The mars house, p.47
The Mars House, page 47
Relief washed through them. No threats, no violence. They could just wait.
* * *
What unfolded across the next week was extraordinary to watch from the inside. When every media outlet in Tharsis received leaked footage from the rehab centre where Aubrey had spent a month last year, River didn’t even flinch. Instead, they looked like someone had handed them a big pile of presents. They did a live, televised drug test that proved not only was there nothing strange in them—but that there had never been. The halo could pick up addiction, even an old one. Clean. Of course. River wasn’t even reliant on coffee.
Immediately House Song was facing a huge backlash for releasing what could only be faked footage.
* * *
And then, River dropped the price of energy. Drastically.
On a live broadcast, they explained why.
“Kali was overcharging. There was some well-hidden fraud in the House Gale accounts. Half of what taxpayers were paying for energy wasn’t for energy at all, it was profit, and that’s why Songshu is so grand. So House Gale is liquidating everything that that money touched. Every citizen in Tharsis will get their money back, in full.” They didn’t mention House Song. They didn’t say where the money had really come from at all.
Between spikes of the urge to claw out their own eyes so they wouldn’t have to watch what would have to be the total bankruptcy of House Gale in the extremely near future, Aubrey waited for the ensuing explosions. River should have been mauled for it. Senators always were, if they admitted making a mistake, or worse, admitted to fraud committed in their own House.
But somehow that wasn’t what happened at all.
People were overjoyed with all the money they were getting back, and the new lower prices for power. Representatives of other Houses who tried to say that Aubrey Gale was clearly buying their way out of a scandal were just—not even shouted down. Attacked. People got death threats. House Gale was everyone’s favourite thing in the worlds.
And insanely, the most insane thing of all—House Gale revenue went up.
Aubrey stole into the meeting where the engineers and finance people explained why. It was because, they said, a swathe of people who were usually priced out of using much power at all were now using it plentifully. It was Earthstrongers; suddenly, an extra two hundred and fifty thousand people were turning on the heating. Even with the new repairs to the neglected fields, which were now running at higher efficiencies than they had in the last decade, the array was struggling to cope with demand. No sooner had someone said that than River was ordering the construction of a new field. As if investing a billion yuan was an ordinary thing to do over coffee.
All the headlines, all of social media, all of everything, was suddenly about the new honour code that Aubrey Gale was single-handedly enforcing on Great Houses. Other Houses found themselves forced to invite people in to scrutinise their own finances. To no one’s surprise, House Song were involved in much more fraud than House Gale. Millions that had been meant for its military defence contracts were being channelled to Earth. It was, the economic analysts said, the biggest money laundering operation in Tharsese history.
Consul Song had never been so unpopular.
The next day, River announced they were running for election.
Aubrey had to sink into a chair and stare at nothing.
They’d left it too late. They couldn’t make the switch now. They’d end up stuck in the middle of a consular campaign. They couldn’t make the switch and say, No actually, I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want to be Consul; that was far too suspicious. They’d have to live with it for at least a few months just to protect the reputation of the House, and consular campaigns were punishing. They’d have preferred to live in a tent in the woods than live like that.
Kasha put her head on Aubrey’s knee, looking sympathetic.
“No,” Aubrey said to her, quietly, because they were in the dining room and people were everywhere, opening bottles of champagne to celebrate the launch of the campaign, which was apparently already wildly popular, “but—this is River. They can’t keep this up. They’ll screw it up. I just need to wait a few months. They’ll drop out.”
They will. The wise thing is to wait. You’re not a coward just because you don’t snatch it all back now. This is called prudence.
Though River would have taken it all back by now.
Kasha panted optimistically and took Aubrey to look at the fish in the entrance hall. River had put a halo on her once or twice and what they’d learned was that Kasha felt that most problems could be solved by the sufficient contemplation of fish.
* * *
Aubrey waited for a month with increasing nerves, and River failed to screw up with increasing confidence, when the riot happened at Gagarin Square.
Aubrey sat by River’s hospital bed, watching them, and trying to come to terms with how there would no switching now for at least two seasons. They had listened to the doctors. It would be winter before the amputation site healed enough to start using a prosthetic. To use it with confidence, longer. However determined Aubrey was to get House Gale back, they were not willing to cut off a leg to make it look convincing.
They were trying, too, to accept that they couldn’t keep up that early level of fury all the time. Sitting here, they didn’t feel angry. They didn’t even feel like River had got what they deserved. It was just horrible, and if they could have undone what had happened, they would have.
Because River was drugged with enough morphine for nobody to think it was odd for them to be hallucinating, Aubrey took their hand where it lay on the mattress and held it. River squeezed it.
“Hey,” River said sleepily. “You said you’d kill me. Is that why you’re here?”
Aubrey smiled a bit. They hadn’t forgotten saying that. They had meant it; they still did, but differently. It was a serene iceberg of an idea that wandered through the archipelago of all their other thoughts. They would do it one day, but it wouldn’t be today. Not like this.
“I don’t need to, you’re doing great by yourself.”
“Yeah.”
“This’ll make you Consul.”
“I’ll screw it up, don’t worry.”
That brought Aubrey up short. “Why are you running then?”
“Prevent wholesale colonisation from Earth,” River whispered. “Earth is about to catch fire. They need to come here. They will. Song thinks we should die for it. Noble cause. I’d rather not.”
Aubrey snorted. “Don’t be dramatic.”
And because River was a machine, even lying in a hospital bed—because they didn’t have the basic emotional intelligence to just say, Yeah, you’re right, I know I’m being annoying and exaggerating things for the sake of provoking people—what they did, was think about it, and frown, and in that measured way they always delivered whatever loony conclusion they’d decided would be most irritating, they said: “Dramatic isn’t the same as unlikely.”
Aubrey walked away. If they stayed, they’d suffocate River right here and now, and it would be hollow and stupid and meaningless, because River still didn’t understand why they were unbearable.
Still. River was right about the consulship. They were a maddening pedant. They weren’t going to win any elections. One lecture about the etymology of “election” later and anyone in their right mind would rather eat their own eyes than vote in the obnoxious professor. And that was even if, after months of rehabilitation and struggling with the injury and a prosthetic, River even wanted to keep up the consulship bid.
It would be fine.
It would.
* * *
The spring and half the summer later, Aubrey let themselves into River’s room after Kasha and folded into the spare chair, their own old chair, and put the screen on. River had done the rounds. Influencers, broadcasters, even newspapers, the serious-journalism ones. In a wheelchair, looking thin and battered and heroic and unbroken; and of course, what they were talking about was the naturalisation drive.
Cover of Vogue.
Aubrey veered between thinking River really believed in cage bans and closed borders, and being convinced they had just latched onto the big divisive issue that could propel them up to Jade Hill. Watching them, it was hard to tell. But whichever it was, losing a leg had done exactly zero to the campaign except skyrocket the poll ratings. It was official as of yesterday. Aubrey Gale was level with Consul Song.
Aubrey was fast losing faith in the voting public of Mars.
The door opened and River came in, looking exhausted. Solly Francis and that horrifying Ren creature were with them. Aubrey got up fast so that nobody would sit on them thinking they were an empty chair. Kasha bounded up and jumped into River’s lap.
Traitor dog.
They were all talking about campaign things; ratings, how different issues polled in different boroughs of the city, a surprising uptick of newly naturalised voters in Americatown who thought the new House Gale policies were a brilliant idea. It was Last on the Bus syndrome. You jumped on just in time, and felt the most immense smugness at seeing the door slam in the face of the person right behind you.
Aubrey stood in the corner, making notes about what they said so they could review it later, and waited for Solly and Ren to leave. Then they waited some more, sitting on the floor, for River to take the evening dose of painkillers that would more or less get them through the night. And waited for them to go to bed.
Aubrey stood at the side of the bed, looking down at them. Awake, River was sharp, so sharp you tended to cut yourself trying to have a conversation. But asleep, Aubrey could see how they’d looked when they were little; when they’d been five or six and scared of Kali’s evil cat.
Aubrey had never missed anyone more than they missed that child-River.
But there were two important facts here. One: the consular campaign wasn’t going away by itself. Two: Aubrey could not be Consul.
You couldn’t fight an election if you never slept and your staff thought you were going insane. So that was what Aubrey was going to make them think.
Hating it, hating how nothing stopped them and no thunderbolt blasted them through a wall and no angel appeared, Aubrey knelt on the edge of the bed and pressed both hands round River’s neck. Very lightly, just enough to interrupt their breathing but not to hurt.
Of course they flew awake, and of course they could see nothing. River gripped at Aubrey’s wrists, trying to tear them off, but they had only been out of hospital for two months, and they were weak from it. It was much harder to keep doing it than Aubrey had thought. They’d thought they were angry enough, after everything, but it was impossible to keep all the reasons front and centre. All they could see was River as a toddler, bubbly and happy.
Aubrey let them go after a minute or so—after that both of them were streaming tears—and then curled up in the corner as Sasha burst in, then Dr Okonkwo. Both of them listened to River’s amazingly put-together account of what had happened, and exchanged exactly the concerned kind of look Aubrey had been hoping for.
* * *
The weeks dragged. Aubrey shadowed River everywhere, writing down every conversation and every meeting, all marked clearly by date, and cross-referenced with sticky notes. Because River would remember. River remembered the names of people they’d met once on a building site. So Aubrey filled notebook after notebook. It was better than taking recordings. To write, you had to rethink things, and re-remember.
It was exhausting and it was incredibly boring. Aubrey spent a lot of time staring hard at clocks, willing ten in the evening to creep round, because that was when River stopped working and went back to mammoth transcripts alone in the room, and that was when Aubrey could escape and go out for a proper walk outside with Kasha. People noticed that Kasha seemed to be going out by herself a lot, but she was an independent dog and she never misbehaved, so nothing ever came of it. Aubrey just had to be careful about throwing things for her.
The drones were a real pain. It was, however, a serious case of hoisted by your own petard.
After the fourth or fifth instance of faked sleep paralysis hallucinations, River had invited in the reality show cameras. Mx Francis was overjoyed, Mx Ren swore a lot, and Sasha seemed tentatively pleased, because more cameras meant better security. River never said it, not even to Dr Okonkwo, but it wasn’t for the election. It was nothing to do with fame. It was that they were so pissing confident in the integrity of their own mind that despite everyone telling them otherwise, they weren’t convinced they were hallucinating at all. The cameras were to see if anyone, anywhere, would see something strange.
And so Aubrey had to be more careful than ever.
Sometimes they had to open or close doors. Sometimes there was no one to follow, not even Kasha. It became well known that there was a ghost at Songshu. Some people murmured that maybe it was Max, maybe Max was dead; those rumours were everywhere, but in the face of no useable evidence from River’s halo, all River had to do was shrug it off.
Sometimes it wasn’t so straightforward. Getting food became a lot harder. It was one thing to sneak meals out of the kitchens in such a way that the cooks wouldn’t notice there was any missing; in a place like Songshu it would have been impossible to keep track of exactly what five hundred people were eating. But there were permanent camera rigs in there now. You couldn’t just open a fridge and take out some salad. Doors opening and closing was a spooky thing people could write off, but floating salad wasn’t. Aubrey had to start putting duct tape over the cameras whenever they had to fetch anything. It was a shabby way of doing it, and of course the producers and the security office kept taking the cameras apart to try and work out why they kept blacking out for five or ten minutes, and then puzzling over the sticky residue, but Aubrey had no idea how to hack into a camera feed or loop footage or anything like that.
And then finally, finally, after River had been on the new prosthesis for most of the autumn, the ceaseless medical appointments faded away.
It was time.
* * *
There was a problem.
Aubrey hadn’t talked to anyone for months. They didn’t realize how debilitating that was until one Saturday, when River stayed in bed with a cold and Aubrey decided to have a day off and go down to Tharsis and not be invisible for a while. It was shocking how badly it went.
They didn’t even get down the Valley. They were on the train when someone asked them, very politely and ordinarily, whether it was easy to get to Benin Gate from the station. The map haptics were always glitchy right by the Valley wall, something to do with satellite signals.
It didn’t feel like being spoken to. It felt like being attacked.
To start with, Aubrey didn’t even process the words properly—it was just an assault, and when they did ram it through their flurrying brain, they couldn’t pull a sentence together. The part of their mind that did spoken words had—been buried somewhere, under the months and months of silence.
It shook them so badly they had to get the next train back to Songshu. They sat under the willow trees in the entrance hall hugging Kasha.
It was bad enough to find that they weren’t functional any more, but what was mortifying was not having realized that that would happen. That was that kind of mistake River would make: assume people were machines you could leave in a cupboard for months and then brush off when you needed them.
Only, said an increasingly loud voice in their head, it wasn’t the kind of mistake River made. You’ve spent so many years thinking of River as some socially inept, spectrum-straddling oddity that you keep assuming things about them that aren’t true. You assumed that they would hate the Senate, you assumed they were such a cloistered introvert that it would be hell for them. You assumed they were such a machine that they would never make anyone like them. But that isn’t River, is it? River—I mean, look at the polling results—is flying. That’s you.
Horribly, Aubrey found themselves crying into Kasha’s fur. By all objective measures, River should be the head of House Gale. Maybe even Consul. Sometimes people just took everything from you and there was no point in revenge. You just had to find a way to escape, and make a different life somewhere else. They should never have started any of this.
Maybe it was time to stop.
But there was nowhere else to go.
* * *
Aubrey went to the consular debate on automatic. They expected to see River wipe the floor with Guang Song, like they had been doing in all the news interviews until now, and when it didn’t happen—when the Consul won—something in that despairing glacier started to shift.
Aubrey didn’t really decide to do it. They just did. Deciding and doing happened at the same time, they put a portcullis down in their mind so they couldn’t think about what would happen if it went wrong, and after the debate, they stole into the back of the Consul’s car. They sat quiet for a while, watching Song read some worrying-looking documents that said big swathes of Earth were looking at terrible wildfires in a matter of weeks, and then, very quietly, said:
“Please don’t be afraid. I need to talk to you.”
The Consul looked up sharply.
“I think—you must have been wondering why Aubrey Gale has suddenly become so capable and so ambitious when they never were before. It’s because that wasn’t Aubrey Gale up there on the podium. Hasn’t been for a year. That’s River. I’m Aubrey.”
“How are you doing that?” the Consul murmured, far too quiet for the praetorians in the front to hear.
Aubrey swallowed hard. “I’m wearing a military-grade filter which Max gave me. I’m—going to take it off. Can you make sure the praetorians don’t shoot me?”
The Consul paused. “Folks,” they said louder. “Don’t panic. I’ve got a military agent in the back with me, wearing a filter. They’re about to take it off. It’s okay.”
