Maureen McHugh - China Mountain Zhang

For the first time I think I jack Janna. Janna is tough, practical, no nonsense. That's her mechanism. Maybe Janna and Karin are a couple? "This is winter gear in New York."

"Well it's not winter gear here. You're supposed to be issued an ARC."

ARC. Artificial climate suit. What the rest of us call atmosphere suits. "I just got here," I say. "Maggie showed me my room and then the caf."

Janna looks at Jim, Jim shrugs. "He can't go out like that," Janna says.

"We'll have to find him something." Jim frowns, "He couldn't wear mine, it'd be too big, and I've got to wear it. Maybe Daniel's. Is Daniel going out?"

Nothing to do but ask Daniel. We tromp to Daniel's room, carrying our coffee mugs. Daniel is asleep, after all it is only 7:45. And dark enough to be midnight. Sunrise isn't until almost 10:00 a.m. I have that disoriented sense of being up at the wrong time.

Daniel says I can use his ARC if it fits. He hands it to me and I shuck my sweater. The air inside the station is cool but not cold. I work out a little, haul tools around all day, I can be casual about being bare-chested, especially next to Jim who looks big but undefined. If he worked out I could never compare with the width of his shoulders. Under his ARC what does he look like? Forget all that for six months, Zhang. It's a small place, people are in each other's laps. I am a monk in the service of research, and Jim is not my type anyway. I tug the ARC over my head, pull the hood off my hair. It is not a good fit, but it will do. It's too warm.

Jim nods. "Better."

Janna nods, too.

Daniel says, "Wear it in good health." He hands me the leggings and shuffles back to bed.

I look at Janna and Jim. "I think I'd prefer to put these on in my room."

Jim grins. "Yeah, probably."

I dress, feeling like I'm playacting, and meet Jim at the caf. We walk down to the pool. Not a water pool, a vehicle pool. There's a cutter unit that looks like it's barely been used, it's not even dirty. I check it to make sure the seals have been broken, but actually it has been used before, so I load it in the back of the yellow floater. Then we load a couple of crates of pre-fab and I climb in the floater with Jim.

"Have you ever been under the ice?" he says.

Sure, I think to myself, I spend all my time under ice, usually up around Macy's. What the hell does he think? New York is a glacier? I don't know what he means 'under the ice.' I don't understand these people when they talk. "I just got here," I say.

"It's not so bad," he says.

Something never to believe, right up there with 'It tastes just like chicken,' is 'It's not so bad.' If it wasn't bad, they wouldn't have to tell me it wasn't bad.

We rumble out into the darkness and I can feel the force of the wind hit me and the floater, when Jim sets the hover he has to head the nose into the wind, but in my suit I'm not cold. If anything I'm a little warm. It's pretty. The sky is black, the land is white. It's so big and empty that it's scary. I wonder if I'm agoraphobic. Of course, I'm a city boy. It's not the space that makes me nervous, it's the absence of human reference. We head off, the nose of the floater about forty-five degrees the left of the direction in which we are actually heading, so we are kind of skidding sideways. I glance back at the station, expecting reassurance, but we scoot over the lip of the big hill down to Lancaster Straight and the station looks smaller and smaller. So I look forward again, which is slightly less unnerving than watching safety recede.

Jim tells me about where we are going. We're heading for Halsey Station, which, when it is finished will be the first of a series of stations that will monitor belukha whales. It's under water in the summer, under the ice in the winter. "Why did you take this job, the chance to study in China?" he says.

"Nobody said anything to me about studying in China," I say.

"That's what the guy before you was out here for," he says. "He said your government wrote it into a hazardous contract, if you renew your contract you get some kind of chance to study in China."

I didn't really read the contract. All right, so you should always read a contract. "I'll have to look," I say. I don't believe it. They wouldn't give somebody a chance to study in China just for spending six months here.

"So why did you come? You don't seem very interested in the great outdoors."

I wonder what I seem like to him. He's a scientist, here because he wants to be, he must get pretty tired of techies who want to do their six months and go home. "It was my third alternate," I say. "I had to take it."

"You mean your government made you come here?"

"Not exactly." I explain about alternatives.

"Were you at all, you know, interested?" he asks. "I mean I know it's not New York, but like you said, it's only for six months and it's a change, you know."

"Yeah," I lie, "I thought it would be interesting. And I thought it would make me study for the engineering exam." He doesn't want to hear how horrible I think this place is, he choose to come here. And I should study for the engineering exam. There isn't much social life here.

"You should check out that education thing," he says. "Kevin only had to work a year and now he's in Guangzhou."

Stay here a year? It would be worth it if I could study in China. But I'm sure that it's more complicated than that, or that the regulations have changed. Madre de Dios, stay here a year?

"There's the station," Jim says. We coast out onto the ice and he points to something that looks like an old-fashioned lighthouse. The ice is run with cracks, long spiderwebs. And as we get closer to the station I can see how the ice has piled up around it. "Shit," he says, "we ought to clear that ice."

The ice has ground against the west side, mounting the side of the tower. We'd need a light-hammer. I mention that.

"There's one in the station," he says, "we have to clear ice every couple of weeks."

We park the floater on the ice and walk across to the station. Without the blow of the floater I can hear the ice groaning all around me. It groans like metal under stress, but there's hectares of it. Wind moan and ice groan, black sky and white blue ice in the dark. We climb slabs of ice to metal rungs set in the side of the tower, and I follow Jim up to the top where he opens a hatch and we see the lit stairs curling down at our feet. He gestures for me to go first and closes the top after us. The wind stops and I realize I've been holding my shoulders tense. They ache. The stairs are a circular metal staircase in a reinforced concrete tower with a ribbon light down the wall, but ugly as it is in here it's better than out there.

Our steps echo as we go down. Underneath is a large space, maybe twenty meters across, with windows for the outer walls. It's bare unfinished concrete floor and ceiling except where someone has started finishing one of the walls in porcelain white. "The actual shell is raconite," Jim says. "We've got this level wired so the lights come on whenever anyone enters but then there are two more levels below us. The middle one isn't as finished as this one, the bottom is labs. I need some help setting up some stuff for a lab, then there's a building protocol you can use to do some work on the place while I run some tests. Ah, the hammer is under stairs, there's only one." He's embarrassed that there's only one, he doesn't want to tell me to do the ice myself.

"Well," I say, "that's what they're paying my inflated salary for."

He grins, relieved. He's a nice guy, big and wooly as a bear. "It won't take you too long," he says. "Just break up the top stuff and be careful not to cut too deep, remember there's water underneath. I'll be on the first level."

"Meishi," I say.