скачать книгу бесплатно
Two hours later the Sabatier was fixed. On the way back to the trailer park, Nadia glanced into the first greenhouse. Plants were already blooming, the new crops breaking out of their beds of new black soil. Green glowed intensely in the reds of this world, it was a pleasure to see it. The bamboo was growing several centimeters a day, she had been told, and the crop was already nearly five meters tall. It was easy to see they were going to need more soil. Back at the alchemists’ they were using nitrogen from the Boeings to synthesize ammonia fertilizers: Hiroko craved these because the regolith was an agricultural nightmare, intensely salty, explosive with peroxides, extremely arid, and completely without biomass. They were going to have to construct soil just like they had the magnesium bars.
Nadia went into her habitat in the trailer park for a standing lunch. Then she was out again, to the site of the permanent habitat. The floor of the trench had been almost leveled in her absence. She stood on the edge of the hole, looking down in it. They were going to build to a design that she liked tremendously, one she had worked on herself in Antarctica and on the Ares: a simple line of barrel-vaulted chambers, sharing adjacent walls. By setting them in the trench the chambers would be half-buried to begin with; then when completed they would be covered by ten meters of sandbagged regolith to stop radiation and also, because they planned to pressurize to 450 millibars to keep the buildings from exploding. Local materials were all they needed for the exteriors of these buildings: Portland cement and bricks were it, basically, with plastic liner in some places to insure the seal.
Unfortunately the brickmakers were having some trouble, and they gave Nadia a call. Nadia’s patience was running short, and she groaned. “We travel all the way to Mars and you can’t make bricks?”
“It’s not that we can’t make bricks,” said Gene. “It’s just that I don’t like them.” The brickmaking factory mixed clays and sulphur extracted from the regolith, and this preparation was poured into brick molds and baked until the sulphur began to polymerize, and then as the bricks cooled they were compressed a bit in another part of the machine. The resulting blackish-red bricks had a tensile strength that was technically adequate for use in the barrel vaults, but Gene wasn’t happy. “We don’t want to be at minimum values for heavy roofs over our heads,” he said. “What if we pile one sandbag too many on top of it, or if we get a little marsquake? I don’t like it.”
After some thought Nadia said, “Add nylon.”
“What?”
“Go out and find the parachutes from the freight drops, and shred them real fine, and add them to the clay. That’ll help their tensile strength.”
“Very true,” Gene said, after a pause. “Good idea! Think we can find the parachutes?”
“They must be east of here somewhere.”
So they had finally found a job for the geologists that actually helped the construction effort. Ann and Simon and Phyllis and Sasha and Igor drove long-distance rovers over the horizon to east of the base, searching and surveying far past Chernobyl; and in the next week they found almost forty parachutes, each one representing a few hundred kilos of useful nylon.
One day they came back excited, having reached Ganges Catena, a series of sinkholes in the plain a hundred kilometers to the southeast. “It was strange,” Igor said, “because you can’t see them until the last minute, and then they’re like huge funnels, about ten kilometers across and a couple deep, eight or nine in a row, each smaller and shallower. Fantastic. They’re probably thermokarsts, but they’re so big it’s hard to believe it.”
Sasha said, “It’s nice to see such a distance, after all this near horizon stuff.”
“They’re thermokarsts,” Ann said. But they had drilled and found no water. This was getting to be a concern; they hadn’t found any water to speak of in the ground, no matter how far down they drilled: it forced them to rely on the supplies from the air miners.
Nadia shrugged. The air miners were pretty tough. She wanted to think about her vaults. The new improved bricks were appearing and she had started the robots building the walls and roofs. The brick factory filled little robot cars, which rolled like toy rovers across the plain to cranes at the site; the cranes pulled out bricks one by one, and placed them on cold mortar spread by another set of robots. The system worked so well that soon the bottleneck became brick production itself. Nadia would have been pleased, if she had had more faith in the robots: these seemed okay, but her experiences with robots in the years on Novy Mir had made her wary. They were great if everything went perfectly, but nothing ever went perfectly, and it was hard to program them with decision algorithms that didn’t either make them so cautious that they froze every minute, or so uncontrolled that they could commit unbelievable acts of stupidity, repeating an error a thousand times and magnifying a small glitch into a giant blunder, as in Maya’s emotional life. You got what you put into robots; but even the best were mindless idiots.
One evening Maya snagged her out in her tool room and asked her to switch to a private band. “Michel is useless,” she complained. “I’m really having a hard time, and he won’t even talk to me! You’re the only one I trust, Nadia. Yesterday I told Frank that I thought John was trying to undercut his authority in Houston, but that he shouldn’t tell anyone I thought so and the very next day John was asking me why I thought he was bothering Frank. There’s no one who will just listen and stay quiet!”
Nadia nodded, rolling her eyes. Finally she said, “Sorry, Maya, I have to go talk to Hiroko about a leak they can’t find.” She banged her faceplate lightly against Maya’s – symbol for a kiss on the cheek – switched to the common band and took off. Enough was enough. It was infinitely more interesting to talk to Hiroko: real conversations, about real problems in the real world. Hiroko was asking Nadia for help almost every day, and Nadia liked that, because Hiroko was brilliant, and since landfall had obviously raised her estimate of Nadia’s abilities. Mutual professional respect, a great maker of friendships. And so nice to talk nothing but business. Hermetic seals, lock mechanisms, thermal engineering, glass polarization, farm/human interfaces (Hiroko’s talk was always a few steps ahead of the game); these topics were a great relief after all the emotional whispered conferences with Maya, endless sessions about who liked Maya and who didn’t like Maya, about how Maya felt about this and that, and who had hurt her feelings that day … bah. Hiroko was never strange, except when she would say something Nadia didn’t know how to deal with, like, “Mars will tell us what it wants and then we’ll have to do it.” What could you say to something like that? But Hiroko would just smile her big smile, and laugh at Nadia’s shrug.
At night the talk still went everywhere, vehement, absorbed, unselfconscious. Dmitri and Samantha were sure that they could soon introduce genetically engineered micro-organisms into the regolith that would survive, but they would have to get permission first from the UN. Nadia herself found the idea alarming: it made the chemical engineering in the factories look relatively straightforward, more like brickmaking than the dangerous acts of creation Samantha was proposing … Although the alchemists were performing some pretty creative things themselves. Almost every day they came back to the trailer park with samples of new materials: sulphuric acid, sorel cements for the vault mortar, ammonium nitrate explosives, a calcium cyanamide rover fuel, polysulfide rubber, silicon-based hyperacids, emulsifying agents, a selection of test tubes holding trace elements extracted from the salts; and, most recently, clear glass. This last was a coup, as earlier attempts at glassmaking had produced only black glass. But stripping silicate feedstocks of their iron content had done the trick; and so one night they sat in the trailer passing around small wavy sheets of glass, the glass itself filled with bubbles and irregularities, like something out of the seventeenth century.
When they got the first chamber buried and pressurized, Nadia walked around inside it with her helmet off, sniffing the air. It was pressurized to 450 millibars, the same as the helmets and the trailer park, with an oxygen-nitrogen-argon mix, and warmed to about 15° Centigrade. It felt great.
The chamber had been divided into two stories by a floor of bamboo trunks, set in a slot in the brick wall two and a half meters overhead. The segmented cylinders made a sweet green ceiling, lit by neon tubes hung under them. Against one wall was a magnesium and bamboo staircase, leading through a hole to the upper story. She climbed up to have a look. Split bamboo over the trunks made a fairly flat green floor. The ceiling was brick, rounded and low. Up there they would locate the bedrooms and bathroom; the lower floor would be living room and kitchen. Maya and Simon had already put up wall hangings, made of nylon from the salvaged parachutes. There were no windows: lighting came only from the neon bulbs. Nadia disliked this fact, and in the larger habitat she was already planning, there would be windows in almost every room. But first things first. For the time being these windowless chambers were the best they could do. And a big improvement over the trailer park, after all.
As she went back down the stairs she ran her fingers over the bricks and mortar. They were rough, but warm to the touch, heated by elements placed behind them. There were heating elements under the floor as well. She took off her shoes and socks, luxuriating in the feel of the warm rough bricks underfoot. It was a wonderful room; and nice, too, to think that they had gone all the way to Mars, and there built homes out of brick and bamboo. She recalled vaulted ruins she had seen years ago on Crete, at a site called Aptera; underground Roman cisterns, barrel-vaulted and made of brick, buried in a hillside. They had been almost the same size as these chambers. Their exact purpose was unknown; storage for olive oil, some said, though it would have been an awful lot of oil. Those vaults were intact two thousand years after their construction, and in earthquake country. As Nadia put her boots back on she grinned to think of it. Two thousand years from now, their descendants might walk into this chamber, no doubt a museum by then, if it still existed – the first human dwelling built on Mars! And she had done it. Suddenly she felt the eyes of that future on her, and shivered. They were like Cro-Magnons in a cave, living a life that was certain to be pored over by the archeologists of subsequent generations; people like her who would wonder, and wonder, and never quite understand.
More time passed, more work got done. It blurred for Nadia: she was always busy. The interior construction of the vaulted chambers was complicated, and the robots couldn’t help much: plumbing, heating, gas exchange, locks, kitchens; they had all the fixtures and tools and could work in pants and sweatshirts, but still it took an amazing amount of time. Work work work, day after day!
One evening, just before sunset, Nadia trudged across torn-up dirt to the trailer park, feeling hungry and beat and extremely relaxed, not that you didn’t have to be careful at the end of a day: she had torn a centimeter hole in the back of a glove the other evening being careless, and the cold hadn’t been so bad, about –50° Centigrade, nothing compared to some Siberian winter days – but the low air pressure had sucked out a blood bruise instantly, and then that had started to freeze up, which made the bruise smaller no doubt, but slower to heal as well. Anyway, you had to be careful, but there was something so fluid about tired muscles at the end of a day’s construction work, the low rust sunlight slanting across the rocky plain, and all of a sudden she could feel that she was happy. Arkady called in from Phobos at just that moment, and she greeted him cheerily; “I feel just like a Louis Armstrong solo from 1947.”
“Why 1947?” he asked.
“Well, that was the year he sounded the most happy. Most of his life his tone has a sharp edge to it, really beautiful, but in 1947 it was even more beautiful because it has this relaxed fluid joy, you never hear it in him before or after.”
“A good year for him, I take it?”
“Oh yes! An amazing year! After twenty years of horrible big bands, you see, he got back to a little group like the Hot Five, that was the group he headed when he was young, and there it was, the old songs, even some of the old faces – and all of it better than the first time, you know, the recording technology, the money, the audiences, the band, his own power … It must have felt like the fountain of youth, I tell you.”
“You’ll have to send up some recordings,” Arkady said. He tried to sing: “I can’t give you any thing but love, baby!” Phobos was about over the horizon, he had just been calling to say hi. “So this is your 1947,” he said before he went.
Nadia put her tools away, singing the song correctly. And she understood that what Arkady had said was true; something had happened to her similar to what had happened to Armstrong in 1947 – because despite the miserable conditions, her youthful years in Siberia had been the happiest of her life, they really had. And then she had endured twenty years of big band cosmonautics, bureaucracy, simulations, an indoor life – all to get here. And now suddenly she was out in the open again, building things with her hands, operating heavy machinery, solving problems a hundred times a day, just like Siberia only better. It was just like Satchmo’s return!
Thus when Hiroko came up and said, “Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position,” Nadia sang to her, “That’s the only thing I’m thinking of – baby!” and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. “The engineer’s solution,” she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman who held their whole ecosystem in her head, but couldn’t hammer a nail straight.
And that night she talked over the day’s work with Sax, and spoke to Spencer about glass, and in the middle of that conversation crashed on her bunk and snuggled her head into her pillow, feeling totally luxurious, the glorious final chorus of “Ain’t Misbehaving” chasing her off to sleep.
But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness. “Do you realize it’s Ls 170 already?” Phyllis said one night. “Didn’t we land at Ls 7?”
So they had been on Mars for half a Martian year. Phyllis was using the calendar devised by planetary scientists; among the colonists it was becoming more common than the Terran system. Mars’s year was 668.6 local days long, and to tell where they were in this long year it took the Ls calendar. This system declared the line between the sun and Mars at its northern spring equinox to be 0°, and then the year was divided into 360°, so that Ls = 0°–90° was the northern spring, 90–180° the northern summer, 180–270° the fall, and 270–360° (or 0° again) the winter.
This simple situation was complicated by the eccentricity of the Martian orbit, which is extreme by Terran standards, for at perihelion Mars is about forty-three million kilometers closer to the sun than it is at aphelion, and thus receiving about 45% more sunlight. This fluctuation makes the southern and northern seasons quite unequal. Perihelion arrives every year at Ls = 250°, late in the southern spring; so southern springs and summers are much hotter than northern springs and summers, with peak temperatures as much as thirty degrees higher. Southern autumns and winters are colder, however, occurring as they do near aphelion; so much colder that the southern polar cap is mostly carbon dioxide, while the northern one is mostly water ice.
So the south was the hemisphere of extremes, the north that of moderation. And the orbital eccentricity caused one other feature of note; planets move faster the closer they are to the sun, so the seasons near perihelion are shorter than those near aphelion; the northern autumn is 143 days long, for instance, while northern spring is 194. Spring fifty-one days longer than autumn! Some claimed this alone made it worth settling in the north.
In any case, in the north they were; and spring had arrived. The days got longer by a little bit every day and the work went on. The area around the base got more cluttered, more criss-crossed with tracks; they had laid a cement road to Chernobyl and the base itself was now so big that from the trailer park it extended over the horizon in all directions: the alchemists’ quarter and the Chernobyl road to the east, the permanent habitat to the north, the storage area and the farm to the west, and the biomed center to the south.
Eventually everyone moved into the finished chambers of the permanent habitat. The nightly conferences there were shorter and more routinized than they had been in the trailer park, and days went by when Nadia got no calls for help. There were some people she saw only once in a while; the biomed crew in its labs, Phyllis’s prospecting unit, even Ann. One night Ann flopped on her bed next to Nadia’s, and invited her to go along on an exploration to Hebes Chasma, some 130 kilometers to the southwest. Obviously Ann wanted to show her something outside the base area; but Nadia declined. “I’ve got too much work to do, you know.” And seeing Ann’s disappointment: “Maybe next trip.”
And then it was back to work on the interiors of the chambers, and the exteriors of a new wing. Arkady had suggested making the line of chambers the first of four, arranged in a square, and Nadia was going to do it; as Arkady pointed out, it would then be possible to roof the area enclosed by the square. “That’s where those magnesium beams will come in handy,” Nadia said. “If only we could make stronger glass panes …”
They had finished two sides of the square, twelve chambers entirely done, when Ann and her team returned from Hebes. Everyone spent that evening looking at their videotapes. These showed the expedition’s rovers rolling over rocky plains; then ahead there appeared a break extending all the way across the screen, as if they were approaching the edge of the world. Strange little meter-high cliffs finally stopped the rovers, and the pictures bounced as one explorer got out and walked with helmet camera turned on.
Then abruptly the shot was from the rim, a one-eighty pan shot of a canyon that was so much bigger than the sinkholes of Ganges Catena that it was hard to grasp. The walls of the far side of the chasm were just visible on the distant horizon. In fact they could see walls all the way around, for Hebes was an almost-enclosed chasm, a sunken ellipse about two hundred kilometers long and a hundred across. Ann’s party had come to the north rim in late afternoon, and the eastern curve of the wall was clearly visible, flooded by sunset light; out to the west the wall was just a low dark mark. The floor of the chasm was generally flat, with a central dip. “If you could float a dome over the chasm,” Ann said, “you’d have a nice big enclosure.”
“You’re talking miracle domes, Ann,” Sax said. “That’s about ten thousand square kilometers.”
“Well, it would make a good big enclosure. And then you could leave the rest of the planet alone.”
“The weight of a dome would collapse the canyon walls.”
“That’s why I said you’d have to float it.”
Sax just shook his head.
“It’s no more exotic than this space elevator you talk about.”
“I want to live in a house located right where you took this video,” Nadia interrupted. “What a view!”
“Just wait till you get up on one of the Tharsis volcanoes,” Ann said, irritated. “Then you’ll get a view.”
There were little spats like that all the time now. It reminded Nadia unpleasantly of the last months on the Ares. Another example: Arkady and his crew sent down videos of Phobos, with his commentary: “The Stickney impact almost broke this rock in pieces, and it’s chondritic, almost twenty percent water, so a lot of the water outgassed on impact and filled the fracture system and froze in a whole system of ice veins.” Fascinating stuff, but all it did was cause an argument between Ann and Phyllis, their two top geologists, as to whether this was the real explanation for the ice. Phyllis even suggested shipping water down from Phobos, which was silly, even if their supplies were low and their demand increasing. Chernobyl took a lot of water, and the farmers were ready to start a little swamp in their biosphere; and Nadia wanted to install a swimming complex in one of the vaulted chambers, including a lap pool, three whirlpool baths, and a sauna. Each night people asked Nadia how it was coming along, because everyone was sick of washing with sponges and still being dusty, and of never really getting warm. They wanted a bath; in their old aquatic dolphin brains, down below the cerebrums, down where desires were primal and fierce, they wanted back into water.
So they needed more water, but the seismic scans were finding no evidence of ice aquifers underground, and Ann thought there weren’t any in the region. They had to continue to rely on the air miners, or scrape up regolith and load it into the soil-water distilleries. But Nadia didn’t like to overwork the distilleries, because they had been manufactured by a French-Hungarian-Chinese consortium, and were sure to wear out if used for bulk work.
But that was life on Mars; it was a dry place. Shikata ga nai.
“There are always choices,” Phyllis said to that. This was why she had suggested filling landing vehicles with Phobos ice, and bringing it on down; but Ann thought that was a ridiculous waste of energy; and they were off again.
It was especially irritating to Nadia because she herself was in such a good mood. She saw no reason to quarrel, and it disturbed her that the others didn’t feel the same. Why did the dynamics of a group fluctuate so? Here they were on Mars, where the seasons were twice as long as Earth’s, and every day was forty minutes longer: why couldn’t people relax? Nadia had a sense that there was time for things even though she was always busy, and the extra thirty-nine and half minutes per day was probably the most important component of this feeling; human circadian biorhythms had been set over millions of years of evolution, and now suddenly to have extra minutes of day and night, day after day, night after night – no doubt it had effects. Nadia was sure of it, because despite the hectic pace of every day’s work, and the way she passed out in sheer exhaustion every night, she always woke rested. That strange pause on the digital clocks, when at midnight the figures hit 12:00:00 and suddenly stopped, and the unmarked time passed, passed, passed, sometimes it seemed for a very long time indeed; and then snapped on to 12:00:01, and began its usual inexorable flicker; well, the Martian timeslip was something special. Often Nadia was asleep through it, as were most of the rest of them. But Hiroko had a chant that she chanted during it when she was up, and she and the farm team, and many of the rest of them, spent every Saturday night partying and chanting that chant through the timeslip – something in Japanese, Nadia never learned what, though she sometimes hummed along, sitting enjoying the vault and her friends.
But one Saturday night when she sat there, nearly comatose, Maya came over and sat against her shoulder for a talk. Maya with her beautiful face, always well-groomed, always the latest in chicarnost even in their everyday jumpsuits, looking distraught. “Nadia, you have to do me a favor, please, please.”
“What?”
“I need you to tell something to Frank for me.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“I can’t have John seeing us talk! I have to get a message to him, and please, Nadezhda Francine, you’re my only way.”
Nadia made a disgusted noise.
“Please.”
It was surprising how much Nadia would have rather been talking to Ann, or Samantha, or Arkady. If only Arkady would come down from Phobos!
But Maya was her friend. And that desperate look on her face: Nadia couldn’t stand it. “What message?”
“Tell him that I’ll meet him tonight in the storage area,” Maya said imperiously. “At midnight. To talk.”
Nadia sighed. But later she went to Frank, and gave him the message. He nodded without meeting her eye, embarrassed, grim, unhappy.
Then a few days later Nadia and Maya were cleaning up the brick floor of the latest chamber to be pressurized, and Nadia’s curiosity got the best of her; she broke her customary silence on the topic, and asked Maya what was going on. “Well, it’s John and Frank,” Maya said querulously. “They’re very competitive. They’re like brothers, and there’s a lot of jealousy there. John got to Mars first, and then he got permission to come back again, and Frank doesn’t think it was fair. Frank did a lot of the work in Washington to get the colony funded, and he thinks John has always taken advantage of his work. And now, well. John and I are good together, I like him. It’s easy with him. Easy, but maybe a little … I don’t know. Not boring. But not exciting. He likes to walk around, hang out with the farm crew. He doesn’t like to talk that much! Frank, now, we could talk forever. Argue forever, maybe, but at least we’re talking! And you know, we had a very brief affair on the Ares, back at the beginning, and it didn’t work out, but he still thinks it could.”
Why would he think that? Nadia mouthed.
“So he keeps trying to talk me into leaving John and being with him, and John suspects that’s what he’s doing, so there’s a lot of jealousy between them. I’m just trying to keep them from each other’s throats, that’s all.”
Nadia decided to stick to her resolve and not ask about it again. But now she was involved despite herself. Maya kept coming to her to talk, and to ask her to convey messages to Frank for her. “I’m not a go-between!” Nadia kept protesting, but she kept doing it, and once or twice when she did she got into long conversations with Frank, about Maya of course; who she was, what she was like, why she acted the way she did. “Look,” Nadia said to him, “I can’t speak for Maya. I don’t know why she does what she does, you have to ask her yourself. But I can tell you, she comes out of the old Moscow Soviet culture, university and CP for both her mother and her grandmother. And men were the enemies for Maya’s babushka, and for her mother too, it was a matrioshka. Maya’s mother used to say to her, ‘Women are the roots, men are just the leaves.’ There was a whole culture of mistrust, manipulation, fear. That’s where Maya comes from. And at the same time we have this tradition of amicochonstvo, a kind of intense friendship where you learn the very tiniest details of your friend’s life, you invade each other’s lives in a sense, and of course that’s impossible and it has to end, usually badly.”
Frank was nodding at this description, recognizing something in it. Nadia sighed and went on. “These are the friendships that lead to love, and then love has the same sort of trouble only magnified, especially with all that fear at the bottom of it.”
And Frank – tall, dark, and somehow handsome, bulky with power, spinning with his own internal dynamo, the American politician (or so Nadia thought of him), now wrapped around the finger of a neurotic Russian beauty – Frank nodded humbly, and thanked her, looking discouraged. As well he should.
Nadia did her best to ignore all that. But it seemed everything else had turned problematic as well. Vlad had never approved of how much time they were spending on the surface in the daytime, and now he said, “We ought to stay under the hill most of the time, and bury all the labs as well. Outdoor work should be restricted to an hour in the early mornings and another in the late afternoons, when the sun is low.”
“I’ll be damned if I stay indoors all day,” Ann said, and many agreed with her.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Frank pointed out.
“But most of it could be done by teleoperation,” Vlad said. “And it should be. What we are doing is the equivalent of standing ten kilometers from an atomic explosion —”
“So?” Ann said. “Soldiers did that — ”
“ — every six months,” Vlad finished, and stared at her. “Would you do that?”
Even Ann looked subdued. No ozone layer, no magnetic field to speak of; they were getting fried by radiation almost as badly as if they were in interplanetary space, to the tune of ten rems per year.
And so Frank and Maya ordered them to ration their time outdoors. There was a lot of interior work to be done under the hill, getting the last row of chambers finished; and it was possible to dig some cellars below the vaults, giving them some more space protected from radiation. And many of the tractors were equipped to be teleoperated from indoor stations, their decision algorithms handling the details while the human operators watched screens below. So it could be done; but no one liked the life that resulted. Even Sax Russell, who was content to work indoors most of the time, looked a bit perplexed. In the evenings a number of people began to argue for immediate terraforming efforts, and they made the case with renewed intensity.
“That’s not our decision to make,” Frank told them sharply. “The UN decides that one. Besides it’s a long-term solution, on the scale of centuries at best. Don’t waste time talking about it!”
Ann said, “That’s all true, but I don’t want to waste my time down here in these caves, either. We should live our lives the way we want. We’re too old to worry about radiation.”
Arguments again, arguments that made Nadia feel as if she had floated off the good solid rock of her planet back into the tense weightless reality of the Ares. Carping, complaining, arguing; until people got bored, or tired, and went to sleep. Nadia started leaving the room whenever it began, looking for Hiroko and a chance to discuss something concrete. But it was hard to avoid these matters, to stop thinking about them.
Then one night Maya came to her crying. There was room in the permanent habitat for private talks, and Nadia went with her down to the northeast corner of the vaults, where they were still working on interiors, and sat by her arm to arm, shivering and listening to her, and occasionally putting an arm over her shoulder and giving her a hug. “Look,” Nadia said at one point, “why don’t you just decide? Why don’t you quit playing one off against the other?”
“But I have decided! It’s John I love, it’s always been John. But now he’s seen me with Frank and he thinks I’ve betrayed him. It’s really petty of him! They’re like brothers, they compete in everything, and this time it’s just a mistake!”
Nadia resisted learning the details, she didn’t want to hear it. She sat there listening anyway.
And then John was standing there before them. Nadia got up to leave, but he didn’t appear to notice. “Look,” he said to Maya. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. It’s over.”
“It’s not over,” Maya said, instantly composed. “I love you.”
John’s smile was rueful. “Yes. And I love you. But I want things simple.”
“It is simple!”
“No it isn’t. I mean, you can be in love with more than one person at the same time. Anyone can, that’s just the way it is. But you can only be loyal to one. And I want … I want to be loyal. To someone who is loyal to me. It’s simple, but …”
He shook his head; he couldn’t find the phrase. He walked back into the eastern row of chambers, disappeared through a door.
“Americans,” Maya said viciously. “Fucking children!” Then she was up through the door after him.
But soon she came back. He had retreated to a group in one of the lounges, and wouldn’t leave. “I’m tired,” Nadia tried to say, but Maya wouldn’t hear it, she was getting more and more upset. For over an hour they discussed it, over and over. Eventually Nadia agreed to go to John and ask him to come to Maya and talk it over. Nadia walked grimly through the chambers, oblivious to the brick and the colorful nylon hangings. The go-between that nobody noticed. Couldn’t they get robots to do this? She found John, who apologized for ignoring her earlier. “I was upset, I’m sorry. I figured you’d hear it all eventually anyway.”
Nadia shrugged. “No problem. But look, you have to go talk to her. That’s the way it is with Maya. We talk, talk, talk; if you contract to be in a relationship, you have to talk your way all the way through it, and all the way out of it. If you don’t it will be worse for you in the long run, believe me.”
That got to him. Sobered, he went off to find her. Nadia went to bed.
The next day she was out working late on a trencher. It was the third job of the day, and the second had been trouble: Samantha had tried to carry a load on the earthmover blade while making a turn, and the thing had taken a nosedive and twisted the rods of the blade lifters out of their casings, spilling hydraulic fluid over the ground, where it had frozen before it even flattened out. They had had to set jacks under the airborne back end of the tractor, and then decouple the entire blade attachment and lower the vehicle on the jacks, and every step of the operation had been a pain.
Then as soon as that was finished, Nadia had been called over to help with a Sandvik Tubex boring machine, which they were using to drill cased holes through large boulders they ran into while laying a water line from the alchemists’ to the permanent habitat. The down-the-hole pneumatic hammer had apparently frozen at full extension, as stuck as an arrow fired most of the way through a tree. Nadia stood looking down at the hammer shaft. “Do you have any suggestions for freeing the hammer without breaking it?” Spencer asked.
“Break the boulder,” Nadia said wearily, and walked over and got in a tractor with a backhoe already attached. She drove it over, and dug down to the top of the boulder, and then got out to attach a little Allied hydraulic impact hammer to the backhoe. She had just set it in position on the top of the boulder when the down-the-hole hammer suddenly jerked its drill back, pulling the boulder with it and catching the outside of her left hand against the underside of the Allied Hy-Ram.
Instinctively she pulled back, and pain lanced up her arm and into her chest. Fire filled that side of her body and her vision went white. There were shouts in her ears: “What’s wrong? What happened?” She must have screamed. “Help,” she grated. She was sitting, her crushed hand still pinned between rock and hammer. She pushed at the front wheel of the tractor with her foot, shoved with all her might and felt the hammer rasp her bones over rock. Then she was flopped on her back, the hand free. The pain was blinding, she felt sick to her stomach and thought she might faint. Pushing onto her knees with her good hand, she saw that the crushed hand was bleeding heavily, the glove ripped apart, the little finger apparently gone. She groaned and hunched over it, pressed it to her and then jammed it against the ground, ignoring the flash of pain. Even bleeding as it was, the hand would freeze in … how long? “Freeze, damn you, freeze,” she cried. She shook tears out of her eyes and forced herself to look at it. Blood all over, steaming. She pushed the hand into the ground as hard as she could stand. Already it hurt less. Soon it would be numb, she would have to be careful not to freeze the whole hand! Frightened, she prepared to pull it back into her lap; then people were there, lifting her, and she fainted. After that she was maimed. Nadia Nine Fingers, Arkady called her over the phone. He sent her lines by Yevtushenko, written to mourn the death of Louis Armstrong: “Do as you did in the past/And play.”
“How did you find that?” Nadia asked him. “I can’t imagine you reading Yevtushenko.”
“Of course I read him, it’s better than McGonagall! No, this was in a book on Armstrong. I’ve taken your advice and been listening to him while we work, and lately reading some books on him at night.”
“I wish you’d come down here,” Nadia said.
