WHITE MARS

by Brian W Aldiss

  'I'll tell you a story. It's really a parable, but you'd distrust that term.'

  'You have five minutes, John,' interposed Suung Saybin.

  Ignoring her, Bateson continued, 'A man was stranded alone on a planet that was otherwise uninhabited. He lived the blameless life of a hermit, befriending bats, rats, slugs, spiders - anything that amused him. That way, you attain sainthood, don't you? One day, a vessel came down from space - pardon me, from the matrix - to rescue him. A grand sparkling ship, from which emerged a man in a golden space suit with long wavy blond hair and a manly tan, bearing a large picnic hamper.

  '"I'm your saviour," he exclaimed, embracing the hermit.

  'The hermit got a good grip on the man's throat and strangled him. Now he owned the spaceship. And the picnic basket.

  'What, I ask you, were his motives? Hatred of intrusion on his privacy, hunger, envy of the golden suit, aversion to this intruder's display of hubris, greed to possess the ship, ambition to enjoy power himself? Or all these things? Or had solitude driven him mad?

  'You cannot resolve these questions - and I have offered you a simple textbook case. The promptings to evil are in all of us. Evil is not a single entity, but a many-splendoured thing. You're wasting your time here if you think otherwise.'

  I crept from the room.

  Being unable to take lunch, I went to a remote upper gallery in search of solitude. Fond though I was of Cang Hai, I hoped to avoid her endless chatter. But there I happened upon my adopted daughter, sitting with her child playing at her feet. Alpha ran to me. I hugged her and kissed her cheeks. Cang Hai, meanwhile, picked up her sheets and assumed a pose whereby I was to take it she had been studying them.

  'I'm surprised to see you up here, Tom. How are you?'

  'Fine. And you?'

  'Trying to learn some science. I'm trying to understand about superfluids. Apparently they are called Bose-Einstein condensates.'

  Alpha said, 'Mummy looks out the window.'

  'Yes. I believe that's what Dreiser's ring contains.'

  'I said, Mummy looks out of the window most of the time!' screamed Alpha.

  'You can certainly learn science there,' I said. Under the endless panoply of stars, dark matter and particles, the Martian landscape rolled its dunescape away into the distance, unvarious, unchanging, and baked or frozen by turns. The thought came, What harm in trying to turn it into a garden?

  'Is something troubling you?' I asked.

  'No.' Then, 'I try to study here, alone with Alpha. I'm glad, always glad, to see you.' Then, 'Those lustful hounds I had to work with in Manchuria ... No ... Only the ambiguities of this research.' She tapped her 3D sheets. 'Even light behaving like both waves and particles. It's hard to grasp!'

  'We're subject to the dissolution of absolutes. Our life here is a bit ambiguous ... Perhaps that's why we question everything. But that's not what's wrong?'

  After a pause, during which she took her child on to her knee: 'I told you about Jon Thorgeson. He stays in my mind, making me unhappy. Or my behaviour does.'

  'He was impertinent.'

  'I don't mean that. I mean ... he wanted me. He was not unpleasant, physically. Why didn't I - you know, let him get on with it? Why does that sort of thing not attract me? Is it that I'm ... ? Well, I don't know. It's absurd to be a puzzle to yourself, isn't it?'

  'Mumma, let's play, please, please, Mumma,' said the child, looking into Cang Hai's face.

  Whatever her failings, Cang Hai, a cloned person, possessed plenty of maternal instinct. As mother and daughter cosseted each other, I continued to gaze out at the world we had inherited - we, who must find a reason for this Martian testing ground, we, the creatures who had only recently learned to walk upright, who had harnessed fire not much more than a million years ago, who had emerged from various forgotten creatures - and who must be the forerunners of myriads more various peoples - oh yes, it was apparent why sex so dominated our thoughts ... But there my reverie was broken by the child's laughter.

  I thought, as I turned back to this nervous, perceptive little person I loved - ah, but not one quarter as much as I had loved my Antonia! - how the Martian landscape was to me, as Charles Darwin had the phrase in one of his letters, not a landscape but 'a most strange assemblage of ideas'.

  I said, 'It doesn't have to be either/or, daughter. We have moved into a mode of both/and understanding.'

  'I mean,' she said boldly, 'am I a saint, a prude, or a lesbian?'

  'Don't force a decision. You are young. Be clear that you consist of your confused self. But in the case of that impositioning Thorgeson, you evaded a case of rape as any woman might have done, had she a cool enough head.'

  'And a warm enough hand!' Suddenly, she laughed, and squeezed Alpha. 'Had I not done so, I would be pregnant now. But no man is going to terraform me until I say so.'

  Why did her words make me happy? Were they designed to do so? Weren't the human mind and human courage great things? I kissed her and her daughter.

  That afternoon we underwent one of our periodic discussions regarding money. Certainly one element distinguishing the texture of Martian life from life Downstairs was that we carried no credit cards. Some people wanted to bring the credit system back, saying it made them feel more like functioning humans. Against that, our economists on Adminex argued that where there was no ownership of property it was impossible to fix prices.

  We had an electronic points system up and running. It worked through the Ambient. The unit was called a credit. To launch the system, our 'bank' - once a cash till in the Marvelos offices - allocated everyone a hypothetical 1,000 credits, somewhat like the dummy money we were given at the start of a game of Monopoly. These credits could be drawn on at any time.

  On the whole, prices of what few things there were to acquire for personal use remained trifling. A cup of coffdrink, for instance, was two credits, moonglow and sunglow were three. In practice it made the system hardly worth bothering with. So the money element withered away. We found we could get along happily without it.

  No one drew wages or paid taxes.

  A reckoning will come when - if ever! - the rockets return from Downstairs. But, after all, we own the planet, thanks to the UN constitution, and so can sort the matter out without too much friction.

  One evening, Cang Hai was on her way to see a dupe friend of hers living above the We Mend Everything post, in the recesses of the old cadre building. The lane was deserted. Of a sudden, a door ahead of her was flung open and three masked men rushed out. Cang Hai had barely turned to run before they slammed into her, seized her and dragged her into a bare room, a store of some kind.

  She heard the door being locked as they tied her to a chair. A bright light was shone into her eyes. She could scarcely make out the outline of her attackers for its dazzle.

  She heard their breathing and was afraid.

  'Right, girl, don't be frightened. We only want to talk to you,' said a voice that Cang Hai recognised as Feneloni's. 'We are not planning to do anything unpleasant, as we could easily do, such as raping you or pulling off that artificial leg of yours.' Someone behind the light chuckled.

  'The time to talk was during the forum,' she said, but could hardly bring the words out from her trembling lips.

  'Now then, just you listen to us. We've had enough yacking from your lot. You and your pal Jefferies. This shit about the Rivers plan and Utopia has got to stop. It's nothing but a time-waster. How are you going to improve people - people stuck on Mars? It's crap! We're going to die here if we just sit around yakking.'

  'Let me have a go at her. She's a tasty little dish,' said one of the hidden men.

  'In a minute,' said Feneloni. 'She's a wimp, doesn't much like sex. Maybe you could teach her.' They laughed. She begged them not to touch her. Feneloni replied, 'Look, we're trying to scare some sense into you. Get real! Stop all this pissing about. Stop beaming these stupid sessions of yours back to Earth, as if everything here was okay. It's not okay. My brother's shi
p was lost, worse luck, or he'd have done something about us being stuck here.

  'We need to get back to real life. We should be staging scenes of riot, carnage, starvation. We have to force the hand of the UN. Get a ship up here, get us out of this mess. You understand that?'

  'Yes,' she said. 'Yes, of course. But—'

  'So you go back to Jefferies and tell him to keep his namby-pamby mouth shut from now on, or you're going to suffer damage, you and your kid. You understand?'

  'Let's have a little fun with her,' said one of the men. 'So she takes us seriously...'

  'Don't think about it,' Feneloni ordered.

  The door burst open. Two security guards ran in, armed with torches and truncheons. The store had been designed as a dry goods warehouse and was covered by functioning security cameras, a factor Feneloni had disregarded. Directly he saw the men he shouted to the others to follow and rushed the intruders. The guards kicked his legs from under him and pinned him to the floor as he fell. The other two men burst out of the door and ran for it down the passageway.

  Once Feneloni was tied up, the security men went over to Cang Hai and released her from the chair. She collapsed with shock. They phoned me. I arrived and helped her back to our quarters. After a shower she fell asleep, to wake in the morning recovered, at least in part.

  Now the question arose of what to do with Feneloni. I went to see him. He was being held in his quarters on Tharsis Street, and looked as sullen as one might expect.

  I asked him what he had to say for himself.

  'You're the talker.'

  I stood looking at him, saying nothing, trying to master my anger.

  Finally he burst out in a torrent of words, saying that he had intended no harm, but could not get a proper hearing for his view, which everyone shared, that everyone hated my guts, that he was only acting on behalf of all, who wished to get back to normal life on Earth and not waste their time on 'this miserable stone'. All he wanted was a decent life again...

  'So is your idea of a decent life to capture and threaten an innocent woman - to threaten to rape her and tear off her leg? You're a coward and a brute, Feneloni, no less a coward and a brute because you do this on Mars rather than Earth. Isn't it to guard against your kind that we try to set up decent rules to live by under our difficult conditions?'

  'Look, we were only scaring the girl.'

  'And were you in control of the situation? Violence of any kind releases baser instincts. Right now I'd like to beat your brains out, but we've tried to set up laws against that kind of thing. What the hell are we going to do about you? A course of mentatropy?'

  He hunched his shoulders and hung his head.

  I waited. 'Well?'

  After a long silence, he said, 'Not mentatropy... I'm not the brute you take me for. There's plenty worse than me. I don't have your powers of speech. That doesn't mean I don't suffer. Why should we be ruled over by those with better powers of speech?'

  I had no wish to talk with him, but forced myself to answer.

  'In every society so far there have been top dogs and underdogs. The question is how we here can make the gulf between them as narrow and as flexible as possible. Would you rather be ruled by those who have - as you put it - "better powers of speech", or those who have the greater brute strength?'

  He stared at the ground. After a pause he said, in a low voice, 'It's a stupid question. All men are supposed to be equal, but if they aren't heard then they aren't equal.'

  'You were heard and dismissed. I could give you an example of a man with great powers of speech - the academic called John Homer Bateson, who is laughed off whenever he addresses the audience. We know that all men are not equal, although it befits a government of any kind to attempt to behave as if they were.'

  'But you're trying to establish your little government here, instead of busting a bracket to get us back to Earth.'

  'Don't be ridiculous, man. What leverage have we with Earth in its present state? Nothing's going to get us home until the repercussions of the EUPACUS disaster clear up. Meanwhile we must do our best to live like humans.'

  The alternatives were clear enough to me. Not to Feneloni. He said that all our committees and forums were a waste of time.

  'I'm not entering into a debate with you, Feneloni. Not only am I determined to establish a fair society, but I expect the intellectual exercise involved to protect us from violence and unrest.

  'Any scum determined to promote violence and unrest must be isolated, as if they had an infectious disease.'

  'No such thing as justice,' he muttered, and hung his head again.

  I waited. I was curious about the way his mind worked; I knew there was good in him.

  After a silence, he said, 'It's all right for you. Some of us have families back on Earth. Kids.'

  I gave him no reply, only wishing I could claim as much.

  Feneloni looked up angrily. 'Why don't you speak, since you're so good at it?'

  'You cannot be allowed to attack a young woman and go unpunished. Tomorrow we will hold a court to decide what that punishment should be. Probably a course of mentatropy. You will be allowed to speak in your defence.'

  Turning on my heel, I left him. Afterwards I wished I had said that to be eloquent was not necessarily a virtue; but it implied orderly thought and, perhaps more than that, wide experience and knowledge. But such, of course, was the reward of privilege, if only genetic privilege. My own troubled boyhood came back to me.

  We made no attempt to track down Feneloni's associates, hoping that without a leader they would not reoffend.

  So it proved. Nevertheless we knew they were there, ready for violence should the opportunity arise.

  Cang Hai was nervous after her experience.

  'Tom, this is the second time I've been threatened with rape! What is it about me...?'

  We talked it over and over. Ben Borrow came and let her talk it out of her system, as far as that was possible.

  One evening, she said to me, 'We know there are such men on Earth. Why should we be surprised to find them here, except that you and I are such innocents?'

  It surprised me that she should think me an innocent, but I made no comment on that. 'They will submit to the rules of society as long as it suits them.'

  'I don't know. Perhaps there's an undercurrent of violence here we are blind to. Just as you and I are blind to the great amount of busy sexual activity going on. How is it that we enjoy debate more than sexual intercourse? Are we exceptions to the rule?'

  I was stung by what she had said; I had assumed that my sexually active life had faded away during my period of mourning for my dead wife. As for Cang Hai, she clearly needed indoctrination into the pleasures of sex. That night, when the domes lay under their usual suspirations that passed for silence, and Laputa and Swift slid across the sky outside, I undressed and went to Cang Hai's bed.

  She sat up angrily. She told me she did not wish me to try and prove anything. That was not love.

  'Don't be silly. Let me in! We may as well have some pleasure.'

  'Go away! I'm having a period. You're too old. I'm not prepared for anything like this. Why didn't you warn me? You're taking advantage of me.' She kicked out at my legs.

  Having been sent away, I lay in the dark in my own bed, wakeful, listening to the great machine that gave us life, breathing, breathing.

  What had her real motives been, what mine?

  How badly the human race needed a period of quiet, for reflection, and to become acquainted with its deepest motives...

  After only brief discussion, we decided that Feneloni should be confined to the store room to which he had taken Cang Hai. The door should be strengthened. He should speak to no one, although he would be permitted the statutory one conversation with visitors. He should have three meals a day. A television monitor would be permitted, on which he could follow the events of the day in the domes. He should be incarcerated for two weeks, and then questioned again, to be set free if he had come
to any better conclusion about himself.

  If not, then mentatropy was to be applied.

  In order to hasten Cang Hai's return to her normal state of equilibrium, and to allow me some relief from the burdens of organisation, which seemed to be exacting a toll on my health, the two of us sat in on some of Alpha's nursery classes.

  Their Social Skills class began with a song:

  Folk of many creeds and nations

  Travelled in realms of thought,

  Made their computations,

  Forged from steel and flame

  Ships of no earthly sort

  Leaving earthly port –

  So strangers to Red Planet came.

  The song ran though several verses. The children sang lustily, with enjoyment. It was noticeable that the girls concentrated on the music. Some of the boys were secretly prodding each other and making faces.

  Afterwards I asked Alpha what she thought of the song, which sounded rather laboured to my ears.

  'We like it,' Alpha said. 'It's a good song, about us.'

  'What do you like about it?'

  '"Ships of no earthly sort" - that's really hot. What does it mean, do you suppose?'

  The teacher, the sculptor Benazir Bahudur, kept the two sexes in the same classroom but segregated. 'It's a difference in the genes,' she explained. 'The boys have more difficulty in learning social skills, as you know. The girls are more intuitive. We think the boys need the girls in the room, to be given a glimpse of an alternative way of behaving. You will see the difference when we get to the games. But first we have a Natural History Slot. Are you ready, kids?'

  Benazir was a slightly built woman. Her leisurely movements suggested a certain weariness, but when the full regard of her deep-set eyes was turned on you, an impression of drive and energy was received.

  A screen lit on the wall. Insect noises could be heard. A brilliant landscape was revealed, the landscape of East Africa. The viewpoint moved rapidly towards a fine stand of trees.

  'They're acacia trees,' said Benazir.

  Young saplings grew here, as well as mature trees with their corded bark. Benazir gave the children an explanation of what trees were and how they had developed. As she was explaining how grazing animals threatened the very existence of trees of all kinds, the viewpoint snuggled into the shade of a particular tree as if it would nest there. The children were silent, wondering.