WHITE MARS

by Brian W Aldiss

  '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.

  No bird flies in the abyss

  Its bright plumage failing

  No eye lights in the dark

  Its sight unavailing

  The air carries no spark

  Only this –

  Only this

  Where sunlight lies ailing –

  Our human hopes sailing

  In humankind's ark

  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.

  10

  My Secret Dance and Rivers for God

  Some malcontents rejected everything offered them in the way of enlightenment, so impatient were they to return to Earth. They formed an action group, led by two brothers of mixed nationality, Abel and Jarvis Feneloni. Abel was the more powerful of the two, a brawny games player who had done his community service in an engineering department on Luna. Jarvis fancied himself as an amateur politician. Their family had lived on an Hawaiian island, where Jarvis had been one of a vulcanism team.

  Expeditions outside the domes to the surface of Mars were strictly limited, in order to conserve oxygen and water. The Fenelonis, however, had a plan. One noontime, they, and four other men, broke the rules and rode out in a commandeered buggy. With them they took cylinders of hydrogen from a locked store.

  A certain amount of hardware littered the area of Amazon
is near the domes. Among the litter stood a small EUPACUS ferry, the 'Clarke Connector', abandoned when the giant international confederation had collapsed.

  The action group set about refuelling the ferry. In a nearby heated prefab shed stood a Zubrin Reactor, still in working order despite the taxing variations in Martian temperatures. It soon began operating at 400° Celsius. Atmospheric carbon dioxide plus the stolen hydrogen began to generate methane and oxygen. The RWGS reaction kicked in. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen, plus catalyst, yielded carbon monoxide and water, this part of the operation being maintained by the excess energy of the operation. The water was immediately electrolysed to produce more oxygen, which would burn the methane in a rocket engine.

  The group connected hoses from the Zubrin to the ferry. The refuelling process began.

  As the group of six men sheltered in the buggy, waiting for the tanks to fill, an argument broke out between the Feneloni brothers, in which the other men became involved. Each man had a pack of food with him. The plan was that when they reached the interplanetary vessel orbiting overhead, all except Abel would climb into cryogenic lockers and sleep out the journey home. Abel would fly the craft for a week, lock it into an elliptical course for Earth, allow the automatics to take over, and then go cryogenic himself. He would be the first to awaken when the craft was a week's flight away from Earth, and would take over from the guidance systems.

  Abel had shown great confidence during the planning stage, carrying the others with him. Now his younger brother asked, hesitantly, if Abel had taken into account the fact that methane had a lower propellant force than conventional fuel.

  'We'll compute that once we're aboard the fridge wagon,' Abel said. 'You're not getting chicken, are you?'

  That's not an answer, Abel,' said one of the other men, Dick Harrison. 'You've set yourself up as the man with the answers regarding the flight home. So why not answer your brother straight?'