Read Mining the Oort for Free Online Page B

on them when they had any pictures to hang. Or they lined the walls with shelves and cupboards, which was usually a necessity anyway, living space being as scarce as it was.
    But that was about as far as any Martian could afford to go with wall decorations, and Dekker had never before seen walls hung with draperies. They weren't just any old kind of spun-rock draperies, either. These were fabric draperies—woven out of organic fabrics, probably even out of real cotton and silk and wool, natural-fiber textiles that had to have been shipped all the way from Earth. At, as Tinker Gorshak would have been sure to point out, the expense of their Martian hosts.
    Dekker's consolation was that at least he had a worthy gift for his hosts, for Tinker Gorshak had come through for him. The old man had not stopped disapproving of Dekker's socializing with the Earthies, but all the same, he had postponed his own dinner long enough to escort Dekker down to the Sunpoint hothouse, and there he had wheedled an actual rosebud from his colleague, the amiable Mr. Chantly. When Dekker entered the Earthies' apartment—more than one room, obviously, since there were no beds in this one, although it was easily three times the size of the single room he shared with his mother—his eyes were popping as he held his flower before him like an ambassador's credentials, staring at everything around.
    It wasn't just the drapes on the walls, it was everything. Even the lights. There wasn't any one-dim-bulb rule here; the room was flooded with brilliant light. He had never seen people dressed like these, either—filmy, silky drapes on the women, puffed shirts and ruffled shorts on the men, nothing that would keep you warm or fit under a hotsuit. Nor had he ever seen a table longer than he was, and every square centimeter of it covered with food . Dozens of varieties of food. Dishes of spicy little balls of hot killed-animal. Fresh raw celery. Carrots slivered into pencil-thin strips (they had to be on even better terms with the hothouse geneticist than Tinker Gorshak was). Bowls of yellow or pink or green pastes to dip the vegetables in. "So glad you could come, Dekker," said the tall, yellow-haired Earthie woman who let him in. "Oh, a rose! How kind of you," she finished, sniffing it and offering it to her daughter. "Look, Annetta, Dekker has brought us a rose."
    "I'll put it with the others," the girl told her mother, and took Dekker's arm. "Come on, Dekker, let's hit the chow line. You must be starving."
    It was annoying to Dekker that this girl should always assume he was hungry. It was even more annoying, in fact embarrassing, when he observed that on the buffet table there were half a dozen vases of flowers, all kinds of flowers, and when Annetta thrust his lone contribution into one of the vases he could hardly find it again.
    But the fact was that as soon as she handed him a plate he found that she had been right. He really was hungry, his salivary glands flowing at the smells and sights of all that remarkable food. And Annetta was devoting herself to him. "Some lobster, Dekker? You've never had lobster? Well, these are only irradiated, you can't get live ones here, of course, but still—And try the guacamole! My mother made it herself, grew her own avocados in the aeroponics."
    The stuff called "guacamole" looked too much like the algae paste the cooks added to soups and stews, and Dekker certainly wasn't going to touch the funny-looking red-shelled stuff Annetta said was lobster. But there was plenty of other food to choose from. He let her guide him to the salads, and the killed-poultry legs in barbecue sauce, but when he took a good look at the display behind the table he stopped short.
    Across the top of the wall was a banner that read Cauchy, Stern-Glass & Co. celebrates the triumph of ecopoiesis. And under it was a row of pictures, the fake-3D kind that almost looked as though they had depth: a grove of fruit trees in blossom; some people with