Page 37 of The Mars House

“I’m much older than you.”

January snorted. “No you’re not.”

“Nice, keep that up,” Gale said, and then opened their arm a little to say, After you.

The pines roared in the wind, and so did other things. Bending over the winding path, drooping under the weight of their own heads, were giant dandelions, the wind tugging their feathers loose. When one of the seeds fell just ahead of him, it glided a few yards and then landed with a thump, fully the size of his head. He brushed the feathers as he passed it. In the city they were terrible weeds, springing up through cracks in tarmac and sometimes reaching about the height of a person—dandelions liked low gravity a great deal, it turned out—but he had never seen anything like this before. Their stems were bark, more like trunks, but when he clocked his knuckles to one, it was hollow. When the next gust of wind rippled through them, more feathers and seeds took off.

The howl of the dust in the trees began to sound like great engines, the kind that belonged to things people were never supposed to go near to.

“There it is,” Gale said.

And there was the house; glass and stone and steel, with soaring cloisters that could never have been built on Earth. Everyone was beetle-sized against the towers. And there was something about them that suggested the architect had not been very concerned with up and down: walkways that swung at counterintuitive angles and glass elevators whose paths twisted in unsettling helixes. He had never seen anything so grand, and for a long time, he just had to stare at it, feeling helpless. If somebody had told him giants had built Songshu a thousand years before humans had understood fire, he would have believed it. He had never felt so tiny, and so unimportant.

He hoped that that was only the altitude talking.

16 January had a theory that getting to know a new language was like getting to know a new housemate. There’s a honeymoon period where you think it’s really interesting, but then you start getting cross with its annoying habits: like, that Songshu had nothing to do with Consul Song. Really, speaking properly and not with a terrible British accent, they were totally different “songs”; Songshu’s was 松 (loose, or release—literally, a pine is a “tree of loose things”), while Consul Song’s was 宋, as in the Song Dynasty. They were pronounced differently too; Songshu’s “song” was very high, in the way English speakers say “ding” when they imitate microwaves and elevators, and Consul Song’s “song” was downward and sharp, like “It’s just a song, moron.” But hearing the difference as an English speaker was a trial—not just a nice gentle among-your-peers kind, but more of the duck-him-to-see-if-he-drowns kind. January had spent a lot of time (usually very early in the mornings when he was trying to negotiate with the factory’s demonic vending machine) grumbling that a happy, friendly language who doesn’t want to horribly torture foreigners does not have one “song” that means loose, one that means a dynasty, an identical one to that which means “deliver” and “from,” and then even more “songs” that mean “eulogy,” “lofty,” and “advice.” But he would also have been the first to admit that English—the language which inflicted “yacht” and such insane constructions as “I will have gone” on much of humanity for many hundreds of years—doesn’t have any high horses to sit on.

14

When the first colonists came to Mars, everything was very well organised, and there was a whole network of satellites in orbit to forecast the weather and support the internet and so forth. But ten years into the programme, some people whose own personal bank accounts were far too large for anyone in their immediate or even distant acquaintance to be affected by it decided that Mars was too costly. What had started as a magnificent endeavour of humankind had ended up with infinite headlines about how repairing A Teapot cost the taxpayer however many thousands of dollars, and there was famine in California because the fires never really went out any more, and Beijing was annoyed too, and several new governments were elected with great relief after campaigning to spend bad Mars money on sensible Earth things, like food.

The Mars Met Office had been run by the same person for all that time. It was two hundred and fifty years, which sounded like a long time, although if you did the same thing every day, then it all had a way of blurring together, and lately, Ariel had started to worry that actually there were whole decades he didn’t remember very well; he’d just sort of floated about, feeling lethargic and sometimes playing silly games with Slava.17

In those early days, there had been a lovely shiny central office in town. But as the money vanished and the years ground into decades, the satellites crumbled in the solar wind, the forecasting system collapsed, and the Met Office had to improvise. So now, it was a little weather station perched on Mount Penglai, the highest mountain in the worlds, where you could observe the weather heading towards Tharsis a treat. It was painfully high altitude, though, and humans had a way of going mad and dying, so Ariel looked after it instead. They never had gone back to weather satellites, which was fine by Ariel. He liked the mountain, and he didn’t want to leave it.

So, forecasting came from his little station, and the few roving mining colonies that moved around the Plains. They logged data every day, so did Ariel, and that was that. It wasn’t very sophisticated, but weather on Mars was either (a) cold and dusty or (b) cold and less dusty, and there was no use spending a lot of money on it. Forecasting took so little time that his station was also an astronomical observatory.

Some of the time, when he wasn’t sitting in the new orbital telescope, Ariel had a body, with arms and legs, and he loved it. He spent a lot of time fine-tuning and updating it—it could taste now, which was fascinating—because it was lovely to think that this was how the people who had written his code centuries ago had all made sense of the world. Slava said that this was a lot like those people who went to special societies and reenacted the Civil War in great detail (any country’s civil war would do); the ones who everyone else preferred to avoid and who always somehow seemed much more likely than the general populace to end up squashed by a vending machine.

Ariel was nervous about that in principle, but in practise, he didn’t have a vending machine and so had tentatively concluded he was probably okay. And it was nice to go for a walk outside, and see and hear and feel like so many other people, and so that was what he did every morning. Every morning, the great barren expanse of the Plains stretched out below the mountain, and the weathervane on the roof of the little station pointed, nearly always, towards Tharsis. The city was directly downwind, and so any weather coming from Penglai would reach it within a few hours.

You wouldn’t know, to look. To look, this place was as untouched as it had been for a million years and more. The air in Tharsis was okay for lungs, but Tharsis was four miles below what would have been sea level, if there was a sea. Penglai was sixteen miles above; three times higher than Everest. There was so little air that the horizon was always a deep gem blue, and colours had brilliant, peculiar edges. Every morning, he was glad to see it, and every morning, he wondered how long it could last. More people were coming all the time, many, many more, and how many little decades could it really be before they found a way to make the air better for them in the high places, and in the great red desert below, there were sky harbours and apartments and all the rest? That would be good too of course, but part of him he couldn’t pin down hurt to think of this primordial wildness all lost. There was a reason mountains were holy, there was a reason Moses had heard the commandments of God from Sinai, and Ariel felt like he could get his fingertips over what that was.

Shuppiluliuma18 III, who was a cat bred carefully from altitude-tolerant snow leopards and hated being left out, always came on the morning walk as well, provided Ariel carried her in a bucket with a cushion in. Ariel was beginning to conclude that an important part of understanding the human experience was understanding the total human servitude to cats.

He was adjusting the cushion and therefore looking down when he saw what was right in front of him on the ground, and later, it made him feel cold to think how easily he could have missed it.

There were footprints in the orange earth.

Facing towards the observatory.

They weren’t his.

He stared at them for nearly a whole minute, because he couldn’t push it through his thoughts properly. To breathe up here, a human being would need an oxygen tank and a space suit.

To get here, they would have had to walk for miles. There was no aircraft that could land in air so thin. Helicopters fell out of the sky with nothing under the rotor blades, and no plane or shuttle could land on the mountain—there was nowhere level enough, and no way to take off again.

The steps led right by him, back into the observatory. He hadn’t seen anything at all.

Ariel turned slowly and crept back.

He tilted open the door and stood sideways to see inside. The observatory looked the same as it always did, with the telescope under the domed roof that could open to the sky, and all his bits and pieces scattered over the work benches. He set the bucket down, and Shoopy meowed encouragingly.

It took him a long time to work out what was missing.

Live in a place for two hundred years, and you stopped seeing the parts of it you didn’t use. It was completely possible to know on one level that you had a cellar full of experimental junk you hadn’t taken out in decades, and on another, to have no idea it was there, and no idea what was down there. He had walked past that door every day for a century. It was there and it wasn’t.

And, just by an inch, it was open.