Page 95 of The Mars House

“Merry Christmas,” Gale said, tentative, like they’d looked up what to say. Of course they had.

He smiled. “Merry Christmas. I, um . . . I saw you talking with that lady. Are you okay, did she do something . . . ?”

“No, no. I saw your fight earlier, so I was showing her the comparative conviction statistics for sexual assault, America versus Tharsis.”

“What?”

Gale pulsed that quiet embarrassment they did whenever they were caught going Full Academic. “Conviction rates are less than one per cent across most countries on Earth,” they said, sounding guilty that they knew. “In Tharsis it’s ninety-eight per cent.”

“You were kept in a cellar and beaten with an abacus as a child, weren’t you,” Mx Francis said in passing. “Numbers were your only friends.”

“I could fire you,” Gale told them.

Mx Francis stuck their tongue out.

“Into space,” Gale sighed.

“Ninety-eight per cent,” January said, because he had stuck on it. “How? I’m not—sorry, you abolished gender, not sex, everyone’s still a person with person-wants and some people in any society are dreadful, so . . . ?”

“Because it’s taken seriously and well policed. There’s a lovely historical graph actually. It tracks reported instances versus conviction rates after every major legal change in the field in the last two hundred years.” They lifted one hand from their tablet to make the image project in three dimensions. The light made their eyes shine. “I love this correlation here. It’s when marriage was reduced to a five-year contract rather than a permanent arrangement. The cases trail off within a generation.”

“Why?”

“No one knows,” Gale said, laughing a bit. “No one knows, but for my money; it’s about taking away any sense that you can ever own someone. Make it normal for kids and hold it there; problem solved. Most elegant piece of legislation I’ve ever seen.”

January looked across at them and had a strange, powerful feeling that it was a kind of magic, for any place to have produced a human being who confronted angry people softly, with a graph they looked at in the way most people looked at Renaissance paintings. “Did she believe you?”

Gale winced. “God, no. I’m a giant dork who accosted her with an unsolicited chart. But she knows where to find the data now, if she’d like to. What?” they added, because January hadn’t looked away.

“I just . . .” He looked down. “Sorry, I’m not trying to start a fight.”

Gale smiled. “Pick up your sword, Spartan.”

“You’re saying you legislated your way out of—everything she’s scared of. But in the debate, you said no amount of legislation could stop violence against women. You said no one has ever succeeded doing that with legal systems, and the reason Tharsis succeeded was that you genetically edited people to make them more physically equal. Only it didn’t work because of that, because if it had, you wouldn’t have needed to make marriage last only five years to stamp it out.” He swallowed. “Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick?”

Gale thought about it for a long time. “Huh,” they said at last. “Okay.”

“Okay what?” January asked, full of dread that he was about to be spectacularly demolished, and Mx Ren was going to have to sweep bits of him up off the floor all evening.

“Okay . . . I was wrong to say there was no legislative solution in either case,” Gale said, starting slow and speeding up toward the end because, he realized, they had finished double-checking they had no counterargument.

“You . . . ?”

“See what happens when you fight?” Gale said, pushing him gently. “Sometimes you win.” They were smiling as if they’d just seen January manage the most incredible spin in midair. “Ganbei.”32 They tinked their champagne glass to January’s.

He had never felt so disconcerted about winning an argument. In fact, he was almost certain he had never won one before. What he’d had were rows with his father, who would usually say whatever would upset the other person most, no matter how insane, and then January would have to leave the house until the urge to murder someone went away. That was what his father had enjoyed calling debate. He had never just—had a conversation like a game of chess, and then watched the other person, entirely measured and courteous, lay down their king and say, good game.

“I—that was me winning? Then do you change your mind? You don’t just want to ban Earthstrongers, you think there could be laws that would help, like with . . .” He waved incoherently towards where the angry lady was still sitting, only she didn’t seem angry now. She had been befriended—and somehow he was seismically unsurprised—by Mx Ren. Gale glanced that way too, all alight, and very gradually, he managed to get his fingernails over the possibility that they weren’t just making a show of good sportsmanship: they were honestly pleased he had learned to do what they did.

Not far from them, there was a little bout of laughter as Mx Francis almost bumped into an Earthstrong man, who went down quickly on one knee. Mx Francis bent to help him up and they went off together. The man had patent leather brogues on without socks and so January suspected that they were meant for each other.

He saw Gale’s eyes snag in that direction too. They hid it well, but they did often flinch at big noises, even when it was laughter.

“I agree there is a possibility we could legislate our way to a far lower accidental homicide rate. I don’t know what that legislation would be.” Gale paused, and the light in them dulled down again. “And I doubt there’s time to work it out before the fleet arrives.”

“But—just—so we’re very clear. I still won.”

“You won,” Gale agreed, with their slow, real smile.