walter said as they approached the pool. "The infant's there, curse the luck."

The infant was his sister, tying up her hair by the side of the pool. She studied Dekker, looking up from under her hair. "Do you like to swim?" she asked.

Dekker considered the question. There was certainly a possibility that there might, somewhere, once have been a Martian who had possessed the skill to keep himself afloat in a body of water, but Dekker had never encountered such a person. He didn't say that. He only said, "I don't know how."

"I'll teach you, if you like," she said. "It's easy. Watch me."

He did, and discovered that the kid sister, Doris Ngemba, wasn't really all that much of a kid. When she threw off the robe to dive into the pool she was wearing nothing over her breasts and only the tiniest of patches over her pubic area. Dekker's eyes attentively followed every movement. Not just Dekker's eyes, either. The Masai with the slingshot was watching her closely, too, until he saw Walter watching him; then the man grinned in embarrassment, turned, and sent a random shot with his slingshot into the shrubs before he stalked away.

Doris had swum the width of the pool and returned; now she was clinging to the side of it, wet and smiling up at Dekker. "How about it, then?" she asked.

"How about your not showing your breasts off in front of the Masai?" her brother said angrily.

"Oh, the Masai," she said, dismissing the whole tribe at once. "I wasn't talking to you anyway, Wally dear. I was talking to Dekker. Are you game for a swimming lesson?"

"Maybe tomorrow," Walter told her, answering for his guest. "Dekker's got to bathe and dress for dinner now. And you'd better get on with it, too, because Father doesn't like to be kept waiting."

Mr. Theodore Ngemba wasn't kept waiting for dinner. It was a close thing, though, because when Walter discovered that his guest didn't have a dinner jacket he had to scour the servants' quarters for clothes from some former Masai butler to fit him. At least fit him closely enough to get through a dinner, though the long-gone Masai butler had been a much fatter man and the jacket hung loose on Dekker's Martian frame.

They were six for dinner: the Ngembas, Dekker, and an elderly woman who wore pearls—six diners and, Dekker saw, eight servants to see that they had the food to dine on. One servant behind each person at table, and a couple of others to carry dishes in and out. It wasn't only the elderly woman who wore expensive baubles, because both Doris and her stepmother had bright mineral stones in their hair and around their necks, and even Mr. Theodore Ngemba had a thick chain of gold supporting a gold medallion of some sort around his neck. Dekker had seen no such display of wealth since that long-ago dinner party with Annetta Cauchy's family on the night of the first comet strike.

Uncomfortable in his scratchy jacket, Dekker found himself seated between Mrs. Ngemba and the elderly woman, who turned out to be a business associate of Mr. Theodore Ngemba. She was named Mrs. Kurai, She ate quietly, listening to the others talk—a welcome bit of luck for Dekker, he thought, since he had no idea what a proper dinner-table conversation should be.

Walter filled all the conversational gaps. He leaned forward to address his father. "Dekker was very interested in the library, sir."

Mr. Theodore Ngemba looked indulgently at his son's guest. "Are you a reader then, Mr. DeWoe?"

"Yes . . . sir," Dekker said, glancing at Walter to make sure he was saying it right.

"Indeed. What have you read recently?"

With everyone looking at him, Dekker thought back. Damn little, actually, if you didn't count school texts. Then he remembered a good subject. "There was this book I read once by a man named Mark Twain. It's called
Huckleberry
Finn
. Huck Finn is floating down the Mississippi River with a man named Jim, an escaped slave, and they talked about what they call the Law of the—"

Tardily he saw that Mr. Ngemba was frowning and trailed off. "That," his host said heavily, "is an offensive book. I do not permit it in my library. It contains words which are not tolerated in decent conversation."

"Sorry, sir," Dekker said, wishing he were somewhere else.

Mrs. Kurai saved him. When her personal servitor had put the soup course before her she said, friendlily enough, "I understand you're going to work in the Oort cloud."

"I hope so," Dekker said politely, watching to see which spoon she took. "Do you own some of the Bonds?"

The woman looked amused. "A few. I used to have more, of course; I suppose we all did, in the beginning."

Dekker looked at her curiously. "But it still is the beginning," he told her. "It'll be another twenty-five years before the project's finished."

"Forty," called Doris Ngemba, and her brother straightened her out.

"He's counting in Mars years, twit," he said.

"So you think the project will continue," Mr. Theodore Ngemba said from the head of the table, waving away the servant with the platter of killed-animal. "It's turning out rather expensive, isn't it?"

Dekker frowned. "My mother's on the all-deme planning board," he said, "and she hasn't said anything about extra costs."

"Perhaps not, perhaps not. But of course it isn't just the physical cost, is it? There's the cost of the money—amortization and interest. And there do seem to be other alternatives to repairing that planet of yours, Mr. DeWoe. It's true that our own farms do not provide enough for the world's population, especially here, with those confounded beasts continually breaking into the crop areas—"

"The government pays us for all the damage they do," his daughter pointed out.

"Point granted, Doris. We do get reimbursed, so the people in Nairobi can keep their precious animals alive to show the tourists. Not reimbursed as well as we properly should, perhaps, but that's not the point. The point is that the food we grow then goes into the mouths of elephants and hippos, and not of people. Oh," he said, gazing expansively around his table, "we do ourselves well enough here, I suppose. What we don't eat the servants do, and what they can't swill down themselves they steal for their families. I imagine four or five hundred people have a taste from our kitchens now and then. Still, the population grows faster than the food resources, doesn't it? And so we have to provide for the future. I suppose, Mr. DeWoe," he said kindly to Dekker, "that the notion of growing crops on Mars must have seemed very attractive at first My father believed so, I'm afraid. That was why he put so much of our capital into the Bonds. But now . . ." He shrugged and smiled.

And then Doris was demanding that Dekker tell them all what life on Mars was like,
really
, and he never did get a chance to hear more of what the "but now" could possibly refer to.

By the next afternoon Dekker had learned many things, though not that one. He had learned what the word was that Mr. Ngemba thought so offensive. "It's a bad word," Walter told him at breakfast, glancing around. "I don't like to say it when the servants might hear, so I'll spell it out. N-I-G-G-E-R. Don't ever use it, please."

"I never have," Dekker said. "I didn't think anyone did, either, not even in those citizenship classes. After all, that story's about a time long ago. People had different standards then."

"Well, we don't have those standards here, Dekker. Please."

"Sure," Dekker said, inspecting his meal. That was one of the other things he had learned, what a proper English breakfast was like. It included covered dishes containing killed-animal things like "kippers" and "kidneys" as well as large quantities of toasted bread and tea. Under Doris's attentive tutelage he had learned, almost, to swim, though not to swim well, of course, since there was not enough fat on his lean Martian frame for buoyancy. Simply staying afloat took vigorous effort. He had had a taste, all too brief a taste, of the "game room," where Walter had displayed, among other things, what wealthy Earthies owned in the way of virtuals. He had learned what "tennis" was, though he was excused from actually playing the game on the grounds of fragility, while Mrs. Ngemba and her two stepchildren took turns on the court. He wasn't excused from croquet, though. That turned out to be the kind of game a Martian could play—it was skill and precision that counted, no brute strength involved—and he managed to beat both Doris Ngemba and her brother through the final wicket.