Page 89 of The Mars House

“I got that one,” January murmured, and then thought: hang on. Gale’s been a senator for what, three or four years. River was doing this with Shang when they vanished, and that was less than two years ago; Gale would have been a senator already when this project was going on. It wasn’t new, that they were the grandmother for their herd.

Or did she think Gale was River? Humans must all look alike. No; she hadn’t even asked. She sounded sure.

There wasn’t time to wonder about inconsistent timelines, but it stuck irritatingly in his mind all the same, like a piece of old thistle from a hay bale.

Right

Right

“It’s emphasis if you say the same thing both ways.”

“How do you know so much about this?”

“I live with the Senator,” Sasha said tolerantly. “It would be weirder if I didn’t know.”

January shook his head, wondering how in the worlds Gale had had time, in life, to know any of this, when they also ran House Gale and the grid and all the rest.

The matriarch was still patting her trunk across Gale’s shoulders. It seemed to January like a very close study.

why

coming?

“How in God’s name are you supposed to explain electricity and power consumption and gravity trains to a mammoth?” January whispered to Sasha.

“I don’t know,” Sasha said, looking worried too. “I guess—this is where we see how good the Senator is.”

As far as January could understand from the eerie two-tone sentences through the speakers, which seemed to separate out different parts of meaning in a way he could only just get his fingernails over,31 what Gale said was something like this:

“You know how humans eat lightning? We can’t make new lightning in the storm. Everyone in the herd is starving now, and soon, they’ll die. Usually we harvest the lightning from the sun, but—there’s no sun now.”

“We’re hungry too,” the matriarch said. “Everything is dying.”

“I know. I can bring food for your whole herd, we have lots of mammoth food. You can have it no matter what you say next, but I was hoping you could help us too.”

“I haven’t got any human lightning.” January had no idea how you went about reading tone of voice in mammoths, but he thought she looked wary.

“I know. But there is a way to make it, with the steel hills on the edge of the cliff. But they are too big for us to move. Even the strong humans can’t move it. Only mammoths could do it.”

“How?”

“There are big metal vines. If you pull them hard enough, the hills will move.” The chains moved the windlasses. “Moving them makes the lightning.” Lifting the trains made potential energy made electricity; January liked moving them makes lightning better though.

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

She was quiet for a moment. “How does it make lightning?”

January had no clue how to explain how a gravity train made electricity even if he was allowed to use normal ideas, never mind just the ones that mammoths knew.

Gale didn’t even seem flustered. “You know when you pull your trunk down a tree really hard, it feels hot? That heat, that’s a sort of baby lightning. When we move the steel hills, their counterweights drag down the cliff, and they make that heat too, a lot of it. That’s all we need. Once we have that, we can make the lightning big, and we can feed everybody with it.”

“You know, it would be much easier if you just ate pine cones,” the matriarch said philosophically.

“I know,” Gale agreed.

“The metal hills are very strange. Some of the herd are frightened of them. Too human. Is it safe to pull the metal vines?”