Page 35 of The Mars House

You wore red to be married here.

There had been rehearsals, but going through the steps was no warning at all for the real performance.

January had never seen so many people in once place; not for the inauguration of presidents, nor the crowning of the Queen. Oceans of people, shimmering with photo flashes. Everyone in Tharsis must have come out to line the long, long road to the temple steps, behind legions of riders holding the banners of House Gale. Above everything, camera drones glinted and swam, each one glowing the colours of its broadcast station, casting luminous comet-tails into the dust streams.

Despite all the classes and the preparation, he had a weird feeling that he had no idea how he’d come to be here.

In one way, he felt very prepared now, and in another, strangely angry. If for even a fraction of his life before now he had been taught with this much focus, he’d have probably cured death by now. He’d often wondered how people like Gale came to be as powerful and as accomplished as they were, and here was the answer. If you spent your whole life like this, surrounded by people helping you do better, learn more, showing you the way, always, then becoming a senator was probably the least of what you could expect. The last time anyone had shown him the way was when he left ballet school for London. He’d been seventeen. People thought you were supposed to find you own way, and he had, too—he’d always been doubtful of people who said they could have been great if they’d just had the right education or the right opportunity because that felt like shifting the blame for being lazy—but if all this showed anything, it was that you could never go as high alone. Nowhere near as high.

In another way, seeing how they had become so strong made Gale less intimidating. They weren’t a scary genius who’d been born that way. They came from a factory designed to build scary geniuses.

“Nearly time,” Gale’s press secretary told him through an earpiece. They were directing from some media fortress where they could see footage from all the drones.

The Silver Temple made cathedrals look like dollhouses. In this courteous gravity, beams and pillars could soar higher than anything that could have been built even in the dreams of Rome. Along the front steps, the beacon fires were burning red. Standing as close as they could get, ranks of journalists were talking to cameras in as many languages as people spoke.

He had to walk alone. He and Gale were coming from opposite directions. There was a gulf of space between him and the nearest riders. The closest he had to anyone with him was the earpiece, and the drones that swarmed overhead.

“All right,” the press secretary said gently. “Three; two; one.”

The drums were the size of human beings, and the noise they made was something you felt through the floor as much as heard. The rhythm was slow, walking pace. It was the longest entrance he had ever had to make. Around him, the wind pulled at the red silk and bled and furled it to the side, and the drums thundered, and all he could think was that he was wearing more than he’d earned in his life, that even the gold-veneered cage they had made to fit over his wedding clothes was worth kingdoms, and then suddenly that he’d been wrong about this. It didn’t feel like a performance now he was doing it. It felt like a wedding, and he didn’t know a soul here. Except Gale, who was coming from the other direction. It was a stupid relief to see them.

When he met Gale at the altar, they held one hand out to him. He took it, and from the crowd there was a sound like the war in heaven.

As soon as there had been a decent interval, though, Gale let go and clenched their own hands together in front of them, out of view of the cameras, as though they’d just had to pick up something slimy.

In January’s pocket, hidden in one of the inner layers of the red robes, the corner of the Consul’s card nicked at his hip, a tiny promise that he wasn’t altogether alone.

After the ceremony, the celebration was at Songshu. House Gale never used private ships or planes because they burned so much energy; so they took the bullet train that climbed the Valleyside.

As the refugee ship came down through the atmosphere a year ago, January had seen the Valley walls. They were four miles of red rock. He hadn’t been able to get his head around it at the time. The reason Tharsis was built in the valley base was that with the extra four miles, the air was much denser down there. As they began to rise, one of Gale’s staff touched his shoulder and gave him a shot that they said would help his body produce enough haemoglobin to cope with the altitude. He was relieved. Most of England was below sea level. He wasn’t made for altitude.

As they glided up the vertical tracks, there were clear patches in the dust, and he could see the skyscrapers rising from the Valley floor, grainy and brown, then sudden stormy patches where there was nothing to see at all but the roiling particulates, dimming the sunlight to almost nothing. In those patches, the carriage lights cast his own reflection on the windows instead.

Four miles high. The entire Valley, all two and a half thousand miles of it, had been carved out by one massive flood millions of years ago, charging through the rock not over millennia but only a few months. The strongest wind was barely what would have been called blustery on Earth. Nothing eroded these rocks, and the gravity only pawed at them. They were still sharp, with none of the soft, waving patterns this sort of canyon would have had at home.

Though he wasn’t looking, he was aware of where Gale was, at the other end of the carriage, talking to some people he recognized. Probably journalists. It looked important. He wanted to go and sit with them, to at least be with someone he knew, but he didn’t think Gale wanted that. Seen and not heard seemed like by far and away the best approach for now—and anyway, as soon as they reached Songshu and all its cameras, the act would start again. Even someone as adept at it all as Gale must need some breathing space. Certainly January did. He felt like he was in the short break between the matinee and the evening show. All the minutes to yourself were precious.

However disorientating and mad it all was, it felt incredible to be back in a show again. In the cellar of his mind, a space that had been shut up for two years now was opening its doors and turning on the lights again. He knew how to do this. He was good at it. There was a rhythm to getting through an exhausting performance schedule. You breathed where you could, you remembered there was time between the acts, you learned to put the glamour and the glitter on a switch that could turn on and off when you wanted.

His phone hummed with a new message. It was from Gale, whose automatic contact icon was Au for Aubrey. It made him think of gold.

Still alive?

He smiled. He knew he shouldn’t be too pleased to have been remembered, because it was general Gale courtesy, not genuine concern, or he was pretty sure, but it was important anyway. Better than I have been for years.

Across the carriage, Gale caught his eye and bowed a little. He did the same, sad as suddenly as he’d been happy. The length of a train carriage was probably about the amount of space Gale preferred to have between the two of them. He didn’t know why it bothered him so much.

January realized someone was trying to give him a glass of champagne. Everyone was noisy and happy. It wasn’t a real celebration, but it was a real show, and it had all the zing of one that was going well.

He was still seventy per cent sure it couldn’t be this straightforward, something awful was going to happen, even though he had met forty lawyers who assured him otherwise and five million people had just watched him join House Gale. He had the same falling feeling he had when the refugee ship left Earth’s atmosphere: the moment of horrible sickness that marked when the engines would either work, or explode. Either way, there was no going back.

And then: sunlight. They were above the dust. Sunlight like he hadn’t even known you could have here, in a perfect unmarked sky. It was the altitude. Cloud level and dust level had come and gone. The light poured in, and he stood up, because he had forgotten how it felt to have real sunlight. Something in his bones uncurled. Below, the dust storm was a velvety blanket in the canyon of the Valley. Up here, there were only flitting little dust ghosts riding the wind.

The tracks glided from vertical to horizontal, and the train surged much faster.

Not far from him, that security officer from before was writing in the journal again, still studiously not talking to anyone. Something about them seemed odd and it took him a moment to realize what. They weren’t dressed up. They had on a rust-coloured jumper under a plain black coat, and their hair in a tidy but unembellished knot. All the other security people were in full House Gale colours. Those uniforms, which had vivid sashes and under-robes that flashed when anyone moved, looked like each one cost more than January earned in a season. He must have been wrong about who they were.

After a stretch of waving coffee fields, and the occasional glimpse of llamas, it all changed again. The coffee vanished, and instead, there was a sea of mirrors. Despite the rags of dust in the air, they were brilliant, reflecting the sharp blue sky with such brightness that he couldn’t look at them for long, even though his eyes had been made for strong light. The mirrors were arranged in great lakes, all tilted a fraction inward, towards mammoth towers that soared so high he couldn’t see their heights from the ground. Somewhere up there, something shone, beacon bright.