WHITE MARS

by Brian W Aldiss

Confinement with civilised treatment won the day, the malefactor to meet with a mentatropist every day, and with a number of ordinary people once a week for conversation, topics to be confined to everyday events and not directed against the prisoner.

  Those who protested that such treatment was too lenient and would encourage crime were reminded that the abolition of public hangings had met with similar outcry. The civilised decision that had been reached was one on which all could pride themselves.

  After this debate, Bill Abramson circulated a message on the Ambient. He appeared, saying, 'The case of Peters, with his mild punishment, gratifies our liberal instincts but represents a case of cognitive dissonance, the disjunction between reality and one's ideas. Such is usually the case with utopianists.

  'Since we are not free of terrestrial vices, we must adhere to terrestrial laws in these matters. Peters committed murder. His pretence of penitence is immaterial. Murderers were traditionally put to death. Peters should be put to death.

  'Despite the collapse of financial infrastructures on our home planet, it cannot be long before ships arrive here to return us to our families. Nevertheless, let us suppose we have to remain here for another year. Or even, if we suppose ships set out now, half a year. In that time, I calculate that something like five hundred extra mouths will have to be fed. That is the result of our unchecked population growth, and unchecked promiscuity. But our food output cannot very greatly increase. So at some point in the future we shall face starvation, or else possibly our precious reservoir of water will dry up.

  'Those who increase their numbers promiscuously are a threat to our small community. I propose that they also should be punished - if not with death, then with a jail sentence and isolation in prison. To my mind, a prison is more urgently needed than Utopia.

  'Thank you for listening to me. I require no cheap abuse in return, but will gladly receive constructive suggestions.'

  The Adminex made an immediate response. They built a gallows on Bova Boulevard and appended to it a large notice:

  PUBLIC HANGMAN WANTED.

  Downstairs, on Earth, a queue for the job would have formed. But in our small enlightened community, no one wished to be branded a hangman. So Bill Abramson was answered.

  A committee of three interviewed the senior mentatropists, the Willa-Vera Composite. The Composite marched into the meeting loaded down with equipment. Mendanadum was in white, White was in lilac. They proceeded to demonstrate how every area of the brain had been precisely mapped, and how mind-body connections had been established over recent decades. In consequence, nanoneurosurgery was proving its worth.

  With the aid of the quantcomp, the mentatropist could dispatch 'remotes' to explore the entire structure of the brain and nervous system. Vera spoke enthusiastically of the 'wired neurons' that served this purpose.

  'These synthetic neurons send back a receivable signal, and can be programmed to trigger the release of chemicals that store memory. We guide the wired neurons to reach the appropriate synapse. We don't really expect you to comprehend the science behind our science - which may seem like magic to the uninformed - but Willa and I assure you that our work is a mingling of technical ability and sheer artistry.

  'Indeed, we are somewhat taken aback that you find it necessary to question our abilities. You have received our CVs, after all.'

  The Composite was engaged for the task of remedying Bevis Paskin Peters.

  Nevertheless, the mentatropy of Peters, conducted by the Willa-Vera Composite, was a slow business, continuing over many months.

  I was permitted to be present at their first session.

  The remotes travelled slowly forward, downward. Neurons glowed and died on the monitor like small security lights as they ventured onward, probing various cytoarchitectonic areas. To the remotes, every neuron marking a local circuit was like a single star, while about them macroscopic systems resembled entire galaxies, dense with suns and dark matter.

  Something that resembled light flickered away from their progress.

  The remotes journeyed through the hemispheres of the cerebrum, some diverting to the diencephalon, a collection of nuclei below the hemispheres, into the thalamus and hypothalamus. Other remotes entered regions of the limbic system and putamen. Still others toured in the cerebral cortex, the blanketing mantle of the cerebrum, a massive and complex constellation of synaptic activity, by one system of measurement a mere 3 millimetres thick.

  It was these latter remotes that detected an area of disturbed neurotransmitters. They moved into the region and began to activate the groupings involved. Here they entered the large-scale quantum coherences that are essential to the generation of consciousness.

  On the screens where the neuroscientists, Willa and Vera, watched, pictures and actions became evident. The skill of the women lay in interpreting the pictures as the remotes fired adjacent synapses.

  'Slightly viridian,' said Willa.

  'Needs fewer fibres,' said Vera. They had their own slang for what they did. 'We're getting coherency.'

  Specific tightly interconnected groups of neurons acted coherently as a single unit. The validity of these groupings was sustained by a coherent quantum-mechanical process, like that of a superconductor or superfluid.

  With tuning, the fibres sank back to form a huge black anatomy, its head hardly visible. Screaming cream things wavered in the background. A pudding cowered in a puddle.

  Home life of Bevis Paskin Peters, aged three. Perception, as someone had said, was all. The sun was square and permeated by fish.

  The Composite caught a signal from a remote homing in on the amygdala. They checked its programme. Here, deep in the limbic brain, wavered a primitive recollection. It had remained there, undiminished by time, since electrical resistance diminishes to zero in the HTC structures located there, much like the similar high temperature superconductors in our electrical cables.

  Although a good theoretical understanding of ordinary superconductivity had been established halfway through the previous century, a proper understanding of HTCs had to wait until the early years of the twenty-first. This understanding had been put to important use in the new brain sciences. The neuron probe began to participate in the collective quantum state, showing a blur on the mentatropy screen which refined itself into an interpretable picture.

  Pressures created an oval viewing like a squeezed lemon. Again a monster male, shouting and raving in deeper than viridian, the waves of anger misshaping it. The monster loomed over a limp white worm. Pale in pink the helpless something fluttered what might have been a hand.

  The two separate remote fleets activated their groupings. The effects of quantum entanglement began to manifest themselves. The patient's anciently stored pain became now.

  A door of jelly slammed and wiped the oval all away.

  'He resents us,' murmured Willa. 'We'll rest him and try again.'

  It took expertise, but Willa-Vera interpreted the code to recognise in the white worm the being that would later grow to become the huge black body, the parent.

  'Father dominant,' muttered Vera. 'Son wishing to be father?'

  I could contain myself no longer but said I hardly understood what was going on.

  'Basically, it's fairly simple,' said the fragile Willa Mendanadum, standing on tiptoe in her eagerness to explain. 'Our remotes are travelling in areas where the effects of quantum state-reduction first become important. That's where a quantum superposition actually becomes one of the classical alternatives. In fact, it appears that the entire phenomenon of consciousness is activated only when certain such quantum-coherent states begin to resolve into these classical alternatives.'

  'But I don't know what you mean by classical alternatives!' I wailed.

  'Oh, that's simple too,' Vera White said, with a knowing smile at her partner. 'Imagine the nebulous borderline between the quantum and classical levels of physical activity, right? This has to do with the measurement problem of quantum mechanics: why is it that whe
n we measure a quantum system we get one answer or another - the classical alternatives - instead of a quantum superposition of alternatives, which are an inherent part of the quantum-mechanical description of nature?'

  I shook my head, feeling foolish.

  'Well, you see, when an observer steps in, the rules change. The standard quantum-mechanical procedures are interfered with! So what effect does the observer have? Why, quantum state-reduction comes in, and one thing or another happens, as Willa has said.'

  She turned to her little partner. 'Ready for another probe? Try coordinates between D60 and - let's open E75.'

  They peered into their spec-monitors. Behind them, paralysed but aware, strapped on the couch while the picoprobes toured his brain, lay Peters, screaming without sound.

  Mentatropy, which would eventually hunt down his terrors and weaknesses and eradicate them, was not an easy option.

  Neuroscience was a subject of popular satire; but, no other workable system of remedy presenting itself, since nobody was prepared to turn themselves into hangman or jailer, the mentatropists continued their work.

  So gradually the dispute regarding the treatment of criminals died down, as other matters arose to be considered.

  Signals were still being sent to Earth Control, the technical centre, and to the UN, both on roughly Feneloni's suggested lines. The response was evasive. The ramifications of EUPACUS's collapse had bitten deep into the socio-political structure of the planet. Until the recession was over, all matrix operations had been suspended. So we were told.

  Now an extra body of advisers congregated about Tom, who continued to be unwell. Supporters included Val Kissorian and Sharon Singh, the woman who had found the rock crystal. I must confess I was jealous of the way in which Tom so clearly doted on her. Sharon was an amiable but shallow personality.

  Of the new questions arising, the most pressing concerned the education of children.

  Following the murder of Alysha, the Oort Crowd closed down and the cephalopods disappeared. I ceased to associate with Paula Gallin, who was not much to be seen.

  A crowd of us used to go to the Captain Nemo to sit around and talk in the evenings, while sipping coffdrinks.

  Generally the talk was about Chimborazo. When I could bear Kathi's silence no longer, I called her on my Ambient.

  'So what's new, Kathi? Why don't I hear from you? Are we not friends any more?'

  'Friends for ever, Cang Hai - however long that may be,' she said in her best sarcastic tone. 'Just to prove it, I will tell you a secret. Don't go spreading it around, eh?'

  'What is it? Are you in love with someone else?'

  'Yes, with that great alien intellect on our doorstep, ninny! You know what? We have discovered that it is accelerating towards us!'

  'What?' I was shocked.

  'It's making much faster progress, babe! It's accelerating at such a rate that it could even collide with the science unit in a year or two...'

  'Kathi! What does this mean? How awful!'

  'And I'm luring it on!' She screamed with laughter and closed down. Her face sank into oblivion.

  I managed to keep quiet about Kathi's news, although I wondered if Tom had been told. I sat in the Nemo with Alpha on my knee as if nothing had happened.

  One day Belle Rivers appeared, accompanied by Crispin Barcunda, carrying several pages downloaded from her Ambient which she spread before us. Belle was her usual majestic self, rock crystal beads jangling down to the waist of her long dress. Crispin was diminished beside her, lightly though he carried his age. We noticed with what old-fashioned courtesy he behaved towards Belle. He sported a long, floppy white moustache and his eyes at least were full of life as he smiled at the company.

  'Crispin and I have become firm friends,' Belle said, cocking her head to one side. 'Between us we encompass much experience of dealing with difficult people. I wish to get away from the concept of good and bad persons, and to speak of difficult people. I know the difficult ones as children, Crispin as adults, when he was Governor of the Seychelles. We have a plan for decreasing the difficulties experienced by difficult people, which we wish to present to you.'

  'We have to talk about this plan,' said Crispin. 'Maybe it will never get further than talk, since it requires many years for its fruition and we may not have that long.'

  'Well, now, it all sounds very mysterious,' said Tom, in rather grumpy fashion.

  'On the contrary, Tom,' said the old man, laughing. 'Like all good radical plans for mankind's happiness, it contains nothing that most sensible people don't already know.'

  Belle began to talk. She said that her educational regime was now running smoothly. It included, as yet informally, the education of parents in the pleasure of being parents, of reading to and listening to their progeny. The Becoming Individual classes she had established received a good response from the children. She had been interested to perceive - here she shot a stern glance at Tom - how most children had what she called 'a religious sense of life'.

  'No one denies that,' Tom interrupted. 'It's the divine aspect of things, Belle - what you have called the phylogenic aspect of things. Your charges have but recently evolved from the molecular state of being. Of course they are full of wonder. I'm delighted you give it expression.'

  She nodded and continued. She loved her children and was concerned that the best possible teaching might not help them prevail in the rough and tumble of terrestrial life (assuming they ever returned to Earth, as she personally did not intend to do). There had been much discussion about punishment for crime; the right conclusion had been reached - that care and consultation were more effective than punishment. She wanted Crispin to talk for a moment about the bad situation on Earth.

  15

  Java Joe's Story

  Crispin Barcunda spoke. 'As Governor of the Seychelles, I was plagued by petty crime. Muggings, theft, aggression against tourists, hot-rodding, break-ins and murder, which sprang from these sometimes rather petty incidents. And we had drug barons and their victims. Often the crimes were drug- or alcohol-related.

  'In short, the Seychelles was a paradigm in small of the rest of the world. Except it was a tropical paradise...

  'Only I didn't see it as a paradise, I can tell you. Fast as we locked the little buggers up, others sprang to take their place. Our prisons were pretty savage places, sordid, old-fashioned, with frequent floggings of delinquents for deterrent effect.

  'Only we know floggings don't deter. They just keep the middle classes happy. Of the little buggers they make big buggers with a grudge against society. I will tell you how we changed all that.

  'It says a great deal for the human race that goodness survives even in the worst places of confinement. Among faces that bear the expressions of rats and snakes, cold, merciless, vindictive, you meet faces that beam decency and kindness.

  'Such a good face belonged to a prisoner called Java Joe. Maybe he had another name, but I never heard it. Just an ordinary black man who happened to be released from a jail sentence on the day I made a very popular speech. I had addressed my audience in Victoria town square by our famous clock tower, exhorting them to value themselves and turn from crime. I had called them, I blush to say, the noblest creatures of the universe.

  'As I was resting up from this hypocrisy, this ex-prisoner, Java Joe, was shown into my presence. He was perfectly polite. He even made himself obsequious. Yet he carried himself with pride. He had come, he said, especially from Crome Island to hear me speak. I asked him if prison had reformed him.

  'His answer was simple. Delivered without reproach, it was simply, "Hell's for punishment, not reformation, isn't it?"'

  Crispin tugged the ends of his moustache in order to contain a smile.

  'Java Joe had come to me with a suggestion, he said. He told me he had read a remarkable old book when he was held in solitary confinement in prison. Java Joe emphasised that he was not a fussy man, but the state of what he called "the bogs" in the prison was a disgrace, planne
d and intended to humiliate all who had to use them. He repeated this latter phrase. This made a passage in this old book he was able to read all the more impressive.

  '"What was the book?" I asked him.

  'Joe was uncertain whether it was a history or a fiction. Maybe he did not understand the difference between the two types of writing, which is little enough, I grant you. Part of the book concerned the building of an ideal house, called Crome.

  'The architect of Crome, Joe told me, was concerned with the proper placing of his privies. By which he meant, in plain English, sir, begging my pardon, the bogs. And here Java Joe began to quote verbatim from the book: "His guiding principle in arranging the sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the ground."

  'Java Joe eyed me closely to make sure I understood this elaborate language from the ancient book. Seeing I appeared to do so, he continued to quote: "It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando (the architect, sir, you see) was moved only by material and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of his privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual reasons. For, he argues, the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe."'

  ' "Are you trying to be satirical at my expense?" I roared. But plainly he was not. He explained that to counteract these degrading effects, the author of the strange book advised that the privies in every house should be nearest to heaven, that there should be windows opening on heaven, that the chamber should be comfortable and that there should be a supply of good books and comics on hand to testify to the nobilty of the human soul.

  '"Why vex me with this recitation?" I demanded. "Is it not more appropriate that the privies in our prisons should be down in the bowels of the earth?"