China Mountain Zhang

HOMEWORK (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 50 litre 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 goatyard 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 25 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 compliment 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 5:00 and I wanted to watch the tape last night, but I ended up working longer than I expected on re-programing 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 has 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 text book 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. Then 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 St." 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 107 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 questions 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 re-program, 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 CO2 level's up in the new yard," she says.

Check the hardware. My area of expertise. "My tutorial's at 5:00, 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 5:00, 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 down 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 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 so 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 CO2 levels are off.

She clears the table. "The two of you can do your homework together," she says to Theresa and I.

"Have you got homework?" Theresa asks.

"A lot," I say.

Theresa giggles.

First thing Thursday morning, I check the CO2 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 CO2 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 CO2 levels in the old goat yard are high, too.

I put a sticker in the garden, oddly enough, O2 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 through 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 O2, 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 he goes when we can't find him, 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 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 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 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.

"Theresa?" I call. She climbs over furniture. "Keep Einstein, baby."

She pulls the goat away from the door and sits down on the floor with him. Martine and I haul goats. They're not heavy, just not made for carrying. They're better for Martine, I pick them up and like as not they struggle.

Coming through the garden with my fourth armload of goat I hear hooves on the kitchen floor. Carlotta is on her feet. "Well, we're not going to have brain-damaged goats," Martine says, coming towards me on her way for her next armload of goat.

"How could you tell a difference?" I ask.

Nineteen goats fill Martine's kitchen. They revive awfully fast and clamber all over each other.

"Do you think we'll be able to put them back in the yard to milk them?" Martine asks.

"Yeah," I say, "in a couple of hours they should be all right. You two go on back to bed, I'll watch goats."

"Come on, Theresa," Martine says.

"Do I have to go to school tomorrow?" Theresa asks.

"Why not?" I ask.

"Cause of all this," she says, exasperated. "I won't be rested."

"Life's tough," I say. "Go to bed now so you'll be rested."

"Dad," she says, "I need to help."

"Nothing to do. Go on."

She says good night rather sullenly and climbs over the furniture. I sit up on the counter.

"Dad!" I hear her call.

"What?"

"My light won't go on."

I hear Martine say, "You don't need a light to sleep."

"Go to sleep!" I call, reinforcement, I hope. The lights are on the system. Everything is on the system. Which reminds me that I have to increase the O2 to the kitchen, nineteen goats are going to use a lot of air. I climb-rather awkwardly actually-over my furniture barricade and Martine comes back down the hall. "I want to increase O2 in the house," I say. "Go on to sleep."

"I won't be able to go back to sleep now," she says.

"Well, go lie down, then," I say. Behind us something clunks and thumps at the barricade and Einstein is in the living room.

I start after the goat, who takes off down the hall, and Martine and I finally corner him in the bathroom.

"That furniture isn't going to stop him," Martine says. Einstein is a shaggy white goat, the kind that look like someone threw a stringy carpet over them.

"Any ideas?" I ask.

Martine thinks a moment and then closes the bathroom door. "Let him stew," she says, "there's nothing he can hurt in there."

His hooves clatter on the bathroom tile. It's dark in there. I hear a muted bleat. I don't think I've ever heard Einstein sound nervous. Maybe he'll have a nervous breakdown and never be right again. It's not that I don't like Einstein, exactly, it's just that he's always been a pain. As Martine says, he's smart.

"Did you lock Einstein in the bathroom?" Theresa calls from her bedroom.

"Yes," I answer, "do you need to go?"

"No," she says, to my relief.

"Go to sleep, Theresa."

I help Martine climb over the barricade, and shove the table more solidly against it. We wade through goat and perch side by side on the counter.

"Do you want a shirt?" Martine asks.

"Not bad enough to go get one," I answer. "You've seen me without a shirt before."

Martine touches her hair self-consciously, barely brushing it with her fingertips, then smooths it firmly.

"It looks all right," I say.

Startled, she drops her hand in her lap. Martine takes personal compliments badly. "Cleo!" she snaps at a goat pushing at the barricade. Cleo doesn't stop and Martine sighes but doesn't go after her.

Oh, I'm tired. And things are a mess. "We're almost out of indicator packs, aren't we?" I ask.

"I imagine," Martine says. "In the morning I'll pick some up, and tell Equipment that our system is down. Can you fix it?"

"No," I say.

"I didn't think so," Martine says and sighes again.

"What are we going to do?" I ask.

"Can you keep the air mixture good manually?"

I shrug. "After a fashion. I guess if I had to I could make some sort of automatic regulator. I don't know if I could do the house, the garden and both goat yards."

"Then we'll close off the new yard and sell some of the goats," Martine says. "We'll see if we can run one yard on manual, at least until we get a new system."

"It might have to wait until the next window," I say. The next window is over a year away.

"We could get one on the free market in New Arizona," she says.

"We don't have the credit," I say.

"We can borrow."

I don't say anything.

After a moment she takes my hand. "Alexi," she says, "this isn't the end of everything, we're not going to lose the place. We may have to give up beer and lemonade and sell strawberries and green beans for awhile."

"It's a lot of money," I say.

Irritated, she says, "You are the most paranoid man imaginable. You think this is debt, you wouldn't believe what I did to get this place started."

"Things don't always go right," I point out.

"And they don't always go wrong, either. And stop talking so quietly. You know, whenever you're upset about something it's as if you had to iron all the expression out of your voice."

"That's better than screaming and raving, isn't it?" I say. I do sound curiously flat, even to my ears. I don't feel flat.

"All right, Alexi," she agrees. Disappointment in her voice, in her body language. We're still holding hands, but I'm sure she doesn't realize it.

"I didn't ask you to marry me," I say, defending myself.

"Son of a bitch," she says, not particularly at me, it has the sound of a general expletive. I'm taken aback, Martine doesn't swear much.

"I should have known. Okay. You want a divorce, we'll divorce."

There it is, proof of how badly I've failed her, failed this whole thing. "I don't want a divorce," I say, "but I'm willing to do whatever you want." I never saw myself sitting on the counter in the kitchen, our feet disappearing into a sea of goats, holding Martine's hand while we discussed divorce. Cleo shoves at the barricade. "Damn it," I leap off the counter and haul the nanny away, shove Theresa-the-goat down. When I turn around, Martine is watching me, and she looks so sad, so, what is the word I am looking for? So devastated. Martine has great huge dark eyes, funny how I never thought of how big her eyes are until this moment, in her pale long face.

"Alexi," she says, forlornly, and to my great consternation she starts to cry.

You have to understand, Martine doesn't cry. At least not in my experience. Martine is iron. She's Army. Discipline. For a moment I don't have any idea what to do. So I wade back through goats and climb up onto the counter and put my arms around her.

"It's all right," I say, and other, soothing things, things you say when someone is crying.

"I know I'm old," she says, sniffling. "I know it wasn't fair, using the holding as a bribe. I thought, though, it would work out." Martine's strong, rather prominent nose gets red, and she looks older when she cries. Certainly not prettier.

"You're not old," I say.

"I'm forty-four," she says, "I'm ten years older than you-"

"Eight," I correct.

"Men like younger women."

"I never felt worthy of you," I say, deeply, from the bottom of my heart.

That makes her cry harder. "I don't want you to feel worthy," she says, "I want you to like me!" She pulls away and gets down among the sea of goats and shoves Lilith out of the way so she can open a drawer and pull out a dish towel.

"I do like you," I say, perplexed. "I like you, I even love you."

"But you're always worrying about pulling your own weight," she says. "You're always going to feel like this was my farm first, so you owe me. Everything is debt, debt, debt. You owe Theresa because her mother died. You owe me because of the holding. You owe the commune because of the new yard so you take this class and try to figure out how to make it useful. Nobody gives a damn if you ever use this class or not, it's politics Alexi. It looks good on the report to New Arizona!"

I don't know what to say. After a minute I say, "You make it sound as if it's a crime to be grateful."

"It's not being grateful," she says. "The flip side of grateful is resentment. You're not my slave, I don't want you to be my slave."

"Hold it," I say. Goats bleat. We are getting loud and Theresa is going to hear this. I grab her arm, "Come on," and haul her out into the garden. "You've exaggerated this all out of proportion. I'm not your slave, I don't feel like your slave, maybe I do worry about keeping up my end. But I never know what you think! You never tell me if you like the way things are or you don't like the way things are. I don't know how you feel about me. I don't know if you like being my wife. Hell, I don't even know if you like sex with me!"

"You don't have to talk so loud," Martine says.

"A minute ago you were complaining I didn't talk loud enough!"

Martine starts to laugh. It runs through my mind that she's hysterical, after all it's between 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning.

"What's wrong?" I say.

"It's funny," she says, laughing.

"What?"

"Here we are with a kitchen full of goats, having our first married argument."

"Is this our first argument?" I ask, trying to remember previous arguments.

"Our first real one," she says.

"We argue about Theresa, you're always telling me not to remind her to feed the goats."

"That's not an argument. I say it, you say she's eight-years-old and then we don't say anymore." She grins at me, red nosed from crying.

"If this is our first argument," I say thoughtfully-

"And we've even brought up," she drops her voice, "the 'D' word, so it qualifies."

"-then we must really be married. Like people who don't get married so one of them doesn't have to go to the South Pole."

"Which would normally mean that right now we should make up," she says,

"except-"

"Yes?" I say.

"We have a kitchen full of goats, Mr. Dormov. But I do like," her voice quavers a bit, "sex with you."

"And I like sex with you. And I don't think you're old," I say. "Ms. Jansch," I put my arms around her and give her a hug, "how about if we go back into the kitchen and sit on the counter and smooch."

"As long as the goats don't start chewing on the furniture," she says.