I put a sticker in the garden, oddly enough, O
2
levels are abnormally high. Of course, the plants are oxygenators but the system takes advantage of that. When Martine said there were problems in the new yard I suspected a leak, even a tiny leak can throw a regulator off. But in both goat yards and the garden?
The regulators are simple, like thermostats, really, and it seems an unreasonable coincidence that all three would go out at once. Which suggests that there’s a problem with our controller. I put a sticker in the kitchen.
“What’s that for?” Martine asks.
“All three of the yards are off,” I say.
“Is it the programming?” she asks.
“The programming was fine until now,” I say, keeping my voice normal. I did the programming to extend the system when we installed the yard. I handle the technical things, it’s my half. Martine talks to the goats.
Martine looks at me, clear-eyed, direct. “Well, is it the system?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what it is.” If it’s the system, we’ll have to apply to the Commune for a new one. More negative credit. If they have one. If they don’t we have to wait until some are allocated, and we’re pulling away from the shipping window. Two years without a system. This holding couldn’t go two years without a system, we’d have to close it and then start all over again in two years. Five minutes and I pull the sticker down and throw it in the paper box.
Martine is waiting, arms crossed.
“Too much O
2
, like the garden. Maybe a leak is throwing everything off.”
She opens a drawer and gets out a candle. I shut off the ventilation in the new yard and go out and spend the rest of the morning looking for leaks. Martine is good at finding leaks, she has an instinct, but even a newcomer like me can tell after a couple of hours that I’m not going to find anything. No drafts at any joints, the seams are all straight, no bubbles in the sealer. I turn the ventilation back on and turn it off in the old yard. After that I check the garden, find the cat sleeping on top of the ductwork, which tells us where she goes when we can’t find her, but no leaks.
Martine comes out to the garden. “Find anything?” she asks.
“No,” I say, “the joints all look fine. I’ll check the programming and run some diagnostics.”
“Do you think it might be the programming or do you think it’s the system?”
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 three-thirty 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 fifteen hundred people in Jerusalem Ridge.
At four I go inside. I can hear 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 pull-off.
It is all so normal, so family. What if the problem isn’t something I can solve with reprogramming? 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, 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 Year’s 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 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 it 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 seven-thirty she watches half an hour on the vid, then at eight she gets her bath. In bed by eight-thirty, she’s allowed to read until eight-sixty 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 eleven. 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 questions 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 as an example. He finds one, says, “Turn to page sixty-seven.” 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 CO
2
tanks. Ultraviolet radiation breaks some of the CO
2
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 and 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 borrow 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 the suit. 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 backpack doesn’t quite follow my back and the flat powerpack 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 moment’s 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 facemask 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 other side of the ridge. 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 ninety klicks across.