White Mars

10

Some malcontents rejected everything offered them in the way of enlightenment, so impatient were they to return to Earth. They formed an action group, led by two brothers of mixed nationality, Abel and Jarvis Feneloni. Abel was the more powerful of the two, a brawny games player who had done his community service in an engineering department on Luna. Jarvis fancied himself as an amateur politician. Their family had lived on an Hawaiian island, where Jarvis had been one of a vulcanism team.

Expeditions outside the domes to the surface of Mars were strictly limited, in order to conserve oxygen and water. The Fenelonis, however, had a plan. One noontime, they, and four other men, broke the rules and rode out in a commandeered buggy. With them they took cylinders of hydrogen from a locked store.

A certain amount of hardware littered the area of Amazonis near the domes. Among the litter stood a small EUPACUS ferry, the “Clarke Connector’, abandoned when the giant international confederation had collapsed.

The action group set about refuelling the ferry. In a nearby heated prefab shed stood a Zubrin Reactor, still in working order despite the taxing variations in Martian temperatures. It soon began operating at 400° Celsius. Atmospheric carbon dioxide plus the stolen hydrogen began to generate methane and oxygen. The RWGS reaction kicked in. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen, plus catalyst, yielded carbon monoxide and water, this part of the operation being maintained by the excess energy of the operation. The water was immediately electrolysed to produce more oxygen, which would burn the methane in a rocket engine.

The group connected hoses from the Zubrin to the ferry. The refuelling process began.

As the group of six men sheltered in the buggy, waiting for the tanks to fill, an argument broke out between the Feneloni brothers, in which the other men became involved. Each man had a pack of food with him. The plan was that when they reached the interplanetary vessel orbiting overhead, all except Abel would climb into cryogenic lockers and sleep out the journey home. Abel would fly the craft for a week, lock it into an elliptical course for Earth, allow the automatics to take over, and then go cryogenic himself. He would be the first to awaken when the craft was a week’s flight away from Earth, and would take over from the guidance systems.

Abel had shown great confidence during the planning stage, carrying the others with him. Now his younger brother asked, hesitantly, if Abel had taken into account the fact that methane had a lower propellant force than conventional fuel.

“We’ll compute that once we’re aboard the fridge wagon,” Abel said. “You’re not getting chicken, are you?”

That’s not an answer, Abel,” said one of the other men, Dick Harrison. “You’ve set yourself up as the man with the answers regarding the flight home. So why not answer your brother straight?”

“Don’t start bitching, Dick. We’ve got to be up in that fridge wagon before they come and get us. The on-board computer will do the necessary calculations.” He drummed his fingers on the dash, sighing heavily.

They sat there, glaring at each other, in the faint shadow of the ferry.

“You’re getting jumpy, not me,” said Jarvis.

“Shut your face, kid.”

“I’ll ask you another elementary question,” said Dick. “Are Mars and Earth at present in opposition or conjunction? Best time to do the trip is when they’re in conjunction, isn’t it?”

“Will you please shut the fuck up and prepare to board the ferry?”

“You mean you don’t bloody know?” Jarvis said. “You told us the timing had to be right, and you don’t bloody know?”

A quarrel developed. Abel invited his brother to stay bottled up on Mars if he was so jittery. Jarvis said he would not trust his brother to navigate a fridge wagon if he could not answer a simple question.

“You’re a titox—always were!” Abel roared. “Always were! Get out and stay out! We don’t need you.”

Without another word, Jarvis climbed from the buggy and stood there helplessly, breathing heavily in his atmosphere suit. After a minute, Dick Harrison climbed down and joined him.

“It’s all going wrong,” was all he said. The two men stood there. They watched as Abel and the others left the buggy and went towards the now refuelled ferry. As the men climbed aboard, Jarvis ran over and thrust his food pack into his brother’s hands.

“You’ll need this, Abel. Good luck! My love to our family!”

His brother scowled. “You rotten little titox,” was all •he said. He swung the pack on to his free shoulder and disappeared into the ferry. The hatch closed behind him.

Jarvis Feneloni and Dick Harrison climbed into the shelter of the buggy. They waited until the ferry lifted off into the drab skies before starting the engine and heading back to the domes. Neither of them said a word.

Abel Feneloni’s exploit and the departure of the fridge wagon from its parking orbit caused a stir for a day or two. Jarvis put the best gloss he could on the escape, claiming that his brother would present their case to the UN, and rescue for all of them would soon be at hand.

Time went by. Nothing more was heard of the rocket. No one knew if it reached Earth. The matter was eventually forgotten. As patients in hospital become so involved in the activities of their ward that they wish to hear no news of the outside world, so the new Martians were preoccupied with their own affairs. If that’s a fair parallel!

Lotteries for this and that took place all the time. I was fortunate enough to win a trip out to the science unit. Ten of us travelled out in a buggybus. The sun was comparatively bright, and the PIRs shone like a diamond necklace in the throat of the sky.

Talk died away as we headed northwards and the settlement of domes was lost below the near horizon. We drove along a dried gulch that served as a road. There was something about the unyielding rock, something about the absence of the most meagre sign of any living thing, that was awesome. Nothing stirred, except the dust we churned up as we passed. It was slow to settle, as if it too was under a spell.

This broken place lay defenceless under its thin atmosphere. It was cold and fragile, open to bombardment by meteors and any other space debris. All about us, fragments of primordial exploded stars lay strewn.

“Mars resembles a tomb, a museum,” said the woman I was travelling next to. “With every day that passes, I long to get back to Earth, don’t you?”

“Perhaps.” I didn’t want to disappoint her. But I realised I had almost forgotten what living on Earth was like. I did remember what a struggle it had been.

I thought again, as I looked out of my window, that even this progerial areoscape held—in Tom’s startling phrase—that “divine aspect of things” which was like a secret little melody, perhaps heard differently by everyone susceptible to it.

I managed to terrify myself by wondering what it would be like to be deaf to that little tune. How bearable would Mars be then?

I was grateful to him for naming, and so bringing to my conscious mind, that powerful mediator of all experience. All the same, I disliked the drab pink of the low-ceilinged sky.

The tall antennae and the high-perching solar panels of the Smudge laboratory and offices showed ahead. It was only a five-minute drive from Mars City (as we sometimes laughingly called our congregation of domes). We drew nearer. The people in the front seats of the bus started to point excitedly.

At first I thought paper had been strewn near the unit. It crossed my mind that these white tongues were plants—something perhaps like the first snowdrops of a new spring. Then I remembered that Tom and I had seen these inexplicable things on our visit to Dreiser Hawkwood. As we drew close to them they slicked out of sight and disappeared into the parched crusts of regolith.

“Life? It must be a form of life…” So the buzz went round.

A garage door opened in the side of the building. We drove in. The door closed and atmosphere hissed into the place. When a gong chimed, it was safe to leave the buggy. The air tasted chill and metallic.

We passed into a small reception hall, where we were briefly greeted by Arnold Poulsen. As chief computer technician, Poulsen was an important man, answerable only to Hawkwood and seldom appearing in public. I studied him, since Tom had spoken highly of him. He stood before us in a wispy way, uttering conventional words of greeting, looking pleasant enough, but forgetting to smile. Then he disappeared with evident relief, his social moment finished.

We were served a coffdrink while one of the particle physicists, a Scandinavian called Jon Thorgeson, youthful but with a deeply lined face, spoke to us. He was more communicative than Poulsen, whom he vaguely resembled, being ectomorphic and seemingly of no particular age.

Did he recognise me from my previous visit? Certainly he came over and said hello to me in the friendliest way.

Thorgeson briefed us on what we were going to see. In fact, he admitted, we could see very little. The science institution comprised two sorts of people. One was a somewhat monastic unit, where male and female scientists thought about what they were doing or what they might do, free from pressures to produce—in particular the pressure to produce “Big Science”. The other unit comprised people actually doing the science. This latter unit was still adjusting the equipment that, it was hoped, might eventually detect Rosewall’s postulated Omega Smudge.

As we were being shown around, Thorgeson explained that their researches were aimed at tackling the mystery of mass in the universe. Rosewall had made an impressive case for the existence of something called a HIGMO, a hidden-symmetry gravitational monopole. The team was running a pilot project at present, on a relatively small ring, since the density of HIGMOs in the universe remained as yet unknown. The ring lay at the rear of the science unit, under a protective shield, we were told.

One of the crowd asked the obvious question of why all this equipment and this team of scientists were shipped to Mars at such enormous expense.

Thorgeson looked offended. “It was Rosewell’s perception that you needed no expensive super-collider, just a large ring-shaped tube filled with appropriate superfluid. Whenever a HIGMO passes through this ring, its passage will be detected as a kind of glitch appearing in the superfluid. Any sort of violent activity outside the tube would ruin the experiment.”

I found myself asking how HIGMOs could manage to pass through the ring. He seemed to look hard at me before answering, so that I felt silly.

“Young lady, HIGMOs can pass clean through Mars without disturbing a thing, or anyone being any the worse for it.”

Someone else asked, “Why not build this ring on the Moon?”

“The Moon—we’re too late for that! Tourist activities, mining activity, the new transcore subway … The whole satellite shakes like a vibrator in a wasps’ nest.”

Turning his gaze on me, he asked, “You understand this?”

I nodded. “That’s why you’re out here. No wasps’ nests.”

“Full marks.” He came and shook my hand, which made me very uncomfortable. “That’s why we’re out here. It’s fruitless to pursue the Smudge on Earth or on Luna. Far too much racket. The Omega Smudge is a shy beast.” He chuckled.

“And if you capture this Smudge, what then?” asked one of the group, Helen Panorios, the YEA woman with dyed purple hair and dark complexion.

“It holds the key to many things. In particular, it will tell us just how the microverse relates to the macroverse, giving us the precise parameters for the dividing line between the small-scale quantum world of atoms and fundamental particles, and the larger-scale classical world of specks of dust upwards to galaxies and so on. I take the view of current “hard science” that these parameters should also tell us how the exterior universe relates to human consciousness. The detailed properties of the universe seem to be deeply related to the very existence of conscious observers—observers maybe like humans, maybe a more effective species which will supersede us. If so, then consciousness is not accidental, but integral. At last we’ll have a clear understanding of all existence.”

“So you hope,” ventured a sceptical voice.

“So we hope. When the ships come back and we can obtain more material, we expect to build a superfluid ring right around the planet. Then we’ll see.”

“Now we see through a glass darkly…” said Helen, admiringly.

“We don’t quote the Bible much here but, yes, more or less.”

A man who had already asked a question enquired rather sneeringly, “What exactly is this key between the large and small you mention? Isn’t human consciousness just a manifestation of the action of the quantputers in our heads?”

“That may well be true in principle, but we can’t proceed without knowing some important physical parameters more exactly, most particularly what’s labelled the HIGMO g-factor, whose value is completely unknown at present—let’s call it ‘the missing-link of physics’.”

“So what happens when you find it? Will the universe come to an end?”

Jon Thorgeson laughed to the extent of exciting the deep lines in his cheeks. He said that life for the majority of people might go on as usual. But even if the universe did end—well, he said, to make a wild guess, the probability was that there were plenty of other universes growing, as he put it, on the same stem. Mathematics indicated as much.

He came to a halt in the middle of a corridor, and our group halted with him and gathered round as he talked.

“As you know, stars keep going by exothermic fusion of hydrogen into helium-4. When the core hydrogen is almost used up, gravitational contraction starts. The consequent rise in temperature permits the burning of helium. In our universe, nucleosynthesis of all the heavier elements is achieved by this continued process of fuel exhaustion, leading to contraction, leading to higher central temperatures, leading to a new source of fuel for the sustaining nuclear energy.

“But in our universe there are what in lay terms we may call strange anomalies in this process. For instance, unless nucleosynthesis proceeded resonantly, the yield of carbon would be negligible. By a further anomaly, it happens that the carbon produced is not consumed in a further reaction. So we live in a universe with plentiful carbon and, as you know, carbon is a basic element for our kind of life.

“I wouldn’t like my boss to hear me saying this, but—who knows?—in a neighbouring universe, these strange anomalies may not occur. It might be entirely life-free, without observers. Or maybe life takes another course and is, say, silicon-based. Such possibilities will become clearer if we can get the tabs on our Smudge.”

One of our group asked if it would be possible for us to enter another universe, or for something from another universe to enter ours.

The lines on Thorgeson’s face deepened in amusement. “There we venture into the realms of science fiction. I can’t comment on that.”

At the end of our tour, I managed to speak to Thorgeson face to face. I told him that many of the people in the domes, particularly the YEAs, were interested in science but did not understand what the particle physicists were working at. Indeed, the scientific team were regarded as being rather secretive.

Lowering his voice, he said that there was dissension in the scientific ranks. The issues were complex. Many men and women on the team did not see the Omega Smudge as worth pursuing, and favoured more practical concerns, such as establishing a really efficient comet- and meteor-surveillance system. On the other hand… Here he paused.

When I prompted him to continue, he said that practical goals were for people without vision—clever people, but those without vision.

“Was Kepler being practical when, in the middle of a war, he sat down and computed the orbits of planets? Certainly not. Yet those planetary laws of his have eventually brought us here. That’s pure science. The Smudge is pure science. I’m not very pure myself—said with a sly laughing glance at me—“but I support pure science.”

Since I understood those sly glances, I asked him boldly if he would visit the domes and lecture us on the subject?

“Want to come and have a drink with me and talk it over?”

“I have to keep with my group. Sorry.”

Too bad. You’re an attractive lady. Korean, are you? We’re a bit short of adjuncts to living over here. Monastic is what we are.”

“Then leave your monastery and lecture us on particle physics.”

“You might find it rather dull,” he said. Then he smiled. “It’s a good idea. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be in touch.”

At that stage, I did not realise how prophetic those words were.

We were waiting in the reception area for our buggybus to finish recharging. I started talking to the technician on duty, and asked her about the small white tongues we had seen outside the building.

“Oh, the Watchers? I can show you them on the monitors, if you like.”

I went behind her desk to take a look at the surveillance system. It clearly showed the white tongues, unmoving outside.

The technician flicked from screen to screen. The tongues surrounded the establishment. Behind them, Olympus Mons could be seen distantly, dominating its region.

“You get a clearer idea of them when I switch over to infrared,” said the technician, so doing.

I exclaimed in alarm. The tongues were no longer tongues. They reminded me, much more formidably, of gravestones I had seen in an old churchyard, tall and unmoving. They formed almost a solid wall about the establishment. It seemed they were covered in a kind of oily, scaly skin of a dull green colour. I asked if they were going to break in.

“They’re quite harmless. They don’t interfere. We think they’re observing. They don’t get in anyone’s way.”

As we looked, a maintenance engineer came into view on the screens, suited up and shouldering welding equipment. As if to confirm the duty technician’s words, the Watchers flicked back into the regolith and were gone, offering him no impediment. He moved out of view and the tongues at once returned.

I could not help feeling cold fear running through my body.

“So there is life on Mars,” I said.

“But not necessarily Martian life,” the technician said. “Sit down for a minute, pet. You look terribly pale. I’m only joking. There’s no life on Mars. We all know that.”

But jokes frequently hold bitter kernels of truth. Knowledge of the Watchers spread and caused alarm. But custom dulls the edge of many things. Whether alive or not, they made no hostile moves. We became used to their presence and finally ignored them.

After my return from Thorgeson and company, I told Kathi over the Ambient how impressed I was by Thorgeson’s intellect. She asked what he had said.

I tried to explain that he had claimed the consciousness of humanity, or of a species that might supersede us, was—what had he said?—an integral function of the universe.

She laughed scornfully. “Who do you think he got that idea from?” she asked.

After a silence, she said, “If we cannot behave in a better and more Utopian way, then we deserve to be superseded, don’t you think?”

I changed the subject and spoke about the tongues surrounding the science unit.

“Don’t worry,” she said lightly. “We shall find out their function in good time. Do you know about quantum state-reduction? No? I’m reading up about it now. It’s the collapse of the wave function, such as Schrodinger’s cat—you know all about Schrodinger’s cat, Cang Hai?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it.”

“Well then, the collapse of the wave function resolves the problem of that poor hypothetical quantum-superposed moggie. It becomes either a dead cat or a live cat, instead of being in a quantum superposition of both a dead and an alive cat.”

“I see … Is that better or worse for the cat?”

She scowled at me. “Don’t try to be funny, dear. Such quantum superpositions occur in the electron displacements in a quantcomp. The definitive experiments conducted by Heitelman early this century made it clear that state-reduction actually takes place when it is the internal gravitational influences that become significant. You see where this leads us?”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid I don’t, Kathi.”

“I’m working on it, babe!” With a cheery wave of its hand her image faded from view.

Sitting there vexed, I tried to understand what she was saying. The gravitational link puzzled me. On inspiration, I decided to Ambient Jon Thorgeson in the science unit.

An unfamiliar face came up in the globe. “Hi! I’m Jimmy Gonzales Dust, Jon’s buddy. We’re training for the marathon and he’s busy on the running machine. Can I help? He’s spoken to me about you. He thinks you’re cute.”

“Oh … Does he? Do you know anything about the—what do you call it? The gravitational … no … The magneto-gravitic anomaly? Have you any information about it?”

He looked hard at me. “We call it the M-gravitic anomaly.” He asked me why I was worrying. I said I didn’t really know. I was trying to learn some science.

Jimmy hesitated. “Keep this to yourself if I give you a shot from the upsat. There’s been a slight shift in the anomaly.”

The photograph he released came through the slot.

I stared at it. It was an aerial view of the Tharsis Shield from 60 miles up. The outline of Olympus Mons—or Chimborazo, to use Kathi’s name—could clearly be seen. Across the shot someone had scrawled with marker pen G-WSW + 0.13⁰.

Why and how, I asked myself, should the anomaly have shifted? Why in that direction—in effect towards Arizonis Planitia and our position?

As I stared at the photo, I noticed furrowed regolith to the east of the skirts of Olympus. Kathi had pointed this furrowing out to me earlier. Now it seemed the furrowing was rather more extensive. I could not understand what it meant. In the end, I returned to my studies, not very pleased with myself. Cute? Me?!

The domes had become a great hive of talk. There were silent sessions by way of compensation. Sports periods were relatively quiet. Other colloquia concentrated on silence, and were conducted by the wooden tongue of a pair of clappers. Silence, meditation, walking in circles, sitting, all reinforced at once a sense of communality and individuality. Those who concentrated on these buddhistic exercises reported lowered cholesterol levels and a greater intensity of life.

Much later, these colloquia became the basis of Amazonis University.

Fornication evenings were a popular success. Masked partners met each other for karezza and oral arts under skilled tutors. Lying together without movement, they practiced inhalation, visual saturation and maryanning. Breath control as a technique for increasing pleasure was emphasised.

Breath control formed the entire subject of another colloquium. In a low-lit studio, practitioners sat in the lotus position and controlled ingoing and outgoing breaths while concentrating on the hara. Mounting concentrations of carbon dioxide in the blood led to periods of timeless “awayness” which, when achieved, were always regarded as of momentous value, leading to a fuller understanding of self.

This opening up of consciousness without the use of harmful drugs became highly regarded in our society, so that the breathing colloquium had to be supplemented by classes in pranayama. At first, pranayama was seen as exotic and “non-Western’, but, with the growing awareness that we were in fact no longer Western, pranayama became regarded as a Martian discipline.

Whether or not this concentration on the breath, entering by the nose, leaving by the mouth, was to be accounted for by our awareness that every molecule of oxygen had to be engineered, this discipline, in which over 55 per cent of our adults soon persevered, exerted a considerable calming effect, so that to the remoter regions of the mind the prospect of a tranquil and happy life no longer seemed unfamiliar.

“A better life needs no distraction…”

In all the colloquia, which rapidly established themselves, the relationship between teacher and taught was less sharp than usual. No one had a professional reputation to uphold; it was not unknown for a teacher to exclaim to a bright pupil, “Look, you know more about this than I—please take my place, I’ll take yours.”

Old hierarchies were dissolving: even as Tom had predicted, the human mind was becoming free.

At all this great activity I looked in amazement. To repair the damage done to my body I studied pranayama, becoming more aware of Eastern influence in our society. I wondered if this was really the case, or did I, with my Eastern inheritance, merely wish it to be so?

I asked this question of Tom. Perhaps we had grown closer over the past year. Tom said, “I cannot answer your question today. Let’s try tomorrow.”

On the morrow, when we met with Belle Rivers again for another discussion of what education should consist, he looked amused and said, “Has your question been answered overnight?”

Playing along with this zen approach, I replied, “No religion has a monopoly on wisdom.”

At this he yawned and pretended to be bored. He said he believed, though without sure foundation, that there had been a time when the West, the little West which then called itself Christendom, had been a home of mysticism. Come the Renaissance, people forgot constant prayer, loving instead the riches and excitements of the world about them. They had given themselves up to the worldly things and even neglected to love, first others, then themselves. Now it was possible that in our reduced circumstances we might learn to love ourselves again with a renewed mysticism.

“And love God?” I asked.

“God is the great cul de sac in the sky.”

“Only to those with spiritual myopia,” Belle said, with a trace of irritation.

I couldn’t resist teasing Tom—a tease in which there was some flattery—telling him he was the new mystic, come to guide us.

“Don’t get that notion in your head, my dear Cang Hai, or try to put it in mine. I cannot guide since I don’t know where we are going.”

But he offered me, chuckling, a story of a holy man who finally gave up calling on Allah because Allah never spoke in return, never said to the man, “Here am I.” Whereupon a prophet appeared to the holy man in a vision, hot foot from Allah. What the prophet reported Allah as saying was this: “Was it not I who summoned thee to my service? Was it not I who engaged thee with my name? Was not thy call of ‘Allah!’ my ‘Here am I’?”

I said I was pleased that Tom had a mystical as well as a practical side, to which he answered that he clung to a fragment of mysticism, hoping to be practical. That practicality might permit our grandchildren to espouse the contentment of real mysticism.

I thought about this for a long time. It seemed to me that he denied belief in God, and yet clung to a shred of it.

Tom admitted it might be so, since we were all full of contradictions. But whether or not there was a god outside, there was a god within us; in consequence he believed in the power of solitary prayer, as a clarifier, a magnifying glass, for the mind.

“At least, so I believe today,” he said teasingly. “My dear Cang Hai, we all have two hemispheres to our brains. Can we not carry two different tunes at the same time? Do you not wish to be silent in order to listen to them?”

While we were talking in this abstract fashion, our friends were making love and more children were being conceived. Too many would threaten the precarious balance of our existence. To find Tom planning for two generations ahead made me impatient.

“We must deal with our immediate difficulties first, not add to them. This random procreation threatens our very existence. Why do you not issue a caution against unbridled sexuality?”

“For several good reasons, Cang Hai,” he said. “The foremost of which is that any such caution would be useless. Besides, if I, a DOP, issued it, it would be widely—and maybe rightly—regarded as an edict flung across the generation gap.”

I laughed—“Don’t be afraid of that. You are older, you know better! Don’t you?”—for I saw his hesitation.

“No, to be honest I don’t know better. Sexual temptation does not necessarily fade with age. It’s merely that the ease with which one can give in to it disappears!” He laughed. “You see, our generations have become too preoccupied with sexuality. You know what Barcunda said.

“Our relationships with natural things withered and died in the streets. We no longer tend our gardens—or sleep under the stars, unless we are down-and-outs. We think stale city thoughts, removed from nature. All we have to relate to is each other. That’s unnatural; we should be responding to agencies outside ourselves. The quest for ever more sexual satisfaction runs against true contentment. Against love, joy and peace, and the ability to help others.”

“Ah, those ‘agencies outside ourselves’ … Yes…”

We sat silently for a while.

At last I said, “It is sometimes difficult for us to speak our minds. Perhaps it’s because I have reverence for you that I agree with what you say. Yet not only that… I have not found great pleasure in sex, with either men or women. Is that something lacking in me? I seem to have no—warmth? I love, but only platonically, I’m ashamed to admit.”

Tom put his large hand on mine.

“You need feel no shame. We are brought up in a culture where those who seek solitude or chastity are made to think of themselves as unwell—fit subjects for new sciences like psychurgy and mentascopism—almost beyond the pale of society. It was not always so and it will not be so again. Once, men who sought solitude were revered. These matters are not necessarily genetic but a question of upbringing.”

After a pause, he said, “And your upbringing, Cang Hai. Where are you in Kissorian’s scheme of things—a later-born, I’d guess?”

“No, Tom, dear. I am a dupe.” Looking searchingly at him, I was surprised he did not immediately understand.

“A dupe?”

“A clone, to use the old-fashioned term. I know there’s a prejudice against dupes, but since our difference doesn’t show externally we are not persecuted. My counterpart lives in China, in Chengdu. We are sometimes in psychic touch with one another. But I do not believe that case affects my attitude to sexuality. As a matter of fact, I spend much time in communication with those archetypes of which you say someone spoke in the debate. I believe I am in touch with myself, though I’m vexed by mysterious inner promptings. Those promptings brought me to Mars—and to you.”

“I am grateful, then, for those inner promptings,” he said, giving me a grave smile. “So you are that rare creature, not born of direct sexual union…”

I told him I knew of at least a dozen other dupes with us on Mars.

With a sudden intuition, Tom asked if Kathi was also a dupe. I said it was not so; was he interested in her?

He chose to ignore this. Dropping his gaze, he said, “My destiny seems to be as an organiser. I’m doomed to be a talker, while in my heart of hearts, that remote place, I believe silence to be a greater thing.”

“But not the silence, surely, that has prevailed on Mars for centuries?”

His face took on a ponderous expression I had observed previously. He stared down at the floor. “That’s true. That’s a dead silence. We shall have to cure it in the end … Life has to be the enemy of such tomb-like silence.”

Smiling apologetically, he dismissed me.

I regretted not telling him that Kathi did not find Mars’s silence a dead silence; she claimed that it could be heard if only we attuned ourselves to it. But she and I had no authority. After all, Tom was a famous and successful man, and who was I? Although I relished his attention, and his kindly looks, he had said nothing about his personal history since the evening on Spider Plant when he had spoken of his first love. Did he regret confiding in me? Could I bear any more of the same?

This is not intended to be a record of my personal feelings. Yet I must admit here that I often thought about that fortunate girl who, Torn had told me, was the youthful Tom’s first lover. I could imagine everything about her.

Even while I practised my breathing exercises—even then, I found myself thinking of her. And of young Tom. And of the two of them, locked together with rain bathing their naked bodies.

This is not really a record of history. I never told anyone this before. But unexpectedly I started thinking that Tom Jefferies did not care for me at all. I felt so bad. I secretly thought I was beautiful and my body was lovely, even if he never noticed, even if no one noticed. Except Jon, who thought I was cute.

Kathi Skadmorr came over from the science unit with some discs of an old jazz man called Sydney Bechet and some laboratory-distilled alcohol. She was spending the night with her lover, Beau Stephens, and invited me to drink with them.

After some drinks, I asked Beau if he thought I was pretty.

“In an Oriental way,” he said.

I told him that was a stupid remark and meant nothing.

“Of course you’re pretty, darling,” said Kathi. Suddenly, she jumped up, put her arms round me, and kissed me on the mouth.

It went to my head like the drink. A track then playing was a number called “I Only Have Eyes For You”. I had never heard it before. It was good. I began to peel off my Nows and dance. Just for the fun of it. And my new leg looked fine and worked beautifully.

When I was down to my bra and panties it occurred to me not to go further. But the two of them were cheering and looking excited, so off they came. My breasts were so nice and firm—I was proud of them. I flung my clothes at Beau. What did he do? He caught my panties and buried his face in them. Kathi just laughed.

With the track ending, I suddenly felt ashamed. I had shown so much crotch. I ran into the bathroom and hid. Kathi came to soothe me down. I was crying. She sang softly, “I don’t know if we’re in a garden, Or in a crowded rendezvous.” And I felt awful next morning.

I never told anyone about this before.

“We must take the most tender care,” Tom said, when the Adminex was discussing education, “of our youngsters, so that they do not think of themselves negatively as exiles from earth. Education must mean equipping a child to live in wisdom and contentment—contentment with itself first of all. We need a new word for a new thing, a word that means awareness, understanding…”

“There’s the Chinese word juewu. It implies awareness, comprehension,” I suggested.

“Juewu, juewu…” He tried it on his tongue. “It has something of a jewel about it, whereas education smells of dusty classrooms. I can almost hear children going to their first playschool at the age of three, chirruping jewey-woo jewey-woo…”

The word was adopted by the group.

We then fell to discussing what activities those early chirrupers should engage in.

Sharon Singh was certain that young children most enjoyed music and verse with strong rhymes; rhythm, clapping, she said, was the beginning of counting, counting of mathematics, and mathematics of science.

Mary Fangold remarked that in the discussions in Plato’s Republic some time is spent wondering which metrical feet are best to express meanness or madness or evil, and which ones grace. The speakers conclude that music engenders a love of beauty.

I ventured to say that “beauty” had become a rather suspect, or at least a specialised, word.

Tom agreed that it had accumulated some embarrassments; yet we still understood that it had something to do with rightness and truth. It was hard to define except by parallels; certainly the right music at the right time was a benison. Better even than the art of speaking with grace, was employing a rich vocabulary—which was rarely the mark of an empty head.

And with the music had to go activity, dancing and such like. This was a way in which juewu helped to unite mind and body.

But we agreed that, while good teaching was important, it could be achieved only by good teachers. As yet no method had been established for guaranteeing good teachers, beyond the simple expedient of training and paying well, though not lavishly.

“But once the system is established,” Tom said, “then our well-taught children will make the best teachers. Patience, love and empathy are more valuable than knowledge.”

The next stage was the regularisation of educational curricula for various ages.

We wanted our first generation of Martian children to understand the unity and interconnectedness of all life on Earth.

We also wished them to understand themselves better than any generations had done before. Phylogeny was a required subject, for only from this could grow knowledge of one’s self.

Ambient and computer skills were already being taught, together with history, geophysiology, music, painting, world literature, mathematics. There would be personality sessions, wherein children could discuss any problems brewing; difficult situations could be dealt with swiftly and compassionately.

Tom appeared pleased with the work. Almost as an afterthought he suggested that the entire scheme should be shown to Belle Rivers, who had spoken on the subject of archetypes during our debates and was in charge of teaching cadre children.

Belle Rivers was slender and elegant, with a certain grandeur to her. She carried her head slightly to one side, as if listening to something the rest of us were unable to hear. She was about forty years old, perhaps more.

Tom opened the conversation by apologising for altering her curriculum. Altered circumstances demanded it. He said that he hoped the revised syllabus, a copy of which we had printed out, would please her.

Without responding, Rivers read through the syllabus. She set it down on a desk, saying, “I see you do not wish religion to be taught.”

“That is correct.”

“We have had to train our children for future careers. Nevertheless we always take care to include world religions in our curriculum. Do you not believe that God prevails as much on Mars as on Earth?”

“Or as little. We cannot leave it to any god to remedy in future those things he or she has failed to remedy in the past. We must attempt a remedy ourselves.”

“That’s rather arrogant, isn’t it?” She appeared less offended than contemptuous.

“I trust not. We are merely amused by ancient Greek tales of gods and goddesses interfering directly in the affairs of humanity. Such beliefs are outdated. We must try to laugh at any belief that imaginary, omnipotent gods will remedy our deficiencies. We must try to do such things for ourselves, if that is possible.”

“Oh? And if it proves impossible?”

“We do not know it will be impossible until we have tried, Belle.”

“That may be true. But why not enlist God in your enterprise? I seem to recall that the great Utopian, Sir Thomas More, made certain that the children of his Utopia were brought up in the faith and given full religious instruction.”

“The sixteenth century thought differently about such matters. More was a good man living in a circumscribed world. We must go by the advanced thought of our own time. All Utopias have their sell-by dates, you know.”

“And your Utopia has dropped any sense of the divine aspect of things.”

Tom offered a chair to Belle Rivers and invited her to be seated. His manner became apologetic. He said he realised that he had made a mistake in having Adminex draw up a new syllabus without consulting her in the first place. It must seem to her that he had usurped her powers, although that had been far from his intention. He had been too hasty; there was much still needing attention.

However, she would notice that her ideas had been taken into consideration. Phylogeny was on the timetable for even small children, wherein the make-up of human consciousness and her understanding concerning archetypes could be considered.

She gazed frowningly into a corner of the room.

Tom shuffled somewhat before asking Belle Rivers not to believe that he was without sympathy for her religious instincts. He was himself all too conscious of the divine aspect of things. Did not everyone who was not utterly bowed down by misfortune or illness, he asked, have a sense of a kind of holiness to life?

Staring hard at Belle, he became lyrical and so, I thought, possibly insincere.

As we moved through our lives, he continued, was there not a vein of enchantment in events, in awakening, in sleeping, in our dreams and in the power of thought? That elusive element, which the best artists, writers, musicians, scientists—even ordinary persons in ordinary jobs—experienced, that special lovely thing of which it was difficult to speak, but which gave life its magic. It might perhaps be simply the ticking of the biological clock, the joy in being alive. Whatever it was, that firefly thing, it was something of which the poet Marlowe spoke:

Listening to this speech, Belle Rivers clasped her hands on the desk in front of her and appeared to study them.

Religion, at least the Christian religion, Tom said, changed over time, abandoning the ill-tempered and savage Jehovah of the Old Testament for a more responsive faith in redemption—though it still based itself on such impossibilities as virgin birth, the resurrection of the dead and eternal life—impossibilities designed to impress the ignorant of Christ’s unscientific age.

When the Omega Smudge would be detected, we should see a genuine miracle—once we understood what had been detected. (Yet would I ever understand this area of science? I made a resolve to learn still more …)

By going two steps forward and one step back, continued Tom, humankind since the days of Jesus Christ had scraped together some knowledge of the world, the universe and themselves. The situation now, in the late middle of the twenty-first century, was that God got in the way of understanding. God was dark matter, an impediment rather than an aid to our proper sense of the divine aspect of things. We had been forced to leave many good things behind on Earth; God should be left behind too.

The world was more wonderful without him.

Belle Rivers, continuing to regard her hands, said merely, “It cannot be more wonderful without him, since he created it.”

Until this juncture Mary Fangold had remained silent, watching Tom and Belle with a faint smile on her lips. Tom said afterwards that Mary, the apostle of reason, knew we had fallen into human error by excluding the hard-working Belle from most of our educational plans. She felt her position to be undermined. Mary spoke up.

The prospectus is only at the planning stage, Belle. We rely on you to continue teaching, just as the children rely on you. We wonder if you would care to include a subject such as we might call, say, Becoming Individual, in your timetable, whereby religion would form a part of it, together with archetypal behaviour and the interrelationship of conscious and sub-conscious.”

Belle regarded her suspiciously. “That does not sound like my idea of religion.”

“Then let’s say religion and reason…”

After a moment’s silence, Belle smiled and said, “Do not think I am trying to be difficult. Basically, your entire plan for improved learning cannot flourish without one additional factor.”

She waited for us to ask her what that factor might be. Then she explained that there were children who were always resistant to learning, who found reading and writing hard work. Others were happy and fulfilled with such things. The difference could be accounted for by the contrast between those children who were sung to and read to by their mothers and fathers from birth onwards, perhaps even before birth, when the child was still in utero, and those who were not, who were neglected.

Learning, she said, began from Day One. If that learning was associated with the happiness and security of a parent’s love, then the child found no impediments to learning and to the enjoyment of education. Those children whose parents were silent or indifferent had a harder slog through life.

The basis of all that was good in life was, she declared, simply love and care, which arose from a love of Christ.

Tom rose and took her hand. “We are in perfect agreement there, at least as far as love and care of the child are concerned,” he said. “You have probably cited the most vital thing. There’s no harm in using Christ as an exemplar. We’re very happy you are the headmistress here, and in charge of learning.”

Tom’s and my, in some respects, mysterious, relationship deepened. I was legally adopted as his daughter at a small ceremony; I became Cang Hai Jefferies, and lived in harmony with him. To be truthful, I mean more or less in harmony with him. It was not easy to get mentally close.

Often when my new leg troubled me—it got the twitches—I would lie in his arms. This was bliss for me; but he never attempted a sexual advance.

Our activities had become formalised. Indoor sports, plays, revues, recitations, dances and baby exhibitions (the many pregnancies had yielded our first Mars-born infants) were weekly events. Training for the first Mars marathon was in progress.

A woman of French origin, Paula Gallin, produced a dark, austere play, shot through with humour, which combined video with human actors. My Culture, to give it its title, was reluctantly received at first, but slowly became recognised as a master work. Most of the action took place on a flat sloping plain, the tilt of which increased slowly as the play proceeded.

My Culture played a part in turning our community into the world’s first modern psychologically oriented civilisation. The setting-up of the Smudge Project grew nearer to completion by the end of 2065, despite material limitations hampering its development. Dreiser kept us informed by frequent bulletins on the Ambient. But many of us sensed that the technological culture of Earth was gradually giving way to an absorption in Being and Becoming.

Being and Becoming had a very practical focus in the maturing of our children. It was prompted by a natural anxiety regarding the happy development of the young in a confined, largely “indoor” world. But the comparative gloom of Mars prompted introspection and, indeed, empathy. It was noted early in our exile that most of us enjoyed unusually vivid dreams of curious content. These dreams, it was understood, put us in touch with our phylogenetic past, as if seeking or possibly offering therapeutic reassurance.

Mistaken Historicism had filled the world with the idea of progress, bringing greater pressure on greater numbers of people, the rise of megacities and the loss of pleasant communication with the self. A wise man of the twentieth century, Stephen Jay Gould, said: “Progress is a noxious, culturally embedded, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced.”

We were trying to replace it—not by going back but going forward into a realisation of our true selves, our various selves, which had experience of the evolutionary chain. Exchanging technocracy for metaphysics, in Belle’s words.

My true self led me to experience pregnancy. Shortly after our much delayed adoption ceremony, I went to the hospital, where I had myself injected with some of Tom Jefferies’s DNA. My womb was grateful for the benevolent gravity and I delivered my beautiful daughter Alpha without pain one day in March 2067. Tom was with me at the birth. There my baby lay in my arms, red in the face after her exertions to emerge into the world, with the most exquisite little fingers you ever saw. Alpha had dark hair and eyes as blue as Earth’s summer skies. And a temperament as fair.

Unfortunately the hospital permitted me no luxury of peace. Almost as soon as I was delivered I was sent back into society. That was Fangold’s doing. The move upset my child for a short while, and then she recovered.

Kathi sent me a message from the science unit. It said, “Did you succumb to Tom or to society? Why are you pretending to yourself you are an ordinary person? Better to pretend to be extraordinary. Kathi.”

It was not very kind.

Following the birth of Alpha, I—and I hope Tom too—was in a trance of happiness. His sorrow for the death of his wife was not forgotten, but he had put it behind him; he accepted her loss as one of those sorrows inescapable from our biological existence. Although I knew that one day terrestrial ships and business would return, I always hoped that day would be far off, so that our wonderful experience of finding our real selves could continue unabated.

My cloud of contentment was increased by a slogan I passed almost every day. Outside the hairdresser’s salon someone had painted VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE—PEACE BEGETS PEACE. The words might have come from my heart.

Belle Rivers seemed to increase in stature. Her Becoming Individual sessions, which parents often attended with their children, as I soon did with Alpha, were perceived to contain much wisdom, which at first appeared uncomfortably to challenge the unity of the self. The significance of archetypes playing distinct roles in our unconscious was difficult for many people to grasp at first. Gradually more and more people became absorbed in the symbolic aspects of experience.

Belle said, magisterially, “We begin to understand how health springs from our being lived, in a sense, as well as living, and from accepting that we act out traditional roles. On Mars we shall come to require new ground rules.”

During the term of my pregnancy I used to wonder about this remark. I wanted to be different. I wanted things to be different.

I discussed this point with Ben Borrow. Ben was a smooth YEA who had done his community service on Luna and was, in his own words, “into spirituality”. However that might be, it was noticeable that he was a devoted disciple of Belle Rivers, often closeted late with her.

“The more we feel ourselves lived, the more we can live independently.”

The melding of opposites, spirit/matter, male/female, good/evil, brings completeness.”

“Only technology can free us from technology.”

“True spirituality can only be achieved by looking back into green distance.”

These were some of Borrow’s sayings. I wrote them down.

He was intent on becoming a guru; even I could see he was also something of a creep. He had a tiny little pointed beard.

Under the tutelage of his powerful mistress, Borrow started a series of teach-ins he called Sustaining Individuality. These were well attended, and often became decidedly erotic. Rivers and Borrow taught that neurophysiological processes in the mind-body, such as dreaming, promoted the integration of limbic system dramas, thus increasing awareness and encouraging cognitive and emotive areas to merge. As there are swimmers in oceans who fear the unknown creatures somewhere below, beyond their knowledge, so there were those who feared the contents of the deeper levels of mind; they gradually lost this culturally induced phobia to enjoy a blossoming of awareness.

After one of these teach-ins I had to tell Borrow that I didn’t know whether or not my awareness was blossoming. How could I tell?

“Perhaps,” he said, matching finger-tip with finger-tip in front of him, “one might say that the aware find within themselves an ability to time-travel into the remote phylogenic past, and discover there wonderful things that give savour to reason, richness to being.

“Not least of these elements is a unity with nature and instinctive life, from which a knowledge of death is absent. Consciousness is something so complex and sensuous that no artificial intelligence could possibly emulate it. Don’t you think?”

“Mmm,” I said. He hurried off, still with finger-tip touching finger-tip. It was not quite the way you put your hands together in prayer. Perhaps he wanted to indicate that he was in touch with himself.

And didn’t wish to be in touch with me.

Our community became locked into this physiological-biological-philosophical type of speculation. Humanity’s spiritual attainments, together with their relationship with our lowly ancestral origins, produced problems of perception. If what we perceive is an interpretation of reality, rather than reality itself, then we must examine our perceptions. That much I understand. But since it’s our unconscious perceptual faculties that absorb and sort out our lifelong input of information, how does our conscious mind make them comprehensible? What does it edit out? What do they edit out between them? What vital thing are we missing?

I asked this question of May Porter, who came to give a short talk about perceptual faculties.

She said, “Ethology has shown that all animals and insects are programmed to perceive the world in specific ways. Thus each species is locked into its perceptual umwelt. Facts are filtered for survival. Non-survival-type perceptions are rejected. An earlier mystic, Aldous Huxley, cited the case of the frog, whose perceptions cause it to see only things that move, such as insects. As soon as they stop moving, the frog ceases to see them and can look elsewhere. ‘What on earth would a frog’s philosophy be—the metaphysics of appearance and disappearance?’ Huxley asks himself.

“Similarly Western humanity values only that which moves; silence and stillness are seen as negative, rather than positive, qualities.”

I was thinking of Kathi’s remarks when I asked May, “What if there was a higher consciousness on Mars that we were not trained to perceive?”

She gave a short laugh. “There is no higher consciousness on Mars. Only us, dear.”

These and many more understandings had a behavioural effect on our community. Certainly we became more thoughtful, if by thought we include pursuing visions. It was as if by unravelling the secrets of truly living we had come up against the tantalising conundrum of life itself, and its reasons, which were beyond biology. Single people or couples or families preferred to live alone, combining with others only on special occasions, such as a new performance of My Culture or a Sustaining Individuality session.

Thus most people came to live as individually as limited space would permit. As a would-be Utopia, it was non-authoritarian, in distinct contrast to Plato’s definition of a good place.

Nor do I imply that a sense of community was lost. We still ate together once or twice a day. It happened that many a time I caught the jo-jo bus to work with Alpha in my arms and found the whole place humming and vibrating like a hive; so many people were doing pranayama yoga on their own, uttering the eternal “Om”.

Oh, then how happy I was! For me it was the best period of our Martian existence, too sensitive, too in-dwelling to prove permanent. I clutched my dear child in my arms and thought, “Surely, surely Mars people will never again be as united as this!”

Since all our teach-in and community sessions were videoed, beamed to Earth, and saved, we could check on our progress towards individuality. Many of us had to chuckle at our earlier selves, our naive questions, our uncertainty.

We were moving towards a degree of serenity when I received a nasty little shock. I caught on my globe an Ambient exchange between Belle Rivers and my beloved Tom.

She was saying, “… on Earth. And there’s a scientist by name Jon Thorgeson. He says he wants to talk to Cang Hai. He says she suggested he might give a lecture about the Omega Smudge to us plebs. Is that okay by you?”

“Just keep her out of my hair, Belle. Let Thorgeson go ahead.”

Belle’s image remained. With her head on one side, she regarded Tom. Then she asked, “Do you know of anything odd going on in the science unit?”

“No. It’s true I haven’t heard from Dreiser just recently. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, simply the feeling something was in the air when I was speaking to Thorgeson. Could be the oncoming marathon, I suppose.”

By the time their images faded I was worried. What did he mean by keeping me out of his hair? He was always so good and kind. He relied on me, didn’t he? It was true he had become rather grumpy recently.

Perhaps it was simply that he disliked hearing Alpha cry—such a beautiful sound! I pitied him.