“Marriage remains a lawful and honourable custom. We must just try to love better, and for that we shall have the assistance of our improved society.”
He sat down, looking rather dejected. There was a moment’s silence. Then a wave of applause broke out.
At this period, I felt dizzy and sick and little able to carry on with my work. I seemed to hear curious sounds, somewhat between the bleat of a goat and the cry of a gull. Even the presence of other people became burdensome.
There was an upper gallery, little frequented, which I sought out, and where I could sit in peace, gazing out at the Martian lithosphere. From this viewpoint, looking westward, I could see the sparsely fractured plain, where the fractures ran in parallel, as if ruled with a ruler. These lines had been there—at least by human standards—for ever! Time had frozen them. Only the play or withdrawal of the Sun’s light changed. At one time of day, I caught from this vantage point the glint of the Sun on a section of the ring of the Smudge Project.
Visiting the gallery on the day following the marriage debate, I found someone already present. The discovery was the more unwelcome because the man lounging there was John Homer Bateson, who had displayed such misanthropy in his speech.
It was too late to turn back. Bateson acknowledged my presence with a nod. He began to speak without preliminaries, perhaps fearing I might bring up the topic of the recent debate.
“I take it that you do not subscribe to this popular notion that Olympus Mons is a living thing? Why is it that poor suffering humanity cannot bear to think itself alone in the universe, but must be continually inventing alternative life forms, from gods to cartoon characters?
“Make no mistake, Jefferies, however industriously you busy yourself with schemes for a just society, which can never come about, constituting as it does merely another Judeo-Christian illusion, we are all going to die here on Mars.”
I reminded him that we were looking for a new and better way to live—on which score I remained optimistic.
He sighed at such a vulgar display of hope. “You speak like that, yet I can see you’re sick. I’m sorry—but you have merely to gaze from this window to perceive that this is a dead planet, a planet of death, and that we live suspended in a kind of limbo, severed from everything that makes existence meaningful.”
“This is a planet of life, as we have discovered—where life has survived against tremendous odds, just as we intend to do.”
He pulled his nose, indicating doubt. “You refer, I assume, to Olympus? You can forget that—a piece of impossible science invented by impossible scientists enamoured of a young Aborigine woman.”
“Ships will be returning here soon,” I responded. “The busy world of terrestrial necessity will break in on us. Then we shall regard this period—of exile, if you like—as a time of respite, when we were able to consider our lives and our destinies. Isn’t that why we DOPs and YEAs came here? An unconsidered life is a wasted life.”
“Oh, please!” He gave a dry chuckle. “You’ll be telling me next that an unconsidered universe is a wasted universe.”
“That may indeed prove to be the case.” I felt I had scored a point, but he ignored it in pursuit of his gloomy thought.
“I fear that our destiny is to die here. Not that it matters greatly. But why can we not accept our fate with Senecan dignity? Why do we have to follow the scientists and imagine that that extinct volcano somewhere out there, out in that airless there, is a chunk of life, of consciousness, even?”
“Why, there is evidence—”
“My dear Jefferies, there’s always evidence. I beg you not to afflict me with evidence! There’s evidence for Atlantis and for Noah’s flood and for fairies and for unidentified flying objects, and for a thousand impossibilities … Are not these absurd beliefs merely unwitting admissions that our own consciousness is so circumscribed we desire to extend it through other means? Weren’t the gods of the original Greek Olympus one such example, cooked up, as it were, to explain the inexplicable? I suspect that the universe, and the universes surrounding it, are really very simply comprehended, had we wit enough to manage the task.”
“We have wit enough. Our ascendancy over past centuries shows it.”
“You think so? What a comfortable lack of humility you do exhibit, Jefferies! I know you seek to do good, but heaven preserve us from those who mean well. Charles Darwin, a sensible man, admitted that the minds of mankind had evolved—if I recall his words correctly—from a mind as low as that of the lowest animal.”
Attempting a laugh, I said, “The operative word there is evolved. The sum is continually ever greater than its parts. Give us credit, we are trying to exceed our limitations and to comprehend the universe. We’ll get there one day.”
“I do not share your optimism. We have made no progress in our understanding of that curious continuity that we term life and death since—well, let’s say, to be specific, because specificity is generally conceded to be desirable—since the Venerable Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History some time in the seventh century. I trust you are familiar with this work?”
“No. I’ve not heard of the book.”
“The news has been slow to reach you, n’est ce pas? Let me quote, from my all too fallible memory, the Venerable Bede’s reflections on those grand questions we have been discussing. He says something to this effect. ‘When compared with the stretch of time unknown to us, O king, the present life of men on Earth is like the flight of a solitary sparrow through the hall where you and your companions sit in winter. Entering by one high window and leaving by another, while it is inside the hastening bird is safe from the wintery storm. But this brief moment of calm is over in a moment. It returns to the winter whence it came, vanishing for ever from your sight. Such too is man’s life. Of what follows, of what went before, we are utterly ignorant.’”
Sighing, I told Bateson I must return to my work.
As I walked away, he called to me, so that I turned back.
“You know what the temperature is out there, Jefferies?” He indicated the surface of Mars with a pale fluttering hand. “I understand it’s round about minus 76 degrees Celsius. Even colder than a dead body in its earthly grave! Nothing mankind could do would warm that ground up to comfortable temperate zone temperatures, eh? Do you imagine any great work of art, any musical composition, was ever created at minus 76 Celsius?”
“We must set a precedent, John,” I told him.
I left him alone on the upper gallery, gazing at the bleached landscape outside.
19
On the following day, when I was resting, Dayo came to visit me again. He tried to persuade me to see what “the computer people’, as he called them, were doing. I could not resist his blandishments for ever, and got myself up.
Going with him to the control room, I found that Dayo was popular there too. He had been learning to work on the big quantputer with the mainly American contingent who staffed the machines. The striking patterns on his tiles for the Lower Ground had been devised using it.
The mainframe had originally been programmed to handle the running of the Martian outpost—its humidity, atmospheric pressure, chemical contents, temperature levels and so forth. Now all these factors were being handled by a single rejigged laptop quantputer.
I was astonished, but the bearded Steve Rollins, the man in charge of the programme under Arnold Poulsen, explained they had evolved a formula whereby interrelated factors could all be grouped under one easily computable formula. Our survival and comfort were being controlled by the laptop. The change-over had taken place at the “X” hour, during a night some five months previously. No one had noticed a shade of difference, while the big mainframe had been freed for more ambitious things.