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 lustful 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 sex 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 assemblage 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 distinguishing 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 ownership 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.