I believe that.
Michel waggled a gloved hand. We remember more than we think we do. More than we want to, sometimes.
They stood there looking into the caldera.
Its hard to believe, Sax said.
Michel looked glum. Is it? There were fifty women in the First Hundred. Odds are more than one of them was abused by men in their lives. More like ten or fifteen, if the statistics are to be believed. Sexually violated, struck, mistreated thats just the way it was.
Its hard to believe.
Yes.
Sax recalled hitting Phyllis in the jaw, knocking her senseless with a single blow. There had been a certain satisfaction in that. He had needed to do it, though. Or so it had felt at the time.
Everyone has their reasons Michel said, startling him. Or so they think. He tried to explain tried, in his usual Michel fashion, to make it something other than plain evil. At the base of human culture, he said as he looked down into the country of the caldera, is a neurotic response to peoples earliest psychic wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist in a narcissistic oceanic bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then some time in late infancy we come to the awareness that we are separate individuals, different from our mother and everyone else. This is a blow from which we never completely recover. There are several neurotic strategies used to try to deal with it. First, merging back into the mother. Then denying the mother, and shifting our ego ideal to the father this strategy often lasts forever, and the people of that culture worship their king and their father god, and so on. Or the ego ideal might shift again, to abstract ideas, or to the brotherhood of men. There are names and full descriptions for all these complexes the Dionysian, the Persean, the Apollonian, the Heraclean. They all exist, and they are all neurotic, in that they all lead to misogyny, except for the Dionysian complex.
This is one of your semantic rectangles? Sax asked apprehensively.
Yes. The Apollonian and the Heraclean complexes might describe Terran industrial societies. The Persean its earlier cultures, with strong remnants of course right up to this day. And they are all three patriarchal. They all denied the maternal, which was connected in patriarchy with the body and with nature. The feminine was instinct, the body, and nature; while the masculine was reason, mind, and law. And the law ruled.
Sax, fascinated by so much throwing together, said only, And on Mars?
Well, on Mars it may be that the ego ideal is shifting back to the maternal. To the Dionysian again, or to some kind of post-Oedipal reintegration with nature, which we are still in the process of inventing. Some new complex that would not be so subject to neurotic over-investment.
Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborated a pseudo-science could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics. But what they did not understand was that physics, while admittedly complicated, was always trying very hard to become simpler.
Michel, however, was continuing to elaborate. Correlated to patriarchy was capitalism, he was saying, a hierarchical system in which most men had been exploited economically, also treated like animals, poisoned, betrayed, shoved around, shot. And even in the best of circumstances under constant threat of being tossed aside, out of a job, poor, unable to provide for loved dependants, hungry, humiliated. Some trapped in this unfortunate system took out their rage at their plight on whomever they could, even if that turned out to be their loved ones, the people most likely to give them comfort. It was illogical, and even stupid. Brutal and stupid. Yes. Michel shrugged; he didnt like where this train of reasoning had led him. It sounded to Sax as if the implication was that many mens actions indicated that they were, alas, fairly stupid. And the limbic array got all twisted in some minds, Michel was going on, trying to veer away from that, to make a decent explanation. Adrenalin and testosterone were always pushing for a fight-or-flight response, and in some dismal situations a satisfaction circuit got established in the get hurt/hurt back axis, and then the men involved were lost, not only to fellow feeling but to rational self-interest. Sick, in fact.
Sax felt a little sick himself. Michel had explained away male evil in several different ways in no more than a quarter of an hour, and still the men of Earth had a lot to answer for. Marsmen were different. Although there had been torturers in Kasei Vallis, as he well knew. But they had been settlers from Earth. Sick. Yes, he felt sick. The young natives were not like that, were they? A Marsman who hit a woman or molested a child would be ostracized, excoriated, perhaps beaten up, he would lose his home, he would be exiled to the asteroids and never allowed back. Wouldnt he?
Something to look into.
Now he thought again of Ann. Of how she was: her manner, so obdurate; her focus on science, on rock. A kind of Apollonian response, perhaps. Concentration on the abstract, denial of the body and therefore of all its pain. Perhaps.
What would help Ann now, do you think? Sax said.
Michel shrugged again. I have wondered that for years. I think Mars has helped her. I think Simon helped her, and Peter. But they have all been at some kind of distance. They dont change that fundamental no in her.
But she she loves all this, Sax said, waving at the caldera. She truly does. He thought over Michels analysis. Its not just a no. Theres a yes in there as well. A love of Mars.
But if you love stones and not people, Michel said, its somehow a little unbalanced? Or displaced? Ann is a great mind, you know
I know
and she has achieved a great deal. But she does not seem content with it.
She doesnt like whats happening to her world.
No. But is that what she truly dislikes? Or dislikes the most? Im not so sure. It seems displaced to me, again. Both the love and the hate.
Sax shook his head. Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for the twenty-first and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. Application of heat, pressure build-up, pressure displacement, venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind was more like what? an ecology a fellfield or else a jungle, populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black holes. Well a bit grandiose, that really it was more like a complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better weather-storm fronts of thought, high pressure zones, low pressure cells, hurricanes the jetstreams of biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds life in the wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.
What are you thinking? Michel asked.
Sometimes I worry, Sax admitted, about the theoretical basis of these diagnoses of yours.
What are you thinking? Michel asked.
Sometimes I worry, Sax admitted, about the theoretical basis of these diagnoses of yours.
Oh no, they are very well supported empirically, they are very precise, very accurate.
Both precise and accurate?
Well, what, theyre the same, no?
No. In estimates of a value, accuracy means how far away you are from the true value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A hundred plus or minus fifty isnt very precise. But if your estimate is a hundred plus or minus fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, its quite accurate, while still being not very precise. Often true values arent really determinable, of course.
Michel had a curious expression on his face. Youre a very accurate person, Sax.
Its just statistics, Sax said defensively. Every once in a while language allows you to say things precisely.
And accurately.
Sometimes.
They looked down into the country of the caldera.
I want to help her, Sax said.
Michel nodded. You said that. I said I didnt know how. For her, you are the terraforming. If you are to help her, then terraforming has to help her. Do you think you can find a way that terraforming helps her?
Sax thought about it for a while. It could get her outdoors. Outdoors without helmets, eventually without even masks.
You think she wants that?
I think everyone wants that, at some level. In the cerebellum. The animal, you know. It feels right.
I dont know if Ann is very well attuned to her animal feelings.
Sax considered it.
Then the whole landscape darkened.
They looked up. The sun was black. Stars shone in the sky around it. There was a faint glow around the black disc, perhaps the suns corona.
Then a sudden crescent of fire forced them to look away. That was the corona; what they had seen before had probably been the lit exosphere.
The darkened landscape lightened again, as the artificial eclipse came to an end. But the whole sun that returned was distinctly smaller than what had shone just moments before. The old bronze button of the Martian sun! It was like a friend come back for a visit. The world was dimmer, all the colours of the caldera one shade darker, as if invisible clouds obscured the sunlight. A very familiar sight, in fact Marss natural light, shining on them again for the first time in twenty-eight years.
I hope Ann saw that, Sax said. He felt chilled, although he knew there had not been enough time for the air to have cooled, and he was suited up in any case. But there would be a chill. He thought grimly of the fellfields scattered all over the planet, up at the four or five kilometre elevation, and lower in the mid and high latitudes. Up at the edge of the possible, whole ecosystems would now start dying. Twenty per cent drop in insolation: it was worse than any Terran ice age, more like the darkness after the great extinction events the KT event, the Ordovician, the Devonian, or the worst one of all, the Permian event two hundred and fifty million years ago, which killed up to ninety-five per cent of all the species alive at the time. Punctuated equilibrium; and very few species survived the punctuations. The ones that did were tough, or just lucky.
Michel said, I doubt it will satisfy her.
This Sax fully believed. But for the moment he was distracted by thinking how best to compensate for the loss of the solettas light. It would be better not to have any biomes suffering great losses. If he had his way, those fellfields were just something Ann was going to have to get used to.
It was Ls 123, right in the middle of the northern summer/southern winter, near aphelion, which along with higher elevation caused the souths winter to be much colder than the norths; temperatures regularly dipped to 230° K, not much warmer than the primal colds that had existed before their arrival. Now, with the soletta and annular mirror gone, temperatures would drop further still. No doubt the southern highlands were headed for a record winterkill.
On the other hand, a lot of snow had already fallen in the south, and Sax had gained a great respect for snows ability to protect living things from cold and wind. The subnivean environment was quite stable. It could be that a drop in light, and subsequently in surface temperature, would not do that much harm to snowed-over plants, already shut down by their winter hardening. It was hard to say. He wanted to get into the field and see for himself. Of course it would be months or perhaps years before any difference would be quantifiable. Except in the weather itself, perhaps. And weather could be tracked merely by watching the meteorological data, which he was already doing spending many hours in front of satellite pictures and weather maps, watching for signs. As were many other people, particularly meteorologists. It made for a useful diversion when people came by to remonstrate with him for removing the mirrors, an event so common in the week following the event that it became tiresome.
Unfortunately weather on Mars was so variable that it was difficult to tell if the removal of the big mirrors was affecting it or not. A very sad admission of the state of their understanding of the atmosphere, in Saxs opinion. But there it was. Martian weather was a violent, semi-chaotic system. In some ways it resembled Earths, not surprising given that it was a matter of air and water moving around the surface of a spinning sphere: Coriolis forces were the same everywhere, and so here as on Earth there were tropical easterlies, temperate westerlies, polar easterlies, Jetstream anchor points and so on; but that was almost all one could say for sure about Martian weather. Well you could say that it was colder and drier in the south than in the north. That there were rainshadows downwind of high volcanoes or mountain chains. That it was warmer near the equator, colder at the poles. But this sort of obvious generalization was all that they could assert with confidence, except for some local patterns, although most of those were subject to lots of variation more a matter of highly analysed statistics than lived experience. And with only fifty-two M-years on record, with the atmosphere thickening radically all the while, with water being pumped onto the surface, etc, etc, it was actually fairly difficult to say what normal or average conditions might be.
Meanwhile, Sax found it hard to concentrate there on East Pavonis. People kept interrupting him to complain about the mirrors, and the volatile political situation lurched along in storms as unpredictable as the weathers. Already it was clear that removing the mirrors had not placated all the Reds; there were sabotages of terraforming projects almost every day, and sometimes violent fights in defence of these projects. And reports from Earth, which Sax forced himself to watch for an hour a day, made it clear that some forces there were trying to keep things the way they had been before the flood, in sharp conflict with other groups trying to take advantage of the flood in the same way the Martian revolutionaries had, using it as a break point in history and a springboard to some new order, some fresh start. But the metanationals were not going to give up easily, and on Earth they were entrenched, the order of the day; they were in command of vast resources, and no mere seven-metre rise in sea level was going to push them off stage.
Sax switched off his screen after one such depressing hour, and joined Michel for supper out in his rover.