WHITE MARS (21 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Only technology can free us from technology.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11

The Missing Smudge

In a rotation of jobs, I was allocated to the synthetic foods department. I preferred it to the biogas department. The smells were better. Here I helped in time to develop something which resembled a Danish pastry. We always glossed over the fact that our foods were created from everyone's manure. Nevertheless, my friends teased me about it.

One of my closest friends, Kathi Skadmorr, had adopted a teasing approach to me since I had danced naked before her and her lover. She rang me unexpectedly in serious vein and invited me on a short expedition to view what she called the 'Smudge experiment'. I was always ready to learn. Although baby Alpha was so small, I left her in the care of Paula Gallin for a few hours while I joined Kathi.

Behind the science unit, Amazonis sprawled brokenhearted under a layer of dusty colour which seemed to be sometimes pink, or rose, or sometimes orange. A swan's feather of cloud vapour overhead reflected these hues.

Kathi and I had suited up before leaving the science unit. As we walked along a netted way, where latticed posts supported overhead cables, a slight agoraphobia attacked me. I clutched Kathi's hand: she was more used to open spaces than I. Yet at the same time I found something closed about the Martian outdoors. Perhaps it was the scarcity of atmosphere; or perhaps it was the indoor feeling of dust lying everywhere, dust much older than ever dimmed the surface of a table back on Earth.

To our left, the ground rose towards the heights that would culminate in Olympus Mons. There, I caught movement out of the side of my eye. A small boulder, dislodged by the morning heat, rolled downhill a few metres, struck another rock, and became still. Again, it was a motionless world we walked through.

The horrors got at me. Was it wise to have brought Alpha into this world? Granted that it was passion rather than wisdom which fathered babies, yet I had experienced no passion. And supposing our fragile systems broke down... then the dread world of the unmoving would prevail over everything ... even over my dear baby. The past would snap back into place like the lid of a coffin.

As if she had read my thought, Kathi began talking about another kind of past, the past of a scientific obsession. She said I would see the latest produce of a line of research stretching back into the previous century.

'Dreiser is teaching me the history of particle physics. It begins before this century,' she told me. 'It's a tale of reasoning and unreasonable hopes. Last century, American physicists proposed to build a giant accelerator beneath the state of Texas. The accelerator was planned to measure many kilometres in diameter. They christened it a superconducting supercollider, SSC for short. The SSC was designed to detect what they referred to as the "Higgs particle". It would cost billions of tax-payers' money, and take an enormous chunk out of the science budget.

'This was the twentieth century's idea of Big Science.' She gave a sardonic chuckle. 'US Congress kept asking why anyone would think it legitimate to believe that so much money should go in a search for a single particle. After three billion dollars had been spent, the whole project was scrapped.'

I asked why it had been thought necessary to find this Higgs particle.

'The physicists who were searching for these basic ingredients which comprise the universe argued that finding the elusive Higgs would supply them with vital answers. It would complete their picture of the fundamental units.

They were like detectives seeking the solution of a mystery.

'The mystery remains. Hence the whole purpose of the Mars Omega Project. You might say the mystery is why we are here. The more deeply we probe nature, the clearer it becomes that these basic units have to be things without mass. There's the mystery - where does mass originate? Without mass, nothing would hold together. Our bodies would disintegrate, for instance.'

I could not help asking what the Higgs particle had to do with mass. Kathi replied that it was still unclear to her, but the physicists of the time had an idea in their heads that the highly symmetrical scheme of the universe would have that symmetry spoilt according to what they termed 'spontaneous symmetry breaking'. The Higgs was tied up with that idea.

'You see, for the pure unbroken scheme with exact symmetry, it was necessary to have all particles without mass. When Higgs enters the picture, everything changes. Most particles acquire mass. The photon is a notable exception.'

'I see. The Higgs was to be a kind of magic wand. As soon as it enters the stage, "Hey presto!" mass comes along.'

'A rhymester said it in a nutshell:

The particles were lighter far than gas.

Then Higgs weighs in, and all is mass.

'Because of this rather magical property, Higgs was christened by journalists "the God particle".'

'And the physicists of that time believed that the SSC would enable them to catch a glimpse of this God.' I found I had lost most of my fears and let go of Kathi's hand.

'According to the theory current at the time,' she said, 'there had to be a certain limited range of possibilities for the mass of the Higgs. Otherwise, there would be an inconsistency with other things which had already been established by experiment. The God particle must deign to live among its subjects, just as if it were an ordinary mortal massive particle.'

I had to ask her what she meant by that.

'In accord with Einstein's famous equation, E=mc
²
, the Higgs particle, it was believed, would correspond to a certain energy. That energy was supposed to lie within the range of what the SSC would have been capable of. But - the SSC was never built, as I have told you.

'As luck would have it, a rival project was already at the planning stage. This was at the international research centre, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.