White Mars

20

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?”

“That’s not possible,” Souto answered and was echoed by several other voices.

“All right, smartarses, it was just a suggestion,” said Saybin tartly.

Dreiser said, “Just to make it clear, I can show you what we actually saw in our screens.”

A large 3vid hung in the air above the dais, as Dreiser projected it. The image was as severe as a text-book diagram. It showed, against the fuzzy grey background, a colourless blur that wavered before shooting up a step halfway along, then continuing on a straight horizontal course.

“The phase is the vertical,” Dreiser explained. “The horizontal is time. In this case, it’s something like 0.5 of a nanosecond from one side of the screen to the other. The step up is .□4 As you see, the signal is not at all clear. But the step function makes it plain that something passed through the ring from above to below. Otherwise the step would have been down by the same 4□. The oscillation before the step becomes more complex throughout our series of glitches.”

A silence fell over the proceedings.

The image faded from overhead.

Kathi spoke quietly from her seat, without getting up. “So you’re all off track. Forget the HIGMO question. The glitches are being caused by Chimborazo itself.”

Laughter came from some scientists as well as the audience.

“Chimborazo is causing the glitches,” repeated Kathi, as if the statement was made more understandable by being recast.

This time the laughter was more mocking.

“Let’s hear what the lady’s case is,” Dreiser interjected. “Give her a chance. What’s on your mind, Kathi?”

She flashed him a grateful look before standing to say, “Arnold Poulsen is experimenting to see whether his 16-hertz sound oscillations will cause people to be more conciliatory towards each other. As yet, he has nothing conclusive.

“Over the last few months, however, I have become convinced that we are experiencing a genuine improvement in personal relations. I notice the difference even in myself.” At this there was brief laughter.

“I’ve become equally convinced that this has nothing to do with Arnold’s experiment. Or, for that matter—sorry, Tom—with the Utopia effect. No, it’s Chimborazo working on us, the Watchtower of the Universe.” She paused to let this sink in, confronting her audience with arms akimbo.

“We know there is a powerful consciousness in that being. We get a CPS, and this has now been confirmed on an ordinary savvyometer, which we modified to accommodate an extremely low frequency range. Our rapidly advancing friend has plenty of awareness right enough!”

She paused as we all took a deep breath at that.

“We know too—or we think we do—that Chimborazo is a symbiotic and epiphytic being; all its component life forms have learned to cooperate rather than compete. That strong cohesive influence appears to work satisfactorily.

“I do not think it would be at all surprising if this ‘influence’, whatever it is, has had its effect on our own human conscious behaviour. We know that quantum effects can hold over great distances. Quantum entanglements between photons have been observed to stretch over a hundred thousand kilometres at least. Probably there is no limit.”

“Sounds to me like fifteenth-century mysticism,” remarked Thorgeson. “The Will of God.”

“Well,” Kathi said challengingly, in something like her old style, “so what does that prove? Not all fifteenth-century mystics were fools!”

Dreiser, ignoring this exchange, said to Kathi. “You talk about your Chimborazo—if I’m forced to use that label—having a powerful consciousness. Would you care to clarify that for us?”

Several of the men sitting behind him showed signs of discontent. They evidently did not like the respect Dreiser—the great Dreiser Hawkwood—paid this newcomer.

Once he had given Kathi the floor, she went happily on.

“Well, we still aren’t sure about consciousness. It’s a riddle awaiting solution. The CPS device is simply a passive detector, much as a Geiger counter used to register radioactivity. It does not in any way alter consciousness. It registers the presence of consciousness by the effect of consciousness on a quantum state-reduction phenomenon—let’s say on some coherent quantum superposition involving a large number of calcium ions.

“What we do know is that consciousness in an entity can detectably affect the reduction of a quantum state, and can be affected by it. That’s how a mentatrope works, after all. The quantum superposition in a mentatrope is influenced by the presence of consciousness as well as influencing consciousness. So it’s not at all unreasonable that consciousness might affect the quantum coherence in our superfluid ring.”

Willa Mendanadum spoke from the audience. “Excuse me, Kathi, but a mentatrope contains no superfluid. The quantum superposition is between different calcium ion displacements. It’s much the same as the superpositions of electron displacements in a quantputer.”

“I’m aware of that,” Kathi replied. “But no quantputer gives a reading on a mentatrope. The organisation of calcium ions in a mentatrope is of a completely different character from that in a quantputer—much more like the superfluid in our ring, where the total mass involved begins to be significant.”

Willa was adamant. Her slight figure seemed to vibrate with scorn. “Sorry, Kathi, I know you’re bidding fair to be a guru and all that, but there is absolutely no evidence of any similarity between this ring and a mentatrope. The scale’s completely different, for one thing. The geometry is different. The materials are different. The purposes are different.”

“But—”

“Let me finish, please. I must make the point that there is absolutely no evidence that the proximity of a conscious human being has any effect whatsoever on the functioning of the ring. In fact, as I understand it, the argon 36 in the ring’s superfluid is geared specifically to detect the monopole gravitational effects of a HIGMO—not of a brainwave!”

Kathi seemed unmoved. She said, “We don’t know what the appropriate quantum superposition parameters are for Chimborazo. Chimborazo is built on an entirely different scale from us humans. Very possibly it has the ability to tune its own internal mental activities so as to relate specifically to the ring.”

“Absurd!” exclaimed Jimmy Gonzales Dust from the back row of boffins.

She turned to him, saying mildly, “Absurd, is it? For an alien intellect twenty-five kilometres high? How dare we presume to suggest its limitations?”

“But you are speculating wildly,” Jimmy protested.

“I’d say that at this juncture, a little wild speculation is in order,” Dreiser said. “Continue, Kathi.”

“My speculation is based on fact, by the way,” Kathi said, with something of her old tartness in her voice. I remembered her fondness for correcting those who were basically on her side. What her relationship was with Dreiser was difficult to guess. “We know that a mentatrope works, but not why. The discovery of the Reynaud-Damien effect was an accident. The implication was that consciousness has a subtle influence on the reduction of a quantum state.”

“I don’t accept that, Kathi,” Jimmy said, cutting in. “However, one result of the French guys’ researches was the development of a CPS detector.”

Her eyes flashed irritation, but she said with disarming mildness, “And the CPS detector led to the development of the mentatrope for psychiatric purposes. Thanks for your contribution, Jimmy. At least we do know that a mentatrope has something in common with the ring, In each case the important element is a quantum state-reduction phenomenon. I’ve looked into the history of the subject. You people, like Jimmy here, are too sunk in ring-technology to remember where it all comes from.”

Jimmy broke in indignantly. “We all know about quantum state-reduction. That was sorted out early this century with the definitive Walter Heitelman experiment.”

Kathi studied him for a moment, gave a brief nod, smiled, and said, changing tack, “And there were some ideas put forth last century, suggesting various possible connections between consciousness and quantum state-reduction. They all petered out because of lack of experimental confirmation, in most cases because of a direct conflict with observation. But the general idea itself still remains, at least in principle. There were heated discussions in the scientific literature, most of it forgotten.

“I’d say that if you put these ideas together—bearing in mind that the glitches in the ring are indeed state-reduction effects—there’s a plausible case for a connection between the ring glitches we’ve recorded and Chimborazo’s consciousness.”

Thorgeson gave a curt laugh. “You’ll be telling us next that the ring will reveal ‘a soul’.”

“Souls are even harder to define than consciousness. But, after all—why not?”

Clapping his hands, Dreiser interposed. “The next obvious move is to perform a mentatropic examination of the ring. I agree with Kathi that these glitches we’ve been observing imply that the Watcher of the Universe has already transferred some ‘consciousness effects’ to the ring. We must find out if that is the case.

“And, by the way, this notion that the ring is ‘pregnant’ or ‘getting ready to conceive’ is just a silly joke—which Jimmy probably started!

“We do not yet understand the powers of Chimborazo. We have discussed this endlessly, and think the life form is probably benign and even defensive. Its collective mind may be immensely powerful. Maybe it could wipe out all our minds with one blast of directed thought; but shelled animals are generally pacific, if terrestrial examples are anything to go by.” He paused to let this sink in.

“One explanation for its camouflage may be that it long ago sensed other consciousnesses on Earth—even across the great matrix distances separating the two planets—and was fearful. Despite its great bulk, it concealed itself as best it could.”

Someone in the audience asked what Dreiser would do if it was found that the ring was acquiring elements of consciousness.

He stroked his little moustache thoughtfully before answering. “If that does turn out to be the case, we’ll have to rethink the whole Smudge experiment. To turn off the refrigeration would be tantamount to murder. Or, let’s say, abortion … It might also be dangerous with Chimborazo towering above us! It’s a dilemma…

“The ring would no longer be a viable tool in the search for the Omega Smudge. The UN authorities, supposing they still exist, would not be happy about that. On the other hand, we would stand on the brink of another great discovery. We would be on the way to understanding what consciousness is all about—what causes it, sustains it…”

Kathi had a word to add. “Just to respond to Charles Bondi’s earlier remark. Of course, if the ring were to be kept going, there could never be any terraforming permitted…”

My thoughts were so overwhelmed by speculation that I could not sleep. I was walking down East Spider (late Dyson Street) in dim-out, when the unexpected happened. Two masked men jumped from the shadows, armed with either pick helves or baseball bats or similar weapons.

“This is for you, you bloody titox, for ruining religion and normal human life!” one shouted as they pitched into me. I managed to strike one of them in the face. The other caught me a blow across the base of my skull. I fell.

I seemed to fall for ever.

When I roused, I was in the hospital again, being wheeled along a corridor. I tried to speak but could not.

Cang Hai and Alpha were waiting for me. Alpha was sitting on the floor, watching her mother bounce a ball again and again against the wall. I saw how Cang was still something of a child, using the excuse of her daughter to play childishly. She stopped the bouncing rather guiltily, scooped Alpha up in her arms, and approached me.

“My dear little daughter,” I tried to say.

“You need rest, Tom, dear. You’ll be okay and we’ll be here.”

Mary Fangold came briskly along, said hello to Alpha and directed my carriage into a small room, talking meanwhile, ignoring Cang Hai. The room became full of tiny specks of light, towards which I seemed to float.

With an effort I roused, to see Cang Hai close by. A spark of anger showed in her eyes. She said, determinedly and loudly, “Anyhow, as I was saying, my Other in Chengdu told me of a dream. An orchestra was playing—”

“Perhaps we’d better leave Mr. Jefferies alone just now,” said Mary, sweetly. “He needs quiet. He will be fully restored in a day or so.”

“I’ll go soon enough, thank you. You could use that symphony orchestra as a symbol of cooperative evolution. Many men and women, all with differing lives and problems, and many different instruments—they manage to sublimate their individualities to make beautiful harmony. But in this dream, they were playing in a field and eating a meal at the same time. Don’t ask me how.”

“Would you like a shower, Mr. Jefferies?” Mary asked. I gestured to her to let Cang Hai rattle on for a moment.

“And you see, Tom, I thought about the first ever restaurant—no doubt it was outdoors—which opened in China centuries ago. It was a cooperative act making for happiness. You had to trust strangers enough to eat with them. And you had to eat food cooked by a cook who maybe you couldn’t see, trusting that it was not poisoned … Wasn’t that restaurant a huge step forward in social evolution…?”

“Really, thank you, I think we’ve had enough of your dreams, dear,” said Mary Fangold.

“Who’s this rude lady, Mumma?” Alpha asked.

“Nobody really, my chick,” said Cang Hai and marched indignantly from the room.

I managed to say goodbye after she had gone. My head was clearing. Mary looked sternly down at me and said, “You’re delivered into my care again, Tom!” She suppressed a joyous laugh, pressing her fingers to her lips. “I hope all this irrational chatter did not disturb you. Your adopted daughter seems to have the notion that she is in touch with someone in—where was it? Chengdu?”

“I too have my doubts about her phantom friend. But it makes her rather lonely life happier.”

Wheeling me forward, she tapped my name into the registry. “Mmm, same ward as before…”

She gave me a winning smile. “There I have to disagree with you. We must try to banish the irrational from our lives. You have fallen victim to the irrational. We need so much to be governed by reason. Most of your gallant efforts are directed towards that end.”

She wagged her finger at me. “You really mustn’t make private exceptions. That’s not the right route to a perfect world.

“But there, it’s not for me to lecture you!”

The attack on me had shattered a vertebra at the top of my spine. The nanobots replaced it with an artificially grown bone-substitute. But a nerve had been damaged that, it appeared, was beyond repair, at least within the limited resources of our hospital.

I stayed for ten days, in that ward I had so recently left, to enjoy once more Mary’s pleasant brand of physiotherapy. I lived for those hours when we were in bed together.

Perhaps all ideas of Utopia were based on that sort of closeness. In the dark I thought of George Orwell’s dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell set forth there his idea of Utopia: a shabby room, in which he could be alone with a girl…

Mary looked seriously at me. “When your assailants are captured, I have drugs in my pharmaceutical armoury that will ensure they never do anything thuggish again…” She nodded reassuringly. “As we agree, we want no prisons here. As my captive, you naturally want me to keep you happy.”

“Passionately I want it,” I said. We kissed then, passionately.

I practised walking with my arm on a nurse’s arm. My balance was always to be uncertain; from then on, I found it convenient to walk with a stick.

I rested one further day in hospital. As I was leaving its doors, Mary bid me farewell. “Go and continue your excellent work, my dear Tom. Do not trouble your mind by seeking revenge on those who attacked you. Their reason failed them. They must fear a rational society; but their kind are already becoming obsolete.”

“I’m not so sure of that, Mary. What kind are we?”

Laughing, she clucked in a motherly way and squeezed my arm. She was her professional self, and on duty.

Suddenly she embraced me. “I love you, Tom! Forgive me. You’re our prophet! We shall soon live,” she said, “into an epoch of pure reason.”

I thought, as I hobbled back to Cang Hai with my stick, of that wonderful satire of Jonathan Swift’s, popularly known as Gulliver’s Travels, and of the fourth book where Gulliver journeys among the cold, uninteresting, indifferent children of reason, the Houyhnhnms.

If our carefully planned new way of life bred such a species, we would be entering on chilly and sunless territory.

Where would Mary’s love be in those days?

Yet would not that rather bloodless life of reason be better than the world of the bludgeon, the old unregenerate world, continually ravaged by war and its degradations in one region or another? My father, whose altruism I had inherited, had left his home country to serve as a doctor in the eastern Adriatic, among the poor in the coastal town of Splon. There he set up a clinic. In that clinic, he treated all alike, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant.

My father believed that the West, with its spirit of enquiry, was moving towards an age of reason, however faltering was its progress.

In Splon I passed many years of my boyhood, unaffected by the poverty surrounding us, ranging free in the mountains behind the town. My elder sister, Patricia, was my great friend and ally, a big-hearted girl with an insatiable curiosity about nature. We used to swim through the currents of our stretch of sea to gain a small island called Isplan. Here Pat and I used to pretend to be shipwrecked, as if in prodromoic rehearsal for being stranded on another planet.

Civil war broke out in the country when I was nine years old, in 2024. My father and mother refused to leave with other foreign nationals. They were blind to danger, seeing it as their duty to stay and serve the innocent people of Splon. However, they sent Pat away to safety, to live with an aunt. For a while, I missed her greatly.

Civil war is a cancer. The innocent people of Splon took sides and began to kill and torture each other. Their pretext was that they were being treated unfairly and demanded only social justice, but behind this veneer of reasonable argument, calculated to dull their consciences and win them sympathy abroad, lay a mindless cruelty, a wish to destroy those whose religious beliefs they did not share.

They set about destroying not merely the vulnerable living bodies of their former neighbours, the new enemies, but their enemies’ homes as well, together with anything of historic or aesthetic worth.

The bridge over the River Splo was one of the few examples of local architecture worthy of preservation. Built by the Ottomans five centuries earlier, it had featured on the holiday brochures distributed by the tourist office. People came from all over the world to enjoy the graceful parabola of Splon’s old bridge.

As tanks gathered in the mountains behind the town, as an ancient warship appeared offshore, as mortars and artillery were dug in along the road to town, that famous Splo Bridge was available for target practice. It fell soon, its rubble and dust cascading into the Splo.

The enemy made no attempt to enter the town. Their soldiers loitered smoking and boozing some metres down the road. They laid cowardly siege to Splon, setting about destroying it, not for any strategic purpose but merely because they had hatred and shells to spare.

Anyone trying to escape from Splon was liable to capture. As prisoners, they suffered barbaric torture. Women were raped and mutilated. Children were raped and used as target practice.

Occasionally, one such captive, broken, was allowed to crawl back to Splon to give a report on these barbarities, in order that the fear and tension of the starving inhabitants might be increased. Often such survivors died in my father’s little surgery, beyond his aid.

The great organisations of the Western world stood back and watched dismayed at the slaughter on their TV screens. In truth they were puzzled as to how to quell civil war, where the will to fight and die was so strong and the reason for the struggle so hard to comprehend.

During that year of siege we lived for the most part in cellars. Sanitation was improvised. Food was scarce. I would venture out with my friend Milos under cover of darkness to fish off the harbour wall. More than once hidden snipers fired at us, so that we had to crawl to safety.

Starvation came early to Splon, followed by disease. To bury the dead in the rocky soil, exposed to snipers on all sides, was not easy—a hasty business at best. I spent some days away from the town, lying in long grass, trying to kill a rabbit with a stone from a catapult. Once, when I returned, triumphant, with a dead animal for the pot, it was to find my mother dying of cholera. My sorrow and guilt haunt me still.

I can never forget my father’s cries of misery and remorse. He howled like a dog over mother’s dead body.

Exhaustion set in among the struggling factions. The war finally petered out. Days came when no shells were fired at us.

A party of the enemy arrived in a truck, waving white flags, to announce an armistice. The leader of the party was a smartly uniformed captain, wearing incongruous white gloves. Quite a young man, but already bemedalled.

It was the chance our men had waited for. They rushed the truck. They set upon the soldiers with rifles and knives and bayonets, and carved up the party, all but the captain, into bloody pieces. They rubbed the face of one man into the broken glass from the vehicle’s windscreen. They set fire to the truck. I stood in the broken street, watching the massacre, enjoying it, thrilling to the screams of those about to die. It was like a movie, like one of my Biker stories.

The captain was dragged into a burned-out factory down the road. He was stripped of his gloves and his uniform, made naked. Some of Splon’s women were allowed—or encouraged—to hack off his testicles and penis and ram them into his mouth. They beat him to death with iron bars.

I was curious to see what was going on in the burned-out factory. A man stopped me from entering. Other boys got in. They told me about the atrocity afterwards.

Next day, a Red Cross truck rolled into town. My father and I were evacuated. My father had lost his will to live, dying in his sleep some weeks later. That was in a hospital in the German city of Mannheim.

While I was laid low in hospital these past memories returned vividly to mind. I was forced to relive them as I had rarely done before. In fear of the horrors of that awful period, I recognised my strong desire for a better ordered society, and for a time and place where reason reigned secure.

Mary and I sat up in bed. She listened sympathetically as I told my tale. Tears, pure and clear, escaped from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

Perhaps the riddle of Olympus had brought on my horrors. The mood under that vast carapace could be one of regret, rage even, at the way the life forms had had to imprison themselves in order to survive as the old free life died. A billion years of rage and regret…?

Several visitors came while I was recovering. They included Benazir Bahudur, the silent teacher of children.

She said, “Until you recover fully your ability to move, dear Tom, I will dance for you to remind you of movement.”

She danced a dance very similar to the one I had watched once before. In her long skirt, with her bare arms, she performed her dance of step and gesture, as supple and subtle as deep water. Life is like this and this. There is so much to be enjoyed…

It was beautiful and immensely touching. “You manage to dance without music,” I said.

“Oh, I hear the music very clearly. It comes through my feet, not my ears.”

Another welcome visitor was Kathi Skadmorr. She slouched in wearing her Now overalls and perched on the end of the bed, smiling. “So this is where Utopias end—in a hospital bed!”

“Some begin here. You do a lot of thinking. I was thinking of dystopias. Presumably you think about quantum physics and consciousness all the time…”

She frowned. “Don’t be silly, Tom. I also think a lot about sex, although I never perform it. In fact, I spend much time sitting in the lotus position staring at a blank white wall. That’s something I learned from you lot. It seems to help. And I also recall ‘I saw a new heaven and a new Earth: for the first heaven and the first Earth were passed away.’ Isn’t that what you Christians say?”

“I’m not a Christian, Kathi, and doubt whether the guy who wrote those words was either.”

She leaned forward. “Of course I am fascinated by scientific theory—but only because I would like to get beyond it. The blank white wall is a marvellous thing. It looks at me. It asks me why I exist. It asks me what my conscious mind is doing. Why it’s doing it. It asks if there are whole subjects the scientists of our day cannot touch. Maybe daren’t touch.”

I asked her if she meant the paranormal.

“Oh, the way you use that label. Tom, dearest, my hero, your adopted daughter whom you so neglect—she has inexplicable, paranormal, experiences all the time.

They’re part of her normal life. Nobody can account for them. We need to reconceptualise our thought, as you have reconceptualised society. Stop clinging to frigid reason.

“Chimborazo is a million times stranger than Cang Hai’s world, yet we think we can account for it within science, can accommodate it within our perceptual Umwelt. Yet all the time it’s performing miracles. Turning a sack of superfluid into a conscious entity … That’s a miracle worthy of Jesus Christ. Yet Dreiser doesn’t turn a hair of his moustache …

“Anyhow, I must be going. I just called to bring you this little present.” From a pocket of her overalls she produced a photocube. In it a complex coil slowly revolved, its strands studded with seedlike dots. I held it up to the light and asked her what it was.

“They’ve analysed one of the exteroceptors they hacked off Chimborazo. This is just an enlarged snippet of its version of a DNA structure. You see how greatly it is more complex than human DNA? Four strands needed to hold its inheritance. The doubled double helix.”

When I was up and about I went to see Choihosla again, this time taking the trouble to knock at his door. We talked these matters over. I even ventured to speculate whether mankind was experiencing a million years of regret that it had achieved consciousness, with the burdens that accompanied it.

“We all suffer on occasions from the dark soul of the night,” he said.

“You mean the dark night of the soul, Youssef.”

“No, no. Look outside! I mean the dark soul of the night.”

Was it the old quirky sage, George Bernard Shaw, who had said that Utopia had been achieved only on paper? Perhaps it had been achieved too in Steve Rollins’s simulation. The people in his quantputer went about their business without feeling, without any sense of tomorrow, being subject to Steve’s team’s supervision. Not a sparrow fell without proper computation. An enviable state?

It was time to get to work again.

I called the advisers of Adminex to me. The date was the first day of Month Ten, 2071.

“Hello!” Dayo said, seeing me with my stick for the first time. “What’s happened to you?”

“The human condition,” I told him.

It was necessary to set about drawing up a constitution for our community. We needed to have the best possible way of life memorialised and, as far as might be, made clear to all.

The Adminex meeting was well attended. Clearly the external threat—if threat it was—from Chimborazo had served to excite our intelligence, if not to unite us. Only once before had so many people attended our forums, when Dreiser had addressed us. They gathered under the doomed Hindenburg and sat there quietly. By now, I thought with affection, I knew all of their faces and most of their names, these creatures of a human Olympus.

A late arrival at our discussion was Arnold Poulsen, who came by jo-jo car. It was a long while since I had seen him; he so rarely entered our forums. He sat now, his hands clasped between his knees, his long pale hair straggling about his face, saying nothing, contributing nothing but his presence.

Because I had been away I knew that things had moved on, and I anticipated argument and opposition. But even Feneloni seemed to have undergone a change of mind.

Speaking slowly, he said, “I must put aside my reservations regarding your creation of a better and just society. I felt the wisdom of your judgement while I was shut away, and it seems to have had its bearing on my change of mind. While it’s true I long to get back to Earth, that’s no reason to create difficulties here. I can’t exactly bring myself to back you, but I won’t oppose you.”

We shook hands. Our listeners applauded briefly.

Crispin Barcunda was present with Belle Rivers. She was looking younger and dressing differently, although she still strung herself about with rock crystal beads. It was noticeable how affectionately she and Crispin regarded each other.

“Well, well, Tom Jefferies, you will turn us yet into a pack of coenobitic monks,” Crispin said, in his usual jocular fashion. “But your declaration of Utopia, or whatever you call it, must not be padded out with your prejudices. If you recall the passage I quoted, to the benefit of everyone, from the good Alfred Wallace’s Malay Archipelago, he states that a natural sense of justice seems to be inherent in every man.

“That may not be quite the case. Perhaps it was stated merely in the fire of Victorian optimism—a fire that has long since burned itself out. However, Belle and I believe that a natural sense of religion is inherent in every man. Sometimes it’s unrealised until trouble comes. Then people start believing all over again in the power of prayer.

“The little nondenominational church we set up has been well attended ever since we learned about Olympus—Chimborazo, I mean—and its movements.

“We are well aware that you are against religion and the concept of God. However, our teaching experience convinces us that religion is an evolutionary instinct, and should be allowed in your Utopia—to which we are otherwise prepared to subscribe. We need you, as chief law-giver, to realise there must be laws that go against your wishes, as there will be some laws contrary to everyone’s wishes. Otherwise there will be no reality, and the laws will fail.”

Belle now turned the power of her regard on me and reinforced what Crispin had said. Tom, our children need guidance on religion, as they do on sex and other matters. It’s useless to deny something exists just because you don’t like it, as we once denied there was life on Mars because it made us feel a bit safer. You have seen and heard the kids with their tammies—a nuisance to us maybe, but seemingly necessary to them. You must listen too to the squeaks of the godly.

“If we are to live rational lives, then we must accept that there are certain existential matters beyond our understanding—for the present at least, and maybe always and for ever.

“It is certainly no perversion to feel a reverence for life, for the miracle of it, for the world and for the universe. Doesn’t the discovery of Chimborazo increase our wonder? Into such reverence the idea of God slips easily. Our minds are not quantputers. They work in contradictory ways at one and the same time. It’s for this reason we sometimes seem at odds with ourselves.”

While listening intently I nevertheless noticed at this moment a fleeting smile on the face of Poulsen, who had sat motionless, not shifting his position, making no comment.

Belle was continuing. “Those most vehement against established religion are often proved to be those most attracted to its comforts. We exist at the heart of a complexity for which any human laws we promulgate must seem flimsy, even transitory.

“There was a time when it was bold to take up an anti-religious stance. That time is past. Now we see that religion has played an integral role in our evolution. It has been a worldwide phenomenon for many centuries, and—”

At which point Dayo broke in, sawing the air with one hand, saying, “Look, Missis Belle, slavery too was a worldwide phenomenon for many centuries. It still exists Downstairs! Millions of people were snatched from West Africa to serve the white races in the New World—twenty-five million people snatched from East Africa by Islamic traders in one century alone. I have the figures!

“Slavery isn’t done away with yet. Always it’s the rich and powerful against the poor and powerless! That doesn’t mean to say we don’t need to banish slavery—or religion. Or that these terrible things are good, just because they’re old, does it? Antiquity is no excuse. We’re trying to reform these horrible blemishes on existence.”

Dayo received a round of applause. A look of delight filled his face. He could not stop beaming.

Belle gave Dayo a nod and a tigerish smile, while seeming to continue her monologue uninterruptedly.

“Life for all generations, more particularly in the dim and distant past, has been filled with injustice, fear, injury, illness and death. God is a consolation, a mediator, a judge, a stern father, a supreme power, ordering what seems like disorder. For many, God—or the gods—are a daily necessity, an extra dimension.

“We like, in our Christian inheritance, to think that God made us in His image. It’s more certain that we made Him in our image.

“And where does that image live? Beyond matrix, beyond time, beyond space-time. Was it intuition that dreamed up such a place, which scientists now believe might exist?”

“You make,” I replied, “religion sound like a unitary matter. In its many sects, in fact, it has proved divisive throughout Earth’s history, a perennial cause of war and bloodshed.”

“But we are creating Mars’s history now,” said Crispin, smiling and allowing a glimpse of his gold tooth, while Belle, scowling radiantly, said, “Tom, let me quote a phrase Oliver Cromwell once used: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken!’”

I let myself be persuaded by their eloquence. “As long as you don’t start sacrificing goats,” I said.

“Heavens,” Crispin said. “Just show me a Martian goat!”

The discussion then turned to other subjects, on which agreement was reached with unique ease, and—with everyone’s assistance—Adminex accordingly drew up and put on record our laws.

As Arnold Poulsen was about to depart as silently as he had come, I caught his sleeve and asked him what he made of the debate.

“Despite wide divergence of opinion, you were agreeable together, and so able to come to an agreeable conclusion. Did you not find that a little unexpected?” He brushed his hair back from his forehead and scrutinised me narrowly.

“Arnold, you are being oblique. What are you saying?”

“From my childhood,” he said, in his high voice, “I recall a phrase expressing unanimity: ‘Their hearts beat as one’. Perhaps you agree that seemed to be the state of affairs here just now. Even Feneloni was amenable to a point…”

“Supposing it to be so, what follows?”

He paused, clutching his mouth in a momentary gesture, as if to prevent what it would say. “Tom, we have difficulties enough here, Upstairs. You have difficulties enough, trying to resolve the ambiguities of human conduct by sweet reason.”

“Well?”

Smiling, he sat down again and, with a gesture, invited me to sit by him as the hall was clearing. He then proceeded to remind me of the extract from Wallace’s Malay Archipelago that Crispin Barcunda—“very usefully’, as Poulsen put it—had read to the company. Poulsen had thought about the passage for a long while. Why should a community of people, those islanders characterised by Wallace as “savages’, live freely without all the quarrels that afflicted the Western world? Without, indeed, the struggle for existence? Such utopianism could not be achieved by intellect and reason alone.

Was there an underlying physical reason for the unity of these so-called savages? Arnold said he had set his quantputer to analysing the known factors. Results indicated that the communities Wallace referred to were small, in size not unlike our stranded Martian community. It was not impossible to suppose—and here, he said, he had consulted the hospital authorities, including Mary Fangold—that one effect of isolation and proximity was that heartbeats synchronised, just as women sleeping in dormitories all menstruated at the same time of the month.

On Mars we presented a case of all hearts beating as one.

The result of which was an unconscious sense of unity, even unanimity.

Poulsen had established a small research group within the scientific community. Kathi had referred to it. To be brief, the group had decided that an oscillating wave of some kind might serve as a sort of drumbeat to assist synchronisation. In the end, adapting some of Mary Fangold’s spare equipment, they had produced and broadcast a soundwave below audibility levels. That is to say, they had filled the domes with an infrasound drumbeat below a frequency of 16 hertz.

“You tried this experiment without consulting anyone?” I demanded.

“We consulted each other.” He spoke in the light, rather amused tone into which he frequently slipped. “We knew there would be protests from the generality, as there always are when anything new is introduced.”

“But what was the result of your experiment?”

Arnold Poulsen laid a thin hand on my shoulder, saying, “Oh, we’ve been running the beat for six days now. You saw the benevolent results in our discussion. All hearts beat as one. Science has delivered your Utopia to you, Tom … The human mind has been set free.”

I didn’t believe him. Nor did I argue with him.

Later, when I was lying with Mary, I told her of what Poulsen claimed to have done, for his pride in scientific ingenuity had irritated me. “To claim that an oscillating wave brought about our Utopia, instead of our own endeavours—why, you might as well claim that God did it…”

She was silent. Then she said, almost in a whisper, “I don’t want to sound unreasonable, but perhaps all those things conspired together…”

I kissed her lips: it was a better course than argument.