White Mars

8

Meanwhile our humdrum lives in the domes were continuing, but I at least was filled with optimism regarding our plans, which ripened day by day.

Adminex circulated our findings on the Ambient and published them on impounded EUPACUS printers. We emphasised that people must be clear on what was acceptable. We invited suggestions for guiding principles.

We suggested a common meeting for discussion in Hindenburg every morning, which anyone might attend.

We placed a high priority on tolerance and the cultivation of empathy.

We concluded by saying, What Cannot be Avoided Must Be Endured.

I received a message back on my Ambient link, saying, “Be practical, will you? We need more toilets, boss. What cannot be endured must be avoided.” I recognised Beau Stephens’s voice.

In those days, I became too busy to think about myself. There was much to organise. Yet some things organised themselves. Among them, sport and music.

I was jo-joing back from the new hospital wing when I saw the freshly invented game of skyball being played in the sports arena. I stopped to watch. Aktau Badawi was with me.

Skyball was a team game played with two balls the size of footballs. One ball, painted blue, was half filled with helium so that, when kicked into the air, its descent was slow. Play could continue only when the blue ball was in the air. Grouping and positioning went on while it was descending. The blue ball could not be handled, unlike the other ball, which was brown.

“Thankfully, we are too old to play, Tom,” said Aktau.

A young man turned from the watching crowd and offered to explain the subtleties of the game to us.

We laughingly said we did not wish to know. We would never play.

“Nor would I,” the man said, “but I in fact invented the blue ball in honour of our lighter gravity. My name is Guenz Kanli, and I wish to speak to you about another innovation I have in mind.”

He fell in with us and we walked back to my office.

Guenz Kanli had a curious physiognomy. The flesh of his face seemed not to fit well over his skull, which came to a peak at the rear. This strange-looking man came from Kazakstan in Central Asia. He was a YEA who, at twenty years of age, had fallen in love with the desolation of the Martian landscape. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks so mottled with tiny veins they resembled an indecipherable map.

He lived at the top of one of our spicules, which gave him a good outlook on the Martian surface. He described it in eloquent terms.

“It’s all so variable. The wispy clouds take strange forms. You could watch them all day. There are fogs, and I have seen tiny snow falls—or maybe frost it was. The desert can be white or grey or almost black, or brown, or even bright orange in the sun.

Then there are many kinds of dust storm, from little dust devils to massive storms like avalanches.

“None of this can we touch. It’s like a form of music to me. You teach people to look inward on themselves, Tom Jefferies. Maybe looking outward is good too.

“We need more of a special music. It exists already, part sad, part joyful.

“If I may, I will take you to hear the wonderful Beza this evening.”

Guenz Kanli was enthusiastic to a remarkable degree, which was perhaps what commended him to me in the first place. I dreaded that a mood of irreversible depression would descend on us if the ships did not soon return.

That evening, we went to hear Beza play.

I was seized with Guenz’s idea, although I never entirely saw the connection, as he did, between Beza’s gipsy music and the Martian landscape.

There was always music playing somewhere in the domes—classical, jazz, popular, or something in between. But, from that evening on, one of our favourite musicians was Beza, an old Romanian gypsy. I persuaded the leading YEAs to listen—Kissorian, May Porter, Suung Saybin, and others. They were taken by it, and from then on Beza was in fashion.

Beza had been elected as DOP—rather against his wish, we gathered—by a remote community in the Transylvanian highlands.

To see Beza during the day, sitting miserable and round-shouldered at the Mars Bar or a cafe table, wearing his floppy off-white tunic, you would wonder what such a poor old fellow was doing on Mars. But when he took up his violin and began to play — bashavav, to play the fiddle—his real stature became apparent.

His dark eyes gleamed through his lank grey hair, his stance was that of a youngster, and the music he played—well, I can only say that it was magic, and so compelling that men ceased their conversation with women to listen. Guenz sometimes took up his fiddle too and played counterpoint.

With the fiddle at his chin and his bow dancing, Beza could play all night. His music was drawn from a deep well of the past, like wine flowing from centuries of slavery and wandering, rising from the pit of the brain, from the fibres of the body. These tunes were what is meant when music is said to be the first of all human arts.

A time dawned when Guenz’s theory that this was the true music of Mars became real to me. I wondered how it had come into being before Mars had ever been thought of as a place for habitation.

After I had listened to Beza I would lie in bed, wide awake, trying to recreate his music in my head. It always eluded me. A slow sad lassu, with its notes long drawn out, would be followed by a sprightly friss, light and airy as a stroll along an avenue, which then broke into the wild exhilaration of the czardas. Then, quite suddenly, sorrow again, driving into the heart.

I must admit I learned these foreign terms from Guenz, or from Beza himself. But Beza was a silent man. His fiddle spoke for him.

Beza’s music was so popular that it became subject to plagiarism. In a small classical quintet was an ambitious Nigerian, Dayo Obantuji. He played the violin adequately, and the quintet was a success, perhaps because Dayo was something of a show-off. He liked to leap to his feet to play solos and generally appear energetic.

The quintet became less popular while Beza’s music was still the rage.

Dayo was also a composer. He introduced a piece, a rather elegant sonata in B flat major, which he christened “The Musician”.

After “The Musician” had been played several times, Guenz became suspicious. He made a public denunciation of the fact that much of the sonata, transposed into another key and with altered tempo, was based on a piece that Beza played.

Dayo strongly denied the accusation.

When Beza was brought into an improvised court as a witness in this case of plagarism, he would only laugh and say, “Let the boy take this theme. It is not mine. It hangs in the air. Let him play with it—he can only make it worse.”

There the matter was dropped. But “The Musician” was not played again.

Instead Dayo came to me and complained that he was the victim of racism. Why had this unfair charge been brought, if not because he was black? I pointed out that although Beza was himself of a minority—indeed a minority of one—he was almost the most popular man in Mars City. I said I felt strongly that racism had no place on the planet. We were all Martians now. Dayo must be mistaken.

Angrily, Dayo asserted that I was denying what was obvious. He had been disgraced by the accusation. His name had not been properly cleared. He was the victim of injustice.

A long argument ensued. Finally Guenz was brought in. He also denied prejudice. He had found an echo of Beza’s music in Dayo’s piece. It was hardly surprising, but there it was. However, he had been convinced that the similarity was accidental, so powerful was Beza’s influence. He was content to believe that Dayo’s name had been cleared. And he apologised graciously, if rather playfully, for having made the charge in the first place.

Dayo again asserted he had been victimised. He burst into angry tears.

“Oh dear, the blue ball is in the air again,” said Guenz.

Then Dayo changed tack. He admitted that he had stolen the theme from Beza’s music, having been unable to get it out of his head.

“I admit it. I’m guilty as hell. You lot are guilty too. Okay, you show no racial prejudice against Beza and the Orientals, but you are prejudiced against us blacks. You secretly don’t believe we’re good for anything, though you’ll never admit it. I’m quite a good musician, but still I’m a black musician, not just a musician. Isn’t that the case?

“My compositions were not appreciated. Not until I took that Romanian tune and transcribed it. Didn’t Brahms do the same sort of thing? What’s wrong with it? I altered it, made it my own, didn’t I? But just because I was black, you picked on me.”

“Perhaps the mistake was,” said Guenz, mildly, “not to label the piece ‘Romanian Rhapsody’—to acknowledge the borrowing. Then you’d have been praised for your cleverness.”

But Dayo insisted that he would merely have been accused of stealing.

“I meant no harm. I only wished to raise my status. But if you’re black you’re always in trouble, whichever way you turn.”

He went off in dejection.

Tom and Guenz looked at each other in dismay.

Then Guenz broke into a laugh. “It’s you whites who are to blame for everything, including getting us here,” he said.

“My instinct is to legislate. But what could legislation do in a case like this? How might one word it? Can I ask you, Guenz, do you feel yourself racially discriminated against, as a Central Asian?”

“It has sometimes proved to be an advantage, because it had some slight novelty value. That’s worn off. There was a time when people were suspicious of my foreignness, but that is in-built, a survival trait. I was equally suspicious of you whites. Still am, to a degree.”

They discussed whether they had any extra in-built discrimination against the Nigerian, Dayo. Had they expected him to “get away” with something? Had the dismal past history of white victimisation of blacks anything to do with it? Was there a superstitious mistrust of “black” as a colour, as there might be of left-handedness?

These were questions they could not answer. They had to conclude it might be the case. Certainly, they would be wary if a traditional green Martian appeared in their midst.

They could only hope that such atavistic responses would die away as rational men of all colours mixed.

We could only hope that the colour question would fade away, united as we were by a common concern regarding survival and in perfecting our society. However, the matter was to arise again later, and in a more serious case.

During this period, I consulted with many people, delegating duties where it was possible to do so. Many people also came to my office to deliver advice or complaint. One of these visitors was a rather lacklustre-looking young YEA scientist. He announced himself as Chad Chester.

“Maybe you know my name as the guy who went down into the water caves off Marineris with Kathi Skadmorr. I guess I didn’t make a great showing compared with her.”

“Not many of us do. What can I do for you?”

Chad explained that he had listened to my lecture on the five obstacles to contentment on Earth. He noted that at one point I had referred to the slogan, “All men are equal”. He was sure this saying embodied a mistaken assumption; he never thought of himself as equal to Kathi, for example. That experience in the caves had led him to put down his thoughts on paper. He felt that “All men are equal” should not be used in any Utopian declaration we might make, for reasons he had tried to argue.

When he had gone I set Chad’s paper aside. I looked at it two days later.

His argument was that the very saying was self-denying, since it mentioned only men and not women. It was meaningless to pretend that men and women were equal; they were certainly similar in many ways, but the divergence between them made the question of being equal (except possibly in law) irrelevant. Furthermore, the diversity of the genetic code meant a different inheritance of capacities even within a family.

“All men are equal” held an implication that all could compete equally; that also was untrue. A musician may have no capacity for business. A nuclear physicist may be unable to build a bridge. And so forth, for several pages.

He suggested that a better slogan would be, “All men and women must be allowed equal opportunities to fulfil their lives.”

I liked the idea, although it had not the economy, the snap, of the original it replaced. I wondered about “All dudes are different.”

Any such sloganeering boiled down to one thing. It was important to have maximum latitude to express ourselves within the necessarily confining rules of our new society. Someone mentioned the dragon that earlier YEAs had painted on the rock face; they emphasised the way in which it had caused alarm, being unexpected. Yet creativity must continue to produce the unexpected or the community would perish. Although latitude was needed, it was generally accepted that our society had to operate within prescribed rules.

Creativity we needed, but not stupidity and ignorance.

We had begun to discuss education when a slightly built and handsome young woman with dark hair came forward. She poured out from the pockets of her overalls on to a central table a number of gleaming objects, various in shape.

“Before you speak of any orderly society, you’d better be aware,” she said, “that Mars is already occupied by a higher form of life. They carved these beautiful objects and then, evidently dissatisfied with them, cast them away.”

The room was in an uproar. Everyone was eager to examine the exquisite shapes, seemingly made of glass. Some appeared to be roughly shaped translucent models of small elephants, snails, labias and phalluses, puppy dogs, hippopotami, boulders, coproliths, and hedgehogs. All were bright and pleasant to the touch.

The faces of those who picked up the objects were full of alarm. Always at the back of our minds had been the suspicion that the yet almost unexplored planet might somehow, against all reason, harbour life.

The young woman allowed the drama of the situation she had created to sink in before saying, loudly, “I’m an areologist. I’ve been working alone in the uplands for a week. Don’t worry! These are pieces of rock crystal, chemical formula SiO₂. They’re just translucent quartz, created by nature.”

A howl mingled with dismay and approbation rose.

The young woman said with a laugh, “Oh, I thought I’d just give you a scare while you were making up all these rules to live by.”

I persuaded her to sit by me while the crowd reassembled. She was lively and restless. Her name was Sharon Singh, she told me. She was half-English, half-Indian, and had spent much of her young life in the terrestrial tropics.

“You can’t find Mars particularly congenial,” I remarked.

She gave a wriggle. “Oh, it’s an adventure. Unlike you, I do not intend to live here for ever. Besides, there are many idle and eager men here who enjoy a little romance. That’s one of the real meanings of life, isn’t it? Mine is a romantic nature…” She flashed a smile at me, then regarded me more seriously. “What are you thinking?”

I could not tell her, saying instead, “I was thinking that we can sell these pretty rock crystal objects for souvenirs when matrix traffic resumes.”

Sharon Singh uttered a rather scornful laugh, momentarily showing her pretty white teeth. “Some things are not for sale!” She gave her wriggle again.

That night, I could not sleep. The smile, those dark eyes fringed by dense lashes, the carelessness, the wriggle—they filled my mind. All my serious contemplations were gone, together with my resolves. I thought—well, I thought that I would follow Sharon Singh to Earth, and gladly, if need be. That I would give anything for a night with her in my arms.

In order to sublimate my desire for Sharon Singh, I made a point of talking personally to as many men and women as possible, sounding out their opinions and gathering an impression of their feelings towards our situation and the practicalities of living decently.

My quantcomp rang as I was going down K.S. Robinson. A woman’s voice requested an appointment. In another half-hour, I found myself confronting Willa Mendanadum and her large companion, Vera White. I saw them in my small office. With Vera in her large flowing lilac robes, the room was pretty full.

Willa had a commanding voice, Vera a tiny one.

“As you will no doubt be aware, Vera and I are mentatropists,” said Willa. “While we support your wish to form a Utopian society, we have to tell you that such is an impossibility.”

“How so?” I asked, not best pleased by her haughty manner.

“Because of the contradictory nature of mankind in general and individuals in particular. We think we desire order and calm, but the autonomous nervous system requires some disorder and excitement.”

“Is it not exciting enough just to be on Mars?”

She said sternly, “Why, certainly not. We don’t even have the catharsis of S V movies to watch.”

Seeing my slight puzzlement, Vera said in her high voice, “Sex and Violence, Mr. Jefferies, Sex and Violence.” She spread ‘violence’ out into its three component syllables.

“So you consider Utopia a hopeless project?”

“Unless…”

“Unless?” Vera White drew herself up to her full girth. “A full course of mentatropy for all personnel.”

“Including all the scientists,” added Willa in her deepest tone.

They departed in full sail when I thanked them for their offer and said Adminex would consider it.

Kissorian came in and exclaimed that I looked taken aback. “I’ve just met some mentatropists,” I said.

He laughed. “Oh, the Willa-Vera Composite!” And so they became known.

We did not forget—at least in those early days—that we constituted a mere pimple on the face of Mars, that grim and dusty planet that remained there, uncompromising, aloof. Despite the reinforcements of modern science, our position was best described as precarious.

The static nature of the world on which we found ourselves weighed heavily on many minds, especially those of delicate sensibility. The surface of Mars had remained stable, immovable, dead, throughout eons of its history. Compared with its restless neighbour from which we had come, Mars’s tectonic history was one of locked immobility. It was a world without oceans or mountain chains, its most prominent feature being the Tharsis Shield, that peculiar gravitic anomaly, together with the unique feature of Olympus Mons.

Emerging from the hectic affairs of the third planet, many people viewed this long continued stillness with horror. For them it was as if they had become locked into one of the tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. This obsessive form of isolation became known as areophobia.

A group of young psychurgists was called before Adminex to deal with the worst afflicted cases. Some of them had earlier reproached me for the thirty-one suicides, saying their services, had they been called into action, would have saved the precious lives. I found among them an enormous respect for the Willa-Vera Composite; clearly the mentatropy duo were not the figures of fun I had taken them for. Psychurgy itself had developed from a combination of the old psychotherapy and more recent genome research; whereas mentatropy, embodying a new understanding of the brain and consciousness, was a much more hands-on approach to mental problems.

The psychurgists reported that sufferers from areophobia endured a conflict of ideas: with a fear of total isolation went a terror that something living but alien would make its sudden appearance. It was a new version of the stress of the unknown, which disappeared after counselling—and, of course, after a reassurance that Mars was a dead world, without the possibility of life.

For this fear of alien beings I felt that Mr. H.G. Wells and his followers were much to blame. The point I attempted to make was that Mars’s role in human thought had been benevolent and scientific—in a word, rational.

To this end, I persuaded Charles Bondi to give an address. Although he regarded my attempts to regulate society as a waste of time, he responded readily enough to deliver an exposition of Mars’s place in humanity’s progressive thought.

His speech concluded: “The great Johannes Kepler’s study of the orbital motions of the body on which we find ourselves yielded the three laws of planetary motion. Space travel has come to be based on Kepler’s laws. The name of Kepler will always remain honoured for those brilliant calculations, as well as for his wish to reduce to sense what had previously been muddle.

“If we are to remain long enough on Mars, our eccentric friend here, Thomas Jefferies, will try to perform a feat equivalent in sociological terms to Kepler’s, reducing to regulation what has always been a tangle of conflicting patterns of behaviour from which, to my mind, creativity has sprung.”

Bondi could not resist that final dig at me.

Yes, ours was an ambitious task. I saw, as he did not, that it could be accomplished because we were a small population, and one which, as it happened, had been self-selected for its social awareness.

During one debate the Ukrainian Muslim YEA named Youssef Choihosla rose and declared that we were all wasting our time. He said that whatever rules of conduct we drew up, even those to which we had readily given universal consent, we would break; such was the nature of mankind.

He was continuing in this vein when a woman of distinguished appearance spoke up to ask him cuttingly if he considered we should have no rules?

Choihosla paused. And if we were to have rules, pursued the woman, pressing home her advantage and looking increasingly majestic, was it not wise to discover what the best rules were and then try to abide by them?

The Ukrainian became defensive. He had spent his year of community service, he claimed, working in an asylum for the mentally deranged in Sarajevo. He had experienced terrible things there. He believed as a result that what Carl Jung called “the shadow” would always manifest itself. It was therefore useless to hope to establish even a mockery of a Utopia. You could not pump morality into a system to which it was not indigenous. (A year or two later, interestingly, he would put forward a much more positive viewpoint.)

Several voices attempted to answer him. The woman who had previously spoken quelled them with her clear firm tones. Her name was Belle Rivers. She was the headmistress in charge of the cadre children, semi-permanently stationed on Mars.

“Why is there a need for laws, you ask? Are laws not present in all societies, to guard against human ‘shadows’? As scientific people, we are aware that the human body is a museum of its phylogenetic history. Our psyches too are immensely old; their roots lie in times before we could claim the name of human. Only our individual minds belong to ontology, and they are transient. It is the creatures—our archetypes, Jung calls them—that reside in the unconscious, like your shadow, which act as prompts to the behaviour of the human species.

“The archetypes live in an inner world, where the pulse of time throbs at a drowsy pace, scarcely heeding the birth and death of individuals. Their nature is strange: when they broke into the conscious minds of your patients in Sarajevo, they undoubtedly would have precipitated psychosis. Your psychurgists will tell you as much.

“But we moderns know these things. The archetypes have been familiar to us for more than a century. Instead of fearing them, of trying to repress them, we should come to terms with them. That means coming to terms with ourselves.

“I believe that we must draw up our rules firmly and without fear, in acknowledgement of our conscious wishes. I also regard it as healthy that we acknowledge our unconscious wishes.

“I therefore propose that every seventh day be given over to bacchanalia, when ordinary rules of conduct are suspended.”

My glance went at once to the bench where Sharon Singh lounged. She was gazing serenely at the roof, the long fingers of one hand tapping gently on the rail of her seat. She was calm while much shouting and calls for order continued round her.

An old unkempt man rose to speak. He had once been Governor of the Seychelles; his name was Crispin Barcunda. We had spoken often. I enjoyed his quiet sense of humour. When he laughed a gold tooth sparkled briefly like a secret signal.

“This charming lady puts forward a perfectly workable idea,” he said, attempting to smooth down his mop of white hair. “Why not have the odd bacchanalia now and again? No one on Earth need know. We’re private, here on Mars, aren’t we?”

This suggestion was put forward in a droll manner so that people laughed. Crispin continued more seriously. “It is curious, is it not, that before we have established our laws, there should be what sounds like rather a popular proposal to abolish them every seventh day? However welcome the throwing off of restraints, dangers follow from it … Is the day after one of these bacchanalias to be declared a mopping-up day? A bandaging-of-broken-heads day? A day of broken vows and tears and quarrels?”

Immediately, people were standing up and shouting. A cry of “Don’t try to legislate our sex lives” was widely taken up.

Crispin Barcunda appeared unmoved. When the noise died slightly, he spoke again.

“Since we are getting out of hand, I will attempt to read to you, to calm you all down.”

While he was speaking, Barcunda produced from the pocket of his overalls a worn leather-bound book.

As he opened it, he said, “I brought this book with me on the journey here, in case I woke up when we were only three months out from Earth and needed something to read. It is written by a man I greatly admire, Alfred Russell Wallace, one of those later-borns our friend Hal Kissorian mentioned in his remarkable contribution the other day.

“Wallace’s book, by the way, is called The Malay Archipelago. I believe it has something valuable to offer us on Mars.”

Barcunda proceeded to read: “‘I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the village freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a community, all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide distinctions, of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the product of our civilisation; there is none of that wide-spread division of labour, which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilized countries inevitably creates.

“‘All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his neighbour’s right which seems to be, in some degree, inherent in every race of man.’”

Snapping the book shut, Barcunda said, “Mr. Chairman, my vote is that we have but one law: Thou shalt not compete!”

A YEA immediately shouted, “That’s all very well for you DOPs. We young men have to compete—there aren’t enough women for all of us!”

Again I looked towards Sharon Singh.

She was examining her nails, as if remote from intellectual discussion.

After the session closed, I talked with Barcunda. We had a coffdrink together. His pleasant personality came across very clearly. I said that it was unfortunate we were not in as favourable a position as Wallace’s savages.

He replied that our situations were surprisingly similar, sunshine deficiency apart.

Our work was not labour, our food was adequate, and we had few possessions.

And we had a benefit the savages of Wallace’s East could not lay claim to, which was the novelty of our situation: we were in a learning experience, isolated millions of miles from Earth.

“It is vitally important that we retain our good sense and good humour, and draw up an agenda for a just life quickly. We cannot secure total agreement, because the pleasure of some people is to disagree. What we require is a majority vote—and our agenda must not be seen to be drawn up merely by DOPs. That would give the young bucks among the YEAs an opportunity to challenge authority. They can’t go out into the jungle to wrestle with lions and gorillas to prove their manhood: they’d wrestle with us instead.”

He gestured and pulled a savage face to demonstrate his point.

“You can’t say I’m a very dictatorial chairman.”

“I can’t. But maybe they can. Take a day off, Tom. Hand over the chair to a young trouble-maker. Kissorian might be a good candidate, besides having such a fun name.”

“Kissorian goes by favour, eh?”

Looking at me poker-faced, Crispin said that he wanted legislation to improve the Martian brand of ersatz coffee. “Tom, joking apart, we are so fortunate as to have the bad luck to be stuck on Mars! We both see the survival of humanity on a planet on which we were not born as an extraordinary, a revolutionary, step.

“I must say I listened to your five bugbears with some impatience. I wanted you to get to the bugbear we have clearly escaped from: the entire systematic portrayal of sexuality and violence as desirable and of overwhelming importance. We no longer have these things pouring like running water from our television and Ambient screens. I fancy that deprived of this saccharine/strychnine drip, we can only improve morally.”

At the next meeting of Adminex (as always, televised for intercom and Ambient), we discussed this aspect of life: the constant projection of violence and sexual licence on media that imitated life. Both Kissorian and Barcunda were coopted on to the team. It was agreed—in some cases with reluctance—that most of us had been indoctrinated by the constant representation of personal assult and promiscuity on various screens, so as to accept such matters as an important part of life, or at least as a more dominant component of our subconscious minds than we were willing to admit to. In Barcunda’s elegant formulation: “If a man has an itch, he will scratch it, even when talking philosophy.”

Without pictorial representations of a gun and sex culture, there seemed a good chance that society might become less aggressive.

But Kissorian disagreed. “Sex is one thing, and violence quite another. Barcunda compounds them into one toxic dose by talking of the saccharine/strychnine drip. I agree that it’s really no loss that we do not have these activities depicted on TV here, but, believe me, we need sex. What else do we have? Everything else is in short supply. We certainly need sex. You speak as if there were something unnatural about it.”

Barcunda protested that he was not against sex, only constant and unnecessary depictions of its various activities.

“It’s a private thing,” he said, leaning across the table. “Showing it on the screen transforms a private thing into a public, a political, act. And so it muddies the deep waters of the spirit.”

Kissorian looked down his nose. “You DOPs had better realise that for the amount of screwing that goes on you’d think we were on Venus.”

Kathi Skadmorr’s activities as a speleologist had made her the hero of the hour. It was suggested at the end of the meeting that I should coopt her on to the Adminex, if only to make that body more popular. I agreed, but was not eager to have another confrontation with her on Ambient.

We continued our discussion of Crispin Barcunda’s saccharine/strychnine drip privately. One of the fundamental questions was whether love and sexuality would become more enjoyable if they retreated into being private things? Without constant representation visually in the media, would not a certain precious intimacy be restored to the act? But how to bring this thing about without censorship: that is, to influence public opinion so that ordinary persons who wished to do so could rid themselves of the poisonous drip, as they had in previous ages rid themselves of the enjoyments of cock-fighting, slavery and tobacco-smoking?

Crispin said, “You want to advance towards the betterment of mankind? Maybe it can be done, maybe not! But let’s have a try, Tom. After all, it gives our lives here an objective. Betterment means a break with the past—chop, like that!—not just a continuation of it, as would have been the case had the terraformers and realtors had their way. Maybe we can do it. But I’d be against any suspicion that sexuality and eroticism was not in itself one of mankind’s blessings. The older I get, and the more difficult sex gets, the more I become convinced it holds the meaning of any valued life.”

I could but agree. “We must try to influence minds. It is important—and not just for our little outpost here. We’re not going to be isolated for ever. Once EUPACUS or its successors have been reassembled, once the world economy has picked up, ships are going to be operating again.

“By that time, we must have our mini-utopia up and running. Just to be a shining example to Earth, to which most of us wish to return.”

“Then maybe on Earth, as in good old Wallace’s island community, the ideal might be reached, where each man scrupulously regards the rights of his fellow man.” As he spoke, Crispin gazed earnestly and short-sightedly into my eyes. “Like not shooting him or fucking his wife.”

He was a good man. Talking with him, I was convinced we could become a better, happier, humanity—without the pathetic need of saccharine/strychnine drips.

“Now you’d better go and coopt Skadmorr,” he said. “She’ll lower the average age of Adminex by a few years!”

I was up early next morning. Runners and the semi-flighted were already about in the streets, exercising. Although we had yet to solve the question of the Martian date line, we had solved the problem of dividing up the days and weeks. Mars’s axial rotation makes its day only sixty-nine minutes longer than Earth’s day. In the time of EUPACUS, an extra “hour” of sixty-nine minutes had been inserted to follow the hour of two in the morning. This was the “X” hour. The other hours conformed to the terrestrial twenty-four.

The innovation of the “X” hour meant that at first terrestrial watches had to be adjusted every day, until an ingenious young technician, Bill Abramson, made his reputation by inserting what he called “the ‘X’ trigger,” which suspended the momentum of watches and clocks for sixty-nine minutes every night, after which they continued working normally as before.

Since an hour is basically the way we measure our progress through the day, there were few complaints at this somewhat ad hoc arrangement. But it did mean that human activity restarted fairly early in the day.

Taking in the scene around me, I could only appreciate the change from the city on Earth I had left, with its gigantic byzantine structures housing thousands of people, walled in like bees in their cells with Ambient connections supplying many of their needs, the facades of these structures awash with pornographic images once sun had set. Below those great ragged skylines, below the coiling avenues, lived the impromptus, subsisting on the city’s grime, anaesthetised by the free porntrips overhead.

But here, under our low ceilings, was a more hygienic world, where coloured plastic ducts were running in parallel or diverging overhead, with jazzy patterns in rubber tiles below our feet and stylised lighting. Birds flew and called among the plant clusters at every intersection. It was at once more abstract and more human in scale than terrestrial cities. I recalled an exhibition I had attended in my home city hall of the paintings of an old twentieth-century artist, Hubert Rogers. Those visions of the future that had so inspired me as a young man were here realised. I recalled them with pleasure as I hopped on a jo-jo bus.

So it was just before six o’clock that I called on Mary Fangold at the hospital for a coffee. I liked to talk over events with this reasonable and attractive woman—and incidentally to visit my adopted daughter, whose implanted leg was now almost completely regenerated.

The first person I encountered was Kathi Skadmorr. She was striding out of the gym with a towel round her neck, looking the picture of health.

“Hi! I was watching your discussion of the prevalence of violent and sexual material. I thought you were talking sense for once.” She spoke in a friendly way, regarding me through those dark, lash-frilled eyes of hers. “What we usually do in private should remain private. Ain’t that what you were saying? It’s pretty simple really.”

“Bringing about the change is a problem, though. That’s not simple.”

“How about telling people to keep it quiet?”

“It’s better to get people’s consent rather than just telling them.”

“You could tell them, then get their consent. Remember the old saying, Tom: Once you get folk by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” She giggled.

“So what are you doing here, so early in the morning?”

“I came over from the science unit to see Cang Hai. Then I did an hour’s work-out. Are you visiting your daughter?”

“Um, yes. Yes, I am.”

She then asked me what I made of Cang Hai’s Other, her mental friend in Chengdu. I had to admit I had really not considered it. Her Other did not impinge on my life.

“Nor apparently does your daughter,” she said with a return to her earlier asperity. “She really loves you, you know that? I believe she has an unusual kind of consciousness, as I have. Her Other may be a kind of detached reflection of her own psyche. Or it may be a little encapsulated psyche within her own psyche, like a—a kind of cyst within her soul. I’m studying it.”

At this juncture, Mary appeared. She was direct as usual and told us to enter her office for coffee and a talk. “But it had better be a brief talk. Say twenty minutes at most. I have a lot to do today.”

As we sat down, I asked Kathi if her unusual kind of consciousness was also a “cyst within her soul”. I used her phrase.

“My consciousness embraces an external. It embraces Mars. It’s all to do with the life force. I’m a mystic, believe it or not. I’ve been down into the gullet, or maybe the vagina, of this planet, into its bladder. I have nothing but contempt for those thirty or however many it was who committed suicide here. They were prats. Good that they died! We don’t want people like that. We want people who are able to live beyond their own narrow lives.”

“They were all victims, cut off from their families,” Mary Fangold said.

“They didn’t do their families much good by killing themselves, did they?”

She crossed her long legs and sipped at the mug of coffdrink Mary had brought. Almost to herself, she said, “I thirst for what Tom proposed—the mind set free!”

Mary and I started to talk together, but Kathi cut us short, speaking eagerly. “You should get rid of all this flaunting of sex, as you say. Sex is just a recreation, after all, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Nothing to be obsessed about. Once you get it out of the way you can fill everyone’s minds with real valuable things, mental occupations. Without TV or the other distractions, we can be educated in science in all its branches. We must learn more, all of us. It’s urgent. ‘Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe’—you remember that saying? Education throughout life. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

Somehow I did not take that opportunity to invite her to join Adminex. I felt she might be too disruptive. However Kissorian asked her a few weeks later. Kathi turned down the offer, saying she was not a committee person. That we could well believe.

Kissorian had a piece of gossip too. He said Kathi was having a love affair—“frequently in the sack’, was his way of putting it—with Beau Stephens. We thought about that. Beau at this time showed little ambition, and was working on the jo-jos.

I realise that I have made little mention in this record of Cang Hai, who had attached herself to me. Certainly she is devoted, and it is hard not to return affection when it is offered without condition. She became increasingly useful to me, and was no fool.

Of course she was no substitute for Antonia.