WHITE MARS

by Brian W Aldiss

  'Gee, you're an enlightened bunch,' said Paula, joshingly. 'Now tell me what you make of the woman's last remark, "I do everything for you; what do you do for me?"'

  So we chewed it over, we cafe-goers, while Paula cooed over Alpha. We were more or less in agreement that the woman's statement was destructive in itself. We disagreed about whether it was made more awful by being the truth or a vicious lie. Nor could we agree about the man's response: was it a sullen repudiation of her remark or a wretched admission of the truth?

  'That's enough,' Paula said, sharply. 'Thanks. Bevis, Vance...'

  What we did not realise was that the mirror behind the bar was a two-way mirror. Later, we saw an edited version of ourselves in Paula's new filmplay, Mine? Theirs? Since we never knew what the filmed pair were quarrelling about, our judgements seemed facile. It was one of Paula's rather unpleasant tricks.

  Perhaps that habit of hers caused the tragedy that was to follow - a tragedy that for a while eclipsed our preoccupation with Chimborazo.

  Paula had a beautiful and strong face with marked features - a forceful jaw, in particular, and a beaky nose; her features were very unlike my rather ambiguous ones. Although she often took and discarded lovers, her real interests, or so it seemed to me, were directed elsewhere. Her predatory and creative mind wished to ingest the experiences of other people, and by so doing widen her own dimensions. Perhaps she had a driving need to resolve her own tensions.

  Her clothes were designed by Bevis Paskin Peters. She rejected the customary unisex Now overalls, so Peters became the planet's first popular costume designer. He evolved a classical line imaginatively in keeping with the shortage of materials. The other man in Paula's ménage a trios was called Vance Aylsha. He was a technician and rather a genius, according to report. He also looked after the little cephalopods in the cafe aquarium.

  At times Paula could be large and florid. At other periods she appeared smaller, perhaps when she was actually working in her studio and unconscious of her own persona. I cannot say I liked her much. She was bigger than I, and unpredictable.

  Nevertheless I was quite frequently in her company because she adored - or at least was fascinated by the growth experience of - Alpha. She would cease her work, towards which she was otherwise obsessive, to play for two hours at a stretch with Alpha. There was nothing Alpha liked better.

  Nor was there much I liked better than to see these two intellects, the mature and the awakening, meeting in quizzes and tricks and mock deceptions and sheer nonsenses. I was aware of the antiquity of these games and that awareness added to my happiness.

  How starkly the lovely energies of the three of us, the warmth of our bodies, contrasted with the frozen world outside, making it more thrilling to be there!

  It was not all plain sailing; with such an outgoing character, arguments were always springing up. I had made some remark in praise of Tom Jefferies, whereupon Paula said, cuttingly, 'You should stay away from that creep.'

  When I protested that Tom was a courageous and altruistic man, Paula gave this reply.

  'Not at all. He's a creep. Of course he loves his plan. He wants us all to conform to it. He wants us all to be better people. That's because he doesn't like us much. Maybe he's scared of us - no, not of you, Cang Hai, but you're another sexless little thing, aren't you?'

  'I'm certainly not sexless. Nor is Tom.'

  'But you don't have sex, do you?' She laughed. 'You need awakening. Come to bed with me and I'll show you what you're missing.'

  Although I did not take up her offer, it was from lack of courage rather than from virtue. I saw why her two current men lusted for her.

  I saw how her interest, as expressed in her plays, was in people rather than theories of behaviour. She liked chaos. It answered a dangerous element in her make-up.

  At the time of which I am speaking, Paula Gallin was working on Mine? Theirs? She spent her days cutting, editing, morphing, swearing. I was witness to her outbreaks of anger against her male friends, whom she found necessary even as they broke her concentration. Creativity was by now better understood and better respected, but I went to the Ambient stand to look at the words of an old savant, Doctor Storr, whose work on the dynamics of creation remained of value.

  Doctor Storr says that a child who has a parent who ill treats him but on whom he is nevertheless dependent will regularly deny the 'bad' aspects of the parent and repress his own hatred, perhaps by developing some symptom such as nail-biting or hair-pulling. These activities show the displacement of repressed aggression and its turning against the self.

  'It seems likely, however,' the doctor continues, 'that there is another way of dealing with incompatibles and opposites within the mind, provided one is sufficiently robust to stand the tension; and this is the way adopted by creative people. One characteristic of creative people is just this ability to tolerate dissonance. They see problems that others do not see; and do not attempt to deny their existence. Ultimately the problem may be solved, and a new whole made out of what was previously incompatible, but it is the creative person's tolerance of the discomfort of dissonance that makes the new solution possible.

  'The process is easy to see in the case of scientific discovery. Something very similar may be going on in the case of the production of works of art. I have discussed the quest for identity characteristic of at least some creative artists, and suggested that, if this is a particular need for such people, as it seems to be, it is connected with an attempt to reconcile incompatibles or opposites in the mind. This is, of course, intimately connected with the problem of identity; for identity, or rather the sense of one's own identity, is a sense of unity, consistency and wholeness.

  'One cannot have a sense of one's continuous being if one is always conscious of two or more souls warring within one breast. In the case of Tolstoy, the ascetic and the sensualist were never reconciled; but one aspect of his creative existence was certainly an attempt to bring this about.'

  I was surprised. For the first time I saw that the doctor's statement, true as far as it went, did not encompass the contrasts and conflicts built into the mind by blind evolutionary development - the phylogenetic, as opposed to the ontogenetic, brain.

  To employ the doctor's rather poetic phraseology, there would always be the two souls warring within one breast; this was what gave to Homo sapiens our restless drive to develop further; it was part of the general creativity we were attempting to harness. We were now developing into a phylogenetic-conscious society, accepting and coming to terms with our inbuilt contradictions, revealing the 'natural' human.

  Paula's drama on which she was working, Mine? Theirs?, was precisely about the interplay between the two kinds of conflict, the ancient generic and the personal.

  I considered these intellectual ideas but, even when practising my pranayama, I taunted myself with the thought of what it would be like to be in bed with Paula, with her dark tempestuous body against mine. These images crept in upon my meditation...

  At this juncture Vance Alysha and Bevis Paskin Peters were the two rivals for Paula's love. Both were men of spirit and worked on the computer simulations necessary for episodes in Paula's drama. Alysha was Caribbean; he had been a star on television in his native Jamaica, and remained proud of it. Peters had won a prize for paranimation at the age of six; he was vain and had a quick temper. And he was said to dress privately in his own flamboyant women's costumes.

  An argument arose between the two men over the interpretation of a turn in Paula's narrative: was a certain character's decision to retreat into the wilds a brave or a cowardly act? This developed into a quarrel over which of them best satisfied Paula's sexual needs. Happily, Alpha and I were not present.

  They fell on the floor, wrestling with and punching each other. Peters seized on a length of computer cable and wrapped it round Alysha's neck. Paula entered the workshop at this point and screamed for Peters to stop. He did not stop. Although Alysha struggled, he was choked to death.

&nb
sp; Mars City had no police as such. Paula called for the guards - those men who maintained the integrity of our structures. They hauled Peters away, unresisting. Since there was nothing like a prison on Mars, they shut Peters in their office, where he sat and wept, overcome by what he had done.

  The guards summoned Tom. Tom and Guenz called our legal forum together to discuss the case. It assembled under the blow-up of the incandescent Hindenburg.

  We were silent, rather sullen this time. Everyone was miserable in their own way. I sat at the rear with other onlookers, holding Alpha, next to a grim Paula. She shed no tear, but her face was ashen. I put a comforting arm round her waist, but she shrugged it off.

  Thinking back to that time, I am surprised that we had faced no such crisis before. There had been animosities and quarrels, certainly, but all had been settled peaceably. Without the aggravation of money or those inhibitions of marriage so wrapped up in old-fashioned notions of property, the levels of discontent had been considerably lowered.

  Jarvis Feneloni was one who spoke up for Peters's execution. Since the sallow-complexioned young man had attempted to leave Mars with his brother - nothing more had ever been heard of Abel and his ship - he had gained something of a reputation by being unruly. 'We have no doubt the man is guilty. He confesses to the crime. We have nowhere to imprison him. In any case, the traditional punishment for murder is death. Why muck about? We must execute Peters. Let's discuss how that should be done.'

  'His confession lessens the case against him, while his remorse is his own punishment,' Tom responded. 'How exactly do you suggest we should kill him? By the methods he used on Alysha? By throwing him out on the Martian surface? By cutting off his head or his oxygen? We have no more right to kill than he. All methods of deliberate killing are distasteful to civilised men.'

  'Well, I'm not civilised! We must set an example, take strong measures. This is our first case of murder, particularly the murder of a—' He stopped himself. We guessed what he was about to say. Instead Feneloni finished lamely, 'Particularly the murder of one so young. We must set an example, so that it does not happen again. And we must build a prison.'

  Tom replied that he agreed an example must be set. But they had to set that example for themselves. If a family has a boy who misbehaves, punishment will probably make him worse; the family must seek to discover what makes him misbehave and remedy it. They will in all probability find that they themselves are in some way at fault. Far from punishing Peters, the assembly should try to see what provoked him to violence.

  'Sex, of course,' said Feneloni, with a laugh. 'Look no further. It's sex. Why are your sympathies with the murderer, not his victim?'

  Guenz responded, eyes twinkling. 'I fear, Jarvis, that sympathy with Peters's victim can do the victim little good.'

  'Okay then, try to discover what motives Peters had, other than sexual jealousy. Then we hang him. Both phases of the operation to be done in public.'

  Tom said that could not be permitted, else all would be implicated in a second death. Peters must submit to a private course of mentatropy.

  Then, said Jarvis, legislation had to be drawn up. Were they to deal with crimes of passion as a special subject, subject to special measures?

  Interruptions from the floor continued for many minutes. 'We want no deaths here!' Choihosla shouted.

  Someone claimed that freedom could not be legislated for. He was answered by another voice that said that they were not free, were indeed isolated far from their home ground, but had founded a contented society; fulfilment need not depend on freedom at all.

  At this, there was uproar. A woman claimed that their 'happy society' was breaking up. It had been at its best one of de Tocqueville's 'voluntary associations', viable only while everyone subscribed.

  But like de Tocqueville's, another voice replied, it depended on hierarchy. Perhaps all this time, they'd been living under the wrong hierarchy. Laughter followed this remark, and the temperature cooled.

  So soon after the disgrace of Dayo, no one in the court dared suggest there was a racial element in Alysha's murder. Perhaps there wasn't, although such suspicions circulated on the Ambient. But who could prove a negative? Better to sweep the whole notion under the carpet.

  Bill Abramson rose to suggest that they had paid too much attention to building a good society and not enough to lobbying Earth to rescue them and restore them to their own planet. What if the subterranean fossil water gave out? It was to their credit that a sort of mediating structure had been established, permitting them to live orderly lives; but perhaps they forgot on what an uncompromising basis that order was built. For himself, with a family at home in Israel, he prayed every night that Earth would send ships.

  'Pray there'll be no more murders,' called a voice from the rear.

  Paula and I had been listening in silence to all this. She now rose, and brought the debate back to the subject, saying in a quiet voice, 'You lay no blame on me, the cause of the men's quarrel. But I also must share the guilt. I liked to have the men vying for me with each other. It satisfied my egotism - and other senses as well. I'm greedy for life, as Peters is and Alysha was. But frankly I'd rather be hanged than have some fool shrink prying into my past life. My past is my property as much as my breath.'

  Tom asked if Paula was trying to alienate the forum's sympathy. 'You might think differently about hanging if you were actually on trial for such a hideous crime. A course of mentatropy must be Peters's sentence. It can but have a better effect on him than a hanging...'

  A vote was taken on what Peters's punishment should be. The audience was four to one against his execution.

  Jarvis Feneloni bowed to Tom, who declared the court adjourned. Jarvis's manner throughout had been courteous. But I caught a look of hatred as he made his salutation to Tom. He had ambitions for himself as well as for justice, and did not like to be bested in argument.

  As usual, the debate was filmed. No one gave a thought to how it would be received on Earth.

  14

  'Public Hangman Wanted'

  Tom was unwell after the Peters debate. He became withdrawn and easily irritated. His answers were brief. I wanted to take him up into the Lushan Mountains in China, to fresh air and solitude. It was the first time I had longed for Earth, with its sensuous landscapes.

  When I said this to him, he told me - quite politely - to go away.

  I took to painting the mountains in watercolour, to amuse myself as well as Alpha. I talked to her about the mountains, the mists in early morning, and the beautiful clouds, the temples looking out over precipices. All this, as it later transpired, was a mistake; it planted a seed of longing in her mind.

  My counterpart in Chengdu sent me a beautiful sexual fantasy, in which a ship somehow enfolded me. We flew through the blue air and I was its engine.

  One day we received a message on our Ambient terminal, as did everyone else on Mars. The harsh voice of Jarvis Feneloni spoke:

  Friends,

  We have amused ourselves too long with the foolish Utopian schemes of our elders. By beaming all our debates to Earth, the terrestrials become sedated. They see no reason to hurry and rescue us. Our broadcasts must cease forthwith.

  I am not alone in being bored by VR representations of beaches, seas and palm trees. I want the real thing again. I can't live without my home and family.

  If we broadcast once more, it should be only to send strongly worded demands to terrestrial powers to come and get us out of this dump. Otherwise, I predict mayhem here.

  Feneloni

  'I must speak to everyone,' Tom said.

  'You are not well,' said Guenz. 'If I may, I will address them. I believe I am a fluent speaker.'

  He did so. Tom seemed relieved to have the duty taken from him. Guenz said that there were times when everyone was tired of the hardships they endured.

  Nevertheless, those hardships were endured communally. It was that which made them bearable, even ennobling.

  But the har
dships were an essential. There was an old Latin saying he remembered from his university days, Sine efflictione nulla salus - 'Without suffering, no salvation.' They were reaching towards salvation, in an unprecedented attempt to build what he might call, to use an old Chinese term 'a spiritual civilisation'.

  'All of us are a part of this challenging task. The weaker-minded among us are fortunate in being able to enjoy VR simulations of an easier life, of palm trees and golden beaches. For the rest of us, our unreal reality is enough, and the building of a just society reward enough.

  'I will tell you something I believe with all my heart. That when the ships finally return here, and those of us who wish to leave go back to Earth, we shall never forget this momentous time, this brave time, when we struggled with ourselves to create a better way of social existence - and triumphed. And we shall never again find such happiness as we have here, so far from the Sun.'

  There was some applause for what many regarded as a final peroration. But, delighted by his success as an orator, Guenz puffed out his cheeks until their capillaries began to resemble an imaginary map of the planet, and started again.

  'Some of us don't dream hard enough. Some of us think they don't need a Utopia. But it's inevitable. It has already been born—'

  From the front row, Jarvis Feneloni rose to interrupt. 'And is already threatened by that monstrous barnacle—'

  From the rear of the hall a violin sounded. Guenz's rhetoric and Feneloni's interruption alike were swept away on a torrent of Baza's music.

  Many were the suggestions of how punishment should be meted out, both in the present case of Peters and in any possible future cases. For a while the idea of penitential suits was popular; stocks were suggested, but the humiliation of a wrongdoer, it was decided, only increased his animus against society.