China Mountain Zhang

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  I shrug, I don’t know.

  “Alexi,” she says sharply, “we’ll deal with it, whatever it is.”

  Martine and her iron will. Sometimes, an iron will isn’t enough.

  I go back into the house and jack into the system and set up tests to run. When I jack out Martine is standing there. I’m sitting on the floor next to the panel so I have to look up at her. She’s got Martine’s intent look. If you don’t know her you’d think she was frowning at you.

  “The tests have to run,” I explain. “It’ll be awhile.”

  “I just came to tell you come eat some lunch.” She puts her hand on my shoulder, and I cover it with mine. Uncharacteristic of Martine, that touch. I don’t know whether to take it as comfort or an indication of the gravity of the situation.

  So we eat lunch, and I go out and clean the filters in the garden. Martine comes out and opens the skylight. Light wind on the surface. Sand shushes softly, the sky is an unnatural cobalt and the sunlight is thin but hard, even with the ultraviolet filtered out. We work through the early afternoon. Martine’s bees drone, working the garden with us. We’re the only place with screen doors in the whole ridge, but I like the bees. I like the screen doors, too. They’re normal, like home on Earth.

  At 3:30 the one between the house and the garden slams and Theresa comes in with Linda.

  “Hi Little Heart,” I say, and realize my mistake too late. She gives me a withering look. It is not appropriate to call an eight-year-old by what she refers to as her ‘baby-name’ in front of her friends.

  “Hello, Comrade Alexi,” Linda says politely, “Hello Comrade Martine.”

  “Dad, can we have lemonade?”

  I glance at Martine, who nods. “Okay. Don’t do anything with the system, I’m running tests.”

  “Okay.”

  Linda started coming over about a year ago and she and Theresa have become ‘best friends’. At first I was afraid that the attraction was the fruit juice in the cooler, but I think that the truth is that there just aren’t that many children. There are less than 1,500 people in Jerusalem Ridge.

  At four I go inside. I can here the girls talking in Theresa’s bedroom-although I can’t hear what they’re saying. I jack in. My diagnostics indicate something is off. Maybe it really just needs reprogramming. I don’t care if I screwed up the programming, I can handle that.

  Martine has a council meeting so I flash soup and biscuits for dinner. Linda’s mother comes by at a little before five, Linda is watching for the scooter and she and Theresa run down to the pulloff.

  It is all so normal, so family. What if the problem isn’t something I can solve with re-programming? What if our system is shot?

  Martine puts on her council meeting outfit, a blouse and slacks. We eat dinner and Theresa tells us about the report she has to write. She has to do a report on one of the leaders of the Second American Revolution. After dinner, she has to be reminded to feed the goats, she does it every evening, but she always has to be reminded. Martine keeps telling me that if I keep reminding her she’ll never learn to think for herself. I keep reminding Martine that she’s eight years old.

  Martine takes our scooter, she has to talk with Aron Fahey about something first, so she leaves early. Theresa and I settle at the kitchen table to do our homework.

  She doesn’t know whether to do her report on Zhou Xiezhi or Christopher Brin. “Can I use the system now?”

  “Go ahead,” I say. She calls up an index and I help her pick out sources. Her reading scores are excellent, ahead of her age group. She’s still behind in math but her teacher says not to worry, she’s catching up. She reads the story of Zhou Xiezhi to me;

  Zhou Xiezhi was the son of doctors. When he was a boy, he went to his grandmother’s farm. His grandmother had many animals, including a big, pink pig. Zhou Xiezhi liked the pig. Each day, Zhou Xiezhi talked to the pink pig. He fed the pig apples and called the pig ‘Old Man.’ The pig would make happy noises, grunt, grunt, grunt, and Zhou Xiezhi would laugh and laugh. On New Years Day the family had a big dinner. They had chicken and beef. They had fish because in Chinese the word for ‘fish’ sounds like the word that means ‘more food.’ There were dumplings and pork ribs. Zhou Xiezhi ran to wish the pink pig a Happy New Year. But the pig was gone. Where was the pig? His grandmother told him, “The pig was part of the New Year Dinner.”

  Zhou Xiezhi cried and cried. After that day he never ate meat again.

  I remember the story of Zhou Xiezhi’s soft heart, of course we studied in primary school. When I got older I was disappointed to learn that the famous vegetarian from China who came to America to help the Soviet Revolution cold-bloodedly ordered that every third captive be put to death until the capitalist defenders of Gatlinburg surrendered.

  Don’t get me wrong, I realize that killing some sixty captives saved him from having to kill thousands of capitalists and lose thousands of his own soldiers, taking Gatlinburg, I just wonder at the mind that could calculate that way, balance human life against human life. No matter how anguished his diary entries.

  Theresa writes her report about Zhou Xiezhi, the military genius from China who left his home forever to organize the People’s Army of America, and died a martyr to the American revolution. I help her draw a timeline. At 7:30 she watches half-an-hour on the vid, then at 8:00 she gets her bath. In bed by 8:30, she’s allowed to read until 8:60 and then lights out.

  I read through my textbook, looking for clues that will help me with the system. Martine gets home and goes to bed and I continue to work, trying to solve problems. When I give in it is after 11:00. I sleep in the third bedroom, where I slept when we were first married, because I don’t want to wake Martine up. It’s good that I do, in the morning the bedclothes are twisted from tossing all night.

  “I got your question and your list of sources,” my tutor says. “If you didn’t get the sources I sent you, let me know.” He glances at me, or at least at the screen. He has a funny look. “Thank you for the compliment on my English, but I’m from Brooklyn.”

  From Brooklyn? New York?

  He clears his throat and begins answering my questions. Some he answers quickly. Some take him longer. I find the seven-and-a-half minute delay frustrating.

  “Comrade Zhang,” I say about forty-five minutes into the hour, “This doesn’t have anything directly to do with the class, but the biggest problem I face as a tech is that we keep having to use our systems to do things they weren’t constructed to do, and to expand them to maximum capacity. If you can think of any information on how to increase the system’s efficiency, I would be very grateful to see it.”

  He is looking through his textbook for a problem to use an example. He finds one, says, “Turn to page 67.” He reads a moment, smiles briefly at the screen, a quick, kind of apologetic thing. “Okay,” he says, “for example.” He tends to over explain, since I can’t tell him what I already know.

  Fifteen minutes later I hear my voice asking my question. “Ah,” he says, “I can’t think of anything off hand, but let me see what I can come up with.”

  End of session. From Brooklyn. American, I assume, unless there’s a Brooklyn Australia or England or something. But he sounds American.

  He must be one smart son of a bitch.

  We get our oxygen out of Mars’ atmosphere and most of our energy is solar. New Arizona uses fission, but we don’t really need it, having lots of unused surface space. Before I start reprogramming I decide to check the solar collectors and the CO2 tanks. Ultraviolet radiation breaks some of the CO2 down, but not enough. We use algae for the rest. Occasionally somebody cracks a tank and the algae gets loose, New Arizona screams about corrupting the Martian environment. There isn’t really much Martian environment to corrupt, some indigenous pseudo-algae and lichens at the poles. Our algae gets irradiated out of existence anyway. But I try to get out and check the tank about every six months. Sandstorms are tough on everything.

  We have an airlock between the house a
nd the garden, set in the roof of the tunnel. It’s tiny, big enough for a person to crouch in. I have to go down to equipment in town and pick up an ARC, we don’t have one and don’t really need one. The suits don’t fold, and it’s a pain to get it bundled up enough to tie it on the back of the scooter. The army would have fits if they ever saw it, it doesn’t exactly fit safety specs. The couplings are old-fashioned gaskets and the whole suit is a mess, but when I get home I pressurize it and stand it out in the garden for an hour and if it has any leaks they’re slow enough I’m not going to care.

  The cat, Mintessa, is alternately fascinated and irritated. She haunts the garden while I fiddle with it. I polish it up, the last time I borrowed one the heating system was very efficient and besides smelling like every other poor soul who’d ever sweated inside it, it nearly roasted me. I scoot a boot across the pavement at her and she arches her back, goes sideways and hisses. Maybe Geoff Kern had it last, he’s got three dogs. Or maybe she just doesn’t like highly reflective surfaces.

  The inside has the ethene reek of cleaning solvent. I stand a moment in the garden, modeling my underwear for the hostile cat, and then clamber into the thing, sealing the front and then boots and helmet and gloves. The pressure holds in the suit, the back pack doesn’t quite follow my back and the flat power pack at the base flares into a fishtail that presses above my kidneys if I stand too straight.

  I put the ladder under the little airlock, pull myself into it. I couldn’t pull myself up so easily in earth gravity, but it’s easy to lift myself in and crouch, close the door. I hope Martine doesn’t move the ladder for some reason-she knows I’m doing this, she wouldn’t move the ladder, just a moments paranoia.

  The little airlock has a pump that labors mightily to pull out some of the air mixture. It doesn’t create much vacuum, but it’s always a shame to waste mixture. Then the outer atmosphere vents in and I crank the outer door open, straighten up and brace against the wind. My face mask polarizes. I can’t remember what season we’re in. I squint at the sky, almost black through my darkened facemask, and it seems to me the sun is north. Of course, we’re pretty far down in the southern hemisphere, the sun better be north. There’s the crest of the ridge behind me, sunlight glinting off the curve of our skylights. The rest of the settlement is in the less side. In front of me the land is full of dark chunks of rock in rusted soil.

  I always thought of Mars as a desert and somehow expected it to look like home. Other than being dry, it doesn’t. The soil color is wrong, for one thing, for another, the only erosion on Mars is wind erosion. For another, there are more rocks. I guess most of our soil comes from water and the action of plants and insects on rock. Pictures of some of the areas down at the pole show stuff that looks more like the baked ground of home, but a great deal of it is huge, cracked areas, like baked mud. Except the plates of cracked soil are meters across, and the cracks are bigger. Step into bigger. Martian landscapes are exaggerated, simplified. Every school child has seen pictures of Olympus Mons; there’s not a mountain on the whole of earth as pure or as huge as Olympus Mons. The crater is 90 klicks across.

  Still, I like coming out once in awhile. There’s no real distance in the Ridge, no vista, no perspective. Everything feels inside. Most of the time I don’t think about it, but when I get outside in the sunlight I always find myself stretching. Unfortunately when I stretch in the ARC the power pack digs into my back, but it still feels good.

  Walking on Mars is difficult. I’ve tried to make a kind of path to the tank but the stones are wobbly and there’s no flat place to put my feet. I pick my way across, arms waving for balance, and check the filters.

  They’re full of sand, but they’re built for that. I empty them but the next sandstorm will fill them. The big, black O2 holding tank looks fine. I take the panel off. My fingers are cold. Just my luck, the last suit I had overheated, this one doesn’t heat at all. The panel covering the instrument readouts is, of course, on the windward side. I turn my back into the wind, hoping the back pack will keep me a little warmer. It’s only about ten centimeters thick at the dorsal ridge, not very protective, and even so the backs of my legs begin to get cold. Everything looks fine, all the quaintly old fashioned L.E.D.s registering the way they should. There’s no way to jack into the system out here, no external jack on the ARC anyway.

  I pick my way back to the airlock and squat, pull the door closed over my head and crank it shut, feel the goosebumps on my arms and thighs while the pump tries to force most of the CO2 out.

  The ladder is still there, too. I swing down to it.

  Martine is standing by the screen door with two trays of seedlings. She was supposed to be building a bee box, either she finished or she’s taking a break. She waits while I pop the helmet. “How’s the tank?”

  “Fine,” I say. “I emptied the filters. The heater doesn’t work on this thing.”

  “I thought you were back in a hurry.” She puts down the trays.

  “Have you seen Min?” I ask.

  “The cat? She’s up on the ductwork, in a snit.”

  “She doesn’t like the suit, either,” I say.

  Bright words. I didn’t expect to find anything wrong out there. Maybe it’s not the system. Maybe I’ll find the problem re-programming.

  “Are you going to check the programming this afternoon?” Martine asks.

  “Not this afternoon,” I say, “I’ve been fiddling with this thing for days, I’ve got to get caught up on some other things.” I don’t look at Martine. Martine gets right down to things and if it takes all night, it takes all night. But I’m not Martine.

  The bed is too warm, I can’t get comfortable. I’m aware I’m keeping Martine awake, I should go and sleep in the other room, but I’m not really awake or asleep, and if I get up she’ll ask what I’m doing. I don’t know if she prefers sleeping with me or not. I think that we have a decent sex life, I mean she’s never said anything one way or another. Not that she should have to, of course. I mean that the act seems satisfying enough to her, and although she once made the comment that she had gotten accustomed to sleeping alone, I feel she prefers to have someone in bed with her now. I have tried to make her feel it was a good idea to marry me, that it benefited her as much as it did me. I am grateful, for myself and for Theresa.

  Sometimes I feel as if I carry this marriage on my back. There were times I felt trapped by my first marriage, by Geri, and the obligation of a child in that situation, it’s a normal enough feeling in any marriage and I’m certain that there are times Martine wonders why she ever took us on. But I have to believe that this marriage is what Martine wants.

  I jerk awake, the alarm has gone off and for a moment I am thinking that it can’t be morning and I can see the chron blinking 2:18 in blue numbers, and then I realize it’s Martine’s alarm signaling that the air mixture is off somewhere. A leak. Sometimes she’ll have three in a month, sometimes we’ll go three months without one.

  I hear her get out of bed, listen to her move around the room, out into the main room. I won’t be able to go back to sleep until she leaves, and I won’t really sleep well until she’s back, which tonight probably means I won’t get much sleep because it usually takes a couple of hours.

  I hear her come back, the light is on in the main room and I am trying to avoid it, digging my face in the crook of my arm. “Alexi?” she says.

  “Hmm?” I say.

  “The alarm is from our yards.”

  “What?” I say.

  “The alarm.” She speaks quietly, but doesn’t whisper. “It’s ours, the air mixture is off in our goat yards. It’s pretty far off in the new yard, not as bad in the old.”

  I get out of bed, grab my pants and check the system. Our system shows a high CO2 level in the old yard so I jack in to manually raise the O2 levels but I can’t manipulate the system. I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do and the relays feel frozen.

  I jack out, run a clear, jack back in. I feel the tension that says I’
m controlling the regulator and change it, but instead of changing it freezes up on me again. I know we’re screwed. That’s not programming, that’s a glitch in the actual system.

  Martine is waiting. “The system’s frozen,” I say. “It’s not regulating the house or the yards.” I shut it down, throwing everything on the little back-up, manual system. Then I jack in and turn on the lights in the yards and the kitchen. “I don’t know how high the CO2 is out there, I don’t know if the system was registering correctly or not.”

  “I’ll test,” Martine says.

  “Put one up in the kitchen, too.” I use the back-up system to start cycling CO2 out of the yards, but it can take a couple of hours. I check the house temperature, we’re running a little cold.

  The O2 levels in the kitchen are a little high. I wonder why the system would do better in the house than in the yards. I hear Martine calling me from the garden.

  “Alexi, there’s too much CO2, the goats are groggy.”

  “It’s okay in here, how’s the garden?”

  “It’s all right.” Martine frowns. “I can’t put the goats in the garden.”

  They’d have a field day and we’d never see strawberries again. “Bring them in the kitchen,” I say.

  Martine looks at me as if I have lost my mind. “Nineteen goats in our kitchen?”

  “What else are you going to do with them? It’ll be a couple of hours before the air quality is all right in the yard.”

  I use furniture to block off the kitchen from the Main Room.

  “What are you doing?” Theresa asks. She’s standing in the hall, wearing her white nightgown, her hair sleeptangled and her fist under her chin the way she used to do when she was younger.

  “The air mixture is bad in the goat yards,” I say. “We’re going to put the goats in the kitchen. Can you go out and help, hold the doors open? Go get your slippers.”

  Martine comes in, a goat under each arm. She drops them splay legged on the floor, and one of the nannies, Carlotta, I think, folds to her knees with a plop. The goats close their slit-pupiled eyes. I climb over the furniture and follow her back to the new yard. The air smells stale, or is it just because I know? The goats lie around, most not bothering to move when we come in. Strange sight, all the quiescent goats, black and whites, whites, bearded. I pick up a nanny and Einstein, who, groggy or not, manages knock my in the chin tossing his head. Next trip back he is standing just in the door to the kitchen, shaking his head to warn me back.