Page 45 of The Mars House

“In—Texas. And we . . . let him in?”

“The Senator overrode my concerns,” said Sasha, not wanting there to be even a suggestion of a consensus-reaching “we” around the subject. There was very definitely a Senator, and then a Sasha.

“That—sounds kind of dumb?”

Sasha breathed in deeply, which wheezed in the mask. “The Senator likes to think the best of people. And it’s our job to enforce people’s best.”

“Yes, Mx Martinez,” they said, chastened.

Privately, Sasha had to agree that it was very, extremely dumb. The Senator had got that way since Gagarin Square. They didn’t even wear seat belts any more, no matter how close to a brain haemorrhage it drove Sasha. What’s going to happen to me that hasn’t already happened?

Things moved in the dust. Sasha hoped they were bears.

20

Lucy had been angry for a long time; more than long enough that, when the anonymous message came through the Earth Rights site, she was happy to pick up the grenades from the shipping container in town and head straight to Songshu.

Because the thing was, when you had a chance to explode a fascist nationalist, it was best to do it. People usually didn’t bother, and that was how fascist nationalists got the power to make you naturalise, and to pull a sad face when your children died of it. She was well past the point of worrying about whether this was a trap, if the person who said they were inside Songshu really was, or asking how it was they had a shipping container full of grenades, plus grenade launchers. It didn’t matter. She just shoved everything into a suitcase, which was very heavy, got on the Valley train up to Songshu, and smiled when a nice young person helped her put the very heavy suitcase on a luggage rack.

As always when she saw someone young here, she had a wave of sadness. They had no idea how badly they were being abused, growing up like this, in this clinical dystopia where children came out of a special bag in the Genesis Institute and everyone flinched away from human beings who actually looked the way God had made them. They could feel they were missing something, you only had to look at how unhappy everyone was on social media and in politics to see that—they knew something was wrong, they knew they had been disconnected from something vital and ancient and important, but in Tharsese there was no word for God, with the capital letter, and you couldn’t talk about men and women without sounding like you were talking about a disease.

Lucy listened to a show run by a lady called Sister Joan, who was absolutely right eighty per cent of the time. What Sister Joan said was—this was the eighty per cent—that you knew you were in trouble when governments made basic things unspeakable, and—this was the twenty per cent—people were amazing turnips at spotting when this was happening. Lucy wasn’t convinced anyone was a turnip. In her experience, people were quite bright. But it took a fiercely bright person to define a thing they had no words for, and an even brighter one to strip away the words they did have to recognise that the thing itself had nothing to do with any of the words.

She watched the news on the way up. It was still full of the wedding, and that poor, poor man House Gale had found to make Aubrey look less like a monster.

She had wondered more than once if he was her source inside Songshu. She hoped so.

Her phone buzzed.

Security officers doing perimeter checks, but that’s all. No working cameras or sensors. Good luck.

She smiled a bit. God bless you, whoever you are.

At the Songshu station, she edged out with some difficulty, hooked the suitcase handle over her wrist, and reshuffled her crutches so she could manage them and the suitcase at once. It would have been easier in her wheelchair, but there were some things she wanted to do standing up. Somewhere not too far away, dust sirens howled.

21

The meeting room was at the top of one of the towers, with a glass dome ceiling and a god’s-eye view across the Plains. Beyond the great pines, the solar farm looked like a lake, the heat from the mirrors water-waving, and beyond those, the dust was coming. Already, the air was gritty, and for January’s eyes, used to sun much brighter than the ordinary light here, the room was too dim for him to see well, all high ceilings and deep shadow. Fleetingly, it occurred to him that he had the money now to buy some glasses and not worry that the cost would mean he couldn’t charge his phone for two weeks.

Out in the dust, purple lightning strobed.

He tried to press down the feeling that he had been allowed into the throne room.

Mx Francis had said in all the pre-wedding preparation that Gale didn’t believe in trophy consorts: January was here to have a voice. When he had said he found it very difficult to voice anything coherent anywhere near Gale, Mx Francis said not to worry, everyone did. Gale had once been, Mx Francis said darkly, a university lecturer. It was the way most people would have said “ran a fetish shop.”

As other people took their seats at the table, he hesitated, wondering if he was seeing people who would soon be running the country. It seemed ridiculous to sit down too, like he belonged here, but someone even pulled a chair out for him. It was Mx Ren. They winked, and he smiled.

He was glad to see that in a corner by the window, out of everyone else’s way, was the maybe-not-a-security-officer with their journal and their rust-coloured jumper. He liked that they didn’t dress as beautifully as everyone else. He hoped it meant they were a normal person, but he didn’t want to rush up to them and ask.

Gale took the chair beside him. January kept his hands in his lap and his knees together, so he wouldn’t take up any more space than he needed. Gale flared their eyes a little at him, wry: Here we go.

“Okay, can we get Ariel from the Met Office on a call, please,” Gale said, as though a rank of titan cyclones howling towards the sun fields was nothing particularly unusual.

It was witchcraft. Everyone relaxed.

The person who answered, and whose image appeared in the middle of the table, was an anxious-looking, rounded, middle-aged man with curly hair and a bow tie. January sat forward, delighted. He had known AI people did sometimes go around in artificial bodies when they weren’t floating through the banking system or the defence satellites, but he had never seen one pay the idea even half this much attention, never mind this much historical attention. Usually they looked like beautiful configurations of clockwork and glass, not human beings. But then, the Mars AIs were as old as the colony. They would all have been created well before Gender Abolition. Maybe Ariel wanted to hang on to his roots. It felt unbelievably touching that a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old god-person would want to do that.

“Senator—Gale, is it?” Ariel said tentatively, in English that had a wonderful homely Israeli accent. He was from Tel Aviv, January was sure of it—Hulking Terry was from there. Tel Aviv was only a couple of thousand miles from London. That was basically half an inch, when you looked at it from Mars. He wanted to bounce. “I don’t think I recognise you.”