Brian Aldiss - White Mars

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?