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, to give it its title, 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 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 reassurance.
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 succumb 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 passed 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.