Page 60 of The Mars House

The way sleep paralysis worked was that you half woke up still immobilised by the chemicals that stopped you sleepwalking, and then you saw someone in the room; and usually it came with overpowering fear and the sense that this was a hostile presence. The visions could be incredibly vivid. It was horrible to feel, even through a haptic engine link.

But Gale never saw anything. And they were never paralysed. What they felt, though, was something very heavy kneeling right on their ribs, and something holding their wrists down. Something too strong to fight. There was never anything there. Only the hallucination was pin-sharp. In it, they could even feel someone’s bootlaces digging into them, and sometimes, the imaginary assailant even had different clothes; Gale could feel wool or cotton, and once, the zip on a leather jacket.

A hallucination it was, however. There was definitively nothing and nobody there.

What drove Dr Okonkwo crazy was that this was not, however much it felt as if it should be, actually sleep paralysis. Gale could move, speak, struggle, all of it. They didn’t just think they could: there was drone footage to prove it. It was disturbing to watch.

And it didn’t feel right. Okonkwo wasn’t a neuro specialist, but they’d felt haptic links with sleep paralysis patients before, and there was a different quality to this hallucination. It was trauma, of course it was, that was the trigger—if you lost a leg and then developed a debilitating sleep disorder, then you’d be an idiot not to imagine they might be related, but Gale was annoying on that front as well. Of course they were traumatised, but having been fairly profoundly damaged as a child,23 they hadn’t begun the whole process thinking they had some basic right not to feel dreadful. And so bizarrely, they coped with dreadful rather better than a well-balanced person. The sleep problems weren’t part of any wider net of symptoms. Without these night-time hallucinations, Okonkwo would have thought they might, actually, be fine.

Okonkwo pulled off the haptic widget and handed Gale some painkillers.

“Hm? I’m fine.”

“You’re in quite a lot of pain.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway,” Dr Okonkwo concluded heavily, and then paused, because they felt peculiar just feeling their own feelings now, and relieved not to have a painful leg, “there isn’t much else we can do now but antipsychotics, and the side-effects of those are . . . such that I know you’ll veto them immediately.”

Gale nodded. “So what you’re saying is . . . live with it and report back if anything changes.”

“I’m afraid so. The only consolation is, it’s probably going to become less frequent and then go away on its own. Trauma does dim over time.”

“I’m not traumatised,” Gale sighed. “I keep trying to say.”

“You assuredly are traumatised, you just don’t have the basic emotional wherewithal to understand.”

“So I can’t sleep and my doctor thinks I’m stupid. Superb.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You know this is why nobody likes you,” Gale said, serene.

“Lots of people like me,” Okonkwo protested, and then felt insecure.

“They’re lying,” Gale said. “Thank you, Doctor.”

By the door, Kasha was watching her imaginary friend, as usual, holding out one paw and then the other.

“You know there’s something wrong with that dog,” Okonkwo said, from a drab need to get revenge.

Kasha seemed to realize she was being talked about, looked over, then hid under Gale’s chair.

“See?” Gale said. They were watching one of the morning shows on a tablet now. January Stirling was on it. They were old-fashioned about that; they didn’t like using their lenses and being virtually in the audience. “Nobody.”

23 Great Houses were proverbially dreadful at child-rearing. In the name of having the best education in the worlds, heirs were raised mostly by AI scholars, some of whom were two hundred years old and really not very fond of children.* The House Gale AI was called Anansi. They famously refused to communicate with anybody who hadn’t learned the periodic table (it was a way, Anansi said blackly, of weeding out children who weren’t trying hard enough), which led to a bit of a skewed start for Gale heirs. If you went back even five or six generations, everyone’s first word was “hydrogen.” Like every other Gale doctor, Okonkwo had tried hard to get rid of Anansi, but course for the Gales that was like trying get rid of their parents. No matter how bad parents were, it was rare to find a person who actually wanted to dismantle them and reuse the parts to make new parents.

*This was still better than being raised by Kali Gale, Dr Okonkwo had to admit.

27

The Gale pearls spent six months in every year on display in a museum, because they were the most valuable in the world. They were the oldest, too; the first saltwater oyster bed had been hand-sown two hundred years ago by graduate students on Gale land, at the edge of a special experimental salt marsh. They had first been strung—two hundred and forty-four of them—for a wedding that had been drone-bombed and so they’d passed to another branch of the family unworn, cased in black velvet and bad luck.

January knew that because, while he waited in the dining room for Mx Francis’s team to faff with lighting and angles and Mx Ren poked at him to make him sit less like a pole dancer in an especially sticky bar, he watched a livestream about what people could expect to see all the celebrities wearing at the Tiangong fundraiser tonight. Gale was much anticipated. The event was still an hour off starting, but there was already a crowd of reporters outside, glittering with golden flashes as people activated the cameras in their contact lenses.

The Consul was anticipated too. They were going to use the event to give a statement about the dust.

The Consul’s card was still in his pocket. Every so often, he took it out and looked at it. There was a lot he wanted to say.