Kim Robinson - Red Mars

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-a-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.” “Please.”

Nadia made a disgusted noise.

It was suprising 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, 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. Outdoors 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 10 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.