Part 20 (1/2)

It was in this glum mood I looked in on the C of E, the Committee of Evil, holding its weekly meeting. The rather comical t.i.tle had been dreamed up by Suung Saybin, but the purpose was serious enough: to try and determine the nature and cause of evil, with a view to its regulation. 'Perhaps the humour lies in the fact that they haven't a hope,' I thought to myself. Maybe the committee was just another way in which people kept themselves amused.

Suung Saybin remained as chair and Elsa Lamont, she of the orthogonal figures and an Adminex official, as secretary. Otherwise, members of the panel changed from month to month. As I entered, John Homer Bateson rose to his feet.

'The previous speaker wastes our time,' he declared. 'We cannot eradicate evil by religion, or even control it, as history shows. All history is a demonstration of the workings of evil. Like Thomas Hardy's Immanent Will, ”it weaves unconsciously as heretofore, eternal artistries of circ.u.mstance”. Nor will reason work. Reason is frequently the ally of wrong-doing.

'Here we are, stuck on this little dried-up orange of a planet, and we plan to banish this monster? Why, we're in its clutches! What are the component parts, the limbs, the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, of evil? Greed, ambition, aggression, fear, power ... All these elements were integral to the very nature of EUPACUS, the conglomerate that dumped us here.

'What impossibly naive view do you have of the nations that stranded us? The United States is by no means the worst of them. But it seeks to extend its empire into s.p.a.ce - apologies, matrix. All the grand designs we may have about exploring this matrix mean nothing to the absconding financiers who backed matrix exploration. All this talk of Utopia - it means nothing, absolutely nothing, to the greedy men in power. Power, money, greed - if you kicked out the present set of slimebags, why, more slimebags would fill the breach.

'I'll tell you a story. It's really a parable, but you'd distrust that term.'

'You have five minutes, John,' interposed Suung Saybin.

Ignoring her, Bateson continued, 'A man was stranded alone on a planet that was otherwise uninhabited. He lived the blameless life of a hermit, befriending bats, rats, slugs, spiders - anything that amused him. That way, you attain sainthood, don't you? One day, a vessel came down from s.p.a.ce - pardon me, from the matrix - to rescue him. A grand sparkling s.h.i.+p, from which emerged a man in a golden s.p.a.ce suit with long wavy blond hair and a manly tan, bearing a large picnic hamper.

'”I'm your saviour,” he exclaimed, embracing the hermit.

'The hermit got a good grip on the man's throat and strangled him. Now he owned the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. And the picnic basket.

'What, I ask you, were his motives? Hatred of intrusion on his privacy, hunger, envy of the golden suit, aversion to this intruder's display of hubris, greed to possess the s.h.i.+p, ambition to enjoy power himself? Or all these things? Or had solitude driven him mad?

'You cannot resolve these questions - and I have offered you a simple textbook case. The promptings to evil are in all of us. Evil is not a single ent.i.ty, but a many-splendoured thing. You're wasting your time here if you think otherwise.'

I crept from the room.

Being unable to take lunch, I went to a remote upper gallery in search of solitude. Fond though I was of Cang Hai, I hoped to avoid her endless chatter. But there I happened upon my adopted daughter, sitting with her child playing at her feet. Alpha ran to me. I hugged her and kissed her cheeks. Cang Hai, meanwhile, picked up her sheets and a.s.sumed a pose whereby I was to take it she had been studying them.

'I'm surprised to see you up here, Tom. How are you?'

'Fine. And you?'

'Trying to learn some science. I'm trying to understand about superfluids. Apparently they are called Bose-Einstein condensates.'

Alpha said, 'Mummy looks out the window.'

'Yes. I believe that's what Dreiser's ring contains.'

'I said, Mummy looks out of the window most of the time!' screamed Alpha.

'You can certainly learn science there,' I said. Under the endless panoply of stars, dark matter and particles, the Martian landscape rolled its dunescape away into the distance, unvarious, unchanging, and baked or frozen by turns. The thought came, What harm in trying to turn it into a garden?

'Is something troubling you?' I asked.

'No.' Then, 'I try to study here, alone with Alpha. I'm glad, always glad, to see you.' Then, 'Those l.u.s.tful hounds I had to work with in Manchuria ... No ... Only the ambiguities of this research.' She tapped her 3D sheets. 'Even light behaving like both waves and particles. It's hard to grasp!'

'We're subject to the dissolution of absolutes. Our life here is a bit ambiguous ... Perhaps that's why we question everything. But that's not what's wrong?'

After a pause, during which she took her child on to her knee: 'I told you about Jon Thorgeson. He stays in my mind, making me unhappy. Or my behaviour does.'

'He was impertinent.'

'I don't mean that. I mean ... he wanted me. He was not unpleasant, physically. Why didn't I - you know, let him get on with it? Why does that sort of thing not attract me? Is it that I'm ... ? Well, I don't know. It's absurd to be a puzzle to yourself, isn't it?'

'Mumma, let's play, please, please, Mumma,' said the child, looking into Cang Hai's face.

Whatever her failings, Cang Hai, a cloned person, possessed plenty of maternal instinct. As mother and daughter cosseted each other, I continued to gaze out at the world we had inherited - we, who must find a reason for this Martian testing ground, we, the creatures who had only recently learned to walk upright, who had harnessed fire not much more than a million years ago, who had emerged from various forgotten creatures - and who must be the forerunners of myriads more various peoples - oh yes, it was apparent why s.e.x so dominated our thoughts ... But there my reverie was broken by the child's laughter.

I thought, as I turned back to this nervous, perceptive little person I loved - ah, but not one quarter as much as I had loved my Antonia! - how the Martian landscape was to me, as Charles Darwin had the phrase in one of his letters, not a landscape but 'a most strange a.s.semblage of ideas'.

I said, 'It doesn't have to be either/or, daughter. We have moved into a mode of both/and understanding.'

'I mean,' she said boldly, 'am I a saint, a prude, or a lesbian?'

'Don't force a decision. You are young. Be clear that you consist of your confused self. But in the case of that impositioning Thorgeson, you evaded a case of rape as any woman might have done, had she a cool enough head.'

'And a warm enough hand!' Suddenly, she laughed, and squeezed Alpha. 'Had I not done so, I would be pregnant now. But no man is going to terraform me until I say so.'

Why did her words make me happy? Were they designed to do so? Weren't the human mind and human courage great things? I kissed her and her daughter.

That afternoon we underwent one of our periodic discussions regarding money. Certainly one element distinguis.h.i.+ng the texture of Martian life from life Downstairs was that we carried no credit cards. Some people wanted to bring the credit system back, saying it made them feel more like functioning humans. Against that, our economists on Adminex argued that where there was no owners.h.i.+p of property it was impossible to fix prices.

We had an electronic points system up and running. It worked through the Ambient. The unit was called a credit. To launch the system, our 'bank' - once a cash till in the Marvelos offices - allocated everyone a hypothetical 1,000 credits, somewhat like the dummy money we were given at the start of a game of Monopoly. These credits could be drawn on at any time.

On the whole, prices of what few things there were to acquire for personal use remained trifling. A cup of coffdrink, for instance, was two credits, moonglow and sunglow were three. In practice it made the system hardly worth bothering with. So the money element withered away. We found we could get along happily without it.

No one drew wages or paid taxes.

A reckoning will come when - if ever! - the rockets return from Downstairs. But, after all, we own the planet, thanks to the UN const.i.tution, and so can sort the matter out without too much friction.

One evening, Cang Hai was on her way to see a dupe friend of hers living above the We Mend Everything post, in the recesses of the old cadre building. The lane was deserted. Of a sudden, a door ahead of her was flung open and three masked men rushed out. Cang Hai had barely turned to run before they slammed into her, seized her and dragged her into a bare room, a store of some kind.

She heard the door being locked as they tied her to a chair. A bright light was shone into her eyes. She could scarcely make out the outline of her attackers for its dazzle.

She heard their breathing and was afraid.

'Right, girl, don't be frightened. We only want to talk to you,' said a voice that Cang Hai recognised as Feneloni's. 'We are not planning to do anything unpleasant, as we could easily do, such as raping you or pulling off that artificial leg of yours.' Someone behind the light chuckled.

'The time to talk was during the forum,' she said, but could hardly bring the words out from her trembling lips.

'Now then, just you listen to us. We've had enough yacking from your lot. You and your pal Jefferies. This s.h.i.+t about the Rivers plan and Utopia has got to stop. It's nothing but a time-waster. How are you going to improve people - people stuck on Mars? It's c.r.a.p! We're going to die here if we just sit around yakking.'

'Let me have a go at her. She's a tasty little dish,' said one of the hidden men.

'In a minute,' said Feneloni. 'She's a wimp, doesn't much like s.e.x. Maybe you could teach her.' They laughed. She begged them not to touch her. Feneloni replied, 'Look, we're trying to scare some sense into you. Get real! Stop all this p.i.s.sing about. Stop beaming these stupid sessions of yours back to Earth, as if everything here was okay. It's not okay. My brother's s.h.i.+p was lost, worse luck, or he'd have done something about us being stuck here.

'We need to get back to real life. We should be staging scenes of riot, carnage, starvation. We have to force the hand of the UN. Get a s.h.i.+p up here, get us out of this mess. You understand that?'

'Yes,' she said. 'Yes, of course. But-'

'So you go back to Jefferies and tell him to keep his namby-pamby mouth shut from now on, or you're going to suffer damage, you and your kid. You understand?'