WHITE MARS (6 page)

It was estimated that 500 people owned 89 per cent of the world's wealth. Most of them belonged in the Megarich category, being able to pay for the antithanatotic treatments.

After your year's community service, you had to pass the various behavioural tests. Then you were qualified for the Mars trip.

'How did you manage?' Kathi asked.

I hesitated, then thought I might as well tell her. 'A rich protector came forward with a bribe.'

Kathi Skadmorr gave a harsh cackle. 'So we're both here under false pretences! And I wonder how many others -YEAs and DOPs?! Don't you just long for a decent society, without lies and corruptions?'

It came as a surprise to me to discover that Tom Jefferies and his wife Antonia - both of them DOPs - had also used a bribe to get to Mars. That I shall have to tell about in a minute, and to describe Antonia's death.

Antonia died so many years ago. Yet I can still conjure up her fine, well-bred face. And I wonder how different history would have been if she had not died.

The DOPs were reckoned to have served their communities; otherwise, they would hardly be Distinguished. As Older Persons, they did not have to undergo the GIQ examination. However, the Gen & S Health test was particularly rigorous, at least in theory, in order to avoid illness en route, that long, spiralling, burdensome route to the neighbouring planet. In some cases, behavioural tests were also applied.

DOP passages were generally paid for by some form of government grant from their own communities. In the eighteenth century, Dr.. Johnson told Boswell that he wished to see the Great Wall of China: 'You would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence ... They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the Wall of China. I am serious, sir.' To have visited Mars brought a similar mark of distinction - conferred, it was felt, on whole communities as well as on the man or woman who had gone to Mars and returned home to them.

One of the excitements of being on Mars was that one occasionally met a famous DOP, not necessarily a scientist, perhaps a sculptor such as Benazir Bahudur, a literary figure such as John Homer Bateson, or a philosopher such as Thomas Jefferies. Or my special friend, Kathi Skadmoor.

I first saw Torn Jefferies from afar, looking sorrowful and remote, but I held the popular misconception that all philosophers looked like that. He was an elegant man, sparse of hair, with a pleasing open face. He was in his late forties. A vibrancy about him I found very attractive.

So I was immediately drawn to him, as were many others. While I was drawn, I did not dare speak to him. Would I have spoken, had I known how our paths would intertwine? Perhaps it is an impossible question - but we were destined to face plenty of those ...

Many scientists went to Mars under the DOP rubric, among them the celebrated computer mathematician, Arnold Poulsen, and the particle physicist I have already mentioned, Dreiser Hawkwood. A percentage of those who had travelled on the conjunction flight became acclimatised to Mars and, because the work and lighter gravity there were congenial to them, stayed on. It should be added that many YEAs stayed on for similar reasons - or simply because they could not face another period of cryogenic sleep for the return journey.

From 2059 onwards, as interplanetary travel became almost a norm, every Martian visitor was compelled by law to bring with him a quota of liquid hydrogen (much as earlier generations of air travellers had carried duty-free bottles of alcohol about with them!). The hydrogen was used in reactions to yield methane for refuelling purposes.

Another factor powered the movement in the direction of Mars. Competition to exist in modest comfort on the home planet grew ever more intense. To gratify its desire for profit and then more profit, capitalism had required economies of abundance, plus economies of scarcity into whose markets its entrepreneurs could infiltrate. Now, under this guiding but predatory spirit, there existed only the voracious developed world and a few bankrupt states, mainly in Africa and Central Asia. Increased industrialisation, bringing with it global overheating and expensive fresh water, made life increasingly difficult and corrupted the competence of democracies. Prisons filled. Stomachs went empty.

While there were many who deplored this state of affairs, they were as powerless to alter it as to stop an express train.

Now a number of them had an alternative.

The Martian community developed its own ethos. Being itself poor in most things, it proclaimed an espousal of the poor, downtrodden and unintelligent. More practically, it fostered a welcoming of the estrangement that Mars brought, a passion for science, a care for the idea of community.

Most Martians had discarded their gods along with the terrestrial worship of money. They were thus able to develop a religious sense of life, unwrapped by any paternalistic reverences. Always at their elbows was the universe with its cold equations; living just above the subsistence level, the Martians sought to understand those equations. It was hoped that the tracing of the Smudge would resolve many problems, philosophical as well as scientific.

We lived under stringent laws on Mars, laws to which every visitor was immediately introduced. The underground water source would not last for ever. While it did last, a proportion of it underwent the electrolysis process to supply us with necessary oxygen to breathe. Buffer gases were more difficult to come by, although argon and nitrogen were filched from the thin atmosphere. The pressure in the domes was maintained at 5.5 psi.

It will be appreciated that these vital arrangements absorbed much electricity. Technicians were always alert for ways of extending our resources. To begin with they relied on heat-exchange pumps as generators, and photovoltaic cells.

I have to tell myself that I am a serious person, interested in serious matters. I will not speak of my increasing affection for Kathi Skadmorr, who after all is a marginal person like me, or my admiration for Tom Jefferies, who is a central person unlike me. Instead, I will talk about worms.

In one Amazonis laboratory was a precious Martian possession - 'the farm', a wit called it. Dreiser Hawkwood had introduced it; his side interest was biochemistry. The farm was contained in a box two metres square and a metre and a half deep. In it was rich top soil from the Calcutta Botanical Gardens, expensively imported by courtesy of Thomas Gunther and his EUPACUS associates. In the box grew a small weigela and a sambucus. Below, in the soil, were worms of the perichaeta species, working away and throwing up their castings.

The metabolism of the worms had been accelerated. Their digestion and ejection of soil was rapid. They worked at dragging down the leaves fallen from the plants, thus enriching the soil with vegetable and microbial life. The enriched soil was to be set in a bed inside one of the domes to provide the first 'natural'-grown vegetables. The tilth would eventually cover acres of specially prepared regolith, breaking it down under greenhouse domes into arable land.

From this modest beginning in the farm, great things were to come. It is doubtful if Mars would ever have become more than marginally habitable without that lowly and despised creature, the earthworm, which Charles Darwin regarded so highly, not dreaming that it would one day transform an alien planet as it had transformed Earth itself.

This new agricultural revolution, intended to supplement the food grown in chemical vats, was assisted by work carried out high above the Martian crust.

Mars has two small satellites that chase across the sky, Swift and Laputa. Early astronomers had bestowed on these two small bodies the unbecoming names of Phobos and Diemos. Swift unwearyingly rises and sets twice in a Martian day. Landings have been made on both satellites. On Swift have been found metallic fragments, presumably the remains of an unsuccessful twentieth-century Russian mission.

Working from a small base on Swift, a series of large PIRs - polymer inflatable reflectors - was set in orbit about Mars to reflect much needed sunlight to the surface. The PIRs are cheap, and easily destroyed by space debris, but equally easily replaced.

The PIRs can be seen in daylight or at night, when they shine brightly unless undergoing occasional eclipse.

It will be deduced from these developments that, despite all the protests, Mars was slowly and inevitably being drawn nearer to terraforming.

Despite all the regulations, the pressure to live brought this change about.

The observatory built on Tharsis Shield near Olympus Mons continued to yield results. The meteorite watch station became operative. The new branch of astrophysics studying the gas giants was officially named jovionics. The telescopes of the observatory tracked many asteroids. Dedication to research was a feature of the scientific atmosphere on Mars. There was little to distract the scientists, as the asteroid-watchers sought to prove the small bodies were the remains of a planet that, before being torn apart by forces of gravity, occupied an orbit between Mars and Jupiter.

Studies of magneto-gravitic irregularities revealed a remarkably high gravity reading for the region near Olympus Mons. I discovered that Kathi was interested in this. No such anomaly existed on Earth, she claimed. She was reading many scientific papers on her Ambient, and told me she believed there was a connection between magneto-gravitic influences and consciousness, so that at present she was looking for a dimensionless quality, but I did not understand her.

When I questioned this connection she believed in, she explained patiently that there were electric and magnetic fields. Whereas electric charges were the direct sources of electric fields, as far as was known there were no equivalent magnetic charges - that is to say, no magnetic monopoles. The influence of hidden-symmetry monopoles on consciousness was subtle and elusive - or appeared to be so as yet. The sophistry underlying the apparently simple laws of the physical universe, the exceptional qualities of many elementary particles, might lead one to suspect the universe of possessing a teleological character.

She was continuing the explanation when I had to admit I could follow her no further.

With a sympathetic smile, Kathi nodded her head and said, 'Who can?!'

She became inquisitive about my beloved Other in Chengdu. Feeling sorry I had mentioned her, I was not very forthcoming. Later, I saw she was interested in the question of consciousness; the existence of my Other, so simple to me, seemed to raise complex questions in her mind.

There seemed little for biochemists and xenobiologists to do once it was agreed that Mars held no life and that its early life forms - archebacteria and so forth - had perished many millions of years before mankind appeared on Earth.

The heliopause, with its strange turbulences, was studied. While Mars was regarded as a completely dead world, indications of life on Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter already mentioned, were observed by new instruments.

But I am getting ahead of our history again. Things were well enough for the Martian-terrestrial relationship, until the disaster occurred that changed the situation, entirely and for ever.

5

Corruption, Cash, and Crash

You need to remember how complex and ill judged terrestrial affairs were up to this period.

Among the harsh pleasures of Mars were many negative ones. I was particularly glad to escape the constant surveillance to which we had been subject. On Earth crime rates were such that every city, every road, every apartment house and condominium and almost every room in those buildings was watched day and night by the glass eyes of security cameras. The sellers of masks profited accordingly, and crime thrived. Oppression and blackmail prospered even more.

The mansion of Thomas Gunther was well equipped with surveillance devices, including those of the latest type. The camgun for instance, would fire yards of adhesive at any visitor to the building whose characteristics were not held in its computer.

Not all forms of crime yielded to inspection. Fraud and corruption could take place in broad daylight, with smiles to outface any camera. Smiles had been worn like masks in the upper echelons of the EUPACUS consortium.

The collapse of the entire enterprise began with a seemingly small event in 2066. A senior clerk in the tall ivory-white tower in Seoul that was the main EUPACUS building was caught embezzling.

The clerk was sacked. No charges were brought against him. He was found dead in his apartment two days later. Possibly it was suicide, possibly murder. But an electronic message was released, triggered by the stoppage of the clerk's electronic heart, to be received at the North American Supreme Court of Justice. It led the court to uncover a massive misappropriation of funds by EUPACUS directors. In comparison the clerk's misdemeanours were nugatory.

A cabal of senior executives was involved. Five arrests were immediately made, although all managed mysteriously to escape custody and were not recaptured.

Investigators visiting a vice-chairman's residence on Niihau Island, in the Hawaiian chain, were met by gunfire. A two-day battle ensued. In the bombed-out ruin of the palace were found disks incriminating directors of the consortium: tax evasion on a massive scale, bribing of lawyers, intimidation of staff and, in one instance, a case of murder. The affairs of EUPACUS were put on hold.