Not like Ryan Martin. Ryan would bend rules. Of course, Ryan wouldn’t ever get promoted to captain.
But then, the majority of them weren’t going to get promoted to anything but two meters of Martian soil and maybe a cairn of rocks.
Hell, maybe she should be thinking about seducing Ryan.
“So, you want the spot on top?” Tana said, breaking in to her thoughts. “Great view.”
It did look like fun, but Estrela wanted to be inside with the commander. She shook her head, and then, realizing that with all the dust on her visor it was hard for Tana to see her, said, “No.” Then, to justify herself, she said, “Let the kid take it—he’ll enjoy the hell out of it.”
Tana nodded. “You got that right.”
10
João
The College of Saint Adelbert was a small but well-regarded college located in a city named Cleveland, in Ohio, in the United States of America—ten thousand kilometers distant from her home. In return for her tuition, Estrela was expected to tutor in the department of languages.
She found the Americans almost incomprehensible. They spoke too fast, seemed interested in nothing except loud music and expensive clothes, and their slang was bizarre—the first time one of her students said to her, “I’m pooped,” she translated it in her mind and broke out into uncontrolled laughter. The student had been baffled; apparently in American dialect the phrase wasn’t even slightly naughty.
The study required by the college was almost too easy. She was bright, and the mission school had been strict and rigorous and had punished errors with a firm rap on the knuckles with a stick of bamboo. It was the freedom of the university that was hard for her to adapt to; it was like the blast of some illicit drug. She struggled to keep her goals firmly in mind, to avoid distractions.
And the college had boys as well, boys who would strut and preen for her, fighting over the chance to sit next to her and simply talk. The college made a token attempt to keep the girls under control, but the rules, she discovered, were openly ignored by the students. She was in a dormitory with two other girls, and they were surprised to find that she had no skill at flirting. Her roommates had to teach her how to enjoy teasing the boys with her presence, or by giving them a carefully casual glimpse of her bare shoulder. When that became boring, they taught her how to take them into her bedroom. It was not long before she had strings of lovers. The sex, to her, was not really the point; what she craved was the attention of their hands, their lips, their eyes on her body.
It helped, sometimes, to take away the nightmares.
When she caught up with João, she found him already a graduate instructor. He had op layer a handsome boy. He was dressed in a silk shirt covered over with a black leather vest gleaming with chrome studs and chains.
She waited until he was leaving a class, and then walked up behind him. “One time,” she said, “you took me up the mountain to see the stars. The sky over the school, it was very dark. You pointed out to me the glowing clouds, like a distant fire in the sky, and told me that it was a baby galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, and it was so far away that we were seeing it as it had been thousands of years ago, and that if every star there had burned out, we would not know for a thousand years. Do you remember?”
João did not turn around. “Yes,” he said. “I remember.”
I thought you were going to kiss me, she thought. But you didn’t. She didn’t say it.
“And the mountains,” she said. “You took me into the mountains. You had a hammer, and we looked at rocks. Do you remember that?”
“Yes,” he said. “I remember that, too.”
Without warning, she punched him on the upper arm, as hard as she could hit, hard enough to spin him halfway around.
This time he looked at her.
She smiled at him, with a smile that she knew had broken the hearts of a hundred other boys. “So,” she said. “How the hell have you been?”
11
Tana
Commander Radkowski didn’t want to push the machines too hard on the first day out, while they were still getting used to the equipment, and so they quit for the night well before the sunset. Commander Radkowski and Estrela inflated the bubble habitat for them to sleep in, while Ryan downloaded the electronic navigation logs of the vehicles.
“Perfect agreement,” Ryan announced. Each of the vehicles had a separate inertial navigation system, and comparing the three readings was a way to check that all of them were working, even over an extended traverse. “Two hundred ninety kilometers. Not bad for the first day.”
Tana translated in her head; a hundred seventy-five miles. No, not bad. If they could keep up that rate it would take them twenty days to reach the pole. And they should go faster, once they got used to the feel of driving real equipment, instead of the virtuals they had trained on.
This territory had a different feel, Tana thought. Rougher. The ground was a dark volcanic rock, riddled with grooves and pockmarks and cracks and crevices. The indentations were filled in with light-colored dust, making odd patterns that looked like a weird, alien writing. She ran her hand over the rock. Even through the glove, she could feel its texture, probe her fingers into the shallow depressions and cracks.
After inflating the bubble, Estrela had disappeared back into the rock-hopper with John Radkowski. Tana wondered why.
She wondered what motivated Estrela. Estrela seemed open and uninhibited, all of her virtues and vices superficial, but Tana had come to suspect that she had a core of opacity, a secret level of self that she never allowed to show.
Since her own disastrous marriage, Tana had been discreet with men—quite willing enough to take an enjoyable interlude when the opportunity presented itself, but not promiscuous. Her job was tough enough; she didn’t need complications in her life. Estrela, though—she flirted with every man she met. How could she?
Tana suddenly thought, what business could she have with John in the rockhopper that could be taking so long? She had a sudden pang of jealousy. But surely not—it was ridiculous to even think it.
Still—there had been that briefing.
“Six astronauts, four male, two females,” the psychologist had told them, in a preflight briefing to the female crew. There had been dozens of such briefings, role-playing lessons in conflict resolution, mandatory courses on cultural awareness. This briefing had been her and Estrela only; the men had been lucky enough to be sent on a training run, Radkowski and Ryan Martin flying a jet fighter across the skies of Nevada, Trevor and Chamlong identifying rocks in a classroom in Houston. “An odd split. Why do you think we chose it that way?”
“No problem,” Estrela said. “A woman can take more than one man.”
“Wrong,” the psychologist had said. The psychologist was an older woman, with a dumpy figure and gray hair. “It’s because if we split it up evenly, the crew would pair off into couples. That will be disastrous. Disastrous for the crew function, and disastrous for the people involved—since there will be a strong social pressure to pair off whether you like to or not.”
“So this way two of the men stay horny?” Estrela said.
“No. I suggest that all of the men should stay horny. I would strongly suggest that you do not engage in sexual relations with any of them. You fall in lust with one of them, that’s fine, but save the bump and grind for until you get back.” She paused. “It doesn’t actually harm men to be horny, you know,” the psychologist said. “In fact, in some ways it even increases male task-related performance ratings.”