Page 22 of The Mars House

Gale rescued him. “Anyway, I’d like to offer you a job.”

January sat back too sharply and Gale went out of his focus. He had never got around to getting new contact lenses, or even glasses. He didn’t see so badly he couldn’t function, but he could only see well at normal talking distance. “I don’t need charity, I’ll find work soon enough—”

Gale was already shaking their head. “Hear me out. Senatorial marriages here are often arranged. Marriage in Tharsis only lasts five years.” They paused. “If it goes well, fantastic. If it doesn’t, it’s only five years of your life.”

It was like being handed one of those wooden puzzles, the three-dimensional ones that came in star shapes or complicated cubes and spheres. January tried to put it together three or four different ways, but then had to give up. He couldn’t see how marriages and jobs linked up. “You’ve . . . lost me?”

Gale sat forward, fire-iron straight, the same as their hair. The ends brushed their elbows. They weren’t dressed for the Senate, but they must have come from the office; hair down meant formal things. Or maybe this was the formal thing, maybe it was January. Without meaning to, he ran his hand through his own hair. It was short. That was the here-equivalent of having tattoos on your face and a vigorous heroin addiction. He hadn’t cut it since coming here, but it was just refusing to grow. It bothered him a lot more than he wanted to say, what with the colour. He hated looking like an old man from behind; a cheap, criminal old man.

“The consular election is soon, and I’m running,” Gale said. “The sitting consul has a very solid blue-collar base, and I am obscenely rich, which is perceived as being a lot worse than what they are, which is relatable and friendly and completely loyal to a foreign power.”

“I know, I saw the debate,” January mumbled.

“If I can’t appeal to at least some of Consul Song’s base, much of which is only first- or second-generation naturalised, I’m done.” They gave him an anaemic smile. “And I just let the full force of the press engine and the judiciary land on the head of a working-class immigrant who did nothing wrong.”

He looked at them sideways, because in his experience, politicians lied, stole, trafficked, and occasionally murdered, and the consensus was that you voted for whoever hadn’t sent pictures of unfortunate parts of themselves to a teenager. Anything better was unrealistic. The debate had been satisfying, but nobody was going to refuse to vote for Gale because of anything that happened to January.

“Who cares?”

“Everyone,” Gale said, looking taken aback. “We have the strictest code of behaviour of any government in the worlds.”

January decided to leave that alone, or he’d end up laughing maniacally and hurling himself out the window. “So you . . . you need to connect with poor voters?”

“Yes. Weddings always go down very well. Particularly fairy-tale weddings of the kind where the ordinary person becomes royalty.”

He rearranged the words in three or four different ways but none of them made any sense. However he looked at it, it was a giant step to one side for no reason.

“I don’t get it.”

“I’m offering you a job, not a real marriage. You would appear at public engagements, you shake hands, you smile, you do the morning shows and the magazines, you act a bit. You would have your own room at the house, plenty of space, and you would not see me unless we were working together. But you would be paid very well, monthly, as with any other salary. A hundred thousand yuan every month for five years. This is not a trick or a game; you will be provided with lawyers, whose job it will be to make that contract bulletproof for you.”

January’s brain stopped working the second it began to suspect that Gale was talking about him.

“What?” he said.

Gale seemed to see he wasn’t asking for more information, just for a gap in which to understand what was happening. Politely, they didn’t say anything.

“You—right,” January said numbly. “Me, though; you’re asking . . . me . . . to marry . . . you.”

“Yes.”

Yuan, real yuan, real money; he hadn’t used real money since coming here. He didn’t ever buy anything you would need money for instead of power. Kilowatts weren’t a currency; it was the same as being paid in food. It was a way not to have a bank account and not to pay tax, and to be invisible to the immigration bureau, who had begun deporting every Earthstronger they could since Gagarin Square.

Gale was talking more to the tumbler of coffee than to January now. It seemed a lot like they were hoping that if they didn’t look at him, he wouldn’t be there. “I’m aware this sounds like the offer of someone who means to kidnap you and keep you in a cellar, but if there’s anything I can do to reassure you, I will.”

January pressed back against his chair. “I’m booked into the naturalisation centre on Monday.”

Gale looked at him as if he had suggested lopping off some limbs. “Why?”

“Why? You were trying to persuade me to do it on a live broadcast, you’re all for it, aren’t you?”

“I am, but you’re not. What are you doing?”

January felt off balance. “I’d have thought you’d be pleased. You spend your whole life campaigning to get people in camps—”

“You’re still telling me what I think, not what you think.”

January felt very odd, because he’d just had a bit of a revelation about the way Gale spoke. It sounded aggressive; they just came up to you and gave you a very hard conversational shove, which felt like being attacked. But he had a strong sense now that that wasn’t how they meant it. It was the way January’s dance teacher had used to make everyone stand on one leg and push their unbalanced side; it was to see how firm you were standing, and the idea was to push back, not to politely fall over. It wasn’t aggressive. It was—interested.