Maureen McHugh - China Mountain Zhang

I guess I became a soldier because when I was a girl that was the way to insure getting the best. That was right after the beginning of the Cleansing Winds Campaign, when we were all trying to get back to the days when socialism meant something to the people. That was going terribly wrong and everywhere you looked people were getting in trouble for things that ten years earlier had been fine, like growing your own silicon chips and all the little backyard technologies. The army looked like a pretty safe deal. I had a string-my uncle was a bird colonel and he got me in. I went in at fifteen. You could do that then. At thirty-five I had my twenty years, a failed marriage and about all I could take of the army. I went looking for West Virginia but while I had been gone it had somehow transferred itself into a copy of New Jersey, and I hadn't gone back looking for New Jersey. That's how I ended up on the settlement project on Mars. Patriotic Volunteers Turn Red Desert Into Productive Land.

But I was back to walking; besides minding my plot, my goats and my bees I walked the perimeter watching for leaks. Lenin knows it was hard. I thought I'd start a new life on Jerusalem Ridge, but I hadn't counted on the fact that wherever I went I'd still be there. And I hadn't changed just by getting on a shuttle and coming to Mars. I wasn't happy. I can't say it was a mistake, I wasn't happy on Earth, either. But on Earth at least I was comfortable. For a long time I wasn't comfortable on Mars. Six months after I got here I about made up my mind to go home, but I kept putting off doing anything about it and now it's gotten to the point where it's easier to stay than to go.

I schedule my day based on what happens, sometimes I'm working at three in the morning, livestock makes it's own times and doesn't really respect yours, but by 4:30 in the afternoon I'm often in the house. It is about 4:30, a week or so after I first saw them, when they stop for a drink of water. I'm a bit off the tube, so they have had to walk, but I'm one of the last empty domes before the long stretch to New Arizona and it's not unusual for people to stop. We still don't have a surplus of drinking water. I always give, I never know when I'll be asking.

I wouldn't know him if it wasn't for the little girl. If he remembers me as the lady with the candle he doesn't say anything. Theresa, the little girl, stands half behind her father, shy in an unfamiliar place. He takes the glass, crouches a bit stiffly and offers it to her. She watches him as she drinks, as if this were something he has produced out of thin air. She hands him back half a glass, which he finishes, using her glass in that unselfconcious way parents do.

"Thank the lady," he says softly.

"Thank you," she says, and reaches for his hand.

"Going to New Arizona?" I ask.

"No," he says, "just in."

New Arizona is about nineteen hours away. Why did he take the child?

We don't know what to say to each other, and he starts to make the motions of someone getting ready to leave.

"Maybe you and the little girl would like something to eat?" It occurs to me that they're living in the dorms. What a shame to make that long trip and go back there to sleep.

He glances down at the top of her brown head, tempted I think, but shakes his head. "No, thank you."

"It's no trouble," I say, "I make soup to keep and flash and I just made a great, fresh pot. It's got to be better than dinner at the complex."

It's the little girl that decides him. She waits, neither hoping nor hopeless, just tired. "If it's no trouble then," he says softly.

The house is concrete, smooth rounded walls, like a hill. Inside it's all green and blues, probably because on Mars everything is red, a color I associate with politics. And I have plants, oxygenators. They take the strain off the recyc system. I've been here seven years, and done pretty well with my own side-business. I've nothing to do with the credit but spend it on the house. "I'm Martine Jansch," I say and stick out my hand.

"Alexi Dormov," he says. "This is my daughter, Theresa."

"Hello," she says, watching her feet.

"Hello Theresa," pleasant old-fashioned name, "are you hungry?"

"Yes," she says.

"Do you like soup?"

"What kind?" she looks up at me. Well, it was a stupid question on my part and a perfectly reasonable question on hers.

Her father doesn't know whether to be amused or embarrassed, and I like him for that. I don't like people who feel that strangers must be amused by everything that their child does.

"Bean," I say.

"I don't know," she answers honestly.

My kitchen is white and beige and blue with a wall full of plants. I pour Theresa a glass full of fruit juice and offer her father a beer, which he accepts with surprise and pleasure. I'm not showing off, I can afford fruit juice and beer.

"You live here alone?" he asks.

"Yes," I say, "but the telecom is set to open by voice and someone is always stopping by." For a moment he looms in my mind as this mentally deranged man who wanders around exposing his daughter to brutal acts of violence. Martine, I think, you have spent too much time alone. Not to mention that he's still clumsy in Martian gravity.

He looks around, admiring the cool white walls with their strip of blue tile, the beige tile floor. Aron's wife makes ceramics and she made the tiles for me, then I installed them myself. "It's a big place for someone to live alone," he says.

"It's not so big. Two bedrooms, a front room and the kitchen. Although I imagine you're accustomed to more crowded conditions." I'm thinking of the dorms, of course.

"Yes, we are, aren't we Little Heart." He ruffles his daughter's hair. "We've been living in Yorimitsu."

Yorimitsu, Yorimitsu. I've heard something about Yorimitsu. I don't pay much attention to news from home, it's always bad. "Something to do with Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, the corridor, Yorimitsu, isn't that… " I can't dredge it up.

"A resettlement camp," he says in the same soft voice he says everything.

People sent to develop the corridor near the end of the Cleansing Winds Campaign. There weren't enough resources, they had to be re-settled again, some of them spent years in resettlement camps waiting to be put somewhere. And Alexi Dormov and his daughter were put on Mars. Where is her mother? "This would seem big to you," I say.

"How did you come here?"

"Voluntarily. I retired from the army," I explain. "I wanted something unstructured."

"You were in the army?"

"Twenty years."

"I was in South Africa," he says.

Peace Keeping Force, volunteer. "Infantry?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "Atmosphere skippers."

Pilot. Well, he's short enough. I have the infantry's distrust for pilots; they tend to be hot heads out to prove their righteousness by flying. I flash the soup and ladle it into blue and beige bowls. Aron's wife, Chen, makes them as well. I think they're pretty, but they probably don't look like much to someone fresh from earth.

I put tabasco on the table and when I put a few drops into my soup they carefully copy me. Not everybody likes tabasco in their bean soup but I don't say anything, I've no intention of embarrassing them. Alexi tastes carefully and then nods. "This is good. This is really good, huh Therese?"

She nods. The spoon looks too big in her hand.

"It has so much taste ," he says, "I thought the food in the complex was pretty good, but this is really good ."

"Thank you," I say, embarrassed. It's just bean soup with a bit of pork in it for flavor. Not even nine-bean soup like we used to have when I was young. The food in the complex is filling; mess hall food. But not what I would describe as good. Alexi has three bowls, a bit embarrassed by his own greed. He so obviously enjoys it that it's a pleasure to serve him. And Theresa eats almost all her bowl and has a biscuit with honey on it. My business is bees, the commune sells Jerusalem Honey all over the quadrant. It's how I can afford my fruit juice and beer.