Page 59 of The Mars House

Of course it had been a lot worse in cities where you couldn’t go out and pick blackberries off the verges. The assistant director at the theatre had still been growing potatoes in her bathtub just in case, even when he joined the company ten years later.

He looked up when he realized Mx Francis was staring at him, and remembered they were only twenty-five. Things like this looked insane if you’d never seen them before; they were allowed to be shocked.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “People get a lot worse than this if something is really wrong. Just allow extra time to do your shopping, if you go home at the weekends. There’ll be queues.”

Mx Francis looked like they had just after the bomb. “What . . . does it look like if it gets worse?”

“It’s hard to explain,” he said after he’d thought about it. “Frightened people do frightening things. Don’t let it worry you. It’s just humans being humans.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Mx Francis said dully, and January wished he had Gale’s gift for explaining.

He thought about that little old man who’d nudged him aside near the convenience store at home in Americatown, and the umbrella. That wouldn’t be working any more.

“It’s gone down rather well on socials, what you just said,” Mx Francis said, from left field.

January risked a glance up at them. “Um. For who?”

“You’ve got a hashtag. #EarthstrongHonour.” They sounded happy, at least.

“Right,” he said, not sure if that was a good thing or a bad one.

As they passed through on the train, the dust blurred things, but not so much that January couldn’t make out how the normal traffic had thinned almost to nothing. Nobody was driving; the dust was already clogging engines, and even if it hadn’t been, the normal purple-blue sheen of the solar sheets on the roads had faded. No power. As they whipped past the Tiangong on the overhead line, he saw the Rings slow, and then stop. The lights there shut down. In Gagarin Square, people were pointing.

He had to stare. That had happened because he’d said it should. It was Dr Molotov’s idea, but—he was the one who had insisted. And Gale had done it. He’d said it and it had happened. He had never known anything like it. The most he’d ever affected in life was what someone else decided to have for lunch. He was so used to seeing big, city-changing things as the product of some kind of faceless officialdom that it was a shock to realize it came down to some random person at an important table saying, Well, actually . . .

“Meanwhile,” Mx Francis said, “tomorrow is the benefit night at the Tiangong. The Senator’s going to ask you. Remember to look, you know. Delighted.”

He had to close his eyes. Against the backdrop of the storm, of all those terrifying numbers, the solar array, the gravity trains, this idiot little non-romance seemed very trivial indeed. He could only imagine how Gale felt about having to pretend to flirt while the energy of the city dwindled.

26

Songshu had a team of resident doctors—you needed them if you had five hundred people living at altitude—and for Dr Okonkwo, the general plan had been to take the position for five years and have a nice, gentle run into a nice, gentle retirement which they would be spending (not that they had planned it meticulously) chiefly on cruise liners to and from that wonderful holiday resort on Earth’s moon where the gravity was so lovely to your knees.

Aubrey Gale losing a leg had thrown what Dr Okonkwo was willing, just, to admit was a small spanner in the works. Rehabilitation was long and boring and disheartening, but Gale was one of those remarkable people who seemed interested in the whole process more than beaten down by it. That had been manageable. But what had emerged after was what Dr Okonkwo was coming to think of as their professional arch-nemesis, and it wasn’t any of the tricky brain tumours or mystery cross-generational naturalisation illnesses professors taught everybody to expect in medical school.

Gale had sleep paralysis. Only it wasn’t.

“Well, you look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards,” Dr Okonkwo observed as Sasha saw them into Gale’s room. Dr Okonkwo had treated three generations of Gales, each one more intimidating than the last, but if you opened with almost-abuse, any given Gale was for some reason much more likely to do as they were told later. “New medication not working?”

“No.”

“Well. Usual drill then,” Dr Okonkwo said, and set the scanner halo over Gale’s temples, and the haptic engine transfer widget thing round their wrist.

They dropped down in the chair opposite to study the imaging as it ghosted across their tablet. Round Okonkwo’s own wrist, the twin of the other widget thing—probably it had a name but when you had a Knee your capacity for remembering pointless information went steeply downhill—lit up.

On the tablet, the images writhed and smoked, resolving occasionally into sudden sharp recognisable things that were gone so quickly they were difficult to follow. None of it made sense; and if Okonkwo had shown this footage to a lecture theatre full of medical students, not one in two hundred would have said it could be anything but the weirdest, most vivid kind of dream. But it wasn’t dreaming. It was Gale’s mind very much awake. It was Gale’s baseline; it was Gale right now, sitting across from Okonkwo in that chair.

As they had said to the police, the halo could show you what the subject was thinking, but it could not show you why they thought so. Even if you watched it frame by frame, Gale’s readout looked like the most incomprehensible, disturbing madness.

What it was, was a particular kind of cleverness. Not pi-to-the-nth-decimal; that was clear on these things. It was the kind that could leap between apparently unrelated things and see connections. Some of Gale’s, Dr Okonkwo could understand. If Gale thought something was stupid, deer and horses often appeared on the screen, because they had studied Japanese and the word for “stupid” was written with the signs for “deer” and “horse.” Some were bizarre. If someone said “mother,” Gale thought of spiders and, for some reason, advanced mathematics and something to do with the Peruvian Andes.

A moment later, the feed from Gale’s haptic engines came through into Okonkwo’s own. They were sitting in their own chair, yes, but they could also feel how Gale felt sitting in theirs. They were in a lot of pain, because they were walking too much on the prosthetic, but it was so ever-present that they didn’t really notice it. The unevenness of that new gait was making their spine hurt too. Over all that was a fog of subtle but unpleasant anxiety. Things filtered through few by few, and each one made Okonkwo glad that their only problem was the Knee.

Last to get through the haptics was thought, and when Gale’s thoughts arrived, Okonkwo had to do what they never did with any other patient. They muted the feed. Gale’s mind happened in four languages at once, random snippets invading all the time, and although it was a calm kind of chaos if you really concentrated, the upshot was a migraine and some very strong feelings about Proto-Indo-European.

“As always, think of the moment you woke up, please, Senator.”

As always, Gale looked away, but did as they were told.