The mars house, p.24
The Mars House, page 24
Max was wearing the Gale pearls in that picture upstairs.
“Okay. We’re ready,” Mx Francis said.
It was a little shock to come back to himself and remember he had to do some acting now.
“Just try to imagine how you’d be if you’d never taken any drugs and you didn’t live in a dumpster,” Mx Ren told him brightly, with a glitter that said: Look, I’d never say it if you looked in any way like that. I’m saying it because you’re worried you look like that and I think that’s obviously hysterical.
“Oh my God, you can’t say that,” Mx Francis said, going high.
“Or I could imagine how you’d be if you weren’t possessed by Baal, eater of children and prince of the toad-infested swamps of hell,” January suggested.
Mx Ren pretended to bite him, and January grinned.
Mx Francis looked a bit wobbly about what was happening. “Could we have less . . . er . . . open abuse?”
“You look great,” Mx Ren said gently, and clapped January’s shoulder. “Right. And . . . rolling.”
Everyone else got out of the shot. Looking like an interested crystal ball, a camera drone lifted above January’s head, and he pretended to be concentrating on the livestream, where somehow the influencer was still talking about pearls. Immediately on cue, Gale sent him a text. It said, Could you come down to my room? I need to ask a favour.
“Probably about Earth etiquette for the ambassador of somewhere important,” he lie-speculated to the drone as it followed him out and down the corridor to Gale’s room, past more of those wonderful tiny courtyards of bonsai forests and hummingbirds. Mx Francis ghosted after.
The door was already resting open on its latch. He tilted it open.
People at home wore less at formal events. People showed off their shoulders and their arms. Here, formal clothes meant more clothes. Gale was in layers now. The fabrics were fine and airy, but together they had a rich weight, fitted close at the waist and shoulder but loose from the hips down, like a much heavier, conservative version of a gown, only slit up both sides to show flashes of trousers the same colour underneath. The amount of fabric was incredible; metres and metres of it, pooling and glinting in the soft light of the lamps. It was what happened, January realized with an odd jolt, when you had the money to have metres and metres of fabric. He knew what it cost; he had been friends with the costume designers at the theatre. Gale was wearing more than the worth of a house in Cornwall, even one with a vineyard.
He stopped in the doorway, though, because contrary to the script, Gale wasn’t alone. They were sitting at a dressing table, straight and taut. Someone else was combing their hair.
It was the security officer who always took their journal everywhere. He hadn’t seen them since the grenades had come in through the meeting room windows. Puzzled, he wondered if they weren’t security at all but some kind of stylist, but he didn’t think so; he’d never seen them do anything glitzy for anyone heading towards any cameras before.
It was all long steady strokes with a bright silver comb, slow, in a way that looked both ritual and somehow as though it might be a punishment. The more January watched, the more uncomfortable he felt.
Gale had those famous pearls wrapped around both hands. It was the way priests held rosaries.
“Hi,” he said tentatively. “You, er . . . asked to see me, Senator.” He held up his phone as though Gale might somehow have forgotten in the last three minutes, and still not sure he should be interrupting. There was something private-looking about the two of them there at the mirror, and he couldn’t shift the sense that he had appeared immediately after a bitter row, for all he hadn’t heard a sound from the corridor.
“Yes, of course,” Gale said, and looked relieved.
The security officer stepped away and folded into a chair a little way away. It wasn’t, January thought suddenly, how an employee would move about. He’d made a mistake about who they were, he could see that much. Family, they must have been.
Or real partner. They were the right age.
Gale didn’t introduce them, though, and the other person didn’t introduce themselves.
“Is there—something I can do for you?” January asked, as a drone floated in over his shoulder. For all he knew what Gale was going to say, he was nervous. It was difficult to imagine that anyone would believe what was about to happen, because it was stupid-unrealistic. The beautiful lord of the beautiful manor house did not take any interest in the mousy governess, and goddesses did not court shepherd boys from fields. Those things wouldn’t have been good stories if they ever really happened.
“Only if you’d like to.” Gale turned away from the mirror, and January couldn’t help thinking they looked grateful to be allowed to stop seeing their own reflection. “There’s an event at the Tiangong tonight, it’s a charity fundraiser. It’s going to be—monstrous, and I was going to go by myself but then I couldn’t face it. I’m sorry to ambush you at such late notice, but would you come with me?”
Remember to look surprised . . . “Would I what?”
“Only if you’d like to,” Gale said again. A pause. “There’s going to be a lot of free wine and pretentious food, some of which will be cake. That’s as much as I can really . . . sell it to you. The people will all be politicians and trade CEOs unfortunately.” Gale did amazing work of looking hesitant. “It would be good to have some normal human company, though. If you didn’t have other plans.”
“S . . . enator,” January said. It was off script, but seeing that person in the rust-coloured jumper with Gale again had robbed him of any small confidence he might have had that Gale was really up to spending a whole night pretending to enjoy him. “Are you sure? It’s one thing to be married, it’s another to actually—you know, spend time with me. I don’t expect it. I know what I’m here for, everyone does.” He nodded at the drone. “I don’t need to be taken to parties.”
Maybe he’d had a stilted family life, but he wouldn’t have let a cousin comb his hair, or a brother or sister if he’d had one. And definitely not, now he was thinking about it, if he were from a Tharsese Great House. Posh people here bowed to their relatives. That was a very . . . couple-y . . . thing to do.
“Why wouldn’t I want to spend time with you?” Gale asked, giving him a quizzical look.
January was supposed to just say, Yes, great, but he couldn’t say yes without checking that having to stay with an Earthstronger for an entire evening wasn’t going to end in Gale having a panic attack. What if that was what they’d been fighting about with the person in the orange jumper before he came in, whether this was a stupid thing to do or not?
Or about the idea of Gale going out tonight with their fake consort instead of their real one.
“I just . . . don’t . . . want you to feel obliged. Or afraid.”
Gale stood up with a hiss of silk, and like he had with the Consul, January had a stab of that very basic fear that came when someone much taller than you moved closer when you didn’t expect it. Without meaning to, he stepped back. He was already only just in the room, and that step backed him against the wall. Gale noticed and stayed still. “Mx Stirling; I know it must be hard to come here and have people looking at you like you might do something terrible. But I do not think that of you, at all. I think that in a previous life you might have been a kitten that was sat on.”
January laughed, and after a second, with a flicker of relief that said they’d been worried about offending him, Gale did too. The bridge was holding; it had handrails and a toll system and everything now. He looked at them for a hanging moment, wanting to say, what a funny dance we keep doing, just because I’m strong and you’re not, and you’re rich and I’m not. Will we have to do it for five years? But they didn’t know each other well enough for him to say that, even if there had been nobody filming.
“I’d love to go,” he said instead.
Gale smiled again. It was their movie-star smile, but the real one lay under it. The camera drone floated nearer. January didn’t look, but he could almost hear Mx Francis and the producers making happy cooing noises.
In the far corner, the person in the rust-coloured jumper looked away, and he didn’t blame them.
Ridiculous. The whole thing was ridiculous.
“Do you have something to wear?” Gale asked.
“I can find something,” January said, and even though it was all fake, he went tingly. They were going out; he hadn’t been out out since leaving London. He got as far as the pub with Val and the others sometimes but that wasn’t out, that was directly opposite the factory. You didn’t dress up. You just sort of fell in.
“Oh,” Gale said. “And these are for you.” They stepped nearer to him, slowly, so he could see what was happening, and then, taking his hand, set the pearls into his palm.
28
There was one train down the Valleyside for people, and one that could take cars. It was further along the cliff, and right by the gravity trains.
January sat glued to the car window, excited as a small child, as the funicular sank down the titan drop of the Valley. In the last of the light, an ambery mauve, the gravity trains looked like primordial monsters clawing up the cliffside out of the dust below. They were colossal. The weight would have ripped them off their tracks on Earth. He was starting to get used to how everything was much bigger here, from people to dogs to buildings, but the concrete blocks were each the size of a house, bolted together with magnetic shackles, each link bigger than him. It was like gliding down the length of a brutal cathedral. And there were nine of them. Nine gigantic, disconcerting things just . . . hanging on the Valley side. If they ever fell, God knew what would happen.
All that, just to store the power the city needed for a single week.
Gale had been quiet, reading something on a tablet with a stylus hovering over the text. When January looked, he realized it was language exercises in—something that didn’t look like any language he had ever seen. It was more like music score for a piano; everything came in two lines, as though somehow the speaker was supposed to talk in chords. With a happy little jolt, January realized Gale would never have sat close enough to him for him see whatever they were reading before. There was room in the car for them to sit well away—there were two sets of seats facing each other, but Gale was next to him, not opposite.
“Please don’t tell Mx Francis,” Gale said, with what sounded like a genuine plea.
“What is that?” January asked.
Gale shifted as if talking about it were difficult, and January realized that somewhere along the way, Mx Francis had trained them to put any academic interests in the Unmentionables box alongside incest and golf.
“It’s a transcript of mammoth communication.”
“It’s a what now?” January squeaked. “Why have you got transcripts of mammoths?”
“I was a linguistics lecturer. I, er . . . well, one of the things I worked on was zoolinguistics, and the communication of megafauna. Elephants, mammoths; whales.”
“They have languages?”
“They have.”
January put his hands on his temples and made a tiny exploding noise, to say: mind blown.
Gale laughed the tentative laugh of a person not convinced they were being given a truthful reaction.
January took a breath, then stopped, because in fact all this sounded familiar, and it took him a moment to remember why. “The person who did my halo test was a Professor Shang. Who—said they worked with River, your River. On this, on mammoths I think. You two did exactly the same thing?”
Something strange happened then. The just-kindling coals that were smoking a sort of nascent happiness behind Gale’s eyes went out. Their whole expression shut down and turned to the diplomatic serenity they wore in the Senate, in public. It was, January was starting to learn, a mask. Whenever they wore it, they were hiding.
“Yes. Apollo twins at Great Houses always have the same education. House Gale prioritises cross-cultural studies—linguistics, translation, all that. Traditionally we’ve served in the Foreign Office, we’re diplomats.”
“That’s ironic,” January said, before he could stop himself, and did just manage to stop before he could add, given what you think about foreigners.
“Why?”
“Nothing. Why would you ever want to be a senator if you can spend your life talking to mammoths?”
“I didn’t want to be a senator. I inherited it.”
“Ah, of course. Sorry.”
“No, that’s the price you pay for being born into obscene wealth and power,” Gale said, doing their trick of hanging over the edge of smiling without falling. “It would be disgusting if I could just do what I wanted.”
January was quiet for a moment, because that was an insight that had clear applications. The main reason he thought that nobody should have to naturalise was that nobody wanted to. But if you had never been allowed to do what you wanted to—then it would be hard to see why anyone else should.
“You look like I’ve given you a splinter,” Gale observed.
“No, that’s just my face.”
“You make that face when I’ve said something you think is crushingly stupid but you don’t want to explain why because you think I’ll just talk over you,” Gale pushed.
That, January thought, was an amazingly accurate assessment given that they’d had all of five conversations together. It was news to him, too, that they minded what he thought about anything. He had thought it was courtesy when they asked him for his opinion; it honestly hadn’t occurred to him that they were taking note of the answers. It made a nervous-happy bubble in his chest.
And yet, and yet, this was the person arguing for him to be maimed if he wanted to stay for more than a year. It was becoming a depressing pattern—he just couldn’t make their politics match their personality. He was in serious danger of believing that Gale might be a nice person; but nice people didn’t want to herd other people into camps and permanently damage them.
“I could always give you some opinionated feedback about your face if you want,” he said, because he had no intention of talking about Gale’s naturalisation policies at random in the back of a car.
Or ever.
They were married, and they would be married for five years. They were only going to be able to stand the sight of each other for more than five minutes if they didn’t play political point-scoring games against each other, and just now—not to mention in that last talk show interview—he had already leaned dangerously near to it. If they did that, Gale would always win, and January would just get angrier and more bitter until he couldn’t do his job any more. All the two of them had to do was float on the surface of unsaid things, and everything would be all right. Or not all right. But enough right.
He got one of those long mirror scrutinies.
“This is going to look like bribery now,” Gale said ruefully, “but I have a present for you. You needn’t use them if you don’t want to, but . . .” They drew out a slim box. Inside was a pair of glasses, silver-rimmed and delicate. “They might be useful.”
January lifted them out slowly. The lenses rippled with colours that weren’t in the real world, and veins of the finest circuitry glimmered there if he tilted them. He slid them on, and everything changed.
They fixed his vision. Something in the software corrected everything and it was all pin-sharp, but that was the least of it.
The two of them weren’t driving through a dust-eerie darkness lit up only faintly by the half-lost lights of the city towers around them now. The sky was alive with light. Purple lines and arrows showed the thermal patterns, grading slowly to blue the higher into the atmosphere they reached. As his eyes caught across them, numbers glittered into being alongside; temperature, speed, and then in a bar across the top of his vision, the weather forecast for the next twelve hours. White glows and bars showed where the constellations were, even though the real stars were invisible above the dust. None of it was intrusive or stark, just there enough to see if you wanted to, brightening a fraction if he looked directly at the data. He jumped when a beautiful neon parachute floated down just ahead of him, advertising vodka.
Gale was different too. There were shimmering, moving patterns across their coat, the brocade all alive. It was subtle but clear. The patterns were from the same paintings as the linings of all his new things from Fenhua: they were from European masterpieces, and this one was—the new glasses told him so and he had never been so happy to know something—based on beautiful nineteenth-century illustrations of Dante’s Inferno.24 Very, very slowly, an angel was falling down the length of the coat, blazing dark fire.
Another unobtrusive banner appeared where the weather forecast had been and informed him that here was Dr Aubrey Gale-Zhou, Senator for Songshu, PhD in zoolinguistics, forty-five years old (Earth Regional Time).
The car was gliding up to the hotel already.
As they stepped out into the strobing of photographs, Gale touched his shoulder and turned him towards the stairs that led inside. A person who was actually in skintight plain white—he could see above the lenses—was draped virtually in silver light as dense as any real fabric. Whatever made the illusion, it threw sharp shadows across things in the vicinity to match. It must have worked best on a plain base. Of course: hence all the teenagers in black jumpsuits.
Just for a few seconds, January’s own sleeves turned to the silvery light. It was an advert: here’s how it would look on you. Entranced, he held his hands out. Gale must have seen it a thousand times before but they waited, and looked too.
“Jesus Christ,” January managed. “Thank you.” He looked up at Gale again, and found that they had been watching him, somewhere between attentive and anxious, as if they half expected him to hurl to the glasses away and say it was barbarian witchcraft. “You didn’t have to.”
“No, welcome. Ready?”
He nodded, and they started up the steps, to shouts to pause for the photographers who wanted to catch what they were wearing.
