She started in the chamber where she had seen the face, and made sure that no one ever saw her at work. So already she was a kind of ally of the man. She worked her way forward through the farm, row by row, storage compartment by storage compartment, tank by tank. No one there. She moved down the ship one torus to the storage tanks, and did the same. Days were passing, and Mars was the size of a coin ahead of them.
As her search progressed she realized how much all the chambers looked the same, no matter how they had been customized for use. They were living inside tanks of metal, and each tank resembled the others, much like the years of a life. Much like city life everywhere, she saw one day: room after room after room. Occasionally the great bubble chamber that was the sky. Human life, a matter of boxes. The escape from freedom.
She searched all the toruses and didn’t find him. She searched the axis tanks and didn’t find him.
He could have been in someone’s room, many of which were locked, as in any hotel. He could be in a place she hadn’t looked. He could be aware of her, and moving away from her as she searched.
She began again.
Time was running out. Mars was the size of an orange. A bruised and mottled orange. Soon they would arrive and go through aerobraking and orbit calming.
It was almost as if she were being watched. She had always felt observed somehow, as if she were living her life on an invisible stage, performing it for an invisible audience who followed her story with interest, and judged her. There had to be something that heard her endless train of thoughts, didn’t there?
But this was more physical than that. She went through the crowded days prepping for arrival, slipping off to make love with John, fencing with Frank to avoid doing the same with him, and all the while feeling there was an eye on her, somewhere. She had learned that no matter where she was, she was in a tank filled with objects, and had trained herself to see the things filling the tank against the Platonic form of the tank itself, looking for discrepancies like false walls or floors, and finding some. Jumping around occasionally. But never catching that eye.
One night she came out of John’s room and felt she was alone. Immediately she returned to the farm, and went from its ceiling up to the axis tanks. Above the ceiling, under the low curve of the inner tank wall, was a storage chamber with a back wall that was too close to be the true end of the tank. She had seen that while eating breakfast one morning, without thinking about anything at all. Now she pulled away a stack of boxes set against this false wall, and saw the whole wall was a door, with a handle.
It was locked.
She leaned back, thought about it. She rapped lightly on the door, three times.
‘Roko?’ said a hoarse voice from within.
Maya said nothing. Her heart was beating hard and fast. The handle turned and she snatched it and yanked the door open, pulling out a thin brown arm. She let go of the door and grabbed the arm harder than the door; instantly she was yanked back into the tiny closet, and seized by hands with a talon grip.
‘Stop it!’ she cried, and as the man was trying to flee under her arm, she crashed down onto him, hitting boxes and insulation padding hard, but staying latched to a wrist. She sat on him with all her force, as if pinning an enraged child. ‘Stop it! I know you’re here.’
He gave up trying to escape.
They both shifted to get more comfortable, and she lessened her grip on the man’s arm, but still held on, not trusting him not to bolt. A small wiry black man, thin face bent or asymmetrical somehow, big brown eyes as frightened as a deer’s. Thin wrist, but forearm muscles like rocks under the skin. He was quivering in her grip. Years later when she remembered this first meeting, what she remembered was his flesh trembling in her grip, trembling like a frightened fawn.
Fiercely she said, ‘What do you think I’m going to do? Do you think I’m going to tell everyone about you? Or send you home? Do you think I’m that kind of person?’
He shook his head, face averted, but glancing at her with a new surmise.
‘No,’ he said, in almost a whisper. ‘I know you’re not. But I been so afraid.’
‘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.’
‘Some day.’
‘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.’