Brian Aldiss - White Mars

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.