Brian Aldiss - White Mars

“Money, finance, has come increasingly to dominate every facet of life on Earth, particularly the lives of those people who have least, who are at the bottom of a wasps’ nest of economics. How can we claim that all men are equal when on every level inequalities exist?

“It became a shibboleth in the twentieth century that maximum economic growth would resolve human problems. Earning power outweighed social need, as the quest for greater profit failed to count the cost in civilised living.

“One way in which this happened was in the dismantling of welfare provisions, such as health care, pensions, child benefit, unemployment allowances.”

Mary Fangold interrupted. She stood tall and proud.

“Tom, I have been thankful to live on Mars, having to watch terrestrial affairs go from bad to worse. Perhaps the people there don’t notice the decline. The dismantling of welfare provisions of which you speak has deepened a well of worldwide poverty. One result is an increase in many infectious diseases.

“We all know smallpox returned with the pandemic of about ten years ago. Cholera is rampant in the Pacrim countries. Many contagious diseases once thought all but vanished early in the century have returned. Fortunately those diseases do not reach Mars.”

“Sit down then!” someone shouted.

Mary looked towards the interruption. “Bad manners evidently have travelled. I am making a reasonable point and will not be deflected.

“I would like everyone here to realise how fortunate we are. The encouraging medical statistics put out by terrestrial authorities are often drawn from the Megarich class, who of course have their own private hospitals, and whose orderly records make them easy subjects for study.

“There is at present a serious outbreak of multiple drug resistance, notably of VRE, or vancomycin-resistant-enterococci, particularly in the ICUs in public hospitals. This is caused in part by the over-employment of antibiotics, while the synthesis of new and effective antibiotics has been falling off. Many thousands of people are dying as a result. Hundreds of thousands. Intensive Care Units are breaking down everywhere on Earth.

“A cordon sanitary exists between Earth and Mars. Because of the long journey time, anyone who happens to be carrying VRE or any virus or infective disease—not, alas, cancer, or any malfunctioning cellular illness”—here she glanced sympathetically at me—“will have recovered from the disease or have died from it. People do die in their cryogenic caskets en route, you know. Perhaps that statement surprises you. We try to keep it quiet.

“So all you YEAs and DOPs, do not wish the journey to take a shorter time. We are fairly safe from terrestrial disease. And that, to my mind, counts for more on the plus side than these dreary negatives we are listening to.”

For her speech Fangold was applauded. She gave me a glance, half apology, half smile, as she sat down.

I could only agree about the dreary negatives, and called a break for lunch.

As usual, we all sat at long communal tables. We were served with vegetable soup, so-called, followed by a synthetic salami stew, accompanied by bread and margarine.

Discussion ran up and down the table. Several voices were raised in anger. Aktau Badawi asked me what I was going to say about Market Domination. “Is this about multinationals?”

“Not really. We all know about the biggest of the lot, EUPACUS, which has stranded us here.

“Downstairs, on Earth, work became an overriding imperative for those in whom poverty and unemployment had not become ingrained. The family mealtime, often rather better than what we are getting now, where families talked and argued and laughed and ate in a mannerly way together, fell victim to the work ethic at an early stage. Fast food was often eaten while preparing to leave for work, at work, or in the streets. There was no mingling of the generations, such as we have here in Amazonis Planitia, no conversation. At least we have that,” I said, pushing my plate aside.

“If jobs were not available locally, then the worker must go elsewhere. In the United States of America, this was no great hardship; it was already a pretty rootless society, and the various states made provision for people to move from one state to another. Elsewhere, the hunt for jobs can mean exile—sometimes years of exile.”

Aktau Badawi said, in his halting English, “My family is from Iran. My father has a big family. He has no employ. His brother—his own brother—was his enemy. He travels far to get a job in the Humifridge plant in Trieste, on a distant sea, where they make some units for the fridge wagons. After a two-year, we never hear from him. Never again. So I must care for my brothers.

“I am like Kissorian has said, second brother. I go north. I work in Denmark. Is many thousand kilometres from my dear home. I see that Denmark is a decent country, with many fair laws. But I live in one room. What can I do? For I send all my monies to home.

“Then I do not hear from them. Maybe they all get killed. I cannot tell, despite I write the authorities. My heart breaks. Also my temper. So I rather do the community year in Uganda in Africa. Then I come here, to Mars. Here I hope for fairness. And maybe a girl to love me.”

He hung his head, embarrassed to have spoken so openly. May Porter, a technician from the observatory, sitting next to him, patted his arm.

“Labour markets require high mobility, no doubt of that,” she said. “Careers can count very low in human values.”

“Human values?!” exclaimed Badawi. “I don’t know its meaning until I listen today to the discussions. I wish for human values very much.”

“Another thing,” said Suung Saybin. “Food warehouses dominate cities because, once a machinery of supply is established, it is hard to stop. Small shops are forced out by competition. Their closure leads to social disorder and the malfunction of cities. The bigger the city, the worse this effect.”

A little Dravidian whose name I never learned broke in here, saying, “There is always the excuse given by pharmaceutical manufacturers. They profit greatly from the sale of fertilisers and pesticides that further decimate wildlife, including the birds. My country now has no birds. These horrible companies claim that improved crop yields are necessary. This is one of their lies. World food production is more than sufficient to feed a second planet! There are 1.5 billion hungry people in the world of today, many of them personally known to me. Their problem is not so much the lack of food as lack of the income with which to purchase food already available elsewhere.”

Dick Harrison agreed. “Don’t by this imagine we’re talking only of starving India, or of Central Asia, forever unable to grow its own food. The most technologically advanced state, the United States, has forty million people on the breadline—forty million, in the world’s largest producer of food! I should know. I came from New Jersey to Mars to get a good meal…”

After the laughter died, I continued.

“The all consuming machinery of greater and greater production entails deregulation of worker safety laws and health provisions. In our lifetimes we have seen economic competition increasing between states. They must grow monstrous to survive, as trees grow to eclipse a neighbour with their shade. So bad capitalist states drive out good, as we see in South America. Greater profits, greater general discomfort.”

At this point, I was unwilling to continue, but my audience waited in silence and expectancy.

“Come on, let’s hear the worst,” Willa Mendanadum, the slender young mentatropist from Java, called down the table.

“Okay. The three concealed discomforts we have mentioned occasion much of the unhappiness suffered by terrestrial populations. They form the undercurrents behind the headlines. Where remedies are applied only to the headline troubles—capital punishment for murder, private insurance for accident, abortion for unwanted babies—they do little good. They merely increase the burdens of life.