Page 70 of The Mars House

The kitchen echoed without all the cooks in it. January studied the coffee machine to see how it worked—his new glasses flashed up a schematic straightaway—then poured in some fresh grounds and set it going. Beside him, Gale lifted down the cups, which were too high up for January to reach without finding a chair to stand on. He concentrated on the steam and the heating plates, his whole right side prickling uncomfortably knowing Gale was there, though he wasn’t looking. The two of them had come all the way home without talking and he wanted not to talk now either, because he’d had enough of feeling stupid and angry and scared for one night.

He risked a glance across when it started to feel like maybe Gale wouldn’t rehash things. Gale’s shoulder was at his eye level, an ink stripe of their hair deep black over the blue evening robe.

“I can do this,” he said. “Go out and—persuade everyone not to kill us.”

“You’re not Cinderella, let me help.”

“There are a lot of things I can’t do, but I can make coffee,” January said, slightly more flatly than he wanted to.

Gale was quiet. They hinged a little bow to him and left with a sigh of silk. Part of him felt abandoned.

By the time everyone was in the dining room, it was almost midnight. Some people had come down with a jumper on over whatever they slept in, and others were hunched up over the cups of coffee looking like they were scrying. Mx Ren was as bright as always (today’s dungarees were bottle green) and January wondered if they ever actually slept, or just recharged in a cupboard somewhere.

Through the new glasses, he could see information about everyone hanging above them in unobtrusive clouds. Everyone had a doctorate in some kind of complicated engineering. Around them, there was art he had never seen before; beautiful, brushstroke herons walked over the floor, fishing in brushstroke pools for brushstroke fish. Hypnotic. When the wind gusted outside, the reeds in the painting waved.27 It was simple, but he could have watched for years. When he looked down, the floor wasn’t the floor but the surface of another pond. A koi swam under him. He had to take the glasses off.

“All right,” Gale said, far more gently than normal. “It’s late, so I’ll keep it brief. At the gala tonight, the Consul announced that a fleet is coming from Earth with uranium. They will be here in two months. I know it sounds good, I know we all want help, but this isn’t good. If they land—we’re a colony again, and probably everyone in this room will be arrested for promoting nationalism.”

No.

What?

January sat back, because he’d had no idea that those were the stakes for Gale. He wanted to yell that they hadn’t bloody said that at the Tiangong.

But then, maybe they thought he knew; in the same way he expected them to know how hard things were for Earthstrongers. He found himself rewinding his memory of that argument. He’d thought they were getting angry with him because he wasn’t cooperating, but—maybe it was because they thought he was saying he thought they deserved to be arrested.

Oh, God.

The quiet had a heaviness to it. There was no sound but the house itself, its lights and vents, and over everything, the shush of the dust rising outside. It was worse than before, already. The floodlights outside were lost in it.

“We have two months to get a new array into the atmosphere and connect it. We’re not going to get any help from central government. Some of the other Houses will refuse to help because they vote with House Song. But I propose you tell me what needs to happen, and I find a way to do the politics.” Gale paused. “I’m not going to lie to you. If this doesn’t work, we’ll all be in a hulk around Jupiter. But if it does work, then it’s likely that the election is ours. I know some of you will be wondering if I’m exaggerating the threat from Earth for political gain, and if I was holding a gun to January’s neck in that interview.” People looked at him, with a few weak smiles. He didn’t have it in him to smile back. “But I’m telling you now, in private, that I’m not. They’re coming, and . . . they will take Tharsis. If anyone is convinced otherwise, and I understand if you are, you can leave with a full reference.”

Nobody moved.

“Fortunately we’ve been thinking about all this already, so we have a head start.” That, January thought, was either a very generous use of “we,” given that literally everyone else had yelled at Gale that building a new array was impossible; or it was the magisterial we. He was starting to feel a little appalled at how one human being could be so ambiguous, all of the time. You would have thought it would be easy to tell if a person was noble or a monster, but here he was, a month later, with no clue. “Tomorrow, I need to know whose help we need, and I will get it. Are there any questions?”

January had expected a barrage, but nobody said anything. Finally Mx Francis stood up, and he thought that they were about to walk out.

“We serve at the pleasure of the House of Gale,” was all they said.

It echoed around the tables, and then people were getting up and sharing tablets and talking fast, and eyes flared blue as calls went out, and Mx Francis was sitting close to Dr Molotov with a stylus and Gale and January were left in the one point of stillness.

A drone floated down next to them.

Gale looked straight at it, held up their antique phone, the one they had ruined to save January’s, and played a song that was everywhere at the moment; it was a ballad from one of those wildly popular Nigerian boy bands, super catchy to the point that January knew the lyrics even though he didn’t speak a word of Hausa.

That’s copyrighted, we can’t put that in the show! someone protested over the microphone.

Gale turned it up.

The drone managed to look harassed as it flew away.

Gale left the phone on the table, still playing the song.

“You could have tanked me, in front of the press,” Gale said him, very quiet. “You . . . why didn’t you?”

“Because,” he said, not quite able to believe they were actually asking him, “I’m scared of you. I don’t know what happened to Max. I don’t know what’ll happen to me if I piss you off enough, do I? I told you. I don’t want to kick the nuclear cat.”

Gale looked shaken. Not just a little off balance, but like he had taken hold of something deep in them and rammed it. If it was acting, they were the most incredible actor. “January. Nothing is going to happen to you. I’m not—I didn’t—you don’t need to be scared of me.”