WHITE MARS (10 page)

'A cordon sanitary exists between Earth and Mars. Because of the long journey time, anyone who happens to be carrying VRE or any virus or infective disease - not, alas, cancer, or any malfunctioning cellular illness' - here she glanced sympathetically at me - 'will have recovered from the disease or have died from it. People do die in their cryogenic caskets en route, you know. Perhaps that statement surprises you. We try to keep it quiet.

'So all you YEAs and DOPs, do not wish the journey to take a shorter time. We are fairly safe from terrestrial disease. And that, to my mind, counts for more on the plus side than these dreary negatives we are listening to.'

For her speech Fangold was applauded. She gave me a glance, half apology, half smile, as she sat down.

I could only agree about the dreary negatives, and called a break for lunch.

As usual, we all sat at long communal tables. We were served with vegetable soup, so-called, followed by a synthetic salami stew, accompanied by bread and margarine.

Discussion ran up and down the table. Several voices were raised in anger. Aktau Badawi asked me what I was going to say about Market Domination. 'Is this about multinationals?'

'Not really. We all know about the biggest of the lot, EUPACUS, which has stranded us here.

'Downstairs, on Earth, work became an overriding imperative for those in whom poverty and unemployment had not become ingrained. The family mealtime, often rather better than what we are getting now, where families talked and argued and laughed and ate in a mannerly way together, fell victim to the work ethic at an early stage. Fast food was often eaten while preparing to leave for work, at work, or in the streets. There was no mingling of the generations, such as we have here in Amazonis Planitia, no conversation. At least we have that,' I said, pushing my plate aside.

'If jobs were not available locally, then the worker must go elsewhere. In the United States of America, this was no great hardship; it was already a pretty rootless society, and the various states made provision for people to move from one state to another. Elsewhere, the hunt for jobs can mean exile - sometimes years of exile.'

Aktau Badawi said, in his halting English, 'My family is from Iran. My father has a big family. He has no employ. His brother - his own brother - was his enemy. He travels far to get a job in the Humifridge plant in Trieste, on a distant sea, where they make some units for the fridge wagons. After a two-year, we never hear from him. Never again. So I must care for my brothers.

'I am like Kissorian has said, second brother. I go north. I work in Denmark. Is many thousand kilometres from my dear home. I see that Denmark is a decent country, with many fair laws. But I live in one room. What can I do? For I send all my monies to home.

'Then I do not hear from them. Maybe they all get killed. I cannot tell, despite I write the authorities. My heart breaks. Also my temper. So I rather do the community year in Uganda in Africa. Then I come here, to Mars. Here I hope for fairness. And maybe a girl to love me.'

He hung his head, embarrassed to have spoken so openly. May Porter, a technician from the observatory, sitting next to him, patted his arm.

'Labour markets require high mobility, no doubt of that,' she said. 'Careers can count very low in human values.'

'Human values?!' exclaimed Badawi. 'I don't know its meaning until I listen today to the discussions. I wish for human values very much.'

'Another thing,' said Suung Saybin. 'Food warehouses dominate cities because, once a machinery of supply is established, it is hard to stop. Small shops are forced out by competition. Their closure leads to social disorder and the malfunction of cities. The bigger the city, the worse this effect.'

A little Dravidian whose name I never learned broke in here, saying, 'There is always the excuse given by pharmaceutical manufacturers. They profit greatly from the sale of fertilisers and pesticides that further decimate wildlife, including the birds. My country now has no birds. These horrible companies claim that improved crop yields are necessary. This is one of their lies. World food production is more than sufficient to feed a second planet! There are 1.5 billion hungry people in the world of today, many of them personally known to me. Their problem is not so much the lack of food as lack of the income with which to purchase food already available elsewhere.'

Dick Harrison agreed. 'Don't by this imagine we're talking only of starving India, or of Central Asia, forever unable to grow its own food. The most technologically advanced state, the United States, has forty million people on the breadline - forty million, in the world's largest producer of food! I should know. I came from New Jersey to Mars to get a good meal...'

After the laughter died, I continued.

'The all consuming machinery of greater and greater production entails deregulation of worker safety laws and health provisions. In our lifetimes we have seen economic competition increasing between states. They must grow monstrous to survive, as trees grow to eclipse a neighbour with their shade. So bad capitalist states drive out good, as we see in South America. Greater profits, greater general discomfort.'

At this point, I was unwilling to continue, but my audience waited in silence and expectancy.

'Come on, let's hear the worst,' Willa Mendanadum, the slender young mentatropist from Java, called down the table.

'Okay. The three concealed discomforts we have mentioned occasion much of the unhappiness suffered by terrestrial populations. They form the undercurrents behind the headlines. Where remedies are applied only to the headline troubles - capital punishment for murder, private insurance for accident, abortion for unwanted babies - they do little good. They merely increase the burdens of life.

'Why are they not thrown out and deeper causes attended to?

'The answer lies in Popular Subscription, our fourth impediment.'

'Now we're getting to it,' said Willa. Someone hushed her.

'What it means, Popular Subscription?' asked Aktau Badawi.

'We are conditioned to subscribe to the myths of the age. We hardly question the adage that fine feathers make fine birds, or that young offenders should be shut up in prisons for a number of years until they are confirmed in misery and anger. When witch-hunts were the thing, we believed in witches or, if we did not believe, we did not like to speak out, for fear of making ourselves silly or unpopular.

'That fear is real enough, as we see in the instances of rare individuals who dare to speak out against unscrupulous practices in giant pharmaceutical companies or national airlines. Their lives are rapidly made impossible.

'It is Popular Subscription that permits the three other mistaken conceptions we've mentioned to beggar our lives.'

'This is no new perception, by the way, Tom,' came the supercilious voice of John Homer Bateson. 'The learned Samuel Johnson remarked long ago that the greatest part of mankind had no other reason for their opinions than that they were in fashion.'

I nodded in his direction. 'The fifth of our bugbears is, simply, the prevalence of Haves and Have Nots - of the gulf between rich and poor. It has always existed on Earth. Perhaps it always will exist there. Now we have the new long-lived Megarich class, living behind its golden barricades.

'But here - why, on Mars we start anew! We're all in the same boat. We have no money. We're all dirt poor and must live at subsistence level. Rejoice that we have escaped from a deep-rooted evil - as deeply rooted as the diseases of which Mary Fangold has spoken.

'We six thousand Crusoes are cut adrift from these miseries - and other miseries you can probably think of. Our lives have been drastically simplified. We can simplify them still further by maintaining a forum here, wherein we shall endeavour to extirpate these errors of perception from our society.

'With a little team work, we can and we will build a perfect and just society. The scientists will do their work. As for the rest of us - why, we have nothing better to do!'

7

Under the Skin

Needless to say, my summing up of mankind's problems did not go undisputed.

At one juncture I was challenged to say what was the point of my lengthy disquisition. I responded, 'We are listing some of the preconceptions of which we must rid our minds. There are others to come. While we are here - while we have the chance - I want us to change, change for our own sweet sakes. We have been slaves to the past. We must become people of the long future. We must set the human mind free. Only then can we achieve the greatest things.'

'Such as what?' a YEA called.

'Once you have set your mind free, I will tell you!'

Willa Mendanadum ignored this vital point. She summed up the opposition.

'These hidden stumbling blocks to mankind's happiness are interesting in their way, but are academic to our present discussion. If we wish to find a means to govern ourselves here, happily and justly, then we must forget about what they are up to on Earth.

'Besides, there are worse and more immediate impediments to our happiness than the ones you mention. If you take my own country, Indonesia, as an example, there you can see a general rule in operation, that big decisions are always made by well-fed people. The well-fed control the ill-fed, and it is in their interest to keep it that way.'

Amid general laughter, as we acknowledged the force of this truism, someone intervened to say, 'Then we can make fair decisions here, because we are all ill-fed.'

Another important statement was made by May Porter, who said, 'I like the word justice. I dislike the word happiness, always have done. It has a namby-pamby taste in my mouth. It was unfortunate that the American Declaration of Independence included that phrase about the pursuit of happiness being an inalienable right. It has led to a Disneyfied culture that evades the serious meaning -the gravitas, if you like - of existence. We should not speak of maximising happiness, but rather of minimising suffering. I seem to recall from my college days that Aristotle spoke of happiness as being only in accordance with excellence.

'It makes sense to strive for excellence. That is an attainable goal, bringing its own contentment. To strive for happiness leads to promiscuity, fast food, and misery.'

Laughter and general clapping greeted this statement.

As a break from all this debate, which I was not alone in finding exhausting, I did the morning rounds with Arnold Poulsen, the domes' chief computer technician, after the day's communal t'ai chi session.

Poulsen was one of the early arrivals on Mars. I regarded him with interest. He was of ectomorphic build, with a slight stoop. A flowing mop of pale yellowish hair was swept back from a high brow. Although his face was lined, he seemed neither young nor old. He spoke in a high tenor. His gestures were slow, rather vague; or perhaps they might be construed as thoughtful. I found myself impressed by him.

We walked among the machines. Poulsen casually checked readings here and there. These machines maintained atmospheric pressure within the domes, and monitored air content, signalling if CO
₂
or moisture levels climbed unacceptably high.

'They are perfectly reliable, my computers. They perform miracles of analysis in microseconds which would otherwise take us years - possibly centuries,' Poulsen said. 'Yet they don't know they're on Mars!'

'If you tell them - what then?'

He gave a high-pitched snort. They would be about as emotionally moved as the sands of Mars ... These machines can compute but not create. They have no imagination. Nor have we yet created a program for imagination,' he added thoughtfully. 'It is because of their lack of imagination that we are able completely to rely on them.'

They could arrive swiftly at the solution of any problem set for them, but had no notion what to do with the solution. They never argued among themselves. They were perfectly happy, conforming to Aristotle's ancient dictum, as quoted by May Porter, that happiness was activity in accordance with excellence - whereas I felt myself that morning to be baffled and cloudy.

Should I not have allowed myself to mourn in solitude the death of my beloved Antonia, rather than embark on the substitute activity of instigating a suitable Martian way of life?

Against one wall of the computer room stood three androids. The computers would activate them when necessary. They were sent out every morning to polish the surfaces of the photovoltaic plates on which we relied for electricity. They had completed their task for the morning to stand there like butlers, mindlessly awaiting fresh orders.

I remarked on them to Poulsen. 'Androids? A waste of energy and materials,' he said. 'We had to discover how to create a mechanical that could walk with reasonable grace on two legs - thus emulating one of mankind's earliest achievements! - but once we've done it...'

Pausing, he stood confronting one of the figures. 'You see, Tom, they give off no CPS, no CPS. Like the dead ... Do you realise how greatly we humans depend on each other's signals of life? It emanates from our basic consciousness. A sort of mental nutrition, you might say.'

I shook my head. 'Sorry, Arnold, you've lost me. What is a CPS?'