Page 10 of The Mars House

That was a little jolt of a realization in itself. He hadn’t been aware, really, that he was living in such a closed-off bubble. It made him uneasy. Bubbles were bad.

Whenever anyone asked him what his background was, or where he was from, he never knew what to say, because he wasn’t from anywhere. Born in Cornwall, yes, into rural poverty, yes. But then ballet boarding school on scholarship in Moscow, and tours all over the world. He was used to thinking of himself as someone who used to be working class, but who had kind of disqualified himself later on. He’d had dinner with pop stars and made friends with actors on movie sets—after a certain point, it wasn’t right to group yourself with the people you’d left behind at home who still worked at the corner shop or as a drone operator at a goods warehouse. He had always been aware, living that glittering life, that it was important to make friends with lots of different kinds of people, richer, poorer, younger, older, or he would be in serious danger of becoming exactly the kind of entitled dickhead he hated. He wasn’t ashamed of moving between classes exactly, but it made him awkward. If he ever did anything practical at home, if he fixed the washing machine or the pipes, his father guffawed and called him a cultural tourist—which meant class foreigner. He was crossing a border he didn’t have a passport for any more.

So he had been proud to be working here, at the factory. He was relieved he wasn’t so far gone down the road of pistachio lattes and wellness retreats that he couldn’t cope with making a normal living in a boiler suit and steel-capped boots. Every day he enjoyed working here felt like another little proof that he wasn’t a cultural tourist who was just visiting difficult things for fun before hurrying away back to the rarefied air of the Royal Opera House.

But standing next to Gale now, he saw afresh what he’d lost. His whole life had shrunk. He wasn’t crossing borders now: the way back was shut. He lived here now, in the boiler suit. All at once he wasn’t proud of it any more. It just looked tattered.

Gale tipped their head a little to catch his eye. It was a tiny motion. They had no mannerisms at all, only a deep stillness. It should have been unsettling, because nobody was like that, not really, but over that stupid memory of his father, it was a relief. No sudden moves. It was marrow-deep elegance, the sort that would have been at home in the old imperial courts, over the shush of sliding paper doors and the hour gongs, where the knights were scholars and you did not speak to the empress without kneeling.

“Lovely to meet you.”

“It’s not,” January said bleakly, “but nice of you to say anyway.”

He had an instant impression that several more lenses, intensifying the magnification of their attention, had clicked down behind their eyes. It might even have been recognition.

No, it couldn’t be. Not even someone like Gale could remember a single face out of a crowd of thousands.

A small voice in the back of January’s mind whispered that Aubrey Gale was exactly the sort of person who could do that.

5

January had been at Gagarin Square when it happened.

When the news reported that there was a bill going before the Senate requiring all Earthstrongers to naturalise, people organised the protests within about fifteen minutes. January had never been to a protest in his life—waterlogged London had no open spaces big enough, and the best you could hope for was to traffic-jam the docks at Parliament with enough people in rowing boats—but he signed up for this. Everyone would meet in Gagarin Square, in front of the Senate, on the morning of the vote, wearing something red.

Now, January couldn’t even remember who had proposed the bill, or why. He had only been in Tharsis for a month or so at the time, so he hadn’t known much about its politicians. He was still getting over the surprise of finding that they were all young and glamorous, not the underbiting paunchy people they were at home. He could recall people saying it wasn’t a serious bill, just a publicity stunt from some junior senator who wanted to take the conservative vote from someone else for some election he hadn’t heard of. Maybe it had been Gale, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the slow, cold feeling it had put through his insides for days.

At first, his instinct had been resignation. There was nothing he could do if the government decided they wanted to stop letting immigrants wander about three times stronger than normal people and providing them with the expensive machinery to do so. It was a miracle they’d let it go on for this long. All he could do was turn up at a naturalisation centre and hope that he didn’t get the really bad side effects.

But slowly, he realized that he had not escaped the floods in London and spent nine months on a crowded refugee ship to come to another world just to cripple himself because some bastard who had never met anyone from outside the country club had decided that he was dangerous. So on the day of the vote, he put on a red scarf and went to Gagarin Square.

The turnout was vast. It looked as though every Earthstronger in Tharsis was there, along with every police officer, soldier, and member of the national guard, who all had riot shields and rifles. There were naturalised and Natural people too, wearing red and carrying signs in Russian and Mandarin and English that showed pictures of children in wheelchairs, and slogans like THIS IS NATURALISATION and NEVER AGAIN. There was music too, and drumming, and the festival smell of sparklers and bao buns. Someone let off fireworks, which showed up nicely even in the morning sky. A fragile elderly Natural person came up to January with a plate of cakes, gave him one, and told him that this bill wasn’t in my bloody name thank you very much, which made his week.

There were huge screens showing the debate that was going on inside, and speakers so that everyone could hear what the senators were saying. Subtitles too. The event organisers must have got those up, because nobody in government ever seemed to remember that if you were fleeing the apocalypse on Earth, the chances were you hadn’t been fitted with the augmentations that would let you connect to the network inside your head.

January had always remembered what Gale said when they took the floor.

“This year, there were nine hundred and twelve homicides in Tharsis.” That burnt caramel voice smoked over everything, and even people who hadn’t been paying attention before paused now. Gale was imperial, glittering and, like always, very still. It was magnetic whether you liked it or not. “Seven hundred and forty-eight of those were perpetrated by Earthstrongers. Most were accidental, but all the victims were Natural. We have an Earthstrong population of two hundred thousand. That means that one in two hundred and sixty-seven Earthstrongers here has killed someone this year alone. Resistance cages don’t work, one time in two hundred and sixty-seven.”

Gale looked right into the cameras, into the crowd outside, stark and hypnotic, and there was a hush like January had never heard before. “If we had a vaccine that killed one in two hundred and sixty-seven people, it would be banned. If we had a software update that killed one in two hundred and sixty-seven people, those who designed it would be imprisoned. This is not a question of race or prejudice. This is a question of failing technology. There are only two solutions: lock people in resistance cages all the time, which is inhuman; or ban cages altogether.”

It got a round of applause from inside the Senate, and a kind of howl from the protesters.

January had never so badly wanted to punch someone. He knew those statistics, of course he did. Everyone did. They were on posters everywhere, they flashed up if you watched television for more than fifteen minutes, they were projected on buildings; kids wore T-shirts that had 1:267 printed on them. He would be the last, last person to say it wasn’t a huge problem.

But given that you could put the internet in people’s brains now, he was just not convinced that the only way to avoid all those horrible accidental deaths was to cripple everyone who could possibly perpetrate one. That was a Stone Age solution. There had to be some engineer somewhere who could think of something better. January’s problem with people like Gale was that it wouldn’t even occur to them to ask what could be done. Because actually good technology—apparently even the stuff required for subtitles—was for real people, not poor people. If you earned less than a million a year you could piss off and enjoy your osteoporosis, thank you.

Someone held up a phone to beam a big hologram poster in view of the floating cameras. The message said:

VALUE OF HOUSE GALE: $15 TRILLION

VALUE HOUSE GALE HAS INVESTED IN CAGE INNOVATION: $0

Val said that January wouldn’t get anywhere by bashing people over the head with The Communist Manifesto,7 but it made January angry too, when people declared that giving someone poor some basic human consideration was the same as being Stalin. It was the kind of argument deployed by people who were saving up for their own private golf course.

Over the noise, the commentary from the Office of National Statistics confirmed that Gale’s figures were correct, and a fact box flashed up beside the screen, from the police databases.

It was about midday when he started to notice that the police were kettling people towards the Senate steps. There was a military security perimeter there, with water cannons, and someone in the chain of command must have been spoiling for a fight, because when he thought about it later, he couldn’t see any other reason to do it. As the crowd was compressed, people had to push up against the riot shields. And the people at the front were already there to try and get into the Senate, to protest inside, or disrupt the vote, or something.