“Except when it was important and worth a lot to you, What a pile of shit!” Francesca now stood up and paced around the hut herself. “You men are so damn hypocritical. You preserve your lofty self-images with amazing rationalizations. You never admit to yourselves who you really are and what you really want. Most women are more honest. We acknowledge our ambitions, our desires, even our basest wants. We admit our weaknesses. We face ourselves as we are, not as we would like to be.”
She returned to the cot and took David’s hands in hers again. “Don’t you see, darling?” she said earnestly. “You and I are soulmates. Our alliance is based on the strongest bond of all — mutual self-interest. We are both motivated by the same goals of power and fame.”
“That sounds awful,” he said.
“But it’s true. Even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself. David, darling, can’t you see that your indecisiveness comes from your failure to acknowledge your true nature? Look at me. I know exactly what I want and am never confused about what to do. My behavior is automatic.”
The American physicist sat quietly beside Francesca for a long time. At length he turned and put his head on her shoulder. “First Borzov, now Wilson,” he said with a sigh. “I feel whipped. I wish none of this had happened.”
“You can’t give up, David,” she said, stroking his head– “We’ve come too far. And the big prize is now within our reach.”
Francesca reached across him and started to remove his shirt. “It’s been a long and trying day!” she said soothingly. “Let’s try to forget it.” David Brown closed his eyes as she caressed his face and chest.
Francesca bent over and kissed him slowly on the lips. A few moments later she abruptly stopped. “You see,” she said, slowly removing her own clothes, “as long as we are in this together, we can derive strength from each other.” She stood up in front of David, forcing him to open his eyes.
“Hurry,” he said impatiently, “I was already—”
“Don’t worry so much about it,” Francesca replied, lazily pulling down her pants, “you’ve never had a problem with me.” Francesca smiled again as she pushed his knees apart and pressed his face against her breasts. “Remember,” she said, tugging easily at his shorts with her free hand, “I’m not Elaine.”
She studied David Brown as he slept beside her. The strain and anxiety that had dominated his face just minutes before had been replaced by the carefree smile of a boy. Men are so simple, Franceses was thinking. Orgasm is the perfect pain reliever. I wish it were that easy for us.
She slipped off the small cot and put her clothes on again. Francesca was very careful not to disturb her sleeping friend. But you and I still have a real problem, she said to herself as she finished dressing, which we need to address quickly. And it will be more difficult because we are dealing with a woman.
Francesca walked outside her hut, into the black of Rama. There were a few lights near the supplies at the other end of the camp, but otherwise the Beta campsite was dark. Everyone else was asleep. She switched on her small flashlight and walked away in a southerly direction, toward the Cylindrical Sea.
What is it that you want, Madame Nicole des jardins? she thought as she walked along. And where’s your weakness, your Achilles” heel? For several minutes Francesca flipped through her entire memory bank on Nicole, attempting to find any personality or character flaw that could be exploited. Money’s not the answer. Sex. isn’t either, at least not with me. She laughed involuntarily. And certainly not with David. Your dislike for him is obvious.
What about blackmail!” Francesca asked herself as she drew near to the banks of the Cylindrical Sea. She remembered Nicole’s strong reaction to her question about Genevieve’s father. Maybe, she thought, if I knew the answer to that question… But I don’t
Francesca was temporarily stumped. She could not figure out any way to compromise Nicole des Jardins. By this time the lights from the campsite behind her were barely visible. Francesca extinguished her flashlight and very cautiously sat down to dangle her feet over the edge of the cliff.
Having her legs suspended above the frozen ice of the Cylindrical Sea brought back a suite of poignant memories from her childhood in Orvieto. At the age of eleven, despite the barrage of health warnings that assaulted her from every direction, the precocious Francesca had decided to start smoking cigarettes. Every day after school she would wind her way down the hill to the plain below the town and sit on the bank of her favorite creek. There she would smoke in silence, an act of solitary rebellion. On those lazy afternoons she would inhabit a fantasy world of castles and princes, millions of kilometers away from her mother and stepfather.
The memory of those adolescent moments produced an irresistible desire to smoke in Francesca. She had been taking her nicotine pills throughout the mission, but they satisfied only the physical addiction. She laughed at herself and reached into one of the special pockets of her flight suit. Francesca had hidden away three cigarettes in a special container that would preserve them in fresh condition. She had told herself before leaving the Earth that the cigarettes were there “in case of an emergency”…
Smoking a cigarette inside an extraterrestrial space vehicle was even more outrageous than smoking at the age of eleven. Francesca wanted to hoot with delight when she threw back her head and expelled the smoke into the Raman air. The act made her feel free, liberated. Somehow the threat represented by Nicole des Jardins did not seem so serious.
While she was smoking, Francesca recalled the acute loneliness of that young girl stealing down the slopes of old Orvieto. She also remembered the terrible secret that she had kept locked forever in her heart. Francesca had never told anyone about her stepfather, certainly not her mother, and she rarely thought about it anymore. But as she sat on the banks of the Cylindrical Sea, the anguish of her childhood appeared to her in sharp relief.
It began right after my eleventh birthday, she thought, plunging back into the details of her life eighteen years before. ! had no idea what the bastard wanted at first She took another deep drag from her cigarette. Even after he started bringing me gifts for no reason.
He had been the principal of her new school. When she had taken her first full set of aptitude tests, Francesca had made the highest scores in the history of Orvieto. She was off the scale, a prodigy. Until then he had never noticed her. He had married her mother eighteen months before and fathered the twins almost immediately. Francesca had been a nuisance, another mouth to feed, nothing more than a part of her mother’s furniture.
For several months he was especially nice to me. Then Mother went to visit Aunt Carlo for a few days. The painful memories came fast, rushing like a torrent through her mind. She remembered the smell of wine on her stepfather’s breath, his sweat against her body, her tears after he had left her room.
The nightmare had lasted for over a year. He had forced himself upon her whenever her mother was not in the house. Then one evening, while he was putting on his clothes and looking in the other direction, Francesca had smacked him in the back of the head with an aluminum baseball bat. Her stepfather had fallen to the floor, bloody and unconscious. She had dragged him into the living room and left him there.
He never touched me again, Francesca remembered, putting out her cigarette in the Raman dirt. We were strangers in the same house. From then on I spent most of my time with Roberto and his friends. I was just waiting for my chance. I was ready when Carlo came.