“I think maybe I take three of them,” Estrela said. “That skinny girl can keep one for herself. In fact, maybe I just take all four, leave nothing for her.” She smiled a wide innocent smile, and looked at Tana. Tana kept her face impassive.
“Now, I can’t tell you how to behave,” the psychologist said, “but I strongly suggest that is not a good idea.”
Estrela had been just twigging the psychologist, Tana had thought. She had been quite vocal in telling Tana that she was none too fond of shrinks, and liked to rattle their cages.
Or so Tana had thought at the time. Now she wished that she wasn’t wearing gloves. If she could, she would be biting her fingers.
What did Estrela want with John in the rockhopper?
And then the emergency band of the radio turned itself on. It was Ryan Martin’s voice, and for a moment she couldn’t figure out what he was saying. Then she suddenly realized.
He was singing.
12
João
Estrela sometimes swore by Santa Luzia. She said that her mother always swore by this.
In actual fact, her mother had been a prostitute. While she was alive, she had used a strong and colorful language that liberally mixed blasphemy, obscenity, and scatology.
João had, slowly and patiently, broken her of her language. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated you look, he said, the moment you lose your temper and swear, everybody will know you were born in a gutter.
It was João who had taught her to swear by Santa Luzia. “Everyone has to swear by something,” he said. “Learn something that’s not crude.”
It had been hard to practice. She had held out her hand, and closed her eyes, and when she relaxed and didn’t expect it, João hit her on the hand with a broomstick. “Santa Luzia!” she was supposed to shout. “Santa Luzia!”
“Yes, but as if you mean it,” João would say, and suddenly hit her with the broomstick again.
“Santa Luzia!”
“If you could blush after you say it, that would be even better,” he told her, but she could never manage that trick. For a long time she was hard pressed to avoid giggling when she said it—it was such a silly, harmless thing to swear by, who could possibly take it seriously?—but after a while it became second nature to her, so much that she now even said it without thinking when she was actually startled.
When she was among Americans, she was silently amused by the poverty of what they thought was swearing. “Fuck!” the Americans would curse. “Fuck you!”—as if that were a curse. They were like children, pleased with a petty daring.
João lived in an enormous ugly concrete building that was a kilometer or so away from the college. He shared a cramped apartment with two other hoys from the college; none of them ever bothered to clean, and the apartment was so cluttered that it was hard to find the floor.
Estrela would come to João’s apartment in the afternoon, after class, and they would talk. João would buy coffee—only little amounts, his teaching assistantship paid very little—and he would make two small cups on the single working burner of the tiny kitchen stove. João told her about his dreams and his plans for the future. None of their other classmates at the college could actually know what we lived through, he would tell her, only you. You are my only true friend, the only one who knows me for who I really am.
He told her how he had decided to study geology. Even from the worst slums, he had stared from the city up at the mountains in the distance, the mountains that were ever changing and always the same. He had decided that people were untrue, but the mountains were a solid thing that he could always rely on, and if he ever understood them, really understood, that he would have something—he could never quite explain what, but something.
Everyone needs something to hold on to, Estrela knew. A mountain was as good a choice as any.
Estrela loved to hear João talk about his dreams and plans, but she secretly marveled that a ragged street boy could hold such elaborate dreams. She, herself, had far simpler hopes. Her dreams at night were broken by images of being alone, huddled against a terrible darkness, with the stench of fear and rifle smoke assaulting her nostrils, and the night punctuated by the beautiful and awful flares of rifle shots. Her hopes and her plans were the same. She had, by her luck and her dogged study, managed to leave Brazil. Her only plans were to never go back.
João helped her learn geology. Her growing up on the streets meant that she had preternatural senses, he told her. You have situational awareness; you observe with a detail that verges on suspicion, detecting every small detail is second nature to you. Turn that to your study and make it work for you.
She didn’t try to hide from João the fact that she had boyfriends. She hoped that perhaps he would become jealous, but he never did. Sometimes he gave her advice. Stay away from this one; when you’re not around he talks like you’re a piece of shit. That one’s violent when he’s drunk.
It is like he said when we met, she thought. I will never break his heart.
And then she thought, he has armored his heart so I won’t break it.
And then she thought, if he has armored his heart, there must be a reason; he is afraid of me.
Someday, I will capture his heart.
13
Walking on Mars
In the Martian evening, in the little amount of free time they had after the bubble habitat was inflated and before the sun had yet set, Trevor went out walking. Ryan Martin followed along with him. Trevor was pretty sure that the commander had instructed Ryan to keep an eye on him. It annoyed him—he was not a child and shouldn’t have needed a baby-sitter—but there was little point in complaining, so he made the best of it.
Besides, Ryan was one of the nicer ones. Ryan usually treated him like an adult, like a full member of the team, and not like a spoiled rich kid.
“Take a look at this,” Ryan said. He was standing of the lip of a depression, looking down.
Trevor walked over and looked down with him. It was an irregular pit, with a jumble of dark rocks, nearly black, inside it. “What is it?”
“Collapsed lava cave, I think.” Ryan bent over and picked up one of the pieces of rock. It was flat and curved like a shard of pottery. He looked at it, then handed it to Trevor. The outside was smooth, but the concave side was rough, almost sharp. “Doesn’t look two billion years old to me,” he said. “I’d bet there’s been recent volcanism here.”
That was interesting. “Recent?” Trevor asked.
“Less than a billion years ago, I’d say,” Ryan said. “Maybe even within the last million years.”
“Oh,” Trevor said.
“What, you were thinking yesterday? Get real, kid.”
Ryan turned and wandered off. That was odd, Trevor thought, if he was watching me. But he took his freedom as a chance to climb on some of the rocks and look around.
Desolate. This place was worse than Arizona; absolutely nothing green at all. If there were even one single cactus, or even a clump of grass—but there were only rocks and sand.
Ryan was saying something that he couldn’t catch, and he suddenly realized that Ryan was singing.
“—had a hammer,” he sang. “I’d hammer on Maars—”
Not real music, not stomp or even bubblerazz, but old stuff, some folk song from the previous century. It certainly was an odd thing to do.
“And if I had a rock—” he sang.
Trevor turned his receiver volume down.
And then suddenly the singing stopped. Trevor waited for a moment, then cautiously toggled the volume back up.
Ryan was just standing there, staring at the rock. Trevor walked over to see what he was looking at, but nothing was there, just a wall of rock.