17
What Dekker was good at wasn't worrying. It was working, and he worked. He worked at the courses that made no sense to him, even English history and "political science," whatever that was. He put the shocking thought of the possible cancellation of the Oort project out of his mind, and when his first grades came in on the text screen in his father's apartment he was pleased, and slightly astonished, to discover that he had placed third in the class.
His father, on the other hand, only nodded. "You've been working hard and studying hard," he pronounced. "What did you expect? Only bear down a little harder on the math, because it has to look good."
"What has to look good?" Dekker asked, but his father already had the earplugs in and was turning on the Nairobi-Jo'burg soccer game. Dekker went back to his studies.
The only thing he really worried about was how his classmates would react to this new Martian kid, this new white Martian kid, placing above twenty-nine of the thirty-two of them. As it turned out, they didn't seem hostile at all. Afira Kantado, the young woman who was fourth in the class—that is, the one who would have been third if Dekker hadn't preempted her place—did give him one short, surly look when the grades were posted. But the others congratulated him, joked with him, or didn't talk about it at all, which he liked best.
The jokes they made were about his accent, but Dekker had that long since squared away. He wasn't the one who talked funny. They talked funny, because—Mr. Cummings had told him, when they chatted for a moment before class one day—that was the perfectly natural way one spoke when one came of parents who had attended good schools. "Good schools," Dekker discovered, were limited to two: a pair of universities named "Oxford" and "Cambridge." The reason these young people were in this prep school was that as soon as they graduated most of them, too, would be off to complete their educations in this "England" where the "good schools" were.
Learning these things made Dekker feel better. When he also discovered that these students were about the brightest Nairobi had, he didn't feel quite so worried about comparisons with Martian students.
The other thing Dekker began to learn was that not all black was the same black. In his original, parochial view, all Earthies had been just Earthies; from his father he had learned that these particular Earthies were identified as Kenyans; now he found that even Kenyans thought of themselves more fractionatedly still. About half the boys, and almost all the girls, considered themselves what they called "Kikuyu," while the handful of tall, weedy, almost Martian-looking ones were called "Masai." Even that wasn't all, because there were a handful who came from other "tribes."
Dekker had to have that word explained to him. A tribe was not at all, Dekker discovered, the same thing as a deme. Tribes were a matter of genes, not location. Surprisingly, you continued to be part of your tribe even if you moved to some other tribe's deme.
All that astonished Dekker greatly. What did it matter what your relatives were?
But it seemed that it did matter, although except for the fact that the Masai were of pleasingly stretched-out proportions compared to the Kikuyu, Dekker could not distinguish between one tribe and another. The Kenyans all could, though. Infallibly, A fair proportion of the "citizenship" classes, as the shove-and-grunt sessions were properly called, were devoted to the subject, Mr. Cummings invariably beginning by reminding all the students that it didn't matter what tribe their ancestors had come from, they were all not only equal but, really, the same.
He got challenged on it, too. Afira Kantado raised her hand and pointed to Dekker. "He's not the same," she said.
"Of course he is, Kantado," Mr. Cummings said patiently, "or at least you should act as though he were." She looked unconvinced, so the teacher explained. "You know what the basis of good citizenship is. You don't have to like any other person. If you have bad feelings, that's all right. It's perfectly natural for you to dislike another person. The important thing is that you must always keep your resentments to yourself—except in these sessions, of course. If you let the hostilities and angers out in the outside world, that's when conflicts start—and violence—and, in the long run, it could even lead to wars. We don't want that, do we? So we must—DeWoe? Did you want to say something?"
Dekker had his hand up. "That isn't the way we do it on Mars," he pointed out.
There was a faint sound from the class, almost a titter. Mr. Cummings gave them a warning look. "No, of course it isn't, DeWoe," he agreed. Different places have different customs. I understand on Mars the thrust is to make you like each other, isn't it?"
Dekker frowned. "Not 'like,' exactly. There are plenty of people I don't particularly like. But we have to trust each other, and care for each other—we have to make sure everybody's being treated fairly. Like—" He had been going to say, "like the Law of the Raft," but changed his mind in the middle of the sentence."—like we're all family."
Mr. Cummings nodded tolerantly. "I suppose that's quite important on Mars, where the conditions are so much more—severe. And of course it would be even more so under even harsher conditions, would it not? For example, DeWoe, you're planning to go out into the Oort cloud to work. Why don't you tell the class what it's like out there?"
"I've never been there," he objected.
"But your father has. He must have told you stories about it."
The fact was, he hadn't. But Dekker was not prepared to admit that in public, so he did his best. "Out in the Oort," he said, "it's like Mars, only tougher. You can't throw your weight around. You can't afford to be jealous of somebody else, or try to get an advantage over him. You have to try to understand how the other person feels."
"It sounds good to me," Walter Ngemba put in, not bothering to raise his hand.
"It sounds stupid," Afira Kantado commented. "What about sex?"
"Sex?" Dekker repeated, trying to imagine what sex had to do with docility—or "citizenship."
"You keep saying 'him.' What about men and women? Don't they ever have two men loving the same woman?"
"Oh," said Dekker, relieved, "that. That's no problem. A man takes a duty wife—or a woman takes a duty husband—and they live together as long as they both want to. Then they stop."
One of the Masai had a hand up, snickering. "When your old man was in the Oort, did he have a duty wife?"
Dekker answered hotly, "My father has a wife. She's my mother. What would he want another wife for?"
Half a dozen hands went up then, over grinning faces. Mr. Cummings shook his head. "This is a very interesting discussion," he pronounced, "but the period's over. We'll resume it at our next session if you like—but now, good afternoon to you all."
As they clumped together at the door, Walter Ngemba touched Dekker's arm and said consolingly, "I'm sorry about that chap Merad. It's just that he's Masai, you know."
Dekker looked at him in surprise. "I thought everybody was supposed to be the same."
"Oh, everybody is. Even Masai. It's just that they are so, well, uncivilized, sometimes. But, look, I've had a thought. Have you got anything planned for the weekend? Because my father said he'd be delighted to have you come have a look at our farm."
"Farm?"
"Our family place. It's out in the Rift Valley. Can you come?"
It was a surprise, but a very pleasing one. "Why, sure. Thanks," Dekker began. Then second thoughts occurred to him. "I do have a lot of studying to do—"
"We can study together; we've got a lot of the same subjects, you know. Do you need to ask your father?"
Need to? "Not exactly," Dekker said.
"Well, talk to him about it. I expect he'll be out there waiting for you, won't he?"
But, as it turned out, that particular afternoon Boldon DeWoe wasn't. There was no sign of the little trike. As Dekker stood uncertainly on the sidewalk, looking up and down at the traffic, the Peacekeeper woman hurried over to him, putting her phone into its pouch and looking concerned.
"You're Dekker DeWoe, aren't you? Well, I've got a message for you. You have to go pick up your father at the Sunshine Shabeen."
"The what?"
"It's a bar," she explained. "Do you know where it is? It doesn't matter; you'll have to take a taxi anyway and the driver will know. All the drivers know the Sunshine Shabeen."
She turned to blow a peremptory blast on her whistle and, before Dekker could ask any questions, a cab swooped over out of the traffic screen. Yes, the driver certainly did know where the Sunshine Shabeen was. Then all Dekker had to worry about was whether the few cues on his amulet were going to be enough to pay the bill.
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.
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.
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. During 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.
His father shrugged. "Just cooperation. Anyway, it's true. You've gone about as far as you can go here. We're going to Denver."
"Denver?"
"It's in Colorado," his father snapped. "In America. Where the Oort headquarters are."
"I know where the Oort headquarters are," Dekker said stiffly.
"I hope to God so," his father said. "That's where you have to go to take your psych test and your entrance examination, and you'd better pass them both, Dek, because getting us set up there is going to cost a pisspot."
"Can you afford it?"
"It's about the only thing I can afford," his father said sourly; he looked thirstily at his bottle, but didn't drink.