Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

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.

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.”

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?”

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.