Brian Aldiss - White Mars

“To be honest, I have a suspicion that the irresponsible excavations of your Lower Ground may be the cause of everything…”

He sat down and folded his arms across his chest.

While he was talking I noticed Kathi shaking her head in mute disagreement, but it was Charles Bondi who spoke next, in flat denial of the last speaker.

“I’m sorry, but that’s all arrant nonsense. Vortices in the superfluid are well understood. They would produce quite different effects from the patterns we have observed. You need only simple calculations to see that it is so.

“Besides which, we have no spare year to play around in. We must find a solution for today. Leo Anstruther made the plea for White Mars, but somehow he was ruled out as Administrator of the UN Department for the Preservation of Mars. When the ships return they will probably be obsessed once more with the idea of terraforming Mars. It makes our situation an urgent one.”

A YEA technician rose and said, “We don’t want to let a plea of urgency destroy understanding. I’d say we should haul off and wait to see what comes next. I mean, what the ring comes up with. Seems we have run out of HIGMOs this week. We should keep watch on next week.”

Georges Souto spoke next. “I’m largely in agreement with the last speaker. For one thing, we don’t know what exactly is going on Downstairs. Maybe they’ve turned their back on the whole notion of matrix travel. Maybe they’re never coming back. Think of that!”

That the audience was thinking of it was apparent from the general exclamation that went up at Souto’s words.

Souto continued. “It could be that the conventional hypothesis that HIGMOs were distributed randomly and uniformly throughout the universe is just plain wrong. Our findings imply that the distribution of HIGMO encounters with the ring may be extremely clumped. The explanation for seeing all these HIGMOs together in such a short space of time is simply that we’re passing through a HIGMO shower, okay?”

Even as he spread wide his hands in explanation, someone shouted out that he was talking nonsense.

Suung Saybin spoke from the audience. “Could all these glitches that you’re worrying about be caused by one and the same HIGMO being trapped in Mars’s gravitational field, so that it oscillates back and forth in the ring?”

“That’s not possible,” Souto answered and was echoed by several other voices.

“All right, smartarses, it was just a suggestion,” said Saybin tartly.

Dreiser said, “Just to make it clear, I can show you what we actually saw in our screens.”

A large 3vid hung in the air above the dais, as Dreiser projected it. The image was as severe as a text-book diagram. It showed, against the fuzzy grey background, a colourless blur that wavered before shooting up a step halfway along, then continuing on a straight horizontal course.

“The phase is the vertical,” Dreiser explained. “The horizontal is time. In this case, it’s something like 0.5 of a nanosecond from one side of the screen to the other. The step up is .□4 As you see, the signal is not at all clear. But the step function makes it plain that something passed through the ring from above to below. Otherwise the step would have been down by the same 4□. The oscillation before the step becomes more complex throughout our series of glitches.”

A silence fell over the proceedings.

The image faded from overhead.

Kathi spoke quietly from her seat, without getting up. “So you’re all off track. Forget the HIGMO question. The glitches are being caused by Chimborazo itself.”

Laughter came from some scientists as well as the audience.

“Chimborazo is causing the glitches,” repeated Kathi, as if the statement was made more understandable by being recast.

This time the laughter was more mocking.

“Let’s hear what the lady’s case is,” Dreiser interjected. “Give her a chance. What’s on your mind, Kathi?”

She flashed him a grateful look before standing to say, “Arnold Poulsen is experimenting to see whether his 16-hertz sound oscillations will cause people to be more conciliatory towards each other. As yet, he has nothing conclusive.

“Over the last few months, however, I have become convinced that we are experiencing a genuine improvement in personal relations. I notice the difference even in myself.” At this there was brief laughter.

“I’ve become equally convinced that this has nothing to do with Arnold’s experiment. Or, for that matter—sorry, Tom—with the Utopia effect. No, it’s Chimborazo working on us, the Watchtower of the Universe.” She paused to let this sink in, confronting her audience with arms akimbo.

“We know there is a powerful consciousness in that being. We get a CPS, and this has now been confirmed on an ordinary savvyometer, which we modified to accommodate an extremely low frequency range. Our rapidly advancing friend has plenty of awareness right enough!”

She paused as we all took a deep breath at that.

“We know too—or we think we do—that Chimborazo is a symbiotic and epiphytic being; all its component life forms have learned to cooperate rather than compete. That strong cohesive influence appears to work satisfactorily.

“I do not think it would be at all surprising if this ‘influence’, whatever it is, has had its effect on our own human conscious behaviour. We know that quantum effects can hold over great distances. Quantum entanglements between photons have been observed to stretch over a hundred thousand kilometres at least. Probably there is no limit.”

“Sounds to me like fifteenth-century mysticism,” remarked Thorgeson. “ The Will of God.”

“Well,” Kathi said challengingly, in something like her old style, “so what does that prove? Not all fifteenth-century mystics were fools!”

Dreiser, ignoring this exchange, said to Kathi. “You talk about your Chimborazo—if I’m forced to use that label—having a powerful consciousness. Would you care to clarify that for us?”

Several of the men sitting behind him showed signs of discontent. They evidently did not like the respect Dreiser—the great Dreiser Hawkwood—paid this newcomer.

Once he had given Kathi the floor, she went happily on.

“Well, we still aren’t sure about consciousness. It’s a riddle awaiting solution. The CPS device is simply a passive detector, much as a Geiger counter used to register radioactivity. It does not in any way alter consciousness. It registers the presence of consciousness by the effect of consciousness on a quantum state-reduction phenomenon—let’s say on some coherent quantum superposition involving a large number of calcium ions.

“What we do know is that consciousness in an entity can detectably affect the reduction of a quantum state, and can be affected by it. That’s how a mentatrope works, after all. The quantum superposition in a mentatrope is influenced by the presence of consciousness as well as influencing consciousness. So it’s not at all unreasonable that consciousness might affect the quantum coherence in our superfluid ring.”

Willa Mendanadum spoke from the audience. “Excuse me, Kathi, but a mentatrope contains no superfluid. The quantum superposition is between different calcium ion displacements. It’s much the same as the superpositions of electron displacements in a quantputer.”

“I’m aware of that,” Kathi replied. “But no quantputer gives a reading on a mentatrope. The organisation of calcium ions in a mentatrope is of a completely different character from that in a quantputer—much more like the superfluid in our ring, where the total mass involved begins to be significant.”

Willa was adamant. Her slight figure seemed to vibrate with scorn. “Sorry, Kathi, I know you’re bidding fair to be a guru and all that, but there is absolutely no evidence of any similarity between this ring and a mentatrope. The scale’s completely different, for one thing. The geometry is different. The materials are different. The purposes are different.”