He had no idea of what those nights had meant to Estrela. She hid her feelings from him very well. He had casually remarked, long ago, that she would never break his heart. It had been an easy remark to make, since he could easily see her beauty, even admire it, but not feel drawn by it. He had, in fact, long forgotten that he had ever made such a remark. He had no real understanding that if she could never break his heart, he was continuously breaking hers.
So when he decided to apply to be the geologist on the newly formed Brazilian astronaut corps, he asked Estrela to marry him. It was a decision of little consequence to him, a minor masquerade to fool public decency, one that he knew both of them could ignore in their private lives.
Estrela looked at the man that she had loved since she had been eleven years old, held back her tears, and said yes. With a casual voice that made it apparent that the matter was only of minor interest to her, she said, yes, of course she would marry him.
19
Falling
There was almost no shadow, and little contrast. Estrela saw the edge ahead of her, but she had thought it was just a sharper-than-average crevice. Instead, it was a sheer rock face, almost five meters high. Suddenly the perspective opened out, and there was nothing ahead of her front wheel. She slammed on her brakes, but on the hard rock surface there was no traction, and the only result was that the dirt-rover fishtailed around in a skid. Before she could bring it back under control and slow down, the dirt-rover was over the edge and, for a moment, she was weightless.
She kicked free of the falling dirt-rover, which had started to tumble as it fell, thinking, better to fall clear than to land with a ton of high-energy metal falling with me. In the lower gravity, everything happened more slowly than she expected. She had enough time to watch the dirt-rover hit on its left side and bounce off to the right, and she hit the ground in a sky diver’s roll. The ground was loose rubble, and she hit hard, skidding instead of rolling, and threw out an arm to stop her fall.
The pain was startling. She didn’t lose consciousness. “Watch out for the cliff, kid!” she said.
“Where did you go?” his voice on the radio said. “You were ahead of me, and you just vanished.”
“It’s a cliff,” she said. “Better slow down.”
“Shit! Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sure, kid, I’m okay.” She could barely keep her teeth from chattering with the pain. Nothing seemed to be broken, but her left shoulder, where she had thrown her arm out for balance and come down with her full weight on it, felt funny. It felt as if it weren’t part of her body at all, but was a dead weight fastened to her shoulder with nails of fire. It would be a good time to go to sleep right now, she thought. I could take a little nap before Trevor gets here. “Say, kid,” she said. “Better call up the doctor, okay? Maybe she ought to take a look at me. Just for kicks, you know?”
She was lying on broken rocks and rubble at the base of the embankment. It was surprisingly comfortable. Seems to be entirely igneous rock, she noted. No schist, no slate, no limestone. Some loose fines she couldn’t immediately categorize.
Trevor’s dirt-rover appeared at the top of the ridge line. He seemed impossibly small and far away. She decided to go to sleep; now that Trevor was here it would be okay to sleep, but when she tried to close her eyes her eyelids hurt, so she decided to go to sleep with her eyes open.
“Shit! Are you okay? Talk to me! Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. It was rather hard to talk when she wanted to keep her teeth clenched.
It seemed like hours before the rockhopper showed up—she kept hearing Trevor call to it, although she didn’t really pay much attention to what he was saying.
The big robotic arm of the rockhopper wasn’t quite long enough to reach down the cliff face and pick her up. It lowered a rope with Ryan and Tana, and the two of them arranged the rope around her. “Not around that arm,” she said. “Ouch! You fuckers, not that arm.”
With some difficulty, they got a sling around her and lifted her up to the rockhopper. Radkowski was already starting to inflate the bubble habitat.
“Forget the habitat,” Tana ordered. “Get her in the rockhopper. Now!”
Inside the pressurized cabin, there was only room for the two of them. It seemed to take forever to get the pressure back up. At last the pressure was high enough for Tana to pull her helmet off. “Stay with me here. Stay awake, stay awake.”
“Where would I go?” Estrela said, or maybe she just imagined she said it.
Then Tana started cutting the suit away from her arm, and she was suddenly wide awake again. Her arm was two sizes too large for the suit, and despite the fact that the piezoelectric fabric was fully relaxed, it was as tight around her arm as an athletic bandage. The piezoelectric fibers made the fabric nearly as tough as armor, and Tana had to bring the scalpel up under the fabric and saw at it. The instant that the pressure was released, the arm began to hurt. Estrela bit her lip to keep from whimpering as Tana slowly and carefully sawed it away.
Tana looked up. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to tough it out,” she said. “I certainly hope we can replace this from the spares we brought. I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” Estrela whispered, and then she fainted.
“Damn,” Tana said.
20
Return to Brazil
Estrela had intended never to return to Brazil. It was ironic, in its way, that when she did return, it was to become one of the most famous women in the country.
The nightmares had never truly gone away, but she had forgotten how friendly Brazil was. She had forgotten how bright the colors were, how comfortable it was to hear a babble of conversation in the familiar carioca accent again, she had forgotten the scent of the air, humid and polluted and dense with humanity but still tangy with the sea, and the comforting presence of the mountains backing up the city.
She had forgotten what it was like to be home.
And João was selected for the Mars mission.
She had her friends and her lovers. As long as she was discreet, she could find interludes of enjoyment. João was a little more discreet, now that he was in the public eye, but he found that, as long as the public image was pure, in Brazil, few people cared what he did in private. And, even in Brazil, there were lithe blond men for him to share body heat with.
João was on television often, darkly handsome and with a rich, liquid voice; Estrela loved to watch him perform for the cameras. She was surprised when the television wanted her on camera as well, and even more surprised that they loved her. While João was away training, and later when he had launched to Mars, beating the Americans by a full two years, the cameras would follow her around, “the beautiful and mysterious Estrela, our luscious national flower.” She has the body of an angel, the tabloids said, and, deeply hidden, a secret core of ice.
“How can you be so calm, with all the women who make eyes at your husband,” the commentator for Semana Brasil asked, a bubble-headed blond with a voice like a parakeet. “Aren’t you just insanely jealous?”
“No,” Estrela said, and laughed. “Let them flirt. No woman could ever take my João away from me.” And she had been so calm and certain and beautiful, that everyone in Brazil felt they knew her.
When they asked her opinions of the geology of Mars, she saw no reason to remind them that she had, in the end, never been more than an average student, graduating with a degree to make her respectable but without the passion for the subject that João had. If the reporters wanted to paint her as an expert in the subject, with a mastery somehow absorbed from her closeness with João, that was their affair.