Page 19 of The Mars House

“Some nerve damage, close to hundred per cent certain. Mostly it’s a bit of joint impairment, cognitive fog, that kind of thing. Very minor.”

“Minor,” January echoed.

“This is a big ask for a human body,” Yan pointed out. “Adjusting to one third gravity is brutal. You will lose bone density, you have to; you will lose muscle density. Minor nerve damage is to be expected. Osteoporosis is basically unavoidable. That’s why people here are delicate, you see? Their bones are only lifting one third of the weight they’d have on Earth.”

January swallowed the need to say, yes, obviously he knew that, he’d been walking round all this time and almost killing people in lifts and scaring famous senators.

He picked up a teaspoon for no reason and spun it through his fingers, like they’d used to do with pens at school, and then stopped. It had EARTHSTRONG LIVING stamped on it. Weighted three times heavier than normal ones. If he did sign up for this place . . . one day soon, the spoon was going to feel too heavy. It would feel like three teaspoons. The bones in his hands would feel . . . what? Sticky, creaky? Or was it going to feel like being a child again—nothing wrong with you, but the world was just more difficult?

“It can be more severe,” Yan went on, at least pretending not to notice his face. “There can be dementia and paralysis. That’s only about one in a hundred cases here. This facility is pretty good. It would be marvellous if we could work out why.”

Everyone laughed.

Everyone except January, who couldn’t tell if they really did find it funny, or if it was gallows humour.

“And there are lots of classes and stuff, about the local culture,” someone else put in. He was using his green pin as a toothpick. He had the most majestic moustache January had ever seen, the sort of moustache that you expected of opera singers and people who really cared about orchids. “I’m from Syria—hang on. Don’t I recognise you from somewhere?”

“Do you?” January said hopelessly.

“Hey, it’s you,” Yan said. “You gave Aubrey Gale hell on a live broadcast. The Consul mentioned you in the debate!”

He got ready to stand up and get out of the way quickly.

But Yan only looked happy. “Nice. Gale’s shady as hell. Have you heard about Max Song?”

“No?”

“Gale’s consort. Disappeared. I suspect murdered and buried under a big pile of spare money somewhere.”

“Song like—Consul Song?” January asked, worried he was falling over one of Mandarin’s many gleeful tripwires.

“Yup,” said Yan. “Younger cousin.”

January wondered how much of an evil genius you had to be in this day and age not just to disappear an annoying consort, but to disappear the Consul’s own cousin. Maybe he was lucky to have got off with a brief prison sentence.

“I thought she was a nutbag all along,” the man with the moustache put in. “Nice people are never that shiny.”

Someone else thumped him. “They, dickhead.”

“Oh, fuck off . . .”

There was what sounded like a well-rehearsed argument in four different languages about whether you should be allowed to say he and she and did you get extra points if you came from a language like Arabic or Russian that he’d and she’d everything, even cars and spoons.

January saw how it all must look to someone like Gale. Stunning, polymath Gale probably felt as though they were meeting cave people whenever someone from Earth showed up, looking like a tiny, squashed troll and mumbling about categories that were only important if you were an endangered species. He wondered if that was what he and she was, really; a millennia-long hangover from when there had only been a few thousand humans left after a terrible ice age, when the only truly important thing about anyone was whether or not they could make new humans, to keep everyone from the hell of dying knowing that they were the last.

January stayed quiet. He liked them all already. It was funny listening to them and they were only having their comedy-argument to entertain him, but it felt dangerous. Most of it felt unspeakable in an urgent, painful way. You couldn’t be who they all were and say any of this.

He looked at Yan, wanting to check they were all right.

“What he was saying was that there are language and culture classes; you know, for integration,” Yan told him, under everyone else, looking amused and not at all upset. “Why Gender Abolition happened, Mandarin grammar, that kind of stuff. They’re mainly for people who’ve come here straight from the Crossing, you wouldn’t need them.”

The patients segued happily into how good the language classes were and how there was help getting jobs if you hadn’t got one already. There was a strict gym regimen enforced by the Legions of Darkness (Yan and two other nurses), but apart from that, it was essentially three months in which you were free to read a lot of books or binge-watch a lot of rubbish. All paid for by the government, and not stingily.

Excellent really.

“What do you think so far?” Yan asked.

What he thought was that it all seemed like a beautifully curated and well-meant version of hell.