China Mountain Zhang (25 page)

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Authors: Maureen F. McHugh

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang
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Then I make him drink all the rest of his tea and put him in bed. I dim the windows. I am so tired. I want to be clean like Haitao. But I sit for a moment and he says something for the first time since I asked him about the bus. “Don’t go,” he says.
“I’m here,” I say, feeling a little foolish. “I’ll stay, and I’ll call you this evening.”
He closes his eyes and I sit what seems like a long time, but which is really only five minutes by my watch. (I count the seconds. I decide to stay ten minutes, then seven, and then slide carefully off the bed at five.)
I dim the windows in the front of the apartment. It is easy, I’ve seen Haitao do it so many times, I just rest my fingertips against the glass and say “Dim,” and when it is dark enough I take my fingers away. On the little table next to the door I see a letter
signed with the red official chop of the University. I am tired and I almost leave it, but I pick it up.
“Comrade Yang:” it begins, they all begin with “Comrade.” “This is to inform you that pending an official investigation from your home district, you are suspended from study—”
It is dated for Friday and it is open. Haitao has seen it, knew about it, but hasn’t said anything. And Saturday night he was in a better mood than I have seen him in a long time. I think of his exhilaration at pressball. How he glowed gold and white.
I assume I have misunderstood the letter, read it again. My Chinese causes me to make mistakes, perhaps it is telling him he has been cleared? No, I go through the sentences carefully, my head beginning to throb from fatigue and strain. He is suspended, they are investigating him. Maybe he hasn’t read it? But why would he print it out on Friday and then not read it?
I put the letter down and go, closing the door softly behind me. I am too tired to care now, I’ll call him this evening and ask him. In the lift I put my hands in my pockets and find something in the right. The gold box with the tiger-eye lid that Haitao gave me the night before.
Xiao Chen is watching the news when I open the door.
“What happened to your face?” he asks.
“Very good party,” I say, grinning. “Except that I walked into a door.”
He shakes his head appreciably.
I shower and sleep. I awake a little before dinner, the sun is strong through the window and I am disoriented and still tired, but I know if I keep sleeping I won’t sleep tonight. When I sit up all my joints crack like old sticks.
I wander out to the kitchen and flash heat some fried rice. Xiao Chen kids me about my dissolute life, tells me I’ve got mail. I figure it’s Peter, I owe him a letter. Guilt makes me avoid printing the letter before I eat.
It’s only one page—Peter’s letters run to four or five pages and use every type of punctuation available.
Ghost,
 
Not to fret, I have sent this to you from the arcade, it is not on my system. This is just to say thank you. I have received my suspension notification and I cannot go through Reform Through Labor. I cannot face my family.
I wish to thank you for all you have done, I believe you will understand. From the first you have always understood, even when no one else did. Even your choice of names. I think perhaps I hoped that last night would show me I made the wrong decision, but when we were almost arrested I knew that I had been a fool to wait.
Think of me with kindness.
 
Haitao
“What is it?” Xiao Chen asks.
I don’t know what to say, I am not sure what it is. He has run away, I think. Where will he go?
I call, there is no answer. The letter is dated today and the time on it is five-fifteen. It is a little after six, which is marked as the delivery time, meaning he sent it at five-fifteen on a forty-five minute delay. He can’t have left this fast, unless he sent it on his way out.
I pull on my coveralls.
“What is wrong?” Xiao Chen asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, “I don’t understand this message from my tutor.”
On the arcade I pass where he would have sent the letter and catch the lift. When the lift opens the hall is full of people and
there is a strong breeze. People are standing around chattering, their arms crossed, the way people stand around an accident.
There is a police tape blocking the hall right before Haitao’s door and the breeze is coming through the door. It is more than a breeze, it is a strong wind. They have arrested him, I’m sure. The wind is like being up on the superstructure when a building is going up.
“What happened?” I ask two women standing there.
“The person in that apartment”—she points—“he broke his window and jumped out.”
“Jumped out,” I say, and then stupidly, “did he die?” We are over a hundred fifty meters above ground level standing in this urban cliff.
“Oh, yes,” she says.
“He is my tutor,” I say. And then add, “I am an engineering student.”
“Why did he do it?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
We stand there for a minute and then I duck under the police tape. I should not, I should get on the lift and go back downstairs, but I have to see. The wind is strong in the doorway, it is coming from the great shattered starburst in the window. Police are picking through the pieces of glass or standing talking.
A man looks up at me, “Hey, what are you doing here! Don’t cross the barrier!”
“He, h-he was my tutor,” I stutter, “I am an engineering student.”
“There is no tutoring today,” the officer says.
On the floor, covered with crystals of glittering glass, are a pair of shoes, neatly folded white tights and white shirt. As if he had taken them off there, in front of his window.
“How did he break the window?” I ask. The windows are supposed to be shatterproof.
“He used a softening agent on it, then heated it with a hairdryer until it was brittle,” the officer says. Then his expression softens. “Where are you from?”
“America,” I say. “I’m American.”
“Well,
tongxue,
” student, “there is nothing you can do here. You should go home.
“I can’t go home,” I say, “I have eighteen more months until I finish my classes.”
He looks at me oddly. “No, no, I meant your dormitory.”
A woman comes into the room, “He wiped his system,” she says, “He made sure that we couldn’t use the trace, either.” Her feet crunch in broken glass.
I don’t know what they are talking about. I back up. I duck under the police tape again, walk through the crowd with my head down. I am afraid. There are people in the lift. I look at the numbers and then at the floor.
In the arcade, I sit down for a moment on a bench, because I don’t want to go back to my dormitory, and then I get up and make a call to New York. It is five-thirty in the morning in New York, Peter is not up.
“Rafael!” he says. “Hey! How are you doing!”
“My friend,” I say, “You remember the one I wrote you about? My tutor.”
“What happened?” he says.
“He killed himself,” I say.
“How?” he says.
Why do we always have to know? What difference does it make? “He broke his window and jumped.”
“Are you going to come home?” Peter asks.
Well, yes. I hope so. I don’t want to die here. Then I think, he means right now.
“No,” I say, “I have to finish school. I did well on my engineering examination.”
We talk, I cannot say why so I say I don’t know and talk around it. I think, it’s good to talk, better than being alone, the money doesn’t matter.
But all our words are empty.
 
 
(Alexi)
 
The inside of Martine’s house is pretty, after two years of living here it still seems a luxury to live in this place. A lot of the homes on the Ridge are pretty. I never pictured life on Mars like this—I grew up in a frontier town on the edge of the corridor, my daddy was a scrap prospector, not a farmer but there were a lot of farmers and so I had an idea of what frontier farming was like. Some years they got crops, some years the People’s Volunteers brought drinking water into town in trucks and when I was in senior middle school I used to go get water for my mother. We had two big fifty-liter plastic containers that we put in the back of an old three-wheel bike. I’d get them filled and then have to stand on the pedals to get the bike to go anywhere. I wanted to join the PV, but after I finished school and married Geri there were too many applicants. Then the party said that the drive to reduce carbon dioxide use was working. That the global temperature was falling, and it would be possible to resettle the corridor. So we went. A few years of hardship, and then, see, we’d be sitting on good, farmable land. When I left earth they were still talking
about global temperatures falling, maybe a degree in fifty years. Three degrees, and they’ll get back to temperature levels in the 1900’s and it’ll rain in Idaho, and across north central Africa and who knows, maybe it’ll rain carp in Beijing, and flowers will bloom in the Antarctic but Geri still died and Theresa spent half of her childhood in resettlement camps.
The Ridge is hard work, Martine and I are up by five. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked so hard in my life. But it’s not like the corridor, where it didn’t make any difference whether you worked or not, it all died. Martine and I put in another tunnel and goat yard to increase the goat herd, and now there are nineteen nannies and four of them are pregnant. And we added a room for Theresa. I didn’t really want to do it, but I felt then as if it was really Martine’s decision and if she wanted to take the risk, I was pretty well along for the ride. We’re into negative credit, it’ll take us a couple of years to pay the Commune back and if those goddamn goats get sick we’ll spend the rest of our lives paying it back, but so far we’re making our contributions. Martine’s honey business is steady and I keep getting sidework doing re-programming. Even if the nannies all dropped dead tomorrow we’d probably get by. Give up beer and sell the strawberries instead of eating them, but get by.
Not that you ever really know how things will turn out. On the corridor, when things got bad, I got us by for awhile by scrap prospecting, like my daddy. Farming was a waste of time, anything we planted dried up if it ever made it out of the ground, so I used to take my little scooter and find what was left of some old road and go look for scrap. It never made much money, but at least it brought in something to buy food. Until the little scooter just gave up and I had to walk back the last twenty-five kilometers. If I had been farther away and had to walk I don’t know how I’d have made it without water, but I was young enough then, I just walked home. Scared to death about how we’d make it without prospecting, but certain we’d make it somehow. When you’re
young it’s always been all right before, you trust it will be all right this time.
But things are different here in the Commune. As long as there’s the supply, the Commune has to make sure everybody has enough to eat, so we won’t starve. And it looks as if Martine’s expansion is going to pay off in the long run, as long as nothing major goes wrong. We complement each other, Martine and I. She’s good with animals and I’m good with keeping things running smoothly.
We’re good business partners, Martine and I. That’s the one part of our lives we handle well.
 
 
Wednesday afternoon. I sit down and watch the tape of my class. I have a tutorial at five and I wanted to watch the tape last night, but I ended up working longer than I expected on reprogramming the tow-motor programs for the Commune.
I’m monitoring a class at Nanjing University, a systems class. I guess Nanjing is a very good school. I’d never have gotten near a university at home, and certainly never had a chance to do anything connected with a Chinese university, but some universities have this special, patriotic program to help the frontier effort so I get to audit the class. They get money from the party, and they get to pat themselves on the back and think of themselves as forwarding the party ideals.
This is the second rec I’ve watched and all that happened in the first class is that the prof belabored some obvious points about programming. Things are broken down into major points for easy memorization, the way the Chinese do everything. Four Modernizations. Three Revolutionary Ideals. Eight Legs Proof. The textbook is a little theoretical. The first class didn’t have much to do with the book. I don’t see how taking this course is going to help either me or the Commune, but the Ridge is footing the communications
bill. Maybe I will learn enough to modify the Ridge controller system.
The translation is good. The prof is really speaking Chinese, of course. All I can say in Chinese are a few phrases I remember from senior middle school.
Ni hao. Ni hao ma? Wo hen hao, xiexie.
Hello, how are you? I’m fine, thank you. And I’m sure my tones stink.
The second class takes off at a gallop. I sit with the book on my lap, stopping the rec, reading the textbook until I have an idea what he’s talking about, then letting him talk again. He whips through the first chapter in an hour, and starts on the second chapter and it actually gets kind of interesting, although I still can’t see what good it’s going to do me. The he assigns problems which I scribble down.
I took an advanced chemistry course in senior middle school. It was a correspondence thing, about five of us took it. My teacher had decided to “make a difference.” We were going to pass entrance exams and go to university at Salt Lake. Anyway, the course had us do experiments where we’d have questions like:
A sample of iron oxide was heated and treated with a stream of hydrogen gas, converting it completely to metallic iron. The original sample weighed 3.50 g and the resultant iron metal weighed 2.45 g. What is the empirical formula of the original compound?
It’s like those jokes that start “A man, a woman and a duck cross Main Street,” and go on for five minutes and at the end say, “and what was the name of the duck?”
Needless to say, that is the feeling that I have looking at the questions in front of me.
A class 3 bundled reinforcement circuit with a 10
7
base can learn to recognize handwriting. It is
run on three samples of different handwriting displayed below. Using the word “cat,” diagram two probable sensitivity patterns.
Right. The whole beginning of the question sets me up to think that I’m going to test for degree of error. I’m hell on degree of error. When I was learning to be a pilot and systems tech in the Army, we were always testing for degree of error, that tells you if the system is going to work or not. When I reprogram, I run a simulation and test for degree of error. Who cares which bundles are becoming sensitized?
I go back and read part of the chapter again. Maybe it’s the fact that the text is translated from Chinese, but somehow I have trouble following the leap from the explanation to the examples of how to figure this stuff out.
Well, that’s what I have a tutor for. I’ve got about an hour and a half until the appointment. Theresa calls and asks if she can stay at the creche and play with Linda and I tell her dinner is at six. Martine comes in from the goats.
“The CO
2
level’s up in the new yard,” she says.
Check the hardware. My area of expertise. “My tutorial’s at five, I’ll look at it after dinner. Theresa’s at the creche with Linda. She’ll be home at six.”
So I kill time until almost five, then sit down and wait.
The screen beeps, but remains blank. There’s a seven-and-a-half-minute delay, approximately. That’s the amount of time it takes the carrier to flash the signal from one planet to the other. Somewhere in China my tutor has sat in front of a similar blank screen. So I introduce myself. “I’m Alexi Dormov,” I say to the blank screen, feeling a little foolish. I tell her or him what I’ve done and explain my problem. Then I wait and kill time by paging through my book.
Seven minutes is a long time when you don’t have much distraction. Then the image coalesces and I see a Chinese man making
himself comfortable. He looks at a book in his lap and then at the screen. Actually, this is seven and a half minutes in his past. Right now he is receiving my signal, watching me recite.
“My name is Zhang,” he says, “I’m in my second year here at Nanjing, studying systems engineering. I’m actually between my third and fourth year of study because I have a two-year certificate. I’m your tutor. My C-Mail Number is NJDX167, my personal suffix is 7994. Why don’t you start by telling me what you’ve done and asking me any questions you might have. I’m going to let the screen record what you ask me so my answers will have, you know, maybe a better context. To fill time, I’ll answer some of the questions most people have.” He talks for about three minutes, I have elapsed time displayed on the screen, and then he looks at his book and notes.
He’s speaking English—translation programs don’t bother to lip synch. His English is very good and I wonder why someone studying systems at Nanjing University would have first studied English. Why is he my tutor? Do all students have to tutor someone? I feel as if I am staring. Will it look as if I am staring at him when he sees it seven and a half minutes from now?
I say that his procedure sounds fine. After a few minutes more I hear my questions, almost fifteen minutes after I asked them. He’s looking at the screen and then his book. He has long hair, is that the fashion in China? He nods. “Turn to page, ah, twenty-six,” he says. So I’ll have a chance to get about four exchanges in an hour of tutorial. Well, maybe I can prep my classes ahead of time and be able to shoot him a whole stack of questions.
He explains sensitivity patterns, a lot of which I already know, then he makes up a problem and solves it step by step. I ask him to download any supplementary material he thinks would be helpful.
“Okay,” he says, “Next session, give me a list of the references you have available, I mean, things like Qia’s, ah,” he pauses a
moment, translating the title from Chinese to English I guess,
“Reference Guide to, ah, System Types.”
The session ends.
I shut the screen off, feeling more than a little unsatisfied with the whole arrangement. The Ridge is paying good credit for me to take an hour of carrier time. It’s not like the class, that’s a squirt, takes no time at all to receive the whole thing. I know there’s a lot of space in the signal, that other things come in with it and get separated, but it doesn’t seem worth what it costs.
Taking the class doesn’t seem worth what it costs, even if the actual class doesn’t cost anything. It’s all theory. It’s not practical. I don’t see how it’s going to help me with the Ridge’s main problem. All of our system is over-extended, everything adapted to do more than it was designed to do, and we don’t really have much back-up. It’s a raw material problem, we just don’t have enough hardware.
Theresa comes in and drops her bookbag on the floor in the living room. Martine dishes up dinner and asks me about my tutorial. I talk and watch her move around the kitchen. She is a tall woman, taller than I am by a finger’s width, big-boned. Not pretty. She was an officer in the Army and that still shows in the way she holds herself. I review what I have done today, cleaned after the goats this morning and run the waste separator and distiller and spent the afternoon figuring out abstractions of systems engineering. Martine has worked all day, I know. And I have so much to do. I should be out in back, checking the garden, and she mentioned the CO
2
levels are off.
She clears the table. “The two of you can do your homework together,” she says to Theresa and me.
“Have you got homework?” Theresa asks.
“A lot,” I say.
Theresa giggles.
 
 
First thing Thursday morning, I check the CO
2
levels in the new yard. Eskimo, one of the old billies, plants his feet wide and shakes his head at me in challenge but the nannies all crowd around me. Theresa sometimes brings handouts and they’ve all become beggars. She’s already fed them, that’s her before-school chore. I break the litmus pack and stick the indicator on the wall, then I shovel goat manure for waste separation. Martine wants the goat yards as clean as the house, which I suppose is a good idea, but the goats aren’t very cooperative.
The CO
2
levels are higher than usual. Not life-threatening to man or goat by any means, but unusual. I go back to the old goat yard and crack the second pack and stick the indicator on the wall. Lilith follows me around. She’s one of the pregnant nannies. She’s also my favorite, she’s affectionate. I think Martine holds this against her, she said once that Lilith was easy. Nobody could ever accuse Martine of being easy. I pet Lilith, and shoo her out of my way and clean up.
The CO
2
levels in the old goat yard are high, too.

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