Mining the Oort (25 page)

Being possibly "in love" or at least "in like"—or, Dekker corrected himself, perhaps simply "in heat"—was certainly giving him a lot to think about, but not so much that he neglected his studies. Ven didn't, either. The two of them actually studied together, on those evenings she was willing to spend with him—part of the time, anyway.

It helped his concentration that Phase Four was interesting. It wasn't just the subject matter, though that certainly did interest Dekker DeWoe. The other interesting thing about it, in more or less a personal way, was that the instructor was his old party friend from long-ago Sunpoint City, Annetta Bancroft.

Dekker respected the woman's position of authority and did not address her by her first name, or attempt any kind of intimacy with his teacher. It wasn't hard to avoid familiarity, anyway. They were kept busy. After the first few days of lectures and testing, they went back to the simulated control chamber they had visited briefly weeks earlier.

Dekker was pleased to find that he had a natural gift for comet handling. Ven was admiring—maybe even a little jealous, too—and Annetta Bancroft patted him on the back. "You ought to put in for one of the Co-Mars stations," she said, and when he said his real intention was the Oort itself, only looked thoughtful. But he knew she was right. He was as good as any in the class at the vital tasks of keeping the comets on course, solving orbital problems, and commanding burns. Was it because of his piloting experience? Dekker didn't think so. The general problems were the same—guidance and thinking ahead—but, of course, here most of the course planning was done by computer. It was the computers that plotted positions and trajectories for each incoming, interrogating every one of them and making a new plot every ten seconds of all the seconds in all the years each comet took to get to its destination. Still, a human being always had to verify the computer's solutions before each burn. That was gospel: computers rarely made small errors, but it took human beings to catch the big ones in time.

And time after time in the control training center, when Dekker punched in his proposed trajectory and watched the golden prediction line extend itself from the comet to the point on the grid where it would reach perihelion, then keyed "normative" to check it against the actual controller's solution, from far out in the Mars orbit, the two lines matched perfectly. Once the rest of the class even broke into spontaneous applause as they watched. Of course, Annetta Bancroft hushed them immediately, but it occurred to Dekker that his father would have been pleased.

He didn't think about his father all that often, though. He hadn't forgotten Boldon DeWoe; there was a sore place in his heart that contained his father's memory. But Dekker had many nearer concerns, and one that, in fact, was present with him in person much of the time, and in his thoughts most of his remaining hours: Ven Kupferfeld.

Spending that much time thinking about Ven Kupferfeld, or indeed about any other woman, was something brand new in Dekker's experience. She wasn't the only woman he had ever bedded, not by more than a dozen. But he had never mooned so over another human being before. When they were together he was fully conscious of the differences between them: Earthie/Martian, rich/poor, sophisticated/naive—most of all, perhaps, simply female/male, because on Earth, Dekker had come to believe, the fundamental differences between men and women were considerably more marked than he had ever observed them to be on Mars.

But when they were apart, the differences didn't seem much to matter. The thought that dominated his mind was just a wish that they were together.

They were in practice together a lot less than Dekker would have wished. Having granted Dekker entry to her bed once, he assumed there would be repeat performances ad lib. There were, to some degree, but not as often as he would have preferred. From time to time, as he approached her at the end of a day's session, she would give him that warm but opaque smile that told him she was going to say she had something else she simply had to do that night.

There were still plenty of evenings together, and after a while even Toro Tanabe noticed. It took the very self-centered Tanabe more than a week to observe that they had switched roles; now it was Dekker who was coming back to their quarters very late and very pleased with himself. Then it took Tanabe less than a second to puzzle out why. He flicked off his screen and gaped up at his roommate as Dekker entered. "For Christ's sake, it's Ven Kupferfeld, isn't it?" Tanabe said, amazed.

"We study together sometimes, yes."

"Oh, of course, yes, I know exactly what you study. I am sure you learn a great deal from all this studying. But that woman is out of your class entirely, DeWoe."

Because Dekker had thought along those lines himself, his response was hotter than it might otherwise have been. "She doesn't think so. If you must know, she's almost as poor as I am."

Tanabe shook his head. "Class is not simply a matter of money," he announced. "At least, once in a great while it may not be. Kupferfeld comes of a very important
family
, while you're a—"

He recollected himself in time to keep from saying "Martian." He didn't say anything at all for a moment. Then, moved by some momentary impulse toward kindness, he changed the subject. He gestured at his lightless screen. "I am going insane with these integrals," he moaned. "I can work them out so easily here on the screen, but when we are actually trying to guide a comet it is so much more difficult."

"Is that what you were doing?" Dekker asked, curious, because the glimpse he had caught before Tanabe turned it
off
had not looked like schoolwork.

Tanabe looked sulky. "Not at this precise moment, no," he admitted. "One needs some relaxation—it was a Marsie, as a matter of fact."

"Oh, hell," Dekker said, laughing.

"I simply wished to understand what your world was like," Tanabe declared.

"You won't get that from the Marsies." Dekker had seen few of those popular shows, because they offended him—highly adventurous blood-letters on Mars, impossibly evil Martian settlers kidnapping Earth women, living like animals in their crude underground shelters, fighting.
Fighting
!

"I know," Tanabe said humbly. "They are of course highly exaggerated, but still . . . And the news is so bad, so I turned it off. The Tokyo indices were down a hundred and fifty last night."

"I don't know what that means," Dekker said, polite but incurious.

"What it means is that my father is about half a million cues poorer than he was yesterday," Tanabe said bitterly. "Oh, there's plenty left—so far. But where will it end?"

Dekker covered a yawn. "It's only money, Tanabe. Is that why you're studying so hard now?"

"While you are studying quite other things with that woman?" Tanabe hesitated, then said, "I know this is not my concern, DeWoe, but listen to what I say. Ven Kupferfeld is not only well connected, she is far stronger than you are. She will eat you alive, man."

"Yes, I'd like that," Dekker agreed, to make the annoying man shut up. Tanabe did. Without another word Tanabe retired to his own room, and when they both got up the next morning he was polite but did not refer to the dangerousness of Ven Kupferfeld again.

Dekker did, though.

The next time he was at Yen's condo, finishing the microcooked meal that they had prepared out of her larder "to save time for studying," he could not help telling her the amusing story of how Tanabe had warned him against her.

Ven didn't seem surprised. She wasn't even offended. She simply handed Dekker her dirty plate and silverware thoughtfully. She watched him carrying them to the cleaner before she said, "What do you think, Dekker? Am I doing you any harm?"

"Of course not," he said, meaning to reassure. "I don't even think Tanabe thought you'd actually
hurt
me in any way. He was just trying to say that you were very different from me."

"Am I?"

Dekker started to say a positive "No," then thought for a second. "Well, of course you're different. There's nothing wrong with that, though. I like you like that."

"Different how, Dekker?" she insisted.

He spread his hands, grinning. "Where do you want me to start?"

"Anywhere you like. Start with the first thing that comes to your mind."

"Well—" He thought for a moment. After rejecting the first two or three "first" things, he settled on one. "Well, just experience. You've been so many places I've just heard about. With your grandfather, I mean."

"Which places?"

"I suppose
all
of them. All those old battlegrounds, for instance. And Africa. Why did you go there, anyway? There aren't any battlegrounds in Africa."

"The hell there aren't," she said. "Africa's about as bloody as any continent in the world, and that's saying a lot. But that's not why I liked it best."

Remembering, Dekker said, "But you wouldn't tell me why because you said you didn't know me well enough yet. Do you now?"

"Probably not," she said, kissing his cheek, but when they were sitting side by side on her couch she began to tell him anyway. "The African game was all protected—you know that." He nodded. "Well, we managed to make a kill anyway."

He sat up to look at her. "How?"

"How? Grandy Jim bribed the rangers, what do you think?"

As she told the story Dekker looked at her almost unbelievingly. But it seemed to be true. Her grandfather had "contacts." His contacts took his money, smuggled him and his then teenage granddaughter onto the reserve, suborned the park rangers, even gave them weapons, two of them, .38-caliber magnetics. The guns were nothing you could kill an elephant with—but even the bribed rangers wouldn't dare anything as immense and conspicuous as an elephant—but they were plenty to kill anything smaller, if you caught it right.

Even a lion.

"That's what Grandy wanted me to have," she said, sounding half fierce, half sentimental. "A lion. An old, mean one, with a black mane. A man-killer. So when the ranger found the right track and spoor—that's shit, Dekker, lion shit—and we knew there was a lion around, the ranger sloped off. My grandfather shot a Grant's gazelle for bait—not to kill, just in the shoulder so it couldn't get away very fast—and we tracked that damn thing limping away until the lion came. Oh, Dekker," she said, her breath coming fast, "I was
scared
, I had just that little popgun, you know! But I let the lion make its kill, and then I killed the lion. One shot. Right through the eye and into the brain. Grandy picked me up and gave me a big kiss, right there."

She stopped, studying Dekker's face. Then she laughed—not a sneering kind of laugh, just a fondly amused one. "Oh, Dek," she said, "it's a good thing you Martians fuck better than you fight. So what do you say? Why don't we get back to what you're good at?"

It all went as well as ever, but while Dekker was still breathing hard, Ven Kupferfeld was already sitting up. "I don't think we finished the wine, did we? Let's not let it go to waste."

He followed, still naked—but then, so was she. She was looking at him contemplatively. "That kind of thing shocks you, doesn't it, Dek? I mean, shooting a lion illegally? I'm sorry. Maybe Tanabe was right—"

"The hell he was," Dekker said, all the more forcefully because he wasn't sure it was true.

"I admit it's not what you'd call socially sound. I can't help it. My grandfather was a fine man, and they destroyed his career."

Dekker came back to stand over her, trying to find grounds for consensus between them.

"I guess," he said, not sure whether it was true, "that there were some good people hurt when they abolished wars."

"They didn't abolish wars, Dekker. They only abolished armies, and they'll be missed when the next war comes."

He looked at her in astonishment. "How can there be a next war? What would they fight it with?"

She shook her head. "Never underestimate the ability of human beings to find ways to fight. Maybe it's atavistic, but I do miss the old days. Dekker? Don't you Martians hate anybody?"

"Hate? I don't think so," he said, searching his memory. "There are plenty of people I don't like much, though."

"No, I mean
hate
. My grandfather hated the Japs."

"But Toro Tanabe—" he began, but she interrupted him impatiently.

"I'm not talking about your fucking roommate, I'm talking about all of them. Grandy said they were the ones that got wars abolished, them and their Peacekeepers. And now they're king of the heap." She stopped and looked at him as though she expected him to say something, but Dekker had nothing to say. This kind of thing was un-Martian, and therefore out of his experience—well, unless you counted the Ngemba family and the Masai. But none of the Ngembas had ever said "hate."

"What about us?" she asked. "Earthies, I mean. Don't all you Martians hate the dirtsuckers?"

He said stiffly, "There's a certain amount of fear, I guess, and resentment over the cost of the Bonds, and—"

"Not fear.
Hate
. Wouldn't you feel pretty good if something bad happened to the Earthies? I don't mean killing them, maybe."

"No." He thought for a moment, and then said it more forcefully. "
No
."

"Well, I would, if something bad happened to the Japs. We whipped their asses once, and I just wish we could do it again."

She sat thoughtful for a moment, then she reached up to caress his cheek.

The simple touch to his face altered the tone of the discussion for Dekker. "I see what you mean," he said vaguely—and really quite untruthfully—preparing for a rerun of their usual entertainment by sitting down next to her and putting his hand on her. But apparently he had mistaken her intentions. She didn't move toward him, as he had expected. She didn't move away, either. She just sat there, leaning back against a corner of the couch and studying him. Then she said abruptly:

"Why are you so frightened of wars?"

That made him sit up. "I'm not
frightened
of wars, Ven. I just think they're barbaric. We're better off without them."