Page 3 of The Mars House

“Where’s that?” he managed. He opened the food parcel, in which there was a wonderful, inexplicable packet of marshmallows. They tasted so good that it was hard to think. He offered the translator one. He had been looking around for the rest of the company, but he couldn’t see anyone. Other people were saying that the helicopters were taking different loads of people to different camps to try and even out numbers.

“Mars,” the man said gently, shaking his head at the marshmallow offer. “The Chinese colony? They’re funding this centre. Ships are coming, for refugees.”

Ships are coming. January hadn’t realized how used he was to the certainty that no one was coming, and no one ever would come, because they never did. To hear that they were—he didn’t even know what that swell of feeling was. Not relief, because relief implied somehow that you’d been aware of feeling bad before, and not even gratitude, because you were grateful when someone passed you the salt or when they remembered your birthday. That wasn’t what you felt when someone you had never met sent ships from another world.

Not far away, another translator was trying to dissuade a big family from travelling to Saudi Arabia. The coastguard there, she was saying, were turning back refugee boats. People were drowning. And don’t even think about trying to get a visa. They say they’re making visas available, but that means they’ll let about five people in and call it a day. No, it doesn’t matter if your mother’s already there. They don’t care. Half the world wants to get to Neom. Unless you’re a rocket scientist, forget it.

January blinked hard and realized he’d lost the thread of what his translator was saying. His hearing had tuned out.

“Say again, sorry?” he said. It was bizarre, the fog in his head. He could only just peer through it at passing thoughts. Most of them were to do with marshmallows.

“We can get you going with the paperwork now,” the translator repeated, as if it were all normal. “They’ve made it very straightforward.”

January swallowed. “I can just—go? Just like that?”

“Just like that, honey,” the man said. “It’s disaster relief. And Tharsis always needs immigrants. It’s a big move, but honestly, no legal hurdles here. They really do want people. You won’t sit in some miserable camp for months, and there’s no restrictions on refugees working. There are restrictions on what Earthstrong people can do, but even so. There’s more work than they’ve got people to do it. Basic stuff, but—it’s work.”

“Earthstrong . . . ?”

“The gravity there is only a third of ours. It can be pretty dangerous to let you just walk around when you’ve come straight from here.” The man hesitated. “Been a bit of a kerfuffle about it lately, but it’s still better than Saudi or China.”

It was the first time that January really understood that normal life was over. He had thought he might die, but he hadn’t thought about what would happen if he lived. London wasn’t going to recover. There would be no more theatre. There was probably no getting to other countries either; the floods must have displaced millions of people, which would mean millions pouring towards international borders. Those borders were already slamming shut.

The simple, stupid truth was that all he wanted to do was go where there was food and heat. He was aching less with hunger than a kind of shock that it was so easy for everything to just collapse, for life to go from boring visits to the café and wondering if it was extravagant to get hot chocolate instead of coffee, to—this. He felt like he would agree to anything just to make it stop, even though he hadn’t even had that bad a time and it hadn’t lasted very long, and actually he was fine.

He didn’t know the first thing about Tharsis, but he did know he didn’t have it in him to try and get to Riyadh or Lagos or Beijing. He wasn’t made of hard enough stuff for that.

And the famous thing about Mars was that there was no water.

That sounded pretty bloody marvellous.

“Yes please,” he said. “I’d like to go.”

1 Formerly Farringdon Station, where what had once been railway platforms now served nicely as wharves.

2 This is not to be confused with football, either the European or the American kinds. Football is for waifs. Rugby is traditionally used as a way for small countries to remind everyone else why they would regret it if they invaded. Nobody wears any kind of protective gear. Players argue that actually, more protection would mean nastier problems, pointing to boxing where gloves mean more people go for head shots, but of course the real reason is that this would get in the way of the whole point, i.e., killing the English.

3 To foreigners, it seemed stupid for England to have a capital city that spent all of its time sinking, but the fact was that most of London—when it was built—was only ever about four metres above the level of the Thames. The lofty hills of Bloomsbury and Mayfair (a whole thirty-eight metres above sea level) still had to have canals. Unfortunately those canals also tended to flood the moment they saw some rain, which was usually, much to the ire of the people who owned the increasingly devalued town houses, and much to the joy of the local octopus population, who then gained access to some pretty exciting wine cellars.

2

600 days later

January’s apartment was on the twelfth floor of what had once been a nuclear reactor’s cooling tower. The refugee agency promised it wasn’t radioactive, and they had even installed little film radiation detectors on all the windows that were supposed to go dark if anything was amiss, but January’s detector was about eighty years old and he wasn’t sure it would notice even if he started a uranium collection on the windowsill.

It was too early for the elevator machinery, which ran right behind his bedroom wall, to have woken him up when the siren went off.

A dozen other identical sirens blared in other apartments all around the building—he could hear them straight through the walls, through the floor, and through the flimsy ceiling. It took him a bewildered second to understand that it was coming from his phone. A flat, less than urgent voice was announcing something in deafening Mandarin. He didn’t catch it at first, not least because he thought it must have been something to do with radiation.

Alert. Major dust storm. Close all the doors, windows, and ventilation outlets. Alert. Major dust storm. If you are outside, find shelter now. Alert. Major dust storm . . .

January jabbed at the phone until it shut up, then searched for some proper news. Despite the time (five twenty, argh, argh, argh), there was a live weather report going out, by a reporter who looked like they had just been hauled out of bed too. They were standing on what must have been the roof of Broadcasting House, trying to talk into the microphone and the wind at the same time. It was all in official Mandarin and of course they weren’t running English subtitles, they’d forgotten about people who didn’t have translation software built in like bloody always, so he had to listen with his eyes shut and wait for the gears in his brain to squeak around to more or less the right cogs.

“—like smoke inhalation, breathing the dust particulates will damage lung tissue, and a few moments ago the Consul took the unusual step of declaring a red weather warning, along with advice to remain indoors if possible. The Met Office have indicated that the storm may cause some electricity shortages as solar energy struggles to reach the sun fields; it’s likely too that in turn, water allowances will reduce as the output from Tereshkova Wharf—”

The signal dropped. He had to look up “inhalation” and “particulates.”4

Curious now, January went to the window and unstuck a corner of the bubble wrap from the frame. He’d put the bubble wrap over the glass to try and keep the heat in over the winter, and he’d got used to seeing nothing but a blur outside. It was a nice surprise to find that the city was still there. This high up, the great artery roads were serene and glittering, and the narrow stripe of sky above the Valley was beginning to lighten. But powering towards the city now, there was a red-brown cloud, just a smudge for the moment, but it was enveloping everything in that direction—the whole Valley, the whole sky. He could feel the wind picking up, icy as it seeped through the glass and the bubble wrap. He had to snatch his hand away and pull his sleeves over his knuckles.