Page 8 of The Mars House

Someone intern-looking was wearing a WE ARE MARS T-shirt.

It was such an innocuous, fun-sounding slogan. It wasn’t though. What it meant was, we are not Earth, and you’re not welcome here any more. It took a considerable bastard to wear that in a place like this. January tried to think about calm happy things, like puffins. He liked puffins. His mum had called them puffweens, which was even better.

“Right!” Val beamed from the front. “I’m Val Legasov, this is my rig and your safety is therefore my responsibility; this is my beautiful assistant January.”

January waved half-heartedly.

Puffins puffins puffins.

Every single person in the chairs was at least three or four generations naturalised. Even sitting, it was clear they were all seven feet tall. After the grey of the factory locker rooms and the grey boiler suits, their clothes looked luxurious. Heavy tailored robes, usually in dark jewel colours, the way that hummingbird feathers were dark and bright at the same time. Everyone had long hair; rich people always had long hair here.

“Shouldn’t you be wearing a cage?” someone said to him.

“No, he’s in a hazardous work environment and he’s more than four metres from you,” Val said, unoffended, though January was a bit. He wondered if they thought he might lunge at them. No, that was piggy and stupid. If a polar bear had been sitting behind the yellow line, he wouldn’t have been feeling too confident about the yellow line either. “The sheltered walkway back is Natural only, he has to cross the yard, there’s stuff falling and things on scaffolding and Christ knows what. Jan?”

Everyone looked expectantly at him. He tried to arrange his face into something pleasant. It wasn’t their fault if they looked like the kind of people who would run you over with a nice car and then bill your relatives for hosing you off the bonnet.

“Okay, welcome to Tereshkova Station. We produce all the water you will find on Mars. Nowhere else can do this on an industrial scale, it’s just us; and the reason it’s just us is that this is bloody dangerous and building two of these buggers will really tempt fate.”

He was glad when they laughed. They weren’t too frightened of Earthstrongers, then, despite that early question. Uncomfortably, he realized he felt now exactly like he had used to do when an all girls’ school trip visited the theatre. Thirteen-year-old girls were, of course, terrifying monsters, and he always wanted to hide in a cupboard until they’d gone; but all that aside, he was six foot two and very strong and a man all at the same time, and they—were not. The sole duty of anyone like him during those school trips was to be kind and clearly harmless, because to be anything else would have been foul.

Maybe these people were rich and annoying, but the idea that he might genuinely frighten them made him queasy.

“Those silos on the far left there are full of biowaste, being melted into fuel by an enzyme that will dissolve you in a few seconds if you get it on you. If you see a funny stain on the ground, please don’t touch it, or you’ll be leaving in a jar.”

More grins. Right; good.

“That fuel is then run through that machine over there, which reaches over a thousand degrees Celsius on the inside. The reaction splits the hydrocarbons and gives us hydrogen. That next tower is a giant vat of hydrogen. It is explosive, so . . . do not smoke, or someone is going to fire-hose you. That hydrogen goes along these pipes here, and then it’s forced to react with oxygen. That reaction is exothermic, which is why the tower is surrounded by cooling pipes. If we lose our electricity and that cooling stops, we explode. And lastly, over that way, is the water tower.”

He paused. “I know this is obvious, but you’re going to see uncaged Earthstrongers working in the yard and on the rig. It’s just about safety. If we fall, we don’t die, and if anything goes wrong, we can run faster; and we’re stupid, so we sign up to work in the big Death Machine.”

People laughed again and something in him that been taut all morning started to relax. He wasn’t scary; he wasn’t.

“Everyone is really friendly; but if you feel worried, the control rooms and managerial staff areas are naturalised only. Val’s going to take you round for a tour now. Don’t wander off. I’m the one with the hoover and the jar if you do.”

Val patted him and herded everyone off.

He sat down on the windowsill, or started to, but someone Natural was coming up to the yellow line, over the line, right up to him. He went down fast onto one knee.

“You shouldn’t cross the line,” he squeaked.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, get up. I’m the Senator’s press secretary,” they said, as if that meant the rules didn’t apply to them. They were intensely chic, with gold beads all through their waist-long braids, and a vivid yellow coat and—maybe because if you were doing publicity for the actual devil then you were too busy to remember your own name—a necklace that said SOLLY. “Would you mind doing an interview when they get here? Just about working here. Your accent is gorgeous.”

“No offence, but I’d rather liquefy in Silo 4,” said January, picking himself up and then wincing when his knee twinged.

“Perfect!” the press secretary beamed, and then looked at something over his head. “Aha. Here they come now.”

What looked like the staff of the entire plant came out to see the Senator arrive. The younger people, January noticed, had gone giggly. He trudged towards the crowd, feeling grumpy. Politicians were always glamorous here, but Aubrey Gale was only ever one soulful stare from reducing at least seventy per cent of any given room to fanning themselves and asking about the air conditioning. The array of exquisite tailoring tended to set off the other thirty per cent. With all that, January was pretty certain most people had no idea what Gale thought about anything, because Gale didn’t need to think about anything; they just needed to stand there, looking like a god, and people would hurry along with presents. And votes.

January, however, did know what Gale thought about things. He followed the news like a bloodhound when it came to Gale.

“Now, you mustn’t kill anyone,” Val said. “Deep breaths.”

“Can I not throw something? Not anything bad; just, like, a sock. With a brick in it.”

“Have some more chocolate.”

“Wait, what, there’s more?” he said hopefully.