LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      Vlad had done the surgery. He told her it would be all right. “It caught you clean. The ring finger is a bit impaired, and will act like the little finger used to, probably. But ring fingers never do much anyway. The two main fingers will be strong as ever.”

      Everyone came by to visit. 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 frostburn 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,

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