Mining the Oort Read online

  Nearing desperation, Dekker suggested, "How about reading a book?"

  "A book." Tsumi sneered. "Screw books. If you want a book, you can have mine." He fumbled in his belly pouch and pulled out a book cartridge. "This is old butt-face's idea of a good book," he said, throwing it at Dekker. "I didn't want this crap. I wanted a book about war."

  Dekker caught the book and turned it over. Its tide was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and according to the jacket it was written by somebody named Mark Twain. "Don't be an idiot," he told the boy. "Who wants to read books about war?"

  "I do. You see wars, don't you? In the eights-and-up docility? So if it's all right for you, why for Jesus' sake can't I read about them?"

  "Because you're too young."

  "That isn't fair," Tsumi said spitefully. Well, Dekker thought, maybe it wasn't. But it wasn't his fault. He hadn't made the rule that the under-eights couldn't see war clips and, come to that, it wasn't fair for him to be stuck with this nasty little piece of work all day, either. His mother had been wrong, Dekker decided. Maybe old Tinker Gorshak did need some docility training, but nobody needed it more than his grandson.

  Then the world's pressures eased for Dekker, because suddenly it was time for Tsumi's actual docility class; because, of course, it never mattered how busy things got or how little spare time anyone had. There was always time for docility training, because the world, the worlds, had long ago passed the point where they could survive their own internal stresses without something like it.

  Dekker, at eight, didn't have to attend the little kids' class. Once he had succeeded in getting Tsumi in the room he was free. He found a quiet place to sit. He took out the book Tsumi had thrown at him and thumbed the "start" button to see what it was going to be like.

  He hadn't hoped for much. But as the words flowed across the screen, he glanced at them, then read them more attentively, and then was hooked.

  When he was finally permitted to return Tsumi to his grandfather's care, Dekker kept the book. As time allowed he read in it, marveling at such outré concepts as "slaves" and "guns" and, perhaps most of all, "rivers." When he came to the part where Huck feigned his own suicide—suicide!—to escape from his drunken father's beatings—beatings!—he went back and reread it twice to make sure he was understanding what the author meant to say.

  So Dekker was not the only boy in human history whose father hadn't particularly cared for him.

  Dekker tried to regard that as a comforting thought, but it wasn't.

  Every night on the flat screens there were pictures of the approaching comet, a big, dirty snowball, ten kilometers through.

  Its temperature was no longer at the icy cold of its birth out in the almost-interstellar Oort cloud, because it had already swung around close to the Sun to slow itself down before climbing back out to intercept Mars. It was warming up. Some of its gases were making its spectacular tail, and even its core was growing fuzzy.

  Watching the thing grow on the news screens didn't satisfy Dekker. It was not anything like being up on the surface itself, in facemask and thermal suit. So when Dekker's mother was detailed to go outside to help secure the city's all-important solar power cells, Dekker invited himself to join the work party. The brat would certainly not be there. It was going to be fun to be out with the workers, even though Tinker Gorshak would be there, too.

  5

  Mars isn't entirely without water. But neither is the sand of the Sahara Desert, if you are willing to work hard enough to get the bound water of crystallization out of the sand grains, and if you're content with a tiny reward. Most of the accessible water Mars has is frozen in the polar ice caps—much good may that do anyone. There's also a certain amount of water that is frozen in mud, under the surface caliche, but it stays there because the distant Sun isn't able to heat the surface enough to melt much of it out; Mars gets only about half Earth's sunshine. Some parts of Mars are marked with the evidence that there once was real flowing water there, namely such scarring as floodplains, and the dendritic riverbeds called lahars. Perhaps streams once did flow in the lahars, when some brief volcanic flurry melted some of that frozen mud and forced it to the surface, so that it flowed downhill until it evaporated into the parched air. It doesn't do that anymore. When people first came to Mars some of them tried to melt out the icy mud under the hardpan. If, they thought, you could drive out some of those volatiles you could increase the density of the atmosphere, which would warm things up, which would help drive out more volatiles. Or, to put it in another way, if you had some eggs you could make ham and eggs, if you had some ham.

  6

  The grotesque, rusty landscape of Mars was the only landscape Mars-born Dekker DeWoe had ever known. He would not have tried to tell anyone it was beautiful. Few youngsters think of such things as the beauty of a landscape in the ordinary course of their lives, and Mars was very ordinary to Dekker. He found the scenery he lived in unsurprising and, actually, quite homey.

  Going out with the work party onto the rubbly plain was a welcome break from the tunnels of Sunpoint City, especially since Tsumi Gorshak hadn't been allowed along. Tsumi's grandfather Tinker, though, kept getting on Dekker's nerves. Tinker insisted on helping. Every time Dekker picked up one edge of the great sheets of protective film, Gorshak materialized beside him to lend a hand, grinning silently through the faceplate of his suit. Dekker hated that. The old man treated him as though he were a child.

  Dekker generally spent a lot of time trying to stay away from Tinker Gorshak, and it wasn't only because of his pesky grandkid. Tinker had faults of his own. To begin with, he was an old, old man. He was nearly forty in Martian years, or over seventy by Earth's standards; after all, he even had grandchildren. Tinker Gorshak was, in fact, one of the very earliest Martian settlers. For that reason, Dekker had a certain amount of respect for Tinker, but he was wary of the man, too, because he knew why the old man was always trying to be his friend. Gorshak kept on doing things for the boy—taking him along on survey trips, or to check the slow growth of the crystal mushroom plantations; bringing him little presents of apples and strawberries as the aeroponic crops grew in the hothouses; asking him how he was doing at school. Dekker wasn't flattered. He didn't want Gorshak's gifts, and he didn't think Gorshak specially cared about how he was doing. What Tinker Gorshak actually wanted was to marry Gertrud DeWoe, and Dekker really didn't want his mother getting married again—even if his father had been actually dead instead of only divorced.

  What made it hard to rebuff Gorshak's offers of help was the fact that, although Dekker did his best in struggling with the covers for the photovoltaic cells, the job really called for adult muscles. It required wrestling huge sheets of film over the long mirrors and the troughs of photocells that turned the sunlight into electrical power. It was also, the people from Sagdayev muttered to each other, pretty much a waste of time. True, it was only common sense to protect your power supplies. If anything happened to the photovoltaic cells, the city of Sunpoint would be in desperate trouble. But what could happen to them? No pieces of the comet would stray so far as to destroy Sunpoint City's mirrors. There might well be some hellish huge dust storms, but those were always a problem on Mars, and every deme's photovoltaic arrays had survived plenty of dust storms before.

  So Dekker wasn't much help to the suited, sweating men and women unfurling the great film sheets, and it didn't make things easier when he could hardly keep his eyes on the ground because so much was fascinating in the sky. There was the great comet itself, its glowing, milky tail spreading almost from horizon to horizon even in the bright midday sunshine. Even more exciting for the boy from the back hills, there were the skinny spiderweb cables that stretched up to invisibility where the Skyhook did its work of lifting capsules from surface to orbit.

  It was also true that the heat of the Martian day sapped much of what strength Dekker could muster for the job. Where Sunpoint sat on the Martian equator, in the middle of this summer day, the temperature was o
ver twenty degrees Celsius. When Dekker dropped his end of a sheet for the third time, Tinker Gorshak hand-signaled to him angrily, and his mother came over and pressed her facemask against his own.

  "Better give it up, Dekker," she advised, her voice thin and faint. "Go find something else to do. We'll finish this without you."

  Dekker signaled agreement gladly enough. There was indeed something else that he preferred to do, and he had only been waiting for the chance.

  Deceitfully, he started back in the direction of the city lock, craning over his shoulder to see what the work party was doing. When he was sure they were too busy to be bothering with him anymore, he changed direction, hurried along in the shelter of the mirrors, and headed out for the open plain.

  The scenery before Dekker's eyes was all brand new to him. What he saw when he looked around the Martian surface were shadows like ink, boulders colored rose and rust, and a pink sky with the small, bright Sun overhead. It not only wasn't like Earth, it wasn't much like Dekker's familiar backyard, either. Sagdayev's soil was browner and grayer at this time of year; here at Sunpoint it was all pink windblown sands over the caliche. An Earthie might not have seen a difference between the two, but Dekker did.

  Of course, that was only natural. All Martians knew that no one but the Martians knew what Mars really looked like. The mudsuckers could never understand. There was an Earth TV show that Dekker and the other Martian settler kids sometimes watched, because it was funny. It wasn't meant to be funny. It was supposed to be a kind of soap opera about passions and perversions among the Martian colonists, but any Martian could see that it was a fake. The whole thing had been computer-shot in studios somewhere on Earth. Good enough to fool the mudsuckers, but an obvious fraud nevertheless.

  When Dekker had put a kilometer's worth of hillocks between himself and the work party, he stopped. It was as bright as daylight ever got on Mars, and the Sun as hot. Dekker turned down the heating coils in his suit and looked up at the sky.

  The comet was majestic above him.

  The thing was immense. Its tail now was forked into two streams of milky light, hardly dimmed by the sunlight. It spread from the western horizon, up past the midday sun and the spindly cables of the Skyhook, almost to the top of the mountain to the east. Dekker could hardly take it in all at once. The facemask wasn't built for sky-gazing. Although it gave nearly 360-degree vision in all horizontal directions, it wasn't made for looking up.

  So, being well away from any interfering grown-ups, Dekker did what he had to do to observe the spectacle. He lay down on the rusty, pebbly Martian soil. He leaned against the side of a little boulder that wore a reddish yarmulke of dust on its top and gazed straight up. He slipped his arm out of the sleeve of his suit, fumbled in his waist pouch for a biscuit, and with two fingers eased it past the stiff helmet collar. He nibbled the biscuit thoughtfully while he admired the comet.

  Dekker was feeling happy. It wasn't just the comet that Dekker wanted to find, out on the barren plains of the dead planet. There was something else there for him, and its name was "privacy."

  Dekker didn't spend much time thinking about whether he disliked living in an underground town, where everyone was always in everyone else's pocket. He had no other life to compare it with; he had lived in Sagdayev deme since he was born. Dazzlingly huge as Sunpoint was to him, it was only a larger Sagdayev. There was no chance in any Martian settlement for the solitude a young boy needs. So as soon as he was old enough to be trusted out by himself, Dekker had spent a lot of his free roaming out of sight among the barren dunes. Out there, he had seen the comet almost as soon as the naked eye could detect it at all, more than a year earlier, when it was only a minute pearly blotch in the nighttime sky. He had followed it down toward its rendezvous with the Sun until it was lost in the solar glare, and picked it up again as it began its return toward Mars orbit. Now it was certainly a spectacular sight. It didn't really look like green fields and rainstorms and cloudy sunsets, but that was what it was supposed to turn into—though of course Dekker knew that this comet was only the first and tiniest beginning of the long effort to make Mars live.

  And out there in the Oort, where this comet had been born and had lived its billion-year incidentless life until some Oort miner had zapped it and threaded it and sent it falling in toward the Sun—out there in the Oort, right this minute, some other Oort miners were picking other comets for the harvest.

  Just as Dekker's father had done, once.

  Dekker wrenched his thoughts away from that subject. Dekker didn't want to think about his father. Dekker had spent too many hours already thinking about the man—yes, crying about the man, too, sometimes when he was little—in all the long Martian years since Boldon DeWoe had lifted him up and kissed him good-bye and given him a stuffed animal to remember his father by, and set off for the Oort . . . and never come back.

  Oh, the man was alive still, no doubt, somewhere on Earth—Dekker's mother had told him that, on the one of the few times she ever talked about her former husband. But Boldon DeWoe had never come back to see his son.

  Dekker wanted something better than that to do with his precious solitary time, so he fumbled in his suit pouch again and pulled the Huckleberry Finn book out. He forwarded through to the part about the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons and read it over again. How baffling it was! How awful. People causing death to each other, and not for any crazy impulse of passion but deliberately, because of some matter of pride . . . yes, and other people applauding them for it, as though that sort of beastlike behavior were the most natural, and even the most proper, thing for them to do!

  He could not understand. He gave up trying after a while and read on. He was back on the safety of the raft with Huck and the runaway slave, Jim, when something made him stop reading. He snapped off the book and blinked, squirming around in his suit. He became aware that he was feeling a slithery, clattery vibration from the soil under him. He jumped to his feet to look around.

  A buggy was coming toward him, heading in the direction of Sunpoint City.

  He couldn't hear it, of course. No one could hear much in the scanty Martian atmosphere, but he could see the buggy clearly as it topped a rise. Evidently the driver saw him. The vehicle hesitated, then made a sharp turn. Rusty pebbles flew like spray from one set of its great mesh wheels; then all wheels spun together and it rolled rapidly to his side. It stopped with the nearest wheel almost touching him, and a young girl looked down at him from the enclosed control seat.

  Dekker realized he had seen her before. She was one of the Earthies his mother had pointed out, and he had even heard her name. Anna? Annette? Something like that. There was no question that she was an Earthie, anyway. Dekker didn't have to recognize her face to know that, because no Martian child would have been allowed a buggy of her own just to wander around in.

  The Earthie girl was gesturing for him to climb up and join her inside the buggy.

  Dekker scowled up at her. He hadn't come out onto the plain to talk to some spoiled Earth brat! But she had already ruined his solitude, and anyway it was easier for him to do what she wanted than to try to argue about it in sign language. He gave in, stepped between the metal mesh wheels, each one twice as tall as Dekker himself, and climbed the spike ladder into the little entrance.

  When the air hissed in and the inner door clicked he opened the door and unsealed his facemask to look at her.

  "Are you lost?" the girl asked. "You shouldn't go out here by yourself. What would happen if you fell or something? Your father's going to give you hell, boy!"

  "I'm not lost," he told her. He didn't bother to tell her all the ways m which she was wrong. If he fell! He supposed she meant if he broke a leg or something—imagine breaking a leg here! Where there was nothing high enough to fall from, and only the gentle Martian gravity to speed the rail. Even if he had somehow managed to knock himself unconscious the suit radio would immediately send out a distress signal and someone would be out to rescue
him in minutes.

  There was one other thing she was very wrong about. His father was certainly nowhere around to punish him, but he wasn't prepared to talk about that to this young female mudsucker from Earth.

  "I guess you just wanted to look at the comet, like me," she said, studying his face. "My name's Annetta Cauchy."

  He shook her hand, mostly to show that he knew Earth customs. "I'm Dekker DeWoe." And, to show that he recognized her, "You're Mr. Cauchy's daughter."

  She nodded graciously, as though he had given her a compliment. "Isn't the comet pretty?" she asked, making polite conversation.

  "I guess so."

  She nodded again, satisfied with his concurrence. Then she advised him, "You ought to like it. It costs a zillion dollars to bring those things here, and my daddy is one of the people paying for it. He's an underwriter for the Bonds."

  Although Dekker wondered for a moment what an "underwriter" was, he didn't answer that. He had heard all he wanted to hear about what the Earthies were paying for, and what they were going to want in return. Anyway, she didn't seem to expect an answer. She was pointing out the window to the Skyhook cable, where a capsule was sliding swiftly down toward the touchdown on the far side of Sunpoint. "My daddy's firm helped pay for that, too," she told him. "It's nice. I rode down it when I came from Earth with my parents. I'll be going up it again when we go home. Would you like to go into space some day?"

  "Of course I would. I will," Dekker said sternly, "some day."

  The girl looked skeptical but polite. She sighed to show she was changing the subject, but without prejudice to her own opinions, and frowned as she looked around at the mountainside. "Tell me, Dekker," she said. "Don't you think all this stuff is pretty, well, creepy? It looks like somebody's just thrown rocks around."