China Mountain Zhang (13 page)

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Authors: Maureen F. McHugh

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang
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Maggie takes me back, and takes me to my room. She sits with me on my bed and tells me, “Right now, you are just sick of life,
perlerorneq,
but you’ll feel better.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumble. But I have a feeling now, not anger. Underneath my tiredness I feel grateful. “Thank you,” I say.
“Go to sleep,” she says.
 
 
I sleep for sixteen hours, through the day and the next night. And when I meet everyone the next morning for breakfast, I am embarrassed, and they are all kind. I cannot look at Maggie Smallwood, so I don’t.
Janna says, “It’s hard for all of us, but for you, well, you didn’t even want to be here.”
“I don’t know what happened to me,” I say, penitent and confused. I go to work, and they keep me working on the third level, close to them, and they talk to me often.
Maggie talks to me, matter-of-fact. “When they had trouble with depression in space, they asked the Inuit Eskimo and the
Greenland Eskimo about
perlerorneq.
It’s like a circuit-breaker. Now the Eskimo train research crews in space ways to deal with it. I learned about it in school, in my Native Studies course.”
My unhappiness is still there, but it is gray, not black. I go back to the full spectrum lights, I study a little. Janna begins to teach me calculus on Monday and Wednesday nights, to keep me studying. I have taken calculus, and she is good at explaining, so it is easy. I do not talk much to Maggie, except to say hello. I am ashamed of my behavior towards her, but what is there to say?
So December passes. Christmas, a package from Peter, sweaters in the most outrageous styles, with little capes; all the rage, he writes. I give one to Karin. We exchange gifts, sing songs. It’s not so bad.
We are expecting sunrise at 12:14 P.M. on February second. In January I study and wait through the days. I have the feeling that I have felt the worst and now it will be all right. I decide to renew my contract.
“Don’t worry,” Janna tells me, “You’ll love the summer, a sun worshiper like you. Explorers used to wear felt blindfolds so they could escape the sunlight to sleep.”
On January twenty-nine we are studying in the late morning. Eric is running an experiment at Halsey from eight P.M. until almost three A.M. and he needs a tech, so I won’t go out to Halsey until later. Each day now there is a false dawn. The sky gets rosy and the sun threatens to rise, the stars paling in the south, but it doesn’t quite come up. Still, I watch. Only four more days.
Janna is checking my figures, I am watching the horizon. Dawn seems so close, so possible. The sky is the pearlescent white of dawn, shading to pink, lavender, indigo, and then somewhere above, to black. The ice is the color of the sky.
And then, four days early, I see the edge of the sun, blinding, above the horizon. “Janna!”
She looks up and her eyes widen and then crinkle with delight. “Oh, Zhang, wonderful.”
It’s morning. I smile and smile.
“It’s not a real sunrise,” Janna explains, “it’s refraction. The earth’s atmosphere bending light rays. The sun is still five degrees below the horizon.”
We sit in silence and watch the sun rise and then dip. In minutes it is over.
I expect to feel the weight of the night again, but no, the sunrise is enough. I can wait. I can study, I can pass the exam. And the second night is not so bad, never as bad as the first.
I have survived. And I think, finally, I am adapting.
 
 
Martine
 
The little girl looks at me and asks, “What’s that?”
“What?” I ask. The myth that all middle-aged women like children is just that, a myth.
“That,” she points.
“It’s a candle,” the man working on the skid says. “Come over here, Theresa, I need you to hold something for me, okay?”
Clearly her father. They both have the same pale, washed-out look, like faded cotton. Newcomers. Maybe whatever life they’d been living before they got here washed them out that way. The little girl looks up at me, not sure what to make of me, then obeys.
I’m walking the perimeter, checking for an air leak. I know it’s here, I just don’t know where it is. We use a very old-fashioned way to locate leaks, whenever we get a flag that the air mixture is off somewhere in Jerusalem Ridge, I come out here and prowl around with a candle, using the flicker of the flame to find the leak.
Don’t go looking for Jerusalem Ridge on your map, it’s called New Changsha, or Sector 56/C-JRU, depending on whether your
map is dated during or after the Cleansing Winds campaign. It’s on the northern edge of the Argyre Basin in the southern hemisphere. JRU is actually the initials of the surveyor. Aron Fahey says the name comes from the initials, but I really couldn’t say. Most of the people who were here thirty years ago and would remember have been relocated. Aron would have been nine then so I’m not sure he really knows. I came when they reopened the sector seven years ago and walked into a viper’s nest of backstabbing and leftover animosities. Even now the Commune tends to break into two parts, the old people left who remember everything anybody ever did to anyone else during the campaign, and the new ones who left our mistakes on earth. The people who were kids during the campaign tend to stick with the new people.
These two are real new, transports. If I didn’t already know, I certainly figure it out when the father carefully jacks the little girl into his troubleshooter. Kids don’t get implants that young here; I don’t think she’s more than six. She looks younger than that, dressed in a red top that’s been stretched out too much in the neck and is too small for her and pants too big. Cast-offs. He’s wearing coveralls, regular issue. I find my leak and repair it. It doesn’t take much to repair a leak; smear sealer on it, mark it for a structural check, although this one looks like someone slammed something into the wall—a common enough occurrence in the godown. While I’m waiting for the sealer to set, I watch the father and daughter. He’s blond and sharp-featured, she has thin, limp hair that’s no-color brown. She stands next to him without fidgeting, careful on her task. She seems to be concentrating more on him than the job; she watches him raptly, mouth open a little, the way kids do.
I leave before they finish their repair job.
When I get home, my separator is on the fritz again and I completely forget about them.
 
 
When I was a little girl I once walked two miles in my sleep. I’m just the walking sort. That was when there were still communes in West Virginia. I guess that’s what I miss most, walking in West Virginia. After they put the train in, it wasn’t the same. Then suddenly the place was crawling with New Yorkers, all looking for a clean place to live where their families could grow up in the country while they went to their good-paying jobs in the city. It was all cadres at first, and maybe a couple of green men. Officers, of course, common soldiers don’t live that well.
I guess I became a soldier because when I was a girl that was the way to insure getting the best. That was right after the beginning of the Cleansing Winds campaign, when we were all trying to get back to the days when socialism meant something to the people. That was going terribly wrong and everywhere you looked people were getting in trouble for things that ten years earlier had been fine, like growing your own silicon chips and all the little backyard technologies. The Army looked like a pretty safe deal. I had a string—my uncle was a bird colonel and he got me in. I went in at fifteen. You could do that then. At thirty-five I had my twenty years, a failed marriage and about all I could take of the army. I went looking for West Virginia but while I had been gone it had somehow transformed itself into a copy of New Jersey, and I hadn’t gone back looking for New Jersey. That’s how I ended up on the settlement project on Mars. Patriotic Volunteers Turn Red Desert Into Productive Land.
But I was back to walking; besides minding my plot, my goats and my bees I walked the perimeter watching for leaks. Lenin knows it was hard. I thought I’d start a new life on Jerusalem Ridge, but I hadn’t counted on the fact that wherever I went I’d still be there. And I hadn’t changed just by getting on a shuttle and coming to Mars. I wasn’t happy. I can’t say it was a mistake, I wasn’t happy on earth, either. But on earth at least I was comfortable. For a long time I wasn’t comfortable on Mars. Six months after I got here I about made up my mind to go home, but
I kept putting off doing anything about it and now it’s gotten to the point where it’s easier to stay than to go.
 
 
I schedule my day based on what happens, sometimes I’m working at three in the morning, livestock makes its own times and doesn’t really respect yours, but by four-thirty in the afternoon I’m often in the house. It is about four-thirty, a week or so after I first saw them, when they stop for a drink of water. I’m a bit off the tube, so they have had to walk, but I’m one of the last empty domes before the long stretch to New Arizona and it’s not unusual for people to stop. We still don’t have a surplus of drinking water. I always give, I never know when I’ll be asking.
I wouldn’t know him if it wasn’t for the little girl. If he remembers me as the lady with the candle he doesn’t say anything. Theresa, the little girl, stands half behind her father, shy in an unfamiliar place. He takes the glass, crouches a bit stiffly and offers it to her. She watches him as she drinks, as if this were something he has produced out of thin air. She hands him back half a glass, which he finishes, using her glass in that unselfconscious way parents do.
“Thank the lady,” he says softly.
“Thank you,” she says, and reaches for his hand.
“Going to New Arizona?” I ask.
“No,” he says, “just in.”
New Arizona is about nineteen hours away. Why did he take the child?
We don’t know what to say to each other, and he starts to make the motions of someone getting ready to leave.
“Maybe you and the little girl would like something to eat?” It occurs to me that they’re living in the dorms. What a shame to make that long trip and go back there to sleep.
He glances down at the top of her brown head, tempted I think, but shakes his head. “No, thank you.”
“It’s no trouble,” I say, “I make soup to keep and flash and I just made a great, fresh pot. It’s got to be better than dinner at the complex.”
It’s the little girl that decides him. She waits, neither hoping nor hopeless, just tired. “If it’s no trouble then,” he says softly.
The house is concrete, smooth rounded walls, like a hill. Inside it’s all green and blues, probably because on Mars everything is red, a color I associate with politics. And I have plants, oxygenators. They take the strain off the recyc system. I’ve been here seven years, and done pretty well with my own side-business. I’ve nothing to do with the credit but spend it on the house. “I’m Martine Jansch,” I say and stick out my hand.
“Alexi Dormov,” he says. “This is my daughter, Theresa.”
“Hello,” she says, watching her feet.
“Hello Theresa,” pleasant old-fashioned name, “are you hungry?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Do you like soup?”
“What kind?” she looks up at me. Well, it was a stupid question on my part and a perfectly reasonable question on hers.
Her father doesn’t know whether to be amused or embarrassed, and I like him for that. I don’t like people who feel that strangers must be amused by everything that their child does.
“Bean,” I say.
“I don’t know,” she answers honestly.
My kitchen is white and beige and blue with a wall full of plants. I pour Theresa a glass full of fruit juice and offer her father a beer, which he accepts with surprise and pleasure. I’m not showing off, I can afford fruit juice and beer.
“You live here alone?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, “but the telecom is set to open by voice and someone is always stopping by.” For a moment he looms in my mind as this mentally deranged man who wanders around exposing his daughter to brutal acts of violence. Martine, I think, you
have spent too much time alone. Not to mention that he’s still clumsy in martian gravity.
He looks around, admiring the cool white walls with their strip of blue tile, the beige tile floor. Aron’s wife makes ceramics and she made the tiles for me, then I installed them myself. “It’s a big place for someone to live alone,” he says.
“It’s not so big. Two bedrooms, a front room and the kitchen. Although I imagine you’re accustomed to more crowded conditions.” I’m thinking of the dorms, of course.
“Yes, we are, aren’t we, Little Heart.” He ruffles his daughter’s hair. “We’ve been living in Yorimitsu.”
Yorimitsu, Yorimitsu. I’ve heard something about Yorimitsu. I don’t pay much attention to news from home, it’s always bad. “Something to do with Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, the corridor, Yorimitsu, isn’t that …” I can’t dredge it up.
“A resettlement camp,” he says in the same soft voice he says everything.
People sent to develop the corridor near the end of the Cleansing Winds campaign. There weren’t enough resources, they had to be resettled again, some of them spent years in resettlement camps waiting to be put somewhere. And Alexi Dormov and his daughter were put on Mars. Where is her mother? “This would seem big to you,” I say.
“How did you come here?”
“Voluntarily. I retired from the Army,” I explain. “I wanted something unstructured.”
“You were in the Army?”
“Twenty years.”
“I was in South Africa,” he says.
Peace Keeping Force, volunteer. “Infantry?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Atmosphere skippers.”
Pilot. Well, he’s short enough. I have the infantry’s distrust for pilots; they tend to be hot-heads out to prove their righteousness by flying. I flash the soup and ladle it into blue and beige bowls.
Aron’s wife, Chen, makes them as well. I think they’re pretty, but they probably don’t look like much to someone fresh from earth.
I put tabasco on the table and when I put a few drops into my soup they carefully copy me. Not everybody likes tabasco in their bean soup but I don’t say anything, I’ve no intention of embarrassing them. Alexi tastes carefully and then nods. “This is good. This is really good, huh Theresa?”
She nods. The spoon looks too big in her hand.
“It has so much
taste,”
he says, “I thought the food in the complex was pretty good, but this is really
good.
”
“Thank you,” I say, embarrassed. It’s just bean soup with a bit of pork in it for flavor. Not even nine-bean soup like we used to have when I was young. The food in the complex is filling; mess hall food. But not what I would describe as good. Alexi has three bowls, a bit embarrassed by his own greed. He so obviously enjoys it that it’s a pleasure to serve him. And Theresa eats almost all her bowl and has a biscuit with honey on it. My business is bees, the Commune sells Jerusalem Honey all over the quadrant. It’s how I can afford my fruit juice and beer.
Their presence wears me out. I’m not accustomed to company and I got up at a little after four this morning. The conversation wears dangerously thin, I’m not holding up my end. I take them out to see my bees. Alexi carries Theresa who is stricken motionless with fascination and terror when I pull a panel out of a hive and explain how I take out the honey. The bees, buttons of tiger fur with glass wings, crawl in glittering, ceaseless motion.
Then we go to see my fourteen goats and I tell their names; Einstein, Jellybean, Eskimo, Constantina, Miss Shapiro, Lucy, Kate-the-Shrew, Lilith (who has the heart of a whore, although I don’t mention that), Hai-hong, Machina Jones, Amelia, Angela, Carmin and Cleopatra. They jostle for attention, gently butting us and trying to get into my pockets to see if I have anything. I feed them for the night, and Theresa flings handfuls of sweetfeed into their buckets, and she and they squeal with delight as they shove
and rear to get their noses in first, leaping over each other. Einstein does his trick, leaping high over Carmin and pushing off the wall to vault into the middle of the pack. Goats do well in light gravity, unlike cows, poor stupid things.
When Alexi carries Theresa back through the tunnel to the house she’s heavy as a sack of grain, her pale sleepy face against his shoulder. I am drunk with the pleasure of showing them my little well-organized farm and the words pop out of my mouth, “Stay the night.”
“Oh now we couldn’t, we’ve put you out enough.”

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