That life ended when she was eleven.
It had been a warm night, and a full moon shone down on the alleys. She slept huddled up against Gilberto, for the little comfort it gave her rather than for warmth.
Gilberto was flatlined. He had stolen a quarter of a liter of gasoline and had spent the evening with his head in a bag, inhaling the fumes. Once he passed it over to her, and she had tried it as well, sticking her head into the bag and taking a big inhalation from the gas-soaked rag, but she had gone reeling back, her head singing from the fumes, her nose suddenly feeling as if cockroaches had crawled inside her nostrils and were clawing around somewhere above her mouth. Gilberto watched her and laughed, his eyes red and swollen from the fumes.
Now he was asleep, fallen over on his back with his mouth wide open, not even hidden away in a doorway. His instincts, his secret antennae that sensed trouble before it showed itself, his secret sense that had kept them both alive, had failed him, blotted away by gasoline fumes.
The policemen were not quiet. They came down the alley with flashlights so bright that they hurt her eyes, swinging their rifles like clubs. She tugged at Gilberto’s arm frantically, and at last he moved. He looked up, his eyes out of focus and leaking a gummy fluid, said “Huh,” and then threw up a thin stream of watery yellow.
It would not have mattered even if they had run. The police had blockaded both ends of the alley. She couldn’t see the faces of the policemen; they were wearing riot helmets with darkened bulletproof visors lowered down over their eyes. One grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet, than shoved her down the alley. She staggered and ran, and another policeman hit her with a rifle-butt and knocked her down again. Guided by blows from the butts of guns, she and Gilberto were herded down the alley until they were crowded together with a dozen other street urchins, ranging in age from four to almost fifteen.
She knew almost all of them, the children who lived on the streets. When they had extra, they would share it with her, and she with them. The had no loyalty and no love, but they were as close a thing to friends as she had ever known.
No one talked to her, no one ventured a reason for the roundup, nor did she expect to hear one. Perhaps a policeman had been killed up in one of the favelas, and they were exacting revenge. Perhaps a merchant had complained of shoplifting, or of shit bespoiling the street, and the police had decided to clean out the human vermin. Maybe there was no reason. Street children in Rio did not expect to live very long.
She was kicked, and then picked up and tossed against the brick wall. She looked up, stunned and bleeding. She knew this place. It was an empty lot where a building had been torn down two years earlier. They had slept there for several weeks, until the people who owned it has seen fit to send guards around to kick them out. Was that it? Were they still mad that they had had squatters? Where was Gilberto? She couldn’t see him.
Somewhere in the darkness, one of the policemen shoved a cassette of the Rolling Stones into a portable stereo tape player and turned up the volume. It was cheap stereo, and the distortion turned the lyrics of “Under My Thumb” into an angry, shouted manifesto.
The flash of the first rifle was like a brief strobe light; the report punctuating the distorted base line of the music.
The policemen had moved back. They formed a line, dark silhouettes with rifles raised, laughing and smoking American cigarettes and shooting children. One at a time the rifles flashed, and at each shot, another of the children jerked and died.
She would be next. She huddled over, whimpering. The humidity of the night was suddenly oppressive, like a weight pressing down on her chest. She wished Gilberto was next to her.
And then suddenly there was bright light, not just flashlights, but the burning glare of searchlights. Someone kicked the tape player, and in the sudden silence the cut-off guitar chord echoed off the buildings. Then there was the amplified booming of voices too loud to comprehend. “DROP YOUR WEAPONS. YOU ARE SURROUNDED. DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND RAISE YOUR HANDS.”
“Gilberto!” she shouted. In the harsh blue illumination of the searchlights, the bodies of the street children looked like no more than piles of empty clothes, heaped helter-skelter in a puddle of blackness that slowly seeped away toward the gutter. She ran to it; frantic, searching the faces.
Gilberto was not there. No, there. There was the dark red shirt, torn at the sleeves, the shirt he had worn, and those were his pants, but where was Gilberto? Surely that could not be him. She ran to the body inside Gilberto’s clothes, but it was too small. Surely Gilberto couldn’t have been this small, barely more than a mannequin made out of sticks. The body couldn’t have weighed more than twenty kilos. She looked into its face, and Gilberto’s eyes, bloodshot from gasoline fumes, stared back at her out of a lifeless body. But it couldn’t be Gilberto, Gilberto was too clever, Gilberto had escaped, he always escaped.
Then they dragged her away.
She didn’t cry; long ago Gilberto had told her never to cry, never to show emotion, never show weakness. No one looked at her, no one comforted her, no one even treated her as a human being. She didn’t expect it.
“Thieves,” one of the policemen said. “Beggars, drug dealers, and whores. Who cares about them?”
“The death squads make us look bad, you know that,” his companion told him. “It’s the foreign journalists.”
“Yeah, but why couldn’t we have waited until they finished shooting before coining in to arrest them? Or we should sell ’em for their organs. I hear that the North Americans pay a thousand dollars per kidney.” He looked down at Estrela, a look like a hawk examining a mouse in its claws. “You figure that’s right?”
“How should I know? But you better not try to sell this one; the lieutenant saw her rounded up alive.”
The first policeman snorted. “What, you think I’d dirty my hands?” He spat on the ground in front of Estrela’s feet. “So what do we do with her?”
“What do you think? She goes to Father Tomé.” The second one shrugged. “He takes in all the filth of the city. One more, to him, it’s nothing.”
And so, in one night, her life on the streets of Rio ended. Estrela the street urchin of Rio vanished silently away, and a new Estrela, a person she had never imagined that it was possible to become, was born.
7
Riding the Rockhopper
Tana was excited.
The desire to explore is a disease, and for all that Tanisha Jackson had been struck by it later than most, she had been still been hit hard. Driving the rockhopper across the sands of Mars was, to her, the fulfillment of her wildest imaginings. Everything about it was exciting. The color of the shadows, the patina of cementation on the soil, the very shapes of the rocks told her she was not on Earth. Every mile they drove she saw something new.
After two hours of driving, Radkowski called for a stop to give them a chance to stretch. Two hours was long enough inside a tiny pressurized cabin meant for a crew of only two, and they all needed some relief, a chance to stretch, to walk around a little, to give their stiff muscles a chance to relax.
Ryan Martin, on one of the dirt-rovers, pulled in next to them and dismounted. His suit was filthy, spattered from head to foot with a coating of dust. “All yours, Commander,” he said. “I’d hand you the keys, but I seem to have misplaced them. Guess you’ll have to hotwire it.”