WHITE MARS (28 page)

After the talk, Helen Panorios came up to Dreiser and asked, timidly, why Olympus had camouflaged itself as a volcano.

'Olympus lies among other volcanoes. So it can become pretty well lost in the crowd.'

'Yes, sir, but what has it camouflaged itself against?'

Dreiser regarded her steadily before replying. 'We can only suppose - although this is terrestrial thinking - that it feared some great and terrible predator.'

'Space-born?'

'Very probably space-born. Matrix-born...'

From this occasion onwards, Dreiser and I spent more time together, discussing this extraordinary phenomenon. Sometimes he would call in Kathi Skadmorr. Sometimes I called in Youssef Choihosla, who professed an empathy with Olympus.

One of the first questions I asked Dreiser was, 'Are you now going to abandon your search for the Omega Smudge?'

He stroked his moustache as if it was his pet, gave me an old-fashioned look, and replied with a question, 'Are you going to abandon your plans for a Utopian society?'

So we understood each other. Ordinary work had to continue.

But it continued under the shadow of that enormous life form that unceasingly inched its way towards us. Despite warnings to the contrary, the four of us drove out one calm day to inspect Olympus at close quarters. Crossing the parched terrain, we began to climb, bumping over parallel fracture lines. Kathi, in the rear seat with Choihosla, seemed particularly nervous, and clutched Choihosla's large hand.

When I jokingly made some remark to her about her nervousness, she replied, 'You might do well to be nervous, Tom. We are crossing Chimborazo's holy ground. Can't you feel that?'

The terrain became steeper and more broken. Dreiser drove slowly. The exteroceptors were all about us. They seemed thicker here, more reluctant to slide back into the frozen regolith. The buggy dropped to a mere crawl. Dreiser flicked his headlights on and off to clear the track. 'God, for a gun!' he muttered. We were all tense. No one spoke.

We surmounted a bluff, and there the rim of it was, protruding above ground level like a cliff. We stopped. 'Do we get out?' I asked. But Kathi was already climbing from the vehicle. She walked slowly towards Chimborazo.

I got out and followed. Dreiser and Choihosla followed me. Suited up, we could hear no external sound.

Even near to, Olympus closely resembled a natural feature, its flanks being terraced in a roughly concentric pattern. There were imitations of flowlines, channels and levees, as well as lines of craters that might or might not be imitations of the real things. We could by no means see all of its 700-kilometre diameter. Even the caldera was hardly visible, though a small cloud of steam hovered above it. Whether as a volcano or a living organism, it seemed impossible to comprehend.

In its presence I felt the hair at the back of my neck prickle. I simply stood and stared, trying to come to terms with it. Dreiser and Choihosla were busy with instruments, noting with satisfaction that there was no radiation reading, receiving a CPS.

'Of course there's a CPS,' said Kathi. 'Do you really need instruments to tell you that? How's the back of your neck, for instance?'

Braver than we were, she climbed up on to the shell and lay flat upon it, her little rump in the air. It was as if - but I brushed aside the thought - she desired sexual intercourse with it.

After a while, she returned and joined us. 'You can feel a vibration,' she said. She returned to the buggy and sat, arms folded across her chest, head down.

Cang Hai's Account

13

Jealousy at the Oort Crowd

At this period, I used to like to go with my baby daughter to a small cafe on P. Lowell called the Oort Crowd. The talk there was all about Chimborazo. The threat from outside seemed to have drawn people together and the cafe was more crowded than ever.

My Ambient was choked with messages from Thorgeson, which alternated between apologies, supplications, abuse and endearments. I preferred cafe life, as did Alpha.

Although I did not wish to be impolite, I eventually sent Thorgeson a message: 'Go to hell, you and your ventriloquist's dummy!' At the same time, I found some sheets on the Ambient network and tried to gain a better understanding of particle physics. I was making little progress, and called Kathi, asking if I might see her.

'I'm busy, Cang Hai, sorry. We have problems.'

Trying to keep the disappointment from my voice, I asked her what the problems were.

'Oh, you wouldn't understand. There's some trouble with the smudge ring. Stray vortices in the superfluid. We're getting spurious effects. Sorry, must go. Meeting coming up. Love to Alpha.' And she was gone.

Possibly this was what my Other in Chengdu had warned me about. I had been walking up a mountain with a king -or at least a man with a crown on his head. The air was so pure. We listened to bird song. Another man came along. He too had something on his head. Or perhaps it was a mask. I wanted him to join us. He smiled beautifully, before starting to run at a great pace up the mountain ahead of us. Then I saw a lake.

The manager of the Oort Crowd was Bevis Paskin Peters. He had taken over a department of the old Marvelos travel bureau. He ran the cafe very casually, being a part-time dress designer - the planet's first. Peters was rather a heavy man, with a sullen set to his features that disappeared when he smiled at you. In those moments, he looked amazingly handsome.

However, Peters was not the reason I went to the Oort Crowd. Nor was Peters often there, leaving the running of the cafe to an assistant, a fair-haired wisp of a lad. I went because Alpha loved to watch the cephalopods. The front wall of the cafe consisted of a thin aquarium in which the little cephalopods lived, jetting their way about the tank like comets.

A YEA marine biologist had become so attached to his pets that he had brought two pairs with him to Mars. Convinced of their intelligence, he had built them a computer-operated maze. The maze, built from multicoloured perspex, occupied the tank. Its passageways and dead ends altered automatically every day. The cephalopods multiplied and had to be culled, so the Oort often had real Calamari on the menu. Ten of the creatures lived in the tank, and seemed to take pleasure in threading their way about the maze.

Alpha sat contentedly for hours, watching. Her particular admiration was for the way in which the squid changed body colour as they glided through the coloured passageways.

We were there one day - I was chatting to some other mothers - when in came Peters with a dark-skinned man I did not know, together with the famous Paula Gallin.

She scooped up Alpha, who knew her well, and kissed her passionately, calling endearments and making Alpha give her beautiful chuckle. The two men, meanwhile, were putting a cassette into a player at the rear of the bar.

Then Paula demanded the attention of the cafe's clientele.

'I just want you all to take a look at a piece of film. A sneak preview of my next production, okay? It won't take a minute. Okay, guys.'

The mirror behind the bar opaqued and there were figures moving and talking. They were in a long hall, filmed in longshot. All was movement. A man and a woman were talking in the crowd, talking and quarrelling. In the main, they avoided each other's gaze, shooting angry glances now and then. As they continued walking but their voices grew louder, the crowd about them froze into immobility.

The man said, 'Look, all I do I do for you.'

'You don't. You do it for yourself,' said the woman.

'You're the selfish one. Why are you always attacking me?'

'I don't attack you, you liar. I was just asking you why-'

'You were distinctly interrogating me,' he said, breaking into her sentence. 'You're always on at me.'

'I simply had a small suggestion to make, but you would not listen. You never listen.'

'I've already heard what you have to say.' He was red in the face now.

'I do everything for you. What do you do for me?'

His manner changed entirely. 'I do nothing for you, do I?' He appeared completely crestfallen. The woman turned her head angrily away.

The film cut, the mirror returned.

Paula laughed with a rich kind of gurgle. 'Okay, folks, now which of those two characters do you think was in the wrong, or was most wrong?'

We gave our opinions, the few of us sitting in the cafe. Some thought the man was feeling guilty about a misdemeanour. Others thought the woman was a nagger. Most of the speakers took sides. I said that they had got themselves into the kind of situation where both parties were wrong; they needed to stop quarrelling and try to find agreement, if necessary calling in a third party.

'Gee, you're an enlightened bunch,' said Paula, joshingly. 'Now tell me what you make of the woman's last remark, "I do everything for you; what do you do for me?"'

So we chewed it over, we cafe-goers, while Paula cooed over Alpha. We were more or less in agreement that the woman's statement was destructive in itself. We disagreed about whether it was made more awful by being the truth or a vicious lie. Nor could we agree about the man's response: was it a sullen repudiation of her remark or a wretched admission of the truth?

'That's enough,' Paula said, sharply. 'Thanks. Bevis, Vance...'

What we did not realise was that the mirror behind the bar was a two-way mirror. Later, we saw an edited version of ourselves in Paula's new filmplay,
Mine? Theirs?
Since we never knew what the filmed pair were quarrelling about, our judgements seemed facile. It was one of Paula's rather unpleasant tricks.

Perhaps that habit of hers caused the tragedy that was to follow - a tragedy that for a while eclipsed our preoccupation with Chimborazo.

Paula had a beautiful and strong face with marked features - a forceful jaw, in particular, and a beaky nose; her features were very unlike my rather ambiguous ones. Although she often took and discarded lovers, her real interests, or so it seemed to me, were directed elsewhere. Her predatory and creative mind wished to ingest the experiences of other people, and by so doing widen her own dimensions. Perhaps she had a driving need to resolve her own tensions.

Her clothes were designed by Bevis Paskin Peters. She rejected the customary unisex Now overalls, so Peters became the planet's first popular costume designer. He evolved a classical line imaginatively in keeping with the shortage of materials. The other man in Paula's ménage a trios was called Vance Aylsha. He was a technician and rather a genius, according to report. He also looked after the little cephalopods in the cafe aquarium.

At times Paula could be large and florid. At other periods she appeared smaller, perhaps when she was actually working in her studio and unconscious of her own persona. I cannot say I liked her much. She was bigger than I, and unpredictable.

Nevertheless I was quite frequently in her company because she adored - or at least was fascinated by the growth experience of - Alpha. She would cease her work, towards which she was otherwise obsessive, to play for two hours at a stretch with Alpha. There was nothing Alpha liked better.

Nor was there much I liked better than to see these two intellects, the mature and the awakening, meeting in quizzes and tricks and mock deceptions and sheer nonsenses. I was aware of the antiquity of these games and that awareness added to my happiness.

How starkly the lovely energies of the three of us, the warmth of our bodies, contrasted with the frozen world outside, making it more thrilling to be there!

It was not all plain sailing; with such an outgoing character, arguments were always springing up. I had made some remark in praise of Tom Jefferies, whereupon Paula said, cuttingly, 'You should stay away from that creep.'

When I protested that Tom was a courageous and altruistic man, Paula gave this reply.

'Not at all. He's a creep. Of course he loves his plan. He wants us all to conform to it. He wants us all to be better people. That's because he doesn't like us much. Maybe he's scared of us - no, not of you, Cang Hai, but you're another sexless little thing, aren't you?'

'I'm certainly not sexless. Nor is Tom.'

'But you don't have sex, do you?' She laughed. 'You need awakening. Come to bed with me and I'll show you what you're missing.'

Although I did not take up her offer, it was from lack of courage rather than from virtue. I saw why her two current men lusted for her.

I saw how her interest, as expressed in her plays, was in people rather than theories of behaviour. She liked chaos. It answered a dangerous element in her make-up.

At the time of which I am speaking, Paula Gallin was working on
Mine? Theirs?
She spent her days cutting, editing, morphing, swearing. I was witness to her outbreaks of anger against her male friends, whom she found necessary even as they broke her concentration. Creativity was by now better understood and better respected, but I went to the Ambient stand to look at the words of an old savant, Doctor Storr, whose work on the dynamics of creation remained of value.