"How's it going?" I ask.
"Okay," he says, "It's going to take me awhile. Is Theresa driving you crazy?"
"No, she's playing with one of the goats."
"Just my luck, my kid's best friend is a goat."
A world of regret in that comment, although he says it lightly enough. When his smile disappears and his face is still for a moment I assume he's thinking of Yorimitsu. I almost say, 'Kids are resilient,' even though it's one of those fallacies like middle-aged women like children. But that's not what he's thinking at all. "Martine," he says, "they're going to transfer us again, and I don't know what to do."
"What?" I say.
"They're going to transfer me again. Isn't it enough to send us to Mars?" He never raises his voice, it is easy to miss the despair in what he says.
"They're shipping you off Mars?" I ask. I can't imagine where else they would send him. Or why.
"No," he says, "not off Mars. They're talking about the water reclamation project down at the pole."
"What about Theresa?" I ask. Life down at the pole is primitive and dangerous.
"I don't know," he says. "They haven't really said we're going yet."
"What makes you think they're going to send you," I say, and realize as I say it that it sounds as if he's some sort of paranoid.
"I know. I've been through this now five times. I know when they're going to ship us off." He balls his fists and puts them together as it all boils out of him. "First Geri and I volunteered for resettlement in Nevada because they were going to send us anyway, then the water dried up and Geri got dysentery while they were shipping us to Yorimitsu and I gave her all my water and even some of the baby's but she still dehydrated and died. I volunteered for South Africa because I thought that a veteran would be treated a little better and because they were criticizing me for my attitude after Geri died-I thought I didn't want Theresa to grow up with a counter-revolutionary father and now it doesn't matter at all because everybody's just embarrassed about the whole Cleansing Winds nonsense. When I came back they put us in Buffalo. Then when we were in Buffalo they started all this nonsense about Mars. I thought, I'm a vet, Theresa's six, they won't uproot us again. But they did. And now they're talking about the water reclamation project at the pole."
"They won't send you, they couldn't send a man with a six year old daughter," I say, thinking that the commune couldn't possibly.
"You don't understand," he says, "we've no guanxi, no connection, no string. Everybody just wants to get rid of us. We're human trash. Disposable. Less useful than goatshit, because you can dump that back in the soil."
The commune won't send them, I think. How would you feel if your wife died of dehydration, I also think, and what kind of society allows that? The commune must be better than that, must be better than Earth if that's what Earth is reduced to.
I hear the sniff and look around. Theresa is standing there holding on to Cleopatra. Cleopatra looks at us with golden eyes expressionless as agates. Theresa rubs her nose with her arm and rubs her eye with her fist, crying and trying to be quiet and trapped between backing away and coming towards us. Did she hear? Or did she just fall or something?
"Baby?" Alexi says, "what's wrong?"
"Are we going to move again?"
"Oh, baby," Alexi says helplessly.
Theresa is easily consoled, but that afternoon she pesters her father. She tries to pick up Cleopatra-possibly because the gravity is weak but not probably because Cleo isn't interested. I don't think Cleo is likely to get hurt, even if dropped, but a flailing hoof could hurt Theresa so I finally have to put the nannie up. Theresa plays awhile but is clearly bored and pesters her father some more. At dinner she doesn't want soup, just cake, and bursts into angry tears when told that they can't stay the night.
"We're a little monster tonight, aren't we," Alexi says.
He carries her out to the scooter and puts her in front of him on the seat. I walk down with them, mostly because I am so eager to see them go and don't want them to know. I send them home with soup and cake.
The program on the separator isn't finished and Monday morning I milk by hand and manually start the separator. Then I check my bees. I'm creating queens to sell, feeding larvae royal jelly. I have to keep them separate, of course, no queen is going to let my royal larvae live in her hive. The little unit that controls environment has gone on the fritz. It's a cheap little unit, it wouldn't cost anything to replace on earth but we're moving away from opposition, when then Earth is closest to Mars, to conjunction when Mars is on one side of the sun and the earth is on the other side. I'll order by transmitter but it will probably be about 18 months until we start getting regular shipments. It's a 26 month cycle from opposition to opposition and the shipping window is about 8 months, we've got another month and a half, but many of those ships already left earth. And right now I'm going to lose some of my royal larvae.
I wonder if Alexi could fix it and decide to have him look at it when he comes in the evening to finish the separator.
He comes alone this evening. Forgive me, but I am relieved. "Where's Theresa?" I ask.
"At the creche," he says, "sometimes I need a little time off."
I realize that I'm alone with Alexi for the first time and I'm nervous. My hand smooths my hair. I'm ten years older than Alexi and not interested. I don't want him to think I'm interested, I want to be friends. I'm sure he's not interested either, so why am I nervous? "Have a beer," I say.
"Let me get to that separator," he says.
When he is finished he says he has to get back, has to get up early the next day and all, but he does stay for the beer, sitting in my living room with the little environment unit. "I can't fix it," he says, "it's all fused inside."
"Have you heard anything more?" I ask.
"About being reassigned? No." His voice is soft and curiously flat. "But I've talked to some of the other guys and they think that the commune probably wouldn't send Theresa to the pole."
I am relieved, I wanted to deny that anything could go so wrong, and now I learn that I was probably right. "I think that's true," I say.
"So I'd probably go on a two year assignment and she'd stay with the creche. That's not so bad, I haven't been much of a father. It's just that the separation is bad for her, she's already withdrawn and immature-at least that's what all the counselors say. She's shy, but so was her mother and after all the moving around… "
"They wouldn't send you and leave her here," I blurt out.
He shrugs. "They'll say it's temporary and that some sacrifices have to be made to open up Mars. I hate to leave her, when I came back from Africa she didn't know who I was and then she had tremendous separation anxiety." His soft voice goes on and on and I discover that the flatness is really bitterness.
I didn't ask you to come here, I am thinking. I didn't ask you and your daughter to stop for a drink of water. And at the same time I am understanding why he takes her with him when he goes to New Arizona. He talks about temper tantrums in the creche when he leaves. I think of her behavior yesterday, when she was upset, the tantrums and tears.
Finally he doesn't say anything more. The silence is thick, but I can't think of anything to say into it. He finishes his beer and says, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to dump my troubles on you like that." But he's only apologizing because he's supposed to, when he leaves he looks around my house, and then he looks at me as if he hates me. It's not fair, I am thinking, I worked for this. My life wasn't easy either. I don't walk him down to the pull-off where the motor scooter is parked.
When I go to bed and set the alarm for five, I realize that I forgot to thank him for re-programming my separator.
McKenzie comes Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday to pick up milk. She gossips a bit, I look forward to her coming. She helped me impregnate my nannies. (My billies are just company for my nannies, I get seed from Earth.) I tell her about Alexi reprogramming my separator.