Brian Aldiss - White Mars

“The process is easy to see in the case of scientific discovery. Something very similar may be going on in the case of the production of works of art. I have discussed the quest for identity characteristic of at least some creative artists, and suggested that, if this is a particular need for such people, as it seems to be, it is connected with an attempt to reconcile incompatibles or opposites in the mind. This is, of course, intimately connected with the problem of identity; for identity, or rather the sense of one’s own identity, is a sense of unity, consistency and wholeness.

“One cannot have a sense of one’s continuous being if one is always conscious of two or more souls warring within one breast. In the case of Tolstoy, the ascetic and the sensualist were never reconciled; but one aspect of his creative existence was certainly an attempt to bring this about.”

I was surprised. For the first time I saw that the doctor’s statement, true as far as it went, did not encompass the contrasts and conflicts built into the mind by blind evolutionary development—the phylogenetic, as opposed to the ontogenetic, brain.

To employ the doctor’s rather poetic phraseology, there would always be the two souls warring within one breast; this was what gave to Homo sapiens our restless drive to develop further; it was part of the general creativity we were attempting to harness. We were now developing into a phylogenetic-conscious society, accepting and coming to terms with our inbuilt contradictions, revealing the “natural” human.

Paula’s drama on which she was working, Mine? Theirs?, was precisely about the interplay between the two kinds of conflict, the ancient generic and the personal.

I considered these intellectual ideas but, even when practising my pranayama, I taunted myself with the thought of what it would be like to be in bed with Paula, with her dark tempestuous body against mine. These images crept in upon my meditation…

At this juncture Vance Alysha and Bevis Paskin Peters were the two rivals for Paula’s love. Both were men of spirit and worked on the computer simulations necessary for episodes in Paula’s drama. Alysha was Caribbean; he had been a star on television in his native Jamaica, and remained proud of it. Peters had won a prize for paranimation at the age of six; he was vain and had a quick temper. And he was said to dress privately in his own flamboyant women’s costumes.

An argument arose between the two men over the interpretation of a turn in Paula’s narrative: was a certain character’s decision to retreat into the wilds a brave or a cowardly act? This developed into a quarrel over which of them best satisfied Paula’s sexual needs. Happily, Alpha and I were not present.

They fell on the floor, wrestling with and punching each other. Peters seized on a length of computer cable and wrapped it round Alysha’s neck. Paula entered the workshop at this point and screamed for Peters to stop. He did not stop. Although Alysha struggled, he was choked to death.

Mars City had no police as such. Paula called for the guards—those men who maintained the integrity of our structures. They hauled Peters away, unresisting. Since there was nothing like a prison on Mars, they shut Peters in their office, where he sat and wept, overcome by what he had done.

The guards summoned Tom. Tom and Guenz called our legal forum together to discuss the case. It assembled under the blow-up of the incandescent Hindenburg.

We were silent, rather sullen this time. Everyone was miserable in their own way. I sat at the rear with other onlookers, holding Alpha, next to a grim Paula. She shed no tear, but her face was ashen. I put a comforting arm round her waist, but she shrugged it off.

Thinking back to that time, I am surprised that we had faced no such crisis before. There had been animosities and quarrels, certainly, but all had been settled peaceably. Without the aggravation of money or those inhibitions of marriage so wrapped up in old-fashioned notions of property, the levels of discontent had been considerably lowered.

Jarvis Feneloni was one who spoke up for Peters’s execution. Since the sallow-complexioned young man had attempted to leave Mars with his brother—nothing more had ever been heard of Abel and his ship—he had gained something of a reputation by being unruly. “We have no doubt the man is guilty. He confesses to the crime. We have nowhere to imprison him. In any case, the traditional punishment for murder is death. Why muck about? We must execute Peters. Let’s discuss how that should be done.”

“His confession lessens the case against him, while his remorse is his own punishment,” Tom responded. “How exactly do you suggest we should kill him? By the methods he used on Alysha? By throwing him out on the Martian surface? By cutting off his head or his oxygen? We have no more right to kill than he. All methods of deliberate killing are distasteful to civilised men.”

“Well, I’m not civilised! We must set an example, take strong measures. This is our first case of murder, particularly the murder of a—” He stopped himself. We guessed what he was about to say. Instead Feneloni finished lamely, “Particularly the murder of one so young. We must set an example, so that it does not happen again. And we must build a prison.”

Tom replied that he agreed an example must be set. But they had to set that example for themselves. If a family has a boy who misbehaves, punishment will probably make him worse; the family must seek to discover what makes him misbehave and remedy it. They will in all probability find that they themselves are in some way at fault. Far from punishing Peters, the assembly should try to see what provoked him to violence.

“Sex, of course,” said Feneloni, with a laugh. “Look no further. It’s sex. Why are your sympathies with the murderer, not his victim?”

Guenz responded, eyes twinkling. “I fear, Jarvis, that sympathy with Peters’s victim can do the victim little good.”

“Okay then, try to discover what motives Peters had, other than sexual jealousy. Then we hang him. Both phases of the operation to be done in public.”

Tom said that could not be permitted, else all would be implicated in a second death. Peters must submit to a private course of mentatropy.

Then, said Jarvis, legislation had to be drawn up. Were they to deal with crimes of passion as a special subject, subject to special measures?

Interruptions from the floor continued for many minutes. “We want no deaths here!” Choihosla shouted.

Someone claimed that freedom could not be legislated for. He was answered by another voice that said that they were not free, were indeed isolated far from their home ground, but had founded a contented society; fulfilment need not depend on freedom at all.

At this, there was uproar. A woman claimed that their “happy society” was breaking up. It had been at its best one of de Tocqueville’s “voluntary associations’, viable only while everyone subscribed.

But like de Tocqueville’s, another voice replied, it depended on hierarchy. Perhaps all this time, they’d been living under the wrong hierarchy. Laughter followed this remark, and the temperature cooled.

So soon after the disgrace of Dayo, no one in the court dared suggest there was a racial element in Alysha’s murder. Perhaps there wasn’t, although such suspicions circulated on the Ambient. But who could prove a negative? Better to sweep the whole notion under the carpet.

Bill Abramson rose to suggest that they had paid too much attention to building a good society and not enough to lobbying Earth to rescue them and restore them to their own planet. What if the subterranean fossil water gave out? It was to their credit that a sort of mediating structure had been established, permitting them to live orderly lives; but perhaps they forgot on what an uncompromising basis that order was built. For himself, with a family at home in Israel, he prayed every night that Earth would send ships.