Page 58 of The Mars House

“No, I’ll be all right,” January said, surprised the offer was even there. Gale was the one at work bright and early the morning after being bombed. He’d expected them to be deaf to any sense that anybody might struggle with nasty press.

“Are you sure?” Gale pushed. “Because I don’t want you to do yourself damage because you think you’re being paid to give me a platform to say things you despise.”

January smiled. “I am being paid to do that. And I agreed to, and you’ve done everything you said you would and better.”

Gale watched him for what felt like a long time. It was rare, January realized suddenly, for anyone to do that, in ordinary conversation. Mostly, people only glanced at you, checking you hadn’t hurried off after an interesting llama. They didn’t see. It made him go strangely still inside. The Gales of the worlds did not usually spend their time seeing the Januarys. He tried to scoop up the memory and hold it close to take out later, if he needed it. “I know that you have nowhere else to go. But when I ask you to do things like this—public interviews, huge events, filmed publicity stunts—you have a veto. You’re my consort, not my clerk, and you’re being paid for your time, not your soul.”

January took a deeper breath, meaning to say something along the lines of, Look, of course I’m going to do my job; but then he held it. Gale had come to fetch him from the secret police yesterday without so much as a sigh. The two of them had passed the point of communicating in polite trivialities.

“Senator—nobody knows what happened to the last person who had my job. Maybe it’s what you say, maybe Max did run away with River, but maybe they disagreed with you once too often. You talk a really good talk, and nobody has ever been as nice to me as you are; but I would be an idiot to forget that talking and doing are different. You’re Schrödinger’s cat, for me. You could be what you say, or you could be radioactive. Don’t get me wrong, it’s far better than what I’d have otherwise, but pardon me if I don’t kick the box with the nuclear cat in it.”

Gale was quiet. If he had thought that they cared what his opinion of them was, he would have worried that the flicker that went through their eyes then was hurt. But they didn’t, so it couldn’t be. “That seems sensible to me.”

“Thank you, Senator. I’ll ask Mx Francis to brief me about the shows.”

As he bowed and got up, his knee twinged and he winced; Gale did too.

22 January looked them up. The praetorians were the people who had taken him from the Tiangong to Jade Hill, the Consul’s personal security service. Like a lot of English in Tharsis, “praetorian” was a weird translation from the real Chinese name. In Chinese it was just “the State Security Ministry,” but whoever did the official English translations had, like usual, decided that you couldn’t have anything that sounded too normal or else people would be fooled into thinking it wasn’t all scary and foreign. The original praetorians were the people who’d looked after the Roman emperors, which really did seem like a stretch to January. Given how precise Gale was, he didn’t understand why they’d use it, but when he asked later, Gale said that if you had a choice between making your country sound boring and normal and full of bureaucracy, or like an awesome scary let’s-have-the-Christians-eaten-by-lions kind of place, they knew which one they wanted thanks very much.

25

It was a solid afternoon of interviews. Suddenly every news programme was doing pieces about the criminalisation of Earthstrongers and let’s hear from January Stirling, that famously innocent person. Mx Francis went with him to three different news studios. At the end of each interview, everyone asked the same question:

“Especially in the light of the terrible situation on Earth, how do you feel about Senator Gale’s naturalisation policies?”

He hated it every time, even though he had prepared his answers.

“Senator Gale was torn apart by someone who looked like me,” was all he could say. Even though he wanted to say, I’m terrified, I’m one wrong answer away from being sent to prison or deported and then; then, well. “It isn’t my place to have any feelings about that.”

“That’s a very different answer to the one you gave a month ago. You accused the Senator of genocide.”

Someone behind a camera waved at him and tapped their ear. You’re speaking too quietly. He looked down. If he spoke any louder, he’d sound aggressive. People had softer voices here. Normal speaking tone for him was how people here snarled.

“I was wrong to say anything. I wish I hadn’t.”

“Wrong to say it—but you believe it?”

In all the interviews so far, he’d lied; he’d said of course not, because that was easier, it was what he was being paid to do, it meant legions of people wouldn’t call him evil. But now, he just couldn’t. Every time he said that, he felt grubby, and ashamed, because doing anything from terror of being cast out was always going to feel dirty.

“Sorry, you just asked me what I felt and I said it wasn’t my place, but it’s in—such contrast to what I believe I think I’m going to have to say it after all,” he said, and behind the camera, he saw Mx Francis throw their hands up at him. Would you mind not derailing my whole campaign and just sticking to the script, thanks? “I feel as though being Earthstrong here is a kind of original sin. I didn’t choose to be born this way, but I was, and it is dangerous to other people. I feel like there’s no way for me to be a good person here, and Earthstrong, at the same time.”

There was a strange hush in the audience, and even among the camera crews, who were all looking at him now, and not the drones they were usually watching hawklike. It was another one of those hanging moments like at the factory, before something smashed and all chaos broke loose. He breathed in deeper. Nothing would smash this time. He was getting better at this. Being around Gale was helping.

“But—what I believe is that there’s no such bloody thing as original sin. Nobody is bad just for existing. If you’re born a man, you’re not evil because you could hurt a woman, only if you do. If you’re born rich, you’re not bad just because you could exploit poor people, only if you do. And if you’re Earthstrong . . . you’re not bad because you could hurt someone Natural.”

He had to look right away from Mx Francis, who was miming stabbing him. “I think any kind of strength means you have to be careful around people who don’t have it. That’s just being an honourable person. I have to be careful of the strength in my bones.” He hesitated. “And other people have to be careful of their power, and their money, and their intellect.”

Because he had been expecting to be shouted down, he didn’t understand what he was hearing at first when it got a round of applause from the audience. He nodded slightly, seriously doubting he’d said anything a thousand other people hadn’t said before him, and painfully aware that Mx Francis looked like they might have set up a big January trap backstage with spikes at the bottom.

There was no January trap with spikes, as it happened. Mx Francis was oddly quiet, and their focus kept straying off into the middle distance in a way that looked like they were seeing online things he couldn’t. As they left the studio building—a sparkling horseshoe-shaped tower whose lower levels were all shops that ran discounts for the broadcasting company staff—they had to navigate around a big queue outside a convenience store. Through the window, the shelves were mostly bare, and a harassed-looking clerk was unstacking boxes as quickly as they could. People were taking things right from their hands. At the door, the automated tills strobed crazily. Someone hurried past January and Mx Francis with a whole net sack of eggs.

“Who panic-buys eggs?” Mx Francis said incredulously.

“It’s anything that’ll last, isn’t it,” January said, watching someone else go by holding a paper bag of flour like it was the crown jewels. He didn’t know how much the warehouses held in reserve, but it couldn’t be much, and with the dust—if it kept up, the next harvest was buggered, worldwide.

“Insane.”

“No, it’s just what people do,” January said, thinking of the famine. He’d been about twelve when it happened, so his memory wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. Flour, pasta, and canned things had vanished the second they were in the shops, and that was right at the start when the shops were still okay. There had been rationing—he remembered his mum showing him how to tick things off on the card—and there had been fights, actual fist fights, about what was equivalent to what if the shops didn’t have something. Could you get another orange if there were no eggs? His mum, who was a vintner in the enviable position of having a full grape harvest, had handed out baskets and baskets of grapes and therefore got whatever she wanted from everyone, but in the old folks’ home down the road, someone had died in the heat and a pair of old ladies who were too frail to leave their flats, and who the staff had forgotten about, cooked him in bits until an ambulance crew found out.