I reach for my plate.
Borden grips my elbow. “Not yet, Venn,” she says. I shake her loose, then turn and try to back away from the hatch. My step is spasmodic. I’m shaking all over. Tak has come up behind me, Joe is on my left.
“Let me go!” I plead. Tak and Joe move in close and put their heads—their naked heads—against my helm. They talk in low voices, tell me I have to maintain, it’s important we all stick together and see this through, this is why we came to Mars. Joe’s wearing his patent-pending skull grin, part determination, part sympathy, part bloody-minded stubbornness. I remember that grin and the first time I saw it. I remember that day back in the lagoon near Carlsbad. The day he and I scared the living shit out of each other, on a stupid dare, when we were snot-nosed kids.
“Relax,” Joe says to me. “There’s good stuff to come. Maybe good answers. God knows we’ve earned them.”
“I w-w-won’t be me,” I say, maybe I whimper. Yeah, that was a fucking whimper. “I’ll get sucked down!”
“I don’t think so. You look muy frio, Vinnie. We’ll get through this together, right?”
I feel my head shaking back and forth, then cycloiding to up and down, like I’m agreeing. That’s the effect Joe has on me, but Tak as well; I don’t want to play the coward or the fool in front of Tak Fujimori.
“DJ’s waiting,” Tak says. “I think he has something to show you.”
“Yeah, but DJ’s crazy,” I say. They ignore that. DJ’s always been crazy.
The hatch opens. A short, dark-haired woman pokes her head through, not as plump or as pretty as the last time we met—haggard and worn down, pale, but recognizable.
“You remember Alice,” Joe says. He likes surprises.
“You can open your plates,” Alice tells us, no prelims, no intros. She walks between us, fluttering her hands and looking a little disgusted. “Everybody peel and get cleaned up, replace those filters. Doc says it’s okay.”
“Who’s the doc?” Borden asks.
“Me,” Alice says. “Former first lieutenant Alice Harper, U.S. Marine Medical Services.”
“You can’t go transvac,” I murmur. “You’d die, right? That’s what you told me.”
“I was wrong,” she says. “After what we did to you. You getting picked up… The trip wasn’t easy, but I made it. What’s behind the big door is worth the risk. You know that—don’t you?”
“Can you ever go back?” I ask.
“Maybe not,” Alice says. “Can you?” She taps her cheek. “Go for it.”
I reach for my plate. Borden shoves out her gloved hand as if to stop me, but Kumar says it will be fine, this is expected. Despite that, Borden signals us to wait. She opens her own plate first. When she still lives, we all break seal and breathe the air of Fiddler’s Green, which is pure and sweet and alive.
Alice crinkles her nose at our waft. “Jesus,” she says. Our skintights have been stressed to their limits. We smell of shit and piss and combat flop sweat. “We got soup and tea inside. Real tea. Mushran, is this fine Indian gent another master of the universe?”
“Yes, Alice,” Mushran says, and introduces Kumar in a tone that indicates here, in the annex, Alice Harper is running things, not Mushran, and certainly not Kumar or any other part of Division Four. No surprise, once they got her here—however they got her here—Alice put herself in charge.
Four tall young men and women wait in an alcove beyond the hatch and receive our shed skintights. The suits are racked and the men begin to replace the filters with fresh ones taken from a box. They must be in their teens—Martian years. Second gen? The women break away and hand us plastic scrub pads, then point us toward a wide, shallow tub, where we step under U-shaped pipes rigged to deliver spray mildly scented of soap. The women make scrubbing motions. Naked, we turn about, enjoying the warm shower. Ishida’s skin and metal drips. Ishikawa has a broad grin.
“Scrub!” Alice shouts.
We scrub.
“Don’t forget butts and privates. And chew this.”
As we emerge, she hands us little lozenges. The lozenges taste of cinnamon. My mouth begins to effervesce. We’ve got foam on our lips.
“Lick it down and swallow. New bacteria, better than your own, believe me. And fresh breath. Your tummies will ache for a couple of hours, but after that, you’ve never felt better.”
“Alice,” one of the men says, shaking his head in disgust, “te suits want disinfect and patch.”
“Do it,” Alice says.
They haul away the skintights. Tak has a stack of white tunics over his arm and starts handing them out. Children’s sizes, considering how tall the Muskies are. Mine drops just below my ass, like a hospital gown, but feels clean and cool against my drying skin.
Still no Teal. I made sure of that before I entered the showers. And no DJ this time. What’s he up to? Is it possible that here, inside Fiddler’s Green, DJ has found a place where he can avoid being the total goofball? Astonishing. I’m starting to feel better about this. Clean makes a difference.
“I got to go topside,” Alice says. “Joe will take you from here. Congratulations, Venn. See you in a few.” She touches fingertips with me and smiles, then moves off. “Say hello to Tealullah,” she adds over her shoulder. “I don’t think she likes me much.”
I watch her fade into the tunnels. “Why’s that?” I ask Joe.
“Because Alice took her kid away,” Joe says.
Joe and Tak stick by me. Borden sticks by me. Kumar has conceded his flanking position to Joe and Tak. I got a posse. “All right,” I say. “We’re here. Where’s Teal?”
“In the annex,” Joe says. “Let’s go.”
CHOSEN BY THE TEA
We look like patients in a mental ward, walking away from the shower room, chewing our gum, foaming and licking, but everyone is dressed the same so we fit right in.
“What was it like at Madigan?” Joe asks.
“Great,” I say. “Docs took good care of me.”
“I’ll bet,” Joe says.
“Sorry we couldn’t get to you in time,” Tak says.
“Hey, no problem. I screwed up,” I say. “Talked to a secretary. Used my finger to pay for a cab. Nice apartment, though. Alice…”
“She’s our Dorothy,” Joe says. “Keeps all the Tin Men and Scarecrows organized.”
I think of all the twisters outside. “Wasn’t sure I could trust her… Still not sure,” I say, time and imagination skewing in my head. Someone’s rummaging in my memories again. And to confuse me more, I’m remembering stuff that never happened. Or looking at things from points of view not my own. Like the bar fight at Hawthorne.
“She’s tough,” Tak says. “Maybe a little too tough.”
“Teal had a baby,” I say. “And they took it away from her?”
“Him, actually,” Tak says.
Kumar and Borden and Mushran are a couple of steps behind, listening.
“Let’s go grab a beer and talk about it,” I say, in my best “where the fuck am I” tone.
“Beer on Mars is crap,” Tak says. “They tried brewing it from sawdust and yeast, so Rafe says.”
“What the hell is he doing here?” I ask. “The Voors would have shot Teal.”
“Voors live here, remember?” Tak says.
“The elder de Groot was a piece of work,” Joe says. “He’s dead. There’s only eight Voors left. About a hundred died when Ants hit their caches two months ago. Rafe saved Teal, but he couldn’t save her husband.”