Mining the Oort Page 10

  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.

  Lunch was on the terrace, with the adults all pleasingly absent. When it was over Walter said, "I promised you we'd study, Dekker. Shall we do it?"

  Surprisingly, Walter was serious about it, and Dekker found that studying with a friend was a big improvement over sitting all alone before the screen in his father's apartment. Dekker was better at math than Walter Ngemba, but the Kikuyu boy came into his own when they turned to planetary astronomy. Dekker was surprised at how much Walter Ngemba knew about the moons of the gas giants, the orbital patterns of asteroids, and especially about the dimensions and characteristics of the planets themselves. It was not a subject that Dekker had spent much time on. It didn't seem useful. Dekker could see that it was possibly interesting as a matter of scientific curiosity, but he had no personal intention of venturing anywhere near any of the less benign planets.

  Walter had no such reservations. He knew as much about the gas giants as about the Earthlike ones. He rattled off radii, masses, orbital periods, and chemical compositions of everything from Saturn through Pluto as handily as though they related to stock on his father's farm.

  The studying went so well they kept it up right through dinner, which, at Walter's suggestion, they had brought to them in Walter's study. It had never occurred to Dekker that that might be an option, and he was delighted to be spared the company of the elders.

  "You seem to be really fond of astronomy," Dekker said, finishing the last bites of his omelet.

  He hadn't meant anything by it, but Walter flushed. "Don't you?" he asked.

  "Well, sure. Sort of. When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time out on the plains at night, looking up at the stars."

  "So did I. Hell, Dekker, I still do. Listen, it's dark; finish your coffee—or take it with you—and we'll go out on the terrace."

  It wasn't quite full dark; a hint of a dull purplish glow still hung over the western escarpment. But the stars were out and so were the comets, more of them than ever, and Dekker regarded every one of them with proprietary pleasure.

  "Great sky. It's almost as clear here as it is at Sagdayev," he commented.

  "I'd like to see Sagdayev sometime," Walter said wistfully. Dekker didn't respond to that; of course, a rich Earthie could take a tourist trip to Mars anytime he liked—maybe even get the hard-pressed Martian economy to pick up the bill for it, if he wanted to and if Mr. Theodore Ngemba still owned any of the Bonds. But it didn't seem polite to say that to his friend.

  He leaned over the rail, peering out onto the dark plain. Nothing was moving there, though he could picture in his mind a vision of that hunting lion he had seen by the airstrip slipping noiselessly through the brush. There was a warm breeze coming up from the plains, but the night was silent. Dekker could hear only a faint sound of conversation from the card room inside, where Doris was playing canasta with her stepmother, and the distant zzzt zzzt of insects being incinerated in the bug zappers scattered around the grounds.

  "There's Mars," Walter said, pointing at the sky.

  Dekker was startled. "Where?" And when he'd located it—bright enough, but pale yellow rather than red, he thought, hanging close below the far-brighter white dot that was Jupiter—he gazed wonderingly. So tiny and so distant, but still his own whole world.

  "Tell me about Mars," Walter ordered.

  So Dekker tried to describe Sagdayev for his friend, and then Walter Ngemba talked about his own life. Dekker was surprised to find that the people he had met were not Walter's whole family. He had two younger sisters. Both of them were living with their mother, Theodore Ngemba's first wife, in a villa at one of the fashionable resorts in the Seychelles. Duri
ng the school week he stayed with an aunt in Nairobi—she was the one who supplied the pale blue limousine. He had a privileged life, he admitted. And yet he wanted more.

  He did not say what "more" was, and Dekker did not ask, either. After they had been silent for a while, Dekker turned to him, thinking to mention that it was about time for bed.

  Walter was staring raptly at the comets. Dekker had been about to say something to him, but the yearning expression on the Kenyan boy's face stopped him. But what in the world did a rich Earthie have to yearn for?

  The Sunday morning breakfast was a leisurely affair, with the adults drinking champagne and Mr. Theodore Ngemba holding forth. He had been watching the early news as he dressed and was not satisfied. "Citizenship training," he announced, "is not doing its job. Have you seen the stories? It's just one kind of violence cropping up after another, all over the world. Right now there's a major strike going on in a place called Khalistan, whatever that is."

  "It's in India," his daughter informed him. "They're striking because they want independence—like Mara."

  "Mara," Mr. Ngemba said, contempt in his voice. "What foolishness."

  Walter saw Dekker's confusion and explained. "Mara is something the Masai say they want, Dekker. This is Mara. The Masai want to have their own country, independent of Kenya, and they call it Mara."

  "Yes," his father said, "and what would they do with this Mara if they had it? The Masai have no industry, no universities, no real culture. They can't even run a farm properly themselves."

  "The ones in our school seem bright enough," Dekker offered.

  "Perhaps the very few elite, yes," Mr. Ngemba conceded generously, and clearly conscious of his generosity. "But how many are there of those?"

  Mrs. Kurai chuckled. "Enough to throw you out if they all got together, Theodore," she said. "Just like your great-great-grandfather threw out the English."

  He smiled back at her. "But, you see, my dear Dolores, they can't. The Masai don't have any Mau Mau to do the trick for them, and if any of them tried to start one we'd just put the rascals in for rehabilitation until they got the notion out of their heads."

  There were more questions there than Dekker wanted to ask in this group. He bode his time until he and Walter were alone before asking for explanations. Walter looked slightly embarrassed. "Oh, the Mau Mau. Yes, several of our ancestors were Mau Mau—had to be, didn't they, or our family wouldn't have amounted to much afterward. It was a political thing. You see, Kenya used to be an English colony, until a man named Jomo Kenyatta organized the Kikuyu into the organization they called the Mau Mau, to drive the English out."

  "By calling a strike, like these people in Khalistan?"

  Walter looked at him in astonishment. "Hell, no, Dekker. By killing enough English to make them decide it cost too much to stay. I thought you'd know that. The Mau Mau would just gather around some English farmhouse one quiet night and butcher everybody inside, and then they'd be gone before the troops could get there. Bloody business, yes, but it worked. A few years of trying to catch those chaps and the English took the hint and packed it in."

  Dekker was speechless. When Walter saw the look on his face he added quickly, "That was a long time ago, of course. Things are different now."

  "I hope so," Dekker said.

  "Well, they are. Listen," Walter said, forcefully changing the subject, "I think we've done enough studying for one weekend, and I don't want to subject you to more of my father than is strictly necessary. What say we take a safari van and take a tour around the game trails?"

  They did, and, with Walter driving, it was an experience. Bumping over the potholed game trails Dekker wondered if he could keep the breakfast down, but the bizarre things he saw made him forget his discomfort. Dekker spotted the corpse of a little antelope kind of animal in a tree, and when he asked about it Walter called, "That's a leopard kill. They put the animals they catch up there for safekeeping, but we're not likely to see an actual leopard today, though." They didn't. However, they did see elephants, thirty or forty of them at a time, wandering slowly across the brush and munching vegetation as they went. They saw hippos in the bend of a river, with a loglike creature, as still as though stuffed, patiently watching from the bank. "It's a croc," Walter said. "It's hoping to catch a baby hippo off by itself." They saw antelopes of many kinds, and buffalo, and giraffes—infinitely taller, when seen from the ground, than they had appeared from the plane on the way up.

  If you left out the animals and the heat—and, of course, the air—Dekker thought, you could almost imagine you were on Mars. The plains looked quite a lot like the rose-rust slopes around Sagdayev, if it hadn't been for the scraggly vegetation that cropped up all around. It almost made him homesick. And then Walter stopped the van and glanced at his watch. "I've been thinking," he said, and stopped there.

  Dekker took his opportunity. "So have I," he said. "Walter? What did your father and Mrs. Kurai mean about the Oort project?"

  Walter looked embarrassed. "I wondered if you'd ask about that. They've been selling off their interests in the project, I think. Well, no. I mean, they really have. They're not satisfied about the financial prospects. It has something to do with those new habitat things."

  Dekker stared at him. He had heard of the habitats, of course, everyone had: tin-can things in space, orbiting Earth sometimes or perhaps not orbiting anything much at all, completely self-sufficient. "They're talking about growing crops on the habitats," Walter explained. "Father's invested in them rather heavily, I think. Supposed to be more economical than growing on Mars, with all that shipping—and, of course, the habitat farms would be a lot quicker to pay off."

  "But that's not the point," Dekker said sensibly. "Mars is a whole planet. I know we're supposed to pay off the Bonds with crops—and we will, with interest, too, don't forget that—but that's not all of it. We'll have a whole new world!"

  "Of course," Walter said. "I'm just telling you what Father says." He hesitated and changed the subject. "You'll be leaving the school soon, won't you?" he asked.

  "I will?"

  "Well, that's what Mr. Cummings said. To take your Oort training, I mean."

  "I suppose I will," Dekker said slowly, wondering how it happened this boy knew as much of his plans as he did.

  Walter nodded. "You know," he said, "I wasn't going to say anything—and, for God's sake, please don't breathe a word about it at home—but there's just a chance I might see you there. Fact is, I've been hoping to take a shot at Oort training myself."

  "What does your father think of that?"

  Walter looked glum. "He doesn't know yet. He'll hate the idea. But I'll be of age this fall, and then I'm going to apply."

  Dekker studied him. "Good luck," he said. "Is that what you were thinking of?"

  "What?"

  "You said, 'I've been thinking.'"

  "Oh." Walter grinned, and glanced at his watch again. "No, what I was thinking about was something else. Look, Dekker, I saw the way you've been looking at Doris. She's a terrible flirt, but of course she's much too young for, well, anything—not even to mention how Father would feel. But there are other possibilities."

  Dekker was baffled—a little resentful, too, because he certainly had had no particular intention of ever going any farther with Doris Ngemba than looking. "What kind of possibilities?" he demanded.

  "I'll show you," Walter said, looking happily guilty, and started the van up. And in ten minutes they were in a village of thatched-roof huts set in a circle around a plaza of trampled earth, with idle Masai men drowsing in the afternoon sun and Masai women bustling around. There were flies all over, and a pervasive stink. "Cow dung," Walter said, grinning. "They use it to plaster their huts." Walter stopped the van and got out, Dekker following.

  Walter looked around, and then pointed at one hut. "They'll take care of you in there," he said. The man outside it had climbed to his feet and was nodding to Walter. "That's Sheila's place. You'll like her; there's another
one in the next hut over I'll take."

  "Take?" said Dekker, beginning to understand but unwilling to commit himself until he was sure.

  "That's how they make their living," Walter said impatiently. "What else do they have to sell but sex? If it's the money you're thinking of, don't give it another thought; it's my shout, of course. You're my guest. But, I say, you've had your hi-vac, haven't you?"

  "Hi-vac?"

  "HIV vaccine. Oh, hell. You haven't, have you? Well, hang on a minute." He stepped over to the hut, whispered for a moment with the man at the door, and came back with a pack of condoms. "Wear one of these, Dekker. Just don't kiss her, you'll be all right." He stopped to think. "Oh, listen—you're a Martian—these things only come in one size, but they stretch. They'll fit you all right, won't they?"

  So when Dekker got back to his father's flat that night he had learned an additional new skill: not only croquet, swimming, and the art of selecting the right fork at a formal dinner, but how to patronize a prostitute. It had been a very educational weekend.

  His education, though, was not quite complete. He had questions for his father, and was pleased to see that, though there was a bottle on the table beside him, and an empty glass, Boldon DeWoe was very nearly sober.

  The first question was mostly rhetorical: "Is it true that they're actually going to go ahead with that idea of growing crops for Earth in space habitats?"

  His father looked surprised, then depressed. "They say so. The Japanese are supposed to be starting to do it already, but it looks to me like it's still mostly talk. You saw the program on the screen. Anyway, I still think they've got too much invested in Mars now; they won't be able to stop it."

  "And did you tell the school I'm leaving?"

  His father's expression changed—a little guilty, a little resentful. "Somebody's been telling stories, hey? No. I didn't tell the school. I did tell Brian Cummings about it, because I needed his cooperation."

  "What kind of cooperation?" Dekker demanded.