Page 38 of The Mars House

And there was a light on.

Shoopy trotted past him, even though she’d never seen down here before, jumped onto the handrail of the stairs and slid down like she was auditioning to be Spider-Cat.

“Hello?” Ariel said quietly. He felt suddenly, vividly fragile. Yes, he could dive up into the satellites in orbit or sit with Slava in the servers of the Central Bank, but he didn’t want to, he liked this body, he had worked for years on it and he belonged to it now, but because he liked sparkly things, he had one glass arm to expose the intricate circuitry underneath and that was fine when there was nothing and nobody around to shove you down any stairs, but when there was . . .

“Ooowr,” said Shoopy, who was polite and always talked back if you talked first.

Nothing.

He went down too. Nothing looked disturbed, and it had no reason to be. Mostly, what was down here was the leftovers from old experiments, very early on in the colony, when terraforming had only just begun and millibar by painstaking millibar, they had squeezed the air pressure up to something a human being might not die in, then to hold water on the surface, then to hold cloud. There were banks of soil samples, rock core samples, ice from the poles—they had historical value if you were an especially keen museum curator maybe, but not in real life.

Except the storm jar cabinet.

Which was empty.

On Earth, if you released a very carefully altered type of silver iodide into the atmosphere, you made rain, because the clouds coalesced around the tiny particles. On Mars, there wasn’t enough moisture, even now, so what you actually got was a giant dust storm. Every fifty years or so, somebody wanted to try again, because the volume of water was increasing all the time on the surface—Tereshkova Wharf saw to that—but it had never yet been enough, and after a lot of nasty storms and a lot of bother, everyone had agreed they’d maybe better leave it a while yet. But he hadn’t thrown the containers away because—well—he didn’t really throw anything away, that was why you had a cellar.

There had been twelve containers left; inoffensive glass things, boring-looking, labelled in Ariel’s own handwriting with This is still a stupid idea, just like the last five times.

They were all gone.

Shoopy climbed into the empty cabinet and looked pleased, like she always did if she managed to fill up any enclosed space with herself.

“But they don’t do anything,” he said helplessly to her. “They just—why would anyone . . . ?”

The front door banged. He jumped. Just the wind, maybe, but the wind shouldn’t have been strong enough to do that, he had lived here always and it had never done that before. He ran back up the stairs, half expecting to find himself locked in, but he wasn’t, and the front door slammed open when he shoved it and tumbled out.

The observatory was built on the last of the mountain’s slope, just shy of the edge of the titan caldera. The air smelled wrong. There was something new in it, and when he looked towards where it was strong, he saw a shape on the cliff edge.

It was outlined in light, ashy particles that were already floating away on the breeze, wisping and hazing towards the Plains and Tharsis. The particles were dense, though, around that one place, and in among them, he could see, very clearly, a human figure: one arm out, holding something to the wind.

And then the silver iodide dust silvered away, and the shape was gone, and Ariel stood frozen on the rocks, not understanding what he’d just seen, but certain he wasn’t alone.

17 Slava was the AI of the Central Bank. Originally she was from Moscow. She’d got the job here after she’d locked the entire Russian senior cabinet in an office for two weeks until they sorted out the budget properly, cut them off from the internet, and activated nuclear blast protocols so that the police couldn’t even get into the building. Probably this should have caused chaos, but the cabinet was unpopular, and rather than rushing immediately to arms, everyone made half-hearted “Oh no” noises and got on with things, and embarrassingly for the Kremlin, the economy rather improved in that time. The Russians, understandably enough, had then banned AI; but people in Tharsis had thought it was a fantastic idea and invited her immediately.

18 A real king a long time ago, which was one of the things that made Ariel fundamentally like human beings.

15

January had thought the Tiangong was lovely, but Songshu made it look like new money trying too hard.

Just inside the foyer, on either side of the door, there were two weeping willow trees. They were actually planted there, roots bedded down with moss and ferns, old leaves and catkins dropping into two streams, real streams, running in channels built into a glass floor. He twisted back to look up at them, disbelieving. So much water. Just for trees. And fish: there were real fish in it.

He thought of his water meter in the tiny flat in the nuclear tower, always hovering around amber, never green. It had been different seeing the polar bear lake at the Tiangong; that was a hotel, for hundreds and hundreds of people. Gale, Gale personally, owned all this. In a way, it was disgusting. If you saw it on paper, as so many millions of gallons, it would be. Seeing it in real life, though . . . it was beautiful. He was glad it existed.

Gale’s demonic press secretary leaned down close to his ear.

“I know you’re probably putting together a giant rant about the obscene privilege of the upper classes and how the righteous Working People ought to stage an immediate revolution, but can you save it for your tell-all memoir in five years and right now this second try and look less like you want to kill someone?”

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” he protested. “It’s lovely. That said, when the revolution comes, this will be a great public park.”

“I can just see the No Spitting signs now,” the press secretary said, with a brilliant mischievous glitter.

January laughed, and beside him, Gale glanced down at him. They seemed surprised for some reason, though he hadn’t done anything loud or startling.

The open space went all the way up a great tower, and somewhere near the top, fireworks went off, inside, blooming golden clouds and bright smoke that made everyone laugh on the way in, and everything smell gloriously of gunpowder. He had a sharp unwanted memory of Fireworks Night at home on his mum’s vineyard.

More trees stood in a beautiful dining room, all of them in full blossom—and decorations, and people, and there was a dinner prepared by a team of worlds-class chefs brought in for the occasion. It was hard to follow all the conversations, because it was mostly people speaking Mandarin far too quick and sophisticated for January to catch. Somebody who he thought might be the Chinese ambassador was there, and some people from other embassies; other politicians from other Houses, celebrities, and after a while he tuned out and concentrated on the food, which was incredible, and then on a gigantic fluffy husky that put her paw on his knee. She had a tag on that said KASHA, which was Russian for “porridge,” but under that, some Chinese characters for ka and sha, which together meant, he was pretty sure, Coffee Monster.