Brian Aldiss - White Mars

Everything happened simultaneously, in an instant of time.

The aim of the Art of Imagination colloquium was to revive in adults that innocent imagination lost with childhood (although children also enjoyed the programme and gave much to it).

“I know the Sun isn’t necessarily square. I just like it better that way.” This remark by an eight-year-old, as comment on his strange painting, Me and My Universe, was later embodied in a large multimedia canvas hung at the entrance of the Art of Imagination Department (previously Immigration).

There were those who attended this colloquium who were initially unable to seize on the fact that they were alive and on Mars. So obnubilated were their imaginations they could not grasp the wonder of reality. They needed a metaphorical sense to be restored to them. In many cases, it was restored.

Then they rejoiced and congratulated themselves that they were Upstairs.

To our regret, the scientists in the main kept to their own quarters, a short distance from the domes. It was not that they were aloof. They claimed to be too busy with research.

I accompanied Tom to the station when he went to talk privately with Dreiser Hawkwood. A woman who announced herself as Dreiser’s personal assistant asked us to wait in a small anteroom. We could hear Dreiser growling in his office. Tom was impatient until we were admitted to his presence by this same assistant.

Dreiser Hawkwood was a darkly semi-handsome man, with the look of one who has bitten deep into the apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Indeed, I thought, noticing that his teeth protruded slightly under his moustache, he might have snagged them on its core. He was much preoccupied with the fact that the paper substitute was running out.

“Predictions are for amusement only,” he said. “When computers came into general use, there was a prediction that paper would be a thing of the past. Far from it. High-tech weaponry systems, for instance, require plenty of documentation. US Navy cruisers used to go to sea loaded with twenty-eight tonnes of manuals. Enough to sink a battleship!”

He jerked his head towards the overloaded bookshelves behind him, from which manuals threatened to spill.

Tom asked him what he was working on.

“Poulsen and I are trying to rejig the programme that controls all our internal weather. It’s wasteful of energy and we could use the computer power for better things.”

He continued with a technical exposition of how the current programme might be revised, which I did not follow. The two men talked for some while. The scientists were still expecting to find a HIGMO.

Regarding the science quarters rather as an outpost, I was astonished to see how well the room we were in was furnished, with real chairs rather than the collapsible ones used in the domes. Symphonic music played at a low level; I thought I recognised Penderecki. On the walls were star charts, an animated reproduction of a late-period Kandinsky and a cut-away diagram of an American-made MP500 sub-machine gun.

The personal assistant had her own desk in one corner of the room. She was blonde and in her thirties, wearing a green dress rather than our fairly standard coveralls.

At the sight of that dress I was overcome with jealousy. I recognised it as made from cloth of the old kind, which wore out, and so was expensive, almost exclusive. The rest of us wore costumes fabricated from Now (the acronym of Non-Ovine Wool), which never wore out. Now clothes fitted our bodies, being made of a semi-sentient synthetic that renewed itself, given a brush occasionally with fluid. Now clothes were cheap. But that dress…

When she caught my gaze, the personal assistant flashed a smile. She moved restlessly about the room, shifting paper and mugs, while I sat mutely by Tom’s side.

Tom said, “Dreiser, I came over to ask for your presence and support at our debates. But I have something more serious to talk about. What are these white strips that rise from the regolith and slick back into it? Are they living things?” He referred to the tongues (as I thought of them) we had encountered on our way over to the unit. “Or is this a system you have installed?”

“You think they are living?” asked Dreiser, looking hard at Tom.

“What else, if they are not a part of your systems?”

“I thought you had established that there was no life on Mars.”

“You know the situation. We’ve found no life. But these strips aren’t a mere geological manifestation.”

Hawkwood said nothing. He looked at me as if willing me to speak. I said nothing.

He pushed his chair back, rose, and went over to a locker on the far side of the room. Tom studiously looked at the ceiling. I noticed Dreiser pat the bottom of his assistant as he passed her. She gave a smug little smile.

He returned with a hologram of some of the tongues, which Tom studied.

“This tells me very little,” he said. “Are they a life form, or part of one, or what?”

Dreiser merely shrugged.

Tom said that he had never expected to find life on Mars, or anywhere else; the path of evolution from mere chemicals to intelligence required too many special conditions.

“My student, Skadmorr, seems to believe we’re being haunted by a disembodied consciousness or something similar,” Dreiser remarked. “Aborigine people know about such matters, don’t they?”

“Kathi’s not an Aborigine,” I said.

Tom took what he regarded as an optimistic view, that the development of cosmic awareness in humankind marked an unrepeatable evolutionary pattern; humankind was the sole repository of higher consciousness in the galaxy. Our future destiny was to go out and disperse, to become the eye and mind of the universe. Why not? The universe was strange enough for such things to happen.

Dreiser remained taciturn and stroked his moustache.

“Hence my hopes of building a just society here,” said Tom. “We have to improve our behaviour before we go out into the stars.”

“Well, we don’t quite know what we’ve got here,” replied Hawkwood, after a pause, seemingly ignoring Tom’s remark. He thumped the hologram. “With regard to this phenomenon, at least it appears not to be hostile.”

“It? You mean they?”

“No, I mean it. The strips work as a team. I wish to god we were better armed. Oxyacetylene welders are about our most formidable weapon…”

As we started the drive back to the domes, Tom said, “Uncommunicative bastard.” He became unusually silent. He broke that silence to say, “We’d better keep quiet about these strips until the scientists find out more about them. We don’t want to alarm people unnecessarily.”

He gave me a grim and searching look.

“Why are scientists so secretive?” I asked.

He shook his head without replying.

Some malcontents rejected everything offered them in the way of enlightenment, so impatient were they to return to Earth. They formed an action group, led by two brothers of mixed nationality, Abel and Jarvis Feneloni. Abel was the more powerful of the two, a brawny games player who had done his community service in an engineering department on Luna. Jarvis fancied himself as an amateur politician. Their family had lived on an Hawaiian island, where Jarvis had been one of a vulcanism team.

Expeditions outside the domes to the surface of Mars were strictly limited, in order to conserve oxygen and water. The Fenelonis, however, had a plan. One noontime, they, and four other men, broke the rules and rode out in a commandeered buggy. With them they took cylinders of hydrogen from a locked store.

A certain amount of hardware littered the area of Amazonis near the domes. Among the litter stood a small EUPACUS ferry, the “Clarke Connector’, abandoned when the giant international confederation had collapsed.