Page 62 of The Mars House

“S . . . enator,” January said. It was off script, but seeing that person in the rust-coloured jumper with Gale again had robbed him of any small confidence he might have had that Gale was really up to spending a whole night pretending to enjoy him. “Are you sure? It’s one thing to be married, it’s another to actually—you know, spend time with me. I don’t expect it. I know what I’m here for, everyone does.” He nodded at the drone. “I don’t need to be taken to parties.”

Maybe he’d had a stilted family life, but he wouldn’t have let a cousin comb his hair, or a brother or sister if he’d had one. And definitely not, now he was thinking about it, if he were from a Tharsese Great House. Posh people here bowed to their relatives. That was a very . . . couple-y . . . thing to do.

“Why wouldn’t I want to spend time with you?” Gale asked, giving him a quizzical look.

January was supposed to just say, Yes, great, but he couldn’t say yes without checking that having to stay with an Earthstronger for an entire evening wasn’t going to end in Gale having a panic attack. What if that was what they’d been fighting about with the person in the orange jumper before he came in, whether this was a stupid thing to do or not?

Or about the idea of Gale going out tonight with their fake consort instead of their real one.

“I just . . . don’t . . . want you to feel obliged. Or afraid.”

Gale stood up with a hiss of silk, and like he had with the Consul, January had a stab of that very basic fear that came when someone much taller than you moved closer when you didn’t expect it. Without meaning to, he stepped back. He was already only just in the room, and that step backed him against the wall. Gale noticed and stayed still. “Mx Stirling; I know it must be hard to come here and have people looking at you like you might do something terrible. But I do not think that of you, at all. I think that in a previous life you might have been a kitten that was sat on.”

January laughed, and after a second, with a flicker of relief that said they’d been worried about offending him, Gale did too. The bridge was holding; it had handrails and a toll system and everything now. He looked at them for a hanging moment, wanting to say, what a funny dance we keep doing, just because I’m strong and you’re not, and you’re rich and I’m not. Will we have to do it for five years? But they didn’t know each other well enough for him to say that, even if there had been nobody filming.

“I’d love to go,” he said instead.

Gale smiled again. It was their movie-star smile, but the real one lay under it. The camera drone floated nearer. January didn’t look, but he could almost hear Mx Francis and the producers making happy cooing noises.

In the far corner, the person in the rust-coloured jumper looked away, and he didn’t blame them.

Ridiculous. The whole thing was ridiculous.

“Do you have something to wear?” Gale asked.

“I can find something,” January said, and even though it was all fake, he went tingly. They were going out; he hadn’t been out out since leaving London. He got as far as the pub with Val and the others sometimes but that wasn’t out, that was directly opposite the factory. You didn’t dress up. You just sort of fell in.

“Oh,” Gale said. “And these are for you.” They stepped nearer to him, slowly, so he could see what was happening, and then, taking his hand, set the pearls into his palm.

28

There was one train down the Valleyside for people, and one that could take cars. It was further along the cliff, and right by the gravity trains.

January sat glued to the car window, excited as a small child, as the funicular sank down the titan drop of the Valley. In the last of the light, an ambery mauve, the gravity trains looked like primordial monsters clawing up the cliffside out of the dust below. They were colossal. The weight would have ripped them off their tracks on Earth. He was starting to get used to how everything was much bigger here, from people to dogs to buildings, but the concrete blocks were each the size of a house, bolted together with magnetic shackles, each link bigger than him. It was like gliding down the length of a brutal cathedral. And there were nine of them. Nine gigantic, disconcerting things just . . . hanging on the Valley side. If they ever fell, God knew what would happen.

All that, just to store the power the city needed for a single week.

Gale had been quiet, reading something on a tablet with a stylus hovering over the text. When January looked, he realized it was language exercises in—something that didn’t look like any language he had ever seen. It was more like music score for a piano; everything came in two lines, as though somehow the speaker was supposed to talk in chords. With a happy little jolt, January realized Gale would never have sat close enough to him for him see whatever they were reading before. There was room in the car for them to sit well away—there were two sets of seats facing each other, but Gale was next to him, not opposite.

“Please don’t tell Mx Francis,” Gale said, with what sounded like a genuine plea.

“What is that?” January asked.

Gale shifted as if talking about it were difficult, and January realized that somewhere along the way, Mx Francis had trained them to put any academic interests in the Unmentionables box alongside incest and golf.

“It’s a transcript of mammoth communication.”

“It’s a what now?” January squeaked. “Why have you got transcripts of mammoths?”

“I was a linguistics lecturer. I, er . . . well, one of the things I worked on was zoolinguistics, and the communication of megafauna. Elephants, mammoths; whales.”

“They have languages?”

“They have.”

January put his hands on his temples and made a tiny exploding noise, to say: mind blown.

Gale laughed the tentative laugh of a person not convinced they were being given a truthful reaction.