Page 67 of The Mars House

He looked up at them properly. “I can’t see you trying to be polite to gamma rays; it wouldn’t make any difference.”

Gale smiled the barest smile, and January breathed out, relieved. Mostly that they seemed at least half convinced, but a little because—because despite everything he didn’t like the idea that he’d poked a sore spot.

You are not so useless that you’ll end up loyal to a murderer literally because they’re nice to you, the Swan King snarled.

He had a horrible feeling that actually, he might already be going that way.

Somebody important announced someone else, who then announced the Consul, to applause. January inclined his head. For a while, people had clapped whenever he went on stage too, so he knew what it was like and he knew that normal people, with an accurate idea of the worth of a soul, looked embarrassed or just a little unwilling; and if you were used to it, the decent thing was to ignore it and do whatever people had come to see. You didn’t behave like it was your due. There was a fine line between magnanimous and smug, and the Consul was tightrope-walking it. It was not how Gale looked. At any given event, Gale could have been talking to three people or three thousand—you couldn’t tell, if you just watched them alone.

Eyes flashed gold everywhere.

“Good evening. I know we’re all here for fun, but I have some important news first. The forecast for this storm is bad. It looks set to last months. The Songshu solar array will fail long before it blows itself out, and without that we have no power, and no water, even if my fine colleague Senator Gale finds a way—which I’m sure they will—to eke out what we have for a while.”

Gale looked like they were deciding between models of wood chipper to feed the Consul through.

“It is with great relief, then, that I can tell you that a fleet of aid ships left Earth’s Tianjin station today. They are bringing uranium, to ensure against solar failure. This is tremendous generosity on the part of China, India, and Nigeria, and a reminder of the great safety to be had in remaining united with our mother states. Their ambassadors are here tonight; let’s show them what Tharsis hospitality looks like.”

There was a huge cheer, the kind that came from relief pouring out of hundreds of people who had been trying to pretend they hadn’t been afraid. Three people in cages who looked like children beside the Consul were ushered up to wave.

Gale touched January’s arm. “Would you mind if we went to see some journalists?”

January clenched one fist, digging his fingernails into his palm. “What will you say?”

“That they can’t be allowed to land. This is—a thinly disguised way to get hundreds of thousands of immigrants here—”

“Refugees.”

“What?”

He stepped behind a pillar, away from the crowd. His heart was going hard, as if someone were coming at him spinning a poker. All his instincts yelled at him to shut up, because you had to swallow down your opinions when you were working for someone who had maybe killed the last person in your job, but he was going to feel filthy if he didn’t say anything. He’d spend the rest of his life feeling filthy. It surprised him even as he decided this was his line in the sand. He hadn’t known he had any sand. “Immigrants choose. Refugees don’t. They’re refugees.”

In his head, the hymn those people had sung outside the burning church echoed and echoed.

“No,” Gale said softly. “They’re not. No one has to come to Mars, it’s the hardest place for anyone to go to—”

“Are you really saying that you’re going to turn them around after months on the Crossing, and—”

“We’ll resupply them, as much as we possibly can, and then we’ll send them to a country that has the capacity to safely take them—”

“What country?” January said incredulously. All at once it didn’t matter, what the Speaker had said. He would stand here and die before he let Gale say that without some kind of challenge. “Name it! Tell me where I should have gone. Which country has space and work and money and some kind of stability all at the same time? I’d love to know, I really would, I’ll piss off there when you’re bored of me. Do you think I wanted to spend eight months of my life getting here and then fighting with immigration services and doing a factory job? If there had been anything else, don’t you think I would have done it?”

Gale looked away for a second, and it was as near to impatience as he’d ever seen them come. His heart tried to get up behind his tonsils. If he kept arguing, he might as well be doing handstands on the edge of a cliff, but he knew already that he couldn’t stop, even though this might be the stupidest thing he’d ever done. “Do you believe that if hundreds of thousands of Earthstrongers come here, into the city, then we won’t see a surge of Natural homicides?”

He shut his teeth. “No, I don’t. Of course I don’t. That isn’t what I’m saying. I’m saying, your solutions will do more harm than good.”

“There are no good solutions. It’s ugly, and things shouldn’t be this way, but they are. If we let them land, there are only two choices. Either we say to one large group of people, I’m afraid you’re going to have to adapt to light gravity and all the health problems that brings, because that’s just the nature of this planet; or we say to a small group of people, A significant number of you will soon be accidentally murdered and sorry, but as a government, we’re fine with that. Tell me a better solution than preventing the situation which makes that choice necessary in the first place. That’s all I’m trying to do when I say we can’t let them land.”

“Would you want a solution, if there was one, or would it make you angry because it would mean your ancestors and your House suffered for no reason?” January asked softly.

He should have known, before he said it, that he was crossing a line. He could call Gale a horrible person and they would shrug, but he’d just said they were dishonourable, and that was something else. They had been leaning a little towards him to hear him over the noise behind them both, but now, they straightened. Aubrey the gentle academic vanished and left him with Senator Gale. He found himself pressing back against the wall.

“That’s what you think I am?” Gale asked, very quiet. “You think I’m doing this because I suffered, so now I haven’t the mental strength to do anything but insist other people suffer, to make what happened to me fairer somehow? Really? You don’t think it’s because there is no solution?”

He wanted to go down to the lake and hide with Ming the polar bear until this blew over. “You have all the money in the worlds. You were talking about spending billions of yuan getting a new solar array into the atmosphere, but if you spent that money on building new sun fields and a new water factory for a new colony, they could land, they could be separate from Tharsis, and they might actually have a chance of surviving the winter—and you would make money from the water you’d invested in! It doesn’t take a genius to come up with that but you are a genius, so you must have thought of it. Why not do that?”

“Because then we’d have a colony of people three times stronger than us a hundred miles away instead of six million miles away, when frankly even the six million isn’t far enough.”

“There has to be something. No one’s going to do it if you don’t.”