Page 50 of The Mars House

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The police didn’t even pretend to ask questions; they arrested January within two minutes, and twenty minutes after that, he was in a helicopter being taken back to Tharsis, his hands clamped together in titanium manacles so heavy he couldn’t lift them more than an inch.

The agents put him in a little room and told him that he’d been speaking to the terrorist group, hadn’t he, and perhaps it had started out looking like a harmless online support forum for people with relatives in naturalisation centres or who people who had come out recently, until somebody messaged him with an offer to provide some heavy artillery.

There were terrorist training camps in America, of course. It wasn’t very far from Great Britain to America, was it? Easy to go, too. The language was basically the same. The culture was Pro-Gender and religious and willing to blow up Tharsis senators. Americans and British people traditionally hated the Chinese, right? He had come to a Chinese colony in order to do some damage if he could, hadn’t he. And then along came Senator Gale. Am I wrong?

“You’re wrong,” January promised. He should have been calm, because he knew Gale was coming, but he couldn’t tell how long he had been here now, and it was beginning to feel like too long. There must be a problem. Maybe it wasn’t very easy to bail out someone the secret police thought was a terrorist. Or maybe one of these officers had shown Gale something that had made them wonder if January really might have spoken to someone. The timing looked horrendous. The first day he was at Songshu. “I’ve never been to the U.S. except on tour with my company.”

“Army tour?”

“Ballet tour,” he said. “I was a dancer. I was only there for a fortnight.”

“But you were there. Where?”

“In Austin.”

“Texas,” one of the officers said, looking him up and down, slowly.

He tried not to think about what lay ahead if Gale didn’t come. The judge had told him that his next offence would land him in a labour camp. He would spend twenty years hacking roads from the red bedrock in the punishing winters that lasted twelve months. Labour was valuable, Earthstrong labour especially so, and they cared if you died out there, they kept you alive for every frozen second of it, and somehow that was worse than the alternative.

“I—Texas is huge, it isn’t just terrorists and desert,” January protested. “Austin’s a big liberal arts city, it was a culture festival.”

“You’re asking us to believe you when you’ve been to Texas, you’re openly Pro-Gender—”

“I’m not Pro-Gender, I’m just—”

“—and you have every reason to have an enormous grudge against Senator Gale, and now you just happened to be involved in a terrorist operation to kill a Tharsis senator.”

“I wasn’t involved, I nearly died!”

“Suicide agents are overwhelmingly people your age.”

“Men your age,” the other one said drily.

He jumped when someone tapped on the door. He didn’t see who was behind it, but it must have been someone important, because the two officers both stepped out. He waited, staring at the table.

The officers came back in. One of them was holding a steel band, and behind them came somebody who didn’t look like they were in the security services. They had a purple scarf on, and they were very much the human version of a happy bear.

“This is Professor Shang, from the cognitive forensics unit. We’re going to do a test.”

“What kind of test?” January asked softly, having visions of needles and straps.

Professor Shang flumped down opposite, dug in a pocket, and rained a whole collection of mismatched spare buttons and bits of old, broken electronic paper whose ink had stopped working properly and flashed shards of random digits and images as it curled sadly on the desk. The officers looked pained. Triumphant, Shang pulled out a pen. “Right,” they said, not using the pen, just holding it, as though they couldn’t have spoken without it. “We’re doing an experiment! It’s called a halo. That scanner there—” they nodded to the metal band the officer was holding “—shows me which areas of your brain light up when you see writing on a page. Now, when we read, we comprehend it in a very specific area of the brain, and you will quite involuntarily start thinking about what the writing says. It lights up your brain. But even better, it lights up very differently if that information on that page is new to you. If you know it, you see it very differently. Basically this is a test to see if you recognise some information or not. The scanner is linked to my tablet, so you’ll see your own thought patterns on it.”

“Okay,” January said slowly, much more nervous of Shang now than the police. You weren’t allowed to be a well-respected professor and this chaotic and scruffy unless you were from Good People, one of those families like the Gales who’d been rich for so long that nobody cared if they went around looking like tramps. Everyone here, they were going to listen to Shang, and if for some horrendous reason this experiment gave up a wrong result, there would be no arguing with it.

He tried to make his mind shut up. It wasn’t saying anything useful.

“So we’ll do some controls first, so I can get a baseline. Normal stuff. You can read a bit of Mandarin?”

January nodded. “I can sort of get through kids’ books with a dictionary.”

“Let’s start with kids’ stuff then,” Shang said kindly.

January flinched when the officer behind him set the scanner over his head like a crown. Shang’s tablet came alive with waving colours.

“Can you tell me what this says?”