Page 135 of The Mars House

“I haven’t got a stance on Earth, it’s a long way away and I don’t know anyone there.”

“Even after . . .”

“One lady rips one irritating senator in half and suddenly everyone’s got an opinion,” said Aubrey dully.

The Consul paused. “I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“I don’t have a stance,” Aubrey sighed. Their sense of humour was so off colour now that most doctors would probably have sent it straight to palliative care.

“You’re so refreshing, have I told you that?”

“Do you mean unresisting?” Aubrey asked after a second.

“I do, that speaks poorly of my character, doesn’t it? No: anyway, there’s another step to this profoundly unethical plan.”

Aubrey waited.

“The dust will wipe out all the security systems at Songshu, and nobody, nobody, will be surprised if some Earthstrong group sends a suicide bomber. We can make sure they don’t succeed and no one’s hurt—but we can also make it seem like they were talking to January Stirling. If you give us information about River’s schedule, it’ll look like it comes from him. It doesn’t matter what his halo says, River won’t want to defend him. They sent January to prison for nothing, they’ll be expecting him to stab them in the back. All we have to do is convince them he has. He goes back to prison, and then we swap you back in.”

Aubrey ducked their head. Now that it was possible—imminently, clearly possible—they didn’t like the idea of putting River in the way of serious harm, even if the bomber had bad information or faulty explosives, or whatever. It was difficult to keep hating someone with enough passion to truly hurt them.

Aubrey breathed in deeper. “Either I agree to help frame January and then swap back in, or . . . you’ll out me, won’t you? Bring River down that way. Identity fraud. Protecting a murderer.”

The Consul looked sad, and old. “Yeah.” They didn’t try to offer any reasons. They didn’t try to say, Look, perhaps millions of lives will depend on landing those ships here. The great purpose of this colony is to do that, and River is in my way.

It must have taken a deep kind of restraint. Aubrey hoped they could be like that one day.

“Why haven’t you done that already? It’s easier and safer than dealing with the fallout of a dust storm.”

“A dust storm is well worth the support of House Gale, once you’re its senator again.”

It was funny. They’d come full circle. They’d started out as a senator under the control of House Song, and now they would be again. Only this time, they weren’t angry. Just grateful. The Consul was a safe harbour to shelter in.

“What happens to River, after we make the switch?” they asked at last.

“Prison,” the Consul said sadly. They paused. “How do you feel about that?”

“I deserved everything I got. But River is as bad as I am. You have to be, to do what they did.”

“They are definitely ruthless,” the Consul reflected. They didn’t sound like they were scared by it, only interested. “I am too.”

Aubrey watched them for a little while. “Consul . . . when the fleet lands. What happens?”

They shrugged. “It’ll be ugly. Probably a lot of Natural people will die. But there’s five million of us and ten billion of them. There’s no other way for this to go. No country in history has ever successfully resisted this kind of thing. Basically all we can do is keep people as calm as possible while Tharsis makes the shift to a majority Earthstrong population. But that’s our duty now. The point of the vanguard is to die in the service of the many who follow, and if they turn round and decide they don’t want to, well, it’s the job of the general to make them.”

Aubrey nodded slightly, and had to stare into space. They had thought River was being dramatic when they talked about all this; it had all felt too big and too complicated to be that simple, but it was simple. “Custard all the way down,” they murmured.

38 Aubrey was only Indian in the sense that they owned clothes paint-stained from Holi and had been forced to study Sanskrit. Nobody Natural in Tharsis was in any possible way Indian, or Scandinavian, or Congolese, or anything else. You were bolted together from whichever genes your parents thought looked cool at the time, and even if things hadn’t worked like that, there was something embarrassing about trying to claim you were originally, say, Scottish, if even your great-great-grandparents had never seen Earth.

54

As Aubrey stopped talking, January had to fight off a bizarre disappointment. He felt as if he’d been behind the curtain at a magician’s show. To start with, it was thrilling and fascinating, but the closer you looked, the more ordinary the theatre was, the more you noticed the chips in the skirting boards and the peeling paint around the hot water pipes, and the dust on the red curtain, and how desperate it all was. He had wanted Aubrey to be someone hateful who he could just righteously resent, but the more they said, the more it slipped away.

He wondered what it had been like on the day of the bomb; when he’d helped Gale and Gale had helped him, instead of either of them doing what any thinking human would have predicted. Aubrey must have felt more trapped than ever.

They’d lost some of their carefulness after that, he realized. They had let him see them while Gale was getting ready to go to the Tiangong. They had been combing Gale’s hair not at night when it might be a sleep paralysis hallucination, but at five in the afternoon. That tormenting of River had gone from strategic to something else.

“That was you,” he said last. “The night we made the announcement about getting the sun fields into the atmosphere, you dragged River up to my door.”