There is a police tape blocking the hall right before Haibao's door and the breeze is coming through the door. It is more than a breeze, it is a strong wind. They have arrested him, I'm sure. The wind is like being up on the super structure when a building is going up.

"What happened?" I ask two women standing there.

"The person in that apartment," she points, "he broke his window and jumped out."

"Jumped out," I say, and then stupidly, "did he die?" We are over 150 meters above ground level standing in this urban cliff.

"Oh, yes," she says.

"He is my tutor," I say. And then add, "I am an engineering student."

"Why did he do it?" she asks.

"I don't know," I say.

We stand there for a minute and then I duck under the police tape. I should not, I should get on the lift and go back downstairs, but I have to see. The wind is strong in the doorway, it is coming from the great shattered starburst in the window. Police are picking through the pieces of glass or standing talking.

A man looks up at me, "Hey, what are you doing here! Don't cross the barrier!"

"He, h-he was my tutor," I stutter, "I am an engineering student."

"There is no tutoring today," the officer says.

On the floor, covered with crystals of glittering glass, are a pair of shoes, neatly folded white tights and white shirt. As if he had taken them off there, in front of his window.

"How did he break the window?" I ask. The windows are supposed to be shatterproof.

"He used a softening agent on it, then heated it with a hairdryer until it was brittle," the officer says. Then his expression softens. "Where are you from?"

"America," I say. "I'm American."

"Well, tongxue," 'student,' "there is nothing you can do here. You should go home.

"I can't go home," I say, "I have eighteen more months until I finish my classes."

He looks at me oddly. "No, no, I meant your dormitory."

A woman comes into the room, "He wiped his system," she says, "He made sure that we couldn't use the trace, either." Her feet crunch in broken glass.

I don't know what they are talking about. I back up. I duck under the police tape again, walk through the crowd with my head down. I am afraid. There are people in the lift. I look at the numbers and then at the floor.

In the arcade, I sit down for a moment on a bench, because I don't want to go back to my dormitory, and then I get up and make a call to New York. It is five-thirty in the morning in New York, Peter is not up.

"Rafael!" he says. "Hey! How are you doing!"

"My friend," I say, "You remember the one I wrote you about? My tutor."

"What happened?" he says.

"He killed himself," I say.

"How?" he says.

Why do we always have to know? What difference does it make? "He broke his window and jumped."

"Are you going to come home?" Peter asks.

Well, yes. I hope so. I don't want to die here. Then I think, he means right now.

"No," I say, "I have to finish school. I did well on my engineering examination."

We talk, I cannot say why so I say I don't know and talk around it. I think, it's good to talk, better than being alone, the money doesn't matter.

But all our words are empty.

HOMEWORK (Alexi)

The inside of Martine's house is pretty, after two years of living here it still seems a luxury to live in this place. A lot of the homes on the Ridge are pretty. I never pictured life on Mars like this-I grew up in a frontier town on the edge of the Corridor, my daddy was a scrap prospector, not a farmer but there were a lot of farmers and so I had an idea of what frontier farming was like. Some years they got crops, some years the People's Volunteers brought drinking water into town in trucks and when I was in senior middle school I used to go get water for my mother. We had two big 50 litre plastic containers that we put in the back of an old three wheel bike. I'd get them filled and then have to stand on the pedals to get the bike to go anywhere. I wanted to join the PV, but after I finished school and married Geri there were too many applicants. Then the Party said that the drive to reduce carbon dioxide use was working. That the global temperature was falling, and it would be possible to resettle the Corridor. So we went. A few years of hardship, and then, see, we'd be sitting on good, farmable land. When I left Earth they were still talking about global temperatures falling, maybe a degree in fifty years. Three degrees, and they'll get back to temperature levels in the 1900's and it'll rain in Idaho, and across north central Africa and who knows, maybe it'll rain carp in Beijing, and flowers will bloom in the Antarctic but Geri still died and Theresa spent half of her childhood in resettlement camps.

The Ridge is hard work, Martine and I are up by five. I don't know if I've ever worked so hard in my life. But it's not like the Corridor, where it didn't make any difference whether you worked or not, it all died. Martine and I put in another tunnel and goatyard to increase the goat herd, and now there are nineteen nannies and four of them are pregnant. And we added a room for Theresa. I didn't really want to do it, but I felt then as if it was really Martine's decision and if she wanted to take the risk, I was pretty well along for the ride. We're into negative credit, it'll take us a couple of years to pay the Commune back and if those goddamn goats get sick we'll spend the rest of our lives paying it back, but so far we're making our contributions. Martine's honey business is steady and I keep getting sidework doing re-programming. Even if the nannies all dropped dead tomorrow we'd probably get by. Give up beer and sell the strawberries instead of eating them, but get by.

Not that you ever really know how things will turn out. On the Corridor, when things got bad, I got us by for awhile by scrap prospecting, like my daddy. Farming was a waste of time, anything we planted dried up if it ever made it out of the ground, so I used to take my little scooter and find what was left of some old road and go look for scrap. It never made much money, but at least it brought in something to buy food. Until the little scooter just gave up and I had to walk back the last 25 kilometers. If I had been farther away and had to walk I don't know how I'd have made it without water, but I was young enough then, I just walked home. Scared to death about how we'd make it without prospecting, but certain we'd make it somehow. When you're young it's always been all right before, you trust it will be all right this time.

But things are different here in the Commune. As long as there's the supply, the Commune has to make sure everybody has enough to eat, so we won't starve. And it looks as if Martine's expansion is going to pay off in the long run, as long as nothing major goes wrong. We compliment each other, Martine and I. She's good with animals and I'm good with keeping things running smoothly.

We're good business partners, Martine and I. That's the one part of our lives we handle well.

Wednesday afternoon. I sit down and watch the tape of my class. I have a tutorial at 5:00 and I wanted to watch the tape last night, but I ended up working longer than I expected on re-programing the tow-motor programs for the Commune.

I'm monitoring a class at Nanjing University, a systems class. I guess Nanjing is a very good school. I'd never have gotten near a university at home, and certainly never had a chance to do anything connected with a Chinese university, but some universities have this special, patriotic program to help the frontier effort so I get to audit the class. They get money from the Party, and they get to pat themselves on the back and think of themselves as forwarding the party ideals.