WHITE MARS

by Brian W Aldiss

  They discussed whether they had any extra in-built discrimination against the Nigerian, Dayo. Had they expected him to 'get away' with something? Had the dismal past history of white victimisation of blacks anything to do with it? Was there a superstitious mistrust of 'black' as a colour, as there might be of left-handedness?

  These were questions they could not answer. They had to conclude it might be the case. Certainly, they would be wary if a traditional green Martian appeared in their midst.

  They could only hope that such atavistic responses would die away as rational men of all colours mixed.

  We could only hope that the colour question would fade away, united as we were by a common concern regarding survival and in perfecting our society. However, the matter was to arise again later, and in a more serious case.

  During this period, I consulted with many people, delegating duties where it was possible to do so. Many people also came to my office to deliver advice or complaint. One of these visitors was a rather lacklustre-looking young YEA scientist. He announced himself as Chad Chester.

  'Maybe you know my name as the guy who went down into the water caves off Marineris with Kathi Skadmorr. I guess I didn't make a great showing compared with her.'

  'Not many of us do. What can I do for you?'

  Chad explained that he had listened to my lecture on the five obstacles to contentment on Earth. He noted that at one point I had referred to the slogan, 'All men are equal'. He was sure this saying embodied a mistaken assumption; he never thought of himself as equal to Kathi, for example. That experience in the caves had led him to put down his thoughts on paper. He felt that 'All men are equal' should not be used in any Utopian declaration we might make, for reasons he had tried to argue.

  When he had gone I set Chad's paper aside. I looked at it two days later.

  His argument was that the very saying was self-denying, since it mentioned only men and not women. It was meaningless to pretend that men and women were equal; they were certainly similar in many ways, but the divergence between them made the question of being equal (except possibly in law) irrelevant. Furthermore, the diversity of the genetic code meant a different inheritance of capacities even within a family.

  'All men are equal' held an implication that all could compete equally; that also was untrue. A musician may have no capacity for business. A nuclear physicist may be unable to build a bridge. And so forth, for several pages.

  He suggested that a better slogan would be, 'All men and women must be allowed equal opportunities to fulfil their lives.'

  I liked the idea, although it had not the economy, the snap, of the original it replaced. I wondered about 'All dudes are different.'

  Any such sloganeering boiled down to one thing. It was important to have maximum latitude to express ourselves within the necessarily confining rules of our new society. Someone mentioned the dragon that earlier YEAs had painted on the rock face; they emphasised the way in which it had caused alarm, being unexpected. Yet creativity must continue to produce the unexpected or the community would perish. Although latitude was needed, it was generally accepted that our society had to operate within prescribed rules.

  Creativity we needed, but not stupidity and ignorance.

  We had begun to discuss education when a slightly built and handsome young woman with dark hair came forward. She poured out from the pockets of her overalls on to a central table a number of gleaming objects, various in shape.

  'Before you speak of any orderly society, you'd better be aware,' she said, 'that Mars is already occupied by a higher form of life. They carved these beautiful objects and then, evidently dissatisfied with them, cast them away.'

  The room was in an uproar. Everyone was eager to examine the exquisite shapes, seemingly made of glass. Some appeared to be roughly shaped translucent models of small elephants, snails, labias and phalluses, puppy dogs, hippopotami, boulders, coproliths, and hedgehogs. All were bright and pleasant to the touch.

  The faces of those who picked up the objects were full of alarm. Always at the back of our minds had been the suspicion that the yet almost unexplored planet might somehow, against all reason, harbour life.

  The young woman allowed the drama of the situation she had created to sink in before saying, loudly, 'I'm an areologist. I've been working alone in the uplands for a week. Don't worry! These are pieces of rock crystal, chemical formula SiO2. They're just translucent quartz, created by nature.'

  A howl mingled with dismay and approbation rose.

  The young woman said with a laugh, 'Oh, I thought I'd just give you a scare while you were making up all these rules to live by.'

  I persuaded her to sit by me while the crowd reassembled. She was lively and restless. Her name was Sharon Singh, she told me. She was half-English, half-Indian, and had spent much of her young life in the terrestrial tropics.

  'You can't find Mars particularly congenial,' I remarked.

  She gave a wriggle. 'Oh, it's an adventure. Unlike you, I do not intend to live here for ever. Besides, there are many idle and eager men here who enjoy a little romance. That's one of the real meanings of life, isn't it? Mine is a romantic nature...' She flashed a smile at me, then regarded me more seriously. 'What are you thinking?'

  I could not tell her, saying instead, 'I was thinking that we can sell these pretty rock crystal objects for souvenirs when matrix traffic resumes.'

  Sharon Singh uttered a rather scornful laugh, momentarily showing her pretty white teeth. 'Some things are not for sale!' She gave her wriggle again.

  That night, I could not sleep. The smile, those dark eyes fringed by dense lashes, the carelessness, the wriggle - they filled my mind. All my serious contemplations were gone, together with my resolves. I thought - well, I thought that I would follow Sharon Singh to Earth, and gladly, if need be. That I would give anything for a night with her in my arms.

  In order to sublimate my desire for Sharon Singh, I made a point of talking personally to as many men and women as possible, sounding out their opinions and gathering an impression of their feelings towards our situation and the practicalities of living decently.

  My quantcomp rang as I was going down K.S. Robinson. A woman's voice requested an appointment. In another half-hour, I found myself confronting Willa Mendanadum and her large companion, Vera White. I saw them in my small office. With Vera in her large flowing lilac robes, the room was pretty full.

  Willa had a commanding voice, Vera a tiny one.

  'As you will no doubt be aware, Vera and I are mentatropists,' said Willa. 'While we support your wish to form a Utopian society, we have to tell you that such is an impossibility.'

  'How so?' I asked, not best pleased by her haughty manner.

  'Because of the contradictory nature of mankind in general and individuals in particular. We think we desire order and calm, but the autonomous nervous system requires some disorder and excitement.'

  'Is it not exciting enough just to be on Mars?'

  She said sternly, 'Why, certainly not. We don't even have the catharsis of S&V movies to watch.'

  Seeing my slight puzzlement, Vera said in her high voice, 'Sex and Violence, Mr. Jefferies, Sex and Violence.' She spread "violence" out into its three component syllables.

  'So you consider Utopia a hopeless project?'

  'Unless...'

  'Unless?' Vera White drew herself up to her full girth. 'A full course of mentatropy for all personnel.'

  'Including all the scientists,' added Willa in her deepest tone.

  They departed in full sail when I thanked them for their offer and said Adminex would consider it.

  Kissorian came in and exclaimed that I looked taken aback. 'I've just met some mentatropists,' I said.

  He laughed. 'Oh, the Willa-Vera Composite!' And so they became known.

  We did not forget - at least in those early days - that we constituted a mere pimple on the face of Mars, that grim and dusty planet that remained there, uncompromising, aloof. Despite th
e reinforcements of modern science, our position was best described as precarious.

  The static nature of the world on which we found ourselves weighed heavily on many minds, especially those of delicate sensibility. The surface of Mars had remained stable, immovable, dead, throughout eons of its history. Compared with its restless neighbour from which we had come, Mars's tectonic history was one of locked immobility. It was a world without oceans or mountain chains, its most prominent feature being the Tharsis Shield, that peculiar gravitic anomaly, together with the unique feature of Olympus Mons.

  Emerging from the hectic affairs of the third planet, many people viewed this long continued stillness with horror. For them it was as if they had become locked into one of the tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. This obsessive form of isolation became known as areophobia.

  A group of young psychurgists was called before Adminex to deal with the worst afflicted cases. Some of them had earlier reproached me for the thirty-one suicides, saying their services, had they been called into action, would have saved the precious lives. I found among them an enormous respect for the Willa-Vera Composite; clearly the mentatropy duo were not the figures of fun I had taken them for. Psychurgy itself had developed from a combination of the old psychotherapy and more recent genome research; whereas mentatropy, embodying a new understanding of the brain and consciousness, was a much more hands-on approach to mental problems.

  The psychurgists reported that sufferers from areophobia endured a conflict of ideas: with a fear of total isolation went a terror that something living but alien would make its sudden appearance. It was a new version of the stress of the unknown, which disappeared after counselling - and, of course, after a reassurance that Mars was a dead world, without the possibility of life.

  For this fear of alien beings I felt that Mr. H.G. Wells and his followers were much to blame. The point I attempted to make was that Mars's role in human thought had been benevolent and scientific - in a word, rational.

  To this end, I persuaded Charles Bondi to give an address. Although he regarded my attempts to regulate society as a waste of time, he responded readily enough to deliver an exposition of Mars's place in humanity's progressive thought.

  His speech concluded: 'The great Johannes Kepler's study of the orbital motions of the body on which we find ourselves yielded the three laws of planetary motion. Space travel has come to be based on Kepler's laws. The name of Kepler will always remain honoured for those brilliant calculations, as well as for his wish to reduce to sense what had previously been muddle.

  'If we are to remain long enough on Mars, our eccentric friend here, Thomas Jefferies, will try to perform a feat equivalent in sociological terms to Kepler's, reducing to regulation what has always been a tangle of conflicting patterns of behaviour from which, to my mind, creativity has sprung.'

  Bondi could not resist that final dig at me.

  Yes, ours was an ambitious task. I saw, as he did not, that it could be accomplished because we were a small population, and one which, as it happened, had been self-selected for its social awareness.

  During one debate the Ukrainian Muslim YEA named Youssef Choihosla rose and declared that we were all wasting our time. He said that whatever rules of conduct we drew up, even those to which we had readily given universal consent, we would break; such was the nature of mankind.

  He was continuing in this vein when a woman of distinguished appearance spoke up to ask him cuttingly if he considered we should have no rules?

  Choihosla paused. And if we were to have rules, pursued the woman, pressing home her advantage and looking increasingly majestic, was it not wise to discover what the best rules were and then try to abide by them?

  The Ukrainian became defensive. He had spent his year of community service, he claimed, working in an asylum for the mentally deranged in Sarajevo. He had experienced terrible things there. He believed as a result that what Carl Jung called 'the shadow' would always manifest itself. It was therefore useless to hope to establish even a mockery of a Utopia. You could not pump morality into a system to which it was not indigenous. (A year or two later, interestingly, he would put forward a much more positive viewpoint.)

  Several voices attempted to answer him. The woman who had previously spoken quelled them with her clear firm tones. Her name was Belle Rivers. She was the headmistress in charge of the cadre children, semi-permanently stationed on Mars.

  'Why is there a need for laws, you ask? Are laws not present in all societies, to guard against human "shadows"? As scientific people, we are aware that the human body is a museum of its phylogenetic history. Our psyches too are immensely old; their roots lie in times before we could claim the name of human. Only our individual minds belong to ontology, and they are transient. It is the creatures - our archetypes, Jung calls them - that reside in the unconscious, like your shadow, which act as prompts to the behaviour of the human species.

  'The archetypes live in an inner world, where the pulse of time throbs at a drowsy pace, scarcely heeding the birth and death of individuals. Their nature is strange: when they broke into the conscious minds of your patients in Sarajevo, they undoubtedly would have precipitated psychosis. Your psychurgists will tell you as much.

  'But we moderns know these things. The archetypes have been familiar to us for more than a century. Instead of fearing them, of trying to repress them, we should come to terms with them. That means coming to terms with ourselves.

  'I believe that we must draw up our rules firmly and without fear, in acknowledgement of our conscious wishes. I also regard it as healthy that we acknowledge our unconscious wishes.

  'I therefore propose that every seventh day be given over to bacchanalia, when ordinary rules of conduct are suspended.'

  My glance went at once to the bench where Sharon Singh lounged. She was gazing serenely at the roof, the long fingers of one hand tapping gently on the rail of her seat. She was calm while much shouting and calls for order continued round her.

  An old unkempt man rose to speak. He had once been Governor of the Seychelles; his name was Crispin Barcunda. We had spoken often. I enjoyed his quiet sense of humour. When he laughed a gold tooth sparkled briefly like a secret signal.

  'This charming lady puts forward a perfectly workable idea,' he said, attempting to smooth down his mop of white hair. 'Why not have the odd bacchanalia now and again? No one on Earth need know. We're private, here on Mars, aren't we?'

  This suggestion was put forward in a droll manner so that people laughed. Crispin continued more seriously. 'It is curious, is it not, that before we have established our laws, there should be what sounds like rather a popular proposal to abolish them every seventh day? However welcome the throwing off of restraints, dangers follow from it ... Is the day after one of these bacchanalias to be declared a mopping-up day? A bandaging-of-broken-heads day? A day of broken vows and tears and quarrels?'

  Immediately, people were standing up and shouting. A cry of 'Don't try to legislate our sex lives' was widely taken up.

  Crispin Barcunda appeared unmoved. When the noise died slightly, he spoke again.

  'Since we are getting out of hand, I will attempt to read to you, to calm you all down.'

  While he was speaking, Barcunda produced from the pocket of his overalls a worn leather-bound book.

  As he opened it, he said, 'I brought this book with me on the journey here, in case I woke up when we were only three months out from Earth and needed something to read. It is written by a man I greatly admire, Alfred Russell Wallace, one of those later-borns our friend Hal Kissorian mentioned in his remarkable contribution the other day.

  'Wallace's book, by the way, is called The Malay Archipelago. I believe it has something valuable to offer us on Mars.'

  Barcunda proceeded to read: '"I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the village freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow, a
nd any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a community, all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide distinctions, of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the product of our civilisation; there is none of that wide-spread division of labour, which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilized countries inevitably creates.

  '"All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his neighbour's right which seems to be, in some degree, inherent in every race of man."'

  Snapping the book shut, Barcunda said, 'Mr. Chairman, my vote is that we have but one law: Thou shalt not compete!'

  A YEA immediately shouted, 'That's all very well for you DOPs. We young men have to compete - there aren't enough women for all of us!'

  Again I looked towards Sharon Singh.

  She was examining her nails, as if remote from intellectual discussion.

  After the session closed, I talked with Barcunda. We had a coffdrink together. His pleasant personality came across very clearly. I said that it was unfortunate we were not in as favourable a position as Wallace's savages.

  He replied that our situations were surprisingly similar, sunshine deficiency apart.

  Our work was not labour, our food was adequate, and we had few possessions.

  And we had a benefit the savages of Wallace's East could not lay claim to, which was the novelty of our situation: we were in a learning experience, isolated millions of miles from Earth.

  'It is vitally important that we retain our good sense and good humour, and draw up an agenda for a just life quickly. We cannot secure total agreement, because the pleasure of some people is to disagree. What we require is a majority vote - and our agenda must not be seen to be drawn up merely by DOPs. That would give the young bucks among the YEAs an opportunity to challenge authority. They can't go out into the jungle to wrestle with lions and gorillas to prove their manhood: they'd wrestle with us instead.'