Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,60

Nevertheless she spoke more with Arkady than anyone else, in the hours of the night when she was alone, in the four-and-a-half hours between Phobos’s rising in the west and its setting in the east. He called in almost every night, at first, and often thereafter.

Pretty soon she was up and around, hand in a cast that was suspiciously slender. She went out to troubleshoot or consult, hoping to keep her mind occupied. Michel Duval never came by at all, which she thought was strange. Wasn’t this what psychologists were for? She couldn’t help feeling depressed; she needed her hands for her work, she was a hand laborer. The cast got in the way and she cut off the part around the wrist, with shears from her tool kit. But she had to keep both hand and cast in a box when outside, and there wasn’t much she could do. It really was depressing.

Saturday night arrived, and she sat in the newly filled whirlpool bath, nursing a glass of bad wine and looking around at her companions, splashing and soaking in their bathing suits. She wasn’t the only one to have been injured, by any means; they were all a bit battered now, after so many months of physical work. Almost everyone had frost-burn marks, patches of black skin that eventually peeled, leaving pink new skin, garish and ugly in the heat of the pools. And several others wore casts, on hands, wrists, arms, even legs; all for breaks or sprains. Actually they were lucky no one had gotten killed yet.

All these bodies, and none for her. They knew each other like family, she thought; they were each other’s physicians, they slept in the same rooms, dressed in the same locks, bathed together; an unremarkable group of human animals, eyecatching in the inert world they occupied, but more comforting than exciting, at least most of the time. Middle-aged bodies. Nadia herself was as round as a pumpkin, a plump tough muscular short woman, squarish and yet rounded. And single. Her closest friend these days was only a voice in her ear, a face on the screen. When he came down from Phobos … well, hard to say. He had had a lot of girlfriends on the Ares, and Janet Blyleven had gone to Phobos to be with him….

People were arguing again, there in the shallows of the lap pool. Ann, tall and angular, leaning down to snap something at Sax Russell, short and soft. As usual, he didn’t appear to be listening. She would hit him one day if he didn’t watch out. It was strange how the group was changing again, how the feel of it was changing. She could never get a fix on it; the real nature of the group was a thing apart, with a life of its own, somehow distinct from the characters of the individuals that constituted it. It must make Michel’s job as their shrink almost impossible. Not that one could tell with Michel; he was the quietest and most unobtrusive psychiatrist she had ever met. No doubt an asset, in this crowd of shrink-atheists. But she still thought it was odd he hadn’t come by to see her after the accident.

One evening she left the dining chambers and walked down to the tunnel they were digging from the vaulted chambers to the farm complex, and there at the tunnel’s end were Maya and Frank, arguing in a vicious undertone that carried down the tunnel not their meaning but their feeling—Frank’s face was contorted with anger, and Maya as she turned from him was distraught, weeping; she turned back to shout at him, “It was never like that,” and then ran blindly toward Nadia, her mouth twisted into a snarl, Frank’s face a mask of pain. Maya saw Nadia standing there and ran right by her.

Shocked, Nadia turned and walked back to the living chambers. She went up magnesium stairs to the living room in chamber two, and turned on the TV to watch a twenty-four-hour news program from Earth, something she very rarely did. After a while she turned down the sound, and looked at the pattern of bricks in the barrel vault overhead. Maya came in and started to explain things to her: there was nothing between her and Frank, it was in Frank’s mind only, he just wouldn’t give up on it even though it had been nothing to begin with; she wanted only John, and it wasn’t her fault