Page 63 of The Mars House

January took a breath, then stopped, because in fact all this sounded familiar, and it took him a moment to remember why. “The person who did my halo test was a Professor Shang. Who—said they worked with River, your River. On this, on mammoths I think. You two did exactly the same thing?”

Something strange happened then. The just-kindling coals that were smoking a sort of nascent happiness behind Gale’s eyes went out. Their whole expression shut down and turned to the diplomatic serenity they wore in the Senate, in public. It was, January was starting to learn, a mask. Whenever they wore it, they were hiding.

“Yes. Apollo twins at Great Houses always have the same education. House Gale prioritises cross-cultural studies—linguistics, translation, all that. Traditionally we’ve served in the Foreign Office, we’re diplomats.”

“That’s ironic,” January said, before he could stop himself, and did just manage to stop before he could add, given what you think about foreigners.

“Why?”

“Nothing. Why would you ever want to be a senator if you can spend your life talking to mammoths?”

“I didn’t want to be a senator. I inherited it.”

“Ah, of course. Sorry.”

“No, that’s the price you pay for being born into obscene wealth and power,” Gale said, doing their trick of hanging over the edge of smiling without falling. “It would be disgusting if I could just do what I wanted.”

January was quiet for a moment, because that was an insight that had clear applications. The main reason he thought that nobody should have to naturalise was that nobody wanted to. But if you had never been allowed to do what you wanted to—then it would be hard to see why anyone else should.

“You look like I’ve given you a splinter,” Gale observed.

“No, that’s just my face.”

“You make that face when I’ve said something you think is crushingly stupid but you don’t want to explain why because you think I’ll just talk over you,” Gale pushed.

That, January thought, was an amazingly accurate assessment given that they’d had all of five conversations together. It was news to him, too, that they minded what he thought about anything. He had thought it was courtesy when they asked him for his opinion; it honestly hadn’t occurred to him that they were taking note of the answers. It made a nervous-happy bubble in his chest.

And yet, and yet, this was the person arguing for him to be maimed if he wanted to stay for more than a year. It was becoming a depressing pattern—he just couldn’t make their politics match their personality. He was in serious danger of believing that Gale might be a nice person; but nice people didn’t want to herd other people into camps and permanently damage them.

“I could always give you some opinionated feedback about your face if you want,” he said, because he had no intention of talking about Gale’s naturalisation policies at random in the back of a car.

Or ever.

They were married, and they would be married for five years. They were only going to be able to stand the sight of each other for more than five minutes if they didn’t play political point-scoring games against each other, and just now—not to mention in that last talk show interview—he had already leaned dangerously near to it. If they did that, Gale would always win, and January would just get angrier and more bitter until he couldn’t do his job any more. All the two of them had to do was float on the surface of unsaid things, and everything would be all right. Or not all right. But enough right.

He got one of those long mirror scrutinies.

“This is going to look like bribery now,” Gale said ruefully, “but I have a present for you. You needn’t use them if you don’t want to, but . . .” They drew out a slim box. Inside was a pair of glasses, silver-rimmed and delicate. “They might be useful.”

January lifted them out slowly. The lenses rippled with colours that weren’t in the real world, and veins of the finest circuitry glimmered there if he tilted them. He slid them on, and everything changed.

They fixed his vision. Something in the software corrected everything and it was all pin-sharp, but that was the least of it.

The two of them weren’t driving through a dust-eerie darkness lit up only faintly by the half-lost lights of the city towers around them now. The sky was alive with light. Purple lines and arrows showed the thermal patterns, grading slowly to blue the higher into the atmosphere they reached. As his eyes caught across them, numbers glittered into being alongside; temperature, speed, and then in a bar across the top of his vision, the weather forecast for the next twelve hours. White glows and bars showed where the constellations were, even though the real stars were invisible above the dust. None of it was intrusive or stark, just there enough to see if you wanted to, brightening a fraction if he looked directly at the data. He jumped when a beautiful neon parachute floated down just ahead of him, advertising vodka.

Gale was different too. There were shimmering, moving patterns across their coat, the brocade all alive. It was subtle but clear. The patterns were from the same paintings as the linings of all his new things from Fenhua: they were from European masterpieces, and this one was—the new glasses told him so and he had never been so happy to know something—based on beautiful nineteenth-century illustrations of Dante’s Inferno.24 Very, very slowly, an angel was falling down the length of the coat, blazing dark fire.

Another unobtrusive banner appeared where the weather forecast had been and informed him that here was Dr Aubrey Gale-Zhou, Senator for Songshu, PhD in zoolinguistics, forty-five years old (Earth Regional Time).

The car was gliding up to the hotel already.

As they stepped out into the strobing of photographs, Gale touched his shoulder and turned him towards the stairs that led inside. A person who was actually in skintight plain white—he could see above the lenses—was draped virtually in silver light as dense as any real fabric. Whatever made the illusion, it threw sharp shadows across things in the vicinity to match. It must have worked best on a plain base. Of course: hence all the teenagers in black jumpsuits.

Just for a few seconds, January’s own sleeves turned to the silvery light. It was an advert: here’s how it would look on you. Entranced, he held his hands out. Gale must have seen it a thousand times before but they waited, and looked too.

“Jesus Christ,” January managed. “Thank you.” He looked up at Gale again, and found that they had been watching him, somewhere between attentive and anxious, as if they half expected him to hurl to the glasses away and say it was barbarian witchcraft. “You didn’t have to.”

“No, welcome. Ready?”