Brian Aldiss - White Mars

The children’s games had been cleverly adapted to encourage the boys without discouraging the girls. Skipping and counting games were played “outside’, on the Astroturf. The differences between the temperaments of boys and girls became clear when Alpha volunteered to tell everyone a story.

Her story was about a little mummy animal (evidently a mole), who lived with her tiny family under the Astroturf. She told her children to behave and, if they were good, they would get extra cups of tealem, their favourite drink. They all went to bed in little plastic beakers and slept well till morning. The End.

Scornfully, a boy called Morry took up Alpha’s tale. The mummy animal was going off to get some groceries. She popped her head up above the ground just as the machine that trimmed the Astroturf was whizzing along. Zummmm! It cut off her head, which went flying with a trail of blood like a comet into someone’s shoe!

“Oh no, it didn’t at all!” shrieked Alpha angrily.

“Well, let’s see how likely these events really are,” said Benazir, smiling at both sides.

“Her head did not come off,” said Alpha firmly. “More likely it was Morry’s head.”

Unable to sustain verbal argument, Morry stuck his tongue out at her.

Benazir said nothing more, but began to dance in front of her pupils. Her steps were slow, teasingly cautious, her hand gestures elaborate, as if they said, “Look, dear children, life is like this and this, and so much to be enjoyed that no quarrels are required…”

As Cang Hai and I walked back to our apartment, we discussed what kind of future citizens of Utopia these children would make. We decided that the anti-social phase the children were going through would not be sustained; and we hoped the element of fantasy and imagination would remain. We realised how important were the skills of mothers, fathers and teachers.

Back in our apartment, I was forced to lie down. I slept for a while.

Despite recurring dizzy spells—and advice from Cang Hai and Guenz and others to consult a doctor—I continued to work steadily with the team to finalise our Utopian plans. Guenz protested that it was useless work if Olympus could rouse up and destroy our little settlement at any time. Mary Fangold replied that it was not reasonable to sit about waiting for a disaster that might never happen. She used a phrase we had heard several times before—almost the motto of the Mars colony—“You gotta keep on keeping on”.

Dreiser Hawkwood and Charles Bondi set up a secure Ambient group with Kathi Skadmorr, Youssef Choihosla and me. We discussed, at Dreiser’s direction, the question of whether Earth should be informed of Olympus’s movements.

We studied the latest comsat photographs. “As you can see,” Dreiser said, “its rate of progress is increasing, even though it is crossing rough territory.”

“It has withdrawn its exteroceptors from around this unit,” Kathi remarked. “One deduction is that it requires them elsewhere to act as under-regolith paddles. Hence the abrupt acceleration.”

Bondi was busy measuring. “Using the churned regolith as the base line, Chimborazo has covered ninety-five or ninety-six metres in the last Earth year. This is an extraordinary rate of acceleration. If it could maintain this acceleration rate—pretty ridiculous, in my opinion—its prow would strike the unit—let’s see, well, hmm, it still has nearly three hundred kilometres to go, so … well, we would have plenty of time—four years at the very least, even on that reckoning.”

“Four years!” I echoed.

Interrupting, Choihosla asked if Chimborazo left excreta behind on its trail.

“Don’t be silly,” Kathi exclaimed. “It is a self-contained unit, can’t waste anything. It’ll have excreta-eaters in under that shell.”

“The point of my question is—do we inform Downstairs or not? I’d like your answer, Tom,” said Dreiser. “This doesn’t have to go to Adminex. We five must say yea or nay.”

“They probably have the Darwin fixed on Mars,” I said. “So they’ll see this thing’s hoof marks.”

“Maybe they have not maintained their telescope since the breakdown,” Dreiser said. “Or, if they have, they may not be too quick to evaluate the implications of the tumbled regolith. What I mean to say is, they may just reckon we triggered a landslide of some magnitude.”

“We should inform Downstairs that ‘the volcano’ has shifted,” said Kathi. “No other comment. We certainly don’t inform them that we think Chimborazo has life, never mind intelligence. Otherwise they’d probably nuke the place—xenophobia being what it is.”

So that was agreed on, after more discussion.

Bondi said, wryly, “You can’t predict what they’ll do down there. They may simply conclude we’ve gone mad.”

“They probably think that already,” I said.

A thousand questions poured through my mind that night, sometimes merging with phantasmagoric strands of dream. My mind was like a rat in a maze, being both rat and maze.

At the “X” hour of night, I climbed from my bed and walked about the limited confines of my room. The question arose in my consciousness: Why was it that, in all the infinitude of matrix, mankind built itself these tiny hutches in which to exist?

I longed to talk with someone. I longed to have Antonia again by my side, to enjoy her company and her counsel. As tears began to roll down my cheeks—I could not check them, though she had been gone now for three years—my Ambient sounded its soft horn.

The face of Kathi Skadmorr floated in the globe.

“I knew you were awake, Tom. I had to speak to you. The universe is cold tonight.”

“One can be lonely, locked in a crowd.” It was as if we exchanged passwords.

“However we may aspire to loneliness, we can’t be as lonely as … you know, that pet of ours out there. Its very being preys on my mind. It’s a case for weeping.”

Guiltily, I wiped away my tears. “Kathi, it’s an immense vegetable thing. Despite its CPS, we don’t know that it has anything paralleling our form of intelligence. How do we know it didn’t grow silently in vegetable state—a sort of fungus, well nigh immune to external influence.”

She was silent, sitting with downcast eyes. “You appreciate the curious parallel between it and us. We live as it does, under a dome…” Seeing she was thinking something out, I said nothing. I liked her face and her sensibility in my globe. For once, she was not being prickly; that too I liked. We certainly were parked in a lonely part of the universe.

Looking up smartly, she said, “Tom, I admire you and your gallant attempt to make us all better people. Of course it won’t work. I am an example of why it won’t work—I was born with an obstinate temper.”

“No, no. Something may have made you obstinate. You’re … you’re just the sort of person we need in Utopia. Someone who can think and … feel…”

As if I had not spoken, she said—she was looking into a dark corner of her room—“Oh, Chimborazo is conscious right enough. I feel it. I felt it when we were there, right by it. I feel it now.”

“We got a CPS, certainly. But… I fear that if there is a mentality at work under its shell, then human understanding has to change. It must change.” I stared down at the digits on my watch, ever flickering the seconds of life away. “If there is life on Earth’s neighbour, then the universe must be a great hive of wildly diverse life. As if intelligence was the natural aim and purpose of the universe.”

“Yes, if consciousness is not simply a local anomaly. But that is too anthropocentric, isn’t it? I came on such ideas too recently to know. Me with my Abo background.” Some of her old scorn sounded in her voice. And then, as if in contradiction, her thought took off. She said about this thing on our doorstep that perhaps in its solitude, in its stony centuries of meditation under its camouflaging shell, it had come to comprehend universals that had never even impinged on human skulls. The human race had always been driven by a few imperatives—hunger, sex, power—and lived by diversity; maybe—just maybe—the unity of this huge thing was proof of a vastly greater strength of understanding…”