Page 73 of The Mars House

Gale walked with one hand to the wall. The limp was bad.

“How does a language even end up with tones?” January asked, not because he imagined there was an answer, but so that Gale would know he wasn’t feeling impatient. “I mean, did everyone get together one morning and say, Oi lads, I know what’ll really piss off all the foreigners . . .”

“No one really knows for sure, but tones probably happen when a language is very old,” Gale said, and January looked up, surprised. “Words erode over time; they always go from jagged to smooth if you give them long enough. Consonants wear away. It happens in English.”

“It does?”

“It does.”

“For example?” January pushed, aware that he was pushing against the fear Mx Francis had instilled in them of saying anything too academic, and that it was severe. He could imagine Mx Francis making liberal use of a taser in the training process.

“For example . . .” Down his left side, he felt them shift, nearly as reluctant to talk about it as they would have been to explain a giant book of pornography. He wanted to say that Mx Francis was wrong, it wasn’t off-putting for someone to know things. Not in the shy, careful, profoundly unpretentious way Gale knew them. But a compliment would have sounded like flirting. Even if you didn’t have an irrational horror of it, that still wasn’t what you wanted at two in the morning after a terrible nightmare. “For example—knight used to be pronounced kuh-nich-t, c-n-i-h-t. If it lives long enough, English isn’t going to say knight, night, nigh, and nine, they’re all going to be nye; I can already hear it in your English. You rarely say a final t, unless you’re enunciating, you—it’s called a glottal stop, you just sort of finish the vowel sharply where the t used to be. But you do say that same sound differently already. Knight is usually a high tone, and nine is usually low, because ‘knight’ finishes right up against your teeth and ‘nine’ doesn’t. And that’s what’s already happened, in tonal languages. A tone is the fossil of a dead consonant.”

“Hah,” January said, really pleased with that. He had never thought of languages as having geologies and fossils before, but he liked it. “That’s lovely.”

They were at the lift now. He waved at the sensor. It took a while to come; which meant Gale had come here on the stairs. Gale’s room was on the fifth floor. It seemed like a deliberate piece of masochism for them to do that to themselves, but January was less than shocked. He could imagine that even if someone had gently tried to raise the possibility of moving to the ground floor in case of emergencies, Gale would defenestrate that person as a point of honour.

“Did you dream?” January asked, once they were inside. “On the way here, I mean; what was it like? I’ve never met anyone who sleepwalks.”

“I don’t know. No. Nothing,” Gale said.

January stood back. “My God.”

“What?”

“You’re a horrible liar. This is very reassuring. Do it again.”

Gale laughed, or tried to. “I—thought someone was dragging me. I thought they pushed me into your door.”

“Vexing,” he said, because he was pretty sure that for Gale, sulphuric acid was less toxic than sympathy.

“Yeah.” They were still rubbing their arm like it hurt. Like someone, he thought suddenly, had grabbed them and pulled. He touched their wrist and glanced up to check they were all right, then pushed their sleeve back.

Something cold slimed down the back of his neck, because there were marks. Bruises. In the shape of fingers.

“Dreams give you bruises, do they?” he asked.

Gale shrugged, amazingly unstirred by it. “Dr Okonkwo says so.”

“Dr Okonkwo says . . . So this has happened before?”

Gale sighed. “I’ve had sleep problems for months. Paralysis and—hallucinations, we keep trying different medication but nothing works. Dr Okonkwo thinks I’m just traumatised from Gagarin Square and it’ll go away by itself.”

“Which cannot be true, because you’re a hell-automaton with no feelings.”

“See? You understand.”

He hesitated. “You know I don’t mean that, right, I’m joking.”

“I know. So, I—”

“Look—”

“Sorry—”

“No—”

“You first.”