Page 91 of The Mars House

As best as he could, he said what he was about to do, and then rubbed the silk on the trunk of one of the young bulls, so that the fur stood up on end. Everyone laughed, humans and mammoths. The little bull loved it, stole the jacket, and rubbed it all over until he was a giant fluff-ball.

“That’s lightning too,” January tried. “But little-lightning, instead of . . . sky-lightning. It does different things, depending on how much there is.”

Gale helped him translate, and at last, it seemed clear that the humans weren’t just doing something bullthink, even if it was odd.

Drones hovered; they were recording, for when the internet came back on. The producers, when they talked through the speakers, sounded like kids let loose in a giant sweet shop, and January didn’t blame them. The footage would probably win them some kind of prize, later. Looking like joyful bubbles, the drones were swooping high, and out over the cliff, to watch the mammoths turn the windlasses; and down the Valleyside, the chains went taut, and the gravity trains began to rise. The mammoths didn’t like electric lights—they had a belief about the two moons which Gale couldn’t translate—and so it was all done by lamplight and the dim silvery glow that struggled through the dust. Each link in each chain was the size of a person. Everything was so gigantic that it made optical illusions. January’s mind kept trying to tell him he was seeing something smaller, nearer to him, and so his sense of distance warped bizarrely, to the point that he couldn’t tell how far away he was from Gale or the others.

Each windlass had a lock, so the mammoths could stop and rest, and eat. People from Songshu had brought crates of apples from the stores, and a cartload of raw corn from a farm further onto the Plains, for which Mx Ren had to trade five heat suits. Twice, the herd grandmother came out to see how things were going, and to take over if one of the others was tired.

Even in a heat suit, because heat suits were designed for Natural people, January was cold. The night had plunged down to minus thirty. There wasn’t anything real he could do, except be there and keep more important people company. He did the coffee runs and explained how things were going to the drones, interrupted once by the little bull with Gale’s jacket, who used it to fluff up his hair and turn him into a dandelion. The bull was sneaking up on anyone too distracted to notice a sneaking mammoth.

But mostly it was watching, and standing still, and feeling slowly colder and colder. He didn’t want to say anything. It was one of those experiences that, he could tell already, he’d forget later. Later, tonight would be only about the mammoths, about the raw awe and joy and worry of seeing such titan things moving among human beings and speaking, and the otherworldly creak of a windlass the size of a steamship turning and turning. Minds, or his at least, had a way of filtering out the uncomfortable dull in-between bits, especially when they came in among such spectacular things. Knowing that gave him a lot of patience with it. What he’d remember later wasn’t the cold or being uncomfortable, but being here.

About halfway through, he had to turn back to Songshu for a bathroom break. Other people were just vanishing into the woods, but he couldn’t even think about that; he was pretty sure he would get instant frostbite in places that he never wanted Dr Okonkwo to have access to.

Walking back was no problem, and he quite enjoyed how phantasmal everything looked in the dust; but walking back out to the gravity trains was a strain. The cage felt heavy, and it was an effort to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It was the cold: he had never realized just how much extra energy you needed to move about in cold like this, even with the heat suit. In theory if he just kept eating he’d have the calorie stores to spend on it, but he just couldn’t eat that much. Maybe on Antarctic bases on Earth, someone had invented a clever super-drink or something that was the food equivalent of jet fuel, but there was nothing like that here, because everyone was genetically engineered to function normally on normal food. He had to stop near the mammoths’ grove, leaning against the trunk of a giant dandelion. Everything ached. He felt like he’d been training for hours and hours. It was pathetic, but that didn’t stop it feeling dangerous. He should never have set out like this on his own. It hadn’t even occurred to him.

Someone tapped his shoulder and he looked round, and then squeaked and fell over, because towering above him was the matriarch.

She gave him what he was coming to recognise as the really-I-think-humans-are-indoor-animals mammoth once-over, and then without any more explanation, she picked him up like he was a little doll and carried him back to the cliff edge. He yelped, but he didn’t think she heard. Her fur was so dense that he thought he might vanish into it. It was instantly warm, and despite the madness of what was happening—Jesus Christ he was thirty feet off the sodding ground—he was relieved, and he almost didn’t want to go when she found Gale and dropped him on the ground next to them.

“Yours,” she explained gravely.

Gale helped him up, then dragged over one of the translation speakers on its little wheeled tripod. “Ah . . . ?”

She didn’t go. “The metal vines are hurting him. You must take them off.”

Gale brushed him off, very light, and lifted some pine needles out of his hair. January swallowed, caught between a wild kind of joy at what had just happened—he defied anyone to be stolen by a helpful mammoth and not turn into the person-version of a pop bottle that had been shaken up—and feeling like a child for needing to be rescued. “No, they’re keeping him weaker so he can’t hurt anyone. He would be too strong. As strong as three people.”

The matriarch gazed down at them quietly for what felt like a long time. “Bulls are strong,” she said at last. “It is part of grandmothering to find a way to let them be. This—” she flicked January’s cage where the high collar of it showed on the back of his neck, incredibly precisely, so that she only just bumped him sideways a few inches “—is not grandmothering.”

Gale frowned. “I don’t think I’m being clear. He would hurt someone accidentally—”

“And you are the grandmother,” she interrupted sharply. She sounded like the beginnings of an earthquake. She pointed back to the grove, to where the big bull had been, when January saw him, nibbling his way through the pine cones, looking a little bit cheered up now, and entertained by a game the babies were playing with giant blow-up ball Gale had brought for them. “He is stronger than three humans? I am stronger than many humans. Will you bind me?”

“No, it’s different,” Gale said, but they looked thrown off, more than they ever had, even when the Consul had won the debate.

January had a bizarre out-of-body moment where a detached part of his brain said: You’re very cold, it’s Sunday, and a senator is arguing about you with a mammoth. On Mars.

“Not different,” the matriarch said. “There is bull strength; this is small. There is grandmother strength: this is great.” She looked down at Gale hard. “Bulls must not try to be more than they are, it is true. But grandmothers must never try to make them less.”

“I see,” Gale said carefully.

The matriarch said nothing more, but in her eyes was a kind of wry glimmer, and January realized she knew the cage would probably never come off. She dragged her trunk gently across him, and across Gale, then paced away to see the other mammoths who were harnessed to the windlasses. The ground shook.

January and Gale stayed there for a while after she had gone.

“Was I just schooled about the nature of good government by a mammoth?” Gale asked at last.

“I think that’s what happened,” January agreed, a bit numb.

Gale was frowning in the way they did when they were about to feed someone through an intellectual mincing machine.

“But look,” January said quickly, because he was seeing a huge row hoving into view, and he desperately didn’t want Gale to personally irritate a mammoth. “Don’t argue with her. She doesn’t understand what cages do, she’s just seeing that you’ve tied someone up.”

Gale was silent for so long, watching the mammoths heave against the windlasses, that January thought they weren’t going to say anything, and he set out back towards the fire. But Gale touched his elbow to stop him.

“No, wait. You’ve been in the cage for weeks, you must need a break. There’s plenty of space out here. If anyone’s scared—it’s more of a them problem than a you problem.” They sighed. “And anyway, I think if she sees you in a cage again, she’s going to take you away and have you adopted by some better humans.”