I let myself be persuaded by their eloquence. “As long as you don’t start sacrificing goats,” I said.
“Heavens,” Crispin said. “Just show me a Martian goat!”
The discussion then turned to other subjects, on which agreement was reached with unique ease, and—with everyone’s assistance—Adminex accordingly drew up and put on record our laws.
As Arnold Poulsen was about to depart as silently as he had come, I caught his sleeve and asked him what he made of the debate.
“Despite wide divergence of opinion, you were agreeable together, and so able to come to an agreeable conclusion. Did you not find that a little unexpected?” He brushed his hair back from his forehead and scrutinised me narrowly.
“Arnold, you are being oblique. What are you saying?”
“From my childhood,” he said, in his high voice, “I recall a phrase expressing unanimity: ‘Their hearts beat as one’. Perhaps you agree that seemed to be the state of affairs here just now. Even Feneloni was amenable to a point…”
“Supposing it to be so, what follows?”
He paused, clutching his mouth in a momentary gesture, as if to prevent what it would say. “Tom, we have difficulties enough here, Upstairs. You have difficulties enough, trying to resolve the ambiguities of human conduct by sweet reason.”
“Well?”
Smiling, he sat down again and, with a gesture, invited me to sit by him as the hall was clearing. He then proceeded to remind me of the extract from Wallace’s Malay Archipelago that Crispin Barcunda—“very usefully’, as Poulsen put it—had read to the company. Poulsen had thought about the passage for a long while. Why should a community of people, those islanders characterised by Wallace as “savages’, live freely without all the quarrels that afflicted the Western world? Without, indeed, the struggle for existence? Such utopianism could not be achieved by intellect and reason alone.
Was there an underlying physical reason for the unity of these so-called savages? Arnold said he had set his quantputer to analysing the known factors. Results indicated that the communities Wallace referred to were small, in size not unlike our stranded Martian community. It was not impossible to suppose—and here, he said, he had consulted the hospital authorities, including Mary Fangold—that one effect of isolation and proximity was that heartbeats synchronised, just as women sleeping in dormitories all menstruated at the same time of the month.
On Mars we presented a case of all hearts beating as one.
The result of which was an unconscious sense of unity, even unanimity.
Poulsen had established a small research group within the scientific community. Kathi had referred to it. To be brief, the group had decided that an oscillating wave of some kind might serve as a sort of drumbeat to assist synchronisation. In the end, adapting some of Mary Fangold’s spare equipment, they had produced and broadcast a soundwave below audibility levels. That is to say, they had filled the domes with an infrasound drumbeat below a frequency of 16 hertz.
“You tried this experiment without consulting anyone?” I demanded.
“We consulted each other.” He spoke in the light, rather amused tone into which he frequently slipped. “We knew there would be protests from the generality, as there always are when anything new is introduced.”
“But what was the result of your experiment?”
Arnold Poulsen laid a thin hand on my shoulder, saying, “Oh, we’ve been running the beat for six days now. You saw the benevolent results in our discussion. All hearts beat as one. Science has delivered your Utopia to you, Tom … The human mind has been set free.”
I didn’t believe him. Nor did I argue with him.
Later, when I was lying with Mary, I told her of what Poulsen claimed to have done, for his pride in scientific ingenuity had irritated me. “To claim that an oscillating wave brought about our Utopia, instead of our own endeavours—why, you might as well claim that God did it…”
She was silent. Then she said, almost in a whisper, “I don’t want to sound unreasonable, but perhaps all those things conspired together…”
I kissed her lips: it was a better course than argument.
21
Dear Tom has been dead now for twenty years. He died at the youthful age of sixty-seven. I zeep these words in what would be midway through 2102 by the old calendar.
A statue to Tom stands at the entrance of the Strangers Hall of Aeropolis in Amazonis Planitia. It depicts him in an absurdly triumphalist pose. I never saw him stand like that. Tom Jefferies was a modest man. He regarded himself as ordinary.
But perhaps the legend below his name is correct:
Prime Architect of Mars—
2015-2082
The Man Who Made Utopia Part of Our Real World.
Did Tom love me? I know he loved Mary Fangold. They never married. Marriage had gone out of fashion. But they were In Liaison as the new rationalism has it.
Do I miss him? Probably I do. I did not remain on Mars. In my old age I have decided to move further out, to lighter gravities.
My daughter Alpha went to seek out those Lushan Mountains I painted for her when she was a child. But I find I am an independent animal, as long as I retain contact with my Other. So our lives unfold.
On the occasion when Tom’s just society was announced and its constitution read aloud, everyone was in a mood for rejoicing. We truly knew we had made a human advance.
Our proceedings, together with the celebrations that followed, were recorded as usual and, as usual, broadcast to Earth.
One incident of that day is vividly recalled. I had not seen my friends, Hal Kissorian and Sharon Singh, for some while—not, in fact, since their marriage—and longed for their company to make my happiness complete.
I rang their bell and was admitted. Both of them greeted me warmly. They were scantily dressed. As they embraced me, I smelt sweet and heavy odours about the room. We talked about all that was happening—or rather, I talked. I talked about Chimborazo and about the wonderful sense of social completeness we had managed to build. They regarded me with fixed smiles on their faces. I belatedly realised that the topics held little interest for them.
On the wall behind the sofa on which they sat was a hand-painted mural. I recognised a blue-skinned Krishna with his flute. Krishna was plump, his figure rather rounded in a girlish way, his eyes large and sparkling. Around him lounged pink ladies in diaphanous gowns, holding flower buds or tweaking one of the god’s oily locks scarcely contained by his crown. They all gazed with lascivious approval at his immense mauve erection.
“Well, that enough of my affairs,” I said. “What have you two been doing?”
Both Kissorian and Sharon burst into joyous laughter. “Shall we show you?” asked Sharon.
I came away with that curious mixture of shame and envy that people of the mind feel for people of the flesh.
It was then I decided I was a solitary person. With a numb heart, it is easy to behave like a true Utopian.
By the fifth year after the collapse of EUPACUS our society had settled on an even keel. All our various disciplines had taken root and were beginning to blossom. The Birth Room was a thriving institution. We had found room for diverse personalities to live together peacefully.
At that time, I visited the Birth Room frequently. I miss it now such things do not exist. I went not only for companionship but to enjoy the transformation in women’s personalities from their personae among men when they entered there. They became simpler and more direct, perhaps I should say unguarded, when they escaped from male regard.