From the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, a queer sci-fi novel about an Earth refugee and a Mars politician who fake marry to save their reputations—and their planet.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Natasha Pulley’s The Mars House, which is out now.
In the wake of environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London’s Royal Ballet, has become a refugee on Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. In Tharsis, January’s life is dictated by his status as an Earthstronger—a person whose body is not adjusted to Mars’s lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. January’s job choices, housing, and even transportation options are dictated by this second-class status, and now a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would make it all worse: Gale wants all Earthstrongers to be surgically naturalized, a process that can be anything from disabling to deadly.
When Gale chooses January for an on-the-spot press junket interview that goes horribly awry, January’s life is thrown into chaos, but Gale’s political fortunes are damaged, too. Gale proposes a solution to both their problems: a five-year made-for-the-press marriage that would secure January’s financial future without naturalization and ensure Gale’s political future. But when January accepts the offer, he discovers that Gale is not at all like they appear in the press. And worse, soon, January finds himself entangled in political and personal events well beyond his imagining. Gale has an enemy, someone willing to destroy all of Tharsis to make them pay—and January may be the only person standing in the way.
When the start bell went, the floor supervisor came out onto the steel balcony above everyone. The supervisor was from here, and even so far above all the Earthstrongers, looked tapered and delicate. The safety barrier on the balcony was bullet-proof glass. Not because anyone had ever shot at it, but because on somebody’s birthday last year, drunken stupidness had happened and a bunch of people had worked out that without cages, they could jump the fifteen feet up to the balcony and whack the glass, which had led to an alarming version of stick-the-tail-on-the-donkey and then the obvious consequence. January had still been finding glass in his boiler suit for a week afterwards.
“All right, up to the yellow line everyone! Good. Cages off.”
Everyone hit the release button of their resistance cages, which was over the heart. Around the room, fifty steel skeletons opened out with a long sigh. January stepped away from his, feeling like he was floating. It wasn’t really a feeling he enjoyed; more than anything, it was like taking a retainer off your teeth. In one way it was a relief, but in another, you could feel things settling more than they should, planning to creep back to where you didn’t want them. Whenever his was off, a clock ran in the back of his head. He started to feel panicky after seven or eight hours.
It wasn’t because he was scared of accidentally naturalising. That took weeks and weeks. What dragged at him was how much stronger he had used to be. The cage simulated the kind of resistance Earth’s gravity made, yes, but a fortnight before being in a refugee camp, he’d been training for eight hours a day. He’d been able to lift more than his own weight above his head. Carry more. An alarming amount of ballet was weight training. Now, even with the cage, it had been a year since he’d done any real exercise. He’d lost weight, and fast: you had to eat a hell of a lot to keep up the kind of muscle he’d had before, and he just couldn’t afford it here, even if he had somehow found time and energy and space to go through even a quarter of those old drills. Most of his shirts were a size too big for him now. It shouldn’t have bothered him, it shouldn’t, because it wasn’t harmful—he’d used to be an athlete and now he was a normal person, that was fine, but he just felt less. He could feel it where he wouldn’t have expected to; his knees felt weaker, his wrists, some muscle or tendon he couldn’t name right under the socket of one hip. And the longer he spent out of the cage, the more he could feel what strength he did have left eroding away in this patient, insidious gravity.
As everyone shuffled into a queue to walk out to the main floor, there was a flurry among them, because everyone was throwing baseballs or apples from hand to hand. It was easy to tell who was new here, because they were the ones whose balls shot off and skittered away— then they had to make the Run of Shame to get them back, to applause. January threw his straight from hand to hand at first, letting his muscles get used to the eerie shock of how easy it was out of the cage, and then, once they were more used it, looped the ball up to eye level. Very, very gently, was how you had to do it; with so little force you felt like the ball wouldn’t even lift out of your hand. Val steered her chair along the line, watching people, making sure they were doing the exercises properly, as sharp as any dance teacher.
She had done them too, until recently. He didn’t know her precise reasons for naturalising, but she’d gone into one of the centres six months ago. The wheelchair was because of nerve damage. They’d had to give her a mechanical heart too. She said she didn’t mind; she said she was thrilled with the free car from the government, which was dead flashy.
He must still have been distracted from this morning, because he dropped his ball. Val caught it, gave him a suggestive look, and pretended to eat it.
“You all right?” she asked, when he forgot to laugh.
“What?”
“Listen, I found a box of chocolate bars in the old storage shed, do you want one? Out of date but the packaging’s fine.” She held out a bar.
“Oh, thanks,” January said. He hadn’t seen chocolate for weeks. Food was expensive here, given the water situation. He thought about it after the first bite. “Sort of undertaste of industrial methane?”
“Christ, throw it away!”
“No, no, it’s good.”
“You’ve got a problem,” Val told him.
January pointed at her with the bar. “You’ve got a massive secret stash of Stolichnaya in the biofuel locker.”
“I have,” Val said, sage. Then, “How do you know?”
January smiled, because it would have been hard to know Val even for five minutes without suspecting a secret vodka stash. Whether she had recently been close to any or not, she was always coated in a patina of steel dust and splotches of inexplicable white gloss paint, and she had once drilled through the ceiling in order to spy, via a periscope she’d prepared earlier, on the Natural people’s locker room. January didn’t think she was being weird, with the periscope. She had gone away looking purposeful. January suspected some kind of blackmail aimed at the supervisor, to whom Val was married and with whom she seemed to be permanently at war. It was a subject of factory-wide speculation as to whether the war was a joke or not.
“Before you all disappear off,” the supervisor called, “remember Senator Gale is visiting today. Nobody do anything obscene in front of the camera, it’s going out on national news. They might want to talk to some of you, so don’t swear and don’t go on a rant about politics, and I’ll buy you all doughnuts. All right?”
January had forgotten it was today.
He rolled down the sleeves of his boiler suit for something to do with his hands. This was actually his favourite boiler suit. It was small enough, which was unusual—the companies didn’t make them specifically for Earthstrongers and seemingly at random they’d do five little ones per batch and you had to fight for them—and he had remembered, finally, to bring a belt to cinch it close enough. There was hardly any paint on it. As factory fashion went, it was sharp. It was silly, but he felt more like himself on days when he wasn’t wearing one with holes in.
Val dusted him with the duster again.
“I bet,” she said, “that there’s some underwear in Lost Property.”
January smiled but had to look down, because he didn’t think he could hide what he thought about Senator Gale, but he didn’t want anyone to ask him about it. “Whatever you want to do with the underwear, I’m not involved and I didn’t hear about it.”
“Well. They’ll be gone soon enough.” Somehow, Val managed to be quite aware of the news, and politics, and just never apply any of it to herself. It made her basically well disposed to everybody, even if they were wearing a PUT EARTHSTRONGERS IN CAMPS T-shirt with a picture of someone throwing away a key on the back. January wished he could be like that. He was hoping that if he could just watch her enough and copy her properly, he might be able to train his soul up to be that strong. Then it wouldn’t matter if his bones weren’t.
“But we have to do the safety briefing for all the press morons and aides they’re bringing with them.”
“What’s this we?” he asked with dread.
She clapped his arm. “They’ll be taking pictures. Nobody wants my face anywhere except inside a bag. You’re all good-looking and you’ve got a fun accent and you used to be famous. They’ll listen to you, even if it’s just because they’re ogling you. Great power to be had from ogling.”
“No, no, no, safety briefings are your—”
“Good lad,” she said cheerfully.
“Mx Legasov,” a passing Natural person in a suit said, indignant. “For God’s sake, you can’t call people lad.”
“We’re family,” Val said. January felt himself go red. They weren’t family; they were acquaintances. January was certain that Val didn’t distinguish him from the forty other people in her direct care.
“Just be careful who catches you using language like that,” the suit-person said, looking harassed and, even in irritation, managing to give off an aura of chartered accountancy. “Nobody wants a lawsuit.”
Val turned to January with an elaborate bow. “Mx Stirling?”
“Mx Legasov,” said January in his poshest voice.*
The suit-person scowled at them both and crabbed off.
Above them, in the brilliant floodlights, dust from the storm above ground was spinning between the tangles of pipes and the cooling towers. Right up the length of the vast yard, rendered as tiny as bright moths at this distance, there were safety inspectors in orange jackets way up in the heights, probably trying to assess if the dust was doing damage to the machinery.
January wondered about a day off tomorrow, determinedly, so that he wouldn’t think about how much he would have loved to see someone shove Aubrey bloody Gale off a cooling tower.
Val propelled him towards the control room, where he could already see glimpses of smartly dressed people waiting.
*He’d heard “Mx” pronounced lots of ways since arriving in Tharsis—people whose first language was Russian tended to say “mikh,” like Mikhail; Mandarin speakers said “mishi,” because the characters for it were 蜜师—roughly, “secret-person,” in the same formula as things like 老师 (laoshi, teacher) and 律师 (lushi, lawyer) which January thought was excellent because it made everyone sound like a spy; and in English it sounded like “Mc,” as if everyone were Scottish. To January’s great joy, there was someone called Mx Wang in HR who liked tartan, and in his head they were very solidly McWang, mastermind of a plot to heroically invade England.
