A Thing As Good As Sunshine

by Juliet Nordeen

  "I didn't know," he said.

  Pria put a hand on his back and helped him sit down on the chair next to Momma. He looked at her, sadness and fear on his face. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

  Momma bowed her head, seemingly unable to look at him. I'd never seen her back down like that before. "It's not your fault. We hadn't told her, yet." She shook her head. "I thought we'd have more time."

  Sheng Tian looked up in surprise. "How old is she?"

  Momma was quiet.

  Auntie Pria answered him. "Fifteen." Sheng Tian's mouth dropped open. "Maybe, sixteen. We're not really sure."

  The silence stretched more than I could handle. "Would someone please talk to me?"

  The three of them looked at me and I swear I didn't know any of them. Auntie had lost the softness in her round face. Momma looked at me the way she sometimes looked at her thin Ledger before she stuffed it into the back of the bunk drawer after shift. And Sheng Tian, he looked at me like he'd never laid eyes, or hands, on me before.

  "Sheng?" I begged him to explain, to cut through the confusion and just be the best thing in my life again.

  He smiled, but there was no sunshine behind it.

  "I need you to keep this between us," Momma said to Sheng Tian. "I need time to get ahead of this situation. Do you understand that I'm asking you for a personal favor?" she asked, emphasizing the last two words in a way that confused me.

  Sheng Tian shook the sad smile off his own face. "I'm not looking to trade favors, ma'am." He looked up at me. "I love her."

  His words worked like a magic spell, cutting my bonds of fear away and releasing me from the corner. I went to him and sat on his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck. "I love you, too."

  "Then do it for Honey-Girl," Auntie Pria said.

  Sheng Tian smoothed my long hair out of his face. "I won't say a word to anyone. On my honor." He paused and buried his face in my hair. "Such as it is."

  Momma reached a hand out to Sheng Tian. "This isn't your fault. You behaved with honor, a man of your place and your station. You could not have guessed what we did not want you to know." I'd never seen a deeper frown on her lips.

  "Time to go, before somebody happens upon this secret counsel of ours," Auntie Pria said.

  I clung to Sheng Tian, but he stood up and set me on my feet. I could feel his honor growing between us like a shield. Those invisible hard edges nearly sharp enough to cut.

  He looked to me, then to Momma, then back again. He finally turned to Momma and asked, "When can I see Honey-Girl again?"

  It felt so odd to hear him asking permission to see me. I teetered on the edge of fury. I knew my life was not entirely my own: a lifetime of keeping out of the way, sharing rations, and hoarding secrets could not be dismissed. But that's not how it had been between Sheng Tian and me. With him I'd always made up my own mind, made choices without having to ask permission. It had made me feel grown-up, and now I felt like a toddler screaming to please, please be allowed to run just one more lap around the deserted tubes before bedtime.

  When Momma looked at me I saw my Momma in her face again; tender, smart, loving. But there was a new thing, too. I saw some of the respect she showed when she and Auntie talked in hushed tones, late into third shift when they thought I was already asleep in our bunk. She reached over and touched my flushed cheek. "Can't stop the sun from rising, now, can I?"

  "No, Momma." I knew it was horrible to think such untrustworthy thoughts, but in my heart I knew if she forbade us from seeing each other I would disobey her and find Sheng Tian as soon as I could.

  "Give me a few shifts to figure this out," Momma said. "We need to answer a few more questions. I'll get word to you when it's safe," she said to him.

  "You'd better get back to class," Auntie Pria said as she tugged at his shoulder. "I'll be in touch. In person, no Coms."

  Sheng Tian kissed the top of my head and let Auntie lead him away. When the door slid shut Momma turned to me and said, "There's a chance that young man is even better than sunshine."

  For some odd reason that made me well up. I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around Momma, grateful for things I'm sure I didn't even understand. She hugged me back and said the most shocking thing: "I'm sorry, Honey-Girl."

  "Sorry?" I asked; face still buried in her shoulder.

  She pulled back. "This isn't going to be easy."

  When I looked into Momma's eyes I saw strength battling with doubt. I wanted her to know everything was going to be okay. "I'm good at keeping secrets," I said. "The best."

  She sat me down on the folding chair and rolled the stool up in front of me. "How much of all that did you understand?"

  Thanks, Momma. I knew that I wasn't the smartest person on the Rock, but I didn't like being reminded of how little I'd really understood in their exchange. I rolled my eyes at her and she stepped away from me, angry.

  After she took three deep breaths she said, "I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at me." But her pointy finger shook at me. "But right now I can't handle you acting like a little punk."

  I knew that voice, it was her dealing-with-little-punks voice, and she was dead serious.

  "You're a smart girl — but book smart, not people smart. Your time to be a child is over. There's more than you can guess riding on every choice you make from here on out."

  Book smart, not people smart. I felt shame that Momma saw me that way, but I grudgingly agreed. I'd really only interacted with a dozen real people in my whole life, but Momma's TechPad had always been there. Most of what I knew in life had been conveyed by electrons.

  For the first time it occurred to me that I had done something really wrong by falling for Sheng Tian. I knew engaging in conversation with him in the laundry pod was the opposite of the agreement I'd made with Momma when I convinced her to let me go out on my own. The way my body reacted when he touched me told me there was a chance it was actually bad. But bad like the things in Momma's thin Ledger were bad, not bad like Perseus Two had been knocked out of orbit and was about to ground itself into Saturn bad. But that's how solemn Momma's face looked.

  Frustration at not comprehending things fought inside me with the fear of what it might mean to understand. My instinct was to let the fear win; to bury my head back in Momma's shoulder and let her take care of things. But Momma said my time as a child was over, and I knew in my belly that meant no more hiding from the truth.

  I climbed back onto Auntie's exam table as Momma re-settled in the corner chair, and we waited. This time Momma's silence wasn't angry. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I sensed a bit of inevitability mixed with excitement and an undercurrent of resignation in the way Momma picked at her fingernails.

  "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 eventu
ally 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 to
lled, 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.