We laughed together. But her laughter was rather abstracted. She began thinking aloud. Belle Rivers's jeuwu did not carry matters far enough. Although Mary had nothing against children per se, she would like to see them removed from their parents at birth, to be reared in institutions where every care would be lavished on them; protected from the amateurishness and eccentricity - if not downright indifference - of their parents, they would grow up much more reasonably. She repeated this phrase in a thoughtful manner. Much more reasonably...
Knowing that Mary Fangold had been disappointed by the establishment of the Birth Room, I asked her how she regarded the matter now.
'As a rational person, I accept the Birth Room as an experiment. I do not oppose the Birth Room. Indeed, I permit my midwives to go there when summoned. However, its function is undoubtedly divisive. The division between the sexes is increased. The role of the father is curtailed.'
'Do you not think that the important mother-baby bond is strengthened by the Birth Room procedures? Are we not right to encourage birthing to become a ceremony? The role of the father is enhanced by the celebration when he is again united with his wife?'
'Ah, now, there you should say husband rather than father. Men favour the husbandly role above that of a father. I will speak plainly to you. The one reason why I did not oppose the Birth Room is that the new mother is given a week's freedom from the importunings of the male. You perhaps would not credit how many men insist on sexual union again, immediately after their wives have delivered, when their vaginas are still in a tender state. The regulations of the Birth Room protect them from that humiliating pain.'
'You must see the worst of human nature in hospital.'
'The worst and the best. We see lust, yes, and fear - and courage. The spectrum of human nature.' After a pause, she added, 'We still have women who prefer to come here to hospital to give birth, and have their husbands with them.'
'But increasingly fewer as time goes by, I imagine?'
'We shall see about that.' Her lips tightened and she turned to summon a nurse.
After a while, Mary said she had a vision of what life could be. For her, Olympus the Living Being (as she phrased it) was an inspiration. Its age must surely be a guarantee of its wisdom, its eons of isolation a promoter of thought. I questioned that. 'Eons of isolation? I would think they might as easily promote madness. Could you endure being alone for long?'
Her glance was humorous and questioning. 'You're really alone, Tom, aren't you? What may be good for the vast living being may not be so good for you...'
She would like to see a society where the young were supported financially until their eighteenth birthday, in order to 'find themselves', as she put it. Only then would they be put to work for the good of the society that had nourished them.
At the other end of the scale the compulsory retirement of men and women at the age of seventy-five would be abolished. Molecular technology had reached a point where the curse of Alzheimer's disease had been banished and both sexes lived healthily well into their early hundreds -barring accidents. It was expected that the class known as the Megarich would live for two centuries. Meditech, she said, had accomplished much of recent decades, although the time when humans lived for 500 years - an opportunity to learn true wisdom, she said - was still far in the future. Say twenty years ahead, given the peace they enjoyed on Mars. Longevity would become inheritable.
When I asked her what pleasure there would be in a lifespan of 500 years, Mary regarded me curiously.
'You tease me, Tom! You of all people, to ask that! Why, given five centuries, you would be able fully to enjoy and appreciate your own intelligence, with which you are naturally endowed. Growing out of the baser emotions, you would achieve true rationality and experience the pleasures of untroubled intellect. You would live to see the perfection of the world to which you had contributed so much. You'd become, would you not, an authority on it?'
I asked playfully, 'The baser emotions? Which are they?'
As she leaned towards me to fit a light harness on my head, I caught a breath of her perfume. It surprised me.
'I don't mean love, if that's what you imply. Love can be ennobling. You pay too little heed to your emotional needs, Tom, do you understand?' Her deep blue eyes looked into mine.
While this discussion was taking place, the nurse was busy securing a cable to my wrist, making sure that it fitted comfortably where a tiny needle entered a vein. The other end of the cable ran to a computer console where a technician sat, his back to me. It in turn was linked with the nanotank.
'What is happening in surgical advance,' Mary was saying, 'is essentially in line with your reforming principles. The technology has developed because of a gradual change in public attitudes. Notably, the dissociation of the acceptance of pain from surgery, which began with the discovery of ether anesthesia halfway through the nineteenth century. You, similarly, wish to separate the association of aggression from society, if I understand you aright.'
Before I could agree or disagree Mary rushed on to say that, as we talked, the computer was analysing the findings of the nanobots that had penetrated my system to check on the concentration of salts, sugars and ATP in the renegade cells of my brain - to, in short, perform a biopsy. The quantputer would order them to redirect the energies of malignant cells, or else to eliminate them.
'So the words pain and knife no longer—' I began. But a curious light was streaming in from I knew not where. I could not trace its source. Perhaps it was a flower, temporarily obscuring my view, as if I were a bee entering it for honey, for pollen, burrowing, burrowing, among the white waves of petals, endless white waves, festive but somehow deadly. With them, a dull scent, an unreal buzzing, the two of them interfused.
As if new senses had roused themselves ... In the middle of them, a dull orange-tinted stain that moved, weeping through puny mouths as it sucked its way onward. But the holy rollers were pressing forward, extinguishing it to the sound of - sound of what? Trumpets? Honey? Geraniums? It was so fast I could not tell.
Then the light and sound were gone, only the endlessness of white waves remaining, churning over in a great ocean of confused thought. Antonia's face? Her nearness? Mary's lips, eyes? A sense of great loss...
'—spring to mind,' I finished. I felt as weak as if I had been away on a long swim. I could hardly focus on those violet-coloured eyes looking into mine.
'It's all over,' said Mary Fangold, kindly, stroking my hand. The nanobots have removed your tumour. Now you will be well again. But you must rest awhile. I have a neat little ward waiting for you, next to my apartment.'
She came to me quietly at the first hour of the night, when the sigh of air circulation fell to a whisper. Her lips had been reddened. Her hair lay about her shoulders. Her pale breasts showed through a semi-transparent nightdress. She stood by my bedside, asking if I slept, knowing well the answer.
'Time for a little physiotherapy,' she murmured.
I sat up. 'Come in with me, Mary.'
Slipping her garment from her body, she stood there naked. I kissed the bush of dark hair on her mons veneris, and pulled her into the bed. There we were in joy, all night, our limbs interlocked, hers and mine. At times it seemed to us that we were back on the great fecund Earth, rolling on its course with its ever changing mantle of blue skies and cloud and its restless oceans.
I remained in hospital for a week, indifferent to what was happening elsewhere. Every night, at the first hour, Mary came to me. We sated ourselves with each other. By day she was again the rational, professional person I had known until then, until the revelation of her lovely body.
During my recuperation period, Cang Hai visited me, accompanied by her precocious child, Alpha. And many other visitors, Youssef, Choihosla among them.
On one visit, finding that I looked perfectly well, Cang Hai ventured to ask me why it was that my late wife had not undergone nanosurgery for her cancer. I was mortified to feel that I had ceased, or almost
ceased, to mourn the death of Antonia.
'My distrust of religion springs in part from this. Antonia was a Christian Scientist all her life. She was brought up in her parents' creed. She held that her cancer could be healed by prayer. Nothing would persuade her otherwise.
'I could not force her,' I said. 'She had every right to her beliefs, however fatal.'
A tear trickled from under the neat epicanthic fold of Cang Hai's eye. 'You surely can't believe that still, Tom.' But I believed I caught her thinking, even as she wiped the tear away, that some good had come from my dear wife's death, whereby I had sublimated grief by striving to change society.
Little Alpha liked to be told stories of bikers and their gang warfare in the days before I was born. In the underprivileged part of the world where my boyhood had been spent, it was sometimes possible to obtain a magazine entitled Biker Wars, which I had greatly relished at the time.
As I was telling the child one such story, we were interrupted by a tiny cry, something between the bleat of a goat and the shrill of a gull.
'Scuse me, unkie,' said the child. 'My little Yah-Yah needs attention.'
She brought forth from the basket she was carrying what appeared to be a small cage. It contained a kind of big-eyed red animal. Alpha showed it to me when she had attended to its needs. So I had my first close look at a tammy.
'Crispin gave it to me,' she said, with pride.
The men and women in the fire prevention force had been rendered virtually unemployed by the success of the Sim White Mars operation. Rather than remain idle they had cannibalised some of their equipment, making an improved version of a toy that had enjoyed a vogue on Earth many decades previously.
In Alpha's cage was a small VR pet. It was born and it grew, constantly needing feeding, cleaning and loving care from the child who owned it. If neglected, the pet could die or 'escape' from its cage. In adolescence, it became rather rebellious and needed tactful handling. Conveniently, at this age a pet of the opposite sex entered the cage. With some guidance from the small owner, the two pets could mate and eventually bring forth another generation of pet.
Time inside the VR cage had been speeded up. The lifespan of a pet was rarely more than twenty-eight days. The far-sighted leader of the fire prevention team had designed the computer pets as a learning toy. When I eventually spoke to this lady, she said, 'Belle Rivers recognises that the children need love. She is less ready to recognise that children also need to give love, to own love-objects, something other than human, to help in developing their own personalities. Kids with tammies will grow up into caring adults - and have fun meanwhile.'
It was far-sighted, but not far-sighted enough. Every kid wanted a tammy. The domes were maddened by the moans, howls and chirps of a wide range of the VR pets. Concerts and plays were ruined by the incessant demands of the toys in the audience. Eventually, tammies had to be banned from such occasions, although this meant that children excluded themselves, lest their charges perished ... I hated imposing bans, but the government of behaviour was an inescapable part of civilised society.
Tammies next became banned at mealtimes, so that children might associate properly with adults. Adminex had in mind here a passage from Thomas More's Utopia, in which he says, 'During meals, the elders engage in decent conversation with the young, omitting topics sad and unpleasant. They do not monopolise the conversation for they freely hear what the young have to say. The young are encouraged to talk in order to give proof of the talents which show themselves more easily during meals.'
This was not always successful. The elders sometimes grew tired of childish prattle. The atmosphere was always soothed by music - not Beza's music, but something much more anaemic, suited to our austere diet.
20
A Collective Mind
I managed to drag myself away from the raptures of Mary Fangold and her delicious physiotherapy. Although I was back in the busy world, finding a juster society slowly developing, act by act, I wished to give Mary a present.
Seeking out Sharon Singh, I asked to see her collection of rock crystal pieces. She displayed them for me, meanwhile gazing up at my face from under her dark fringe of hair. Among the many shapes, I chose one that, in its finely detailed folds, closely resembled a vagina.
Giving it to me, Sharon said, 'Isn't it curious that the cold pressures of Mars should create such a hot little thing?'
She gave a tinkling laugh.
Olympus - now more frequently referred to as Chimborazo; Kathi Skadmorr had won that argument - had taken hold of people's imaginations. Discussion groups met regularly to chew over the riddle. It was a subject for argument in public and across the Ambient.
Most Ambient users found it hard to accept that Chimborazo could be conscious. They were daunted by the thought of that great solitary intellect sitting permanently upon a planet that had become hostile to life. What was it waiting for? was a frequently asked question.
Certainly not a bombardment by CFC gas, was one answer.
The parallel between Chimborazo's shelter for collaborating species and our own situation in the domes was quickly seized on. Fondness replaced fear as a response to its existence.
Dreiser's remark about a stack of thoughts 23 kilometres high kept returning to me. Also there was the speculation about what one might encounter if one prized up the protective shell and looked - went? was drawn? - inside.
I believe that Hawkwood's interview was a great persuasive force in the establishment of our Utopian constitution.
One interesting theory I heard discussed on my return to society was that Chimborazo's power of consciousness was far greater than we had suspected. Its attention had become directed across the gulfs of matrix to where it sensed other minor flames of consciousness. It had kept the minds of terrestrials busied with ambitions to visit Mars in order to lure them to provide it with company.
These were speculations without much ground in fact. However, when I contacted Dreiser and Kathi, I found that they too were in the midst of a welter of troubled speculation. Their new findings presented us with new problems. I moved Adminex to call a meeting in Hindenburg Hall at once.
A whole phalanx of scientists attended. The meeting was crowded. Children were welcomed. Their tammies had to be left behind.
Dreiser began speaking without preamble. 'We have a confusion of opinions here. You have every right to hear them. In some cases they amount to serious disputes between us.
'The fact is that, over the last week, we have observed no less than twenty-seven glitches in the superfluid of the ring. The interpretation of these phenomena is unclear as yet. When examined closely, the build-up to these glitches has a curious and complicated structure. Most of us have therefore reached the conclusion that the glitches are not caused by HIGMOs after all.
'The question then is: What does cause them?
'I am going to ask Jon Thorgeson to give his point of view.'
Thorgeson rose. As when he had spoken in public before, he began nervously but soon got into his stride.
'I don't really expect you non-scientists to understand all the nuances of the situation. Maybe you've heard before that there is something going wrong in the ring. There may be stray vortices in the superfluid which lead to spurious effects. I believe that to be the case. It is the obvious explanation.
'Before we go any further, or develop any crazy ideas, we have to turn off the refrigeration units so that the superfluid can return to its normal fluid state. Okay, so then we examine the tube thoroughly and clean it. That is a meticulous job. Then we switch the refrigeration on again, turning it up very very slowly, so that no vortices can develop.
'It's just lousy luck that this procedure will take about a year. By that time the ships will be back, I don't doubt - and their vibrations would spoil everything. We have to take that chance.
'To be honest, I have a suspicion that the irresponsible excavations of your Lower Ground may be the cause of everything...'
He sat
down and folded his arms across his chest.
While he was talking I noticed Kathi shaking her head in mute disagreement, but it was Charles Bondi who spoke next, in flat denial of the last speaker.
'I'm sorry, but that's all arrant nonsense. Vortices in the superfluid are well understood. They would produce quite different effects from the patterns we have observed. You need only simple calculations to see that it is so.
'Besides which, we have no spare year to play around in. We must find a solution for today. Leo Anstruther made the plea for White Mars, but somehow he was ruled out as Administrator of the UN Department for the Preservation of Mars. When the ships return they will probably be obsessed once more with the idea of terraforming Mars. It makes our situation an urgent one.'
A YEA technician rose and said, 'We don't want to let a plea of urgency destroy understanding. I'd say we should haul off and wait to see what comes next. I mean, what the ring comes up with. Seems we have run out of HIGMOs this week. We should keep watch on next week.'
Georges Souto spoke next. 'I'm largely in agreement with the last speaker. For one thing, we don't know what exactly is going on Downstairs. Maybe they've turned their back on the whole notion of matrix travel. Maybe they're never coming back. Think of that!'
That the audience was thinking of it was apparent from the general exclamation that went up at Souto's words.
Souto continued. 'It could be that the conventional hypothesis that HIGMOs were distributed randomly and uniformly throughout the universe is just plain wrong. Our findings imply that the distribution of HIGMO encounters with the ring may be extremely clumped. The explanation for seeing all these HIGMOs together in such a short space of time is simply that we're passing through a HIGMO shower, okay?'
Even as he spread wide his hands in explanation, someone shouted out that he was talking nonsense.
Suung Saybin spoke from the audience. 'Could all these glitches that you're worrying about be caused by one and the same HIGMO being trapped in Mars's gravitational field, so that it oscillates back and forth in the ring?'
WHITE MARS Page 28
