Page 32 of The Mars House

“Yes, and you.”

“Are you going to tell me what it is and why you’re showing me?” asked January, who couldn’t help feeling it was bloody histrionic to announce something like that and not explain.

“No,” the Consul said happily. “Ruin the surprise, wouldn’t it.”

Probably they were just having fun; probably they didn’t mean it as a little power play to remind him who was Consul here. Probably.

Gale, he couldn’t help thinking, would have considered all of this to be in very poor taste.

What, said the voice in his head, you’d rather a good-looking nutter with classy manners than someone who’s actually right but also a bit annoying?

It sounded stupid when you put it like that, but actually it was a window into why Gale was so popular. There was a part of him that preferred the classy manners. He wanted to call that frivolous, but in fact it was the opposite. Frivolity meant something surface-level and easily scratched away, but this was down deep in him somewhere. It mattered that Gale was polite and kind in person. It mattered that the Consul . . . wasn’t.

You, the voice informed him crossly, are a garbage person. You deserve to end up stabbed in the secret sex dungeon Gale most definitely has.

The Consul led the way down more strangely tilting corridors, and explained that while surveillance was tricky from six million miles away, there was, out on Mount Penglai,15 a telescopic array that covered such a broad surface area that the images it generated could show particular mountains on a small planet orbiting Alpha Centauri.

What it could also show was anywhere on Earth, so long as everyone happened to be facing the right way at the time.

They stopped at a room that required a fingerprint scan to get inside and January glanced round at the secret service agents, alarmed.

“Just sign this,” one of them said, quite friendly now, and held out a tablet. “Official Secrets Act.”

January didn’t ask what was behind the door. Secrets, obviously. He signed it.

What the feed from the great telescope array was showing now was a huge line of fire across the United States. California, New Mexico, Louisiana, Florida, the whole South. The smoke plumes were so big they covered over cities.

It was projected across a wall in an otherwise dim room.

“How is it looking?” the Consul asked a group of people sitting around a central table. “Do we have a clear window again?”

All of them looked military, and they all stood up. January hung back in the gloom with the secret service people, and the Consul didn’t tell him to do otherwise. Alice sat on his foot. One of the Secret Service people knelt down and gave her a puzzle toy to play with.

“We do, for the next two hours. It’s much worse than yesterday. It’s now fifty-eight degrees Celsius on the surface,” someone reported. “We think everyone who can has moved underground; and everyone who can’t is moving towards the sea. But for some that’s a very long walk. We’re seeing convoys of people walking.”

The image zoomed in, and there were indeed people walking—all on the verges of the freeway, and only the verges, because the tarmac itself was gleaming and sticky. People were holding umbrellas against the heat, tugging little kids along in antigravity buggies. They must have been looking after one another’s children to give each set of parents a break, because some people were trailing ten or twelve, like dejected balloons.

“Why aren’t they driving?” the Consul asked.

“Because it’s so hot that the solar fabrics they use to charge the cars—well, they’re melting.”

“And there’s still nothing about this on their social media?”

“No. Total censorship, total shutdown of any image that even looks like a fire.” The general sighed. “A few things are getting through, people smart enough to talk about a traffic jam or an accident or something, but even those posts are vanishing almost before anyone can catch them. It looks like the White House means to keep this entirely secret.”

“They must know we can see.”

“They don’t care,” the general shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what we say, no one there will believe us. The news reaching U.S. citizens is all about bad traffic in California and summer internet outages, and how well it’s going against the Russians in Alaska.”

“Things in Alaska aren’t going well, are they?”

“No, they’ve fallen back almost entirely, but they don’t want their own population to know that. Two billion Americans, and only one billion of them put Namina Gray in office, and she knows what’s going to happen if the other billion hear bad things.”

The Consul pressed both hands over their face like a breathing mask. “It’s just staggering, isn’t it.”

January caught himself feeling irked to hear someone talk about it as if it were surprising. You needed to be very divorced from disaster, and very safe, and used to everything being lovely and fair and good, to be staggered. And then he half laughed at himself, because he sounded like one of those old men who told stories about how In My Day we all had to eat gravel and our fathers murdered us nightly and we were grateful.

“It’s called the illusory truth effect. If you hear something often enough, for long enough, you’ll believe it. Even if you originally knew that the information was false,” the general said wryly. “And the only thing Americans hear is that nothing’s wrong with their weather and Russia is losing.”