Page 5 of The Mars House

“I know. I’m sorry,” he said again, trying to melt into the lift wall. It was chipboard, which had scared him when he first arrived, but of course in light gravity, wood would do for a lot of things. Not even real wood. Some kind of printed composite that just looked like it.

The old person huffed and grumbled something in Russian which sounded a lot like “bloody immigrants.”

It wasn’t until the lift doors closed that he saw the new graffiti on them. It was sprayed on from a template, quick and neat and efficient, at eye level. It was the Natural First logo, which was the same as the government poster, except that the delicate cage was replaced by bars, like a prison door.

“It’s just kids,” the kind nurse said to him awkwardly.

January nodded and didn’t say that kids didn’t usually make such clever templates for their graffiti.

Thankfully, the trains were still running. The Olympos Line was good, even in bad weather. The dust was so thick it was hard to see the carriage markers on the platform, but it was clear where the Earthstrong-only carriage would stop, because of the gradation of height in the people waiting.

What was really alarming about gravity was how much it squashed you. January was an inch taller here than he had been on Earth, an inch: he noticed it on shirt hems. If you were born here, if your spine had grown in lighter gravity, you were usually even taller. If your great-grandparents had been born in this gravity, you were about seven feet high. Scientists said that eventually, the lower gravity would actually mean people developed stronger bones than they would do on Earth, but for now, only seven generations from the first colonists, they definitively had not, and they were in the wobbly stage where evolution was still getting its boots on. From what he understood, someone seventh-generation Natural was stronger than someone, say, second, but that still wasn’t strong.

He made his way to the cluster of smaller dust silhouettes, and had to punch himself in the thigh to try to stop himself picturing the lift doors opening, and how scared everyone had looked.

The stations had height-and-weight sensors that noticed if you were Earthstrong, and like always, the neon flashed as he passed it.

REMEMBER TO WALK SLOWLY!

DID YOU KNOW?

A POLAR BEAR IS THREE TIMES HEAVIER THAN THE AVERAGE HUMAN.

IF YOU’RE FROM EARTH, YOU’RE AS STRONG AS A POLAR BEAR HERE!

January had looked this up once, because he’d suspected the government weren’t envisaging normal people when they said Earthstrong, but giant Viking heavyweight boxers.

What he had found was that it was technically true, for him, if you were talking about quite a delicate lady polar bear. He wanted to think this meant that he had won an important statistical point, but he had a creeping feeling that it didn’t. As she was breaking into the house and eating the cat, he doubted many people would say, “But don’t worry, she’s actually quite small for a polar bear.”

When it arrived, the train was nothing but the scythe of its lamps. The front carriage was Earthstrong only, so he shuffled on with three or four other people, all of them wearing resistance cages under their coats the same as him, shushing as they pushed against every move. Not trusting himself now, he kept brushing the steel sternum to check it was definitely there.

That person in the lift had been right. He could have killed someone.

Pink elephants pink elephants think about pink elephants.

He calmed down slowly, maybe because everything in the Earthstrong carriage was made for people like him. The lights were brighter, the handrails and grip-rings set lower than usual, there were real, physical signs because the train operators had realized nobody Earthstrong could afford lenses and glasses for virtual ones, and on this line, being impressively brand new, they even put more oxygen in the air. It helped.

In his pocket, his charge card was a smooth, reassuring weight. It was like nothing he’d had in London, a sort of pebble-sized rectangle of quartz. He kept turning it over and over between his fingertips like a worry stone, then remembered to actually pay with it, just a tap to the panel on the train’s bulkhead. Two kilowatts for a day pass. Expensive, but there was no way around it.

January sat near the front window and watched as they ploughed through the dust and the dark tracks. The rails ran over high bridges over the roads and the warehouses where little lights shone, around the glittering financial district and the gigantic open space that was Gagarin Square, the memorial statue from the riot towering over the people coming and going. He shut his eyes till he was sure that was past.

The advertisements panel next to him flared hopefully to life and burst into a hologram image of a place that looked like a luxury hotel.

“If you’re planning to stay on Mars,” a cheerful voice said, “the government will pay for you to naturalise to local gravity. It only takes three months, and in that time, you’ll live in a state-of-the-art facility with the very best medical care. No more cages, no more work restrictions, no more worry . . .”

It showed him someone Earthstrong walking through lovely rooms and a shiny medical centre, and friendly doctors smiling. He’d seen the same advert a thousand times, but this time, he watched it.

“Once you’ve naturalised,” the cheerful voice continued, “you’ll get automatic citizenship, universal basic income, and free medical insurance, and you can apply for work anywhere you like.”

It didn’t mention anything about how you’d have to do that new job while you were coping with nerve damage and osteoporosis. Government adverts only ever used voices like that to remind you to pay your taxes.

He opened and closed his hands, feeling the pull of the cage gauntlets. He had been here for a year. He hadn’t decided whether he wanted to try and go back. He kept not thinking about it.

On the Crossing, on the ship, the lawyers had taken a very different stance to the cheerful voice in the government advert.

“It is your choice, at least for now, whether you wear a cage, or whether you naturalise,” a human rights barrister had told a whole sports hall full of people. It had been the only place on the refugee ship big enough to hold all one thousand people aboard all at once. It was so big that you could see the floor curving upward and away; all the living spaces were part of great wheels that rotated just fast enough to mimic Earth’s gravity. But it still smelled like every other sports hall ever built: polish and shoes.

“But let’s be clear. If you naturalise to Mars gravity, you can never go home. Your bones, organs, and muscles will acclimatise to functioning with one third of the effort they do on Earth. Try and go back to Earth after that, you’ll die of a heart attack the second you enter the atmosphere. Now, there’s all kinds of benefits to naturalising; you can have office jobs, you’ll get citizenship and therefore universal basic income, free healthcare, the works. If you don’t, it’s manual labour only, health insurance comes out of your pay, and you can only live in a few specially adapted places around the city. But one of the reasons the Tharsis government is so generous with those who do naturalise is that they know full well it’s a death sentence. The health impact will kill you in the end. Before the invention of resistance cages, the life expectancy of the first settlers’ Mars-born children was forty-five. So make your decision very carefully.”