WHITE MARS

by Brian W Aldiss

  A branch served as a highway for ants. The creatures were busy patrolling the whole tree. The camera followed them down to the ground and up to the fragrant blossoms of the acacia.

  'I'm glad we don't have those little things up here, miss,' said one of the girls.

  'Ants are clever little creatures,' Benazir replied. 'They have good social organisation. They guard the acacias from enemies - from herbivores and other insects. In return, the trees give them shelter. You wouldn't want to climb that tree, would you? Why is that?'

  'Because you'd get stung/attacked/bitten/eaten alive,' came gleeful answers from various parts of the room.

  A thoughtful-looking boy asked, 'What about the tree having sex? How can bees get to the flowers if they are attacked by these creepy little things?'

  Benazir explained that the young acacia flowers, which smell very sweet, put out a chemical signal to keep the soldier ants away, so allowing the bees to pollinate them.

  'What do the flowers smell like, exactly?' the boy asked.

  Cang Hai and I debated privately if such glimpses of life on Earth would not start the children wondering about what they were missing. When we put this point to Benazir, she said that her charges had to be prepared for their return to Earth. She fed them with these shots of knowledge before they went out to play.

  The children's games had been cleverly adapted to encourage the boys without discouraging the girls. Skipping and counting games were played 'outside', on the Astroturf. The differences between the temperaments of boys and girls became clear when Alpha volunteered to tell everyone a story.

  Her story was about a little mummy animal (evidently a mole), who lived with her tiny family under the Astroturf. She told her children to behave and, if they were good, they would get extra cups of tealem, their favourite drink. They all went to bed in little plastic beakers and slept well till morning. The End.

  Scornfully, a boy called Morry took up Alpha's tale. The mummy animal was going off to get some groceries. She popped her head up above the ground just as the machine that trimmed the Astroturf was whizzing along. Zummmm! It cut off her head, which went flying with a trail of blood like a comet into someone's shoe!

  'Oh no, it didn't at all!' shrieked Alpha angrily.

  'Well, let's see how likely these events really are,' said Benazir, smiling at both sides.

  'Her head did not come off,' said Alpha firmly. 'More likely it was Morry's head.'

  Unable to sustain verbal argument, Morry stuck his tongue out at her.

  Benazir said nothing more, but began to dance in front of her pupils. Her steps were slow, teasingly cautious, her hand gestures elaborate, as if they said, 'Look, dear children, life is like this and this, and so much to be enjoyed that no quarrels are required...'

  As Cang Hai and I walked back to our apartment, we discussed what kind of future citizens of Utopia these children would make. We decided that the anti-social phase the children were going through would not be sustained; and we hoped the element of fantasy and imagination would remain. We realised how important were the skills of mothers, fathers and teachers.

  Back in our apartment, I was forced to lie down. I slept for a while.

  17

  The Birth Room

  Despite recurring dizzy spells - and advice from Cang Hai and Guenz and others to consult a doctor - I continued to work steadily with the team to finalise our Utopian plans. Guenz protested that it was useless work if Olympus could rouse up and destroy our little settlement at any time. Mary Fangold replied that it was not reasonable to sit about waiting for a disaster that might never happen. She used a phrase we had heard several times before -almost the motto of the Mars colony - 'You gotta keep on keeping on'.

  Dreiser Hawkwood and Charles Bondi set up a secure Ambient group with Kathi Skadmorr, Youssef Choihosla and me. We discussed, at Dreiser's direction, the question of whether Earth should be informed of Olympus's movements.

  We studied the latest comsat photographs. 'As you can see,' Dreiser said, 'its rate of progress is increasing, even though it is crossing rough territory.'

  'It has withdrawn its exteroceptors from around this unit,' Kathi remarked. 'One deduction is that it requires them elsewhere to act as under-regolith paddles. Hence the abrupt acceleration.'

  Bondi was busy measuring. 'Using the churned regolith as the base line, Chimborazo has covered ninety-five or ninety-six metres in the last Earth year. This is an extraordinary rate of acceleration. If it could maintain this acceleration rate - pretty ridiculous, in my opinion - its prow would strike the unit - let's see, well, hmm, it still has nearly three hundred kilometres to go, so ... well, we would have plenty of time - four years at the very least, even on that reckoning.'

  'Four years!' I echoed.

  Interrupting, Choihosla asked if Chimborazo left excreta behind on its trail.

  'Don't be silly,' Kathi exclaimed. 'It is a self-contained unit, can't waste anything. It'll have excreta-eaters in under that shell.'

  'The point of my question is - do we inform Downstairs or not? I'd like your answer, Tom,' said Dreiser. 'This doesn't have to go to Adminex. We five must say yea or nay.'

  'They probably have the Darwin fixed on Mars,' I said. 'So they'll see this thing's hoof marks.'

  'Maybe they have not maintained their telescope since the breakdown,' Dreiser said. 'Or, if they have, they may not be too quick to evaluate the implications of the tumbled regolith. What I mean to say is, they may just reckon we triggered a landslide of some magnitude.'

  'We should inform Downstairs that "the volcano" has shifted,' said Kathi. 'No other comment. We certainly don't inform them that we think Chimborazo has life, never mind intelligence. Otherwise they'd probably nuke the place -xenophobia being what it is.'

  So that was agreed on, after more discussion.

  Bondi said, wryly, 'You can't predict what they'll do down there. They may simply conclude we've gone mad.'

  'They probably think that already,' I said.

  A thousand questions poured through my mind that night, sometimes merging with phantasmagoric strands of dream. My mind was like a rat in a maze, being both rat and maze.

  At the 'X' hour of night, I climbed from my bed and walked about the limited confines of my room. The question arose in my consciousness: Why was it that, in all the infinitude of matrix, mankind built itself these tiny hutches in which to exist?

  I longed to talk with someone. I longed to have Antonia again by my side, to enjoy her company and her counsel. As tears began to roll down my cheeks - I could not check them, though she had been gone now for three years - my Ambient sounded its soft horn.

  The face of Kathi Skadmorr floated in the globe.

  'I knew you were awake, Tom. I had to speak to you. The universe is cold tonight.'

  'One can be lonely, locked in a crowd.' It was as if we exchanged passwords.

  'However we may aspire to loneliness, we can't be as lonely as ... you know, that pet of ours out there. Its very being preys on my mind. It's a case for weeping.'

  Guiltily, I wiped away my tears. 'Kathi, it's an immense vegetable thing. Despite its CPS, we don't know that it has anything paralleling our form of intelligence. How do we know it didn't grow silently in vegetable state - a sort of fungus, well nigh immune to external influence.'

  She was silent, sitting with downcast eyes. 'You appreciate the curious parallel between it and us. We live as it does, under a dome...' Seeing she was thinking something out, I said nothing. I liked her face and her sensibility in my globe. For once, she was not being prickly; that too I liked. We certainly were parked in a lonely part of the universe.

  Looking up smartly, she said, 'Tom, I admire you and your gallant attempt to make us all better people. Of course it won't work. I am an example of why it won't work - I was born with an obstinate temper.'

  'No, no. Something may have made you obstinate. You're ... you're just the sort of person we need in Utopia. Someone who can think and ... feel...'
<
br />   As if I had not spoken, she said - she was looking into a dark corner of her room - 'Oh, Chimborazo is conscious right enough. I feel it. I felt it when we were there, right by it. I feel it now.'

  'We got a CPS, certainly. But... I fear that if there is a mentality at work under its shell, then human understanding has to change. It must change.' I stared down at the digits on my watch, ever flickering the seconds of life away. 'If there is life on Earth's neighbour, then the universe must be a great hive of wildly diverse life. As if intelligence was the natural aim and purpose of the universe.'

  'Yes, if consciousness is not simply a local anomaly. But that is too anthropocentric, isn't it? I came on such ideas too recently to know. Me with my Abo background.' Some of her old scorn sounded in her voice. And then, as if in contradiction, her thought took off. She said about this thing on our doorstep that perhaps in its solitude, in its stony centuries of meditation under its camouflaging shell, it had come to comprehend universals that had never even impinged on human skulls. The human race had always been driven by a few imperatives - hunger, sex, power -and lived by diversity; maybe - just maybe - the unity of this huge thing was proof of a vastly greater strength of understanding...'

  She sighed. 'Beau's here with me, Tom. He's sleeping. He does not feel Chimborazo's presence as I do. Oh, we're so limited ... Maybe its unity is proof of a greater understanding. Something gained through the chilly expanses of time - what we comprehend as time, anyway - until it has reached perfect knowledge and wisdom. Does that sound like wishful thinking?' She laughed at herself.

  'Suppose it was like that, Kathi. Would we be able to converse with it? Communicate? Or would its understandings put it for ever beyond our conceptual reach? "What we comprehend as time" - there's an example ... So it's to us a kind of god - totally without interest in anything outside itself.'

  'I wouldn't be too sure of that...'

  She put her hands to her cheeks in a gesture I had seen her use before. 'It's that time of night when imaginations run away with themselves. Could be it's just a freak mollusc, stranded on a failed planet that long since yielded up its essence ... Tom, go to sleep! I wish I were there to talk to you, closely...'

  Her face faded and was gone.

  I could not sleep. The conversation lingered in my mind. My head ached; I felt stifled.

  I staggered out of my chamber in search of company, and barged without knocking into Choihosla's apartment.

  Youssef Choihosla was kneeling on a small mat, his forehead to the floor. A dim lamp stood nearby.

  I halted in the doorway. Choihosla looked up with a brow of thunder. He began a stream of abuse, biting it off when he recognised me.

  'Tom? You look ghastly! Come in, come in. What's up? It's "X" hour.'

  He rose as I entered. I said, 'You were in the midst of prayer. I'm sorry to break in.'

  'Allah is great. He will forgive an interruption. Come and sit down.'

  I sat weakly and he brought his great bulk close and also sat, hands on knees. I spoke of my confusion of mind, brought about by the thought of the unknown life form not far away from us. He confessed that his prayer - 'largely wordless' - had been seeking reassurance for the same reason.

  We talked for a long while, merely speculating.

  My curiosity got the better of me. I saw an electronic gadget with a small screen, at present blank, lying on the floor by Choihosla's prayer mat, and asked him what it was.

  He hesitated, then picked it up and presented it to me for my inspection.

  Pressing a button, I set golden bodies in motion on the screen, while figures jerked across the lower section of it.

  This was a Muslim ephemeris. It calculated the positions, not only of the Sun, the Moon, Earth and Mars, but also of Mecca, throughout the year. It enabled Choihosla to pray towards the holy city when the revolutions of Earth brought Mecca to a point facing towards Amazonis, where our structures were situated. Choihosla explained that it was considered poor theology to pray when Mecca was on the other side of Earth's globe, facing away from Mars.

  'Well, it's ingenious,' I remarked. He hefted the little calculator in the palm of his hand. 'You buy these ephemerises for a few cents in the bazaars,' he said, offhandedly. 'Of course, it's a Western invention...'

  Seeing the puzzlement in my eyes, he said, 'You wonder about my faith - maybe how I persist in it? Don't you need something bigger than yourself in life?'

  I pointed in what I imagined to be the direction of Olympus Mons.

  'It's out there,' I said.

  Monstrous things apart, we came to realise nothing could be achieved without decent living conditions. The thinness of the atmosphere of Mars rendered us susceptible to meteoritic bombardment, as we had been well aware. We now set about extending our quarters by excavation, creating a new subterranean level where the apartments had rooms larger than those in our previous quarters. These apartments had balconies and galleries; the bricks we fabricated were glazed in various colours, while genetically altered plants - in particular creepers - were planted and flourished under artificial light. Rooms were decorated in various bright colours and afforded better opportunities for solitude.

  I found a glowing message waiting on my Ambient. When I punched Receive, Charles Bondi's voice came to me, full of controlled anger: 'Jefferies, what are you people doing over there? Why do you think our research unit was positioned on Mars? It was because we required complete silence and no vibrations, wasn't it? Our foundation represents the whole reason for habitation on this planet. Your drillings are threatening our search for the Omega Smudge. We're getting strange readings. I have to tell you that all drillings and excavations must cease at once. Immediately. Please acknowledge that this has been done.'

  I froze his face. Studying it, I did not see the aggression implied by his words.

  My reply was brief. 'Charles, I am sorry we upset your solitude. But so far your researches have produced nothing. Meanwhile we have to live. This is why our spicules were sited at a distance from your foundation. We shall be finished within a few days. I have no intention of failing to complete what will be new much required living quarters, and I invite you to inspect them when you have recovered from your annoyance.'

  He sent a one-word reply, 'Luddite!' Then we heard no more of the matter. While marvelling at scientific arrogance, I saw its necessity and urged the workers to press on as speedily as possible, to get the vibration over and done with.

  As the plans for our Utopia came nearer to realisation, so discussions on the employment and containment of power became more urgent. In what sort of context would an autocratic temperament like Bondi's be content? How could the admirable restlessness of enquiry be satisfied by a Utopian calm? How could our Utopia maintain both stability and change? These were some of the questions that confronted us.

  We debated the nature of power and the striving for power. Eventually it was Choihosla who suggested that we should question our concept of power itself.

  He began by asking us a riddle. Who is it who holds most power of life and death over another?

  Answers from the floor included an executioner, an army sergeant in the heat of battle, a murderer, the chief of a savage tribe, the launcher of nuclear missiles, and (mischievously) a scientist.

  Choihosla shook his head. 'The answer is - a mother over her newborn child. Bear that in mind while I speak to you.'

  He said he realised his proposals would be anathema to all whose brains had been, as he put it, 'dissolved by the Western way of life'. But a little thought was needed on the matter and that thought must be directed to overturning accepted ideas of power as an opportunity for gain.

  The various presidents, monarchs and dictators who wielded power Downstairs were not to be emulated Upstairs. All of them sought to accumulate wealth for themselves. The citizens under them also sought to accumulate wealth for themselves. We, fortunately, had no wealth. Nevertheless we would need a leader, a man or a woman, to whom all questions of justi
ce could eventually be referred. He suggested this person should assume the title of Prime Architect. The title was neutral as regards gender, and it correctly implied that something constructive was going on.

  But the conception of power as a force that enabled an individual to gain more than was his or her due had to be discarded. Power had to derive from the determination to achieve and maintain a well-organised society. Since this determination would be reinforced by the hope - however illusory - of achieving the perfectability of humanity, it would follow that the powerless would not be harmed by power, any more than a child is harmed by the mother's power over him. Indeed, the linkages of power, from officials to parents, to children, to pets, would share by example the unifying hope of a general well-being. Both child and mother benefit by the maternal wielding of power.

  At this point, Cang Hai said, 'You are trying to bring back Confucianism!'

  'Not so,' replied Choihosla. 'Confucianism was too rigid and limited, although it contained many enlightened ideas. But these days we hear much about "human rights" and too little about human responsibilities. In our Utopia, responsibility carries with it satisfaction and a better chance for benevolence.'

  'So what is your revised nature of power to be?' someone asked.

  'No, no.' He shook his heavy head, as if regretting he had spoken in the first place. 'How can I say? I don't seek to change the nature of power - that's ridiculous. Only our attitude to power. Power in itself is a neutral thing; it's the use of it that must be changed from malevolent to benevolent. By thought, by empathy. I am sure it can be done. Then power will provide a chance to increase everyone's well-being. Given a society already positive in aspect, that will be the greatest satisfaction. Both Prime Architect and citizen will benefit by what I might call a maternal wielding of power.'