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…”
She sighed. “Beau’s here with me, Tom. He’s sleeping. He does not feel Chimborazo’s presence as I do. Oh, we’re so limited … Maybe its unity is proof of a greater understanding. Something gained through the chilly expanses of time—what we comprehend as time, anyway—until it has reached perfect knowledge and wisdom. Does that sound like wishful thinking?” She laughed at herself.
“Suppose it was like that, Kathi. Would we be able to converse with it? Communicate? Or would its understandings put it for ever beyond our conceptual reach? ‘What we comprehend as time’—there’s an example … So it’s to us a kind of god—totally without interest in anything outside itself.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that…”
She put her hands to her cheeks in a gesture I had seen her use before. “It’s that time of night when imaginations run away with themselves. Could be it’s just a freak mollusc, stranded on a failed planet that long since yielded up its essence … Tom, go to sleep! I wish I were there to talk to you, closely…”
Her face faded and was gone.
I could not sleep. The conversation lingered in my mind. My head ached; I felt stifled.
I staggered out of my chamber in search of company, and barged without knocking into Choihosla’s apartment.
Youssef Choihosla was kneeling on a small mat, his forehead to the floor. A dim lamp stood nearby.
I halted in the doorway. Choihosla looked up with a brow of thunder. He began a stream of abuse, biting it off when he recognised me.
“Tom? You look ghastly! Come in, come in. What’s up? It’s ‘X’ hour.”
He rose as I entered. I said, “You were in the midst of prayer. I’m sorry to break in.”
“Allah is great. He will forgive an interruption. Come and sit down.”
I sat weakly and he brought his great bulk close and also sat, hands on knees. I spoke of my confusion of mind, brought about by the thought of the unknown life form not far away from us. He confessed that his prayer—“largely wordless”—had been seeking reassurance for the same reason.
We talked for a long while, merely speculating.
My curiosity got the better of me. I saw an electronic gadget with a small screen, at present blank, lying on the floor by Choihosla’s prayer mat, and asked him what it was.
He hesitated, then picked it up and presented it to me for my inspection.
Pressing a button, I set golden bodies in motion on the screen, while figures jerked across the lower section of it.
This was a Muslim ephemeris. It calculated the positions, not only of the Sun, the Moon, Earth and Mars, but also of Mecca, throughout the year. It enabled Choihosla to pray towards the holy city when the revolutions of Earth brought Mecca to a point facing towards Amazonis, where our structures were situated. Choihosla explained that it was considered poor theology to pray when Mecca was on the other side of Earth’s globe, facing away from Mars.
“Well, it’s ingenious,” I remarked. He hefted the little calculator in the palm of his hand. “You buy these ephemerises for a few cents in the bazaars,” he said, offhandedly. “Of course, it’s a Western invention…”
Seeing the puzzlement in my eyes, he said, “You wonder about my faith—maybe how I persist in it? Don’t you need something bigger than yourself in life?”
I pointed in what I imagined to be the direction of Olympus Mons.
“It’s out there,” I said.
Monstrous things apart, we came to realise nothing could be achieved without decent living conditions. The thinness of the atmosphere of Mars rendered us susceptible to meteoritic bombardment, as we had been well aware. We now set about extending our quarters by excavation, creating a new subterranean level where the apartments had rooms larger than those in our previous quarters. These apartments had balconies and galleries; the bricks we fabricated were glazed in various colours, while genetically altered plants—in particular creepers—were planted and flourished under artificial light. Rooms were decorated in various bright colours and afforded better opportunities for solitude.
I found a glowing message waiting on my Ambient. When I punched Receive, Charles Bondi’s voice came to me, full of controlled anger: “Jefferies, what are you people doing over there? Why do you think our research unit was positioned on Mars? It was because we required complete silence and no vibrations, wasn’t it? Our foundation represents the whole reason for habitation on this planet. Your drillings are threatening our search for the Omega Smudge. We’re getting strange readings. I have to tell you that all drillings and excavations must cease at once. Immediately. Please acknowledge that this has been done.”
I froze his face. Studying it, I did not see the aggression implied by his words.
My reply was brief. “Charles, I am sorry we upset your solitude. But so far your researches have produced nothing. Meanwhile we have to live. This is why our spicules were sited at a distance from your foundation. We shall be finished within a few days. I have no intention of failing to complete what will be new much required living quarters, and I invite you to inspect them when you have recovered from your annoyance.”
He sent a one-word reply, “Luddite!” Then we heard no more of the matter. While marvelling at scientific arrogance, I saw its necessity and urged the workers to press on as speedily as possible, to get the vibration over and done with.