The mars house, p.33
The Mars House, page 33
“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.”
“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?”
“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.
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.”
