Page 126 of The Mars House

Because what the finance people said—they said it in the finance version of the incredibly complicated chemical formula—was that Kali had accepted vast sums of money from House Song to neglect the Songshu solar array.

The idea was simple. Kali was to drain it of funds, make solar power more expensive, more inefficient, make sure it was understaffed and undermaintained, and come up (preferably quarterly) with new reasons it was unfeasible to run properly or expand. All that, until the array wasn’t fit for purpose any more.

When a flummoxed Aubrey asked why in the worlds anyone would want that, the finance people fidgeted with their tablets and said, well, this is what governments do when they want to privatise a beloved national resource: they make it terrible until the voters ask them to get rid of it. Probably the Consul wants to sell Songshu—probably to Beijing.

And to seal this, Kali had arranged Aubrey and Max’s marriage.

It took Aubrey a long time—weeks and weeks—to understand what the underlying custard of the situation was. Because anything that vast and worlds-changing couldn’t have a boring simple thing behind it, and when they realized that actually it did, they felt insecure, because like most people they’d been brought up to look carefully for nuance and feel suspicious about simple answers. Simple answers were usually to be had from zealots or morons.

But nonetheless, what it all added up to, when you got down to it, was a way to put the entire power supply of Mars—Songshu—into the hands of an Earth government.

“Is there any way to get out of this?” Aubrey asked. “Can we say no, new Senator, new arrangements, no more bribes?”

The lawyers looked uncomfortable. “Senator,” someone said, very carefully, “House Song has some damaging material on you. Videos. They’ll release those if you try to change anything. We can try to work out strategies to minimise that damage, if . . . ?”

Aubrey didn’t even ask what video. There was probably a whole library to choose from.

“The other difficulty,” said a second lawyer, “is that without House Song money, House Gale is bankrupt. Kali—was quite a big spender.”

Custard.

“Did you know about this?” Aubrey asked Max about a season later. It took that long to winch everything up to a mental elevation at which they could actually articulate it. In that time, they had churned around, staring at accounts, trying to find a way out, and seeing there was no way out, and meanwhile they were going to the mandatory Senate sessions and voting with Guang Song. It shouldn’t have been awful. Aubrey didn’t care who had control of Songshu. That was big-picture stuff: mostly Aubrey’s philosophy was that if you could pay everyone who worked for you fairly, you weren’t currently in hospital with alcohol poisoning, and you’d managed to say hello to the dog in the last twenty-four hours, you couldn’t really complain. But the more they thought about that money, and whatever video Song had, the more they felt—cancerous.

The two of them were on one of their walks through the Songshu pine forest. Because the project to introduce polar bears to the Plains had been too successful, it was now illegal to go out without a rifle, so they both had a semiautomatic propped against one elbow. The trees were groaning to each other in the deepening winter, and the husks of old dandelion seeds had piled up over the path in places, each one a big as a mortar shell. They were on their way out to Sun Field Twelve, because at this time of day, the heat bouncing around between the solar mirrors was just enough to be summery. If you sat at the base of the salt tower, you could have a respectable picnic and watch the moons rise.

Aubrey and Max didn’t do this because they liked each other. They didn’t. They did it because someone at the security office always leaked footage of them together, it did the rounds in the news, and it looked like they had a fairy-tale life and wasn’t it romantic and don’t you want to be sick in a bag.

Which was important, Kali had always said, because if the great aren’t seen to be good (making their arranged marriages work, not complaining, showcasing their Family Values and Personal Integrity), that’s when people get the guillotines out.

Especially, Aubrey thought feverishly, if you were swimming in dodgy money from Earth. Kali, though a giant cynic, hadn’t been wrong. The one thing that set Tharsese Great Houses apart from repulsive megacompanies on Earth was their honour. Honour was everything. You didn’t take bribes, you expelled anyone who so much as looked at an intern wrong, and if you were in charge you worked—above all else—for the benefit of those hundreds of people who worked for you. Nobody else. And that was right. Anyone who was as rich as the heads of Great Houses, and who did not have a crushing sense of duty, was in serious danger of turning into a proper despot by next Tuesday. If people thought for a second you might be despot material . . .

“I . . . went where I was told,” Max said, which was military-speak for I had a bad feeling about it but the consequences of asking too many questions would have been severe.

“What do we do? This—I know I’m a useless socialite, but I draw the fucking line at being bought and paid for by Beijing.”

Max thought about it. They were one of those old-fashioned strong-and-silent types, which was annoying, because they seemed to rely on you interpreting silence as deep feeling when as far as Aubrey could tell, it was just absence of feeling, and probably they were thinking about ramen recipes, or where the laundry had got to. “Would it be so bad to divorce? Let my House release whatever video of you they’ve got?”

“What?”

“Well, you hate being a senator, and you’re shit at it.” Max believed in saying what they thought. Aubrey always wanted to say, That’s fine, but then you have to accept that I believe in throwing those who vex me off the roof of the Tiangong. “River would be brilliant. If your concern is House Gale, let it go to River, problem solved.”

There were lots of things about that little statement that Aubrey wanted to smash with a hammer, but what their brain fell over was the last bit. “River doesn’t want to be a senator, Max, it would destroy them. They can only go forty-five seconds without lecturing someone about Oracle Bone Script or the formation of Ancient Greek participles.”

“Okay,” Max agreed, in the way that meant they didn’t agree at all but, having come off a tour on Titan, didn’t have the energy to fight unless someone was actually trying to stuff a hand grenade down the back of their shirt. They seemed to hear how annoying that was, and sighed. “Look . . . is it really that bad? You get lots of money from doing this, and you’re not political. Is it really going to keep you up at night, to run the sun fields down? All that will do, really, is tie Tharsis to Beijing, which will make it—heaven forefend, I know—slightly easier for people from Earth to come here.”

To some extent, Max was right. Aubrey liked having friends, and silly-luxurious celebrity parties with red carpets and press, and not being too bothered by politics. They didn’t like people who ranted on one side or the other; those people always seemed to forget that you could solve a lot if you just drank a bottle of vodka with the other person instead of demanding they articulate mathematically the precise logic of their position and then destroying it with your superior logic, as if that had ever convinced any human in either world, in the history of anything, at all.

But they had never so immediately and so sincerely wanted to punch someone in the face.

“That isn’t the point, is it, they’re blackmailing me!”

“So just to be clear. You don’t . . . care about unionists or nationalists or Earth or Mars,” Max said, half laughing in exactly the way people laugh at a very small child which has just declared its aversion to spoons because a spoon once fell on its head. “You’re angry because your personal dignity is being impugned.”

“I care about someone holding some mystery tape over my head,” Aubrey snapped. “And unless River can come up with a way to fund this House without help from yours, then they’d be no better than me anyway.”

Speak of the devil; up ahead, there was a mammoth-sounding whoop, and a human laugh. River: playing with the mammoth babies, still invisible in the fog but probably only forty yards away among the trees.

Max lit up.