Page 88 of The Mars House

“It’s true that elephants never forget,” Gale said, and then they were walking out into the grove before January could argue any more.

“Are we about to watch them get gored?” January asked Sasha, who had come out too.

Sasha was strangely calm though. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Am I missing something? They’re wild animals—we just saw them tear up a railway. And an entire train.”

“Just watch,” Sasha said.

For someone who had only ever seen a relative do the job, Gale seemed astonishingly certain about what to do. They were walking slowly, in full view, but not creeping; and they were going towards, not the big bull, but a smaller mammoth with a tawny coat. She was grazing quietly close to the others who were worrying about the baby in the tree trunk, watching them, but not involved. January had a strange feeling she was judging whether or not to tell the others to leave the baby alone for a minute.

When she saw Gale, she jumped. It was the way a human would have jumped if they’d seen an unexpected mouse right up close, not necessarily a horrible thing, just a surprise. Gale put both hands up slowly to show they weren’t going to do anything sudden.

January was certain, certain, that the matriarch—that was who she was, he realized at a lag—was going to solve this human-mouse problem by crushing it. She had clearly had a long day. A frightened baby was hiding in a hollow tree. A gigantic bull had the worrying thousand-mile stare that veterans did. She wasn’t going to be in the mood to deal with a mystery mouse that wanted things. He gripped Sasha’s sleeve. The tendons of his cage gauntlet chinked against their watch.

“Do we even have anything that would deter a mammoth?”

“No. Quiet,” Sasha told him, but not impatient. They were nearly laughing. “Just let them do it.”

January had a flash of indignation. Sasha had spent weeks looking at him as if he might accidentally snap Gale’s neck, but now here was a herd of ice age megafauna with tusks the size of buildings and somehow Sasha was the picture of Zen.

The matriarch didn’t crush Gale. Instead, she dropped right onto her knees and made a sound that January couldn’t hear, only feel reverberating in the spaces between the bone and cartilage in his knees, and even though he had never heard it before, and never met elephants before, never mind a mammoth, something right in his skeleton—maybe something left over from when human beings had first walked on the ice—recognised it. She was laughing. As if she knew exactly what was going on, she put her head right down, and let Gale reach up to put the halo sensors on her.

It was the most uncanny, incredible thing he had ever seen. She made Gale look tiny. Standing, she was about eighty feet high—her eyelashes were as long as Gale’s arm—but she stayed still, and when the sensors were in place, she straightened up, unreadable, but calm. She was waiting. It wasn’t like seeing an ordinary animal. She looked wise. This would be, he realized, how it felt when humans finally found an alien species. They would be unfathomably different, but unfathomably the same as well.

The halo feed appeared in January’s glasses. It was a mind—that he could recognise—but he couldn’t read anything in the patterns. It was like Gale’s halo scans: there was clearly thinking going on, but how it worked wasn’t clear at all. But what was obvious was that there was a person behind it. With opinions and feelings and memories.

“You have to think in Mammoth,” Sasha explained softly. “They talk in two ways at the same time, like a piano, high and low. We can’t make the right sounds, so that’s why you need that machinery and the speakers.”

The speakers made an unearthly sound. It was how mountains would have spoken to each other, and in January’s glasses, the subtitles started. Like Sasha had said, they were piano score translations, always two lines at once. Either one alone wouldn’t have made any sense.

bad * lovely

weather * see you again

“Jesus Christ,” he breathed.

Very, very gently, the matriarch lifted her trunk and brushed the top of Gale’s head.

different * difficult

coat * day

“I don’t understand,” January whispered.

“They say coat when they mean clothes, on a human,” Sasha explained. “She’s saying it’s been a hard day and the Senator looks different.”

different * now

role

“They’re saying they look different because they have a different job now.”

now?

grandmother

“Like, in charge now. A senator.”