The Martians(28)

“Not necessary with me,” she said. Impulsively she reached out with her free hand and touched the side of his head. He shivered like a horse. Body like a bantamweight wrestler. An animal, moving involuntarily at the touch of another animal. Starved for touch, perhaps. She moved back away from him, let go of his arm, sat with her back leaning against the padding on the wall, watching him. An odd face somehow, narrow and triangular, with that asymmetry. Like pictures in magazines of Rastafarians from Jamaica. From below wafted the smell of the farm. He had no smell as far as she could tell, or else just more of the farm.

“So who's helping you?” she said. “Hiroko?”

His eyebrows shot up. After a moment's hesitation: “Yeah. Of course. Hiroko Ai, God damn her. My boss.”

“Your mistress.”

“My owner.”

“Your lover.”

Disconcerted, he looked down at his hands, bigger than his body seemed to need. “Me and half the farm team,” he said with a bitter little smile. “All of us wrapped around her little finger. And me living in a crawl space, for Christ's sake.”

“To get to Mars.”

“To get to Mars,” he repeated bitterly. “To be with her, you mean. Crazy man that I am, damn fool idiot crazy man.”

“Where are you from?”

“Tobago. Trinidad Tobago, do you know it?”

“Caribbean? I visited Barbados once.”

“Like that, yeah.”

“But now Mars.”

“Someday.”

“We're almost there,” she said. “I was afraid we would get there before I found you.”

“Hmph,” he said, looking up at her briefly, thinking this over. “Well. Now I not in such a hurry to get there.” He looked up again, with a shy smile.

She laughed.

She asked him more questions, and he replied, and asked more of his own. He was funny—like John in that—only sharper-edged than John. A bitterness there; and interesting, she suddenly realized, just as someone new, someone she didn't already know all too well. You got to watch out for Hiroko, he warned her at one point. “Hiroko, Phyllis, Arkady—they be trouble. Them and Frank, of course.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It's quite a crew you have,” he replied slyly, observing her.

“Yes.” She rolled her eyes; what could one say?

He grinned. “You won't tell them about me?”

“No.”

“Thanks.” Now it was him holding her by the wrist. “I'll help you, I swear. I'll be your friend.” Staring her right in the eye, for the first time.

“And I'll be yours,” she said, feeling touched, then suddenly happy. “I'll help you too.”

“We'll help each other. There'll be the hundred and all their jostle, and then you and me, helping each other.”

She nodded, liking the idea. “Friends.”

She freed her arm, and with a brief squeeze of his shoulder got up to leave. He still trembled slightly under her hand.

“Wait—what's your name?”

“Desmond.”

2. Helping Him

Thus in Underhill Maya always knew her stowaway Desmond was out there in the farm, getting by in circumstances almost as prisonlike as those he had suffered on the Ares. For days and months at a time she forgot this as she mangled her relationships with John and Frank, irritating Nadia and Michel, who were both nearly worthless to her, and irritating herself just as often or more—feeling incompetent and depressed, she didn't know why—having difficulty adjusting to life on Mars, no doubt. It was miserable in a lot of ways, to be cooped up in the trailers and then the quadrangle, with only each other. It wasn't that much different from the Ares, to tell the truth.

But every once in a while Maya would see a movement in the corner of her eye, and think of Desmond. His situation was worse than hers by far, and he never complained, did he? Not that she knew, anyway. She didn't want to bother him to find out. If he came to her, fine; if not, he would be observing from his hideaway, would see what he saw. He would know what kind of trouble she was facing, and if he cared to speak to her, he would come to her.

And he did. Every once in a while she would retire to her cubicle in the quadrangle of barrel vaults, or then to the larger one out in the arcade that Nadia built, and there would come that scritch-tap-scritch which was their private signal, somehow, and she would open the door and there he was, small and black and buzzing with energy and talk, always in an undertone. They would share their news. Out in the greenhouse it was getting strange, he said; Hiroko's polyandry was catching, and Elena and Rya were also enmeshed in multiple relationships, all of them becoming some kind of commune. Desmond obviously remained apart somehow, even though they were his only associates. He liked to come by and tell Maya all about them; and so when she saw them in the ordinary course of life, looking innocuous, it brought a smile to her face. It taught her that she was not the only one having trouble managing her affairs; that everyone was becoming strange. Everyone but Desmond and her, or so it felt as they sat there in her cubicle, on the floor, talking over every one of their colleagues as if numbering rosary beads. And each time as their talk wound down she would find some reason to reach out and touch him, hold his shoulder, and he would clasp her arm in his viselike grip, quivering with energy, as if his internal dynamo was spinning so fast he could barely hold himself together. And then he would be off. And the days after that would be easier. It was therapeutic, yes; it was what talks with Michel should have been but weren't, Michel being both too familiar and too strange. Lost in his own problems.