Page 46 of The Mars House

Because he had been speaking Mandarin so much lately, January had one of those strange precious moments when he heard the sound of his own language, not just the meaning. It wasn’t so much like Troll as he’d thought; it was weird, and it sounded old and cold and full of mist and horses, unlike the silicon boardroom chic of Mandarin, but kind of beautiful too.

“No, sir, you last spoke to my predecessor, Kali Gale. That was forty-five years ago. My name is Aubrey.”

“Aubrey, that’s a nice name. Less, er, aggressive.”

Gale smiled, full of rue. “Thank you. I’m sorry to bother you, sir, and I know you must be busy, but I’m at Songshu and I’m looking at a dust storm coming in across the Plains. I was hoping you could tell me how long this is forecast to last, and perhaps why we’re seeing something so irregular on so little warning.”

January wasn’t sure what he had expected Ariel to be like, but not nervous. He was clearly nervous. Perhaps it was talking to Gale, perhaps Ariel didn’t speak to many people and when he did, they weren’t usually speaking in razor-sharp sentences in a voice like molten sugar about to catch fire—that was universally intimidating—but he must have encountered versions of Gale before. He couldn’t go round being worried by politicians.

“Well, I’m—afraid that it’s difficult to do much modelling. I’m still—well, still struggling to see what’s causing it. But just in case, you don’t happen to have some sort of—backup, other than solar power, do you?” Ariel said, looking hopeless.

“No, sir,” Gale said, steady as always. “Tharsis has been run on solar power from the Plains for a hundred and fifty years because there is no viable alternative. Wind power is useless in gravity this light, even in a storm. Fuel-grade hydrogen is produced using electricity, so you need solar power even for that; and what hydrogen we can produce is used for generating water. Fusion stations are banned, since Los Angeles . . .”

January looked up Los Angeles.20

“. . . and the old nuclear power stations haven’t been used for a century. They were only temporary to begin with and they’re housing now. Technically they’re available as a backup, but there is no uranium on Mars. We’d need to send to Earth for that. The whole point of Songshu is that it gives Tharsis energy independence from Earth.”

“Yes, I was afraid of that. Well, you, er . . . will probably need to find some ways to stretch the power,” Ariel said miserably. “This looks like a big one to me. Think months, not weeks.”

Gale was quiet for a second. They didn’t seem shocked, or even worried, but there was a line between their eyebrows, one January was starting to recognise. It meant something didn’t look right. “What’s the nature of your difficulty, in seeing the cause?” they asked.

“Sorry?”

“Do you need extra equipment to analyse dust samples, or satellite imagery of an area you can’t see?”

Ariel looked off to one side, as if he were fantasising about running away. “No, nothing like that. It’s just—well, there’s more on Mars than we know, you see. All manner of things are unearthed as the weather changes, terraforming is a continuing process, as you know, and . . .”

“What things, specifically?” Gale asked.

January actually heard Ariel’s teeth bump shut. He had never seen anyone look so desperate to get away from a question. He wondered if there shouldn’t be a law against aiming Gale at unprepared people.

“Well, you see . . . you see, it’s deposits of silver iodide,” Ariel said, and the way he stared at Gale was begging. “Quite naturally occurring, you understand, there must be some cave systems where it forms, and—yes. It could be the silver iodide.”

Gale snapped back in their chair. They didn’t ask what silver iodide was (used in photography, said January’s phone) and they didn’t say, hang on, so you do know what the cause is, why did you say you didn’t. “Thank you, sir,” they said, very quiet, with far more weight than January had expected them to give something so unhelpful and odd. “I’ll let you get on.”

“No, thank you, Senator,” Ariel whispered, and cut the call.

“What the hell was that about?” Mx Francis asked incredulously. January’s brain made an unpromising clunking noise as it switched from Ariel’s English into Mandarin Mode. “He doesn’t know and then he does, and what’s silver iodide anyway?”

“Turn the cameras off,” Gale said.

“But we want to—” a producer began.

“Turn them off, please.”

The producer sighed and waved the drones out.

“I’d like to know,” Gale said, as if there had been no pause, “what it would take to construct a new solar array in the atmosphere.”

The explosion of indignation was instant. Some people who must have been scientists all started talking at once.

“The energy transfer from an atmospheric solar array is deeply inefficient. Yes, you’re above the dust, but you still have to get that energy from those panels in space down to—”

Mx Ren was talking too. “The cost would be insane, you’ll bankrupt House Gale if you even—”

“The Consul would read that as a power grab,” Mx Francis put in fast and high. “We’re a public service, but that would require far more money than we get from taxpayers! They’d try and shut us down—”

Gale was shaking their head. Like always, the smoke in their voice carried straight through everyone else. They didn’t have to shout. “Dr Molotov, work out a realistic figure.”