Page 134 of The Mars House

Pow.

“This is bad,” the Consul said the afternoon after Aubrey had sat in on River’s conversation with January at the Tiangong. They hooked a chair across with one ankle. They didn’t ever just sit in chairs; it was more like a docking process. “If Stirling’s got no haptics, he’s not seeing the Hades filter. We can’t swap you back in while he’s at Songshu.”

Aubrey thought about it, and tried to plan out what they wanted to say, to get it right. They were starting to think clearly again when someone spoke to them, which felt wonderful, but it was backfiring in that they were starting to get verbose just as a way of proving to themselves that they could. “He’s being paid to do this. The—choice was this or naturalisation, and he’s a dancer, I can see why he would . . .” Stop letting it get away from you . . . “He doesn’t like River. He was being polite today, but he’s going to hate them once he has to live at Songshu. Maybe—you can talk him round to your side?”

“I’m going to try,” the Consul said heavily. “He might agree. We’re about to get a lot of refugees, and I can’t see him wanting to let River, or anyone, lock them out. Those wildfires that were forecast—they’ve started. It’s going to be worse than they thought.”

Whenever Aubrey saw footage from Earth, even when they saw people interviewed and convinced themselves for five minutes that such a place could possibly be real, it wouldn’t stay in their head for long. It made sense, but it was one of those quicksilver ideas that danced away from you if you tried to hold it. The gravity, and the wars, and the floods—it sounded like something from a fairy-tale nightmare. It was difficult even to imagine wildfires. The hottest temperature ever recorded on Mars was twenty degrees Celsius, and people had lost their minds.

The Consul hesitated. “Anyway, I have an idea. But it depends on how you feel.”

“I—sincerely doubt that it does.”

“Okay.” They hunched forward, hands clasped. “I have two problems. One, House Gale’s anti-Earthstronger policies have taken off. There’s a record clamouring from the general public for cages to be banned. Record hate crimes against Earthstrong immigrants too. Even if we fill the air with images of desperate refugees, we’ll never get people to settle to the idea of bringing them here. Even though that’s what this colony is for.”

Aubrey nodded.

“Two, January Stirling, who could single-handedly derail your switch back into House Gale.” They sighed. “So what I need is a way to get people to accept a flood of refugees; and I need January Stirling to not be the Senator Consort of House Gale. Do you know about Ariel, at the old weather station at Mount Penglai?”

“Sure,” Aubrey said, puzzled at the sudden change of subject. They couldn’t see what Ariel had to do with the politics of House Gale, or immigration rules. “The AI of the Met Office?”

“Mm. Ariel’s been doing that for two hundred years. They were around in the old days, before the atmosphere was under control. Back when they were doing weather control experiments to try and make it rain.”

“Didn’t that just make giant dust storms?”

“Yeah. It did.” The Consul gave them a long intense look, willing them to see without having to say it.

Aubrey inclined their head a little. “Sun fields can’t operate in a dust storm. And our fields have had chronic underinvestment for the last twenty years under Kali. We couldn’t cope with a period of prolonged darkness.”

“Right. We’d need Earth to rescue us. Send uranium. Fire up the old reactors. It would take their ships a couple of months to get here, but—what’s your assessment? It’s nearly the end of winter, could River keep Tharsis alive until help comes?”

Aubrey gazed at the edge of the table, thinking. “There would be blackouts. A lot of people would die of cold. The poorest twenty per cent of Tharsis can only just afford electricity as things are.”

“Okay, so some people die—actually that’s to the good, because if they die without power, then that seems like River’s fault—but the city as a whole, can it survive?”

“More or less,” Aubrey said slowly. “It would be tight, though, even with blackouts. If the fleet from Earth were delayed, we’d be looking at thousands and thousands of deaths.”

“But it’s possible.”

“Did . . . you hear me?” Aubrey asked, worried they hadn’t articulated it nearly as well as they’d thought. “I wasn’t exaggerating. A thousand deaths would be a good figure. We—I mean, House Gale—run simulations of power failure all the time, and it’s pretty horrendous, even with short blackouts. And it would disproportionately affect Earthstrongers. They’re not genetically modified for the climate here.”

“I heard,” the Consul said. “But a thousand deaths here in exchange for saving millions of people coming from Earth? I’m fine with that. Aren’t you?”

Aubrey didn’t know what they were fine or not fine with any more. They had spent all their time as a senator losing their temper over things that shouldn’t have mattered, and failing to solve the problems that should have had their full attention from their first minute in office. If they had a moral compass, it was too wonky to be relied upon for decisions like this. Or any decisions.

“Even if something goes wrong, even if most people here die, that’s still better than denying entry to the people coming here from Earth,” the Consul pushed. “No?”

Aubrey had to look away. That didn’t sound right. You couldn’t always say that the greater number of people were always in the right. That was how you ended up with empires.

But they didn’t trust that broken compass any more. The Consul was a kind person. You had to trust someone, and a kind person was a good place to start.

“And then any ships arriving from Earth will be able to land because—we’ll need them.”

“Right.”

Aubrey nodded gradually.

The Consul hesitated. “What’s your stance on Earth?”