Maureen McHugh - China Mountain Zhang

I am talking to the ice, and I am saying over and over, "I have lost my frigging mind, do you understand? I have lost my frigging mind. I have lost my frigging mind."

Maggie comes over and takes my arm and says, "Come inside. Come inside."

At first I think, no. But then I realize I am cold, and that I really want to, so I let her pick up my pull-over and the cutter and we go inside. Now she talks and I am quiet. "It's nothing," she says, "it happens in the winter. Come inside, have something hot, have some tea. The Eskimo call it perlerorneq, winter depression, it happens when it gets dark and you're unhappy, but now it's over, you're okay, you'll be okay. I'll make you a cup of tea, very sweet, here put this back on and get warm." To Jim and Janna, "Zhang is tired, I'll take him back, he's not going to work today. Don't worry, he's okay now."

Words wash over me, I don't care. I don't care, except I am so tired that I could weep. I wonder if I am going crazy, but I think that if I am, at least I will go home.

Maggie takes me back, and takes me to my room. She sits with me on my bed and tells me, "Right now, you are just sick of life, perlerorneq, but you'll feel better."

"I'm sorry," I mumble. But I have a feeling now, not anger. Underneath my tiredness I feel grateful. "Thank you," I say.

"Go to sleep," she says.

I sleep for sixteen hours, through the day and the next night. And when I meet everyone the next morning for breakfast, I am embarrassed, and they are all kind. I cannot look at Maggie Smallwood, so I don't.

Janna says, "It's hard for all of us, but for you, well, you didn't even want to be here."

"I don't know what happened to me," I say, penitent and confused. I go to work, and they keep me working on the third level, close to them, and they talk to me often.

Maggie talks to me, matter-of-fact. "When they had trouble with depression in space, they asked the Inuit Eskimo and the Greenland Eskimo about perlerorneq . It's like a circuit breaker. Now the Eskimo train research crews in space ways to deal with it. I learned about it in school, in my Native Studies course."

My unhappiness is still there, but it is gray, not black. I go back to the full spectrum lights, I study a little. Janna begins to teach me calculus on Monday and Wednesday nights, to keep me studying. I have taken calculus, and she is good at explaining, so it is easy. I do not talk much to Maggie, except to say hello. I am ashamed of my behavior towards her, but what is there to say?

So December passes. Christmas, a package from Peter, sweaters in the most outrageous styles, with little capes; all the rage, he writes. I give one to Karin. We exchange gifts, sing songs. It's not so bad.

We are expecting sunrise at 12:14 p.m. on February 2. In January I study and wait through the days. I have the feeling that I have felt the worst and now it will be all right. I decide to renew my contract.

"Don't worry," Janna tells me, "You'll love the summer, a sun worshiper like you. Explorers used to wear felt blindfolds so they could escape the sunlight to sleep."

On January 29 we are studying in the late morning. Eric is running an experiment at Halsey from 8:00 p.m. until almost 3:00 a.m. and he needs a tech, so I won't go out to Halsey until later. Each day now there is a false dawn. The sky gets rosy and the sun threatens to rise, the stars paling in the south, but it doesn't quite come up. Still, I watch. Only four more days.

Janna is checking my figures, I am watching the horizon. Dawn seems so close, so possible. The sky is the pearlescent white of dawn, shading to pink, lavender, indigo, and then somewhere above, to black. The ice is the color of the sky.

And then, four days early, I see the edge of the sun, blinding, above the horizon. "Janna!"

She looks up and her eyes widen and then crinkle with delight. "Oh, Zhang, wonderful."

It's morning. I smile and smile.

"It's not a real sunrise," Janna explains, "It's refraction. The earth's atmosphere bending light rays. The sun is still five degrees below the horizon."

We sit in silence and watch the sun rise and then dip. In minutes it is over.

I expect to feel the weight of the night again, but no, the sunrise is enough. I can wait. I can study, I can pass the exam. And the second night is not so bad, never as bad as the first.

I have survived. And I think, finally, I am adapting.

The little girl looks at me and asks, "What's that?"

"What?" I ask. The myth that all middle-aged women like children is just that, a myth.

"That," she points.

"It's a candle," the man working on the skid says. "Come over here Theresa, I need you to hold something for me, okay?"

Clearly her father. They both have the same pale, washed out look, like faded cotton. Newcomers. Maybe whatever life they'd been living before they got here washed them out that way. The little girl looks up at me, not sure what to make of me, then obeys.

I'm walking the perimeter, checking for an air leak. I know it's here, I just don't know where it is. We use a very old fashioned way to locate leaks, whenever we get a flag that the air mixture is off somewhere in Jerusalem Ridge, I come out here and prowl around with a candle, using the flicker of the flame to find the leak.

Don't go looking for Jerusalem Ridge on your map, it's called New Changsha, or Sector 56/C-JRU, depending on whether your map is dated during or after the Cleansing Winds Campaign. It's on the northern edge of the Argyre Basin in the southern hemisphere. JRU is actually the initials of the surveyor. Aron Fahey says the name comes from the initials, but I really couldn't say. Most of the people who were here thirty years ago and would remember have been relocated. Aron would have been nine then so I'm not sure he really knows. I came when they reopened the sector seven years ago and walked into a viper's nest of back-stabbing and leftover animosities. Even now the Commune tends to break into two parts, the old people left who remember everything anybody ever did to anyone else during the Campaign, and the new ones who left our mistakes on Earth. The people who were kids during the Campaign tend to stick with the new people.

These two are real new, transports. If I didn't already know, I certainly figure it out when the father carefully jacks the little girl into his troubleshooter. Kids don't get implants that young here; I don't think she's more than six. She looks younger than that, dressed in a red top that's been stretched out too much in the neck and is too small for her and pants too big. Cast offs. He's wearing coveralls, regular issue. I find my leak and repair it. It doesn't take much to repair a leak; smear sealer on it, mark it for a structural check, although this one looks like someone slammed something into the wall-a common enough occurrence in the godown. While I'm waiting for the sealer to set, I watch the father and daughter. He's blond and sharp featured, she has thin, limp hair the color of dishwater. She stands next to him without figiting, careful on her task. She seems to be concentrating more on him than the job; she watches him raptly, mouth open a little, the way kids do.

I leave before they finish their repair job.

When I get home, my separator is on the fritz again and I completely forget about them.

When I was a little girl I once walked two miles in my sleep. I'm just the walking sort. That was when there were still communes in West Virginia. I guess that's what I miss most, walking in West Virginia. After they put the train in, it wasn't the same. Then suddenly the place was crawling with New Yorkers, all looking for a clean place to live where their families could grow up in the country while they went to their good-paying jobs in the city. It was all cadres at first, and maybe a couple of green men. Officers, of course, common soldiers don't live that well.