A Thing As Good As Sunshine (3 page)

"Momma,
please tell me what's wrong. I can take it."

She
laughed and put her hands over her face. "Good, because I'm not sure I
can."

"Momma?"

"Honey-Girl,
when Auntie comes back we have to check and make sure you're not pregnant."

Pregnant?
Suddenly I felt not at all smart, in any way.

Neither
of us said another word until Auntie Pria came back. Auntie was in full
medic-mode when she took a small blood sample and then laid me back onto the
exam table and gloved-up.

"Honey-Girl,
listen carefully, I'm going to tell you the whole sordid story about the birds
and the bees that Momma never told you," she said and gently probed into
places only Sheng Tian had ever been. I was grateful for the clinical tone she
used, because my head nearly exploded with every new concept she laid out:
intercourse, penises, vaginas, eggs, sperm, fertilization, zygotes, fetuses,
babies, genetics.

I
listened very carefully, which wasn't easy with my brain whirring away. The new
ideas Auntie described threw odd light on things I'd been ignorant about my
whole life, things I had naturally just accepted without question. The new ideas
rattled, crashed, met, melded, bounced, clashed and finally settled uneasily
into a context with what I already knew in a way that left more holes than
answers.

Auntie
eventually patted my knee and helped me to sit up. Momma remained in the
corner, head hung low and eyes averted. Auntie took off her gloves, balled them
up and pocketed them rather than putting them in the recycler.

"Any
questions?" Auntie asked.

Questions?
I had more questions than there were asteroids in the belt. Where should I
start with the questions?

"Sheng
Tian knows all of this, too?"

Auntie
laughed. "Maybe not in quite so much detail. But yes, I'm sure he's got
the basics."

"So
how come it bothered him so much to find out I'm fertile? He looked at me like
I was untouchable."

Auntie
looked at Momma. For the first time I understood that both of those titles were
honorary, and why they had to be. Momma could not possibly be my mother. Auntie
was not her sister. But we were still family.

"Honey-Girl,
when a woman signs-up for work on a Perseus Rock, she surrenders her fertility
before shipping off-world."

"What?
How?"

"The
surgery is called a hysterectomy," Auntie explained. "They cut us
open and remove the uterus, the place the baby implants and grows after intercourse."

From
Momma I knew that competition for colonial mining positions out here in the
belt was fierce, ten or twelve or fifteen years of work and you could go back to
Earth as a full-citizen and live like a Sultan. It took sacrifice, compromise,
separation from everyone and everything you loved. But to give up a part of
yourself to take the job, any job, that was brutal. Horrifying. "All of
you?"

"All
of us. And they check to be sure when we arrive," Auntie said. I saw a
tear leak from the corner of her eye before she looked at the floor. "I
check, now."

I felt
sick.

"When
you told Sheng Tian you'd come up from Earth on the last crew transport, he had
no reason to think that sex with you was anything more than what it appeared to
be. A physical act of love," Momma said.

"Or
lust," Auntie interjected.

"Love,"
I said, insulted.

"Either
way, he wasn't worried about pregnancy. Until Auntie Pria dropped that bomb on
him."

"But
pregnancy is natural, right," I said, thinking back on Auntie's birds and
bees talk. "Why would it worry him?"

Momma
sat down in front of me and took both my hands in hers. "Honey-Girl, how
many children have you seen in this rock?"

I
answered without thinking. "Just me."

"And
how many children do you think are written into my Ledger?" Momma asked.
It was the same tone of voice she used when she asked me to think through a study
problem instead of giving me the answer.

An image
of Momma's two Ledgers popped into my head. In the big thick one with the
Perseus Company logo embossed on the cover she tracked every kilogram of cargo
that came off the supply ships. Company cargo. Supplies. Regularly delivered
and distributed. The details, hand-recorded on the pages — not trusted to
bits-and-bytes — were a critical part of her job, and I knew this by the way
she handled it: it was either in her hands, locked in her desk at the dock, or secured
in the slot by our door. But the other Ledger, the thin one she kept hidden,
that one she handled with extreme secrecy, as though peoples' lives depended on
it. That Ledger was full of the critical "stuff" that Momma referred
to as "none of the Company's damn business."

"I'm
in the thin Ledger?"

Momma
nodded. I felt really sick. I wasn't supposed to be on the Rock. My existence
violated the rules. I was Momma's sunshine, and I was illegal, immoral and
wrong.

*****

In the
end, it's ironic that it wasn't sneaking off to see Sheng Tian that got me
caught. It wasn't even the pregnancy that turned me out. It was the damn cat.

Momma
had been so out of sorts since I revealed my love for Sheng Tian (and loaded
her life up with more secrets to manage) that I wanted to do something nice for
her. It took me almost every second of first shift, but with help from Sheng Tian
I acquired a chunk of soft, pure ore and carved Momma a statue of her big grey
tom. Sheng Tian even found me some reflective plastic that I shaped into
glowing eyes. I was so proud of how much it looked like the cat that I couldn't
wait to show her. I signed my name to the bottom of the statue liked I learned
real artists were supposed to do and then placed it up along one of the drill ledges
across the hall from our unit's doorway to wait. This cat wouldn't butt against
her legs or purr in her lap, so it wasn't full-on sunshine, but I hoped it
would bridge the gap until Momma found her next sunshine.

Someone,
a nosey neighbor or just a random person passing by — it doesn't matter, not
really — found the cat before Momma got home and got curious. Curiosity led to
a rapid investigation. The security team came by when Momma was still on shift
at the dock and caught me alone in the unit which was supposed to be empty. They
showed me the cat and asked if I'd made it, and I answered yes out of
intimidation. When I couldn't show identification, they grabbed me and pinned
my arms down and hauled me out of the unit without saying a word, no matter how
I pled and cried and begged. They hid their faces behind dark plastic face
shields. Though I knew my whole life that someone might come and take me away,
and feared it more recently because I finally understood why, I never imagined
the people to do it would be so cold, so mechanical, so inhuman.

Restrained
in metal cuffs, arms wrenched nearly out of place, I got pushed and shoved
until they brought me back together with Momma in the biggest room I'd ever
seen. The cut-rock ceiling arched overhead fifteen times my height and the
floor was twice the size of that, squared. When the men in black, tight-fitting
coveralls shoved me down, back-to-back with Momma in the middle of it all, they
locked us against a rock post as big around as my waist that grew right out of
the floor. From where I sat I saw six airlocked doors heading out toward other
parts of Perseus. I knew we were near the belly of the rock by the way the
reduced gravity upset my empty stomach.

"Momma,
I'm sorry," I said as I tried to twist around and see if she was hurt,
crying, afraid.

"Hush."
I couldn't see the look on her face, but I knew her tone. "When we're
alone."

Not
alone. I looked up and actually jumped when I saw how close I was to other
people, strangers, for the first time in my life. They looked at me through
squinty eyes, and wide-open eyes, and right down their noses. I couldn't count
them, there were so many and they moved too quickly, but at least a hundred made
their way about the big chamber and most of them had their attention on us.

I had no
idea people came in so many shapes and sizes! And smells! As a gray-haired man
with dark eyes moved closer, right up to where four black-suited men formed a
perimeter around me, I nearly gagged on his body smell. Breathing through my
mouth as he studied me helped, but then I found myself hyperventilating as my
focus leapt from him to all the other people around the room. They pointed,
they smiled with malice, they gaped. Some turned away to private conversations and
then turned back, angry at me.

A brown
haired woman joined the gray-haired man, and then a tall black woman and
another and another, testing the perimeter of men guarding us. I pushed my back
into the post behind me, wishing it would open up and swallow me. But it
didn't. I started to cry.

"No,
Honey-Girl," Momma said harshly. "Not 'til we're alone."

I bit my
lip and stifled my tears, but my breath stayed ragged. They watched me, all of
them. The crowd, I guess that's what you'd call it, grew bigger after the end
of first shift as everyone transitioned from primary responsibilities to their
secondary chores. Closing my eyes didn't help much — their voices filled the
enormous space with a sound higher and brighter but just as invasive as the
sound from the drills deep in the core of the asteroid — but it helped some, so
I kept them closed.

At some
point in mid-second shift, Momma clasped hands with me behind our backs and
tugged on my left one. I opened my eyes and looked that direction just in time
to see Sheng Tian and Auntie Pria walk by. They kept their distance, staying
closer to the wall than to us, but their eyes said everything. Sadness. Fear. Worry.
I squeezed Momma's hand and shut my eyes again.

Eventually,
after the shift bell tolled, things grew quiet; I opened my eyes to find the
room nearly deserted. The sheer empty space rolled my stomach and I wanted
nothing more than to go back and hide in Momma's unit where the cozy walls made
me safe.

"Excuse
me," Momma said, "could you please give my daughter and me some
privacy?"

I heard
grumbles about following orders in response.

"Good
god, man! It isn't like we'll escape if you just stand five meters further
away. Besides, where would we go?" It was her dealing-with-little-punks
voice, and surprisingly it had the effect she wanted. Our perimeter guards
clumped up and moved off a small distance.

"Momma,
I'm sorry."

"I
know, Honey-Girl. It's not your fault."

"If
I hadn't carved that cat," I said.

"Cat?"

I explained
to Momma about the gift I'd made for her and how it got me, us, caught.

"Thank
you, that was sweet."

"But
it got us caught. I'm sorry. It's all my fault."

"I
forgive you." And then the strangest thing happened, Momma started to cry.
I cursed the cuffs holding me to the stake. "I hope you can forgive me,"
she said through her tears.

"Forgive
you? For what?"

"Tomorrow,"
she said. "It's going to get very, very ugly. They'll come to resolve
this." By
they
I knew she meant the Commanding Officer and his Governors
— she reserved a special contempt for them and it always came out in her tone
of voice.

"All
of them against us," I said, fear a cold ball in the middle of my chest.
"Can't Auntie Pria help?"

"Under
no circumstances are you to mention Auntie Pria or anyone else you know. Do you
understand?"

I
thought about it for a moment. Momma's thin Ledger was full of secrets. I was
in the Ledger. I was a secret, but ten people in the Rock in addition to Momma
and Auntie knew about me. That's not much of a secret, but when I considered
the circumstances of meeting those other people, except for Sheng Tian, it was
always to get help doing something Momma couldn't do for me by herself. I
finally understood that Momma endangered them by exposing them to the secret of
me.

It was a
wonder someone hadn't turned me in long before.

"We
have to protect them the way they protected me."

"Protected
us."

In that
instant I realized that I wasn't the only one in trouble. "Momma, what are
they going to do to us?"

"I
don't know."

I'd
never heard her say that before. Sometimes she'd say,
look it up for
yourself
, or jokingly threaten
I could tell you but then I'd have to
kill you
, but she'd never in my life said
I don't know
.

My tears
came back. Shame. Anger. Fear — the worst fear I'd ever felt in my whole,
short, cooped-up life.

"No
crying, Honey-Girl," she said as she grasped both of my hands in hers
behind our backs. "Don't give them the satisfaction. You didn't start
this; neither did I. You dry those eyes and hold your head up."

I did
what she asked and spent the rest of third shift dozing, watching and thinking.
My butt grew sore from sitting on and against unpadded, cold rock. My wrists
chafed in the cuffs. The guard changed and occasionally people walked past to
take a look, but they all maintained their distance. My thoughts raced, mostly
thinking about how Momma had not once said
everything's going to be okay
.

*****

Instead
of the normal first shift bell, I woke to an announcement cancelling all the
day's non-critical duties and declaring an emergency town hall meeting in the
amphitheater to convene in sixty minutes. Our guards uncuffed us and took us to
a huge hygiene facility right off the main room to take care of our business
and clean-up. I washed quickly, but Momma stood under the hot shower until a
guard came in and yelled something at her, something unintelligible because of
the wall of human noise flooding in around him.