Mars Crossing

1 Night

Estrela would never tell it to other members of the crew, but the nightmares were coming again. In the middle of the night she would be alone, huddling in the dark, terror squeezing her ribs, afraid to breathe or move or make a sound. The purple afterimage of rifle fire faded away from her eyes and the urine stink of fear clogged her nostrils, far more real and more vivid than the smells of the ship or the sounds of the sleeping crew or the whir of the air circulation fans. Her ears straining at the darkness for sounds that she hoped she would never again hear.

She didn’t know why she was alive.

João had been the only one who could take the nightmares away, and João was dead. She clung to his memory, the one real thing she knew, and refused to cry.

They were going to die.

2 Journey

The journey started before dawn.

Estrela and Ryan set out first to scout the terrain ahead of them on the two dirt-rovers, heading north and east from the landing site. The dirt-rovers were laden down with supplies: spare zirconia cells, bubble tents, fuel cells and solar arrays, repair tools and extra parts for the dirt-rovers along with a spare thermophotovoltaic isotope generator, superfiber cable and a winch and pitons, water, and fifty days’ supply of the highly condensed and nearly tasteless bricks of food that the astronauts referred to as Purina Human Chow. The main supplies for the expedition would be carried on the rockhopper, of course, but they had loaded up the dirt-rovers to the limits of their carrying capacity in order to haul the maximum amount of support equipment on the expedition north. Their survival, they all knew, would depend on their forethought in bringing with them the equipment that they needed.

Northward and eastward.

The ground was smooth, easy traveling even for the overloaded little dirt-rovers, and as they moved the dust hung in the still air behind them like a pale yellow fog. They were traveling in a flat-floored valley between parallel ridges on either side.

The predawn light was orangish red. Ryan had intended to take the point position, with Estrela following, but she had quickly grown annoyed with his pace and took the lead without asking.

“Don’t get too far ahead,” he radioed to her.

“Relax,” she said. “No problem.”

A few kilometers down the trail, Ryan stopped his dirt-rover atop a small rise and got off. He had told himself that he would not look back, but after five minutes, he couldn’t help himself. Don Quijote stood on the side of a small dune, surrounded by the deflated airbags and tilted at a drunken angle, looking as if it would topple over at any moment. Behind her in the distance was Dulcinea. From here, it was impossible to guess that anything was wrong.

It looked so forlorn. He knew that he would never see them again. He had a sudden urge to turn back, that there must be some way to fix the problem, but he knew it was impossible.

Ryan got back on his dirt-rover and started the engine. The next time he looked back he was ten kilometers away, and the Don Quijote had disappeared over the horizon. There was nothing but gentle undulations of sand stretching as far as he could see.

Estrela’s dirt-rover had vanished ahead of him, but he could tell where she was by the plume of dust hanging in the air. He concentrated on following the tracks of her rover, distinct enough in the sand to follow easily. From time to time her voice would come in over the radio to remark on a possible obstacle or an interesting landmark, but for the most part they rode in silence.

The flatness of the terrain was broken by the occasional crater. At first he detoured around them, but after a while he saw that Estrela’s tracks didn’t deviate at all, and he started following. Up, teeter at the crest, and then down like a roller coaster to the flat, sand-covered bottom, then again at the other side.

During the drive, he mulled over their situation. Slowly, he began to convince himself that it might not be as bad as he’d thought. The Brazilians had surely put some margins of safety into their return ship. Engineers always plan for a worst case. If they would shave every single ounce of excess weight and rely on using up all of the safety margin, it was quite likely that they would be able to fly five back on the Jesus do Sul. He would work the numbers again as soon as he got a chance. He had been right, he told himself, not to alarm the crew by bringing up the problem of who should return. Hell, it would be a jinx to dwell on the possibility, but it was not out of the question that one of them might die on the trip north. It would be a tragedy, but surely the Jesus do Sul would be able to launch four. Four might be no problem at all.

“Rover one, Radkowski,” Commander Radkowski’s voice came over the radio. “Anything to report?”

Ryan slowed down and cued his radio. “The way has been fine,” he said. “Mostly compacted sand. A few rocky outcroppings and some boulders, but nothing we haven’t been able to go around.”

“Got it. Okay, we’ve packed up here and we’re setting out. Stay in touch.”

Behind them, the rockhopper set out.

3 Riding the Rockhopper

At first Trevor found it exciting. All through the morning, there were constantly new vistas, every mile a new planet, fresh and exciting. The occasional dry voice of Ryan or, less often, Estrela, broke in on the radio to apprise them of landmarks ahead. The six-wheel suspension kept the rockhopper level, and it moved over the sand with a motion more like a boat than a wheeled vehicle.

For Trevor, the drive was disconcerting. It continually seemed to him that they had made a mistake, that they had circled around and were heading south, instead of north. He would look at the inertial guidance readout on the rockhopper’s console, and think, That’s wrong. We’re going the wrong way. But then he would look at the sun, and realize, no we’re going the right way. And then the entire planet would seem to spin around him for a moment until he was reoriented.

Mars confused his sense of direction.

Three of them in the cabin of a Mars rover designed for two was one too many. They were crammed together so tight that Trevor could barely move without hitting one of the others with his elbow.

After a while watching Mars was almost hypnotic. It didn’t really change. One ridge of yellowish stone would dwindle down to a wall no higher than his waist and then disappear, and be replaced by another just like it. When they got closer to a ridge, he saw that the surfaces were smooth, blasted by millennia of sand to a soft, pillowed surface.

The sky was a sheet of hammered bronze.

“That one looks like a bear,” he said.

No one answered him. It was a boulder the size of a small house, half-buried in the sand, with a rough, dark gray surface, almost black. A chunk of lava that had been thrown out by one of the enormous volcanoes? Trevor wished that he had paid more attention in training to the geologists. When they had gone out on the training field trip to El Paso, the geologists had been ecstatic to point out minute details of the shapes and textures of the rocks they saw, but Trevor had forgotten most of it.

It did look like a bear, crouching with its head turned away.

Trevor hummed, softly so as not to attract unwelcome attention from the others. It was too cramped to tap his feet, but he cracked the joints in his toes to the beat of the music in his head. The rockhopper’s wheels bumping over Martian rocks set up a syncopated percussion line, and inside his head, Negative Ions accompanied it with a stomp soundtrack:

4 Comparisons

It was all his fault.

John Radkowski thought about his brother like a dog worrying at a wound, knowing that it hurts, but unable to keep from chewing at it.

Karl had been a hero, not him. In the moment of truth, he had failed to speak up. He had run.

And now, he had not run far enough. The expedition was failing; his leadership was failing, and it was all his fault.

It was his fault.

His fault.

To the others in the crew, the expedition to Mars was the fulfillment of a dream. From childhood they had wanted to see the small blue planet dwindle to no more than one bright star among a million others, and know that they were on their way, part of something larger than themselves, the expansion of humanity into the cosmos.

John Radkowski had not looked at the stars. His brother Karl had told him what to do: Get out of the projects, get away from the gangs, go as far away from here as you can get and don’t ever look back.

To John Radkowski, leading the expedition to Mars was nothing more than following his brother’s instructions. And, driving across the desolation, he had only one thought:

What would Karl do?

5 The Calculus of Sacrifice

Estrela drove her dirt-rover as far and as fast as she could. She barely paid any attention to the scenery, and she had turned her radio to the “emergency only” setting, where only a priority-one page would beep through to her.

Estrela had some thinking to do.

When Ryan Martin had proposed his plan, she had instantly noticed the huge and disturbing fact that Ryan failed to present to the rest of the crew. She knew the Jesus do Sul very well. She, more than anybody else, knew that at its heart Brazil was still a poor country, and that the mission had no luxuries, nothing extra—not even the capability to return more than few grams of Martian dust.

The margin that Ryan Martin had been counting on did not exist.

The Brazilian Mars mission hadn’t been designed to carry samples back. Perhaps once, in the optimistic days when first the mission had been designed, the sample return had been real. But by the time that Jesus do Sul was being built, Brazil was in the slow process of national bankruptcy. There was no money for extras. Jesus do Sul was, first and foremost, a public-relations mission, designed to show off the expertise of an insolvent nation in a desperate attempt to attract investors from outside, richer nations. The well-publicized two hundred kilograms of rocks to be returned, the weight that Ryan had counted on leaving behind, was a carefully crafted fiction.

The Brazilian ship had not been designed to carry back even one kilogram of rocks. João had explained it all to her one evening, slowly and patiently. With any extra payload it would fail to get into orbit. The Brazilians had sent an expedition of two; they could return an expedition of two. Two astronauts, and not a kilogram more, was what their return ship was capable of launching home.

She had remained silent. If Ryan Martin did not mention to the crew that his plan could, at best, only save two of them, why should she?

The fact that he had left it out frightened her as much as anything else. It showed that he knew that their situation was desperate, and that in his opinion sacrificing some members of the crew would be an improvement on their current situation. He was afraid that the crew would panic if they knew. At that moment, she knew that they must be very close to death.

Could it possibly be that he didn’t know? The specifications of the Jesus do Sul were not public knowledge. Could he possibly believe that they could cram five people into a ship that had been designed for two? It seemed unlikely.

Estrela turned her head to take a sip from the nipple of the drinking bottle. The suits had not been designed for long-term use; until she took her helmet off, the electrolyte-replacement drink would be the only nourishment she’d get. She reminded herself not to suck too much; it would have to last. But the thought only made her thirstier.

The alternative was slightly more sinister. Suppose that Ryan Martin did know that only two of them could return to Earth. Could he have a reason to keep this fact secret?

Clearly, he intended to be one of those persons.

A trek to the north pole would be an ambitious traverse even for a fully functional, well-planned mission. It would take the skills of the full team of five to make it. Once they got to the north pole, though, three of the five must somehow be persuaded to remain on Mars. The easiest way to do that would be to make sure that three of them were already dead.

She knew what it was like to have to kill for her life. When it comes to a matter of life or death, anybody would learn to lie and to kill.

Any way she looked at it, Ryan Martin looked to her like a killer.

6 A Childhood in Rio

Whenever anybody would ask her where she came from, Estrela Carolina Conselheiro would tell them she was from Ipanema. “I’m the girl from Ipanema,” she said, tossing her head and smiling. “Just like in the song.”

It was a lie. She was from Rio, yes, but although the mother she could barely remember had given birth to her no more than ten kilometers from the chic restaurants and boutiques of the Visconde de Piraja, Ipanema might as well have been farther away than the moon.

Most of her history was a lie. She had not grown up sheltered, staying out of public schools with a private tutor. Her parents, she said, had been an artist and a successful businesswoman who had been killed in the earthquake and fire of 2009, the same fire that destroyed her birth records. It was quite plausible. Earthquakes are so uncommon in Brazil that the 2009 earthquake, catching Rio completely unprepared, had devastated a large portion of the city, including many records. It was also completely untrue.

She had grown up on the streets. She had her virginity taken away by age seven, and seen her first man killed with a knife at age nine. All she knew about the beaches of Ipanema was that, if you were caught shoplifting there, after they shot you they would take your body up to Madureira to dump it, so as not to frighten the tourists away.

Her brother Gilberto had taught her how to read. He had been all the family she ever had. “You have to learn to read, Estrela,” he had told her. “Then, one day, when you’ve become rich, we’ll kill them all.” His smile gleamed in the dim light. He had been completely serious.

But there was no way they would ever become rich.

They survived by stealing, begging, selling drugs for the gangs when they could, and going through garbage when there was nothing to steal and nothing to beg and no European tourists to sell drugs to. When there was no garbage, they ate nothing. Gilberto would offer to sell her body when he thought he could find a taker who would pay for the thrill of sex with a girl not yet even close to puberty, but most of the customers he offered her to would only curl up their lips in disdain. There was little market for a whore that was starved and dirty and probably diseased.

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.”

He turned the dirt-rover over to Radkowski, who would take the next shift on forward scouting, and Radkowski in turn gave him command of the rockhopper and wobbled away slowly on the dirt-rover for a test drive.

“How is it out there?” Tana asked.

“Wild and desolate,” he said. “But in its own way, beautiful.” Through his visor, she could see him shaking his head. “No place to raise children, though.”

That was an odd thing to say, she thought. Ryan had never expressed any interest in children. He was widely known as a confirmed bachelor. The girls had privately tagged him the heartbreaker of Houston; he was interested enough in the opposite sex, sure, but just for the night. He just didn’t seem to have intentions of settling down with one woman.

Tana was scheduled to take over from Estrela on the second dirt-rover, but Estrela was nowhere around. Ryan said that she had called in, saying that she was twenty kilometers ahead and didn’t see any point in backtracking to meet them; she would wait for them, and they could change drivers when they caught up.

So she would have to get back in the rockhopper. Fine. That was just like Estrela, thoughtless and self-centered. But she didn’t have to get in just yet.

“I’m going to look around,” she told Ryan.

“Fine, as long as you don’t go far away from the rover,” he said. “It’s a fifteen-minute stop, no more.”

“Got it, boss,” she said.

They weren’t far from the ridge. Although it was covered with loose rocks, it looked like it would be easy enough to climb, but she knew she wouldn’t have time. It was basic basin-and-range territory; she knew that from the geology field trips in Nevada and Texas that had prepared them for what they would see on Mars. Not a good place to look for signs of fossil life. Still, she examined three rocks that looked like they had signs of carbonate globules, and cracked one open to inspect the cross section. The call to return to the cabin came all too soon.

She looked at the tiny pressurized cabin. Shit. She couldn’t go back in there. It was just too crowded. Now that she had stretched, she just couldn’t force herself to go back inside.

She climbed up on the rockhopper and continued up, until she found a place to sit on the very top, her legs straddling around the crew cabin, one leg on either side. There was even a tie-down eyelet that could be used as a handhold.

“Ryan? I’m staying out here.”

“Negative. We’re ready to go.” There was a pause, and then he said, “Where are you?”

She could see him standing below her, looking around in all directions. “Look up,” she said.

“What?” He looked up at the mountain range, his back to her, rotating his whole body from side to side to scan the slope.

“No, here,” she called. “Up here on the rockhopper.”

He swiveled around to look at the rockhopper. “You can’t ride up there!”

She smiled. “Want to bet I can’t? Think you can get me down? And, anyway, I’m just riding with you for fifteen more miles. If I ride up here, I can just hop off and switch with Estrela; you don’t even have open the hatch. Well, except to let her in.”

Trevor was already inside, waiting. Ryan stared up at her in silence for a few moments, started to say something, and then stopped. “Well, don’t think we’re going to stop to pick you up if you fall off,” he said at last, and swung around and up into the hatch to the pressurized cabin.

She knew that he would, in fact, stop for her if he had to; Ryan was not about to lose one of the crew. But she had no intention of falling off. She had won. “Got it, commandant,” she said. “Falling off not allowed.”

“Damn kids gonna want to ride up there next, I know it,” he muttered.

As the rockhopper started up, it lurched, and then swayed from one side to the other. “Yikes!” she said.

The rockhopper stopped abruptly, and she had to grab suddenly to stay seated.

“You okay up there?”

“No problem,” she said. “I’m fine. Go ahead.” She kept a solid grip on the handhold this time. Once she got used to the side-to-side swaying and found her balance, it really wasn’t bad. No worse than balancing on skis or a skateboard, and far easier than the time she had tried riding on a camel.

Now, this is more like it, she thought. Riding across Mars in style. Plenty of room, and the greatest view on the planet. Best seat on the bus.

“Yahoo!” she shouted. She had made sure to turn her voice-activated microphone off before she shouted, and there was no reply, not even an echo. There should have been an echo, it would have completed the effect.

“Yahoo!”

8 Father Tomé

Nobody had told Estrela where she was being taken or tried to explain what was happening, nor did she ask any questions. Estrela already knew that her comfort, health, or opinions were of no interest to those who had her in their custody. She kept alert for a chance to dart away, to disappear into the shadows of the city. But she had been handcuffed—although she’d not been accused of a crime—and there were no clear opportunities. After the brief reprieve, she thought, she would be taken farther away and shot.

Instead, they put her on an ancient bus, and without explanation she was driven what had seemed like hundreds of kilometers inland. She had huddled in the corner, hissing and baring her teeth when anybody got near her. She had never been inside a motor vehicle before; the experience made her queasy, and if she had not been fairly faint with hunger, she thought that she would certainly have thrown up.

The School of the Beneficent Jesus of the South was a rude collection of tin-roofed cinder block huts and dirt pathways. She didn’t have any clear image in her mind of what a Father Tomé would look like, but the bald, smiling, roly-poly Anglo man in a faded Ipanema Beach Club T-shirt did not fit any of her expectations.

“Oh, my,” he said. He looked at the driver, shook his head, and then looked pointedly at the plastic handcuffs.

The driver’s hands were unexpectedly gentle as he cut the handcuff away from her. “She’s all yours now,” the man said, and went back to his bus.

She was ready to bolt now, but the wide-open spaces and the mountains disoriented her. She had no idea where the city was, if it was near or far. She had no idea of what was safe, or where she could hide, or what she could eat, or who she could trust.

Father Tomé smiled at her and held out his hand. In it was something, a little fur-covered purple object that, after she’d stared at it for a minute, she recognized as some sort of an animal, a stuffed animal. A lizard, no, a dinosaur. A purple stuffed dinosaur.

“Here, my frightened little avocado, this is for you,” he said. “Take it. It’s yours.”

It looked forlorn in his huge hand.

She wanted it. She snatched it out of his hand, hugged it to her breast and began to cry.

“Poor little avocado,” he said. “Welcome to Jesus do Sul. You are safe here.”

She was turned over to the ministrations of three laughing girls, who were not really much older than she was, although in their self-confidence they seemed to be much older and more experienced. “I am Maria Bonita,” the first one told her. “I am Maria da Glória,” the second girl said. “I am Maria Araujo,” the third one said. “The Father calls us the three Marias,” they said, all three together, and they exchanged glances and nodded solemnly at each other, secure in their identities.

They stripped her—she fought—and plunged her into hot water—she shrieked and flailed. Then they held her and scrubbed her firmly with huge wooden brushes, and she fought again. Finally they soaked her hair with kerosene. She screwed her eyes shut and held her breath, terrified, waiting for the flare of a match, and when they rubbed the kerosene briskly into her scalp, it felt as if her head was on fire, but a cold fire, chilling and burning at the same time. But the fire did not spread, and all they did was to wash it away again, covering the sharp odor with some bubbly soap that smelled like exotic flowers. Finally they dried her with huge fluffy towels. They gave her back the little stuffed dinosaur, which she clutched to her chest, and then dressed her in pajamas that were two sizes too large. It was the cleanest clothing she’d ever worn.

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.

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.”

“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.

“What is it?”

“Did you see that?”

“What?”

“It moved. That rock, did you see it? It flowed, just like water.” Ryan knelt down to put his hand on the rock. “It’s moving. I can feel it.”

“Where?” Trevor put his hand against the rock, but felt nothing.

“Hey, feel the heartbeat? This rock is alive. It’s not a rock at all, it’s an animal. I can feel it. Here.” He took Trevor’s hand and pressed it against the rock. “Can you feel it?”

It felt like rock. Rough, pitted, volcanic rock.

Abruptly Ryan got up and walked away. He was swaying, unsteady on his feet. Could he possibly be drunk? Now he was listing to one side as if he was about to fall over.

The rocks couldn’t possibly be alive. Trevor pressed his hand against the boulder again, and closed his eyes and held his breath to better feel the surface. When he concentrated he could feel his own pulse in the tips of his fingers, but the rock was still just a rock.

“Maybe a dinosaur,” Ryan said. “It’s sleeping, though. Say, kid, you know something? I’ve figured it out. We’re not on Mars. It’s all a hoax. We’re somewhere in Nevada, not on Mars. Look, I bet that’s Vegas right there over the horizon.” He put his hand up to his visor to shield his eyes from the sun.

“Stupid suit. Why the hell do we have to wear these things, anyway?” He put his hand up to the helmet ring-fitting, but then dropped it. “Kid, they tricked us. It’s a training mission. Look, take a look at the gravity.” He picked up a rock and dropped it. It fell, taking a second or so to hit the ground. “Look, was that slow, or not? Was that Mars gravity? I couldn’t tell.” He picked up another rock and dropped it. “Maybe it is. How do they fake that, I wonder?” He picked up another rock, but then seemed to forget what do with it.

“Hey, this rock is carved,” he said. “Carved, I tell you.” He dropped it and tried to pick up another. “Look, it’s a bowling ball.” He tried to pick it up, and couldn’t.

Trevor was seriously frightened now. Was Ryan psychotic? Was he going to go off on a killing spree, like a psycho killer in the movies? He looked around, but they were out of sight of the rest of the party. In fact, he wasn’t quite sure exactly where they were in relationship to the habitat.

Ryan sat down with a thump that Trevor thought he could hear even through the thin atmosphere, and picked up a handful of dust. “If I had a bowling ball,” he sang, “I’d go bowling—”

Trevor walked up to him. Just under Ryan’s collar, in the control section of his suit, was the switch that turned on the emergency broadcast frequency. Trevor reached over, flipped up the protective cover, and tapped it. When it didn’t light, he hit it again, this time hard.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“Brushing off some dirt.”

“Yeah?” Ryan looked down at his suit. “Say, the suit is dusty, isn’t it. You think I should take it off?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Okay.” Ryan went back to his singing, changing tunes. “I was lost, and now I’m found—”

From over the ridge across from them, a figure in a bright purple spacesuit came racing up the hill toward them.

Ryan looked up. “Tana! Hey, Tana, join the party! Where’s the beer?” He started to get up.

“Stay right there!” Tana commanded. “Shit! Kid, how long has he been like this?”

Ryan staggered to his feet, but seemed to have trouble staying upright. His voice was puzzled. “I think I’m drunk. That’s funny, I haven’t had any beer yet.”

“Hold still, hold still, damn it!” She had a cylinder of compressed oxygen out, and was fumbling with the pressure fitting on Ryan’s backpack. “Trevor, hold him steady.”

Trevor held onto Ryan with both hands. He had never been so glad to see anybody.

“Say, Tana,” said Ryan conversationally, “have I ever told you how cute you are? I’d really like to—” He cut himself off. “But you don’t want to. No, you’d probably die.”

“Hold still. You’ll be okay. Hold still, I’ve gotta purge you.”

“Of course,” Ryan continued, “you’ll probably die anyway. Did I tell you that only three of us can fit on the ship? Little teeny ship. Those Brazilians were little teeny guys, too. Maybe just two.”

Then the oxygen purge got into his life support system, and his voice trailed off. “Kid,” he said. “Kid, I’ve been really really dumb.”

“You said it,” Tana replied.

14 Hobbit Hab

During the training exercises, Ryan had tagged the bubble habitat the “hobbit habit,” since it was so small that ordinary humans had to hunch over when standing inside. “Damn thing is built for hobbits, not humans,” he’d said. From the outside, the bubble habitat looked like three golden brown biscuits baked together into a single mass, with a smaller biscuit, an airlock, stuck to one side. The yellow was the natural color of Kapton, a puncture-resistant polyimide, reinforced with invisible strands of high-strength carbon superfiber. The walls were just translucent enough that, from the outside, the hobbit habit shone with a deep, almost incandescent glow.

All five of them were inside now. Tana had seated Ryan on one of the supply cases and had strapped an oxygen mask on him. She drew a sample of his blood to analyze later. “Who’s president?” She hit him on one knee and watched his reflexes critically.

“Yamaguchi.” From under the oxygen mask, it sounded something like “Yohmoosh.” “Unless he’s been impeached. Or better yet, hanged.”

“Dream on.” Yamaguchi was not well liked among the Mars crew. As a senator, he had sponsored the legislation that killed the NASA Mars program after the Agamemnon disaster; as president, he had tried—unsuccessfully—to stop the Quijote expedition by demanding a billion-dollar payment as usage fee for the government equipment.

She tapped his other knee and watched the reflex. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”

“Sagan, just like the astronomer. No relation.”

“Stick your hand out straight and hold it steady.” She watched it critically, looking for tremors. “Good. Touch your nose with your index finger, please. Good, now again with your left index finger. Excellent. Tell me, where are we right now?”

“Inside a teeny little hobbit room that smells like plastic and”—he sniffed—“something else, maybe peroxide.”

“And where is that?”

He grinned. “On Mars.”

“Good,” Tana said. She peeled one eyelid up and shone a flashlight in his eye, watching the pupil contract, then did the same in the other. “I’d say that you’re oriented times three. You had a bad case of anoxia there, and I’m not real happy about it, but it looks like there’s no permanent damage. You can take the oxygen mask off now if you want. Do you have a headache?”

Ryan pulled the mask off. “I’m okay.”

“Roll it up neatly and put it away. Any idea what happened?”

Ryan shook his head, wincing slightly as he did so. Tana thought that he probably did have a headache. She would have liked to do a full PET scan workup to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, but without equipment, that was obviously impossible. “I’d say that something went wrong with the zirconia cell, but I don’t know what,” he said. “It wasn’t feeding me oxygen. I’ll take it apart tomorrow.”

“Do it tonight. None of us are going anywhere until we know what’s happened and can be sure it won’t happen again.”

Ryan winced slightly again, but nodded his head. “You’re right. Okay, tonight.”

Tana called through the opening, “I’m done here. Come on in.”

Commander Radkowski came into the bubble-segment, then Trevor, and finally Estrela, Estrela managing to be graceful even when she was hunched over like a caveman. With five in the segment, it was extremely crowded.

Now Ryan was the center of attention, and he fidgeted.

“Something you said,” Tana remarked casually. “Right at the end. Do you remember it?”

“It’s kind of hazy,” Ryan said, but when Tana gave him a sharp glance, he added, “Yes, I think so.”

Tana looked over to Commander Radkowski, hoping he would help, but he didn’t seem ready to take over the questioning. “Only three of us can fit on the ship, was that what you said?”

Ryan nodded, and when everybody was silent, looking at him, he cleared his throat. “Well, it’s a small ship.” Nobody said anything. “I did tell the commander.”

Tana turned and looked at Commander Radkowski. “You knew this, and you kept it from us?”

“I—well, it seemed a good idea at the time.”

“You’re saying, if we do make it all the way to the pole, only three of us can go home? And you didn’t tell us?” She turned to Estrela. “And you?”

Estrela looked away. “It is our ship. I know the specifications.”

Tana looked at Trevor. He shook his head mutely. “So, the only ones who didn’t know that two of us have to die were the nigger and the kid, is that right?”

She’d used the word hoping for some shock value, and it seemed to work. Radkowski spread his hands out, and turned them palms up. “It’s not like that—”

“Really.” She crossed her arms. “Okay, explain it to me.”

“All I was thinking was, we get to the ship, anything can happen. We need to work as a team. We can’t have everybody worrying. And, besides, who knows? It’s a tough trek anyway, I can’t be sure everybody is going to make it. If two of us die—”

Tana widened her eyes dramatically. “You’re saying that you were actually planning for two of us to die on the road?”

“No! Not that at all! I just meant—” Radkowski lowered his head. “I just thought that if we went, at least three of us could be saved.”

“Or maybe we could fix the ship so it could launch four,” Ryan added. “I don’t know for sure that it can’t.”

“Okay,” Tana said, and looked back at Commander Radkowski. “Now, tell me another thing. What were you and Estrela doing in the rockhopper an hour ago?”

Tana didn’t think that Radkowski could blush, but he did. He looked down at his feet. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” She looked at Estrela as she said it. Estrela looked back imperturbably, her head cocked slightly to the side. “You must have been doing something.”

“She wanted to talk to me.”

“Really? In private? About what?” She was still looking at Estrela, and Estrela’s slight hint of a smile told her more than she wanted to know.

Radkowski said, almost mumbling, “I should have realized she would know how big the ship was.” He looked up at her. “Nothing happened. She just wanted to talk to me.”

When Trevor’s broadcast had gone out, it had taken almost ten minutes for Radkowski to get to Ryan. It shouldn’t have taken him two.

They must have been doing something. Tana had a very good guess as to what.

15 Onward

The mood the next morning was subdued. Commander Radkowski told Trevor Whitman that it was time for him to practice driving the dirt-rovers, and sent Estrela to supervise him. Apparently Trevor’s reaction to the episode of anoxia had met some threshold of the commander’s approval. Or perhaps Ryan’s encounter with anoxia had impressed the commander with the fact that a crew member could be incapacitated at any time, and he might need the help of any of the crew, even Trevor.

Ryan, meanwhile, had finished analyzing the failure of the zirconia electrolysis unit in his suit. It was a replication, in miniature, of the same problem that had attacked the Dulcinea. The oxygen partial-pressure sensors had been suffused by sulfur radicals, and both the primary and backup sensor gave a false reading of oxygen overpressure. As a result, the feedback mechanism in the suit had turned down the oxygen production rate, until the gas mixture that Ryan had been breathing was nearly depleted of oxygen.

An overnight thermal bake-out of each of the sensors should be sufficient to clear away the accumulation before it reached a dangerous threshold. It would be best to do it every night. To be safe, Ryan changed the parameters in the oxygen control software so that if an apparent excess of oxygen occurred, the suit’s computer would keep oxygen production going, rather than cut it to zero. Finally, he suggested that when they were on the surface, everybody should run a manual oxygen level check on their suits twice a day—the manual system used a different sensor that should be immune from the problem—and they should swap out sensor elements if they saw any sign of trouble.

That would give them three layers of fail-safe against a recurrence of the failure. Nobody was happy about trusting their lives to a sensor that they knew could be faulty, but with the changes Ryan suggested, it should be as safe as anyone could make it. And he could see no alternative.

“What do we do now?” Tana asked.

“We continue north.” Commander Radkowski looked at her steadily. “We still have no other choice.”

Estrela and Trevor took the dirt-rovers ahead on pathfinder duty.

Ryan had worked most of the night on the problem, and Commander Radkowski assigned him to the first shift riding as passenger in the rock-hopper. Radkowski piloted the rockhopper himself, and Tana once again took up her position perched on top of the vehicle. The commander gave her a disapproving look. If he had been the pilot of the rockhopper on the previous day, he would have forbidden her to ride outside in the first place, but now that it was established, he didn’t bother to try to stop her. And, besides, it did make the rockhopper’s tiny cabin a little less crowded.

The morning sky was the color of adobe, streaked with feathery clouds, tiny crystals of carbon dioxide ice in the Martian stratosphere. The terrain was rockier, and Tana’s ride was quite a bit bumpier. Still, once she fit herself into the rhythm of it, it wasn’t a problem to keep her balance.

“Hey, Estrela, wait up!” Tana could hear everything that Trevor said over the communications link. “Hey, you’re going too fast! Slow up, okay? Wait for me!”

Estrela didn’t answer, but Tana could see that she was staying ahead much less than she had the previous day, probably in deference to Trevor’s inexperience.

16 João’s Secret

One day, for no reason that Estrela could say, she realized what had been really quite obvious all along.

João had his crowd, and despite the fact that he had almost no money, he was every evening at bars. He spent the nights drinking in the company of boys dressed in elaborately casual attire, bright primary colors adorned with sporting logos like Nike and Polo. They seemed an odd crowd for the João she knew, a João who was moody and studious and intently focused. But he hid this side of him well when he was with his American friends, assuming a mask of frivolity. Estrela assumed that he was social climbing.

She was herself climbing as high and as fast as she could, erasing her past and inventing a new one, studying the dress and the mannerisms of the North American girls and imitating everything, or at least as much as she could copy without thousands of cruzados to spend on clothes. Her origins in the street were a secret she never talked about, and most of the other girls, who knew only that she was from Brazil and had her tuition and living expenses paid from the charity of the order, assumed that she must be the daughter of a maid or a shop worker, poor but unexceptional.

But one day she was waiting in João’s dingy apartment, and João came by with one of his impeccably high-class friends. The boy gave her a look that dismissed her utterly, as if she was of less interest than the furniture. And when he bid farewell to João, his fingers lingered a little too long on João’s arm, and his glance lingered a little too long on João’s eyes, and she thought, Why, he is looking at João just like a lover would. And then, never even having articulated it to herself until that moment, she thought, But of course, why shouldn’t he? He must be João’s lover.

Until then it had never struck her as odd that João had no girlfriends. He was handsome enough; he could have had any of Estrela’s friends if he had but once called their name in his gentle, commanding voice, but she had only thought that he was too good for them.

Why, João is a veador, she thought, and suddenly all that had been opaque to her became clear.

João, when she mentioned it, shrugged. “I can’t believe that you didn’t know,” he said.

“Aren’t you afraid of diseases?”

João looked at her.

“You know. The homosexual disease. The—you know!”

“Say it.”

“You know! AIDS!”

“I am far more cautious than you are, my little orchid,” João said. “You have, what, a dozen male friends who skewer you like a barbecued goat on a spit? Are you not yourself afraid?”

“I take precautions,” she said, indignantly tossing her hair.

“What precautions?”

“I make them all wear—” She made a gesture with her hand, like unrolling a tiny inner tube. “You know. The tiny shirt. Camisinhas.”

“Ah, so you do make your knights wear their rubber armor,” João said. “As well you should. I am glad to hear it. And so do I.” He lowered his eyes. “Am I afraid?” He raised his eyes and looked directly at her, his dark eyes penetrating through her like fire. “Yes, of course I am afraid. It is a horrible thing, when love is death and death is love. It is my worst fear, and each time I love, I think, is this it? Is this one to be my death? But what can I do? Can I change the stars in their course, or keep the ocean from surrounding the world? No more can I change the way I am. If it is fated that I must die, well, then, every man must die. And I will have lived a little, and have known the love of a few men. I am careful, my love, I am as careful as I can possibly be, but death comes for all men. And for women too, little orchid.”

Oddly, once she knew his secret, it brought her closer to João. He would now bring her out with his drinking buddies, and after a while they accepted her as just a rather odd friend of João’s. She saw them, at first, as shallow poseurs pretending at an assertive masculinity, unworthy of João’s affection; later as confused young men, uncertain of their sexuality or their identity; and finally she didn’t see them as anything at all, just friends of João’s: Andrew who got drunk and sang, Justin who liked to take her to ancient Hollywood musicals and then discuss the characters and the costumes all night long, Dieter who taught her to ride a dirt bike, Jean-Paul who wrote poetry.

When João broke up with the two others he had shared his apartment with, it was only natural that he took a new apartment with her. João was in a Ph.D. program at Cleveland State University by then, the rising star of the geology department; she had won an assistantship and would be starting the following autumn. Unlike João, who studied rocks with an intensity that sometimes almost frightened her, she had no particular passion for geology. It was as good a subject as any other, no better, no worse.

What does he see in those rocks? she sometimes thought. What does he see in those men?

But it was an excuse to avoid going back to Brazil.

17 Trevor on Wheels

Trevor drove to the theme music of the songs stomping through his head—

riding on that lonesome road, riding riding riding

He was being excruciatingly careful. Driving the dirt-rovers had been easy enough in the virtual reality simulation, but he was acutely aware that this was real reality, and smashing up a dirt-rover would mean that none of the crew would ever trust him again.

hauling down that heavy load, riding riding riding

He stayed well behind Estrela, following in her tracks, watching where she avoided obstacles. Estrela banked it over casually, sometimes weaving lazy S-curves for no reason he could see other than just for the hell of it. The rocky surface had little traction, though, and he was afraid to follow her. If he leaned the rockhopper over very far, he was afraid it would slide out from under him. So he slowly dropped further behind. It was okay. He was practicing being cautious, and there was no real way he could get lost; the dirt-rover had its own laser-gyro-based inertial navigation system that gave him a readout of his position to within a fraction of an inch. In the very worst case, if he lost track of both Estrela ahead of him and the rock-hopper behind him, he could radio and ask for a position.

So he didn’t mind that he was slowly dropping behind her.

He was almost a mile behind when she drove over the cliff.

18 Marriage of Convenience

In 2014, when Brazil announced its astronaut program, João had studied the application guidelines—both the ones that were written and the ones that were implied. A Mars mission was in the air; everybody knew it. The Americans had already announced their intention to go to Mars, and João studied the Brazilian space program carefully. They were asking for geologists. Why, he considered, with no oil to drill for in space, no mountains, no ores, why would the Brazilians want geologists for astronauts? Why, then, if not for Mars?

João had kept his tastes for young men discreet. In America, to be openly homosexual sometimes would invite an attack, and it certainly meant a dead end for advancement, at least for those not in careers friendly to those who were not straight, such as hairdressing or dancing. No, it was wise to keep his private life silent.

João was already at a disadvantage, being Brazilian in an American-dominated economy. He was working with a petrochemical company now, scouting locations for exploratory wells in the Yucatan. It was work that he enjoyed—of everything, he most liked walking in the field, picking up rocks and examining them and trying to imagine what tectonic conditions had formed them, what their history was, what story they told about the geological conditions deep down under the earth. The rocks of Yucatan were mostly limestone. The core drillings, the seismic tomography, the petrography and magnetometry and analytical chemistry—all of the tools of physical geology he found interesting and was adept at using and interpreting, but at heart what he most liked was just walking in the territory with a hammer and a hand lens, looking at the terrain and picking up rocks.

Did he want to become an astronaut? Yes, he decided.

Estrela had not, in all that time, gone back to Brazil.

Often she stayed with João. His passion was for young men, preferably lean, blond young men with mirror-shades and a taste for suede. But some years lean young blonds were few and far between, and on those evenings when he was between lovers, and bored, Estrela had been available, and so—

Well, it was of no consequence to him, a physical comfort, a small shared intimacy he could enjoy, even though he might have wished that Estrela were a man. She was his friend, and even if she did not share his soul, she was the one he bared his soul to, the only person on earth who really knew him.

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.

And when the expedition failed, when international television broadcast the terrible images of the bodies of the Brazilian astronauts, lying uncovered in the snow a hundred million miles away from their native soil, she became the symbol of Brazil, beautiful and tragic.

She knew in her heart that João had, in his own way, loved her. Perhaps he had never felt the intense physical ache she had felt for him, but still, he had loved her in a way that none of his silly blond boys could ever know.

She never cried, but she grieved in her own way, and knew for certain that she would never love again.

So when the time came for Brazil to send an astronaut on the third expedition to Mars, there was no real disagreement on the choice of who to send.