4
Sunpoint City was a settlement of a whole different order from Sagdayev. Sunpoint City's mountain was the truly impressive Pavonis Mons, topping out at twenty kilometers and startling to look at, even for Martian-born Dekker DeWoe. The city sat right on the Martian equator—that was of course why it was called "Sunpoint." Therefore it was the point where the Skyhook touched down, and therefore the metropolis of the planet.
The other impressive thing about Sunpoint City was that, by Martian standards, it was vast. There were more than nine hundred people living in its nearly three kilometers of underground tunnels and chambers, all carved out of the soil under the Martian surface caliche and doubly sealed to keep the precious atmosphere inside.
Dekker DeWoe was awed. He had never seen so many strangers before. Some of them were really strange—in fact, some were not Martians at all. Sunpoint was where off-planet visitors arrived, and where many of them stayed. It held several dozen Germans, Americans, Ukrainians, Japanese, Brazilians—whole families of them—people from Earth! As they strolled together down one of the passageways Dekker's mother pointed a group of the Earthies out, three or four grown-ups and a couple of children. "Take a good look," she whispered. "You won't see them very often." Dekker knew why. The Earthies kept pretty much to themselves, in their own luxurious quarters.
"Can we see where they live?" he asked.
"Well, we can walk by their section," his mother said, after a moment's thought. "We haven't been invited in, though." But when they got to the Earthie quarter, a level down from the—slightly—risky top sections of Sunpoint, there wasn't much to see. It looked pretty much like any other part of the city, just another corridor, though conspicuously marked diplomatic area. Loud music was coming out of it, though. That was certainly strange; people didn't trespass on other people's hearing, did they? It did not look any grander than the corridor that held the DeWoes' own borrowed cubicle—not from the entrance, anyway—though Dekker did notice something strange about it. A dozen small rectangles of patterned, colored fabric hung from sticks in the walls. "They're pretty," Dekker said, to be polite.
"They're flags," his mother explained. "The one with the red stripes, I think that's the flag for America." And as they walked back to their own place she startled him by telling him that, down that corridor, the Earthies had private rooms for each person, as well as such other unimaginable luxuries as bathtubs and even pets. "Two of the Earthie families have cats," his mother sniffed when they were back in their own quarters, "and Tinker says there used to be a parrot, but it died." And when he asked how the Earthies could afford such wanton waste, she said somberly, "Earthies can afford anything, Dekker. Especially because, you know, we're the ones who'll be paying for it."
"Oh, right," he said, enlightened. "The Bonds."
"The Bonds," Tinker Gorshak growled from the doorway, surprising Dekker, who hadn't known he was there. "Earthies and the Bonds," he said, moving his mouth as though he wanted to get rid of the words.
He wasn't alone, either. A little kid was hanging on one of Tinker's legs, thumb in his mouth, staring at Dekker. "This is my grandson, Tsumi," the old man said proudly. "We came by to see if you needed any help. You boys are going to have fun together, Dek."
Feeling his mother's eye on him, Dekker put out his hand to shake the kid's. He pulled it back quickly; it was the one Tsumi had had in his mouth, and it was still spit-wet, but Tinker, not noticing, went back to his subject. "The Earthies say they're here to supervise their investments, but they're really tourists. They came to watch the fireworks show! And we're paying a thousand cues a day for each one of them. Do you know what cues are, Dekker? Their money. Hard money."
Dekker's mother shook her head at him. "Dekker knows what currency units are, Tinker," she said.
"And does he know that we have to borrow the goddam things from them, so we can use the funds to pay for them? Because they don't want the things we have, here, you know. What they want has to come from Earth, and it has to get paid for in Earth currency units."
Gerti DeWoe sighed. "Tinker," she said, half joking, "I think you need docility training more than the kids do. Anyway, as long as you're here, let's get some work done. Help me get everything put away."
That didn't take long for the refugees from Sagdayev—even with Tinker's pesty little grandson getting in the way—since they didn't have many possessions to stow. The funny thing was, Tinker told them, that all over Sunpoint the locals were engaged in the same activity. The refugees from Sagdayev thought it was pretty comical that the Sunpointers should be worrying about the comet impact for themselves. There could be no doubt that Sunpoint City was far enough away to be safe from even ground tremors. Mars was too old to suffer much seismic activity, even when some tens of millions of tons of cometary material smashed onto its crust. All the same, since the refugees were guests of Sunpoint City, it was only good manners to help their hosts. So they all turned out to get everything battened down, books off the shelves, walls braced, breakables stowed away, and to help emergency crews practice damage control with sealant in case the outside walls sprang a leak.
The trouble with everybody being busy was that Dekker had to be busy, too. Not with anything useful. With baby-sitting. It was Tinker's idea, but Gerti DeWoe endorsed it. "Of course you can keep an eye on Tsumi," she said reasonably. "You'll be a big help. Tinker's got all he can do, and so does Tsumi's father." So did she. She didn't say that, but she didn't have to, so Dekker resigned himself to the company of the brat.
The trouble was that the brat wasn't interested in showing Dekker around Sunpoint City, which could have been interesting. He wanted Dekker to play with him, and Dekker got pretty tired of playing little kids' games. Tsumi didn't even want to use the virtual-reality hoods, or at least not the kinds he was old enough to be permitted, although it was a heaven-sent opportunity for kids. With everyone else so busy, most of the time the hoods were idle. The brat wouldn't sit still, either.
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.