Page 31 of The Mars House

Consul Song was just as big in real life as they looked in broadcasts.

January went down on one knee, his heart revving like a jet engine. There were about eight more soldiers here, and every single one of them was watching him like he had a bomb strapped to his chest. He had never more intensely wanted to jump out the nearest window.

The Consul beamed and surged up. They were broad as well as tall, and more than anyone he’d ever met, they came with such an impression of coiled-up spare energy that they seemed as though standing up too quickly might ricochet them off the ceiling. They were wearing a green hoodie with, of all the reassuring things, a chocolate bar sticking out of the pocket.

“Stand up, stand up! Welcome to Jade Hill. How d’you like it?”

“I don’t, it’s very intimidating,” January said, feeling miniature and weakened, even though that was stupid without his cage—but it was because he didn’t have the cage—and fumbling with the Consul’s Mandarin. Gale’s was crystalline—it was so clear he could see everything in it always. The Consul had a much streetier way of talking—rougher, faster, full of slang, and he could already tell he was going to struggle. Not working class, because that would have been English, but . . . folksy. Nobody had given back his phone. He couldn’t even run the translation.

The Consul laughed. “All right, you lot, sod off,” they said, and the security officers grinned and ghosted away, suddenly normal people and not soldiers. Once they were gone: “Sit down, please. I know it was rude of me to just summon you here. I expect you’ve got an idea about why, though?”

“I—really haven’t.” He hinged gradually onto the edge of a couch that was too high, balancing awkwardly, but then in the end he had to sit cross-legged like a schoolboy on the floor of the assembly hall, hoping the dust marks from his boots wouldn’t be too bad.

The Consul landed opposite and pulled out the chocolate, which they snapped in half. They offered him one of the halves.

A part of him that must have paid attention to those myths of people kidnapped by gods and taken to the underworld made him shake his head, probably too emphatically to be polite. But his whole skeleton reverberated with it. Don’t eat anything. If you eat something, you owe something.

“You might remember this Aubrey Gale person you’re supposed to marry?” the Consul said, not seeming to mind at all. “The hate-spewing nationalist whose wedding about eight billion people will watch tomorrow, and whose general madness will look much more legitimate when it’s supported by the Earthstronger they victimised live on international news—ringing any bells?”

January waited, trying hard to tell if this was genuine good humour or the shark kind that manifested before someone showed you the special chair with straps on. That was the frustrating thing about trying to navigate life in your third language. You didn’t know all the little cues and shorthands, and to make it worse, Tharsis seemed to frown on anyone being at all expressive. It was too loud, too big, too threatening. Good manners really meant small manners.

The Consul paused. “That was me trying to be funny, but I feel like it clunked.”

“Are you deporting me?” he asked, because he couldn’t wait any more. He didn’t ask how they knew he was the one Gale would be marrying. It hadn’t been announced, but probably it didn’t take much, if you were Consul, to see that Gale was paying for his room at the Tiangong, and endless preparation for what could only be a very public entrance into the House.

“What?”

“Are you going to tell me I have to stop this now and say how dreadful Senator Gale is or you’ll send me back to Earth?” January elaborated.

The Consul looked honestly dismayed. “What? No, that would be—very illegal, there’s such a thing as human rights.”

January watched them at a tilt, balancing on saying that human rights were an imaginary thing that only worked if everyone agreed, and they only agreed if they weren’t upset or hungry at the time.

He took a breath to ask why he was here then, if not to be horribly threatened, but then he had to reconsider, because trotting through the open door there was, right now, a small pig. It looked happy to see them, and hurried over.

“Can . . . you see a pig?” he asked.

The Consul laughed and stroked the pig’s ears. It tried to get into January’s lap, plainly under the impression it was still a much smaller pig. “This is Alice. Aubrey sent a litter of piglets to the European Federation Embassy after it turned out their Chancellor had a pig-related adventure at university—”

“Sorry, Aubrey Gale did that? My Gale?” He hadn’t meant to interrupt, but he was too surprised not to.

“Oh, yes, they’ve got a cracking sense of humour once you get past all the pretentiousness and the fascism,” the Consul said mildly. “But anyway, there were loads of pigs, so I adopted one and so did lots of other Earth embassies and now we all get together and talk about our pigs. Resounding diplomatic success really. I love it when a prank backfires.”

Alice snuffled hopefully at their pockets. The Consul took out a packet of peanuts and gave a handful to January, and there was an interlude in which there was a lot of happy squeaking. January wondered suddenly if this was a small ploy; See, you really ought to trust me, look at my trustworthy pig.

“You know about Max, right?” the Consul asked. “You know what you might be walking into?”

January nodded.

He had fallen down a research rabbit hole looking into Max, whose proper name was Maksim Liu, a younger scion of House Song. Max had been a marine, the hardest of the hard, regularly vanishing on black ops somewhere out around Saturn for reasons the government was never at liberty to say. Then Max vanished along with the younger Gale heir, River, never to be heard from again. It was more plausible than it sounded, everyone agreed; if you were a marine then you could very effectively disappear, and if you could do that, you probably would, as a big up-yours to the person you were leaving. The police had cleared Aubrey Gale of any wrongdoing. January was on the fence. Not just on it; bolted to it. It did all sound reasonable when you looked into it, but he was pretty sure Gale could have made the mandatory adoption of pink wigs sound reasonable.

“That’s good,” the Consul said, “because . . . as I’m sure you know, you have no way out of this now. Even if I say, I’ll pay you lots of money not to do it and you say to House Gale you’ve changed your mind, you’re setting up an Earthstrong theatre in New Kowloon, thanks, I suspect Aubrey would make a big show of being magnanimous and then have you hit by a garbage truck so you can’t sell the story to the press.”

January didn’t know what to say to that. It had a horrible ring of truth.

“Come with me,” the Consul said. “There’s something I want you to see.”

“Oink,” said Alice.