Page 18 of The Mars House

January smiled a bit.

“I . . . did not say any of that, because I am professionally neutral in matters of international politics,” she sighed.

“Yes, ma’am. Ah . . . thanks.”

“Good luck,” she said, not as if she imagined there was any good luck left to wish on anyone.

So he walked the three miles across town, through the roaring dust, to the naturalisation centre near the docks. The metro was running, but he wanted to do something that would make him too tired to think, and trying to walk and breathe at the same time in a dust storm seemed like just the thing. Inside his gloves, the gauntlets of the resistance cage got colder and colder, until the metal stung.

Even without any internal signal, it would have been difficult to get lost in Tharsis. With its grid system, you only had to count the streets, and because the dust storms came every year, all the street signs and numbers were lit up bright, and the road markings were luminous, all in different pastel colours. The roads were lined with solar cells, so they usually glowed as cars drove over them, charging them through the wheels, but that wasn’t happening any more. The dust must be blocking too much light.

The news said it would clear up soon.

The nurses at the centre were Natural but fearless, and as soon as he arrived, he got a tide of warmth from one of them and hustled straight off to the canteen. He was glad of that, because otherwise he would have had to faff with his phone making sure he was reading the signs right. The facility was brand new, so they were all Mandarin. No English or Russian translations. After his extra two weeks of lessons, he was starting to see that English gave things a patina of shabbiness. It was elderly and cheap, and only people’s grandparents spoke it exclusively, and so it came with a sort of vestigial memory-smell of mothballs.

The nurse, whose name was Yan, seemed concerned that he’d walked all the way in the dust. He thought they might have asked something about it, but he couldn’t concentrate, because someone was being pushed past in a wheelchair. They looked mostly dead, hooked to a drip.

The canteen was cosy despite the freezing weather outside. It was the first time he’d been indoors and warm enough at the same time since the refugee ship, and in a strange rush he remembered how much better you thought if you were comfortable. There were proper carpets and well-cushioned chairs, and tiny little terrariums of beautiful hothouse flowers on each of the tables. That was typical of Tharsis. They spent money even on things they hated. Prisons, naturalisation centres. It seemed to be a point of national pride that everything was immaculate, and he was starting, also, to understand that it was a way to underline how this wasn’t Earth, thank you.

And, no doubt, so that people like Gale could say, but look, the conditions are marvellous, what are you complaining about?

It was almost lunchtime, and the broad room was filling with people. Some were moving carefully, holding cups in both hands and looking frightened they were going to smash something. Others, not so careful, had the doughy, unhealthy look that came when muscle deflated. Two people were in wheelchairs. It looked . . . almost okay, but then, these wouldn’t be the worst cases, because they wouldn’t be coming here to eat.

Yan took him across to an already populated table and introduced him, vanished briefly, then came back with a pastry and a coffee, both of which were for him. He felt the deep sort of gratitude that should really have applied only to people who saved you from being run over by a train; he hadn’t had real pastry since London.

“January’s just here for a look around,” Yan explained to the others, who were giving him curious looks. He couldn’t tell if it was because they recognised him from the news or because he was objectively strange-looking. During the Crossing, his hair had lost its colour. It had gone from black to an unpleasant off-white. “Would some of you mind providing a bit of inside information that isn’t coming from Open Evening Nurse?”

Everyone smiled; Yan was always nice, then, not just with visitors. That was good.

January slid into a chair, very conscious of the shush of the cage as he did, and the way the others’ eyes followed the flash of the steel across his shoulders. Yan sat down opposite.

“January’s an unusual name,” someone American said. He was wearing a green pin, which meant “he,” and rather chicly, January thought, he had it speared through a purple silk handkerchief. He had grey hair too, but that was because he was in his fifties. He sounded very refined; January could imagine him giving a lecture in front of a blackboard, probably about algebra. Some people were made of tweed even if they weren’t wearing any. “Story in it?”

“Not really,” he said, surprised to be asked, but happy too. Nobody he knew spoke thorough enough English to put his name together with the month. Earth months were obsolete anyway here, where the year was nearly seven hundred days long.11 Knowing about months at all, never mind in English, was esoteric, like knowing the zodiac signs. “Mum was knackered when they got her to fill out the birth certificate form and she put the date in the wrong box, but then she decided she liked it.”

“That’s wonderful,” the American man beamed, and January felt a few inches better than before. With an odd flash, he realized the man was flirting. That was flattering. He hadn’t even thought about any of that since London and, if he was honest, not a great deal before then either. It sent his thoughts into a flustered tumble. Flattering but, like he always did for no reason he could trace, he felt attacked. The man might as well have been coming at him with a mad grin and a flick knife.

That feeling would go away after about a week, once he knew the man better. It was fine. Then it might be nice to be flirted with. At some point he might even work out why he had such a stupid reaction to it. Probably something deep and awful about his father, but January didn’t like poking around in the corners of his own mind in the same way he didn’t like investigating drains.

“So how is it here?” he asked.

“It’s a great place. You couldn’t ask for better. Rooms are like in a hotel,” somebody said.

“And the nurses are good,” said somebody else.

“I’ve lost a lot of feeling,” the American man added, but not sounding like he minded, and January admired him in a huge rush for that. The whole reason he hadn’t done this himself was that he was precious about his health. To meet someone who didn’t care—it reset some important gauges. “Can’t tell if cups are hot or cold. It’s quite interesting.”

January noticed that by contrast he was feeling everything much too strongly and ordered himself to calm down, which did not work.

“Nerve damage is a common side effect,” Yan explained. “We’re not sure why. Not everyone gets it, and we haven’t found anything that predicts it very well.” They pushed their glasses up, though they didn’t need to. “Actually a lot of naturalisation symptoms are like that. No one really knows why it happens. Lots of theories to do with local chemicals, radiation, all that.”

He felt off balance. “You mean it’s not the gravity?”

“Well, it might be, but the gravity doesn’t account for everything. Sometimes something goes wrong at a cellular level. Researchers are working on it all the time. It seems to happen much more now than it did to the first colonists, which is a bit of a puzzle.”

January had to look down. He was tracing patterns in some spilled water on the edge of the table, because suddenly it was impossible not to do anything with his hands. A bit of a puzzle, Christ. “What . . . are the chances of that happening?”

Yan breathed in deep, and January realized that this must be their least favourite part: explaining how awful it was going to be.