Brian Aldiss - White Mars

“Then leave your monastery and lecture us on particle physics.”

“You might find it rather dull,” he said. Then he smiled. “It’s a good idea. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be in touch.”

At that stage, I did not realise how prophetic those words were.

We were waiting in the reception area for our buggybus to finish recharging. I started talking to the technician on duty, and asked her about the small white tongues we had seen outside the building.

“Oh, the Watchers? I can show you them on the monitors, if you like.”

I went behind her desk to take a look at the surveillance system. It clearly showed the white tongues, unmoving outside.

The technician flicked from screen to screen. The tongues surrounded the establishment. Behind them, Olympus Mons could be seen distantly, dominating its region.

“You get a clearer idea of them when I switch over to infrared,” said the technician, so doing.

I exclaimed in alarm. The tongues were no longer tongues. They reminded me, much more formidably, of gravestones I had seen in an old churchyard, tall and unmoving. They formed almost a solid wall about the establishment. It seemed they were covered in a kind of oily, scaly skin of a dull green colour. I asked if they were going to break in.

“They’re quite harmless. They don’t interfere. We think they’re observing. They don’t get in anyone’s way.”

As we looked, a maintenance engineer came into view on the screens, suited up and shouldering welding equipment. As if to confirm the duty technician’s words, the Watchers flicked back into the regolith and were gone, offering him no impediment. He moved out of view and the tongues at once returned.

I could not help feeling cold fear running through my body.

“So there is life on Mars,” I said.

“But not necessarily Martian life,” the technician said. “Sit down for a minute, pet. You look terribly pale. I’m only joking. There’s no life on Mars. We all know that.”

But jokes frequently hold bitter kernels of truth. Knowledge of the Watchers spread and caused alarm. But custom dulls the edge of many things. Whether alive or not, they made no hostile moves. We became used to their presence and finally ignored them.

After my return from Thorgeson and company, I told Kathi over the Ambient how impressed I was by Thorgeson’s intellect. She asked what he had said.

I tried to explain that he had claimed the consciousness of humanity, or of a species that might supersede us, was—what had he said?—an integral function of the universe.

She laughed scornfully. “Who do you think he got that idea from?” she asked.

After a silence, she said, “If we cannot behave in a better and more Utopian way, then we deserve to be superseded, don’t you think?”

I changed the subject and spoke about the tongues surrounding the science unit.

“Don’t worry,” she said lightly. “We shall find out their function in good time. Do you know about quantum state-reduction? No? I’m reading up about it now. It’s the collapse of the wave function, such as Schrodinger’s cat—you know all about Schrodinger’s cat, Cang Hai?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it.”

“Well then, the collapse of the wave function resolves the problem of that poor hypothetical quantum-superposed moggie. It becomes either a dead cat or a live cat, instead of being in a quantum superposition of both a dead and an alive cat.”

“I see … Is that better or worse for the cat?”

She scowled at me. “Don’t try to be funny, dear. Such quantum superpositions occur in the electron displacements in a quantcomp. The definitive experiments conducted by Heitelman early this century made it clear that state-reduction actually takes place when it is the internal gravitational influences that become significant. You see where this leads us?”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid I don’t, Kathi.”

“I’m working on it, babe!” With a cheery wave of its hand her image faded from view.

Sitting there vexed, I tried to understand what she was saying. The gravitational link puzzled me. On inspiration, I decided to Ambient Jon Thorgeson in the science unit.

An unfamiliar face came up in the globe. “Hi! I’m Jimmy Gonzales Dust, Jon’s buddy. We’re training for the marathon and he’s busy on the running machine. Can I help? He’s spoken to me about you. He thinks you’re cute.”

“Oh … Does he? Do you know anything about the—what do you call it? The gravitational … no … The magneto-gravitic anomaly? Have you any information about it?”

He looked hard at me. “We call it the M-gravitic anomaly.” He asked me why I was worrying. I said I didn’t really know. I was trying to learn some science.

Jimmy hesitated. “Keep this to yourself if I give you a shot from the upsat. There’s been a slight shift in the anomaly.”

The photograph he released came through the slot.

I stared at it. It was an aerial view of the Tharsis Shield from 60 miles up. The outline of Olympus Mons—or Chimborazo, to use Kathi’s name—could clearly be seen. Across the shot someone had scrawled with marker pen G-WSW + 0.13 0.

Why and how, I asked myself, should the anomaly have shifted? Why in that direction—in effect towards Arizonis Planitia and our position?

As I stared at the photo, I noticed furrowed regolith to the east of the skirts of Olympus. Kathi had pointed this furrowing out to me earlier. Now it seemed the furrowing was rather more extensive. I could not understand what it meant. In the end, I returned to my studies, not very pleased with myself. Cute? Me?!

The domes had become a great hive of talk. There were silent sessions by way of compensation. Sports periods were relatively quiet. Other colloquia concentrated on silence, and were conducted by the wooden tongue of a pair of clappers. Silence, meditation, walking in circles, sitting, all reinforced at once a sense of communality and individuality. Those who concentrated on these buddhistic exercises reported lowered cholesterol levels and a greater intensity of life.

Much later, these colloquia became the basis of Amazonis University.

Fornication evenings were a popular success. Masked partners met each other for karezza and oral arts under skilled tutors. Lying together without movement, they practiced inhalation, visual saturation and maryanning. Breath control as a technique for increasing pleasure was emphasised.

Breath control formed the entire subject of another colloquium. In a low-lit studio, practitioners sat in the lotus position and controlled ingoing and outgoing breaths while concentrating on the hara. Mounting concentrations of carbon dioxide in the blood led to periods of timeless “awayness” which, when achieved, were always regarded as of momentous value, leading to a fuller understanding of self.

This opening up of consciousness without the use of harmful drugs became highly regarded in our society, so that the breathing colloquium had to be supplemented by classes in pranayama. At first, pranayama was seen as exotic and “non-Western’, but, with the growing awareness that we were in fact no longer Western, pranayama became regarded as a Martian discipline.

Whether or not this concentration on the breath, entering by the nose, leaving by the mouth, was to be accounted for by our awareness that every molecule of oxygen had to be engineered, this discipline, in which over 55 per cent of our adults soon persevered, exerted a considerable calming effect, so that to the remoter regions of the mind the prospect of a tranquil and happy life no longer seemed unfamiliar.

“A better life needs no distraction…”

In all the colloquia, which rapidly established themselves, the relationship between teacher and taught was less sharp than usual. No one had a professional reputation to uphold; it was not unknown for a teacher to exclaim to a bright pupil, “Look, you know more about this than I—please take my place, I’ll take yours.”