WHITE MARS

by Brian W Aldiss

  'What we propose should be written into our constitution is that marriage is forbidden. No more marriages. Instead, an unbreakable contract to produce and rear children. Demanding, yes, but with it will come benefits and support from the state.

  'This unbreakable contract may be signed and sealed by any two people determined to devote themselves to creating the brilliant and loving kind of child Belle Rivers thinks can be produced by an impractical rank on rank of shrinks. The new contract cannot be broken by divorce. Divorce is also forbidden. So it will be respected by one and all. Outside of that contract, free love can prevail, much as it does now - but with severe penalties for any couple producing unwanted babies.'

  Stephens sat down in a dense silence as the forum chewed over what he had said.

  Crispin slowly rose to his feet. 'Beau has been talking about breeding, not marriage. Just because his - or rather, Nietzsche's - ideas are admirable in their way, that doesn't make them practical. They're too extreme. We could not tolerate being locked for ever into a twosome that had proved to have lost its original inspiration, or to have found no other inspiration. To grow as Beau suggests, we must be free. We offer no such draconian answer as Beau proposes, to a question that has defeated wiser heads than ours.' He sighed, and continued more slowly.

  'But we do know that a marriage is as good as the society in which it flourishes - or fails ... It may be that when our just society is fully established the ancient ways of getting married - and of getting divorced where necessary - will prove to be adequate. How adequate they are must depend not on laws, which can be broken, but on the people who try to abide by them.

  'Marriage remains a lawful and honourable custom. We must just try to love better, and for that we shall have the assistance of our improved society.'

  He sat down, looking rather dejected. There was a moment's silence. Then a wave of applause broke out.

  At this period, I felt dizzy and sick and little able to carry on with my work. I seemed to hear curious sounds, somewhat between the bleat of a goat and the cry of a gull. Even the presence of other people became burdensome.

  There was an upper gallery, little frequented, which I sought out, and where I could sit in peace, gazing out at the Martian lithosphere. From this viewpoint, looking westward, I could see the sparsely fractured plain, where the fractures ran in parallel, as if ruled with a ruler. These lines had been there - at least by human standards - for ever! Time had frozen them. Only the play or withdrawal of the Sun's light changed. At one time of day, I caught from this vantage point the glint of the Sun on a section of the ring of the Smudge Project.

  Visiting the gallery on the day following the marriage debate, I found someone already present. The discovery was the more unwelcome because the man lounging there was John Homer Bateson, who had displayed such misanthropy in his speech.

  It was too late to turn back. Bateson acknowledged my presence with a nod. He began to speak without preliminaries, perhaps fearing I might bring up the topic of the recent debate.

  'I take it that you do not subscribe to this popular notion that Olympus Mons is a living thing? Why is it that poor suffering humanity cannot bear to think itself alone in the universe, but must be continually inventing alternative life forms, from gods to cartoon characters?

  'Make no mistake, Jefferies, however industriously you busy yourself with schemes for a just society, which can never come about, constituting as it does merely another Judeo-Christian illusion, we are all going to die here on Mars.'

  I reminded him that we were looking for a new and better way to live - on which score I remained optimistic.

  He sighed at such a vulgar display of hope. 'You speak like that, yet I can see you're sick. I'm sorry - but you have merely to gaze from this window to perceive that this is a dead planet, a planet of death, and that we live suspended in a kind of limbo, severed from everything that makes existence meaningful.'

  'This is a planet of life, as we have discovered - where life has survived against tremendous odds, just as we intend to do.'

  He pulled his nose, indicating doubt. 'You refer, I assume, to Olympus? You can forget that - a piece of impossible science invented by impossible scientists enamoured of a young Aborigine woman.'

  'Ships will be returning here soon,' I responded. 'The busy world of terrestrial necessity will break in on us. Then we shall regard this period - of exile, if you like -as a time of respite, when we were able to consider our lives and our destinies. Isn't that why we DOPs and YEAs came here? An unconsidered life is a wasted life.'

  'Oh, please!' He gave a dry chuckle. 'You'll be telling me next that an unconsidered universe is a wasted universe.'

  'That may indeed prove to be the case.' I felt I had scored a point, but he ignored it in pursuit of his gloomy thought.

  'I fear that our destiny is to die here. Not that it matters greatly. But why can we not accept our fate with Senecan dignity? Why do we have to follow the scientists and imagine that that extinct volcano somewhere out there, out in that airless there, is a chunk of life, of consciousness, even?'

  'Why, there is evidence—'

  'My dear Jefferies, there's always evidence. I beg you not to afflict me with evidence! There's evidence for Atlantis and for Noah's flood and for fairies and for unidentified flying objects, and for a thousand impossibilities ... Are not these absurd beliefs merely unwitting admissions that our own consciousness is so circumscribed we desire to extend it through other means? Weren't the gods of the original Greek Olympus one such example, cooked up, as it were, to explain the inexplicable? I suspect that the universe, and the universes surrounding it, are really very simply comprehended, had we wit enough to manage the task.'

  'We have wit enough. Our ascendancy over past centuries shows it.'

  'You think so? What a comfortable lack of humility you do exhibit, Jefferies! I know you seek to do good, but heaven preserve us from those who mean well. Charles Darwin, a sensible man, admitted that the minds of mankind had evolved - if I recall his words correctly - from a mind as low as that of the lowest animal.'

  Attempting a laugh, I said, 'The operative word there is evolved. The sum is continually ever greater than its parts. Give us credit, we are trying to exceed our limitations and to comprehend the universe. We'll get there one day.'

  'I do not share your optimism. We have made no progress in our understanding of that curious continuity that we term life and death since - well, let's say, to be specific, because specificity is generally conceded to be desirable -since the Venerable Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History some time in the seventh century. I trust you are familiar with this work?'

  'No. I've not heard of the book.'

  'The news has been slow to reach you, n'est ce pas? Let me quote, from my all too fallible memory, the Venerable Bede's reflections on those grand questions we have been discussing. He says something to this effect. "When compared with the stretch of time unknown to us, O king, the present life of men on Earth is like the flight of a solitary sparrow through the hall where you and your companions sit in winter. Entering by one high window and leaving by another, while it is inside the hastening bird is safe from the wintery storm. But this brief moment of calm is over in a moment. It returns to the winter whence it came, vanishing for ever from your sight. Such too is man's life. Of what follows, of what went before, we are utterly ignorant."'

  Sighing, I told Bateson I must return to my work.

  As I walked away, he called to me, so that I turned back.

  'You know what the temperature is out there, Jefferies?' He indicated the surface of Mars with a pale fluttering hand. 'I understand it's round about minus 76 degrees Celsius. Even colder than a dead body in its earthly grave! Nothing mankind could do would warm that ground up to comfortable temperate zone temperatures, eh? Do you imagine any great work of art, any musical composition, was ever created at minus 76 Celsius?'

  'We must set a precedent, John,' I told him.

  I left him alo
ne on the upper gallery, gazing at the bleached landscape outside.

  19

  The R&A Hospital

  On the following day, when I was resting, Dayo came to visit me again. He tried to persuade me to see what 'the computer people', as he called them, were doing. I could not resist his blandishments for ever, and got myself up.

  Going with him to the control room, I found that Dayo was popular there too. He had been learning to work on the big quantputer with the mainly American contingent who staffed the machines. The striking patterns on his tiles for the Lower Ground had been devised using it.

  The mainframe had originally been programmed to handle the running of the Martian outpost - its humidity, atmospheric pressure, chemical contents, temperature levels and so forth. Now all these factors were being handled by a single rejigged laptop quantputer.

  I was astonished, but the bearded Steve Rollins, the man in charge of the programme under Arnold Poulsen, explained they had evolved a formula whereby interrelated factors could all be grouped under one easily computable formula. Our survival and comfort were being controlled by the laptop. The change-over had taken place at the 'X' hour, during a night some five months previously. No one had noticed a shade of difference, while the big mainframe had been freed for more ambitious things.

  And what things! I had wondered why the control staff took so little interest in our forums and the Utopian society. Here was the answer: they had been otherwise engaged.

  At Dayo's prompting, Steve showed me the programme they were running. He spoke in an easy drawl.

  'You may think this is unorthodox use of equipment,'

  Steve said, stroking his whiskers with a gesture he had and grinning at me. 'But as that great old musician, Count Basie, said, "You just gotta keep on keeping on". If you regard science as a duel with nature, you must never drop your guard. Stuck here on this Ayers Rock in the sky, we must keep on keeping on or we stagnate. Guess you know that.'

  'Guess I do.'

  'As a kid I used to play a game called Sim Galaxy on my old computer. It produced simulations of real phenomena, from people to planetary systems. If you kept at it long enough, fighting entropy and natural disasters, it was possible to get to rule over a populated galaxy.'

  Steve said that his team had adapted a more modest version of the game, into which they had fed all the quantputer records, sedulously kept, of every person and event on Mars. The simulation had become more and more accurate as the programme was refined. Every detail of our Mars habitation, every detail of each person in the habitation, was precisely represented in the simulation. They called the programme Sim White Mars.

  We watched on a widescreen monitor. There people lived and moved and had their being. Our small Martian world was totally emulated; the one item missing was Olympus, a being as yet incomputable.

  I fought against the suspicion that this was not a true emulation but a trick, until Steve mentioned casually that they were using a new modified quantputer that computed faster, fuzzier, than the old conventional quantputer - certainly than any of the quantcomps people carry around with them.

  The scale of the thing made me feel dizzy. Dayo was immediately at hand, fetching me a stool.

  In full colour, recognisable people went about their business, around the settlement and in the laboratory. They seemed to move in real time.

  The scene flipped to a schoolroom, where Belle Rivers was talking with a jeuwu class of ten children. Steve moved a pointer on to Belle, touched a key, and at once a scroll of characteristics came up: Belle's birth date and place, her entire CV and many other details. They flashed on the screen and were gone at another touch of a key.

  'We call these simulated objects and people emulations, they are so precise,' said Steve. 'To them, their world is perfectly real. They sure think and act like real.'

  'But they are mere electronic images. They can't be said to think.'

  Steve laughed. 'Guess they don't realise they're just a sequence of numbers and colours in a computer, if that's what you mean.' He added, in lower key, 'How often do we realise we're also just a sequence in another key?'

  I said nothing.

  The people on screen were now gathering in the main thoroughfare. This was recognisably the day the third marathon was held. There were the runners, many with false wings attached to them. There were the officials who ran the race. There were the crowds.

  A whistle blew and the runners started forward, struggling for space, so closely were they packed, even as they had done weeks previously.

  'All this takes real heavy puting power, even using the quantputer,' Steve said. 'That's why we are running some weeks behind real time. We're working on that problem.' The runners began to trot, jostling closely for position. 'I guess we'll catch up eventually.'

  'Want to bet on who will win?' Dayo asked mischievously.

  'You see this is a kind of rerun of the marathon,' Steve said. 'And now, I just tap on a couple of keys...'

  He did so. The screen was filled with phantom creatures, grey skeletons with strange pumping spindles instead of legs, naked domes for heads, their teeth large and bared. The inhuman things pressed onwards, soundless, joyless ... The Race of Death, I thought.

  'We got the X-ray stuff off the hospital,' Steve said. 'It's spare diagnostic equipment...'

  The skeletons streamed on, with ghostly grey buildings as background, racing through their silent transparent world.

  Steve tapped his keyboard once more and the world on the screen became again the one we recognised as ours.

  With a flash of humour, he said, 'You have your Utopia, Tom. This is our baby. How do you like it?'

  'But in the wrong hands...' I began. A feeling of nausea silenced me.

  Dayo took my arm. 'I want you to watch yourself as an emulation, Tom. Please, Steve...'

  Steve touched a couple of keys on his keyboard. The scene changed. An office block along the marathon course came into focus. Moving through the window, the emulation picked out a man and two women, standing close together, watching the runners pass their building. I recognised Cang Hai, Mary Fangold and myself.

  My emulation clutched his head and went to the back of the room to sit on a sofa. Cang Hai came over to it and stood there in silence, looking down at its - my - bowed head. After a moment, I stirred myself, smiled weakly at Cang Hai, rose, and returned to the window to watch the runners.

  'I don't remember doing that,' I said.

  'The CV, Steve,' Dayo prompted.

  The key. My details, my birth date and place, my CV. Momentarily my skeletal self was there, grey, drained of all but emptiness, long bony fingers clutching at my ostrich egg of skull. Then: 'Diagnosis: Suffers from untreated brain tumour'. Only later did it occur to me that had I died then, my emulation would have continued to live, at least for a while.

  I found Steve gazing at me and stroking his beard. 'You better get yourself looked after, chum,' was all he said.

  The old R&A hospital was greatly enlarged in order to cope with its new general functions. Entry was through an airlock, the hospital atmosphere being self-contained against external emergencies and slightly richer in oxygen than in the domes in order to promote feelings of well-being. Extensive new wards had been built and a nanotechnology centre added, where cell repair machines were housed.

  I must confess to feeling nervous as I entered the doors. I was greeted warmly by the hospital personnel manager, Mary Fangold.

  As we shook hands, her dark blue eyes scrutinised me with more than professional interest.

  'You're in good hands here, Tom Jefferies,' she said. 'We are all admirers of your Utopian vision, which is carried out in our hospital as far as is possible. I hope to take care of you personally. We are treating only a few persistent sore-throat and eye cases at present.

  'We regard those who are ill and enter here less as patients than as teachers who bring with them an opportunity for us to study and repair illness. Our progress is less towards health tha
n towards rationality, which brings health.'

  When I remarked that, despite her kind sentiments, the old, the ageing, would become a burden, she denied it. No, she said, the burdens of old age had been greatly exaggerated in former times. The old and experienced, the DOPs, cost very little. On Earth, many of them had savings that they gradually released after retirement on travel and suchlike. Thus they contributed to society and the economy. Their demands were much fewer than were those of the young.

  I asked her if she was keen to return to Earth, to practise there.

  She smiled, almost pityingly. Not at all, was her answer. 'The elements in the formula have been reduced here to a manageable level.'

  She was determined to remain on Mars in her interesting experimental situation, free of many diseases which plagued Earth, helping to bring about a Utopian phase of human life. For her money, we could remain cut off for good! Were not working and learning the great pleasures for anyone of rational intelligence?

  She and a nurse conducted me to a ward-lounge, where we sat over coffdrink gazing out of windows that showed simulated views of beach, palm trees and blue ocean, where windsurfers rode the breakers.

  Continuing her discourse, Mary said that it was the young who were expensive. Child benefits, constant supervision and education, health care, the devastations of drink and drugs, and - at least on Earth - crime, all formed major items in any nation's financial regimen of expenditure. Contrary to the general consensus that children were a blessing, she maintained they were rather a curse; not only were they an expense, but they forced their parents to participate in a second childhood while rearing them. She regarded this as an irrational waste of years of young adulthood.

  'It's true,' I answered, 'that most crime on Earth is committed by the young. Whereas, if I recall the statistic correctly, the over-seventies account for only 1.3 per cent of all arrests.'

  'Yes. Mainly for dangerous driving, the occupational hazard of the age! Happily, we do not have that problem on Mars.'