The mars house, p.13
The Mars House, page 13
“Are you going to tell me I have to stop this now and say how dreadful Senator Gale is or you’ll send me back to Earth?” January elaborated.
The Consul looked honestly dismayed. “What? No, that would be—very illegal, there’s such a thing as human rights.”
January watched them at a tilt, balancing on saying that human rights were an imaginary thing that only worked if everyone agreed, and they only agreed if they weren’t upset or hungry at the time.
He took a breath to ask why he was here then, if not to be horribly threatened, but then he had to reconsider, because trotting through the open door there was, right now, a small pig. It looked happy to see them, and hurried over.
“Can . . . you see a pig?” he asked.
The Consul laughed and stroked the pig’s ears. It tried to get into January’s lap, plainly under the impression it was still a much smaller pig. “This is Alice. Aubrey sent a litter of piglets to the European Federation Embassy after it turned out their Chancellor had a pig-related adventure at university—”
“Sorry, Aubrey Gale did that? My Gale?” He hadn’t meant to interrupt, but he was too surprised not to.
“Oh, yes, they’ve got a cracking sense of humour once you get past all the pretentiousness and the fascism,” the Consul said mildly. “But anyway, there were loads of pigs, so I adopted one and so did lots of other Earth embassies and now we all get together and talk about our pigs. Resounding diplomatic success really. I love it when a prank backfires.”
Alice snuffled hopefully at their pockets. The Consul took out a packet of peanuts and gave a handful to January, and there was an interlude in which there was a lot of happy squeaking. January wondered suddenly if this was a small ploy; See, you really ought to trust me, look at my trustworthy pig.
“You know about Max, right?” the Consul asked. “You know what you might be walking into?”
January nodded.
He had fallen down a research rabbit hole looking into Max, whose proper name was Maksim Liu, a younger scion of House Song. Max had been a marine, the hardest of the hard, regularly vanishing on black ops somewhere out around Saturn for reasons the government was never at liberty to say. Then Max vanished along with the younger Gale heir, River, never to be heard from again. It was more plausible than it sounded, everyone agreed; if you were a marine then you could very effectively disappear, and if you could do that, you probably would, as a big up-yours to the person you were leaving. The police had cleared Aubrey Gale of any wrongdoing. January was on the fence. Not just on it; bolted to it. It did all sound reasonable when you looked into it, but he was pretty sure Gale could have made the mandatory adoption of pink wigs sound reasonable.
“That’s good,” the Consul said, “because . . . as I’m sure you know, you have no way out of this now. Even if I say, I’ll pay you lots of money not to do it and you say to House Gale you’ve changed your mind, you’re setting up an Earthstrong theatre in New Kowloon, thanks, I suspect Aubrey would make a big show of being magnanimous and then have you hit by a garbage truck so you can’t sell the story to the press.”
January didn’t know what to say to that. It had a horrible ring of truth.
“Come with me,” the Consul said. “There’s something I want you to see.”
“Oink,” said Alice.
“Yes, and you.”
“Are you going to tell me what it is and why you’re showing me?” asked January, who couldn’t help feeling it was bloody histrionic to announce something like that and not explain.
“No,” the Consul said happily. “Ruin the surprise, wouldn’t it.”
Probably they were just having fun; probably they didn’t mean it as a little power play to remind him who was Consul here. Probably.
Gale, he couldn’t help thinking, would have considered all of this to be in very poor taste.
What, said the voice in his head, you’d rather a good-looking nutter with classy manners than someone who’s actually right but also a bit annoying?
It sounded stupid when you put it like that, but actually it was a window into why Gale was so popular. There was a part of him that preferred the classy manners. He wanted to call that frivolous, but in fact it was the opposite. Frivolity meant something surface-level and easily scratched away, but this was down deep in him somewhere. It mattered that Gale was polite and kind in person. It mattered that the Consul . . . wasn’t.
You, the voice informed him crossly, are a garbage person. You deserve to end up stabbed in the secret sex dungeon Gale most definitely has.
The Consul led the way down more strangely tilting corridors, and explained that while surveillance was tricky from six million miles away, there was, out on Mount Penglai,15 a telescopic array that covered such a broad surface area that the images it generated could show particular mountains on a small planet orbiting Alpha Centauri.
What it could also show was anywhere on Earth, so long as everyone happened to be facing the right way at the time.
They stopped at a room that required a fingerprint scan to get inside and January glanced round at the secret service agents, alarmed.
“Just sign this,” one of them said, quite friendly now, and held out a tablet. “Official Secrets Act.”
January didn’t ask what was behind the door. Secrets, obviously. He signed it.
What the feed from the great telescope array was showing now was a huge line of fire across the United States. California, New Mexico, Louisiana, Florida, the whole South. The smoke plumes were so big they covered over cities.
It was projected across a wall in an otherwise dim room.
“How is it looking?” the Consul asked a group of people sitting around a central table. “Do we have a clear window again?”
All of them looked military, and they all stood up. January hung back in the gloom with the secret service people, and the Consul didn’t tell him to do otherwise. Alice sat on his foot. One of the Secret Service people knelt down and gave her a puzzle toy to play with.
“We do, for the next two hours. It’s much worse than yesterday. It’s now fifty-eight degrees Celsius on the surface,” someone reported. “We think everyone who can has moved underground; and everyone who can’t is moving towards the sea. But for some that’s a very long walk. We’re seeing convoys of people walking.”
The image zoomed in, and there were indeed people walking—all on the verges of the freeway, and only the verges, because the tarmac itself was gleaming and sticky. People were holding umbrellas against the heat, tugging little kids along in antigravity buggies. They must have been looking after one another’s children to give each set of parents a break, because some people were trailing ten or twelve, like dejected balloons.
“Why aren’t they driving?” the Consul asked.
“Because it’s so hot that the solar fabrics they use to charge the cars—well, they’re melting.”
“And there’s still nothing about this on their social media?”
“No. Total censorship, total shutdown of any image that even looks like a fire.” The general sighed. “A few things are getting through, people smart enough to talk about a traffic jam or an accident or something, but even those posts are vanishing almost before anyone can catch them. It looks like the White House means to keep this entirely secret.”
“They must know we can see.”
“They don’t care,” the general shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what we say, no one there will believe us. The news reaching U.S. citizens is all about bad traffic in California and summer internet outages, and how well it’s going against the Russians in Alaska.”
“Things in Alaska aren’t going well, are they?”
“No, they’ve fallen back almost entirely, but they don’t want their own population to know that. Two billion Americans, and only one billion of them put Namina Gray in office, and she knows what’s going to happen if the other billion hear bad things.”
The Consul pressed both hands over their face like a breathing mask. “It’s just staggering, isn’t it.”
January caught himself feeling irked to hear someone talk about it as if it were surprising. You needed to be very divorced from disaster, and very safe, and used to everything being lovely and fair and good, to be staggered. And then he half laughed at himself, because he sounded like one of those old men who told stories about how In My Day we all had to eat gravel and our fathers murdered us nightly and we were grateful.
“It’s called the illusory truth effect. If you hear something often enough, for long enough, you’ll believe it. Even if you originally knew that the information was false,” the general said wryly. “And the only thing Americans hear is that nothing’s wrong with their weather and Russia is losing.”
“How many people are being . . . displaced?”
“We think close to fifty million, but that’s literally just some of our analysts counting on grid squares and averaging. And what’s of concern to us is how many people are moving towards airports with interplanetary travel. China has already shut the border. Nigeria and Saudi Arabia look like they’ll do the same. Russia’s out, obviously. We’re going to see a boom in people-smuggling to Mars.”
The images were incredible; they might have been from drone footage taken directly above the roads. Everything the Consul had said looked right. There were cars abandoned on the verges, their solar canopies sticky-looking, some sparking fitfully. Not even that far away from the convoy of trudging people, maybe two miles or so, the fires were as high as the trees, slinging from branch to grass to house faster than January would ever have thought fire could move. By a white church, old-fashioned, all wooden, a big group of people were kneeling on the steps, not moving. Even though the fire was licking at the gate.
“What are they doing?” one of the generals asked.
The image zoomed in, but no one said anything. Everyone just looked puzzled.
“Praying,” January said, too quiet.
“What was that?” someone said.
“They’re praying. That’s a temple.”
The Consul nodded slowly. “Listen, all of you. I might not be in this chair in three months’ time. You might have five years of Aubrey Gale slamming the borders shut. But I’m in the chair right now, and those people are praying while hell comes up through the ground. This colony was built to answer prayers like that, and while I’m the one here, we’re going to. Let’s go and get them.”
January had to replay his memory of the words, because he couldn’t make them make sense at first.
Let’s go and get them.
Just like that.
With no warning, his throat closed up and he had to turn away, and he was standing there with both hands clamped over his mouth so that he wouldn’t make a sound. He couldn’t tell where it had come from. No, he could. In his mind, Tharsis was beautiful and rich and closed off. That he had managed to get here was a bizarre aberration that wouldn’t happen again.
But here it was. Someone who saw the neighbour’s house on fire and picked up the hose without charging for the water.
“We’re with you, Consul,” the first general said. “But something to consider is that we’re at aphelion. It’s going to take them more than two months to get here, even if we launch ships from the lunar docks today. If they get here, only to find a new government hostile to immigration—I mean, I don’t know to what extent Aubrey Gale would actually enact the policies they’re talking about, but we have to consider the possibility that a Gale consulate wouldn’t even allow them to land.”
The Consul was nodding. “I know. We’ll have to risk it. Thank you, everyone. If I could have the room now?”
January watched everyone else leave, ghosting by in the dark uniforms that were nothing like anything military at home. They were as heavy as senatorial robes, sashed sometimes with red or blue depending on which force they represented, he didn’t know which or why. They reminded him of priests.
He pulled his sleeve over his eyes, which were sore now.
Once everyone was gone, the Consul waved him into a newly empty chair. Like before, it was so high he had to curl up in it, because his feet didn’t touch the ground.
“I didn’t bring you in here to show off,” the Consul said seriously. “I just wanted you to see who is going to lose if Aubrey wins.” They sighed. “There is one water factory on Mars, only one, you know that better than anyone, and there’s no infrastructure anywhere outside Tharsis. No pipes, no roads. It would be great to send Earthstrongers to the far side of the planet, but we can’t. There’s no water, and no way to get them enough water. They land here or they end up in a desert. We can’t build another water factory, because guess which House would have to agree to supply it with the gigantic amount of power it would need?”
He lifted his hand to say, Yes, House Gale, I know.
“And it won’t be like the first colonists. There isn’t any money behind refugee ships, they’re not scientists and engineers and marines. They would have to survive with whatever they brought. People are resourceful, but what happens when we tell millions of people to do that? At what point does it just become easier to invade Tharsis?”
The screen still showed that white church.
January had to sit back in his chair and stop looking at it. “I know.”
“I know you know, but what do you think?” The Consul inclined their head. “Do you agree with Aubrey? Lock them out, make them fend for themselves—invite problems down the line?”
“Of course I don’t agree!” he burst out. “What, I’m marrying Senator Gale because I like them? I don’t. Gale is right, there’s a massive problem, and I’m dangerous even though I don’t want to be, but no one can tell me the solution is either to make everyone like me maim ourselves or sit on a planet that’s on fire.”
“So why are you marrying Aubrey? Money?”
“No. It’s the only way I won’t have to naturalise and I’ll have enough electricity and enough food all at the same time,” he said, feeling bleak that that wasn’t blindingly obvious. “Consul, why am I here? Why are you showing me all this?”
“Because,” the Consul said, with a pensive frown that seemed to say that the answer he had just given was somehow not what they’d thought it would be, “you’re about to marry into House Gale, and you’re going to be surrounded by people who say, as if it’s undisputed fact, that I won’t just be bringing refugees here on those ships, but probably a good portion of the Chinese army to shore up my consulship. That’s the real issue, you understand?”
“No. Sorry?”
“The relative harmfulness or harmlessness of Earthstrongers in general isn’t what this election is really about. What it’s about is that I support a continued union with China and the other states who built Tharsis; Aubrey is a nationalist who wants an independent Tharsis. Do you understand our legal position with regard to China?”
January took a slow breath and squashed down the need to say, do you really think that when I was studying Mandarin for hours every day and learning what refugees can and can’t do, and feeling space-sick quite a lot of the time, and then later when I was doing twelve hours a day at a manual labour job in a literally explosive water factory, that I went back to my room in the evenings and curled up with international legal codes? “No,” he said.
“We’re what’s called a Special Economic Area,” the Consul said. “It means we do have our own government and a certain amount of practical independence, but we pay tax to Beijing, who police our interplanetary shipping lanes and until recently, subsidised our infrastructure and healthcare and everything, really. It’s only in the last twenty years or so that Tharsis has become wealthy enough to support itself, see?”
“Okay?”
“I want that support to continue. Aubrey wants to break it off totally. Demonising Earthstrongers is a way for them to do that.” The Consul sighed. “I brought you here so you’ll remember those people praying at that temple, even once Aubrey’s put you through the Far Right Brainwashing Machine, and you’ll remember we’re talking about saving refugees just like you, not importing Earthstrong troops.”
January had to look at the floor for a second—it was a long way away—because in a small but strengthening prickle, he was starting to feel annoyed. The way Gale talked to him was sometimes blunt, a bit shove-from-the-dance-teacher-to-test-your-balance, but what was behind that, he realized now, was an absolute trust that he would keep his balance. Gale assumed he was as clever as they were, even if he didn’t know as many individual things. And they answered the bloody question, if you asked it. The Consul thought he was so feeble he’d be brainwashed soon. And they were not answering the question.
“Okay, you don’t want me to be brainwashed, but why?” he said. “Why do you care, why am I here?”
The Consul laughed, a big sudden laugh that made him jump. “You sounded dead like Aubrey just then. You’re here because I want to find out whether you’d give me a call if you learned something in the murky depths of the House Gale swamp that could help me win this election.”
He felt like he had when Gale asked him to marry them. He understood the words, but the meaning was so unlikely that it got stuck in his Sense of Reasonableness filter, the one everyone had because it was an evolutionary necessity. If one monkey thought another monkey had said to watch out for the falling cocks and looked around faithfully for chickens, that monkey got squashed by the falling rocks. You needed the filter that said: Yes, I know what I heard but it can’t be right.
Only every now and then, it really did rain chickens.
Today’s chicken seemed to be that he, January, was a significant enough figure in national politics for the Consul of Tharsis to try to talk him round.
All at once, he understood why Gale spoke so carefully. There was so much more weight on everything you said, if you were saying it not as some random factory bloke having a bit of a rant in the break room, but as someone whose opinion—mattered. It was as much of a shock as it would have been to land back in Earth’s punishing gravity. He was used to his muscles taking that weight, but not his words. It was paralysing. Feverishly, he thought it was a major omission to have a word for people from gravity three times stronger and inventions like cages to stop them doing everybody else a lot of damage, but not for people whose influence was a thousand times stronger. At least if you had a word for a thing, you could put a border around it and think about it properly, instead of flailing helplessly when you realized you were metamorphosing into it unexpectedly one Tuesday morning at Jade buggering Hill.
The Consul looked honestly dismayed. “What? No, that would be—very illegal, there’s such a thing as human rights.”
January watched them at a tilt, balancing on saying that human rights were an imaginary thing that only worked if everyone agreed, and they only agreed if they weren’t upset or hungry at the time.
He took a breath to ask why he was here then, if not to be horribly threatened, but then he had to reconsider, because trotting through the open door there was, right now, a small pig. It looked happy to see them, and hurried over.
“Can . . . you see a pig?” he asked.
The Consul laughed and stroked the pig’s ears. It tried to get into January’s lap, plainly under the impression it was still a much smaller pig. “This is Alice. Aubrey sent a litter of piglets to the European Federation Embassy after it turned out their Chancellor had a pig-related adventure at university—”
“Sorry, Aubrey Gale did that? My Gale?” He hadn’t meant to interrupt, but he was too surprised not to.
“Oh, yes, they’ve got a cracking sense of humour once you get past all the pretentiousness and the fascism,” the Consul said mildly. “But anyway, there were loads of pigs, so I adopted one and so did lots of other Earth embassies and now we all get together and talk about our pigs. Resounding diplomatic success really. I love it when a prank backfires.”
Alice snuffled hopefully at their pockets. The Consul took out a packet of peanuts and gave a handful to January, and there was an interlude in which there was a lot of happy squeaking. January wondered suddenly if this was a small ploy; See, you really ought to trust me, look at my trustworthy pig.
“You know about Max, right?” the Consul asked. “You know what you might be walking into?”
January nodded.
He had fallen down a research rabbit hole looking into Max, whose proper name was Maksim Liu, a younger scion of House Song. Max had been a marine, the hardest of the hard, regularly vanishing on black ops somewhere out around Saturn for reasons the government was never at liberty to say. Then Max vanished along with the younger Gale heir, River, never to be heard from again. It was more plausible than it sounded, everyone agreed; if you were a marine then you could very effectively disappear, and if you could do that, you probably would, as a big up-yours to the person you were leaving. The police had cleared Aubrey Gale of any wrongdoing. January was on the fence. Not just on it; bolted to it. It did all sound reasonable when you looked into it, but he was pretty sure Gale could have made the mandatory adoption of pink wigs sound reasonable.
“That’s good,” the Consul said, “because . . . as I’m sure you know, you have no way out of this now. Even if I say, I’ll pay you lots of money not to do it and you say to House Gale you’ve changed your mind, you’re setting up an Earthstrong theatre in New Kowloon, thanks, I suspect Aubrey would make a big show of being magnanimous and then have you hit by a garbage truck so you can’t sell the story to the press.”
January didn’t know what to say to that. It had a horrible ring of truth.
“Come with me,” the Consul said. “There’s something I want you to see.”
“Oink,” said Alice.
“Yes, and you.”
“Are you going to tell me what it is and why you’re showing me?” asked January, who couldn’t help feeling it was bloody histrionic to announce something like that and not explain.
“No,” the Consul said happily. “Ruin the surprise, wouldn’t it.”
Probably they were just having fun; probably they didn’t mean it as a little power play to remind him who was Consul here. Probably.
Gale, he couldn’t help thinking, would have considered all of this to be in very poor taste.
What, said the voice in his head, you’d rather a good-looking nutter with classy manners than someone who’s actually right but also a bit annoying?
It sounded stupid when you put it like that, but actually it was a window into why Gale was so popular. There was a part of him that preferred the classy manners. He wanted to call that frivolous, but in fact it was the opposite. Frivolity meant something surface-level and easily scratched away, but this was down deep in him somewhere. It mattered that Gale was polite and kind in person. It mattered that the Consul . . . wasn’t.
You, the voice informed him crossly, are a garbage person. You deserve to end up stabbed in the secret sex dungeon Gale most definitely has.
The Consul led the way down more strangely tilting corridors, and explained that while surveillance was tricky from six million miles away, there was, out on Mount Penglai,15 a telescopic array that covered such a broad surface area that the images it generated could show particular mountains on a small planet orbiting Alpha Centauri.
What it could also show was anywhere on Earth, so long as everyone happened to be facing the right way at the time.
They stopped at a room that required a fingerprint scan to get inside and January glanced round at the secret service agents, alarmed.
“Just sign this,” one of them said, quite friendly now, and held out a tablet. “Official Secrets Act.”
January didn’t ask what was behind the door. Secrets, obviously. He signed it.
What the feed from the great telescope array was showing now was a huge line of fire across the United States. California, New Mexico, Louisiana, Florida, the whole South. The smoke plumes were so big they covered over cities.
It was projected across a wall in an otherwise dim room.
“How is it looking?” the Consul asked a group of people sitting around a central table. “Do we have a clear window again?”
All of them looked military, and they all stood up. January hung back in the gloom with the secret service people, and the Consul didn’t tell him to do otherwise. Alice sat on his foot. One of the Secret Service people knelt down and gave her a puzzle toy to play with.
“We do, for the next two hours. It’s much worse than yesterday. It’s now fifty-eight degrees Celsius on the surface,” someone reported. “We think everyone who can has moved underground; and everyone who can’t is moving towards the sea. But for some that’s a very long walk. We’re seeing convoys of people walking.”
The image zoomed in, and there were indeed people walking—all on the verges of the freeway, and only the verges, because the tarmac itself was gleaming and sticky. People were holding umbrellas against the heat, tugging little kids along in antigravity buggies. They must have been looking after one another’s children to give each set of parents a break, because some people were trailing ten or twelve, like dejected balloons.
“Why aren’t they driving?” the Consul asked.
“Because it’s so hot that the solar fabrics they use to charge the cars—well, they’re melting.”
“And there’s still nothing about this on their social media?”
“No. Total censorship, total shutdown of any image that even looks like a fire.” The general sighed. “A few things are getting through, people smart enough to talk about a traffic jam or an accident or something, but even those posts are vanishing almost before anyone can catch them. It looks like the White House means to keep this entirely secret.”
“They must know we can see.”
“They don’t care,” the general shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what we say, no one there will believe us. The news reaching U.S. citizens is all about bad traffic in California and summer internet outages, and how well it’s going against the Russians in Alaska.”
“Things in Alaska aren’t going well, are they?”
“No, they’ve fallen back almost entirely, but they don’t want their own population to know that. Two billion Americans, and only one billion of them put Namina Gray in office, and she knows what’s going to happen if the other billion hear bad things.”
The Consul pressed both hands over their face like a breathing mask. “It’s just staggering, isn’t it.”
January caught himself feeling irked to hear someone talk about it as if it were surprising. You needed to be very divorced from disaster, and very safe, and used to everything being lovely and fair and good, to be staggered. And then he half laughed at himself, because he sounded like one of those old men who told stories about how In My Day we all had to eat gravel and our fathers murdered us nightly and we were grateful.
“It’s called the illusory truth effect. If you hear something often enough, for long enough, you’ll believe it. Even if you originally knew that the information was false,” the general said wryly. “And the only thing Americans hear is that nothing’s wrong with their weather and Russia is losing.”
“How many people are being . . . displaced?”
“We think close to fifty million, but that’s literally just some of our analysts counting on grid squares and averaging. And what’s of concern to us is how many people are moving towards airports with interplanetary travel. China has already shut the border. Nigeria and Saudi Arabia look like they’ll do the same. Russia’s out, obviously. We’re going to see a boom in people-smuggling to Mars.”
The images were incredible; they might have been from drone footage taken directly above the roads. Everything the Consul had said looked right. There were cars abandoned on the verges, their solar canopies sticky-looking, some sparking fitfully. Not even that far away from the convoy of trudging people, maybe two miles or so, the fires were as high as the trees, slinging from branch to grass to house faster than January would ever have thought fire could move. By a white church, old-fashioned, all wooden, a big group of people were kneeling on the steps, not moving. Even though the fire was licking at the gate.
“What are they doing?” one of the generals asked.
The image zoomed in, but no one said anything. Everyone just looked puzzled.
“Praying,” January said, too quiet.
“What was that?” someone said.
“They’re praying. That’s a temple.”
The Consul nodded slowly. “Listen, all of you. I might not be in this chair in three months’ time. You might have five years of Aubrey Gale slamming the borders shut. But I’m in the chair right now, and those people are praying while hell comes up through the ground. This colony was built to answer prayers like that, and while I’m the one here, we’re going to. Let’s go and get them.”
January had to replay his memory of the words, because he couldn’t make them make sense at first.
Let’s go and get them.
Just like that.
With no warning, his throat closed up and he had to turn away, and he was standing there with both hands clamped over his mouth so that he wouldn’t make a sound. He couldn’t tell where it had come from. No, he could. In his mind, Tharsis was beautiful and rich and closed off. That he had managed to get here was a bizarre aberration that wouldn’t happen again.
But here it was. Someone who saw the neighbour’s house on fire and picked up the hose without charging for the water.
“We’re with you, Consul,” the first general said. “But something to consider is that we’re at aphelion. It’s going to take them more than two months to get here, even if we launch ships from the lunar docks today. If they get here, only to find a new government hostile to immigration—I mean, I don’t know to what extent Aubrey Gale would actually enact the policies they’re talking about, but we have to consider the possibility that a Gale consulate wouldn’t even allow them to land.”
The Consul was nodding. “I know. We’ll have to risk it. Thank you, everyone. If I could have the room now?”
January watched everyone else leave, ghosting by in the dark uniforms that were nothing like anything military at home. They were as heavy as senatorial robes, sashed sometimes with red or blue depending on which force they represented, he didn’t know which or why. They reminded him of priests.
He pulled his sleeve over his eyes, which were sore now.
Once everyone was gone, the Consul waved him into a newly empty chair. Like before, it was so high he had to curl up in it, because his feet didn’t touch the ground.
“I didn’t bring you in here to show off,” the Consul said seriously. “I just wanted you to see who is going to lose if Aubrey wins.” They sighed. “There is one water factory on Mars, only one, you know that better than anyone, and there’s no infrastructure anywhere outside Tharsis. No pipes, no roads. It would be great to send Earthstrongers to the far side of the planet, but we can’t. There’s no water, and no way to get them enough water. They land here or they end up in a desert. We can’t build another water factory, because guess which House would have to agree to supply it with the gigantic amount of power it would need?”
He lifted his hand to say, Yes, House Gale, I know.
“And it won’t be like the first colonists. There isn’t any money behind refugee ships, they’re not scientists and engineers and marines. They would have to survive with whatever they brought. People are resourceful, but what happens when we tell millions of people to do that? At what point does it just become easier to invade Tharsis?”
The screen still showed that white church.
January had to sit back in his chair and stop looking at it. “I know.”
“I know you know, but what do you think?” The Consul inclined their head. “Do you agree with Aubrey? Lock them out, make them fend for themselves—invite problems down the line?”
“Of course I don’t agree!” he burst out. “What, I’m marrying Senator Gale because I like them? I don’t. Gale is right, there’s a massive problem, and I’m dangerous even though I don’t want to be, but no one can tell me the solution is either to make everyone like me maim ourselves or sit on a planet that’s on fire.”
“So why are you marrying Aubrey? Money?”
“No. It’s the only way I won’t have to naturalise and I’ll have enough electricity and enough food all at the same time,” he said, feeling bleak that that wasn’t blindingly obvious. “Consul, why am I here? Why are you showing me all this?”
“Because,” the Consul said, with a pensive frown that seemed to say that the answer he had just given was somehow not what they’d thought it would be, “you’re about to marry into House Gale, and you’re going to be surrounded by people who say, as if it’s undisputed fact, that I won’t just be bringing refugees here on those ships, but probably a good portion of the Chinese army to shore up my consulship. That’s the real issue, you understand?”
“No. Sorry?”
“The relative harmfulness or harmlessness of Earthstrongers in general isn’t what this election is really about. What it’s about is that I support a continued union with China and the other states who built Tharsis; Aubrey is a nationalist who wants an independent Tharsis. Do you understand our legal position with regard to China?”
January took a slow breath and squashed down the need to say, do you really think that when I was studying Mandarin for hours every day and learning what refugees can and can’t do, and feeling space-sick quite a lot of the time, and then later when I was doing twelve hours a day at a manual labour job in a literally explosive water factory, that I went back to my room in the evenings and curled up with international legal codes? “No,” he said.
“We’re what’s called a Special Economic Area,” the Consul said. “It means we do have our own government and a certain amount of practical independence, but we pay tax to Beijing, who police our interplanetary shipping lanes and until recently, subsidised our infrastructure and healthcare and everything, really. It’s only in the last twenty years or so that Tharsis has become wealthy enough to support itself, see?”
“Okay?”
“I want that support to continue. Aubrey wants to break it off totally. Demonising Earthstrongers is a way for them to do that.” The Consul sighed. “I brought you here so you’ll remember those people praying at that temple, even once Aubrey’s put you through the Far Right Brainwashing Machine, and you’ll remember we’re talking about saving refugees just like you, not importing Earthstrong troops.”
January had to look at the floor for a second—it was a long way away—because in a small but strengthening prickle, he was starting to feel annoyed. The way Gale talked to him was sometimes blunt, a bit shove-from-the-dance-teacher-to-test-your-balance, but what was behind that, he realized now, was an absolute trust that he would keep his balance. Gale assumed he was as clever as they were, even if he didn’t know as many individual things. And they answered the bloody question, if you asked it. The Consul thought he was so feeble he’d be brainwashed soon. And they were not answering the question.
“Okay, you don’t want me to be brainwashed, but why?” he said. “Why do you care, why am I here?”
The Consul laughed, a big sudden laugh that made him jump. “You sounded dead like Aubrey just then. You’re here because I want to find out whether you’d give me a call if you learned something in the murky depths of the House Gale swamp that could help me win this election.”
He felt like he had when Gale asked him to marry them. He understood the words, but the meaning was so unlikely that it got stuck in his Sense of Reasonableness filter, the one everyone had because it was an evolutionary necessity. If one monkey thought another monkey had said to watch out for the falling cocks and looked around faithfully for chickens, that monkey got squashed by the falling rocks. You needed the filter that said: Yes, I know what I heard but it can’t be right.
Only every now and then, it really did rain chickens.
Today’s chicken seemed to be that he, January, was a significant enough figure in national politics for the Consul of Tharsis to try to talk him round.
All at once, he understood why Gale spoke so carefully. There was so much more weight on everything you said, if you were saying it not as some random factory bloke having a bit of a rant in the break room, but as someone whose opinion—mattered. It was as much of a shock as it would have been to land back in Earth’s punishing gravity. He was used to his muscles taking that weight, but not his words. It was paralysing. Feverishly, he thought it was a major omission to have a word for people from gravity three times stronger and inventions like cages to stop them doing everybody else a lot of damage, but not for people whose influence was a thousand times stronger. At least if you had a word for a thing, you could put a border around it and think about it properly, instead of flailing helplessly when you realized you were metamorphosing into it unexpectedly one Tuesday morning at Jade buggering Hill.
