White Mars Part 12

Staring hard at Belle, he became lyrical and so, I thought, possibly insincere.

As we moved through our lives, he continued, was there not a vein of enchantment in events, in awakening, in sleeping, in our dreams and in the power of thought? That elusive element, which the best artists, writers, musicians, scientists - even ordinary persons in ordinary jobs - experienced, that special lovely thing of which it was difficult to speak, but which gave life its magic. It might perhaps be simply the ticking of the biological clock, the joy in being alive. Whatever it was, that firefly thing, it was something of which the poet Marlowe spoke: One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least Which into words no virtue can digest.

Listening to this speech, Belle Rivers clasped her hands on the desk in front of her and appeared to study them.

Religion, at least the Christian religion, Tom said, changed over time, abandoning the ill-tempered and savage Jehovah of the Old Testament for a more responsive faith in redemption - though it still based itself on such impossibilities as virgin birth, the resurrection of the dead and eternal life - impossibilities designed to impress the ignorant of Christ's unscientific age.

When the Omega Smudge would be detected, we should see a genuine miracle - once we understood what had been detected. (Yet would I ever understand this area of science? I made a resolve to learn still more ...) By going two steps forward and one step back, continued Tom, humankind since the days of Jesus Christ had sc.r.a.ped together some knowledge of the world, the universe and themselves. The situation now, in the late middle of the twenty-first century, was that G.o.d got in the way of understanding. G.o.d was dark matter, an impediment rather than an aid to our proper sense of the divine aspect of things. We had been forced to leave many good things behind on Earth; G.o.d should be left behind too.

The world was more wonderful without him.

Belle Rivers, continuing to regard her hands, said merely, 'It cannot be more wonderful without him, since he created it.'

Until this juncture Mary Fangold had remained silent, watching Tom and Belle with a faint smile on her lips. Tom said afterwards that Mary, the apostle of reason, knew we had fallen into human error by excluding the hard-working Belle from most of our educational plans. She felt her position to be undermined. Mary spoke up.

The prospectus is only at the planning stage, Belle. We rely on you to continue teaching, just as the children rely on you. We wonder if you would care to include a subject such as we might call, say, Becoming Individual, in your timetable, whereby religion would form a part of it, together with archetypal behaviour and the interrelationship of conscious and sub-conscious.'

Belle regarded her suspiciously. 'That does not sound like my idea of religion.'

'Then let's say religion and reason...'

After a moment's silence, Belle smiled and said, 'Do not think I am trying to be difficult. Basically, your entire plan for improved learning cannot flourish without one additional factor.'

She waited for us to ask her what that factor might be. Then she explained that there were children who were always resistant to learning, who found reading and writing hard work. Others were happy and fulfilled with such things. The difference could be accounted for by the contrast between those children who were sung to and read to by their mothers and fathers from birth onwards, perhaps even before birth, when the child was still in utero, and those who were not, who were neglected.

Learning, she said, began from Day One. If that learning was a.s.sociated with the happiness and security of a parent's love, then the child found no impediments to learning and to the enjoyment of education. Those children whose parents were silent or indifferent had a harder slog through life.

The basis of all that was good in life was, she declared, simply love and care, which arose from a love of Christ.

Tom rose and took her hand. 'We are in perfect agreement there, at least as far as love and care of the child are concerned,' he said. 'You have probably cited the most vital thing. There's no harm in using Christ as an exemplar. We're very happy you are the headmistress here, and in charge of learning.'

Tom's and my, in some respects, mysterious, relationship deepened. I was legally adopted as his daughter at a small ceremony; I became Cang Hai Jefferies, and lived in harmony with him. To be truthful, I mean more or less in harmony with him. It was not easy to get mentally close.

Often when my new leg troubled me - it got the twitches -I would lie in his arms. This was bliss for me; but he never attempted a s.e.xual advance.

Our activities had become formalised. Indoor sports, plays, revues, recitations, dances and baby exhibitions (the many pregnancies had yielded our first Mars-born infants) were weekly events. Training for the first Mars marathon was in progress.

A woman of French origin, Paula Gallin, produced a dark, austere play, shot through with humour, which combined video with human actors. My Culture, Culture, to give it its t.i.tle, was reluctantly received at first, but slowly became recognised as a master work. Most of the action took place on a flat sloping plain, the tilt of which increased slowly as the play proceeded. to give it its t.i.tle, was reluctantly received at first, but slowly became recognised as a master work. Most of the action took place on a flat sloping plain, the tilt of which increased slowly as the play proceeded.

My Culture Culture played a part in turning our community into the world's first modern psychologically oriented civilisation. The setting-up of the Smudge Project grew nearer to completion by the end of 2065, despite material limitations hampering its development. Dreiser kept us informed by frequent bulletins on the Ambient. But many of us sensed that the technological culture of Earth was gradually giving way to an absorption in Being and Becoming. played a part in turning our community into the world's first modern psychologically oriented civilisation. The setting-up of the Smudge Project grew nearer to completion by the end of 2065, despite material limitations hampering its development. Dreiser kept us informed by frequent bulletins on the Ambient. But many of us sensed that the technological culture of Earth was gradually giving way to an absorption in Being and Becoming.

Being and Becoming had a very practical focus in the maturing of our children. It was prompted by a natural anxiety regarding the happy development of the young in a confined, largely 'indoor' world. But the comparative gloom of Mars prompted introspection and, indeed, empathy. It was noted early in our exile that most of us enjoyed unusually vivid dreams of curious content. These dreams, it was understood, put us in touch with our phylogenetic past, as if seeking or possibly offering therapeutic rea.s.surance.

Mistaken Historicism had filled the world with the idea of progress, bringing greater pressure on greater numbers of people, the rise of megacities and the loss of pleasant communication with the self. A wise man of the twentieth century, Stephen Jay Gould, said: 'Progress is a noxious, culturally embedded, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced.'

We were trying to replace it - not by going back but going forward into a realisation of our true selves, our various selves, which had experience of the evolutionary chain. Exchanging technocracy for metaphysics, in Belle's words.

My true self led me to experience pregnancy. Shortly after our much delayed adoption ceremony, I went to the hospital, where I had myself injected with some of Tom Jefferies's DNA. My womb was grateful for the benevolent gravity and I delivered my beautiful daughter Alpha without pain one day in March 2067. Tom was with me at the birth. There my baby lay in my arms, red in the face after her exertions to emerge into the world, with the most exquisite little fingers you ever saw. Alpha had dark hair and eyes as blue as Earth's summer skies. And a temperament as fair.

Unfortunately the hospital permitted me no luxury of peace. Almost as soon as I was delivered I was sent back into society. That was Fangold's doing. The move upset my child for a short while, and then she recovered.

Kathi sent me a message from the science unit. It said, 'Did you succ.u.mb to Tom or to society? Why are you pretending to yourself you are an ordinary person? Better to pretend to be extraordinary. Kathi.'

It was not very kind.

Following the birth of Alpha, I - and I hope Tom too -was in a trance of happiness. His sorrow for the death of his wife was not forgotten, but he had put it behind him; he accepted her loss as one of those sorrows inescapable from our biological existence. Although I knew that one day terrestrial ships and business would return, I always hoped that day would be far off, so that our wonderful experience of finding our real selves could continue unabated.

My cloud of contentment was increased by a slogan I pa.s.sed almost every day. Outside the hairdresser's salon someone had painted VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE - PEACE BEGETS PEACE. The words might have come from my heart.

Belle Rivers seemed to increase in stature. Her Becoming Individual sessions, which parents often attended with their children, as I soon did with Alpha, were perceived to contain much wisdom, which at first appeared uncomfortably to challenge the unity of the self. The significance of archetypes playing distinct roles in our unconscious was difficult for many people to grasp at first. Gradually more and more people became absorbed in the symbolic aspects of experience.

Belle said, magisterially, 'We begin to understand how health springs from our being lived, in a sense, as well as living, and from accepting that we act out traditional roles. On Mars we shall come to require new ground rules.'

During the term of my pregnancy I used to wonder about this remark. I wanted to be different. I wanted things to be different.

I discussed this point with Ben Borrow. Ben was a smooth YEA who had done his community service on Luna and was, in his own words, 'into spirituality'. However that might be, it was noticeable that he was a devoted disciple of Belle Rivers, often closeted late with her.

'The more we feel ourselves lived, the more we can live independently.'

The melding of opposites, spirit/matter, male/female, good/evil, brings completeness.'

'Only technology can free us from technology.'

'True spirituality can only be achieved by looking back into green distance.'

These were some of Borrow's sayings. I wrote them down.

He was intent on becoming a guru; even I could see he was also something of a creep. He had a tiny little pointed beard.

Under the tutelage of his powerful mistress, Borrow started a series of teach-ins he called Sustaining Individuality. These were well attended, and often became decidedly erotic. Rivers and Borrow taught that neurophysiological processes in the mind-body, such as dreaming, promoted the integration of limbic system dramas, thus increasing awareness and encouraging cognitive and emotive areas to merge. As there are swimmers in oceans who fear the unknown creatures somewhere below, beyond their knowledge, so there were those who feared the contents of the deeper levels of mind; they gradually lost this culturally induced phobia to enjoy a blossoming of awareness.

After one of these teach-ins I had to tell Borrow that I didn't know whether or not my awareness was blossoming. How could I tell?

'Perhaps,' he said, matching finger-tip with finger-tip in front of him, 'one might say that the aware find within themselves an ability to time-travel into the remote phylogenic past, and discover there wonderful things that give savour to reason, richness to being.

'Not least of these elements is a unity with nature and instinctive life, from which a knowledge of death is absent. Consciousness is something so complex and sensuous that no artificial intelligence could possibly emulate it. Don't you think?'

'Mmm,' I said. He hurried off, still with finger-tip touching finger-tip. It was not quite the way you put your hands together in prayer. Perhaps he wanted to indicate that he was in touch with himself.

And didn't wish to be in touch with me.

Our community became locked into this physiological-biological-philosophical type of speculation. Humanity's spiritual attainments, together with their relationship with our lowly ancestral origins, produced problems of perception. If what we perceive is an interpretation of reality, rather than reality itself, then we must examine our perceptions. That much I understand. But since it's our unconscious perceptual faculties that absorb and sort out our lifelong input of information, how does our conscious mind make them comprehensible? What does it edit out? What do they edit out between them? What vital thing are we missing?

I asked this question of May Porter, who came to give a short talk about perceptual faculties.

She said, 'Ethology has shown that all animals and insects are programmed to perceive the world in specific ways. Thus each species is locked into its perceptual umwelt. Facts are filtered for survival. Non-survival-type perceptions are rejected. An earlier mystic, Aldous Huxley, cited the case of the frog, whose perceptions cause it to see only things that move, such as insects. As soon as they stop moving, the frog ceases to see them and can look elsewhere. "What on earth would a frog's philosophy be - the metaphysics of appearance and disappearance?" Huxley asks himself.

'Similarly Western humanity values only that which moves; silence and stillness are seen as negative, rather than positive, qualities.'

I was thinking of Kathi's remarks when I asked May, 'What if there was a higher consciousness on Mars that we were not trained to perceive?'

She gave a short laugh. 'There is no higher consciousness on Mars. Only us, dear.'

These and many more understandings had a behavioural effect on our community. Certainly we became more thoughtful, if by thought we include pursuing visions. It was as if by unravelling the secrets of truly living we had come up against the tantalising conundrum of life itself, and its reasons, which were beyond biology. Single people or couples or families preferred to live alone, combining with others only on special occasions, such as a new performance of My Culture Culture or a Sustaining Individuality session. or a Sustaining Individuality session.

Thus most people came to live as individually as limited s.p.a.ce would permit. As a would-be Utopia, it was non-authoritarian, in distinct contrast to Plato's definition of a good place.

Nor do I imply that a sense of community was lost. We still ate together once or twice a day. It happened that many a time I caught the jo-jo bus to work with Alpha in my arms and found the whole place humming and vibrating like a hive; so many people were doing pranayama yoga on their own, uttering the eternal 'Om'.

Oh, then how happy I was! For me it was the best period of our Martian existence, too sensitive, too in-dwelling to prove permanent. I clutched my dear child in my arms and thought, 'Surely, surely Mars people will never again be as united as this!'

Since all our teach-in and community sessions were videoed, beamed to Earth, and saved, we could check on our progress towards individuality. Many of us had to chuckle at our earlier selves, our naive questions, our uncertainty.

We were moving towards a degree of serenity when I received a nasty little shock. I caught on my globe an Ambient exchange between Belle Rivers and my beloved Tom.

She was saying, '... on Earth. And there's a scientist by name Jon Thorgeson. He says he wants to talk to Cang Hai. He says she suggested he might give a lecture about the Omega Smudge to us plebs. Is that okay by you?'

'Just keep her out of my hair, Belle. Let Thorgeson go ahead.'

Belle's image remained. With her head on one side, she regarded Tom. Then she asked, 'Do you know of anything odd going on in the science unit?'

'No. It's true I haven't heard from Dreiser just recently. Why do you ask?'

'Oh, simply the feeling something was in the air when I was speaking to Thorgeson. Could be the oncoming marathon, I suppose.'

By the time their images faded I was worried. What did he mean by keeping me out of his hair? He was always so good and kind. He relied on me, didn't he? It was true he had become rather grumpy recently.

Perhaps it was simply that he disliked hearing Alpha cry - such a beautiful sound! I pitied him.

11.

The Missing Smudge

In a rotation of jobs, I was allocated to the synthetic foods department. I preferred it to the biogas department. The smells were better. Here I helped in time to develop something which resembled a Danish pastry. We always glossed over the fact that our foods were created from everyone's manure. Nevertheless, my friends teased me about it.

One of my closest friends, Kathi Skadmorr, had adopted a teasing approach to me since I had danced naked before her and her lover. She rang me unexpectedly in serious vein and invited me on a short expedition to view what she called the 'Smudge experiment'. I was always ready to learn. Although baby Alpha was so small, I left her in the care of Paula Gallin for a few hours while I joined Kathi.

Behind the science unit, Amazonis sprawled brokenhearted under a layer of dusty colour which seemed to be sometimes pink, or rose, or sometimes orange. A swan's feather of cloud vapour overhead reflected these hues.

Kathi and I had suited up before leaving the science unit. As we walked along a netted way, where latticed posts supported overhead cables, a slight agoraphobia attacked me. I clutched Kathi's hand: she was more used to open s.p.a.ces than I. Yet at the same time I found something closed about the Martian outdoors. Perhaps it was the scarcity of atmosphere; or perhaps it was the indoor feeling of dust lying everywhere, dust much older than ever dimmed the surface of a table back on Earth.

To our left, the ground rose towards the heights that would culminate in Olympus Mons. There, I caught movement out of the side of my eye. A small boulder, dislodged by the morning heat, rolled downhill a few metres, struck another rock, and became still. Again, it was a motionless world we walked through.

The horrors got at me. Was it wise to have brought Alpha into this world? Granted that it was pa.s.sion rather than wisdom which fathered babies, yet I had experienced no pa.s.sion. And supposing our fragile systems broke down... then the dread world of the unmoving would prevail over everything ... even over my dear baby. The past would snap back into place like the lid of a coffin.

As if she had read my thought, Kathi began talking about another kind of past, the past of a scientific obsession. She said I would see the latest produce of a line of research stretching back into the previous century.

'Dreiser is teaching me the history of particle physics. It begins before this century,' she told me. 'It's a tale of reasoning and unreasonable hopes. Last century, American physicists proposed to build a giant accelerator beneath the state of Texas. The accelerator was planned to measure many kilometres in diameter. They christened it a superconducting supercollider, SSC for short. The SSC was designed to detect what they referred to as the "Higgs particle". It would cost billions of tax-payers' money, and take an enormous chunk out of the science budget.

'This was the twentieth century's idea of Big Science.' She gave a sardonic chuckle. 'US Congress kept asking why anyone would think it legitimate to believe that so much money should go in a search for a single particle. After three billion dollars had been spent, the whole project was sc.r.a.pped.'

I asked why it had been thought necessary to find this Higgs particle.

'The physicists who were searching for these basic ingredients which comprise the universe argued that finding the elusive Higgs would supply them with vital answers. It would complete their picture of the fundamental units.

They were like detectives seeking the solution of a mystery.

'The mystery remains. Hence the whole purpose of the Mars Omega Project. You might say the mystery is why we are here. The more deeply we probe nature, the clearer it becomes that these basic units have to be things without ma.s.s. There's the mystery - where does ma.s.s originate? Without ma.s.s, nothing would hold together. Our bodies would disintegrate, for instance.'

I could not help asking what the Higgs particle had to do with ma.s.s. Kathi replied that it was still unclear to her, but the physicists of the time had an idea in their heads that the highly symmetrical scheme of the universe would have that symmetry spoilt according to what they termed 'spontaneous symmetry breaking'. The Higgs was tied up with that idea.

'You see, for the pure unbroken scheme with exact symmetry, it was necessary to have all particles without ma.s.s. When Higgs enters the picture, everything changes. Most particles acquire ma.s.s. The photon is a notable exception.'

'I see. The Higgs was to be a kind of magic wand. As soon as it enters the stage, "Hey presto!" ma.s.s comes along.'

'A rhymester said it in a nutsh.e.l.l: The particles were lighter far than gas.

Then Higgs weighs in, and all is ma.s.s.

'Because of this rather magical property, Higgs was christened by journalists "the G.o.d particle".'

'And the physicists of that time believed that the SSC would enable them to catch a glimpse of this G.o.d.' I found I had lost most of my fears and let go of Kathi's hand.

'According to the theory current at the time,' she said, 'there had to be a certain limited range of possibilities for the ma.s.s of the Higgs. Otherwise, there would be an inconsistency with other things which had already been established by experiment. The G.o.d particle must deign to live among its subjects, just as if it were an ordinary mortal ma.s.sive particle.'

I had to ask her what she meant by that.

'In accord with Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, the Higgs particle, it was believed, would correspond to a certain energy. That energy was supposed to lie within the range of what the SSC would have been capable of. But - the SSC was never built, as I have told you.

'As luck would have it, a rival project was already at the planning stage. This was at the international research centre, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.

'The CERN project was greatly cheaper than the cancelled SSC would have been. It employed a tunnel already in use for an earlier experiment. The new project was the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC.'

I imagined a great tube, with a vanishing perspective into circular darkness.

'In the late twentieth century, the earlier experiment on the CERN site had yielded a great deal of information about leptons. But the energy used to produce leptons was not nearly enough to produce a Higgs. A lepton, by the way, is a member of the lightest family of subatomic particles, such as an electron or a muon. However, the clever group who constructed the LEP, as the tunnel was called, foresaw that it would be possible comparatively cheaply to modify their experiment, so that protons replaced the positrons and electrons of the original experiment.

'Protons, neutrons, and their anti-particles, belong to the family of more ma.s.sive particles known as hadrons. hadrons. Hence the terminology, the Large Hadron Collider.' Hence the terminology, the Large Hadron Collider.'

Kathi stopped. Then she spoke rather abstractedly. 'Imagine the drama of it! The world seemed to be on the brink of a great discovery. Would they be able to trace the Higgs through the LHC? The equipment was finally up and running in about 2005. A year later, it began to reach the kind of energy levels at which it seemed possible that they might actually detect the Higgs particle. This was at the lower end of the scale of theoretical possibilities for the Higgs ma.s.s. So the fact that they found no clear candidate they could identify with the Higgs did not unduly worry the physicists.'

We stood in that unnatural place, staring at our boots.