WHITE MARS

by Brian W Aldiss

  We rejoiced. With a water supply, living on Mars was now practicable. But the way lay open for terraforming.

  Cang Hai's Account

  3

  The EUPACUS Deal: The Rotten Door

  Should the citizens of the United States, for example, be answerable solely to Martian law when on Mars? Eventual answer: Yes. Mars is not a colony, but an independent world.

  This was the sensible legal decision that became the foundation stone for the Deed of Independence that governs our lives on Mars and will stand as exemplar for all the other worlds we inhabit in times to come.

  One of the greatest achievements of the last century was the establishing of preliminary planetary surveys. Less acknowledged was a system of workable international law.

  From the start, weapons were prohibited here. Smoking is necessarily prohibited, not only as a pollutant but as a needless consumer of oxygen. Only low-grade alcohols are allowed. Habit-forming drugs are unknown. An independent judicial system was soon established. Certain categories of science are encouraged. We owe everything to science.

  Under these laws and the laws of nature, we have built our community.

  When I think back to this early time just now, I find consolation there. My daughter, Alpha Jefferies - now Alpha Jefferies Greenway - left Mars last year to live on a planet she had never known. I fear for her on that alien globe, although she now has a contract-husband to protect her.

  She told me once, when we were still in communication, that Earth is the world of life. My image of it is as a world of death - of starvation, genocides, murders, and many horrors from which our world here does not suffer.

  My arguments with my dear lost daughter have caused me to look again at those first years on Mars, when there was an excitement about being on a strange world and we were not entirely free of Earth-generated myths regarding ancient life on Mars, of finding old land-locked canals leading nowhere, or great lost palaces in the deserts, or the tombs of the last Lords of Syrtis! Well, that's all juvenile romanticism, part of the fecundity of human imagination, which sought to populate an empty world. And that is what still thrills me - this great empty world in which we live!

  I will introduce myself. I am the adopted daughter of the great Tom Jefferies. I first knew life in the crowded city of Chengdu in China, where I was trained as a teacher of handicapped children. After five years of teaching in the Number Three Disability School, I felt a longing to try another planet. I applied for work on a UN work scheme and was accepted.

  For my community service, I served for a year as kennel-maid at a dog-breeding station in Manchuria, where life was extremely hard. I passed the behavioural tests to become a fully fledged YEA. After all the preliminaries, including the two-week MIC - or Martian Inculcation Course - I was permitted to board the EUPACUS ship to Mars, together with two friends, on an ORT, an Opposition Return Trip.

  What excitement! What dread!

  Although I had anticipated that Mars itself would be bleak, I had not imagined life in the domes, which, by the time I arrived, was unexpectedly colourful. As a reminder of the semi-Oriental composition of Marvelos, the travel bureau subsidiary of EUPACUS which freighted everyone to Mars and back, brilliant lanterns were hung among the simple apartment blocks. Tank-walls of living fish stood everywhere. Flowering trees (originating from Prunus autumnalis subhirtella) were planted along avenues. And what I liked best were the genetically adapted macaws and parrots that cast a scatter of colour as they flew free, and sang with sweet voices instead of croaking.

  Apart from this pleasant sound, the domes were reasonably quiet, since the small jojo ('jump-on-jump-off') electric buses taking people about made little noise.

  As I grew to know the settlement better, I found this colourful sector was just the 'tourist spot'. Beyond it lay the rather grimmer Permanents Sector, austere and undecorated, lying behind P. Lowell Street.

  All this was enclosed, of course, under domes and spicules. Outside lay an airless planet of rumpled rock. My spine tingled just to look out at it.

  Not that this view was featureless. To the west lay the rumpled extent of Amazonis Planitia, on the eastern edge of which we were situated. The domes had been built squarely on the 155th latitude, 18 degrees north of the equator. The site was sheltered from ferocious winds, which had built the yardangs to westward.

  Our shelter loomed to the east of us, to the immense bulk of Olympus Mons, the cliff-like edges of whose skirts were only some 295 kilometres away. Its seamed slopes were lit every evening by the dull sun.

  The Pavonis Observatory began immediately to give brilliant results. Studies of the gas giants became transformed almost into a new branch of astrophysics. Research into earlier temporalities and proto-temporalities was enlarging an understanding of the birth of the universe. Probes launched from the Martian surface had brought back iron-hard samples of ammonia-methane mix from Pluto containing impurities suggesting that the distant planet had its origins beyond the solar system. A meteorite watch station became operative.

  Thomas Gunther's Omega Smudge detector was being established when I made my first trip outside. The tube was under construction. I heard it said that clever lawyers were bending the proscriptions on doing science under Martian law in order to permit a larger ring to be built if needed.

  However that was, the research unit, established half a kilometre from the domes (Areopolis as it now is), came under the control of the authoritarian particle physicist, Dreiser Hawkwood.

  Because of its later significance, I must report a conversation that took place some time in those early days. It was recorded, as were most discussions in the first years, and now resides in the Martian Archive. Maybe similar conversations took place elsewhere. They assumed importance in the light of later discoveries.

  Four scientists in the Pavonis Observatory, perched high on the Tharsis Shield, were talking. The deepest voice was identifiable as that of Dreiser Hawkwood himself. He was a bulky man with an unfashionable moustache and a gloomy expression.

  'When we were driving up here,' a woman said, 'I kept thinking I saw white objects like tongues slicking away underground, fast as an oyster goes down a gullet. Tell me I was dreaming.'

  'We've established there is no life on Mars. So you were dreaming,' said a colleague.

  'Then I was dreaming too,' said another. 'I also saw those white things sticking up, disappearing as we approached. It seemed so unlikely I didn't care to say anything.'

  'Could they be worms?'

  'What, without topsoil?' Dreiser Hawkwood asked. His deep voice is easily identifiable. He laughed, and his colleagues laughed obediently with him. 'We shall find a natural geological explanation for them in time. They may be a form of stalagmite.'

  The fourth member of the group did not contribute to this conversation. He was sitting somewhat distant from his friends, staring out of the canteen window at Olympus Mons, only a few kilometres away.

  'Must get together an expedition to look at that weird volcano,' he said. 'The largest feature on the planet and we make little of it.'

  Olympus Mons was about 550 kilometres across. It rose to 25 kilometres above the Mars datum, in consequence of which it could be seen from Earth even in the days of terrestrial telescopes. It rated as one of the most remarkable objects in the solar system.

  Despite the interest of the scientists, increased demand for oxygen and water severely limited exploration work. Fuel for vehicular exploration consumed more oxygen. It was to be some while before Olympus Mons was investigated - or really entered our consciousness to any extent.

  I'm not accustomed to being an historian. Why have I set myself this task? Because I was there on that occasion when Tom Jefferies stood up and declared, 'I'm going to kick down a rotten door. I'm going to let light in on human society. I'm going to make us live what we dream of being - great and wise people, cicumspect, daring, inventive, loving, just. People we deserve to be. All we have to dare to do is throw away the old and difficu
lt and embrace what's new and difficult and wonderful!'

  I'm getting ahead of myself, so I'd better describe how it was in the early days on the Red Planet.

  I want to set down all the difficulties and limitations we, the first people on an alien planet, experienced - and all our hopes.

  EUPACUS got us there, EUPACUS set up all the dimensions of travel. Whatever went wrong later, you have to admit they never lost a ship, or a life, in transit on the YEA and DOP shippings.

  You certainly stayed close to nature on Mars, or the Eternal Verities, as a friend of mine called them. Oxygen and water supplies were fairly constant preoccupations.

  Water was rationed to 3.5 kilograms per person per day. Communal laundering drank up another 3 kilograms per head per day. Everyone enjoyed a fair share of the supply; in consequence there were few serious complaints. Spartan though this rationing may sound, it compared quite favourably with the water situation on Earth. There, with its slowly rising population, industrial demands on fresh water had increased to the point where all water everywhere was metered and as expensive as engine fuels of medium grade. This effectively limited the economically stressed half of the terrestrial population to something less than the Martian allocation.

  The need to conserve everything led to our system of communal meals. We all sat down together at table in two shifts, and were leisurely about our frugal meals, eking out food with conversation. Sometimes one of the company would read to us during the evening meal - but that came later.

  At first I was shy about sitting among all those strange faces, amid the hubbub. Some of the people there I would later get to be friends with (not Mary Fangold, though), such as Hal Kissorian, Youssef Choihosla, Belle Rivers, funny Crispin Barcunda - oh, and many others.

  But by luck I chanced to sit next to a pretty bright-faced YEA person. Her shock of curly dark brown locks was quite unlike my own straight black hair. She overcame my shyness, and obviously treated the whole business of being on a strange planet as a wonderful adventure. Her name was Kathi Skadmorr.

  'I've been so lucky,' she told me. 'I just came from a poor family in Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania. I was one of five children.'

  This shocked me. It was not permitted to have five children where I came from.

  She said, 'I served my year at Darwin, working for IWR, International Water Resources. I learned much about the strange properties of water, how the solid state is lighter than the liquid state, how with capillary action it seems to defy gravity, how it conducts light...' She broke off and laughed. 'It's boring for you to hear all this.'

  'No, not at all. I'm just amazed you wanted to talk to me.'

  She looked at me long and carefully. 'We all have important roles to play here. The world has narrowed down. I'm sure your role will be important. You must make it so. I intend to make mine so.'

  'But you're so pretty.'

  'I'm not going to let that stop me.' And she gave a captivating chuckle.

  As almost everyone of that first Martian population agreed, to survive on Mars close cooperation was a necessity. The individual ego had to submit to the needs of the whole body of people.

  Continual television reports from Mars brought to the attention of the Downstairs world (as we came to call Earth) the fairness of Martian governance and our egalitarian society. It contrasted markedly with terrestrial injustice and inequality.

  I don't want to talk about my own troubles, but I had been rather upset by the voyage from Earth, so much so that I had been referred to a psychurgist, a woman called Helen Panorios.

  Helen had a dim little cabin on one of the outer spicules where she saw patients. She was a heavily built lady with dyed purple hair. I never saw her wearing anything other than an enfolding black overall-suit. A mild woman she was, who did seem genuinely interested in my problems.

  As I explained to her, the six-month journey in cryosleep had terrified me. I had been detached from my life and seemed unable to reconnect with my ego. It was something to do with my personality.

  'Some people hate the experience; some enjoy it as a kind of spiritual adventure. It can be seen as a sort of death, but it is a death from which you reawaken - sometimes with a new insight into yourself.' That's what she kept telling me. Basically she was saying that most people accepted cryosleep as a new experience. Just coming to Mars, being on Mars, was a new experience.

  I had come to hate the very name EUPACUS. The thought of undergoing that same annihilation getting home again to Earth scared me rigid. There had to be a better way of making that journey across millions of miles of space - or matrix as the new more correct term had it. Interstellar matrix teemed with radiations and particles, so that to naked experience 'space' had come to have a Victorian ring about it.

  Travel between Earth and Mars was on the increase, or at least it had been before the disaster. Marvelos was hard pressed to meet the demand. Space vehicles were manufactured in terrestrial orbit under licence. Practically every industrialised nation of Earth was involved in their manufacture, if only in making pillows for the coffin-cots. The space vehicles, each with elaborate back-up facilities, were billion-dollar items. Shareholders were reluctant to invest in more rapid development. Takeovers and mergers of companies were happening all the time under the EUPACUS roof.

  Helen talked me through the entire process of a voyage.

  The consortium's ferry ships carried us passengers up from Earth to the interplanetaries, which parked in orbit about Earth and Luna. I was queasy from the start, even with a g-snort in me. I'm really not a good traveller. Then we passed into the interplanetary passenger ships, popularly known as 'fridge wagons'. You never forget the curious smell in a fridge wagon. I believe they start right away with some sort of airborne anaesthetic circulating.

  'I didn't care for the way the compartments were so like refrigerated coffins,' I told Helen. Even before the wagon released from orbit, you were going rapidly into that dark nowhere of cryosleep as bodily functions slowed. That was terror for me ...

  'You were primed beforehand, Cang Hai, dear,' said Helen. 'You know well the economics of that journey back at that stage of development. Taking passengers in cryosleep obviates the need for the ships to carry food and water. Little air is needed. Fuel and expense are saved. Otherwise, well, no trip...'

  I relived the rush upwards from Earth. For most people, the spirit of adventure overcame any feelings of sickness, though not for me. Two hundred and fifty-six kilometres up, the barrel shape of the fridge wagon loomed, riding in its orbit. It had looked small, then it was enormous. Its registration number was painted large on its hull.

  You have to admit it was a neat manoeuvre, considering the speed at which both bodies were travelling. With hardly a jar, they locked. I did then dare, before entering the wagon, to take a last look out at the Earth we were leaving. Fridge waggons have no ports.

  I had to cry a little. Helen tenderly placed a hand on my shoulder, like the mother I never had, saying nothing. I was leaving behind my Other, back in Chengdu. Nobody would understand that.

  Once in that strange-smelling interior, dense with low murmurs of various machines, we were guided to a small apartment, a locker room really. There one undressed with a neuter android in attendance, stowed away one's few belongings, and took a radiation shower. It was like preparing for a gas chamber. Advised by the android, you now had to lock your bare feet into wall-grooves and clasp the rungs in the curving wall above head level. The compartment now swung and travelled to a vacant coffin-cell. Music played. The aria 'Above my feet the roses speak...' from Delaport's opera Supertoys.

  Then you were somehow motionless and monitors uncoiled like snakes. Tiny feeds attached themselves to your body. Before the wagon left orbit, your body temperature was approaching that of frozen meat. You might as well have been dead. You were dead.

  I did a bit of screaming in front of Helen Panorios. Gradually I seemed to get better.

  We worked through the disorientation o
f rousing back to life in Mars orbit, speeding above all that varied tumble of rock and desert and old broken land.

  'You certainly have to welcome new experience to get that far!' I said at one point.

  When disaster struck, those who welcomed new experience were certainly well prepared for anything. Which was an important factor in influencing what happened to us all.

  Helen rather liked to lecture me. She called it 'establishing a context'. Marvelos organised two types of visit to Mars, one when Earth and Mars were in conjunction, (called the CRT, the Conjunction Return Trip), one when they were in opposition (called the ORT, the Opposition Return trip).

  Outward bound both trips took half a year. It was inevitable that those trips had to be passed in cryosleep.

  Perhaps it's worth reminding people that by 'year' I always mean Earth year. Earth imposed its year on Mars thinking much as the Christian calendar had been imposed over most of Earth's nations, whether Christian or not. We will come to the rest of the Martian calendar and our clocks later.

  The difficulty lay in the provision of return journeys. Helen grew quite excited about this. She showed me slides. While the return leg of an ORT took an uncomfortable year, the CRT took only half a year, no longer than the trip outwards. The snag was that the ORT required a stay of only thirty days on Mars, which was generally regarded as a pretty ideal time period, whereas the CRT entailed a stay of over a year and a half.

  I was booked for an ORT, and found I couldn't face the mere thought of it. Helen had booked on a CRT. Her time away from Earth was going to be eighteen times longer than mine. Although I remained in touch with my Other in Chengdu, I could not have faced such a long stretch away. Now I found I could not face the long year in cryosleep.

  Of course everyone who came to Mars had made these decisions. Despite such obstacles, the number of applications for flights increased month by month, as those returning reported on what for most was the great emotional experience of their lifetime.