Mining the Oort Read Free

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.