Page 24 of The Mars House

They were in Gagarin Square, opposite the Senate, and the parakeets were out in a cheerful swarm, ruffling their feathers in the fountain. Val had mentioned once that they were special cold-resistant parakeets escaped from a lab somewhere, but since Val was Val, he couldn’t tell if he was having his leg pulled or not. In any case, Tharsis had embraced the parakeet idea, and the beautiful hotel on the far side of the square had a café called the Parakeet and Pickle. It was right at the top of the tower, with a view across the whole city. The dust streams were dark patches everywhere, like quick fog. Because it was heated for Natural people, it was cold inside.

January hovered at the doorway of the café. There was no partition, but there wasn’t a NO EARTHSTRONGERS sign either.

Gale noticed. “It’s all right.”

“I’d better ask,” January said, because he had an uncomfortable feeling that no partition meant no expectation of Earthstrong people, not perfect contentment on the part of the establishment about letting everybody in.

He saw Gale think about arguing with him, and saw them decide not to. Instead they stood tilted aside so that any passing waiters could see him, but angled toward him so it was clear who he was with. He should have been trying to catch someone’s eye, but it was difficult not to watch Gale. They were more still than anyone he had ever met. It wasn’t a natural stillness. It looked like someone had flogged them as a child until they’d learned to stand motionless and straight even under cannon fire. When they did move, it was slow and smooth. It should have looked mannered, but the weight of the money and the power behind it made it—something else. It was the care you had to take, he realized, when everyone was always watching you, and when seeming anxious or fidgety at the wrong moment could send shockwaves through the stock market.

When Gale saw him looking, January had a bolt of embarrassment, but then Gale bowed, very slightly, in a way that promised it was only normal. Feeling awkward, because he had never moved in the echelons of society that would require it, he tipped a fractional bow back. He thought something opened in Gale’s expression then, but he didn’t have time to decide what, because a waiter had arrived.

“Ah,” January said hopefully. “Is it all right for me to . . . ?”

“Oh, we have visiting diplomats here all the time,” the waiter said happily, and ushered the two of them to a table. Not without a curious double take at January, like people always did when they realized he was not as old as his hair. It wasn’t the colour people’s hair went if they dyed it white. It was like frozen spiderweb on gorse late in winter when the frost had settled for the season.

Different world. He had never been mistaken for anyone important before. It was proximity to Gale; Gale was so glamorous it was catching. Their hair was swept up in the writhing silver diadem that all senators wore, and they were dressed in the deep blue that was the official sigil colour of House Gale. These were requirements for senators in public, because they were supposed to be obvious from a distance, just like nurses or police officers. Whatever the reason, Gale looked like the governor of somewhere with endless territory and diamond mines.

So did other people in the café. There were more plainly dressed business types, bankers and lawyers maybe, but there were celebrities too; he recognised an actor, and someone from a Gucci advert. People were sending curious glances his way; but, because he was plainly with Gale, it was only curiosity. Nobody was asking the waiter to have him thrown out, even though he was in jeans and his one good shirt.

The security officers vanished into discreet corners, except one, who sat at the next table along, ignoring the sign that said it was reserved. None of the waiters tried to make them move. January felt uneasy, almost sure they were there in case he did something, but they only took out a journal, leatherbound, and started taking what he quickly realized were minutes. It was charming to see someone do that by hand. They wrote in swift scruffy Chinese.

Hot water arrived immediately—cafés always served hot water here, not cold, because it was always cold outside—and so did some tiny things that looked like jewels pretending to be cookies.

“Can I take your coat?” the waiter added.

“Um, no, thanks, I’ll hang on to it, I’m freezing.”

“Oh, gosh—yes, I suppose it is cool for you in here—can I fetch you a heat pack?”

January blinked, because he hadn’t expected anything helpful. “I mean, if you have one around?”

“Of course,” the waiter exclaimed, and glided away looking purposeful.

“What are these?” he asked, about the jewel things.

“Macarons; they’re made of almonds,” Gale said, and then paused, focused on something in the middle distance, which January had come to recognise, on people here, as meaning that they were reading something online. The café menu, probably. He could just make out what might have been text moving across their irises, clear and bright against the black. Then he had to look away, because it struck him suddenly as somehow indecent, to be able to see what was in their eyes.

Yes: “Would you like some coffee?”

“Soya flat white please.”

Just for a flicker of a moment, Gale looked puzzled that January knew enough about coffee to know exactly what he wanted. January looked down, not wanting to admit he’d been very middle class before the flood. Interns had brought his coffee to the dressing room.

Saying so would remind Gale of how far he’d fallen, and he honestly couldn’t think of anything worse. Two years ago, if he’d been talking to someone in his position, he’d have thought that showed a marked faithlessness in humans, but it wasn’t faithless, just sensible. He had a theory about why.

It was like being injured. If you were hurt in a straightforward, ordinary way, people felt sympathetic, helped, and that was that. But there was a tipping point. There was a difference between breaking your wrist and horrifying necrosis. If it was bad enough, that instinct to help vanished, because there was no helping. What was left was the instinct to hit you with a rock.

He had a terrible certainty that losing your country was like the horrifying necrosis. You couldn’t go around blaming other people for feeling that way. It was old mercy, hammered into human DNA in the ages before medicine.

And Gale was the person who was happy to push refugees into naturalisation centres. January couldn’t help suspecting that Gale had a very low hit-it-with-a-rock threshold.

Over by the till, something went “ding”; their order going through. Gale’s focus came back to him. He wasn’t quite ready for it. After the television interview, it still felt a little like having a gun levelled at him, even though he knew it wasn’t loaded today. Gale seemed to understand, because they pretended to study the macarons. It was a tiny thing, but there was such courtesy in it that January’s throat went dry. He couldn’t remember that anyone had ever been this careful with him.

But then, it wasn’t as though anyone’s election campaign had ever relied on him before either.

“So,” Gale said. “Do you stream much?”

It was flattering, he thought, that Gale imagined he was someone who could run something electrical for that long, instead of a person who worried about the power it took to boil the kettle. “No, not really.”