Red Mars

“Please.”

It was surprising how much Nadia would have rather been talking to Ann, or Samantha, or Arkady. If only Arkady would come down from Phobos!

But Maya was her friend. And that desperate look on her face: Nadia couldn’t stand it. “What message?”

“Tell him that I’ll meet him tonight in the storage area,” Maya said imperiously. “At midnight. To talk.”

Nadia sighed. But later she went to Frank, and gave him the message. He nodded without meeting her eye, embarrassed, grim, unhappy.

Then a few days later Nadia and Maya were cleaning up the brick floor of the latest chamber to be pressurized, and Nadia’s curiosity got the best of her; she broke her customary silence on the topic, and asked Maya what was going on. “Well, it’s John and Frank,” Maya said querulously. “They’re very competitive. They’re like brothers, and there’s a lot of jealousy there. John got to Mars first, and then he got permission to come back again, and Frank doesn’t think it was fair. Frank did a lot of the work in Washington to get the colony funded, and he thinks John has always taken advantage of his work. And now, well. John and I are good together, I like him. It’s easy with him. Easy, but maybe a little … I don’t know. Not boring. But not exciting. He likes to walk around, hang out with the farm crew. He doesn’t like to talk that much! Frank, now, we could talk forever. Argue forever, maybe, but at least we’re talking! And you know, we had a very brief affair on the Ares, back at the beginning, and it didn’t work out, but he still thinks it could.”

Why would he think that? Nadia mouthed.

“So he keeps trying to talk me into leaving John and being with him, and John suspects that’s what he’s doing, so there’s a lot of jealousy between them. I’m just trying to keep them from each other’s throats, that’s all.”

Nadia decided to stick to her resolve and not ask about it again. But now she was involved despite herself. Maya kept coming to her to talk, and to ask her to convey messages to Frank for her. “I’m not a go-between!” Nadia kept protesting, but she kept doing it, and once or twice when she did she got into long conversations with Frank, about Maya of course; who she was, what she was like, why she acted the way she did. “Look,” Nadia said to him, “I can’t speak for Maya. I don’t know why she does what she does, you have to ask her yourself. But I can tell you, she comes out of the old Moscow Soviet culture, university and CP for both her mother and her grandmother. And men were the enemies for Maya’s babushka, and for her mother too, it was a matrioshka. Maya’s mother used to say to her, ‘Women are the roots, men are just the leaves.’ There was a whole culture of mistrust, manipulation, fear. That’s where Maya comes from. And at the same time we have this tradition of amicochonstvo, a kind of intense friendship where you learn the very tiniest details of your friend’s life, you invade each other’s lives in a sense, and of course that’s impossible and it has to end, usually badly.”

Frank was nodding at this description, recognizing something in it. Nadia sighed and went on. “These are the friendships that lead to love, and then love has the same sort of trouble only magnified, especially with all that fear at the bottom of it.”

And Frank – tall, dark, and somehow handsome, bulky with power, spinning with his own internal dynamo, the American politician (or so Nadia thought of him), now wrapped around the finger of a neurotic Russian beauty – Frank nodded humbly, and thanked her, looking discouraged. As well he should.

Nadia did her best to ignore all that. But it seemed everything else had turned problematic as well. Vlad had never approved of how much time they were spending on the surface in the daytime, and now he said, “We ought to stay under the hill most of the time, and bury all the labs as well. Outdoor work should be restricted to an hour in the early mornings and another in the late afternoons, when the sun is low.”

“I’ll be damned if I stay indoors all day,” Ann said, and many agreed with her.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Frank pointed out.

“But most of it could be done by teleoperation,” Vlad said. “And it should be. What we are doing is the equivalent of standing ten kilometers from an atomic explosion —”

“So?” Ann said. “Soldiers did that — ”

“ — every six months,” Vlad finished, and stared at her. “Would you do that?”

Even Ann looked subdued. No ozone layer, no magnetic field to speak of; they were getting fried by radiation almost as badly as if they were in interplanetary space, to the tune of ten rems per year.

And so Frank and Maya ordered them to ration their time outdoors. There was a lot of interior work to be done under the hill, getting the last row of chambers finished; and it was possible to dig some cellars below the vaults, giving them some more space protected from radiation. And many of the tractors were equipped to be teleoperated from indoor stations, their decision algorithms handling the details while the human operators watched screens below. So it could be done; but no one liked the life that resulted. Even Sax Russell, who was content to work indoors most of the time, looked a bit perplexed. In the evenings a number of people began to argue for immediate terraforming efforts, and they made the case with renewed intensity.

“That’s not our decision to make,” Frank told them sharply. “The UN decides that one. Besides it’s a long-term solution, on the scale of centuries at best. Don’t waste time talking about it!”

Ann said, “That’s all true, but I don’t want to waste my time down here in these caves, either. We should live our lives the way we want. We’re too old to worry about radiation.”

Arguments again, arguments that made Nadia feel as if she had floated off the good solid rock of her planet back into the tense weightless reality of the Ares. Carping, complaining, arguing; until people got bored, or tired, and went to sleep. Nadia started leaving the room whenever it began, looking for Hiroko and a chance to discuss something concrete. But it was hard to avoid these matters, to stop thinking about them.

Then one night Maya came to her crying. There was room in the permanent habitat for private talks, and Nadia went with her down to the northeast corner of the vaults, where they were still working on interiors, and sat by her arm to arm, shivering and listening to her, and occasionally putting an arm over her shoulder and giving her a hug. “Look,” Nadia said at one point, “why don’t you just decide? Why don’t you quit playing one off against the other?”

“But I have decided! It’s John I love, it’s always been John. But now he’s seen me with Frank and he thinks I’ve betrayed him. It’s really petty of him! They’re like brothers, they compete in everything, and this time it’s just a mistake!”

Nadia resisted learning the details, she didn’t want to hear it. She sat there listening anyway.

And then John was standing there before them. Nadia got up to leave, but he didn’t appear to notice. “Look,” he said to Maya. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. It’s over.”

“It’s not over,” Maya said, instantly composed. “I love you.”

John’s smile was rueful. “Yes. And I love you. But I want things simple.”

“It is simple!”

“No it isn’t. I mean, you can be in love with more than one person at the same time. Anyone can, that’s just the way it is. But you can only be loyal to one. And I want … I want to be loyal. To someone who is loyal to me. It’s simple, but …”

He shook his head; he couldn’t find the phrase. He walked back into the eastern row of chambers, disappeared through a door.

“Americans,” Maya said viciously. “Fucking children!” Then she was up through the door after him.

But soon she came back. He had retreated to a group in one of the lounges, and wouldn’t leave. “I’m tired,” Nadia tried to say, but Maya wouldn’t hear it, she was getting more and more upset. For over an hour they discussed it, over and over. Eventually Nadia agreed to go to John and ask him to come to Maya and talk it over. Nadia walked grimly through the chambers, oblivious to the brick and the colorful nylon hangings. The go-between that nobody noticed. Couldn’t they get robots to do this? She found John, who apologized for ignoring her earlier. “I was upset, I’m sorry. I figured you’d hear it all eventually anyway.”

Nadia shrugged. “No problem. But look, you have to go talk to her. That’s the way it is with Maya. We talk, talk, talk; if you contract to be in a relationship, you have to talk your way all the way through it, and all the way out of it. If you don’t it will be worse for you in the long run, believe me.”

That got to him. Sobered, he went off to find her. Nadia went to bed.

The next day she was out working late on a trencher. It was the third job of the day, and the second had been trouble: Samantha had tried to carry a load on the earthmover blade while making a turn, and the thing had taken a nosedive and twisted the rods of the blade lifters out of their casings, spilling hydraulic fluid over the ground, where it had frozen before it even flattened out. They had had to set jacks under the airborne back end of the tractor, and then decouple the entire blade attachment and lower the vehicle on the jacks, and every step of the operation had been a pain.

Then as soon as that was finished, Nadia had been called over to help with a Sandvik Tubex boring machine, which they were using to drill cased holes through large boulders they ran into while laying a water line from the alchemists’ to the permanent habitat. The down-the-hole pneumatic hammer had apparently frozen at full extension, as stuck as an arrow fired most of the way through a tree. Nadia stood looking down at the hammer shaft. “Do you have any suggestions for freeing the hammer without breaking it?” Spencer asked.

“Break the boulder,” Nadia said wearily, and walked over and got in a tractor with a backhoe already attached. She drove it over, and dug down to the top of the boulder, and then got out to attach a little Allied hydraulic impact hammer to the backhoe. She had just set it in position on the top of the boulder when the down-the-hole hammer suddenly jerked its drill back, pulling the boulder with it and catching the outside of her left hand against the underside of the Allied Hy-Ram.

Instinctively she pulled back, and pain lanced up her arm and into her chest. Fire filled that side of her body and her vision went white. There were shouts in her ears: “What’s wrong? What happened?” She must have screamed. “Help,” she grated. She was sitting, her crushed hand still pinned between rock and hammer. She pushed at the front wheel of the tractor with her foot, shoved with all her might and felt the hammer rasp her bones over rock. Then she was flopped on her back, the hand free. The pain was blinding, she felt sick to her stomach and thought she might faint. Pushing onto her knees with her good hand, she saw that the crushed hand was bleeding heavily, the glove ripped apart, the little finger apparently gone. She groaned and hunched over it, pressed it to her and then jammed it against the ground, ignoring the flash of pain. Even bleeding as it was, the hand would freeze in … how long? “Freeze, damn you, freeze,” she cried. She shook tears out of her eyes and forced herself to look at it. Blood all over, steaming. She pushed the hand into the ground as hard as she could stand. Already it hurt less. Soon it would be numb, she would have to be careful not to freeze the whole hand! Frightened, she prepared to pull it back into her lap; then people were there, lifting her, and she fainted. After that she was maimed. Nadia Nine Fingers, Arkady called her over the phone. He sent her lines by Yevtushenko, written to mourn the death of Louis Armstrong: “Do as you did in the past/And play.”

“How did you find that?” Nadia asked him. “I can’t imagine you reading Yevtushenko.”

“Of course I read him, it’s better than McGonagall! No, this was in a book on Armstrong. I’ve taken your advice and been listening to him while we work, and lately reading some books on him at night.”

“I wish you’d come down here,” Nadia said.

Vlad had done the surgery. He told her it would be all right. “It caught you clean. The ring finger is a bit impaired, and will act like the little finger used to, probably. But ring fingers never do much anyway. The two main fingers will be strong as ever.”

Everyone came by to visit. Nevertheless she spoke more with Arkady than anyone else, in the hours of the night when she was alone, in the four and a half hours between Phobos’s rising in the west and its setting in the east. He called in almost every night, at first, and often thereafter.

Pretty soon she was up and around, hand in a cast that was suspiciously slender. She went out to troubleshoot or consult, hoping to keep her mind occupied. Michel Duval never came by at all, which she thought was strange. Wasn’t this what psychologists were for? She couldn’t help feeling depressed: she needed her hands for her work, she was a hand laborer. The cast got in the way and she cut off the part around the wrist, with shears from her tool kit. But she had to keep both hand and cast in a box when outside, and there wasn’t much she could do. It really was depressing.

Saturday night arrived, and she sat in the newly filled whirlpool bath, nursing a glass of bad wine and looking around at her companions, splashing and soaking in their bathing suits. She wasn’t the only one to have been injured, by any means; they were all a bit battered now, after so many months of physical work: almost everyone had frostburn marks, patches of black skin that eventually peeled, leaving pink new skin, garish and ugly in the heat of the pools. And several others wore casts, on hands, wrists, arms, even legs; all for breaks or sprains. Actually they were lucky no one had gotten killed yet.

All these bodies, and none for her. They knew each other like family, she thought; they were each other’s physicians, they slept in the same rooms, dressed in the same locks, bathed together; an unremarkable group of human animals, eyecatching in the inert world they occupied, but more comforting than exciting, at least most of the time. Middle-aged bodies. Nadia herself was as round as a pumpkin, a plump tough muscular short woman, squarish and yet rounded. And single. Her closest friend these days was only a voice in her ear, a face on the screen. When he came down from Phobos … well, hard to say. He had had a lot of girlfriends on the Ares, and Janet Blyleven had gone to Phobos to be with him …

People were arguing again, there in the shallows of the lap pool. Ann, tall and angular, leaning down to snap something at Sax Russell, short and soft. As usual, he didn’t appear to be listening. She would hit him one day if he didn’t watch out. It was strange how the group was changing again, how the feel of it was changing. She could never get a fix on it; the real nature of the group was a thing apart, with a life of its own, somehow distinct from the characters of the individuals that constituted it. It must make Michel’s job as their shrink almost impossible. Not that one could tell with Michel; he was the quietest and most unobtrusive psychiatrist she had ever met. No doubt an asset, in this crowd of shrink-atheists. But she still thought it was odd he hadn’t come by to see her after the accident.

One evening she left the dining chambers and walked down to the tunnel they were digging from the vaulted chambers to the farm complex, and there at the tunnel’s end were Maya and Frank, arguing in a vicious undertone that carried down the tunnel not their meaning but their feeling: Frank’s face was contorted with anger, and Maya as she turned from him was distraught, weeping; she turned back to shout at him, “It was never like that,” and then ran blindly toward Nadia, her mouth twisted into a snarl, Frank’s face a mask of pain. Maya saw Nadia standing there and ran right by her.

Shocked, Nadia turned and walked back to the living chambers. She went up magnesium stairs to the living room in chamber two, and turned on the TV to watch a twenty-four hour news program from Earth, something she very rarely did. After a while she turned down the sound, and looked at the pattern of bricks in the barrel vault overhead. Maya came in and started to explain things to her: there was nothing between her and Frank, it was in Frank’s mind only, he just wouldn’t give up on it even though it had been nothing to begin with; she wanted only John, and it wasn’t her fault that John and Frank were on such bad terms now, it was because of Frank’s irrational desire, it wasn’t her fault, but she felt so guilty because the two men had once been such close friends, like brothers.