Page 29 of The Mars House

The Tiangong was a bizarre shape from the outside; it was a glass tower, but it also had gigantic rotating rings around its upper stories, which looked like some kind of infernal device that priests and alchemists had nightmares about.

But what they were, were gravity simulators. They were filled with rooms for Earthstrongers. It must have been spectacularly expensive to run, because the power you needed to make a whole chunk of a building rotate safely—and fast—was probably migraine-inducing, but the Tiangong was where diplomats and visiting royalty stayed, and so money was no object. January’s room was inside one of those rings. He spent the first few days of his stay in a semi-mad euphoria at being able to walk around without the cage and without worrying about it.

He was not a great fan of the other people who were rich enough to stay in the Rings; they were the sort of people who, on Earth, owned gold-plated cars and Pacific islands, here on stupid-luxury holidays that included private mammoth safaris on the Plains. But he loved the rotating view of Tharsis. He sat and watched it all spin past for an hour. You could see Gagarin Square directly below, all of the government district and the embassies in New Kowloon, and the nuclear tower in Americatown, where he’d lived, and the neon readout of the water tower at Tereshkova Wharf. The Rings were so high above the rest of the city lights, there were even stars at night. He saw Earth rise over the Valleyside.

Even aside from the Rings, he couldn’t quite believe that rooms like the ones in the Tiangong existed, anywhere. They looked like something from a palace, with sliding doors and fountains that whispered into lily-dotted channels along the floor, and a fridge full of free food and free champagne. There was even a note on the desk that said if you were an anxious sort of person, it might be helpful to visit the café downstairs, where your stay included a daily hug with one of five polar bear cubs, all of whom were friendly and whose mother had lived at the hotel for years, cheerfully catching fish out of the specially constructed lake on the ground floor.13 He visited; it had mist, and reeds, and everything.

But he didn’t manage to spend much time in the glorious room, or even in the polar bear café. His time filled up with all kinds of things.

First were one to one Mandarin lessons. Those happened at the university, which ran classes for diplomats. He could speak quite well, the gentle tutor said, but he was going need to read well too, and for all that lots of people relied on translation software, House Gale were scholars; they were traditionally the people who built the software, and software was only as good as the skill of people behind it. Even if you were marrying in, it was important to embrace the culture and founding principles of your House. And so he had endless drills, and piles of Chinese characters to learn every day, and more classes on top of that about how Tharsese was coming to be significantly different to traditional Mandarin.14 It harvested from Russian and English and Hindi, to the point that a lot of people weren’t calling it a dialect any more, but a new language.

There were history lessons too. He’d studied history at school, but only the famous stuff; that Empress Zhou had dismembered people and put them in big jars and that China’s momentary fall to the West in the nineteenth century had mainly happened because Dowager Empress Somebody was a famous idiot. But that had been out of textbooks, and he had spent most of the time gazing out the window and wondering how many scouts were going to be at the end-of-year dance show.

These classes, though; they happened in a special simulation cinema room like the one at the prison, and you could sit beneath a tree in the Han Dynasty and watch the imperial knights train, and listen to a poet recite the old poems like they were supposed to be, and see the New Year fireworks above the Forbidden City. He found he was sponging it in at an unbelievable rate, right from prehistory to the launching of the Song Ark, which had brought the first engineers and scientists to colonise Mars. He was steeped in it, which should have felt like drowning, but it didn’t. It was more like a hot bath. For the first time in a long time, he remembered how much like he liked learning things, properly, and how rare it was to be able to do that.

There was media training too. Tutoring on how to answer tricky questions in interviews, advice on how to speak well in public, battalions of lawyers reassuring him about things he hadn’t even thought of. Counselling on how to cope with intense media focus, and how to stay sane when you were being filmed all the time. A psychologist who specialised in (a) reality shows and (b) natural disasters took pains to make it very clear to him that those two things were of equal magnitude.

“Mind that you keep speaking to someone in English, too,” the psychologist said. “You’re living in Mandarin now. It can be a little shocking, how quickly you forget your first language in these circumstances.”

January had been feeling it already. Some of the things that had felt completely natural before were starting to sound bizarre now. His whole life, he’d said “all well?” to mean hello; but he kept snagging on the grammar of it now. All what, exactly, and well in the sense of health, or well like good, or was it both, and actually, where was the verb?

And just like it had after prison, but more so now, English sounded . . . grubby. It was full of rough sounds and too many consonants, so many that in the vaulting halls of the university and the Tiangong, where you only ever heard the quiet song of Mandarin, it sounded like some kind of fantasy language for trolls.

“I don’t think I have anyone to talk to,” he said, only understanding the truth of it as he was speaking.

The psychologist nodded a little, clearly making an effort to look neutral instead of worried. “Well. Senator Gale speaks English.”

January didn’t say, that would be marvellous if I ever saw Senator Gale. He didn’t. He hadn’t seen Gale since that first day at the Parakeet and Pickle, and he doubted that he would until the wedding. Gale had more important things to do than chat to him in Troll.

His favourite part, because secretly it had always been his favourite part in any preparation for a big show—and this marriage was exactly that—was the visits to the tailor.

Tailor: actually, they were a senior designer at a fashion house that was so terrifyingly haute couture that they only ever made clothes for celebrities. The building itself was close to the Tiangong, firmly in New Kowloon, which was the poshest district in Tharsis, all glass and lovely enclosed fountains and gardens. He was starting to understand that fountains, more than anything else, were status symbols: anything that used unnecessary water was a marker of wealth. Like always, someone from House Gale chaperoned him through, and took him up to a long, open studio. A photoshoot was going on already, with eight or nine models whose hair was dyed gold and who were, very carefully, going through a choreographed sword fight in incredible clothes that looked like they were made of floating chain mail.

He felt irredeemably drab, and cheap, and foreign. Not for the first time, he wished Gale were there, even though it was unreasonable to wish that. Whenever he was doing something big and new and worrying, he tended to latch duckling-like on to the nearest person who was nice to him and panic if they didn’t appear often enough.

Which was silly, for a grown-up of thirty-three who had crossed between worlds and who had once been the Swan King. It was amazing, though, how hard it was to pull yourself together when life was happening at you in your third language and at least seventy per cent of the time you were hazy about what was going on.

“Aha!”

It made him jump. Someone with very high platform shoes had just appeared from behind a set of screens, tape measure round their shoulders and notes written in pen around one wrist.

“You’ll be Mx Stirling? I was told to look for the young Earthstronger with the white hair and I thought, how intriguing, but . . . now that we’re talking I’m worried I can’t actually tell how old you are and that I might just be a racist?”

January laughed. “No, that’s me. I’m January.”

“Fenhua,” they said, looking relieved. “I’ll be doing your fittings.”

January relaxed. Fenhua was much less scary than he’d expected. And their shoes had little locks in the heels. When he asked about those, Fenhua showed him a silver key; you could put the key in the locks, turn it, and change the designs on the toecaps. They looked pleased with how delighted he was with that.

“So; so, so.” They talked fast, and he had to concentrate to catch everything. “The brief is to make you look classy, but the annoying fact is that someone who’s only six foot two but forty inches across the chest can’t look classy in Tharsis; if I put you in the kind of stuff the Senator wears, you’ll look like a gangster who’s just successfully robbed a bank.” They said it cheerfully and it made January laugh, because he had been thinking that all the way to the studio. “What you and I are going to do is come up with a new classy, based on older Earth designs but pulling toward Mars enough for people here to recognise the quality. So I don’t want to hide the cage or how broad you are. I want to show it off. Sound good?”

“You’re the boss,” agreed January, who automatically trusted anyone with shoes that good.

They did exactly what they said they would.

In some ways, everything they made was very Tharsese. It was long sleeves and heavy fabrics against the always-cold. But they used light colours, not the deep ones that suited Gale. Very light blue, creams, icy greens, and somehow they all made January less grey; and instead of just trying to fit the cage above or below, everything was designed around it. There were places cut out to show the spine or the complicated gauntlets, and echoes of the shapes it made in the embroidery. But the best thing were the linings. They were all silk, printed with old paintings from Europe. He had never seen some of them before, and it shocked him how lovely they were. He couldn’t say anything at first.

“Are you okay?” Fenhua asked, looking worried. “We can change it if—”