WHITE MARS (15 page)

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.

Cang Hai's Account

9

Improving the Individual

In hospital I learned to walk with my artificial leg. At first it had no feeling; cartilage growth was slow. Now the nerves were growing back and connecting, giving a not unpleasant fizzy sensation. When I was allowed out of hospital for an hour at a time, I took a stroll through the domes, feeling my muscle tone rapidly return.

Attempts had been made to brighten the atmosphere of our enforced home while I had been out of action. The jo-jo buses were being repainted in bright colours; some were decorated with fantastic figures, such as the 'Mars dragon'.

Glass division walls were tanks containing living fish, gliding like sunlit spaceships in their narrow prisons. The flowering trees recently planted along the main avenues were doing well. More Astroturf had been planted. Between the trees flitted macaws and parrots, bright of plumage, genetically adapted to sing sweetly.

I liked the birds, knowing they had been cloned.

Inspired by these improvements, I tried to brighten Tom's spartan quarters.

When I was fit enough to rejoin my fellows, I found more confidence in myself, perhaps as a result of my friendship with Kathi.

So a year passed, and still we remained isolated on Mars.

Our society was composed as follows. There were 412 non-visitors or cadre (all those who were conducting scientific experiments, technicians, 'carers', managers, and others employed permanently on Mars before the EUPACUS crash), together with their children. This number comprised 196 women, 170 men and 46 children, ranging in age from a few months to fifteen years old, plus 62 babies under six months. Of the 2,025 DOPs, 1,405 were men and 620 women, and of the 3,420 YEAs, 2,071 were men and 1,349 women. A visiting inspection team consisted of 9 medics (5 women and 4 men) and 30 flight technicians (28 men and 2 women).

Thus the total population of Mars in
ad
2064 was 5,958.

To which it must be added that two carers, two DOP women and 361 of the YEA women (about one-quarter of them) were pregnant. The population of the planet was, in other words, due to increase by about 6 per cent within the next six months.

This caused some alarm and much discussion. Blame went flying about, mainly from the DOPs, although as a group they were not entirely blameless. A pharmacist came forward to admit that the pharmacy, which was housed in the R&A hospital, had run out of anti-conception pills, having been unprepared for the EUPACUS crash and the cessation of regular supplies of pharmaceuticals.

After this revelation some DOPs suggested that young people use restraint in their sexual lives. The suggestion was not well received, not least because many couples had discovered that sex held an additional piquancy and that an act of intercourse could be sustained for longer, in the lighter Martian gravity. Nevertheless worries were expressed concerning the extra demands on water and oxygen supplies that the babies would exert.

I tried to commune with my shaded half in Chengdu. My message was: 'Once more, the spectre of overpopulation is raising its head - on an almost empty planet!' It was puzzling to receive in return an image of a barren moorland covered in what seemed to be a layer of snow.

As I tried to peer at this snow cover, it resolved itself into a great white flock of geese. The geese bestirred themselves and took to the air. They flew round and round in tight formation, their wings making a noise like the beating of a leather gong. The ground had disappeared beneath them.