Page 6 of The Mars House

Someone who hadn’t thought about it properly put their hand up. “Why is the government so keen on people naturalising but not on cages?”

“Because,” the barrister sighed, “Earthstrongers are unbelievably dangerous.”

Tereshkova Wharf had its own underground stop. January and all the other Earthstrongers got off there, just in time to hear the hammer of the night shift’s end-bells. After the bright carriage, the platform beyond looked dark, even though it was floodlit. The dust wasn’t blowing in this far underground, but it was settling on the floor from people’s clothes, and on the tracks where the trains pulled it in.

Almost straightaway, he had a panicky feeling, like he was drowning, only without the water.

That was just slightly thinner air than his lungs wanted. It was fine.

The workers’ entryway into the plant was, like everything here, divided into two. Over one gate, there was a sign that said NATURALISED in Mandarin and English. That one led up a set of steel steps, into the upper locker room. Over the other, it said EARTHSTRONG. That one led down, to the lower. All the way down, other signs yelled at you to make sure you were on the right side, that cages must not come off yet, and that anyone who was supposed to be in one but wasn’t would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

4 If he’d been on the big Everything App everyone here used, he could have run a filter over the broadcast and heard it all in perfect English. The software was amazing. But to get the app, you had to be a citizen, with a social security number. And without the app, you couldn’t order deliveries, you couldn’t book tickets for anything, or pay normally in shops, use vending machines, and a dozen other things. This, January was coming to feel, was very typically Tharsese. It was that painstaking, meticulous kind of unhelpfulness you only normally encountered in the post office.

5 Mori and Daughter, on Filigree Street, had been a watchmaking shop since the 1880s, expanding only with a serious grudge into electrical timekeeping at the end of the twenty-first century, when they made a name for themselves doing to phones what Rolex had done to watches. The guarantees were famously issued for five hundred years. Mori timepieces only ever increased in value, and if January had sold his, he could probably have bought a house. He didn’t want a house, though. He wanted something of his mum’s.

3

The locker room always furled out a wonderful reassuring smell of turpentine and engine oil. It was freezing today, and January could see his breath as he hung up his coat and slotted his charging card into the bank of plugs. The longer the card sat there, the longer it charged, at five kilowatts per hour. That was a generous rate of pay, for a manual labour job.

Val Legasov, his section chief, wheeled her chair up beside him, produced an orange feather duster, and dusted him with it to say hello. Val was one of those swearing filthy dinosaurs who had been born fifty-five years old and who nonetheless managed to be completely charming. On days when he was unhappy, it made him sad that she was married.

“Early bird today,” she noted.

“I saw on the news about how maybe there won’t be enough power to keep us running properly?”

“They can store solar power for a few weeks,” she said, like she wasn’t worried. “There’s plenty of water in the Tower, though. Boss says enough to keep Tharsis going the whole week even if we can’t make a drop more.” She listened. If you knew what to listen for, you could hear the gigantic engines working—or not—under the floor and in the walls. “Sounds all right to me.”

January nodded, but privately he couldn’t help feeling unconvinced. “And the, er . . . duster?”

“It’s my new poking device,” she explained. January edged a bit further away, into the already long queue for the coffee.

When the start bell went, the floor supervisor came out onto the steel balcony above everyone. The supervisor was from here, and even so far above all the Earthstrongers, looked tapered and delicate. The safety barrier on the balcony was bullet-proof glass. Not because anyone had ever shot at it, but because on somebody’s birthday last year, drunken stupidness had happened and a bunch of people had worked out that without cages, they could jump the fifteen feet up to the balcony and whack the glass, which had led to an alarming version of stick-the-tail-on-the-donkey and then the obvious consequence. January had still been finding glass in his boiler suit for a week afterwards.

“All right, up to the yellow line everyone! Good. Cages off.”

Everyone hit the release button of their resistance cages, which was over the heart. Around the room, fifty steel skeletons opened out with a long sigh. January stepped away from his, feeling like he was floating. It wasn’t really a feeling he enjoyed; more than anything, it was like taking a retainer off your teeth. In one way it was a relief, but in another, you could feel things settling more than they should, planning to creep back to where you didn’t want them. Whenever his was off, a clock ran in the back of his head. He started to feel panicky after seven or eight hours.

It wasn’t because he was scared of accidentally naturalising. That took weeks and weeks. What dragged at him was how much stronger he had used to be. The cage simulated the kind of resistance Earth’s gravity made, yes, but a fortnight before being in a refugee camp, he’d been training for eight hours a day. He’d been able to lift more than his own weight above his head. Carry more. An alarming amount of ballet was weight training. Now, even with the cage, it had been a year since he’d done any real exercise. He’d lost weight, and fast: you had to eat a hell of a lot to keep up the kind of muscle he’d had before, and he just couldn’t afford it here, even if he had somehow found time and energy and space to go through even a quarter of those old drills. Most of his shirts were a size too big for him now. It shouldn’t have bothered him, it shouldn’t, because it wasn’t harmful—he’d used to be an athlete and now he was a normal person, that was fine, but he just felt less. He could feel it where he wouldn’t have expected to; his knees felt weaker, his wrists, some muscle or tendon he couldn’t name right under the socket of one hip. And the longer he spent out of the cage, the more he could feel what strength he did have left eroding away in this patient, insidious gravity.

As everyone shuffled into a queue to walk out to the main floor, there was a flurry among them, because everyone was throwing baseballs or apples from hand to hand. It was easy to tell who was new here, because they were the ones whose balls shot off and skittered away—then they had to make the Run of Shame to get them back, to applause. January threw his straight from hand to hand at first, letting his muscles get used to the eerie shock of how easy it was out of the cage, and then, once they were more used it, looped the ball up to eye level. Very, very gently, was how you had to do it; with so little force you felt like the ball wouldn’t even lift out of your hand. Val steered her chair along the line, watching people, making sure they were doing the exercises properly, as sharp as any dance teacher.

She had done them too, until recently. He didn’t know her precise reasons for naturalising, but she’d gone into one of the centres six months ago. The wheelchair was because of nerve damage. They’d had to give her a mechanical heart too. She said she didn’t mind; she said she was thrilled with the free car from the government, which was dead flashy.

He must still have been distracted from this morning, because he dropped his ball. Val caught it, gave him a suggestive look, and pretended to eat it.

“You all right?” she asked, when he forgot to laugh.

“What?”

“Listen, I found a box of chocolate bars in the old storage shed, do you want one? Out of date but the packaging’s fine.” She held out a bar.

“Oh, thanks,” January said. He hadn’t seen chocolate for weeks. Food was expensive here, given the water situation. He thought about it after the first bite. “Sort of undertaste of industrial methane?”

“Christ, throw it away!”

“No, no, it’s good.”

“You’ve got a problem,” Val told him.