Brian Aldiss - White Mars

As nationality came to play a less active role in human affairs, the concept of age-grouping, with activities suitable for each age, became predominant. Divisions such as YEAS and DOPS were influential in this shift in thinking. It proved to be the thirty-something group that received most benefit from Huochuan teaching.

Huochuans promoted a system of two-way communications. Those whose lives had taken a wrong turning could receive consultation and/or counselling. A method developed whereby long-bygone conversations could be recalled verbatim and improved. Anyone had opportunities to reconsider their lives and alter career or direction if insight demanded it.

In payment the beneficiary contributed to the huiyan by depositing a vid, document or disk, recording their inward and outward lives. In this way, the Huochuans accumulated a grand compendium of the experiences of generations in a kind of psychic genetic inheritance. For the first time in human history, attention was paid to the individual life—to all individual lives—“this odd diversity of pain and joy’, as an old folk song has it.

Such huiyan records served as a style of general entertainment/enlightenment (called tuokongs), much in the way of some serious TV programmes of the twentieth century.

With the proliferation of genetically altered vegetables and fruits, the eating of meat became a thing of the past in many regions. Domesticated animals became a rarity, although cats, dogs and songbirds were almost venerated, as were the semi-domesticated reindeer of far northern lands. Here and there, gates of zoo cages were flung open and their occupants set free.

People lived differently. They thought differently. Their cities were now contained; they kept in contact with one another by Ambient, much as ships at sea had once kept in touch by radio satellite. The old system of M-roads fell into decay. Beyond city walls, the wilderness was allowed to return. There, as on Mars, a degree of solitude could be enjoyed.

“The Utopians!” It became a magical word. While a percentage of those returning from Mars fell prey to terrestrial diseases, the virus of Utopian thinking spread. I am told that, in the great hall of the Unified World (as the reconstituted United Nationalities is called) stands a row of bronze busts of those of us who made history. There in effigy is Dreiser Hawkwood, there is Tom Jefferies, of course, and Kathi Skadmoor and Arnold Poulsen. And I am there too!

If future generations enquire why I, my humble little self, should stand there with the great, there is a reason. For I it was who went out with Kathi and Dreiser to confront Chimborazo when it gave birth.

The inspiration to do this came to me in a waking dream from my earthly Other. I was walking somewhere in a kind of desert called Crapout—though how I knew its name I have no idea—with another person, maybe male, maybe female, when a strange manifestation filled the sky.

It appeared like the cloud of an explosion, very alarmingly. I sheltered my companion in my arms, and was unafraid. A noise of trumpets sounded when, from the great threatening cloud, something beautiful appeared. I can’t describe it. Not an angel, no. More like a—well, a winged octopus, a pretty winged octopus, trailing streamers. It seemed to glance down at me with much kindness, so that I woke crying.

I gathered my courage and called Kathi. She spoke to Dreiser. We suited up and went out on the surface. Chimborazo was immense; the furrow of regolith it ploughed before itself was close to the science unit. The Smudge ring was covered in a layer of grit.

Chimborazo towered over us, ridged and immeasurable. A fearful wind blew. I remember the date. It was the second day of Month One of the year 2072.

Then came the noise, a call of some kind, like bugles and cellos combined.

The three of us stood our ground. The mighty thing reared up. We had a glimpse of pronged exteroceptors and a kind of mucus curtain. From the curtain shot a pale stalk, perhaps like an elephant’s trunk, withered in appearance, with a mouth and labia, moist, at its end. This strange protrusion penetrated the ring.

Again the trumpet note of triumph. I gripped Kathi’s hand. Liquid surged. Dreiser said faintly, “Amniotic fluid!”

The enormous creature seemed to back away and settle down. It became motionless.

On the churned regolith lay a thing resembling a small boulder. I went forward and lifted it with ease. It was comparatively light. As I carried it in my arms into the science unit, the thing began to open up.

After billions of years, Chimborazo had managed to reproduce itself, pumping both male and female cells into the receptive fluid…

So the great yearning for Utopia spread on Earth. It brought about revolution first of all in Europe, that fertile ground of so many past upheavals. Was it Chimborazo’s influence that made us unite as one, as never before? Be that as it may, we must believe we achieved Utopia of our own volition. We must believe in free will and the strength of will.

Now my daughter Alpha lives far away from me, while I myself am even further from Earth than Mars is. She has a man and a child, so her life is fruitful and, I suppose, happy. I will never see her again, or embrace her, or kiss her little daughter.

At least it is a consolation to know she will enjoy the promises of what to me is the inaccessible future.

I am a Jovian. I live a life of pattern. My actions are premeditated. I am pleased to contribute to this report.

Since the Jovian moons carried little or no emotional freight for human beings, they were not treated with the scruples Mars had once enjoyed.

Monitor probes, accompanied by a freighter, arrived by the turn of the century at what Galileo Galilei originally termed “the Medician stars’, our four sizeable moons. A base was established on Ganymede while the other satellites, in particular Io and Europa, were surveyed by machinonauts.

Ganymede was made habitable by bioengineered plant-insect stock. These ephemeral life forms had been despatched in unmanned probes, to soft-land here and prepare it for human life. They clothed it in their corpses before we arrived. Such advances were not possible in the early days of Mars landings.

Our first ugly prefabricated buildings have long since been devoured and regurgitated to form our spinlifters.

Life is pleasant here. I find much scientific research to keep me occupied, and am compiling an Amb entitled Pluto As an Abode of Life. Although the sun is distant, we enjoy the brilliant spectacle of Jupiter in our skies, together with the swarming variety of other moons to inspire us and tempt our thoughts ever outwards, into further and better transformations of human life.

The quest for knowledge continues.

Indeed, such work continues beyond the solar system, beyond the Oort Cloud. There, beneath the light of stars, a Cheeth-Rosewall is coming into operation. This Chheeth-Rosewall is immeasurably larger than the failed miniature HIGMO detector constructed on Mars a century ago.

The ring has a diameter of about the same extent as one of Saturn’s outer rings, with a cross-section of just a few millimetres. The volume of superfluid is therefore not too large. However, we expect to detect a HIGMO at last.

HIGMO density is a good deal less than anticipated. However, the research has acquired vital importance: as generally agreed, it will yield important truths about the nature of consciousness— as well as solving the riddle of mass.

Once we can control these things, we shall be able to project our minds across the universe. And what we shall there encounter, who can say?