Page 23 of The Mars House

Jesus.

“It’s free. I’ve run out of money. I don’t have a job. And I won’t get one unless I naturalise.”

“What do you mean?” Again, it sounded sharp, but Gale didn’t look angry or combative. They were just waiting for him to explain, tilted forward slightly to hear him across the unnatural distance the two of them were talking across, over the whirring of the heating unit.

Which was making the room properly warm for the first time since he’d lived here. It was amazing.

“I mean it’s three months of free food and I don’t have enough for three weeks. And after that I can get citizenship and universal basic income until I find work.”

Gale was frowning. “Citizenship isn’t dependent on naturalisation. You can apply anyway. All climate change refugees from Earth are eligible—”

“I put in a citizenship application when I got here; the same week.” He had a bleak flashback to the six hours it had taken at the immigration office. “I don’t expect to hear back for four years.”

“Four. Si,” Gale repeated in Mandarin, because “four” and “for” were too close.

January shrugged. “That’s normal. They say it’s the backlog.” Backlog was code for time we think we can get away with waiting while we hope you reconsider. “Naturalisation gets you automatic citizenship. Well; you know that. You wrote that law.”

Gale said nothing at first, and January had a strange but distinct feeling that he had just said something that was either wrong or unfair. They looked, just for a second, like they wanted to say as much, and he felt his whole body go tense, waiting to be smashed through the conversational floor again like last time; but Gale just let that breath out, and then started again. “Yes. I did. But do this and you’ll never think about money again. Whatever else I am, I am not as horrendous as the naturalisation process.”

If the floor had tilted under his chair, January would have been less confused. He had thought Gale took the position they did because they either didn’t really understand what people were losing in naturalisation, or they thought Earthstrongers deserved the suffering for bothering the Tharsese authorities to begin with. To understand that it was terrible, and yet to fight for it—he couldn’t find a way those things matched up.

And, and, hang on, a little voice in his head protested, that was actually Aubrey actual Gale admitting that they personally were not very nice.

He thought he must have misunderstood—there was so much room to misunderstand even in English here, because nobody’s English ever quite matched up—so he scanned them for any extra clues about what they’d meant, but everything he saw matched what he’d thought. When Gale met his eyes, they were full of a kind of tentative apology.

“You don’t want an Earthstronger in your house, Senator,” he said instead.

Gale looked away again, and this time, January saw a flicker of something like desperation. It made him stare too hard, because Gale noticed and rearranged their face into its normal diplomatic gentility. “Please,” they said, much more softly.

January couldn’t read them properly at all, and he was already doubting he’d seen that flicker. Or maybe it was the election Gale felt that desperation about? Maybe they really did think they would lose without January? But—somehow he didn’t think so. They seemed . . . afraid. “Is something else going on? Is—I’m sorry, is someone forcing you to do this? Only you look frightened.”

It was the wrong thing to say. He saw Gale take a fractional, half-amused offence at being asked. Asking, he realized too late, sounded to them like being called a coward. He had a strong feeling that Gale would rather have stepped off the roof than admit to anything stronger than distant unease. “I’m fine.”

He had to pull himself back from the urge to recommend they get in touch with their human side before it boiled over and they had some kind of nervous breakdown.

“You came all this way to see someone who was a pig to you on a national broadcast, when you could get anyone you like; why are you talking to me?” he pushed anyway.

“Firstly,” Gale said, lifting their eyebrows, “you did nothing wrong. People are enormously touchy about every minuscule social faux pas because it’s very cold here and there is no water. Hardship breeds irritable humans.”

January shut his teeth. Nobody had said it like that before. Tentatively, he looked up, trying to gauge if Gale really meant that, or if forgiving him was just a negotiation technique. Gale was looking back at him, quiet and poised, and maybe concerned. They didn’t seem like they were lying.

“Secondly: this is proving very bad for my campaign, the Consul is mashing me with it, it makes me look like a horrible person.”

“Well, you are a horrible person,” January said, half aiming for a joke and half not.

Gale tilted their head a fraction, as though they’d quite enjoyed that. “Thirdly, I’ve wrecked your life. I’d like a chance to mend it.”

January felt his way around it, but slowly, because part of him was sure that it would bite. He found a corner. “If you wanted that, then you could just do a press conference and give me a few thousand yuan.”

“Do you want a press conference and a few thousand yuan?” Gale said. “We can do that, but you’d still be unemployable.”

January sat quiet, looking at the future and its two branches. One was marriage; one was naturalisation. “Five years?”

“Five years,” Gale said back, as though January had slammed a gavel on the table.

10

The contract negotiations began the next morning, and they promised, said all involved, to last much of the week. While the lawyers talked—January wasn’t even sure what about, but they looked busy—Gale took him out to a café to give him the basic brief. Silent security officers ghosted after them, dressed in black, each one a foot taller than January.