Page 125 of The Mars House

Yuan gasped. “Treasure!”

“You have to be super careful, they’re Senator Gale’s. They’re real. They’re worth more than I am.”

“I will,” Yuan promised reverently, and went to sit with Kasha.

The Consul looked. “He doesn’t look too well.”

“No, no cage,” January mumbled.

The Consul nodded a little. If they’d chosen that moment to say, You know he’ll have one soon if I get my way, January would have punched them. But they didn’t. What they said was:

“I’m going to do a press conference. I’m going to say it’s wonderful that the solar array has been launched, but that unfortunately Senator Gale has, in the light of the unrest here and how it’s becoming increasingly clear that their own House security is responsible, decided to stand down from the election. The footage will show that it was Sasha Martinez who opened fire. Senator Gale presided over a massacre.”

“That is not what happened and you know it,” he ground out.

“Whoever wins is who writes the story,” the Consul said, shaking their head, regretful, but he didn’t think the regret was for what had happened. It was for him; it was regret that for reasons which perplexed them, he had reached the age he was without understanding how this worked. “And Senator Gale is going to agree, in order to live.”

As they spoke, they looked past him, at Aubrey.

He understood. The switch would only work if he was in on it, because he could take his glasses off and see what they really looked like. Everyone else would see a filter. There would be no suggestion that this was a different person. He was the only bump in the road. If he helped, then he could smooth over any inconsistencies. Earthstrongers would see a different person, but only in real life: the filters would work if you were watching any kind of recorded footage, and how many Earthstrongers would ever get close enough to Aubrey to see them clearly? Not many. If anyone did, well, probably there would be some story about an injury and plastic surgery. It would be silly, but people would believe it, because the alternative—there was in fact a different person running House Gale—was even sillier.

Of course, it would work without him. He could easily end up dead somewhere, whoops, tail end of all the riots and nastiness, very tragic, big funeral, job done.

If he played along, there would at least be time to think of something else.

“Who is this?” he asked towards Aubrey, to stretch things out, and because all his instincts howled to pretend to have no idea. He didn’t know why. That part of his brain wasn’t talking to him any more.

No; no. He knew why. Because if the Consul thought this was coming as a shock to him, and Gale had lied to him and never explained, then that was a reason to think he might genuinely want to help.

“I’m Aubrey Gale,” Aubrey said, quite gently. “The person you’ve known lately is my Artemis. River. They took this House from me a year ago. I’m sorry I never spoke to you. I was worried you’d come up to me in front of other people.”

No wonder. One hello would have undone everything.

“How?” he asked, even though he knew. He wanted the extra minutes. “Why are you even doing this?”

The Consul and Aubrey exchanged an awkward look. Neither of them seemed like maniacal conspirators. They were as clearly as uncomfortable with the absurdity as him. More, because they were the ones who actually had to do it.

Between the two praetorians, River was watching Aubrey.

“I can explain,” Aubrey said.

What was dragging at him, painfully, was that they sounded just like River. They both had the same intonation, and the same smoke in their voices. If he’d had his eyes shut, he wouldn’t have known he was talking to someone new.

52

Songshu, being a scientific research institute as well as the House Gale family seat, was full of physicists and engineers, and therefore its graffiti was of an unusual sort. On the kitchen doors, somebody had put a note that said Beware, followed by a wildly complex-looking chemical formula. It looked like it was warning you about some horrifying radioactive accident, but what the formula actually said was “exploding custard.”

Which led Aubrey to develop the Exploding Custard Theory of Knowledge.

It went like this.

Sometimes, something scary-looking and incredibly complicated is in fact really simple. But because it looks so scary, it’s hard to catch. Somebody can explain the actually-simple-thing to you in perfect detail, with graphs and lines and a helpful slideshow of evidence, and you understand entirely; for about twenty seconds, and then it kind of slithers away, because it can’t be that simple, it isn’t, look at the graphs and the slideshow, you wouldn’t need those things if it were all just—custard.

The reason was pretty straightforward. Most people had an in-built horror of looking like an arrogant dick. You had to have an ironclad faith in your own brain if you could look at the graphs and slideshow and say, yes, that’s just a stupid-complicated way of describing this boring ordinary thing. Most people assumed complicated meant difficult.

And the terrifying thing was: this process of doubt happened even if right now you were covered in custard.

A little while after Kali died and Aubrey took over House Gale, they sat down with the finance people and immediately fell victim to Exploding Custard Theory.