White Mars

19

On the following day, when I was resting, Dayo came to visit me again. He tried to persuade me to see what “the computer people’, as he called them, were doing. I could not resist his blandishments for ever, and got myself up.

Going with him to the control room, I found that Dayo was popular there too. He had been learning to work on the big quantputer with the mainly American contingent who staffed the machines. The striking patterns on his tiles for the Lower Ground had been devised using it.

The mainframe had originally been programmed to handle the running of the Martian outpost—its humidity, atmospheric pressure, chemical contents, temperature levels and so forth. Now all these factors were being handled by a single rejigged laptop quantputer.

I was astonished, but the bearded Steve Rollins, the man in charge of the programme under Arnold Poulsen, explained they had evolved a formula whereby interrelated factors could all be grouped under one easily computable formula. Our survival and comfort were being controlled by the laptop. The change-over had taken place at the “X” hour, during a night some five months previously. No one had noticed a shade of difference, while the big mainframe had been freed for more ambitious things.

And what things! I had wondered why the control staff took so little interest in our forums and the Utopian society. Here was the answer: they had been otherwise engaged.

At Dayo’s prompting, Steve showed me the programme they were running. He spoke in an easy drawl.

“You may think this is unorthodox use of equipment,”

Steve said, stroking his whiskers with a gesture he had and grinning at me. “But as that great old musician, Count Basie, said, ‘You just gotta keep on keeping on’. If you regard science as a duel with nature, you must never drop your guard. Stuck here on this Ayers Rock in the sky, we must keep on keeping on or we stagnate. Guess you know that.”

“Guess I do.”

“As a kid I used to play a game called Sim Galaxy on my old computer. It produced simulations of real phenomena, from people to planetary systems. If you kept at it long enough, fighting entropy and natural disasters, it was possible to get to rule over a populated galaxy.”

Steve said that his team had adapted a more modest version of the game, into which they had fed all the quantputer records, sedulously kept, of every person and event on Mars. The simulation had become more and more accurate as the programme was refined. Every detail of our Mars habitation, every detail of each person in the habitation, was precisely represented in the simulation. They called the programme Sim White Mars.

We watched on a widescreen monitor. There people lived and moved and had their being. Our small Martian world was totally emulated; the one item missing was Olympus, a being as yet incomputable.

I fought against the suspicion that this was not a true emulation but a trick, until Steve mentioned casually that they were using a new modified quantputer that computed faster, fuzzier, than the old conventional quantputer—certainly than any of the quantcomps people carry around with them.

The scale of the thing made me feel dizzy. Dayo was immediately at hand, fetching me a stool.

In full colour, recognisable people went about their business, around the settlement and in the laboratory. They seemed to move in real time.

The scene flipped to a schoolroom, where Belle Rivers was talking with a jeuwu class of ten children. Steve moved a pointer on to Belle, touched a key, and at once a scroll of characteristics came up: Belle’s birth date and place, her entire CV and many other details. They flashed on the screen and were gone at another touch of a key.

“We call these simulated objects and people emulations, they are so precise,” said Steve. “To them, their world is perfectly real. They sure think and act like real.”

“But they are mere electronic images. They can’t be said to think.”

Steve laughed. “Guess they don’t realise they’re just a sequence of numbers and colours in a computer, if that’s what you mean.” He added, in lower key, “How often do we realise we’re also just a sequence in another key?”

I said nothing.

The people on screen were now gathering in the main thoroughfare. This was recognisably the day the third marathon was held. There were the runners, many with false wings attached to them. There were the officials who ran the race. There were the crowds.

A whistle blew and the runners started forward, struggling for space, so closely were they packed, even as they had done weeks previously.

“All this takes real heavy puting power, even using the quantputer,” Steve said. “That’s why we are running some weeks behind real time. We’re working on that problem.” The runners began to trot, jostling closely for position. “I guess we’ll catch up eventually.”

“Want to bet on who will win?” Dayo asked mischievously.

“You see this is a kind of rerun of the marathon,” Steve said. “And now, I just tap on a couple of keys…”

He did so. The screen was filled with phantom creatures, grey skeletons with strange pumping spindles instead of legs, naked domes for heads, their teeth large and bared. The inhuman things pressed onwards, soundless, joyless … The Race of Death, I thought.

“We got the X-ray stuff off the hospital,” Steve said. “It’s spare diagnostic equipment…”

The skeletons streamed on, with ghostly grey buildings as background, racing through their silent transparent world.

Steve tapped his keyboard once more and the world on the screen became again the one we recognised as ours.

With a flash of humour, he said, “You have your Utopia, Tom. This is our baby. How do you like it?”

“But in the wrong hands…” I began. A feeling of nausea silenced me.

Dayo took my arm. “I want you to watch yourself as an emulation, Tom. Please, Steve…”

Steve touched a couple of keys on his keyboard. The scene changed. An office block along the marathon course came into focus. Moving through the window, the emulation picked out a man and two women, standing close together, watching the runners pass their building. I recognised Cang Hai, Mary Fangold and myself.

My emulation clutched his head and went to the back of the room to sit on a sofa. Cang Hai came over to it and stood there in silence, looking down at its—my—bowed head. After a moment, I stirred myself, smiled weakly at Cang Hai, rose, and returned to the window to watch the runners.

“I don’t remember doing that,” I said.

“The CV, Steve,” Dayo prompted.

The key. My details, my birth date and place, my CV. Momentarily my skeletal self was there, grey, drained of all but emptiness, long bony fingers clutching at my ostrich egg of skull. Then: “Diagnosis: Suffers from untreated brain tumour”. Only later did it occur to me that had I died then, my emulation would have continued to live, at least for a while.

I found Steve gazing at me and stroking his beard. “You better get yourself looked after, chum,” was all he said.

The old R A hospital was greatly enlarged in order to cope with its new general functions. Entry was through an airlock, the hospital atmosphere being self-contained against external emergencies and slightly richer in oxygen than in the domes in order to promote feelings of well-being. Extensive new wards had been built and a nanotechnology centre added, where cell repair machines were housed.

I must confess to feeling nervous as I entered the doors. I was greeted warmly by the hospital personnel manager, Mary Fangold.

As we shook hands, her dark blue eyes scrutinised me with more than professional interest.

“You’re in good hands here, Tom Jefferies,” she said. “We are all admirers of your Utopian vision, which is carried out in our hospital as far as is possible. I hope to take care of you personally. We are treating only a few persistent sore-throat and eye cases at present.

“We regard those who are ill and enter here less as patients than as teachers who bring with them an opportunity for us to study and repair illness. Our progress is less towards health than towards rationality, which brings health.”

When I remarked that, despite her kind sentiments, the old, the ageing, would become a burden, she denied it. No, she said, the burdens of old age had been greatly exaggerated in former times. The old and experienced, the DOPs, cost very little. On Earth, many of them had savings that they gradually released after retirement on travel and suchlike. Thus they contributed to society and the economy. Their demands were much fewer than were those of the young.

I asked her if she was keen to return to Earth, to practise there.

She smiled, almost pityingly. Not at all, was her answer. “The elements in the formula have been reduced here to a manageable level.”

She was determined to remain on Mars in her interesting experimental situation, free of many diseases which plagued Earth, helping to bring about a Utopian phase of human life. For her money, we could remain cut off for good! Were not working and learning the great pleasures for anyone of rational intelligence?

She and a nurse conducted me to a ward-lounge, where we sat over coffdrink gazing out of windows that showed simulated views of beach, palm trees and blue ocean, where windsurfers rode the breakers.

Continuing her discourse, Mary said that it was the young who were expensive. Child benefits, constant supervision and education, health care, the devastations of drink and drugs, and—at least on Earth—crime, all formed major items in any nation’s financial regimen of expenditure. Contrary to the general consensus that children were a blessing, she maintained they were rather a curse; not only were they an expense, but they forced their parents to participate in a second childhood while rearing them. She regarded this as an irrational waste of years of young adulthood.

“It’s true,” I answered, “that most crime on Earth is committed by the young. Whereas, if I recall the statistic correctly, the over-seventies account for only 1.3 per cent of all arrests.”

“Yes. Mainly for dangerous driving, the occupational hazard of the age! Happily, we do not have that problem on Mars.”

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.