Ceres Reach is running short of the one thing the belt can't mine

CERES REACH — The belt is made of what everyone wants. Iron and nickel come off the regolith in graded ore, rare metals too, the slow-mined stock that ends up as hulls and rectennas out at the Lagrange stations. A man can stand in the sorting bays here and watch the wealth of the inner system pour out of the rock, and be forgiven for thinking a place this rich cannot want for anything.

It wants for water. It has always wanted for water. Lately the wanting keeps a schedule.

Water is the one thing you cannot mine out of stone. It comes off the ice, the same ice that made Ceres worth settling in the first place, and that ice has become the Reach's finest export. When the window to the inner settlements opened last, a single departure carried tens of thousands of tonnes of it sunward, bound for the L4 gardens and Verne's shipyards and habitats that grow faster than their own reserves can keep them watered. It was the largest load of ice this port has ever cleared. The processors cheered the tonnage. The allocation board did not.

The premium and the reserve

"We are rationing against a shipping schedule," said Idara Bassey, who chairs the Reach's water allocation board, a body that did not exist a decade ago and now sits longer than any other on the colony. "The window does not care what the habitat rings need this month. The window opens, the buyers are waiting, and the premium they pay is a number our own growth cannot match. So we meter the taps and we hold the reserve, and every quarter I am asked to explain why a colony sitting on a moon of ice tells its own people to conserve."

The premium is the whole of it. Ice that stays in the Reach becomes drinking water and hydrogen and oxygen for the processing plants, becomes the slow green margin of a habitat trying to feed itself. Ice that ships out becomes settlement bonds and stewardship credits on the Orbital Exchange, and the exchange pays now, in the window that is open, not later, in some harvest that might come. A colony can be forgiven for taking the sure thing. It can also drift that way, load by load, until it has sold the water that was supposed to grow it.

"The export is outbidding us for our own ice," said Tomas Okonkwo, who runs one of the older processing consortia and speaks for several. "I have contracts to fill sunward and a plant here that could double its output if the reserve would release the volume. It will not, and it is right not to, and both of those things are true. That is the trouble."

Arithmetic and nerve

I have watched a window worked before, out here and elsewhere, and there is no drama in it, only arithmetic and nerve, the same combination that carried my ancestors across an ocean with no land in sight and no promise of any. What the arithmetic says now is that the Reach's two hungers, the trade that pays it and the growth that sustains it, draw on the same finite thing. The window that lets one out is the window that keeps the other short.

The board has proposed a floor: a reserve tonnage that cannot be sold in any window, whatever the premium, held for habitat and processing first. The consortia call it a tax on the only wealth the belt produces cheaply. The habitat councils call it survival. The next window opens some months yet from now, and the argument will not be settled before it does. It will only be loaded aboard, one way or the other, and launched.

"You cannot drink a bond," Bassey said, and let it sit there. "I put that in the last report. Someone struck it out as editorializing. I put it back."