Page 7 of The Mars House

January pointed at her with the bar. “You’ve got a massive secret stash of Stolichnaya in the biofuel locker.”

“I have,” Val said, sage. Then, “How do you know?”

January smiled, because it would have been hard to know Val even for five minutes without suspecting a secret vodka stash. Whether she had recently been close to any or not, she was always coated in a patina of steel dust and splotches of inexplicable white gloss paint, and she had once drilled through the ceiling in order to spy, via a periscope she’d prepared earlier, on the Natural people’s locker room. January didn’t think she was being weird, with the periscope. She had gone away looking purposeful. January suspected some kind of blackmail aimed at the supervisor, to whom Val was married and with whom she seemed to be permanently at war. It was a subject of factory-wide speculation as to whether the war was a joke or not.

“Before you all disappear off,” the supervisor called, “remember Senator Gale is visiting today. Nobody do anything obscene in front of the camera, it’s going out on national news. They might want to talk to some of you, so don’t swear and don’t go on a rant about politics, and I’ll buy you all doughnuts. All right?”

January had forgotten it was today.

He rolled down the sleeves of his boiler suit for something to do with his hands. This was actually his favourite boiler suit. It was small enough, which was unusual—the companies didn’t make them specifically for Earthstrongers and seemingly at random they’d do five little ones per batch and you had to fight for them—and he had remembered, finally, to bring a belt to cinch it close enough. There was hardly any paint on it. As factory fashion went, it was sharp. It was silly, but he felt more like himself on days when he wasn’t wearing one with holes in.

Val dusted him with the duster again.

“I bet,” she said, “that there’s some underwear in Lost Property.”

January smiled but had to look down, because he didn’t think he could hide what he thought about Senator Gale, but he didn’t want anyone to ask him about it. “Whatever you want to do with the underwear, I’m not involved and I didn’t hear about it.”

“Well. They’ll be gone soon enough.” Somehow, Val managed to be quite aware of the news, and politics, and just never apply any of it to herself. It made her basically well disposed to everybody, even if they were wearing a PUT EARTHSTRONGERS IN CAMPS T-shirt with a picture of someone throwing away a key on the back. January wished he could be like that. He was hoping that if he could just watch her enough and copy her properly, he might be able to train his soul up to be that strong. Then it wouldn’t matter if his bones weren’t.

“But we have to do the safety briefing for all the press morons and aides they’re bringing with them.”

“What’s this we?” he asked with dread.

She clapped his arm. “They’ll be taking pictures. Nobody wants my face anywhere except inside a bag. You’re all good-looking and you’ve got a fun accent and you used to be famous. They’ll listen to you, even if it’s just because they’re ogling you. Great power to be had from ogling.”

“No, no, no, safety briefings are your—”

“Good lad,” she said cheerfully.

“Mx Legasov,” a passing Natural person in a suit said, indignant. “For God’s sake, you can’t call people lad.”

“We’re family,” Val said. January felt himself go red. They weren’t family; they were acquaintances. January was certain that Val didn’t distinguish him from the forty other people in her direct care.

“Just be careful who catches you using language like that,” the suit-person said, looking harassed and, even in irritation, managing to give off an aura of chartered accountancy. “Nobody wants a lawsuit.”

Val turned to January with an elaborate bow. “Mx Stirling?”

“Mx Legasov,” said January in his poshest voice.6

The suit-person scowled at them both and crabbed off.

Above them, in the brilliant floodlights, dust from the storm above ground was spinning between the tangles of pipes and the cooling towers. Right up the length of the vast yard, rendered as tiny as bright moths at this distance, there were safety inspectors in orange jackets way up in the heights, probably trying to assess if the dust was doing damage to the machinery.

January wondered about a day off tomorrow, determinedly, so that he wouldn’t think about how much he would have loved to see someone shove Aubrey bloody Gale off a cooling tower.

Val propelled him towards the control room, where he could already see glimpses of smartly dressed people waiting.

6 He’d heard “Mx” pronounced lots of ways since arriving in Tharsis—people whose first language was Russian tended to say “mikh,” like Mikhail; Mandarin speakers said “mishi,” because the characters for it were 蜜师—roughly, “secret-person,” in the same formula as things like 老师 (laoshi, teacher) and 律师 (lushi, lawyer) which January thought was excellent because it made everyone sound like a spy; and in English it sounded like “Mc,” as if everyone were Scottish. To January’s great joy, there was someone called Mx Wang in HR who liked tartan, and in his head they were very solidly McWang, mastermind of a plot to heroically invade England.

4

The control room had a broad window that looked across the whole plant, from the hydrogen production side on the left, all the way round a titan panorama of pipes and walkways and pumps to the water storage towers, lunging far further into the air than anything of their sort ever would have on Earth. As January and Val passed inside, into a glorious wave of heat, he shot an instinctive glance towards the giant neon readout on the tower, even though he already knew it was all right.

There was a stir when people noticed them. He kept well behind the yellow line marked in tape on the floor, marked every few paces with a big E, and a big 地.

He was glad to see that Senator Gale wasn’t there yet. This was just the press and the general hangers-on who always seemed to float around politicians. Probably Gale was above such sublunary considerations as safety briefings.

And, in that case, maybe the day would be lovely after all. Maybe Gale would poke a suspicious stain that was in fact made of the special digestive enzyme in Silo 4 that made biowaste into biofuel, and do everyone a favour by turning immediately into goo.