Page 92 of The Mars House

“I like my current humans,” January promised, and then faltered, because Gale looked at him as if he had just twisted a knife between their ribs. Whatever they were thinking, though, they didn’t say it.

“You can get changed in the tea-and-coffee tent, there’s a heater,” was all they said, and they unlocked his cage.

“Just until we go back inside?”

“Right,” Gale said, but they looked troubled, gazing after the matriarch, and he couldn’t tell if it was because, again, they were terrified but determined not to let anyone know.

He had to get out of his heat suit, which was complicated and unpleasant when he felt just how cold the air really was, and then out of most of his clothes as well. When he unlocked the cage and pressed the release, he had the most incredible illusion of flying. If he’d shut his eyes, he would have thought he’d bobbed up to float around on the tent ceiling. It seemed insane to look and see he was still on the ground. If getting out of a cage after eight hours felt odd, then getting out of it after two months was a special genetically modified type of bananas. When he tried to step away from the open steel skeleton to get his clothes back on, he moved too strongly, and fell over—and then when he pushed down on the ground to try and get up again, it was too much and he sent himself jolting sideways.

“Are you all right?” Gale asked from outside. They must have heard a thump.

“Yep. Don’t wait for me, this . . . might take a little bit of thought,” he said to the tent wall. Very, very carefully, he eased his hands flat to the ground again, and pushed so delicately he was sure he wouldn’t move at all, but it was enough to see him upright. Getting one knee under him and then standing up was tricky, but little by little, he got back into his clothes, and back into the heat suit. He cast around for something to throw between his hands, found an orange, and then had to explain embarrassedly to the cook why there was an orange exploded on the floor. At last, he edged outside and walked up and down until he was sure he wasn’t going to rocket himself off the edge of the cliff. Not far away, Sasha was watching him hard, one hand resting on their gun, looking like they might be planning a brain haemorrhage.

Partly as way to stay warm, partly to show that, even though he wasn’t in his cage for now, he wouldn’t be moving about much, January stuck near the fire pit that was keeping the kettles hot. There was a windbreak that blocked most of the dust. He alternated between watching the mammoths at the windlasses, which was mesmerising, and watching the zithers of dust that did make it past the windbreak and caught fire in miniature comet-tails. Dr Okonkwo came out briefly to ask him how Gale seemed (fine, but how would he tell?) and overlapped with Mx Ren, who had watched a documentary about Antarctica and had taken it to heart about keeping your Earthstronger stuffed with enough calories in cold conditions.

“Nearly there,” Gale said, emerging from the dust and radiating happiness. January had a pang, because he’d never seen them like this before. He wanted to hug them, but he was absolutely not coordinated enough to do that with any confidence he wouldn’t break their ribs.

The mammoths had realized he was suddenly much stronger, because now he could work the locks on their harnesses without any mechanical help, and the little bull who liked static electricity had been challenging him to arm-and-trunk-wrestling contests. They were talking too quickly for the translation software to pick it all up, but he had a feeling that the mammoths had a betting pool going about the matches. Certainly there had been a delighted honk from one of them when he won, and the little bull dropped theatrically onto his back with all his feet in the air.

“Have you been talking to them?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t let them start,” Dr Okonkwo grumbled, hands shoved deep in pockets. “We’ll be here till July on the construction of mammoth gerunds.”

“You know nobody likes you,” January said.

“God’s sake, why does everyone keep saying that?”

“Wisdom of crowds, mate,” said January, who had no idea who else had said that, but suspected he was destined to be their true love.

“They have myths,” Gale said, pulling off their dust mask to drink some coffee. “It’s incredible. And some of the stories are about things that—well, they know things they shouldn’t be able to know. The species here is only two hundred and fifty years old, they were resurrected out of test tubes for Mars, so that’s only eight generations of mammoths; but they have stories about a dream time when everything was heavier, and the horizon was further away, which does sound like . . .”

“Nonsense,” grumped Dr Okonkwo.

But even Mx Ren looked intrigued.

“Earth,” January said, and found himself smiling too, because if that was somehow true, then the worlds were subtly, quietly better than he had thought.

Gale gave him some coffee, glowing. He held his hands open so they could rest the cup in them without the risk of touching him, but they gave him that soldierly look that said don’t be ridiculous and closed his fingers gently around it. He noticed himself grinning like a mad person, and reflected that he was really nothing more than a human-shaped version of Kasha: basically all he wanted from life was to play jumping and for someone to occasionally tell him he was a Good Boy.

“They’re up!” someone yelled. “They’re coming!”

Everyone ran to the cliff edge to see. Sure enough, the gravity trains creaked into view, and at last, they docked with their magnetic locks with a howl of freezing metal, and there was a human-mammoth cheer.

Because they were wild, though, the mammoths didn’t stay. The grandmother looked at Gale and January for a long moment, unreadable, and turned away. They all walked into the forest, shaking the ground.

31 River Gale had written the only extant pachyderm dictionary, he found out later. Lots of people had theories about the way mammoths divided up their speech, but what River had to say about it rang truer to January than anything else he found. The rule was, broadly: adjectives, descriptions, and very personal information above in the high strain, but actions and impersonal fact-type things in the deeper one. The reason (and River had asked several mammoths exactly this, because the best person to know why mammoths did things was a mammoth) was that the lower vocal range had evolved so low because the deeper the sound, the greater the distance it could carry. Mammoths could talk to each other across miles. But the kinds of things you needed to say to people over a long distance were different to the ones you said if you were snacking on pine cones with them. If you were calling over miles, what you were saying, usually, was something like: help, or come over here, there’s water, or there’s dust coming, or I’m on my way back now. What you did not need to say was: morning, how’s your mother, isn’t it lovely weather we’re having. That would have been odd, and rude, because the whole herd would hear it—it was like talking on an open radio channel. Which had a knock-on effort into ordinary conversation: core information went deep, and embellishment came higher. You could switch things around, but it changed the meaning radically. Saying “happy” down low, for example, was a mammoth joke, because what it really meant was I order you to become immediately happy.

40

As they walked through the forest back to Songshu, they passed the work site where Dr Molotov and the grounds maintenance people were cutting down trees. Each one was so enormous that fallen, it reached all the way to the twisted wreck of the railway tracks, and as well as dust, the air swam with sawdust and old earth. A tornado was riding across the Plains, strobing maroon lightning that shone on the folds of everyone’s sleeves, and on the surface of their masks. Up on the rig, the little fires from the welding torches still flew. The night shift had managed to come in partway on the train, and ride the rest of the way. They’d stay at Songshu too.

It seemed like something out of a dream, but the path back was full of horses. People from farms all across the Plains were bringing them, sometimes only one, a farm shire from one of the eco-establishments who never used grid electricity even at the best of times, and sometimes twenty from a training ranch. Tharsis horses were tall, just like everything else, but they were being corralled in exactly the same way they had been for hundreds of years; a couple of riders, a couple of fantastically trained dogs. They were getting ready to attach the horses to makeshift carts and wagons to get the firewood out to the train station and down the cliff.

The foyer was divided now into Natural and Earthstrong, so he followed the Earthstrong passage, which Sasha’s team had separated from the Natural one with bulletproof glass. Gale walked on the other side, and with a playfulness he had never known from them before, trailed one hand along the glass close to him. He did the same, full of a fragile building joy.

They’d done it. No one was going to die. Tereshkova Wharf was going to have enough water. It wouldn’t explode. The internet was coming back on. They might even get the array up before the fleet arrived.

And mammoths had myths about Earth.