White mars by Brian W. Aldiss & Roger Penrose. Chapter 12, 13

‘If that is so – and I hope it may be so – it will mean the fading away of individualism. This is what has happened with our friend Chimborazo, if I guess correctly. It has become a single creature consisting of the symbiotic union of all indigenous Martian life.’

Came a shout from the audience. ‘What gives you the idea that this weird mind is good?’

Dreiser responded thoughtfully. ‘I repeat that individualism had no chance on Mars. To survive, this entity evolved a collective mind. It has therefore learned control … But we can only speculate upon all this. With awe. With reverence.’

Here Kathi chipped in to say, ‘It may seem to us slow and ponderous, but why should we not believe it to be superior to our own fragmented minds?’

After the talk, Helen Panorios came up to Dreiser and asked, timidly, why Olympus had camouflaged itself as a volcano.

‘Olympus lies among other volcanoes. So it can become pretty well lost in the crowd.’

‘Yes, sir, but what has it camouflaged itself against?’

Dreiser regarded her steadily before replying. ‘We can only suppose – although this is terrestrial thinking – that it feared some great and terrible predator.’

‘Space-born?’

‘Very probably space-born. Matrix-born…’

From this occasion onwards, Dreiser and I spent more time together, discussing this extraordinary phenomenon. Sometimes he would call in Kathi Skadmorr. Sometimes I called in Youssef Choihosla, who professed an empathy with Olympus.

One of the first questions I asked Dreiser was, ‘Are you now going to abandon your search for the Omega Smudge?’

He stroked his moustache as if it was his pet, gave me an old-fashioned look, and replied with a question, ‘Are you going to abandon your plans for a Utopian society?’

So we understood each other. Ordinary work had to continue.

But it continued under the shadow of that enormous life form that unceasingly inched its way towards us. Despite warnings to the contrary, the four of us drove out one calm day to inspect Olympus at close quarters. Crossing the parched terrain, we began to climb, bumping over parallel fracture lines. Kathi, in the rear seat with Choihosla, seemed particularly nervous, and clutched Choihosla’s large hand.

When I jokingly made some remark to her about her nervousness, she replied, ‘You might do well to be nervous, Tom. We are crossing Chimborazo’s holy ground. Can’t you feel that?’

The terrain became steeper and more broken. Dreiser drove slowly. The exteroceptors were all about us. They seemed thicker here, more reluctant to slide back into the frozen regolith. The buggy dropped to a mere crawl. Dreiser flicked his headlights on and off to clear the track. ‘God, for a gun!’ he muttered. We were all tense. No one spoke.

We surmounted a bluff, and there the rim of it was, protruding above ground level like a cliff. We stopped. ‘Do we get out?’ I asked. But Kathi was already climbing from the vehicle. She walked slowly towards Chimborazo.

I got out and followed. Dreiser and Choihosla followed me. Suited up, we could hear no external sound.

Even near to, Olympus closely resembled a natural feature, its flanks being terraced in a roughly concentric pattern. There were imitations of flowlines, channels and levees, as well as lines of craters that might or might not be imitations of the real things. We could by no means see all of its 700-kilometre diameter. Even the caldera was hardly visible, though a small cloud of steam hovered above it. Whether as a volcano or a living organism, it seemed impossible to comprehend.

In its presence I felt the hair at the back of my neck prickle. I simply stood and stared, trying to come to terms with it. Dreiser and Choihosla were busy with instruments, noting with satisfaction that there was no radiation reading, receiving a CPS.

‘Of course there’s a CPS,’ said Kathi. ‘Do you really need instruments to tell you that? How’s the back of your neck, for instance?’

Braver than we were, she climbed up on to the shell and lay flat upon it, her little rump in the air. It was as if – but I brushed aside the thought – she desired sexual intercourse with it.

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