Page 80 of The Mars House

“What’s to stop you closing people in?”

“Is it okay to bring children? I have kids born here but I’m in a cage . . .”

January had never been so frightened that he had just made a horrifying mistake. Beside him, Gale was as luminous and warm as they always were in public, the calculating machine of their real character buried well out of sight, but now that he knew it was there, he couldn’t unhear its ticking. They wouldn’t consider it a reason not to lock people away just because some of them would suffer, or because he would be angry. Nobody had ever saved them from anything just because they would suffer.

He was still carrying the Consul’s card in his pocket. He found himself turning it around and around between his fingertips.

34

The new tower climbed all through the end of November and into December29 like an Advent candle in reverse. It climbed fast, too. Swarms of people were working on it, kitted out in heat suits and breathing masks against the storm. Through the blasting dust, all you could see of them from Songshu were the lights of the welding torches, whole constellations, through the day and the impenetrable nights. Sometimes, when the dust was dense enough, it caught fire, so that every torch had a brilliant comet-tail of burning particles downwind. Even in this gravity, the base of it was vast to support the weight. Twelve steel struts each the size of an oil rig held it up, and every day, more steel came, loaded on the trains from the Valleyside. Every foundry in Tharsis was going at full strength to supply it—even the blast furnaces that served the interplanetary shipyards.

Mars was rich because of its steel—it was iron that made the red planet red—but even so, January couldn’t help wondering if the supply chain could keep up.

Not least because all those foundries used power that Songshu barely had.

From the Valleyside pinnacle, he could see down into Tharsis. It was dark for sixteen hours a day now. Almost all of it. Steelworks, Tereshkova Wharf, and hospitals were the only exceptions. Schools were shut. Shops were shut, except for food. Offices. All most people could do was sit at home and wait.

Songshu wasn’t any different. He had to sleep in his coat now. In the eight hours when there was electricity, the big screens in the dining room were permanently tuned to the news. It was full of stories about gigantic queues outside supermarkets as rationing kicked in, interviews with Earthstrongers who didn’t dare go to the naturalisation centres in case Gale locked them in, with tailbacks of ambulances outside hospitals as cases of hypothermia rocketed. It was so cold that supermarkets didn’t need power for freezers; they could just set up a stall outside and everything from vegetables to meat froze solid. Water rations were going out in slices of ice.

So that not everything broadcast from Songshu was doom and misery, January and Gale started filming little funny segments about culture differences; everything from how British English was different to Tharsese English, to things that made sense on Earth but not at all on Mars, like Lunar New Year, to how they felt temperature differently; Gale could hold their hand in ice for half an hour comfortably (which shocked Earthstrong people who were watching), and then there was some serious incredulity on Natural social media when January sat under a heat lamp in thirty degrees without catching fire. They did one about the genuine danger in coastal areas of being eaten by sharks, which of course to Tharsese people sounded like worrying about pterodactyls. It was only twenty minutes a day, but he looked forward to it, because it was the only time he heard Gale laugh their brilliant boiling-whisky laugh. He felt as though the two of them might be rebuilding their bridge, with more solid support pillars this time.

After a few weeks, he noticed he kept hearing about himself on the news more and more, to the point that it was a bit of struggle to sit in the dining room and go increasingly pink as the people around grinned and looked significantly between him and the screens.

There were analysis stories where social media experts were interviewed—

“House Gale really does seem to have tapped into some magic with January Stirling—what do we think is going on?”

“Well, I think what we’re seeing is just appreciation for a really nice human being who’s been put in the most extraordinary situation. I think a lot of us wondered what Aubrey Gale thought they were doing, but that Cinderella narrative is proving very hard not to like . . . ”

And then there were political shows that seemed dedicated to picking apart every word to do with the election—

“Of course this sets up a problem for Senator Gale down the line: if they win this election, January Stirling is going to have to naturalise just like every other permanent Earthstrong resident in Tharsis, and a lot of people are feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the idea of making him do that . . . ”

And even talk shows about daily life in the power lockdown—

“So something great happened to me yesterday. I live in a super mixed district in Dengta—we have one of the highest rates of accidental Earthstrong-caused homicide in Tharsis—and I have an Earthstrong neighbour. We’ve always avoided each other, but yesterday morning a mail drone delivered one of my packages to her, and she came round with it, when I opened the front door, she was kneeling on the threshold. I don’t know about you all, but though I knew in theory that some Earthstrongers will do this if the situation might be dangerous, I’d never actually seen it before January Stirling knelt to Senator Gale, and I tell you, it just wiped out any fear I had right away. We laughed a lot and she came in for coffee, and I asked about whether she’d ever seen a jellyfish and she said no, I’m from Arizona, and anyway, long story short, we get together every second evening now to watch these crazy nature documentaries from Earth.”

Mx Francis thought it was wonderful—apparently Fenhua’s fashion house had started an affordable line of designs based on January’s new clothes and the sales were ludicrous now that everyone had nothing to do but shop online, so now there were #EARTHSTRONGHONOUR T-shirts everywhere—Mx Ren thought it was hilarious (they wore the T-shirts under the pink dungarees), and January couldn’t tell what Gale thought. They seemed pleased, but they didn’t talk about any of it, probably because they had more important things to do, but he was worried there was a glassy, brittle edge to it. Maybe they were worried about a public backlash if he did have to naturalise in the end. In one way, that gave him a little slice of hope, but in another, it put a fearful knot in his stomach, because it would have been naïve to think that becoming briefly famous would stop Gale getting rid of him if he turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help. He didn’t dare to ask. He was less scared of them lately—it was hard to laugh with someone about jellyfish every day and still be afraid—but playing like a drumbeat in the back of his head was, You still don’t know what happened to Max, you still don’t know what happened to Max.

Every night, Gale filmed a live update of the progress on the tower and the painfully slim intake of power from the solar panels for the day.

Despite all that public pressure, they didn’t show any sign of being fuzzy or confused on the broadcasts. They looked very tired, January thought, but so did everyone. It was hard to sleep when the house got down to minus five indoors at night. And there had been no more midnight visits. He was beginning to hope that it had been a one-off.

Every day, the news reported the progress of the fleet from Earth, and the uranium it was bringing. Songshu wasn’t the only place with a building project. Down in Tharsis, they were clearing people out of the converted nuclear towers, and getting those ancient reactors ready to fire again.

A hundred and eighty million kilometres away.

A hundred and fifty.

A hundred.

On Christmas Eve, the fleet and its uranium had only forty million kilometres left to come. They would cover that in two weeks, and arrive just after the election.

The tower was at thirty-eight kilometres.

As every single news programme and talk show pointed out, the person to win the election would be the one who could get their power to Tharsis first, and just now, the bookies were offering bang-on fifty-fifty odds.

29 For January, it was November and December—for everyone else, they were rounding into the two hundreds of Winter. It was chance that his traditional winter and Mars’s were lining up; of course, you usually got two Decembers in every Martian year, long as it was.