Page 90 of The Mars House

“Yes. We can use dead vines to fasten around you, so you don’t have to pull with your trunk. It’s safe. It won’t hurt anyone. And if you don’t like it, you can say, and we can stop.”

Dead vines; that had to be harnesses.

“How long?”

“For one day. Seven of you, if that’s all right.”

“That’s all right.” She looked down at Gale for a long time, quiet. “It’s very difficult to be the grandmother of the herd. Everyone always watching you. Bulls always chafing.”

“Yes.”

“You put your bull in metal vines,” she said, and January realized with a shock that she was talking about him.

Gale laughed. “I didn’t do that, he did. He chooses.”

January found his fingers hooking under the cage’s sternum, which they seemed to decide to do whenever he was feeling awkward. And he did feel strangely awkward. Gale had thought it was funny, but the matriarch seemed not to. She was giving him a long study that, even coming from a mammoth, didn’t look very approving.

“Did he,” was all she said in the end, and perhaps it was clunky translation, but it sounded doubtful to him. She paused. “We hurt your metal road and your metal monster. I’m very sorry. Everyone was scared of the fire. He panicked.” She looked at the great bull who was still slumped against the tree. “Not his fault. Fear-mind not the same as calm-mind, especially for bulls. Cannot change. No metal vines for him.”

January had a prickle of unease. No metal vines for him; she had phrased it in a way where Gale could interpret it as a bad thing, that was there was no constraining him, but something about the way she shifted, to put herself fractionally more between the unhappy bull and the humans, gave January a strong feeling that she didn’t mean it like that. It sounded more like she meant: Get away from him with your weird metal vines. He tried to put it out of his head. He wasn’t a Mammoth translator.

Gale, for sure, seemed not to read into it. “I know. I understand. It’s okay. I can fix them later.”

“This isn’t a trick, for revenge about the metal road?” the matriarch asked gradually.

Just in the last minute or so, she had gone from being clearly pleased to see Gale, to much less trusting. She kept studying January and he couldn’t help thinking it was because of him. She didn’t like the cage, or she didn’t like him, he couldn’t tell.

“No.” Gale paused. “The metal hills are near here. Everyone here will still be able to hear what’s happening up there. I can leave some of my herd here with the rest of yours. You can kill them if it’s a trick.”

She thought about it, cast one last slow look over January, and then patted Gale gently. “Then we will help you make your lightning, grandmother.”

And so Dr Molotov built mammoth harnesses from replacement chain for the trains—things they could get out of themselves when they wanted—and it was only early evening by the time they were ready. From what January could tell through the ribbon breaks in the dust, the moons weren’t even out yet. He thought he caught a tiny shimmer that might have been the Pole Star.

There was no software that could translate from human to mammoth. The human had to do mammoth thinking and relay that through the halo and the speakers; even when Gale explained that the noises humans made among themselves was talking, the mammoths were sceptical and January had a feeling that they didn’t see how it could possibly work. But Gale did teach everyone a few useful things they could all transmit through a halo, and there were plenty of halos when they raided a weary Dr Okonkwo’s supply.

Mammoths had please and thank you like everyone else; they had pull, and stop, and now, but they were curious too, and like anyone else, they were wary about being involved until someone could show them how it worked. Unlike the grandmother, most of the others didn’t like the idea of letting humans eat lightning, in case it hurt them, and because humans often didn’t know how to look after themselves, and were they completely sure about this? If you found one in the desert, one of the young mammoths said seriously, they were always helpless. They couldn’t find water or hunt or anything, they would just sit there and die if you didn’t scoop them up and put them near to some other humans. The mammoth theory was that humans were so closely bound up in their herds that a single human alone was always going to be in danger. It sort of went mad—or, like bees, humans were a hive, and any single one didn’t really have a considerable enough brain to look after itself. The living thing, the entity, was the swarm.

January thought that humans should ask mammoths their opinions about more things.

So it didn’t work for Gale to explain. Gale was just one human; there had to be evidence that other humans in the herd agreed it was necessary, and it turned out, somehow to nobody’s surprise except January’s, that he was better at thinking in Mammoth than Mx Ren or Mx Francis and the others.

“You’re closer to old ways of living,” Mx Ren pointed out. “You still think in terms of bulls and grandmothers.”

With Gale coaching him through, January had a go at explaining too. He had a feeling that it was lightning that was the problem, even though that was really the only word you could have in Mammoth for electricity. Lightning sounded dangerous, and the herd must have seen it hit the mountains, or even hit mammoths. But they weren’t slow to understand ideas. They had huge ideas, and they used them, he was noticing, as metaphors even in ordinary conversation. When they said something was stupid, what they actually said was bullthink.

“They’re so gendered,” Mx Francis complained.

January took a breath to say that it might not be such a bad thing, a matriarchy, but he didn’t have time, because Gale smacked Mx Francis over the back of the head.

“Do we have anything to make static with?” he asked Gale.

“Static. Ah . . . yes. Yes.” They pulled off their coat, and took off the jacket they had on underneath. “This is silk.”

January hesitated. “I might—get mammoth on it?”

“Are you seriously saying you believe I wouldn’t rather be wearing tweed?” Gale asked.

A mammoth tapped him on the head to remind him he was meant to be explaining things.