Page 113 of The Mars House

“I do. It’s a straightforward thing, why not?”

“Why not indeed.” The Speaker watched them for a second. “Tell me what you think about this, I’m supposed to be tabling it soon. America and China are still issuing extradition orders on public figures they dislike. Our statehood is unrecognised on Earth, and so as you will have seen in the news, people are being arrested from ships in international deep space on the Crossing, and if they’re naturalised, getting to Earth’s orbit is immediately fatal. What would you do to stop that?”

“Doesn’t the Refugee Act serve?”

“Sorry?”

“I’m not a lawyer, but doesn’t the Act make it illegal to deport a refugee to a place where they would face physical persecution? Earth’s gravity is physical persecution, for us. We don’t need to be a sovereign state for that to apply. Do we?”

The Speaker smiled. “No. We don’t. Listen. What would you think about spearheading a campaign to get more people arriving here to naturalise? It will protect them from extradition under the Refugee Act, but it’ll be a hard sell, naturalisation being what it is.”

River tilted their head. “And it doesn’t matter if I fail, because I’m in an unelected seat which is safe as long as I technically do my job, and because I’ve been about as involved in the senatorial process before now as a very sickly donkey. You can pass it off as another Aubrey Gale dead end, nothing to do with you.”

“I wasn’t going to put it like that,” the Speaker said, looking caught out in the way River found people always did with them, whether they were pretending to be Aubrey or not. It wasn’t something they liked about themselves. They came across, if they didn’t speak, as completely harmless; but then two sentences later, everyone realized that they weren’t really talking to a person so much as some kind of threshing machine in a person suit. “And—naturally if you were successful, you’d make a lot of friends.”

“No, it’s all right. I like it.” And, the mechanical voice that was so good at calculation said, it was supremely advantageous to help. The Speaker was Max’s Apollo. When the questions and the rumours started when Max didn’t reappear, it was going to be important to have Max’s own Apollo consider them a friend.

You are a stone-cold sociopath, said another voice, a lot like Aubrey’s.

River felt dirty. They had always been too calm under pressure, they’d never been panicky or scared or joyful even when they should have been, but until now it had been something between a joke and a disability. It had never clicked that in the right circumstances, this thing they could do was not a joke, but radioactive.

“You do?” the Speaker said.

“I do,” River said, thinking.

The week before Aubrey was due to come home, River did the most insidious and despicable thing they had ever done and hoped they ever would do.

They got together with a lively, clever charity for young people, and launched a campaign about turning off your filters. On a livestream, River and two other senators, along with some actors and news anchors, all switched off their filters to show what they really looked like, and the footage and photographs sprawled everywhere. Vogue did a feature, and the fashion section of Xinhua. Then River bought some of the pictures from the charity, and used them for the posters of the new naturalisation campaign, with a new slogan.

No filters. Just the truth.

The head of security, a gentle veteran called Sasha who had always had a hell of a time with Aubrey, took River respectfully aside when they got back to Songshu.

“Senator, can I have a quick word?”

“Of course.”

This was it. Sasha knew Aubrey more than well enough to know the difference.

Sasha shifted. “I just wanted to say—I’ve been with you a while, but I’ve never seen you work like you have this week. It doesn’t mean much, Senator, but—we’re all proud of you.”

River stared at them. They would have been less shocked to get a punch in the head. “Doesn’t mean—Mx Martinez. Thank you.”

Sasha bowed. “Well. We all serve at the pleasure of the House of Gale.”

“We all do,” River echoed, suddenly on the edge of crying. They’d never understood people like Sasha, people who had been in the forces, who risked their lives all the time, and who then took jobs protecting senators and celebrities who must have driven them mad with all their naïveté and carelessness. There was an endlessly long-suffering nobility in it. When Sasha didn’t straighten from the bow, River caught their arms and levered them upright again.

“I’ve—never really sat down with you, have I?” River asked, tentative, in case Aubrey had.

“Why would you?”

“Because you’re interesting. I want to know about where you served, and . . . no, sorry. I’m chronically nosy,” they said apologetically. It was something Aubrey snapped back with, every time River said they were being a dick. When are you going to learn to have a normal human conversation instead of just interrogating people like you’re an investigative fucking journalist on the scoop of the century?

“Senator,” Sasha said gently, “that might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said.”

River laughed, and then stopped, because Aubrey had just burst through the door.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”