China Mountain Zhang (16 page)

Read China Mountain Zhang Online

Authors: Maureen F. McHugh

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang
6.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“I volunteered.”
Goats run across the kitchen floor and Theresa backs out from under the table, blue bottom appearing first.
Alexi and I are looking at each other and my heart is pounding. He is looking at me and what is he thinking; what right does she have? Is he wondering if this is some sort of declaration I am making? Is he angry at me? I want to look down and I can feel heat in my face.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he says.
“I’m running for a position on council,” I say, “it will help to look as if I am involved.”
He looks away first, perplexed. “Oh. I didn’t know you wanted to be on council.”
“There’s a lot you may not know, Alexi,” I say sharply. Only afterwards do I realize that he might mistake that to mean something about my feelings for him. Which is not what I mean at all. And then suddenly I am tired of them. I want to be finished with this conversation, I want them out of my house. Theresa has gotten one of the nanny-kids to stay still and she is petting it.
“What’s its name?” she asks.
“Theresa-the-goat,” I answer. “It’s Cleopatra’s baby.” I meant that to be a surprise, a big deal, but it comes out matter-of-fact.
“That’s my name!” Theresa says.
“How many people are they sending?” he asks.
“The request is for five, but the committee hasn’t met yet.”
“Is it two years? Really?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, “Philippa is going to send me the notice, but I haven’t seen anything.”
“Come on, Theresa,” Alexi says, “we have to head on to New Arizona.” But the peremptory note is gone from his voice. He’s off balance.
“Can Theresa-the-goat come with us?”
“No,” he says, “she has to stay with Martine and Cleopatra, she’s only a baby.”
“Can she come to the transport with us?” Theresa begs.
“No,” I say, “but she’ll be here when you get back.” Theresa skips and bounces in the martian gravity. Alexi alone seems strained. He opens the hatch on the transport and lifts Theresa in and I see a big duffel bag behind the seats. I’m surprised only because I remember how little he had the first time they came; a little bag with a nightgown and a change of clothes for Theresa, a change of coveralls for himself.
He is looking at me oddly, and I think he is going to say something. But apparently he changes his mind and says, “’Bye Martine, thanks for everything.” Then he grabs the handle by the door and swings himself into the cab.
Theresa waves energetically and blows me a kiss, but I see only Alexi’s profile as he starts the transport and shifts into forward.
 
 
Another air leak, this one comes in at about ten-thirty at night and it’s after one when I find it. When I first started it took me six, seven hours to find an airleak, but by now I know where to look. Still, I’m worn out when I finally get to bed. I wake up from a dream of forests and squirrels; the red fox squirrels from where I grew up, big-eyed and leaping from tree branch to tree branch. I am standing in the passageway that leads from the house to the
goat yard, standing barefoot in my nightgown. I haven’t been sleepwalking in years and it scares me a great deal.
The committee on the allocation of people for the water reclamation project finally meets. Cord has been unable to make time until a week before the next council meeting. He doesn’t bother to hide his irritation at being on the committee. He’s middle height and stocky, an old-timer. During the height of Cleansing Winds he was publicly accused and convicted of anti-revolutionary behavior in one of the infamous “People’s Trials,” a polite euphemism for trial by unruly mob. He was badly beaten, I’m told. It explains his attitude toward the Commune.
We don’t like each other. Cord doesn’t really care for anyone, he and his wife are still married but the gossip is that their eldest son sleeps in the front room so his father can have a room away from his mother. I don’t care for Cord because when the Army moved against the W.P.B. (Winds of the People Brigades) we arrested people who’d run those trials and I’d seen the Army allow them to be tried by the same mob. That eye for an eye justice doesn’t seem right to me. As an officer I allowed it because it served as a kind of catharsis for the people, but Cord reminded me of decisions I’d never been proud of.
Philippa is a teacher, a newcomer; she’s been here six years. She’s married to an old-timer, a man twenty-five years older than she is. She’s in her early thirties but her hair is graying and she wears it pulled back. It’s a matronly look. I don’t know her very well, our paths don’t often cross. We were in the dormitory together or I wouldn’t know her at all.
First we discuss the requirements, or at least Philippa and I do. Five people to be sent to the reclamation project at the pole. It’s understood that landholders don’t go. What would happen to my goats, or Philippa’s corn if we were gone for two years?
“So it’ll have to be five from the dorms,” Philippa says. “And it probably should be newcomers who’ve been here a year or less since the others are eligible for a holding after three years.”
“But we never have a holding ready,” I point out.
Philippa shrugged. “We might.”
We have a list of all the newcomers who’ve been here a year or less. There are four. Alexi’s name is first on the list.
“Well, that’s four,” Philippa says. “What happens if we can only come up with four?”
“This man, this Dormov fellow, I know him,” I say. “He’s been relocated four times, he’s a widower and he’s got a six-year-old daughter. The counselors on earth said that all this dislocation was bad for her.”
“But we’ve only got four,” Philippa says. “Besides, he’ll earn credit. They get hazard credit. That’ll help him get started when he gets back, and we’ll keep the daughter at the creche. What I’m really worried about is that there’s only four. New Arizona will give us hell if we don’t come up with five.”
“So much for equality,” Cord mutters.
“What?” Philippa says.
“Send the newcomers. It’s like a draft. The people like Aron Fahey never go.”
“Aron Fahey is a landholder,” Philippa says.
“So who’s to say he’s any better than this comrade with the daughter?”
Cord is an unexpected and not altogether wanted ally.
“So you think landholders should be considered, too?” Philippa says dryly.
Cord sits up, “Yes, I do.” He looks straight at her, malice glinting. “I think you, Martine, and I should be considered. And the Fahey clan and the Mannheims and everybody else.”
“I suspect that would be thrown right out of council,” Philippa says.
“Perhaps it should be brought up, anyway,” Cord says.
“Well then, why don’t you make the report,” Philippa suggests.
“I’ll do that,” Cord says.
And that is the committee meeting. I don’t know what to do.
Cord’s idea is ridiculous. He’ll raise it, everybody will be made uncomfortable. Aron or someone will quote “The good of the many outweighs the good of the few.” And the four newcomers will go. We’ll discuss what to do about the fifth person and what will happen if we only send four.
I go home. I’m tired and I keep thinking about the look on Alexi’s face the night he came alone to fix the separator. How different he turned out to be than the way I thought of him when I first met him—the hidden bitterness, and the awkwardness the last time I saw him.
The bitterness doesn’t surprise me, scratch the surface and it seems a lot of people are bitter.
And why not?
I go down and feed my goats. I spend some time down there just fussing so as to be near them. I like goats. People have the wrong idea about goats, about how stubborn they are and all. Goats are just smart, that’s all. My goats are mostly even-tempered and they aren’t hard to deal with. God knows, a person who can’t outsmart a goat is in pretty sad shape. I am cleaning up, shoveling manure to be used to make alcohol for fuel and as fertilizer when I think again of Alexi swinging up into the cab of his truck, the easy strength in martian gravity. And I think of the duffel bag. He could probably get nearly everything they own in that duffel bag.
What if he has? What if he doesn’t plan to come back?
Martine, use your head, this is Mars. Where could he go? New Arizona where my beer comes from? Then west to Wallace which would put him on the big north-south artery. Sure, he could run, but where would he get fuel? (He’s a clever man with machines, but a thief?) And even if he could get fuel, there’s just no place to run. There aren’t more than seventeen, eighteen million people on the whole planet. He’s not stupid, he wouldn’t try it. When they caught him they’d take Theresa away from him, execute him if he wasn’t lucky, sentence him to reform through labor if he was.
That would mean mining, or the real hazardous duty on the water reclamation project for the rest of his short life.
It’s foolishness to think he would run. I think about Alexi too much, I have middle-aged fancies. He’s young and attractive and friendly and yes, I’m lonely and goats aren’t enough.
Nonetheless, I fret.
 
 
Tuesday he should be back from his run. Surely they’ll stop on their way in. At least say hello. Tuesday comes, slides past. In the evening I call the dorms. Dormov isn’t in, he’s running late. Do I want to leave a message? No, I don’t want to draw attention to his absence.
He could have had transport trouble. They could have stayed an extra day because he has a little money in his pocket. She has a cold, maybe, or ate something that disagreed with her. Or he did. Although the thought of him sick and them alone bothers me. I imagine him sick in a dorm and Theresa in a creche in a commune in New Arizona.
He wouldn’t run, I tell myself. He knows they’d put a bullet in the back of his head. Theft of a transport, he
knows.
It’s hard enough to protect myself from my own stupidity, how can I be expected to protect myself from someone else’s?
 
 
Wednesday evening, watching the kitten chase across the floor, batting a plastic spool across the tiles. The transmitter says, “Martine?”
“Alexi?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“You came back.” The words are out of my mouth.
I expect him to laugh and say something about it took them long enough, but instead he just says, “Yeah.” It’s like a sigh. It’s full of regret, it doesn’t pretend that we don’t both know.
“Are you at the pull-off?” My voice is so matter-of-fact, I’m astounded. None of my relief is in it.
“About twenty minutes out.”
“Come by, you can sleep here tonight.”
“Okay,” he says. “Theresa’s asleep.”
“Okay.”
And then I’m in the kitchen, digging out tofu, bread, running down to the garden for a tomato and parsley and a handful of strawberries. I cook onions, slice in the tofu, the tomato and the parsley. Basil from my kitchen plants. I slice cheese onto brown bread, slice strawberries to put under the cheese, put it on a plate to flash when they get in. And coffee; decaf, or I’ll be awake all night. I scrub the cutting board, the sink, the counter, water the plants, clip off the dead leaves, fill twenty, then twenty-five, then thirty minutes with activity. Finally, thirty-five minutes later I hear him call, “Martine?”
“In the kitchen,” I answer.
He comes to the kitchen door. Good thing it’s martian gravity because he is carrying Theresa and he looks done in.
“Sit down,” I say.
Theresa has her head on his shoulder and opens her eyes only when he shifts her to put her down. I put the bread in to flash, wait for the timer and then pull it out. “Theresa,” I say, “have a little bread and cheese and then you can go to sleep. Careful, it’s hot.”
I pour him coffee and heap food on his plate, pour coffee for me and take some bread and cheese. At first he picks at it, then he eats. Theresa eats half of her bread and cheese and then I take her in to the guest bedroom and take off her shoes and socks, her coveralls and top. Tonight she can sleep in her underwear. I turn the bed up warm and tuck her in and she falls asleep as I am sitting on the bed.
When I come back, Alexi is sitting at the table, the plate pushed away from him, his hands wrapped around an empty coffee cup.
“Thank you,” he says. “I don’t know how to say thank you.”
“What made you come back?” I ask.
“I realized I couldn’t do it. I thought, maybe in New Arizona, or in Wallace, I could slip into the free market or something. But it’s not like earth, there’s nowhere to go. I don’t know what to do. And I kept thinking, you’re on the committee, I know I’ve asked so much of you, but I thought maybe you could help.”
I’m full of anger. Anger is boiling up inside me. Just looking at this man, sitting at my kitchen table, full of my food, asking me for help. I know that my anger is irrational, I know that it’s the flip side of fear, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling it.

Other books

The Marked by Scott, Inara
Unforgettable by Karin Kallmaker
The Last Time We Spoke by Fiona Sussman
Slippery Slopes by Emily Franklin
The Feathery by Bill Flynn
Indigo Road by RJ Jones
Game Saver by BJ Harvey
Lucy Crown by Irwin Shaw