Brian W Aldiss, page 1
A Whiter Mars
A Socratic Dialogue Of
TimesTo Come
byBrian W. Aldis
SHE Wewant to present a history of the development of Mars, and how we have
progressed spiritually. It is a glorious and surprising story, a history of human society understanding and recreating itself. WhileI am speaking to you from Mars, my Earthbound avatar is speaking to you from our old parent planet. Let us cast our minds back before everything changed, to the Age of Estrangement, when nobody had ever set foot on Earth’s neighbouring planet.
HE So. Backto the twenty-first century and a barren planet. The first
arrivalson Mars found an empty world, free of all the imaginary creatures
whichhave been supposed to haunt the Earth: the ghosts and ghouls and
long-legged beasties, the vampires, the leprechauns, the elves and
fairies - all those fantasy creatures which beset human life, born of dark forests, old houses, and ancient brains.
SHE You’ve forgotten the gods and goddesses, the Greek gods who gave their
names to the constellations, the Baals and Isises and Roman soldier gods, the vengeful Almighty of the Old Testament, Allah - all imaginary super -beings which supposedly controlled mankind’s behaviour before humanity could control itself.
HE You’re right, I forgot them. Theywere all creaking floorboards in the
cellarsof the brain, inheritances from eo-human days. Earth was over
populatedwith both real and imaginary persons. Marswas blessedly free of all that.On Mars , you could start anew. It’s true the men and women who arrived on Mars had a lot of conflicting Mars legends in their heads...
SHE Oh, you mean that old stuff. Percival Lowell’s Mars of the canalsand the
dyingculture. I still have a kind of nostalgia for that grand sunset vision- wrong in reality, right as imagery. And Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom...
HE And all the horrors which earlier humanity invented to populate Mars - H.G.
Wells’s invaders of Earth, rather than the gentle Hrossa andpfiQtriggi of
C.S. Lewis’s Malacandra.
SHE Life, you see, always this bizarre preoccupation with life, however
fantastic.Tokens of the insufficiency of our own lives.
HE But thefirst men who went to Mars came from a technological age. They
harbouredanother idea in their heads. Certainly they were hopingto find
lifeof some sort, archebacteria being reckoned most likely. They nourished
the ideaof terraforming the Red Planet and turning it into a sort of
inferiorsecond Earth.
SHE Havingat last managed to reach another planet, they desired to make it
likeEarth! The idea seems strange to us now.
HE They had not acquiredthe habit of living away from Earth. ‘Terraforming’
wasan engineer’s dream - a novelty. Their perceptions had to change. They
stoodthere, gaping - aware for the first time of the magnitude of the task
andof its aggressive nature. Every planet has its own sanctity.
SHE Evenat the most impressive moments in life, a voice seems to speak within
us, the mind communing with itself. Percy Bysshe Shelley was thefirst to recognise this duality.In a poem onMont Blanc , he speaks of standing watching a waterfall and says:
Dizzy Ravine! -and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate phantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around...
HE Yes, the words strike to the very essence of human perceptions. As
phenomenologydeclares, our inner discourse shapes our outward perception.
I’llremind you that the great Martian expedition was not the first
scientificexcursion which set out to discover a new world. Ittoo had trouble with its perceptions.
SHE You’respeaking of the way the West was won in the case of North America?
The slaughterof the Indian nations, the killing of buffalo? Wasn’t all that a primitive kind of terraforming?
HE I was referring to the expedition of Captain James Cook in H.M.S. Endeavour
tothe South Seas. Inhis three hundred and sixty-six ton wooden ship
Cook eventually circumnavigatedthe globe . The Endeavourwas commissioned
to observethe 1769 transit of Venus across the face of the Sun, among
otherobjectives.The choice of Joseph Banks, then only twenty-three, as scientific observer was a good one. Banks had a trained connoisseur’s eye.
Itwas regarded by the enlightened Royal Society as vital that accurate drawings should accompany written descriptions of all new discoveries. Banks’s artists hadtheir problems . Scientific diagramsof landscapes and plants and animals were made, but artistry also crept in. Drawing faithful records of the native peoples of the Pacific was beggared by the preconceptions of the time. AlexanderBuchan took an ethnographic view, drawing groups of natives free from the conventions of neo-classical style; whereas Sydney Parkinson disposed of them according to the dictates of composition. In Johann Zoffany’s famous canvas, The Death of Cook,many of the participants in that picture assume classical postures, presumably to increase the air of Greek tragedy.
Thus the unfamiliar was made palatable for the folks back home, was made to bend to their preconceptions.
SHE Mmm.I see what you’re getting at.Behind the difficulties of coming to
termswith the unknown lay a philosophical problem, typical of that century. Were the misfortunes attendant on mankind owed to a departure from, a defiance of, natural law - or was it that mankind could raise itself above the brute beasts only by improving on and distancing himself from nature?The city-dweller or the Noble Savage?
HE Exactly. Thediscovery of the Society Islands favoured the former idea,
thatofNew Zealand andAustralia the latter.
Australiaand NewZealand, when their barren shores were first sighted,
fostered the concept of improvement and progress. When CaptainArthur
Phillipfounded the first penal colony inAustralia , at Port Jackson in
1788, herejoiced in an eighteenth-century version of terraforming. Down
wentthe trees, away went the wild life - including the natives - the area
wasflattened, and Phillip declared, “By degrees large spaces are opened,
plans are formed, lines marked, and a prospect at least of future
regularity isclearly discerned, and is made the more striking by the
recollectionof former confusion.’ Ah, thestraight line! -the marker of
civilisation, of capitalism!
The overwhelming belief in conquering nature -in somehow distancing
ourselvesfrom nature, from something of which we are an inescapable part
prevailedfor at least two centuries.
SHE Possiblythis dichotomy of perception was reinforced by Cartesian dualism,
whichmade a sharp distinction between mind and body - the sort of thing Shelley spoke against. A metaphorical beheading...
HE I’m unsure about that. It may be as you say.
SHE Whatwe need to bear in mind is that a belief can take rather firm hold
once itcirculates among the population. No matterif it’s totally erroneous. Even in these days of interplanetary travel, half the population ofEarth still believes that the Sun orbits the Earth, rather than vice versa. What conclusions do youdraw from that - other than that ignorance has more gravitational weight than wisdom?
HE Or that we are more hive-minded than we care to believe?
SHE Well, let’s get back to Mars and those first arrivals here. 5,
HE Try torecall what the situation was in those days. With the growth in
economic power of the Pacrim countries in the twenty-first
century, the International Dateline had been removed to the centre of
the Atlantic, and American trade was locked into that of its Asian
neighbours. Thecost of all Martian expeditions was met by a consortium,
formedby US, Pacrim and EU space agencies. That was EUPACUS, a long
forgotten acronym. However, the UN, thenunder a powerful and far
sighted General Secretary, George Bligh, brought Mars under its own jurisdiction.Once you were on Mars, you came under Martian law, not under the laws of your own country.
SHE Itwas a sensible provision. Alesson had been learnt from the days when
Antarctica had been a continent set aside for science. Just occasionally we manage to learn from history! We wanted the RedPlanet to be a White Mars - a planet set aside for science.
HE That’s an ancient battlecry!
SHE Oldbattlecries still retain their power. In the mid-twenty-first century,
there wasa movement on Earth called APIUM - the Association for the
Protectionand Integrity of an Unspoilt Mars.It was regarded as a rag
-taggle of eccentrics andGreens at first. APIUM wanted to preserve Mars
asit had been for millions of years, as a kind of memorial to early
man’s early dreams. Their claim was that every environment has its sanctity, and sufficient environments had been ruined on Earth without starting out at once to monkey with another planet - an entire planet.
However,the people who landed on M
HE Ah, yes, terraforining. Thatword and concept coined by a SF writer, by
nameJack Williamson. Howalluring and advanced it was when first coined.
It was another of thoseideas which took root easily in the fertile soil
ofthe human mind.
SHE Yes. Therewas nothing sinister about it. The astronauts simplytook the
ideafor granted.It was a part of their mythology - meaning an old way of thought. They imaginedthey’d improve the planet and make it like Earth. They had glowing computerdesigns to seduce them, showing all of Mars looking like the Cotswolds on a sunny day.
HE But theyalso carried in their minds opposed preconceptions. Mars as a
rubbishdump of rock, ‘suitable for development’, like something from a
diagramof ‘Nuclear Winter’ - that old guilt-myth - or Mars as a
heavenly body, formidable, aloof, enduring.Similar to the two opposed
ideasthat Captain Cook had held three centuries earlier. And-
SHE Theyleft their ships and stood there, like stout Cortez, silent upon a
peak inDarien in Keats’s poem, with the whole vista of the planet
confrontingthem, and-
HE And?
SHE Andthey knew - it was that discourse of Shelley’s between the outer and
innerworld - they knew that terraforming was just a dream, a terrestrial city-dweller’s computer phobia. It was undesirable. To use an old term, it was blasphemous, against nature. Youknow how city-dwellers fear nature.In a kind of vision, they saw that this environment must not be destroyed.That it carried a message, an austere message: Rethink! You have achieved much -achieve more ! Rethink!
HE Rethink - and re-feel - because it was experience which brought a
revolutionin their understanding. They knew as they stood therethey were
at a turning point in history. Yet,you see , some people claim this
vital decision not to terraform sprang from a powerful speech by UN
Secretary George Bligh, who argued against it.His words were often quoted:
‘Terraforming is a clever idea which may or may not work. But cleverness is a lesser thingthan reverence . We musthave reverence for Mars as it has always existed. Wecannot destroy the millions of years of its solitude merely for cleverness. Stay your hand!’
SHE Youbelieve those words of Bligh’s were in the astronauts’ minds when they
landed?
HE I partly believe so. I wish to believe so because staying the hand is often
abetter, if a less popular, way to proceed than conquest. Anyhow, they did
stay their hands. It proved the beginning of a tide in the
affairsof men. Fortunately, youcouldn’t exploit Mars: there were no
natural resourcesto exploit - no oil or fossil fuels, because there had never been forests. Limited underground reservoirs of water.Just - just that amazing empty world, so long the target of mankind’s dreams and speculations, a desert rolling ever onward through space.
SHE The old-fashioned word ‘space’, had by then been relegated to the
etymologicalmuseum, by the way. That highway of teeming particleswas now known as ‘matrix’.
HE Okay. Thousands on thousands of young folk desired to visit Mars,just as ,
two centuries earlier, they had walked, rolled or ridden westwards
acrossthe face of North America. The UN had to formulate rules
for visitors. Two categoriesof people were permitted to go, travelling uncomfortably in EUPACUS ships: the YEAs and the DOPs. (Laughs]
SHE It was a sensible arrangement. Or at least it worked, given the
difficultiesof the journey. TheYEAs were Young Educated Adults. Theyhad to pass an examination to qualify. The DOPswere Distinguished Older Persons. They were selectedby their communities.The cost of an Earth -Mars round trip was high. DOPs werepaid for by their communities. The YEAs paidin work , doing a year’s community service before their journey.
HE So the giant fish farms off Galapagos andScapa Flow , and thebird ranches
ofthe Canadian north, and the vineyards of the Gobiwere developed...
allby voluntary labour.
SHE Andthe afforestation of most of the Outback inAustralia .
HE And of the great flow of people who went to Mars, that wonderfulnew Ayers
Rock in the sky, to meditate, to explore, to honeymoon, to realize
themselves-all found themselves up against the reality of the cosmos. All
stood therein awe, breathing in the laws of the universe.
SHE Andone of them said, marvelling, ‘And that I have come here to experience
allthis means I am the most extraordinary thing in the entire galaxy.’
HE Thencame the crash!
SHE Ohyes, just when minds were changing everywhere! And the crashmarked the
endof a certain exploitive chain of thought. Pundits in 2085 called it the end of the Twentieth Century Nightmare. The consortiumEUPACUS collapsed . It wasa case of internal corruption. Billions of dollarshad been embezzled and, when the figures were examined, the whole company fell apart.
EUPACUS had a monopoly on interplanetary travel, and on all travel arrangements. All that traffic stopped. Five thousand visitors were on Mars atthe time , together with two thousand administrators, technicians and scientists - Mars of course makes an excellent observatory for studying Jupiter and its moons.
Seven thousand people - all stranded here!
HE But Mars is a big desert island. By this time, it was acomplex community ,
lackingWild West atmosphere, with serious business to do. There were no
gunson Mars; no mind-destroying drugs; there was no currency, only limited
credit.
SHE Anotherimportant thing. No animals. For there was no grazing orfodder to
behad, no animals lived on Mars, except for a few cats. Vegetarianismbecame a positive thing rather than a negative.The habit was emulated by terrestrials. In fact, renewedconcern for animals by demonstrations and lobbying, induced many governments to bring in Animal Rights laws. A revulsionto rearing animals for slaughter and human consumption was widespread.The human conscience was getting up off the couch!
