She didn’t even know who she was. Not the starved street child. Not anybody she knew. She didn’t know who she was, and there was no point in fighting any more.
“Why, she’s beautiful,” a voice said. “Father Tomé, your little waif is no avocado at all. She is an orchid, precious and beautiful.”
She had been called many things in her life, but never beautiful. She peeked out from between her fingers to see who had said it.
A young man stood next to Father Tomé, a mestico, tall and slender with dark skin and dark eyes and a lion’s mane of dark hair. He was smiling at her with a smile that lit up the very air and set her heart to glowing with an ache like a hunger she could never name. She ventured a smile of her own, tentative and small, and he raised his hand and took a half step backward as if her smile had the force of a sudden gale.
“I am João,” he said, his voice rich and deep with the familiar street accent of the cariocas. “Ah, my beautiful little orchid, I can see that you will break many, many hearts, but you will never break mine.”
Wherever he goes, she told herself, I will follow in his shadow.
Following in João’s footsteps, she discovered, would not be easy. He had himself been a student of the Jesus do Sul. He had excelled in his education and, at age fifteen, had already been accepted at the College of Saint Adelbert, far away in North America, to study for a degree in geology. The Holy Order of Saint Anselm, Father Tomé’s order, was paying his tuition; the School of Jesus do Sul was itself assisting him with the expenses of travel. “The best of my children ever to leave Jesus do Sul,” Father Tomé said. “How could we do otherwise than to help him?” In return, João would return to Brazil every summer and assist with the teaching.
Father Tomé, she discovered, called all of his wards avocado; she never learned why. He was a communist who talked fiercely of overthrowing the government of Brazil and redistributing the country’s wealth to the poor. What she knew of economics was that the rich people had huge houses and servants and drove around in chauffeured limousines with darkened windows and ate ice cream whenever they felt like it. The poor people had nothing and were invisible.
She was going to be a rich person, and one day eat ice cream in her own automobile.
No, Father Tomé told her, that’s wrong, my clever little avocado. You should learn to share.
No, she told him. She would be rich.
Father Tomé smiled. “Then you will have to learn. You will have to learn manners, and how to dress, and how to behave nicely, and how to have a nice mouth that does not swear. Sister Isabel will teach you.”
I will, she promised herself. I will. I will!
In later days, she rarely saw Father Tomé. There were always too many children in the escola, for Father Tomé could never turn one away, and the escola was as crowded with tossed-together shacks as any favela shantytown. The teacher who assisted most with the street children, the new ones who needed instruction in even the most simple matters of grammar and etiquette, was Sister Isabel. She was four feet tall and at least as wide, quite simply the ugliest woman Estrela had ever seen. Sister Isabel had a boundless patience and a deep love for her charges. “You shall be a little lady,” she told Estrela. “Don’t you want to be beautiful? Don’t you want people to love you? Then you must learn to talk properly.” She had a heart as big as Brazil. Estrela felt safe with sister Isabel.
And so she found, for a while, a home, and learned to be a lady. She never forgot her brother Gilberto, although much later she would think back on her life before the school and wonder whether, after all, he really had been her brother.
All things change. In time, Father Tomé was reprimanded for his support of radical politics and left the Catholic church. Sister Isabel left to be married, a fact which astonished Estrela, who had not believed it possible that she could have had any life outside of the school. And Estrela herself, driven by forces that she herself could not name, excelled in her studies and did exactly as she had promised the very first day she met him: followed in the footsteps of João Fernando Conselheiro, north to the United States of America to study geology.
9
Roving on Mars
The surface beneath Estrela’s wheels turned from sand to a pea-sized gravel, and then from the gravel to a dark rock. Desert pavement, it was called, a bare rock surface swept clean of the sand overlayer. From time to time the rock was fractured with jagged cracks filled with smaller rubble. None of the fractures were deep enough to be a danger to the rover, but the ride was jarring, and the dirt-rover’s traction on the bare rock was poor.
The fracture lines ran east and west, making them parallel to the Valles Marineris, invisible over the horizon to the north. Another sign of tectonic stress, she guessed.
Estrela parked her dirt-rover on a rise and settled back to wait for the others. She looked out across the rocky plain, but didn’t really see it.
Radkowski was the commander of the mission; he would be the one to make the final decision on who would return. Could she argue that, as a Brazilian, it was her right to return on the Jesus do Sul? It was, after all, a Brazilian ship; would he accept for that argument? Maybe. It would be worth a try.
It might help him see it her way if she seduced him.
She saw the dust long before the rockhopper came into view. The trail of disturbed dust hung in the air, winding like a fuzzy yellow worm across the landscape, the rockhopper an iridescent green insect ahead of it.
Tana, she saw, was perched precariously on top of the rockhopper like a mahout riding an elephant. She jumped down when the rover stopped.
“The territory’s getting a bit more interesting as we get closer to the Valles,” she said. “Not just the craters and boulders—was that a butte I saw back there? Did you get a chance to take a closer look at it?”
“Wasn’t doing any sightseeing,” Estrela said. Was Tana blind or stupid? she wondered. Then she thought, no, she just hadn’t figured it out yet. Well, that might be all for the good. If Tana didn’t yet realize that somebody was going to get left behind, Tana wouldn’t be competition when she tried to seduce the commander.
That was going to be tough. The members of the expedition were crowded together like bugs, and she couldn’t see where they would find any privacy. And the commander had good cock, but kept his pants zipped. She’d seen him eyeing her when she was changing, but he was prudish sometimes, didn’t like to diverge from the rule book. That struck her as odd: He talked like he grew up on the streets, and you’d think that he would know that you had to grab what you can get when you can get it. But he acted like God was watching him at every moment and he’d get blasted by a lightning bolt if he bent the rules a little. But that was the way commanders were, she knew. The ones who bent the rules didn’t get picked to command missions.