Page 109 of The Mars House

“Where’s Kasha?” Yuan asked January, sounding scared he wasn’t supposed to talk.

“I don’t know, but she’s a really smart dog, she’ll be okay.”

“Can you two not swear in front of the toddler?” Dr Molotov said at the same time, voice high.

Gale pushed the tent flap open. They were alone, and they looked defeated. Either they hadn’t found anyone else, or they had and they hadn’t been able to wake anyone. “All right, enough. Enough.”

They all went quiet. It was like having the teacher back in the room.

“Sasha, it isn’t his fault. He’s right, he would have been demented to trust me. January . . .”

“Don’t, Senator,” Sasha said, very soft.

Gale brushed their shoulder and Sasha looked away. “January. You said—rightly—that the reason you didn’t trust me is that I didn’t ask if you’d found River. But I didn’t need to. Because I am River.”

“I’m too tired for weird Tharsese jokes,” January said. “You’re all super funny, ha ha, now tell me what’s actually happening and stop taking the piss.”

But Gale was giving him an anxious uncertain look, one that said they didn’t know what else to tell him, and little by little, it settled on him that this wasn’t a joke at all.

“Explain,” was all he had it left in him to say.

47

The trouble with running around after mammoths with a halo and lots of recording equipment was that the mammoths found this very peculiar. Now that the dictionary was finally pulling together, River had confirmed a long-standing suspicion about all the recordings of the university’s databases: they were mostly pachyderm conversations about what the funny little ape things were doing and whether perhaps they needed some sort of help.

There were ways to splice together recordings and come up with the Mammoth approximation of, please would you talk to each other normally because I’d really like to eavesdrop for my research paper; but after years of trying it, River wasn’t convinced that mammoths always recognised Mammoth when it coming from one of the funny ape things with the speakers. They saw it in the way people saw parrots mimicking them. If it occasionally came out with something coherent, then the sensible mammoth wrote that off as a fluke. And that was before you had to try and explain what a research paper was, or what writing was, or why you liked to do it.

This herd, though, was used to its funny ape thing. They understood about research papers.34 Except for the calves. If River stayed for long, they wanted to play football.

“No, but the thing is,” River said to the baby mammoth who was, right now, stealing the halo and holding it up, knowing very well it was out of reach, “this is important, because the Penglai mission is going to reach Alpha Centauri in three years, and you are our only realistic dry run at learning to talk to aliens before we actually have to. I know I look silly, but I mean it. People on Earth are trying this with elephants, but between you and me, you have bigger vocal ranges and you’re less primed to gore people. So—no pressure at all, but—look, you can have a pine cone if you give it back.”

The calf abandoned the halo and rooted through River’s bag. Not far away, his mother made a deep amused rumble that was impossible to really hear, but thrummed up through the ground. It was such a wonderful noise. She was almost half as tall as the sequoia next to her; fifty feet away, River was still in her shadow, deep and cold. The calf’s father, a bull who had uncharacteristically stayed with the herd rather than wandering off alone the way they usually did, had sat down not far away, clearly watching and enjoying himself. He had a gigantic stack of pine cones next to him. The whole herd had gathered them up and were snacking on them, very much, River was beginning to suspect, like humans ate popcorn.

“There’s no football in there, you unholy terror.”

The calf was very sure that there was, upturned the pack, and then triumphantly nudged the deflated beach ball over in River’s direction. He honked in a way that very clearly meant, Do the thing, do the thing.

“I hate children,” River told him.

“Moo,” said the calf, unmoved.

There was a gunshot.

In the forest, it was a strangely unobtrusive noise. River swung around. The only reason to shoot out here was if there was a polar bear inside the perimeter.

No more shots. Either the bear was dead, or the person was.

River snatched up their own rifle. The baby mammoth prodded them in the back, interrogative.

“I’ll be back,” River promised. They were pretty sure the mammoths understood what that meant, even without speakers and a halo. The calf looked put out all the same.

The Songshu pine forest was the only place on Mars that had mist. Usually River was pleased about that, because it was a tiny link to Earth and the things everyone had left behind, but today, they would have given a kingdom for a clear desert morning. Instead, the vapour clung in rags among the great pines, and the ground was spongy and scattered about with tiny streams. Wonderful news for the ecosystem people working out of the Songshu greenhouses; less so if you were trying to find someone who was being eaten by a bear.

“Hello?” River shouted. “Anyone here?”

Someone smacked into them sideways, full of panic, and the two of them went down with a thump on the pine-needly ground.

“River! River, I’ve—I think—Max—”