Page 111 of The Mars House

Aubrey was more than strong enough to lift someone their own size.

Just too late, River realized they hadn’t quite got control over their own face in time, and they saw Aubrey see exactly what was going through their mind.

It looked absolutely automatic. River didn’t think it was even properly malicious. It was just a wild need to stop a problem. But it was a shock when Aubrey slammed the butt of the rifle right into River’s chest. They fell over backwards and just for a second as their hands skidded through the grass, they were five years old again and trying to work out how to do cartwheels. They had to sit very still. It hurt, but that wasn’t what was paralysing: Aubrey had never hit them before. Actually, no one had. They’d never been in a fight. More than the chance that Aubrey had killed someone, the understanding that there was no going back smacked into River. Something fissured right in the bedrock of their soul, something deeper down than they’d known they went.

A tiny child-voice in them said: But if I haven’t got Aubrey, then I haven’t got anyone.

Something similar must have shifted in Aubrey too, because instant regret flashed across their face.

“I’m sorry!” Aubrey gasped. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that!”

River looked up at them, and found themselves reflecting with a mad sort of calm that what you think you mean and what you mean can be very different things.

“Please don’t look at me like that. Come on.” Aubrey helped them up. “Are you okay?”

“I’m—yes, I’m fine.” Grass stains on their elbows, just like being little again.

Aubrey pressed both hands over their eyes. “I don’t know what happened. But I can’t take a halo. I’m not—I’m not going to prison.”

They sounded wild. Wild in the way of an animal that knew a hunter was after it, the kind of wild that would see a vixen attack a bear if it cornered her with her cubs, even though there was no possible way a vixen could win a fight with a polar bear. River had never seen it, but the mammoths said it happened more often than you’d think. It was a mammoth saying. When they said vixen-and-the-bear, they meant really frightened people will hurt you if you give them no other choice, even if you’re stronger.

A very heavy thought dropped into River’s head. It was that they’d dropped their rifle when they fell.

“Aubrey,” River said softly. “If you turn yourself in—if you accept the sentence, you’ll be out in half the time you’re given, and it will be less if they find something went wrong in your head when—”

“Do you know what happens on prison hulks?” Aubrey demanded, and River took a step back without meaning to, and that scared them. They’d never retreated from another person before. “If the prison company runs out of money, they just steer the ship too close to Jupiter’s gravity and whoops, we all die of heart failure! Or they stop the air supply, or they let rations go down so badly the prisoners have to mutiny and then they’re all shot on sight. And no one cares, because Tharsis doesn’t have the resources to run a proper system. We all understand that prison means you live if you’re lucky but otherwise it’s execution in disguise, come on, I’ve been talking about this in the Senate for years, have you even listened to one debate?”

River had not. Aubrey had pet projects that were easy to talk about because you had to attend the Senate and you had to table a certain number of ideas per year if you represented a Great House. They had never once taken on anything that was difficult, or complicated, and they’d never got anything done either. Aubrey talked about the prison ships because it was an obvious problem, but they never pushed anyone to solve it, because then they’d have to come up with something new next time. So River never paid any attention. It was hard to cheer someone on when you knew they were being deliberately mediocre.

But they were right, about the prison hulks.

River’s throat had turned into sandpaper. They were two miles from the house. It was at least a few more minutes before Sasha and the security people could arrive, and—oh, God, if Aubrey had managed to hide a body in the time between the gunshot and River arriving, they could definitely hide another one before Sasha got here. It was a crazy thought, it was insane to imagine being shot by your own Apollo, and yet; and yet, it was somehow not in any way surprising, it was somehow established in River’s mind already, that maybe it would be like this one day.

“It was an accident,” Aubrey said.

“I believe you,” River lied. “I just don’t know what to do. Someone’s going to put a halo on you today.”

They two of them stood staring at each other in silence, and in that silence, horribly, the internet glitched. It sometimes did, around the sun fields; it was the fog or the heat or something, River wasn’t sure, but all their haptics shut off. The gentle, crowding shush of the rest of world vanished—the contented tides of the stock markets, the little bubble of joy that was coming from a high school where a movie star was visiting, the spikes of tension coming from the Senate, the strange void that was Americatown because nobody there had implants—and for a nasty second it was like going deaf.

And, in front of them, they caught a snatch of Aubrey’s face; their real face. They looked very different. River hadn’t seen them truly since the two of them were tiny. They had a broken nose that the filters corrected—when had that happened, why had they never said?—and a bolt of grey through their hair, and different teeth. Seeing that felt horribly like spying on them in the shower. That face, their natural face, was private.

River’s own filters must have gone off too. They didn’t use many, but there were some because, even for an academic, not wearing them looked somewhere between lazy and ill. Aubrey glanced away just the same as they had.

And then, right there, extraordinary but entirely simple, was the solution, and River had to stare at it to make sure that it didn’t have any unexpected faults or fissures, but they stress-tested much bigger ideas for a living at the university and they could already see that however bizarre, this one was strong. Sometimes things really were simple. Sometimes your whole life was different because at exactly the right—wrong?—moment, you said five words.

Every day after, for a long time, River stared at the future that might have happened if they’d said nothing. There was pretty good visibility. What was there, was something that might be a fairy tale people on Earth told their kids a thousand years from now.

Once upon a time, there was a city. It was very rich, the richest city in the worlds, and beautiful, and emperors from far away were desperate to take it over.

The emperors promised to pay a universe of money to whoever could deliver it. In charge of the city was a wily general. Perhaps they wanted all that money, or perhaps they just really liked the emperors. In any case, they plotted and planned, but nothing came of it, because the city was too far from the emperors, and too strong.

Then one day, a foolish prince killed someone. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it wasn’t; but that poor murdered person was from the wily general’s family, and all at once, the wily general understood what to do.

The general promised to protect the foolish prince—if the prince gave the general their palace. At that palace, there were fields that harvested sunlight, and made power for the whole city. Now it belonged to the general.

The general sold it to the emperors.

Delighted, the emperors shut down the sun fields. Now, the city—which was in a very cold, frightening place—would freeze and starve unless they sent it fuel.