Part 2 (1/2)

I'm getting ahead of myself, so I'd better describe how it was in the early days on the Red Planet.

I want to set down all the difficulties and limitations we, the first people on an alien planet, experienced - and all our hopes.

EUPACUS got us there, EUPACUS set up all the dimensions of travel. Whatever went wrong later, you have to admit they never lost a s.h.i.+p, or a life, in transit on the YEA and DOP s.h.i.+ppings.

You certainly stayed close to nature on Mars, or the Eternal Verities, as a friend of mine called them. Oxygen and water supplies were fairly constant preoccupations.

Water was rationed to 3.5 kilograms per person per day. Communal laundering drank up another 3 kilograms per head per day. Everyone enjoyed a fair share of the supply; in consequence there were few serious complaints. Spartan though this rationing may sound, it compared quite favourably with the water situation on Earth. There, with its slowly rising population, industrial demands on fresh water had increased to the point where all water everywhere was metered and as expensive as engine fuels of medium grade. This effectively limited the economically stressed half of the terrestrial population to something less than the Martian allocation.

The need to conserve everything led to our system of communal meals. We all sat down together at table in two s.h.i.+fts, and were leisurely about our frugal meals, eking out food with conversation. Sometimes one of the company would read to us during the evening meal - but that came later.

At first I was shy about sitting among all those strange faces, amid the hubbub. Some of the people there I would later get to be friends with (not Mary Fangold, though), such as Hal Kissorian, Youssef Choihosla, Belle Rivers, funny Crispin Barcunda - oh, and many others.

But by luck I chanced to sit next to a pretty bright-faced YEA person. Her shock of curly dark brown locks was quite unlike my own straight black hair. She overcame my shyness, and obviously treated the whole business of being on a strange planet as a wonderful adventure. Her name was Kathi Skadmorr.

'I've been so lucky,' she told me. 'I just came from a poor family in Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania. I was one of five children.'

This shocked me. It was not permitted to have five children where I came from.

She said, 'I served my year at Darwin, working for IWR, International Water Resources. I learned much about the strange properties of water, how the solid state is lighter than the liquid state, how with capillary action it seems to defy gravity, how it conducts light...' She broke off and laughed. 'It's boring for you to hear all this.'

'No, not at all. I'm just amazed you wanted to talk to me.'

She looked at me long and carefully. 'We all have important roles to play here. The world has narrowed down. I'm sure your role will be important. You must make it so. I intend to make mine so.'

'But you're so pretty.'

'I'm not going to let that stop me.' And she gave a captivating chuckle.

As almost everyone of that first Martian population agreed, to survive on Mars close cooperation was a necessity. The individual ego had to submit to the needs of the whole body of people.

Continual television reports from Mars brought to the attention of the Downstairs world (as we came to call Earth) the fairness of Martian governance and our egalitarian society. It contrasted markedly with terrestrial injustice and inequality.

I don't want to talk about my own troubles, but I had been rather upset by the voyage from Earth, so much so that I had been referred to a psychurgist, a woman called Helen Panorios.

Helen had a dim little cabin on one of the outer spicules where she saw patients. She was a heavily built lady with dyed purple hair. I never saw her wearing anything other than an enfolding black overall-suit. A mild woman she was, who did seem genuinely interested in my problems.

As I explained to her, the six-month journey in cryosleep had terrified me. I had been detached from my life and seemed unable to reconnect with my ego. It was something to do with my personality.

'Some people hate the experience; some enjoy it as a kind of spiritual adventure. It can be seen as a sort of death, but it is a death from which you reawaken - sometimes with a new insight into yourself.' That's what she kept telling me. Basically she was saying that most people accepted cryosleep as a new experience. Just coming to Mars, being on Mars, was a new experience.

I had come to hate the very name EUPACUS. The thought of undergoing that same annihilation getting home again to Earth scared me rigid. There had to be a better way of making that journey across millions of miles of s.p.a.ce - or matrix matrix as the new more correct term had it. Interstellar matrix teemed with radiations and particles, so that to naked experience 's.p.a.ce' had come to have a Victorian ring about it. as the new more correct term had it. Interstellar matrix teemed with radiations and particles, so that to naked experience 's.p.a.ce' had come to have a Victorian ring about it.

Travel between Earth and Mars was on the increase, or at least it had been before the disaster. Marvelos was hard pressed to meet the demand. s.p.a.ce vehicles were manufactured in terrestrial orbit under licence. Practically every industrialised nation of Earth was involved in their manufacture, if only in making pillows for the coffin-cots. The s.p.a.ce vehicles, each with elaborate back-up facilities, were billion-dollar items. Shareholders were reluctant to invest in more rapid development. Takeovers and mergers of companies were happening all the time under the EUPACUS roof.

Helen talked me through the entire process of a voyage.

The consortium's ferry s.h.i.+ps carried us pa.s.sengers up from Earth to the interplanetaries, which parked in orbit about Earth and Luna. I was queasy from the start, even with a g-snort in me. I'm really not a good traveller. Then we pa.s.sed into the interplanetary pa.s.senger s.h.i.+ps, popularly known as 'fridge wagons'. You never forget the curious smell in a fridge wagon. I believe they start right away with some sort of airborne anaesthetic circulating.

'I didn't care for the way the compartments were so like refrigerated coffins,' I told Helen. Even before the wagon released from orbit, you were going rapidly into that dark nowhere of cryosleep as bodily functions slowed. That was terror for me ...

'You were primed beforehand, Cang Hai, dear,' said Helen. 'You know well the economics of that journey back at that stage of development. Taking pa.s.sengers in cryosleep obviates the need for the s.h.i.+ps to carry food and water. Little air is needed. Fuel and expense are saved. Otherwise, well, no trip...'

I relived the rush upwards from Earth. For most people, the spirit of adventure overcame any feelings of sickness, though not for me. Two hundred and fifty-six kilometres up, the barrel shape of the fridge wagon loomed, riding in its...o...b..t. It had looked small, then it was enormous. Its registration number was painted large on its hull.

You have to admit it was a neat manoeuvre, considering the speed at which both bodies were travelling. With hardly a jar, they locked. I did then dare, before entering the wagon, to take a last look out at the Earth we were leaving. Fridge waggons have no ports.

I had to cry a little. Helen tenderly placed a hand on my shoulder, like the mother I never had, saying nothing. I was leaving behind my Other, back in Chengdu. n.o.body would understand that.

Once in that strange-smelling interior, dense with low murmurs of various machines, we were guided to a small apartment, a locker room really. There one undressed with a neuter android in attendance, stowed away one's few belongings, and took a radiation shower. It was like preparing for a gas chamber. Advised by the android, you now had to lock your bare feet into wall-grooves and clasp the rungs in the curving wall above head level. The compartment now swung and travelled to a vacant coffin-cell. Music played. The aria 'Above my feet the roses speak...' from Delaport's opera Supertoys. Supertoys.

Then you were somehow motionless and monitors uncoiled like snakes. Tiny feeds attached themselves to your body. Before the wagon left orbit, your body temperature was approaching that of frozen meat. You might as well have been dead. You were dead.

I did a bit of screaming in front of Helen Panorios. Gradually I seemed to get better.

We worked through the disorientation of rousing back to life in Mars...o...b..t, speeding above all that varied tumble of rock and desert and old broken land.

'You certainly have to welcome new experience to get that far!' I said at one point.

When disaster struck, those who welcomed new experience were certainly well prepared for anything. Which was an important factor in influencing what happened to us all.

Helen rather liked to lecture me. She called it 'establis.h.i.+ng a context'. Marvelos organised two types of visit to Mars, one when Earth and Mars were in conjunction, (called the CRT, the Conjunction Return Trip), one when they were in opposition (called the ORT, the Opposition Return trip).

Outward bound both trips took half a year. It was inevitable that those trips had to be pa.s.sed in cryosleep.

Perhaps it's worth reminding people that by 'year' I always mean Earth year. Earth imposed its year on Mars thinking much as the Christian calendar had been imposed over most of Earth's nations, whether Christian or not. We will come to the rest of the Martian calendar and our clocks later.

The difficulty lay in the provision of return journeys. Helen grew quite excited about this. She showed me slides. While the return leg of an ORT took an uncomfortable year, the CRT took only half a year, no longer than the trip outwards. The snag was that the ORT required a stay of only thirty days on Mars, which was generally regarded as a pretty ideal time period, whereas the CRT entailed a stay of over a year and a half.

I was booked for an ORT, and found I couldn't face the mere thought of it. Helen had booked on a CRT. Her time away from Earth was going to be eighteen times longer than mine. Although I remained in touch with my Other in Chengdu, I could not have faced such a long stretch away. Now I found I could not face the long year in cryosleep.

Of course everyone who came to Mars had made these decisions. Despite such obstacles, the number of applications for flights increased month by month, as those returning reported on what for most was the great emotional experience of their lifetime.

The UN and EUPACUS between them agreed on the legal limits of those permitted to visit Mars. Their probity had to be proved. So it had fallen out that those who came to Mars arrived either as YEAs or as DOPs.

The arrangements for a Mars visit were long and complex. As EUPACUS grew, it became more and more bureaucratic, even obfuscatory. But the rule was quickly established that only these two categories of persons ever came to Mars, and then only under certain conditions. (This excluded the cadre needed for Martian services.) The main category of person was a Young Enlightened Adult (YEA). This was my category, and Kathi Skadmorr's. Provision was also made for - the Taiwanese established this term - Distinguished Older Persons (DOPs). Tom Jefferies was a DOP.

Once these visitors reached Mars - I'm talking now about how it was back in the 2060s - she or he had to undergo a week's revival and acclimatisation (the unpopular R&A routine). Maybe they also saw a psychurgist. R&A took place in the Reception House, as it was then called, a combined hospital and nursing home run by Mary Fangold, with whom I did not get along. This was in Amazonis. Later other RHs were set up elsewhere.

'In the hospital,' Helen reminded me, 'you were given physiotherapy in order to counteract any possible bone and tissue loss and to a.s.sist in the recovery of full health. Why did you not accept the offer of psychurgy there and then?'

This was when I had to admit to her that I was different.