WHITE MARS (39 page)

As I was telling the child one such story, we were interrupted by a tiny cry, something between the bleat of a goat and the shrill of a gull.

'Scuse me, unkie,' said the child. 'My little Yah-Yah needs attention.'

She brought forth from the basket she was carrying what appeared to be a small cage. It contained a kind of big-eyed red animal. Alpha showed it to me when she had attended to its needs. So I had my first close look at a tammy.

'Crispin gave it to me,' she said, with pride.

The men and women in the fire prevention force had been rendered virtually unemployed by the success of the Sim White Mars operation. Rather than remain idle they had cannibalised some of their equipment, making an improved version of a toy that had enjoyed a vogue on Earth many decades previously.

In Alpha's cage was a small VR pet. It was born and it grew, constantly needing feeding, cleaning and loving care from the child who owned it. If neglected, the pet could die or 'escape' from its cage. In adolescence, it became rather rebellious and needed tactful handling. Conveniently, at this age a pet of the opposite sex entered the cage. With some guidance from the small owner, the two pets could mate and eventually bring forth another generation of pet.

Time inside the VR cage had been speeded up. The lifespan of a pet was rarely more than twenty-eight days. The far-sighted leader of the fire prevention team had designed the computer pets as a learning toy. When I eventually spoke to this lady, she said, 'Belle Rivers recognises that the children need love. She is less ready to recognise that children also need to give love, to own love-objects, something other than human, to help in developing their own personalities. Kids with tammies will grow up into caring adults - and have fun meanwhile.'

It was far-sighted, but not far-sighted enough. Every kid wanted a tammy. The domes were maddened by the moans, howls and chirps of a wide range of the VR pets. Concerts and plays were ruined by the incessant demands of the toys in the audience. Eventually, tammies had to be banned from such occasions, although this meant that children excluded themselves, lest their charges perished ... I hated imposing bans, but the government of behaviour was an inescapable part of civilised society.

Tammies next became banned at mealtimes, so that children might associate properly with adults. Adminex had in mind here a passage from Thomas More's
Utopia,
in which he says, 'During meals, the elders engage in decent conversation with the young, omitting topics sad and unpleasant. They do not monopolise the conversation for they freely hear what the young have to say. The young are encouraged to talk in order to give proof of the talents which show themselves more easily during meals.'

This was not always successful. The elders sometimes grew tired of childish prattle. The atmosphere was always soothed by music - not Beza's music, but something much more anaemic, suited to our austere diet.

20

A Collective Mind

I managed to drag myself away from the raptures of Mary Fangold and her delicious physiotherapy. Although I was back in the busy world, finding a juster society slowly developing, act by act, I wished to give Mary a present.

Seeking out Sharon Singh, I asked to see her collection of rock crystal pieces. She displayed them for me, meanwhile gazing up at my face from under her dark fringe of hair. Among the many shapes, I chose one that, in its finely detailed folds, closely resembled a vagina.

Giving it to me, Sharon said, 'Isn't it curious that the cold pressures of Mars should create such a hot little thing?'

She gave a tinkling laugh.

Olympus - now more frequently referred to as Chimborazo; Kathi Skadmorr had won that argument - had taken hold of people's imaginations. Discussion groups met regularly to chew over the riddle. It was a subject for argument in public and across the Ambient.

Most Ambient users found it hard to accept that Chimborazo could be conscious. They were daunted by the thought of that great solitary intellect sitting permanently upon a planet that had become hostile to life. What was it waiting for? was a frequently asked question.

Certainly not a bombardment by CFC gas, was one answer.

The parallel between Chimborazo's shelter for collaborating species and our own situation in the domes was quickly seized on. Fondness replaced fear as a response to its existence.

Dreiser's remark about a stack of thoughts 23 kilometres high kept returning to me. Also there was the speculation about what one might encounter if one prized up the protective shell and looked - went? was drawn? - inside.

I believe that Hawkwood's interview was a great persuasive force in the establishment of our Utopian constitution.

One interesting theory I heard discussed on my return to society was that Chimborazo's power of consciousness was far greater than we had suspected. Its attention had become directed across the gulfs of matrix to where it sensed other minor flames of consciousness. It had kept the minds of terrestrials busied with ambitions to visit Mars in order to lure them to provide it with company.

These were speculations without much ground in fact. However, when I contacted Dreiser and Kathi, I found that they too were in the midst of a welter of troubled speculation. Their new findings presented us with new problems. I moved Adminex to call a meeting in Hindenburg Hall at once.

A whole phalanx of scientists attended. The meeting was crowded. Children were welcomed. Their tammies had to be left behind.

Dreiser began speaking without preamble. 'We have a confusion of opinions here. You have every right to hear them. In some cases they amount to serious disputes between us.

'The fact is that, over the last week, we have observed no less than twenty-seven glitches in the superfluid of the ring. The interpretation of these phenomena is unclear as yet. When examined closely, the build-up to these glitches has a curious and complicated structure. Most of us have therefore reached the conclusion that the glitches are not caused by HIGMOs after all.

'The question then is: What does cause them?

'I am going to ask Jon Thorgeson to give his point of view.'

Thorgeson rose. As when he had spoken in public before, he began nervously but soon got into his stride.

'I don't really expect you non-scientists to understand all the nuances of the situation. Maybe you've heard before that there is something going wrong in the ring. There may be stray vortices in the superfluid which lead to spurious effects. I believe that to be the case. It is the obvious explanation.

'Before we go any further, or develop any crazy ideas, we have to turn off the refrigeration units so that the superfluid can return to its normal fluid state. Okay, so then we examine the tube thoroughly and clean it. That is a meticulous job. Then we switch the refrigeration on again, turning it up very very slowly, so that no vortices can develop.

'It's just lousy luck that this procedure will take about a year. By that time the ships will be back, I don't doubt - and their vibrations would spoil everything. We have to take that chance.

'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.