White Mars

9

In hospital I learned to walk with my artificial leg. At first it had no feeling; cartilage growth was slow. Now the nerves were growing back and connecting, giving a not unpleasant fizzy sensation. When I was allowed out of hospital for an hour at a time, I took a stroll through the domes, feeling my muscle tone rapidly return.

Attempts had been made to brighten the atmosphere of our enforced home while I had been out of action. The jo-jo buses were being repainted in bright colours; some were decorated with fantastic figures, such as the “Mars dragon”.

Glass division walls were tanks containing living fish, gliding like sunlit spaceships in their narrow prisons. The flowering trees recently planted along the main avenues were doing well. More Astroturf had been planted. Between the trees flitted macaws and parrots, bright of plumage, genetically adapted to sing sweetly.

I liked the birds, knowing they had been cloned.

Inspired by these improvements, I tried to brighten Tom’s spartan quarters.

When I was fit enough to rejoin my fellows, I found more confidence in myself, perhaps as a result of my friendship with Kathi.

So a year passed, and still we remained isolated on Mars.

Our society was composed as follows. There were 412 non-visitors or cadre (all those who were conducting scientific experiments, technicians, “carers’, managers, and others employed permanently on Mars before the EUPACUS crash), together with their children. This number comprised 196 women, 170 men and 46 children, ranging in age from a few months to fifteen years old, plus 62 babies under six months. Of the 2,025 DOPs, 1,405 were men and 620 women, and of the 3,420 YEAs, 2,071 were men and 1,349 women. A visiting inspection team consisted of 9 medics (5 women and 4 men) and 30 flight technicians (28 men and 2 women).

Thus the total population of Mars in AD 2064 was 5,958.

To which it must be added that two carers, two DOP women and 361 of the YEA women (about one-quarter of them) were pregnant. The population of the planet was, in other words, due to increase by about 6 per cent within the next six months.

This caused some alarm and much discussion. Blame went flying about, mainly from the DOPs, although as a group they were not entirely blameless. A pharmacist came forward to admit that the pharmacy, which was housed in the R A hospital, had run out of anti-conception pills, having been unprepared for the EUPACUS crash and the cessation of regular supplies of pharmaceuticals.

After this revelation some DOPs suggested that young people use restraint in their sexual lives. The suggestion was not well received, not least because many couples had discovered that sex held an additional piquancy and that an act of intercourse could be sustained for longer, in the lighter Martian gravity. Nevertheless worries were expressed concerning the extra demands on water and oxygen supplies that the babies would exert.

I tried to commune with my shaded half in Chengdu. My message was: “Once more, the spectre of overpopulation is raising its head—on an almost empty planet!” It was puzzling to receive in return an image of a barren moorland covered in what seemed to be a layer of snow.

As I tried to peer at this snow cover, it resolved itself into a great white flock of geese. The geese bestirred themselves and took to the air. They flew round and round in tight formation, their wings making a noise like the beating of a leather gong. The ground had disappeared beneath them.

It was all beautiful enough, but not particularly helpful.

Tom and I took a walk one evening, and were discussing the population question. A strip of sidewalk along the street was covered with an Astroturf that mimicked growth and was periodically trimmed. This was Spider Plant Alley, renamed after the plants that mopped up hydroxyls, much as Poulsen had said. Throughout the domes, plants were pervading the place.

I particularly liked Spider Plant at the evening hour. It was then that the quantcomp that controlled our ambient atmospheric conditions turned lighting low and cut temperatures by 5 degrees for the night. A slight breeze rustled the plants—a tender natural sound, even if controlled by human agency.

As I hung on Tom’s arm, I asked him when he was going to regulate primary sexual behaviour.

He replied that anyone who attempted such regulation would meet with disaster, that sexuality was a vital and pervasive part of our corporeal existence. While other facets of that existence were denied us on Mars, it was only to be expected that sexual activity should intensify.

“You also have to understand, dear daughter, that sexual pleasure is good in itself—a harmless and life-enhancing pleasure.” He looked down at me with a half-smile. “Why else has it excited so many elders to control it throughout the ages? Of course, beyond the sexual act lie potential ethical problems. With those we can perhaps deal. I mean—well, the consequences of the sexual act, babies, diseases and all those rash promises to love for ever when lust is like fire to the straw i’ the blood, as Hamlet says.”

We walked on before I added, “Or, of course, whether both parties give their consent to the merging of their bodies.”

I thought of how I was always reluctant to give that consent. Had I, by becoming Tom’s adopted daughter, somehow managed to avoid giving that consent yet again? I did not know myself. Though I lived in an info-rich environment, my inner motivations remained unknown to me.

“You are justifying sex simply because it’s enjoyable?” I asked.

“No, no. Sex justifies itself simply because it’s enjoyable. Sometimes it can even seem like an end in itself.”

Silence fell between us, until Tom said—I thought with some reluctance—“My father spent all his inherited wealth on a medical clinic in a foreign land. I was brought up there. When I was repatriated at the age of fifteen, both my parents were dead. I was utterly estranged, and put under the nominal care of my Aunt Letitia.” He stopped, so that we stood there in the semi-dark. I held his hand.

“I fell in love with my cousin, Diana—‘Diana, huntress chaste and fair’, the poet says. Luckily, this Diana was fair and unchaste. I was cold, withdrawn—traumatised, I suppose. Diana was a little older than I, eager to experience the joys of sexual union. I cannot express the rapture of that first kiss, when our lips met. That kiss was my courageous act, my reaching out to another person.”

“Is that what it needs? Courage?”

He ignored me. “Within hours we were naked together, exploring each others’ bodies, and then making love—under the sun, under the moon, even, once, in the rain. The delirium of innocent joy I felt … Ah, her eyes, her hair, her thighs, her perfume—how they possessed me! … I’m sorry, Cang, this must be distasteful to you. I’ll just say that beyond all sensual pleasure lies a sense of a new and undiscovered life.

“No, I’m a dry old stick now, but I’d be a monster if I tried to deny such pleasures to our fellow denizens…”

I was feeling cold and suggested we went inside.

“People still think you’re some kind of a dictator,” I said, with more spite in my tone than I had intended.

Tom replied that he imagined he was rather a laughing stock. Idealists were always a butt for humour. Fortunately, he had no ambition, only hope. Enough hope, he said, lightly, to fill a zeppelin. He repeated, enough hope…

Yet in his mouth that last word held a dying fall.

That night, when alone, I wept. I could not stop.

I wept mostly for myself, but also for humanity, so possessed by their reproductive organs. Our Martian population was slave to unwritten ancient law, multiplying as it saw fit. That pleasure of which my Tom spoke always came with responsibilities.

At least the R A hospital could prepare for an outburst of maternity, its original duties being in abeyance. There were no new intakes of visitors to be acclimatised. One ward was converted into a new maternity unit, all brightly lit and antiseptic, in which births could be conducted with conveyor-belt efficiency.

Everywhere, there was industry. Existing buildings were converted to new uses. The synthesising kitchens were extended. Factories were established for the synthesis of cloth for clothing. All talents were seized upon for diverse works. During the day the noise of hammering and drilling was to be heard. We would endeavour to be comfortable, however temporary our stay.

There was music in the domes. Not all terrestrial music was to our taste, and composers like Beza were sought to compose Martian music—whatever that might be!

The more far-sighted of us looked ahead to a more distant future. Among these was Tom. Whether or not he really had hope, he and his committee pressed ahead with his plans to involve everyone in everyone else’s welfare. They engrossed him; sometimes I felt he had no personal life.

He declared that it was a matter of expedience that the education of young children should be given priority. There I was able to assist him to some extent.

Several committees were elected to formulate with others their hopes and endeavours for a better society. They held colloquia, which began in itinerant fashion, the more appealing ones becoming permanent features of our life. Sometimes they were met with impatience or hostility, although it was generally conceded that conditions in the domes might get rapidly worse unless they were rapidly improved. Improvement was something we strove for.

Emerson’s remark long ago that people preened themselves on improvements in society, yet no one individual improved, lay at the basis of many endeavours. The mutuality required for a just society implied that we must hope to improve the individual, to fortify him; otherwise any improvements would merely enhance the status of the powerful and lower that of the less powerful, and we would be back with the suppressions so prevalent on Earth.

Somewhere in the individual life must lie the salvation of whole societies, or else all was lost.

Hard as I tried, I found it difficult to study. If only I could learn more, I told myself, Tom would love me more. Many a time, I would simply sit in a cafe and listen to the music that filled the place. Kathi Skadmorr and I had many conversations. For her, learning seemed easy. She worked with Dreiser Hawkwood and found him, she said, a little overpowering. I thought privately that anyone Kathi found overpowering was worth a great deal of respect.

She had become absorbed in studying Olympus Mons. At times, the great volcanic cone seemed to fill her thought. She had submitted a carefully reasoned paper to Dreiser on the Ambient, suggesting a name change. Olympus was a “fuddy-duddy” name. She had found a better name for it when talking with an Ecuadorian scientist, Georges Souto. He had told her of an extinct volcano in Ecuador, the top of which, he said, because of the oblate spheroidal nature of Earth, was the point furthest from the centre of the Earth. In fact, it was 2,150 metres further from that centre than Everest, commonly assumed to be the highest point on Earth.

The sophistry of this argument greatly amused Kathi. When she learned that this defunct volcano was named Chimborazo, meaning the “Watchtower of the Universe’, she campaigned for Olympus Mons to be renamed Chimborazo. The campaign was a failure at first, and Dreiser, she said, was annoyed with her for talking nonsense.

Shortly after this, she studied satellite photographs of the Tharsis Shield, and observed—so she claimed—tumbled and churned regolith on the far side of Olympus, as if something had been burrowing there. When she pointed this out to Dreiser, he told her not to waste his time, or she would be sent back to the domes.

Many of the pressures extant on Earth—or Downstairs, as had become the fashionable term for our mother planet—had been relieved by our exile Upstairs. The intense pressure of commercialism had been lifted. So had many of the provocations of racism; here, we were all in the same boat, rather than in many jostling boats.

In particular, money, the gangrene of the political system, had been removed from play, although admittedly a sort of credit scheme existed, whereby payments were postponed until we were hypothetically returned Downstairs.

After a year or so, this credit scheme had taken sick and died, primarily because we found we could manage without it, and secondarily because we ceased to believe in it.

It was deemed futile to approach any individual with ambitious schemes if he or she was miserable. Many people missed or worried about their families Downstairs. Once our communication cards ran out, there was no renewing them, and the terrestrial telecom station was closed down—another feature of the EUPACUS fiasco. Counselling was provided, and the psychurgical group was kept busy. Also effective in healing was the community spirit that had arisen, and a renewed sense of adventure. We lived in a new place, within a new context, the “different psychological calculus”.

One of our colloquia became engaged in the art of making new music: primarily a capella singing, which we raised to high standards. We had brought in home-made and revolutionary musical instruments. The “Martian Meritorio” was established in time as our great success. But I still remember with affection our solo voices raised in song—in specially written song.

The improvement of the individual was pursued in such sessions as body-mind-posture, conducted at first by Ben Borrow, a disciple of the energetic Belle Rivers. Borrow was a little undersized man, full of energy, as easily roused to anger as to raucous laughter. He drove and inspired his attendees to believe, as he did, that the secret of a good life lurked in how one stood, sat and walked in the light gravity.

Perhaps because the bleak surroundings led our thoughts that way, our Art of Imagination colloquium was always successful. Swift and Laputa, those two satellites, first dreamed of by an Irish dean, that chased regularly above our heads, were used to connect the reality of our lives with the greater reality of which we were a transitory part.

A way of knowing ourselves was to relate our lived experience with the flow of language, thought and concepts surrounding us, by which the mundane could be reimagined. “Know thyself was an exortation requiring, above all, imagination. In this department, the Willa-Vera Composite, one so whippetlike, the other so much like a doughnut, proved invaluable.

Hard work along these lines produced some extraordinary artistries, not least the four-panel continuous loop video abstract entitled “Dawning Diagram” which, with its mystery and majesty, affected all who watched it. Human things writhed into shape from the molecular, rose, ran, flowered in bursts of what could have been sun, could have been rain, might have been basalt, died, bathed in reproductive dawns. In another quarter of the screen an old Tiresias read in a vellum-bound volume, tirelessly turning the same page.

Everything happened simultaneously, in an instant of time.

The aim of the Art of Imagination colloquium was to revive in adults that innocent imagination lost with childhood (although children also enjoyed the programme and gave much to it).

“I know the Sun isn’t necessarily square. I just like it better that way.” This remark by an eight-year-old, as comment on his strange painting, Me and My Universe, was later embodied in a large multimedia canvas hung at the entrance of the Art of Imagination Department (previously Immigration).

There were those who attended this colloquium who were initially unable to seize on the fact that they were alive and on Mars. So obnubilated were their imaginations they could not grasp the wonder of reality. They needed a metaphorical sense to be restored to them. In many cases, it was restored.

Then they rejoiced and congratulated themselves that they were Upstairs.

To our regret, the scientists in the main kept to their own quarters, a short distance from the domes. It was not that they were aloof. They claimed to be too busy with research.

I accompanied Tom to the station when he went to talk privately with Dreiser Hawkwood. A woman who announced herself as Dreiser’s personal assistant asked us to wait in a small anteroom. We could hear Dreiser growling in his office. Tom was impatient until we were admitted to his presence by this same assistant.

Dreiser Hawkwood was a darkly semi-handsome man, with the look of one who has bitten deep into the apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Indeed, I thought, noticing that his teeth protruded slightly under his moustache, he might have snagged them on its core. He was much preoccupied with the fact that the paper substitute was running out.

“Predictions are for amusement only,” he said. “When computers came into general use, there was a prediction that paper would be a thing of the past. Far from it. High-tech weaponry systems, for instance, require plenty of documentation. US Navy cruisers used to go to sea loaded with twenty-eight tonnes of manuals. Enough to sink a battleship!”

He jerked his head towards the overloaded bookshelves behind him, from which manuals threatened to spill.

Tom asked him what he was working on.

“Poulsen and I are trying to rejig the programme that controls all our internal weather. It’s wasteful of energy and we could use the computer power for better things.”

He continued with a technical exposition of how the current programme might be revised, which I did not follow. The two men talked for some while. The scientists were still expecting to find a HIGMO.

Regarding the science quarters rather as an outpost, I was astonished to see how well the room we were in was furnished, with real chairs rather than the collapsible ones used in the domes. Symphonic music played at a low level; I thought I recognised Penderecki. On the walls were star charts, an animated reproduction of a late-period Kandinsky and a cut-away diagram of an American-made MP500 sub-machine gun.

The personal assistant had her own desk in one corner of the room. She was blonde and in her thirties, wearing a green dress rather than our fairly standard coveralls.

At the sight of that dress I was overcome with jealousy. I recognised it as made from cloth of the old kind, which wore out, and so was expensive, almost exclusive. The rest of us wore costumes fabricated from Now (the acronym of Non-Ovine Wool), which never wore out. Now clothes fitted our bodies, being made of a semi-sentient synthetic that renewed itself, given a brush occasionally with fluid. Now clothes were cheap. But that dress…

When she caught my gaze, the personal assistant flashed a smile. She moved restlessly about the room, shifting paper and mugs, while I sat mutely by Tom’s side.

Tom said, “Dreiser, I came over to ask for your presence and support at our debates. But I have something more serious to talk about. What are these white strips that rise from the regolith and slick back into it? Are they living things?” He referred to the tongues (as I thought of them) we had encountered on our way over to the unit. “Or is this a system you have installed?”

“You think they are living?” asked Dreiser, looking hard at Tom.

“What else, if they are not a part of your systems?”

“I thought you had established that there was no life on Mars.”

“You know the situation. We’ve found no life. But these strips aren’t a mere geological manifestation.”

Hawkwood said nothing. He looked at me as if willing me to speak. I said nothing.

He pushed his chair back, rose, and went over to a locker on the far side of the room. Tom studiously looked at the ceiling. I noticed Dreiser pat the bottom of his assistant as he passed her. She gave a smug little smile.

He returned with a hologram of some of the tongues, which Tom studied.

“This tells me very little,” he said. “Are they a life form, or part of one, or what?”

Dreiser merely shrugged.

Tom said that he had never expected to find life on Mars, or anywhere else; the path of evolution from mere chemicals to intelligence required too many special conditions.

“My student, Skadmorr, seems to believe we’re being haunted by a disembodied consciousness or something similar,” Dreiser remarked. “Aborigine people know about such matters, don’t they?”

“Kathi’s not an Aborigine,” I said.

Tom took what he regarded as an optimistic view, that the development of cosmic awareness in humankind marked an unrepeatable evolutionary pattern; humankind was the sole repository of higher consciousness in the galaxy. Our future destiny was to go out and disperse, to become the eye and mind of the universe. Why not? The universe was strange enough for such things to happen.

Dreiser remained taciturn and stroked his moustache.

“Hence my hopes of building a just society here,” said Tom. “We have to improve our behaviour before we go out into the stars.”

“Well, we don’t quite know what we’ve got here,” replied Hawkwood, after a pause, seemingly ignoring Tom’s remark. He thumped the hologram. “With regard to this phenomenon, at least it appears not to be hostile.”

“It? You mean they?”

“No, I mean it. The strips work as a team. I wish to god we were better armed. Oxyacetylene welders are about our most formidable weapon…”

As we started the drive back to the domes, Tom said, “Uncommunicative bastard.” He became unusually silent. He broke that silence to say, “We’d better keep quiet about these strips until the scientists find out more about them. We don’t want to alarm people unnecessarily.”

He gave me a grim and searching look.

“Why are scientists so secretive?” I asked.

He shook his head without replying.