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 Mars in that first expedition had to justify costs. Theywere going  to prepare to terraform it. It wasa foregone conclusion for them. Theywere bound by the pressures of their rather primitive societies.

 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!

 HE  You mustbe mistaken about the animals. I remember seeing documentaries

     showingyour Martian domes full of bright birds. And there were fish, too.

 SHE Oh, birds and fish, yes, but no animals.The birds  were genetically

 manipulatedmacaws and parrots. Insteadof squawking , they sang sweetly. They wereallowed to fly free in limited areas of the main domes, the ‘tourist’ domes. Theywere prized . No oneattempted to kill and eat them during the period when Mars was isolated.

 HE  So theMartians remained cut off, luckily under wise leaders.During the

     periodof isolation, water - the fossil water from underground   reservoirs

 wasstrictly rationed.It was needed for agriculture and went through electrolysis to provide necessary oxygen. The isolatedcommunity  had reason to cohere. Without coherence there was no chance of survival.

 SHE Themulti-billion collapse of  EUPACUS brought financial crisis to the

 businesscentres of Earth, to LA,Seoul ,Beijing ,London ,Paris ,Frankfurt . The disillusionwith laissez -faire capitalism was complete. Somuch so that  ‘Stay your hand!’ became a popular phrase. Stay your hand from grasping another ice-cream, another beer, another car, another house! You stayedyour hand out of pride.

 It was five years before a limited flight schedule with Mars was re -established. By then the idea of community service had sunk  in, reinforcing the concept of the world’s population as a unit, and as part of Earth’s necessary biota. Discovering that the Mars community had achieved a frugal Utopia, thatall there were lean but fit, was a cause for great rejoicing - most nationalities had one or more representative members on White Mars.

 HE  The Martianexample hastened the swing away from exploitive capitalism

     towardsthe managerialism that had already begun. Laissez-faire passed

     away inits sleep, as communism had done before it. The epochof peaceful

     Earth opened, with leadership concentrating on integrating its component

     parts, and a general tendency to behave more like park-keepers than robber

     barons.

 SHE Ah, but with the increase in YEA and DOP pilgrims to the heroic White Mars,

 theplanet ran out of water. The underground reservoirs, such as they were, had been drained dry. It looked like the end of a civilisation on Mars.

 HE  I’m notsure it was as bad as that, because already manned probes were

     forgingfurther out into the system  and the realm of the gas giants,

     mightyJupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Unexplained activity  had

     beensighted betweenNeptune and its large satellite, Triton. So  a base

 wasestablished on Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede-

 SHE Ihave visitedGanymedeCity . It’s a pretty swinging place. People live for

 theday.I fear Mars gets  bypassed now, because views of Jupiter  from Ganymede and the other moons are so inexhaustibly wonder-making.

 HE  From Ganymede,it was just a hop to the neighbouring moon, Oceania- the

     rechristenedEuropa - where views of Jupiter are even more stunning.

     There’s a floatingbase onOceania , built on top of a kilometre-deep ice

     Hoe.Under the ice crust, remarkably, isa fresh water ocean - pure fresh

     water, without life, or without life until we seeded some there.

     That water gets despatched inbladdees to Mars. Mars now hasa large lake

     slowlyturning into a sea of fresh water. Its main problem is solved.

 SHE  Andso of course Mars is being terraformed, at last.The human race has

 movedon and no longer needs a monument to old dreams and illusions.

 HE  Mars’s periodof frugal Utopia did not last.But the blackness of the

     twentiethcentury, with all its wars, genocides, killings, injustice and

     greedhad faded away. Somehow,  we found the strength, in Bligh’s words,

 to stayour hand. Thehuman race  is happier - less tormented - as it launches out towards the stars.

 SHE Tomeet with all those other species we don’t yet know of... Maybe with

 God?

 HE  Unlikely.Godwas one of those creaking floorboards in the brain we left

     behindwhen we got to Mars.

 SHE Icannot accept that. Whatwould become of the human race if there was no

 god?

 HE  What became of it during the twentieth century when supposedly therewas a

     god? You believersmight say , ‘He saved us from destroying ourselves with

     ournuclear weapons. That was  his will.’ Equally,if we  had destroyed

 ourselves, that would have been God’s will too, according to you. There’s no God -yet I hate him. I hate the way religious belief has caused us to waste our energies looking away from our own intractable problems. He stood in  our way of enlightenment, like Jung’s Shadow, barring us from accepting that we are made of the ashes fallen from the flanks of extinct  suns. Thatwe are   universe-stuff.The universe  is where we belong.

 SHE You must allow me strongly to disagree. Godhas been our inspiration,

 lifting us from the material. Have you never listened to all the beautiful sacred music composed in  his name,  or seen all the great paintings faith has inspired?

 HE  The paintings were painted by men. God didn’t have half themusical genius

     of Johann Sebastian Bach, I can tell you. You must give up this

     illusion, comforting although  it is.  Giving it  up is  part of  the

 process ofbecoming adult.

 SHE Idon’t understand you.

 HE  You mean you don’t understand evolution.

 SHE Don’tbe silly. Science and religion are not in conflict.

 HE  No - it’s experience and religion which are in conflict.

 SHE Andwhat will we do without God?

 HE  We must learn - as we are slowly learning - to judge ourselves, and our own

     actions.

 SHE Youwon’t shake my faith. I’m sorry you don’t have it.

 HE  Faith? Beingunmoved by facts? Come,you must not pride yourself on’such

     blindness. Think how the  concept of God separated  us from the rest  of

 nature, set us above the animals, gave us the example of puissance and abasement.Made us self-preoccupied idiots.

 SHE That’sblasphemous rubbish. Yousound almost inhuman when you speak like

 that.

 HE  We are almost becoming another species, we space-goers. Physical and mental

     change is  rapid now. We have  developed from the gifts  of that

 tormentedtwentieth century, from the discovery of the DNA code and the subsequent advance of genetic engineering.The bladdees shuttling to and fro across matrix betweenOceania and Mars are living entities developed by bio-engineering skills from the modest bladder-wort.

 SHE Youremember the excitement when Ganymede was made habitable by new plant

 insectstock. Theplantsects were despatched in unmanned  probes. They

     soft-landedon Ganymede, dispersed, reproduced rapidly, and prepared  the

     satellitefor us when we  arrived there. Bythat time , the plantsects

 had culminated, consuming themselves, leaving their bodies for compost. Such advances would have been impossible in the early days of Mars landings, with their mechanistic approach.

 HE  Anddid God walk on Ganymede? No,he stood in our way! Washe not Carl

     Jung’s monstrous Shadow, cutting ourselves  off from a realisation of

 ourselvesas being intrinsically a part of the whole cosmos - ashes from extinct suns?

 SHE Tryto love God, whether or not you think he exists. Hatredis harmful to

 you. God was necessary - essential, perhaps - for some ages past, and the Saviour represented a condition for  us to aspire to in the  long period of darkness.

 HE  [Laughs)You’re saying we have saved ourselves?

 SHE I’msaying only that the concept of a loving Saviour helped us, once upon a

 time. But certainly we’vedone away  with hatred on the outer satellites, along with most forms of illness; genetic revision and improved  immune systems have altogether clarified our minds.

 HE  It wasthe understanding that we are an intrinsic part of nature which

     transformed our  perceptions when  we arrived  on Mars.  Much  has

 followed.The bleak Martian globe cleared our minds. A prompting of our

 symbiotic relationshipwith plant life speeded the development of warm

 -blooded plants.It has radicallychanged our being and appearance. That

     epiphyte  growing on your head,  much resembling an orchid, is now

     women’s  crowning glory! It  permits youto  carry with you a micro

 atmosphere, a temperature-gauge and other perceptions, wherever you go.

 SHE As do the ferns sprouting round your venerable cranium. Youare right

 there.We’re now true terrestrials, half-human, half-plant, creatures of nature, well-equipped to venture throughout a waiting universe.

 HE  Well, it’s been pleasant to talk with you. You must go on your way.I have

     toretire; I’m growing too old  to travel. We shall not meet again.

 Farewell, dear spirit!