Flatlander - Larry Niven [6]
We looked at the stars, my brothers and I. You can’t see stars from the city; the lights hide them. Even in the fields you couldn’t see them around the lighted horizon. But straight overhead, they were there: black sky scattered with bright dots and sometimes a flat white moon.
At twenty I gave up my UN citizenship to become a Belter. I wanted stars, and the Belt government holds title to most of the solar system. There are fabulous riches in the rocks, riches belonging to a scattered civilization of a few hundred thousand Belters, and I wanted my share of that, too.
It wasn’t easy. I wouldn’t be eligible for a singleship license for ten years. Meanwhile I would be working for others and learning to avoid mistakes before they killed me. Half the flatlanders who join the Belt die in space before they can earn their licenses.
I mined tin on Mercury and exotic chemicals from Jupiter’s atmosphere. I hauled ice from Saturn’s rings and quicksilver from Europa. One year our pilot made a mistake pulling up to a new rock, and we damn near had to walk home. Cubes Forsythe was with us then. He managed to fix the com laser and aim it at Icarus to bring us help. Another time the mechanic who did the maintenance job on our ship forgot to replace an absorber, and we all got roaring drunk on the alcohol that built up in our breathing air. The three of us caught the mechanic six months later. I hear he lived.
Most of the time I was part of a three-man crew. The members changed constantly. When Owen Jennison joined us, he replaced a man who had finally earned his singleship license and couldn’t wait to start hunting rocks on his own. He was too eager. I learned later that he’d made one round trip and half of another.
Owen was my age but more experienced, a Belter born and bred. His blue eyes and blond cockatoo’s crest were startling against the dark of his Belter tan, the tan that ended so abruptly where his neck ring cut off the space-intense sunlight his helmet let through. He was permanently chubby, but in free fall it was as if he’d been born with wings. I took to copying his way of moving, much to Cubes’s amusement.
I didn’t make my own mistake until I was twenty-six.
We were using bombs to put a rock in a new orbit. A contract job. The technique is older than fusion drives, as old as early Belt colonization, and it’s still cheaper and faster than using a ship’s drive to tow the rock. You use industrial fusion bombs, small and clean, and you set them so that each explosion deepens the crater to channel the force of later blasts.
We’d set four blasts already, four white fireballs that swelled and faded as they rose. When the fifth blast went off, we were hovering nearby on the other side of the rock.
The fifth blast shattered the rock.
Cubes had set the bomb. My own mistake was a shared one, because any of the three of us should have had the sense to take off right then. Instead, we watched, cursing, as valuable oxygen-bearing rock became nearly valueless shards. We watched the shards spread slowly into a cloud … and while we watched, one fast-moving shard reached us. Moving too slowly to vaporize when it hit, it nonetheless sheared through a triple crystal-iron hull, slashed through my upper arm, and pinned Cubes Forsythe to a wall by his heart.
A couple of nudists came in. They stood blinking among the booths while their eyes adjusted to the blue twilight, then converged with glad cries on the group two tables over. I watched and listened with an eye and an ear, thinking how different flatlander nudists were from Belter nudists. These all looked alike. They all had muscles, they had no interesting scars, they carried their credit cards in identical shoulder pouches, and they all shaved the same areas…. We always went nudist in the big bases. Most people did. It