Page 30 of The Mars House

“No—no. Sorry.” He had to stare at the silk for a little longer. “All these—are from where I’m from?”

“All in the same thousand square miles, yes. Senator Gale called the director at the Louvre personally, to get permission to use these images.”

“The Senator did?” January echoed, perplexed. He had thought Gale had had enough of him. He wouldn’t have imagined for a second that they were negotiating with museums in France just to make him feel welcome.

“Oh, yes. The French would have turned me down if I’d applied, or even the company; you need to be royalty to get hold of this stuff. Europe was a real powerhouse for art at one time, do they not teach that?”

He shook his head. “No, they do, I just, I forgot . . . what having culture feels like.” That wasn’t right either. He hadn’t forgotten. He had never noticed what having it felt like. It had slipped away from him shred by shred, and he hadn’t seen it, or really perceived the loss, but here it was. And suddenly it seemed insane that he’d lived like this for two years, without—what? Fine things that came from where he was from, fine thoughts, and light caught in pigment and oil; none of it should have mattered, what mattered was having enough water to drink and enough electricity to run the cooker. But that was true, and it wasn’t at all.

He struggled to get the right words. “Without it you’re just an animal with clever thumbs, but with it, you’ve got . . .”

“Armour,” Fenhua agreed. They smiled. “That’s exactly what the Senator said.”

13 Her name was Ming, which meant “bright,” and if she took a particular shine to a guest, she had been known to bring them some of the fish, which was why all the rooms had an unexpected-fish-disposal service. Ming hadn’t come down on a particular theory about what humans were, but she suspected they were just rubbish, bald polar bears who were bad at hunting, and being kindly, she tended to try and look after them. She had been genetically engineered not to want to eat anybody and therefore had the run of the hotel—she had a collar with a master keycard on it—and one of her favourite things was to hide under the reception desk when the hotel manager was on duty, because even rubbish bears had to get used to being startled sometimes, on account of how it was important for general survival; and, on maybe a more self-serving note, she did think the noise the manager made when she played Surprise Bear was very funny.

14 River Gale had written a book about it. It was called Triglossia on Mars and the Emergence of Tharsese. January was hopeful for a minute until he looked it up and found that triglossia wasn’t a sort of dinosaur.

12

It was the day before the wedding that the hotel manager knocked on January’s door. When January opened it, the manager looked tight and scared. Behind them were two towering people in a severe, purple-sashed uniform he recognised but whose meaning he didn’t know. Nobody smiled.

“Mx Stirling, sorry to disturb you,” the manager said. “But these people have been very insistent. You’re being summoned.”

January looked between all of them, feeling tiny. There was no point arguing. This was clearly not a thing he could negotiate. “Where to?” he asked quietly, having visions of a deportation centre and a Crossing ship back to Earth. Whoever the uniformed people were, they were soldiers, or some kind of very serious police. Not House Gale. They were wearing different sigils—House Song. He didn’t know anything about House Song except that Song was the name of the Consul. Maybe they also ran part of the immigration bureau. All at once it seemed idiotic that he’d never gone to any of those meetings at work about what your rights were if you were detained. He’d just tried not to think too much about it, resting on the icy certainty that if they came for him one day, knowing his technical rights would be bugger all use.

“This way please,” one of them said woodenly.

It was early in the morning, and he wasn’t wearing his cage yet. “I’ll just get my cage on then.”

“That isn’t necessary. Now, please.”

An uneasy chill went across his skin. “No, I can’t, that’s illegal—”

“Now,” they said, in the tone of a person with a taser baton.

Even though the cage made him weaker, stepping out of the door without it made him more exposed than if he’d had to go naked. Going without it meant that if anything happened, if he even bruised someone, he was going to a labour camp, because he might as well have charged out with a loaded assault rifle. He couldn’t help hearing the judge’s voice again: second offence. Every step was going to have to be an effort not to use too much force. Worse, he had distinct and nasty feeling that the uniformed people knew that, and they were doing this precisely to make him worry.

He followed them silently, the back of his neck burning where the hotel manager stared after him, and trying to trace over the last month, and what he might have done to fall foul of them—maybe paperwork moving through House Gale and setting off alarms in a government office, or maybe the Prosecution Service had decided that he hadn’t spent enough time in prison, or maybe it was just that someone at the hotel had reported a suspicious Earthstronger in a suspiciously expensive room and this was some kind of fraud investigation.

The uniformed people didn’t explain. They stood too close to him in the lift, both of them head and shoulders taller than him, and then ushered him—not forcefully, at least—into a waiting car whose charging lights pulsed a soft blue as it soaked in solar power from the road. It reminded him of police sirens from home. Cars were tall here and he didn’t have to duck to get in. Inside, it was freezing, the heating set too low, like always. He hunched into his coat. When he tried to take out his phone to call someone from House Gale, one of the uniformed people took it off him and put it in a black bag.

The car only took them half a mile; around the length of Gagarin Square, past the high monument to those who died in the riot, and to the unnerving building that stood right opposite the Senate. Only government cars were allowed through Gagarin Square, and ahead of them, startled parakeets soared out of the way.

The car stopped right outside.

“Come with us,” one of the soldiers said, when January sat rooted in the seat even once the car door was open.

This was Jade Hill.

Probably Gale would have a few thoughts about why it was that everyone always called their government by the name of the place it sat in, January thought with a fever edge as the soldiers propelled him up the steps—too high for him—to the main doors.

Americans talked about the White House, Chinese people talked about Zhongnanhai, and here, about Jade Hill; even the ancient Egyptians did it, he knew hazily. Pharaoh meant “Great House.” Everybody across the worlds had the same marrow-understanding that after a point, it wasn’t people making decisions, but a kind of swarm intelligence, and the only name for it was the hive it lived in.

The place was strange because it was old. He knew a bit about it, from culture lectures on the Crossing. When the first colonists began to build, they could only build with what they already had. What they had were nine titan colony ships, the Arks; nine ships which carried about ten thousand human beings, and ten million plant and animal samples to start off ecosystems in the newly terraformed land. Five had come from China, which was why Mandarin had won in the competition for first language here, and why the final say on Tharsese law came from the courts in Beijing. They had taken those one of the ships apart—the Yushi, which meant the Jade—and built Jade Hill.

Even now, it held the ghost of spacefaring. Its towers had plainly once used to be corridors between habitats, and its fantastic arches were repurposed from those great wheels that once turned in space to forge artificial gravity.

The soldiers led him through corridors that didn’t look like they’d been built with any gravity in mind, into an elevator that twisted around an arch, and to an office that was open and airy, but very austere, just like the person hunched over the desk.