Red Mars - By Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,59

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 Maya. 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 shot 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, 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