Page 17 of The Mars House

There was a groan from the House Gale side of the crowd, and Gale stood very still under it, just letting it drown them. It should have been satisfying to see that, but it wasn’t. They hadn’t even tried to defend themselves, or bluster a way through. January had never seen a politician lose an argument so honestly. Somehow it was as bad as seeing them win. He wished Gale could just be obnoxious—then it would be easy to hate them in a nice straightforward way.

He wished the Consul would look less smug, too.

“Then we must now move on,” the moderator concluded. “The next topic is the long-argued idea of nationalising major industries, such as electricity generation. Senator Gale, the floor is yours first this time . . .”

January didn’t hear the end of the question, because the House Song people in the prison audience were singing the Chinese national anthem and chanting So-o-ong one, Gale nil in three languages.

He bent forward against his knees and pressed his hands over his eyes. He didn’t know what to think any more. In his soul, he did know it was all right to defend yourself if someone was trying to maim you, and Gale was trying to maim him. But he felt like he was going mad, because half the people in that stadium and half the people in this room just—didn’t agree. It was one of those basic things he would have thought everyone could agree about, and seeing that an awful lot of people thought he was the Mars equivalent of a horrifying misogynist for thinking so . . . it was turning his lungs to glass.

“Are you okay?” the warden asked him. “You’ve gone the most dreadful colour.”

He nodded. He made an effort to smile. He could imagine that if you were a Natural person, watching an Earthstronger angst about being Earthstrong would be a special sort of infuriating and very much deserving of a punch in the throat. “I’m always a dreadful colour.”

The warden smiled too. “Come on. You need a cup of coffee and some chocolate.”

“There’s chocolate?” January asked, a tiny bit hopeful despite everything.

8 High-security ones weren’t. High-security ones were hulks orbiting Jupiter, and in the event of a riot or even too much complaining about the food, the pilots were notorious for dipping too low and pinning everyone with the fierce gravity. If it happened too often, the guards flew away on escape vessels and remote-controlled the hulk deeper into orbit, where it was fifty-fifty whether you died of a heart attack. The Department for Justice always said it was “unexpected atmospheric fluctuations,” and of course doing it at all on purpose would be dreadfully illegal. In the Senate, it was known as the Whoops We Did It Again policy.

9 It wasn’t just an instinct to be alone. Bathrooms in Tharsis always cheered him up, because bathroom terminology in Mandarin was fantastic. The word for “toilet” was 马桶, matong, which literally meant “horse bucket,” and the word for “sink” was 洗手池, xishouchi, which meant “wash-hand-pond.” So sometimes you came across glorious signs that reminded you to please flush the horse bucket and then use the hand-washing pond. It was hard to have a bad day after that.

8

On the day he was released, January went home on the metro in a fugue and only remembered when he was almost at the nuclear cooling tower that there would be no food in the flat. He stopped by the little supermarket opposite, ordered online and waited outside so he wouldn’t have to pay the delivery fee. He leaned against the big sign on the wall that said NO EARTHSTRONGERS, beside a big friendly collie who the serial dognapper would have loved. January rubbed its ears, feeling discombobulated. All the inmates had been Earthstrong, and it was odd to be back in the real world again where most people were much taller than him.

He didn’t realize he was standing in a sunbeam until a tiny, determined-looking old Earthstrong man shuffled him to one side and put up an umbrella. The solar fabric on it gleamed happily as it soaked in the light, channelling it down into a battery in the handle. They were cheap, those umbrellas; the charge they gathered would only power a kettle or a few lights for the day, but it was worth the bother if you were too old or too ill to work.

He had a bleak vision of his own future. Say he did manage to stay here—he was going to become one of those old men who had to go out at five in the morning in the summer to claim a decent sunbeam in Gagarin Square with an umbrella and stare at parakeets until he had enough power to make a cup of coffee.

No; no. No. Shut up. It was fine. Things came along.

“There you go,” the shop clerk said, easing a cotton bag of groceries into his arms. They looked at him twice. “Aren’t you that man who threatened to kill Aubrey Gale?”

It was the first time he’d heard a Natural person say man, and the first time he’d heard how it sounded here. It was the way someone in London would have said pig.

He found himself shaking his head. Earthstrongers, especially any from Europe, all looked the same to everyone here. He didn’t think it was rudeness. It was just that they didn’t see many of those kinds of faces, so that differentiating between particular ones became a lot like trying to tell apart different puffins. You’d have to be really into puffins. It was the way human brains worked, and January had never minded, and now he’d never been more grateful for it. “No, I’ve just got the same hair.” He should dye it, he thought miserably.

The clerk relaxed. “Sorry, sweetheart.”

At home, he took all the gone-off things out of the fridge and threw them away, then put the new things in, then dropped down against the radiator and couldn’t get up again.

In the morning, he went to the European Federation Embassy. All the nice embassies for important countries were in New Kowloon where the Senate was, but Europe was just some funny bits stuck on the side of Russia, so it was in Dengta, one district over, above a nice hotel. He waited in the severe waiting room for an hour before someone could see him, and when he was shown into her office, she looked tired and harassed already, even though it was only ten o’clock. Like about half of the Earthstrong people in Tharsis, she was wearing a coloured pin. Hers was red, which meant she was solidly “she.”10

“I—read online that I can get help finding work here,” he said when she asked him what she could do.

She let her head drop a little. Her hair was in a bun held up by convenience store chopsticks, the kind that came joined together at the top. “You’re January Stirling.”

He wished the seat was the kind you could huddle back into. “Yes.”

“I’m so sorry, Mr Stirling, but . . . there’s nothing we can do to help you. There are very, very few industries in Tharsis that will accept Earthstrong ex-convicts of any kind. Even then, we’re talking cash-only fast-food places round the back of the wet market in Americatown.” She opened her hands on her desk. “Immigration law has tightened a lot since Gagarin Square. If you’re not a citizen, if you’re not naturalised, and if you have a criminal record all at the same time . . . it’s bleak.”

He had thought that that would be the answer, but he had needed to hear someone official say it. Now that they had, it was a sort of relief. “So—what should I do?”

“Well, you have three options. The fast-food joints behind the wet market. Or, ask the immigration bureau to deport you back to Earth. That way the Crossing is free. But . . . between you and me, I’m going to advise you not to do that. The war between Russia and America is about to land pretty solidly in what’s left of Britain. The Russians are about to invade. It’s going to be a hellhole by the time you get there. Hence all this . . .” She waved around the office, to all the people hurrying to and fro, looking grim, shouting on calls. As she let her hand drop, she picked up her stylus, not to write anything with, just to fiddle with. It clinked on her cage gauntlet. “I would never, ever recommend this normally, but . . . the other option is to naturalise. That means full citizenship, free healthcare, a free university degree or trade apprenticeship.” She seemed to see what she was doing with the stylus and slung it irritably into a box with some others. “I know you were a dancer,” she said quietly. “But honestly . . . it’s either naturalise, become a career criminal with some Americatown gang, or end up conscripted in a war zone on Earth.”

“Right,” he said. He couldn’t feel anything. He was suspended in that moment between accidentally pouring a kettle of boiling water over your hand instead of into a cup, and your brain understanding that pain was happening. It was coming, and soon, but it wasn’t quite there yet.

“It isn’t right,” she said, slumping back in her chair. “No one gets to tell you that you have to hurt yourself for the benefit of someone else, I feel dirty saying it to you. I don’t know how Aubrey Gale sleeps at night. Flinching precious Noble Victim fuckwit.”