White mars by Brian W. Aldiss & Roger Penrose. Chapter 17, 18

‘We’ll keep you posted.’

So we had to get on with our lives. The betterment of conditions brought about by the development of Lower Ground, as we called it, improved everyone’s morale. But, as with many improvements, these would not guarantee lasting contentment. I had taken a liking to Dayo Obantuji, the anxious young Nigerian, who showed great interest in our circumstances. We often discussed the developments of Lower Ground. Having abandoned musical composition, Dayo proved adept at devising decorative tile patterns, bursting with life and colour, to adorn the main corridor.

But I said to him, ‘If we look back to the metropolises of the nineteenth century, we see filthy cities. In New York and Paris and London, filth and grit and stench were permanent features of life. These cities – London in particular – were coal-oriented. There was coal everywhere, coal dumped down chutes in the street, coal dragged upstairs, coal spilt and burned in a million grates, grimy smoke, cinders and ash strewn here and there.

‘The exudations of coal mingled with the droppings of the horses that dragged the coal carts through the streets and pulled all kinds of carriages and cabs. The whole place was a microclimate of filth. The twentieth century saw vast improvements. Coal was banished, smokeless zones were introduced. The noisome fogs of London became a thing of the past. Electric heating developed into central heating and air-conditioning. Solar-heating panels replaced chimneys. Animals disappeared from the streets, to be replaced by automobiles, which – at least until they multiplied beyond tolerance and were banished from our cities – brought a decided improvement to urban life.

‘And was the new comfort and ease of the home, reinforced by vacuum-cleaners and other devices that made homes more hygienic, considered Utopian? Not at all. The improvements came in gradually and, once there, were taken for granted.’

‘I wish they could have been taken for granted where I came from,’ said Dayo. ‘Our governments never had the interests of the people at heart.’

‘To greater or lesser extent,’ I said, ‘that is the characteristic of all governments. It happened that in Western countries an educated population had a strong enough voice to regulate or become government. That educated class also accumulated the capital to invest in sustained improvement, which has in itself promoted more improvement, often in unanticipated spheres.

‘To give an instance of the sort of thing I’m thinking of, back in the 1930s, in the fairly early days of motoring, an ordinary family found that a small car was within its price range; they could buy what was called, in those bygone days, “the freedom of the road”.

‘Crude though methods of contraception were in those days, the family then had a choice: another baby or a Baby Austin? Another mouth to feed or a T-model Ford? By opting for the car, they lowered population growth rates, which improved family living standards and encouraged the liberation of women.’

Dayo looked moody. ‘In Nigeria it is scarcely possible to speak of the liberation of women. Yet when I think how intelligent my mother was – far more clever than my father…’ Looking at the floor, he added, ‘I wish I was dead when I think how I behaved to her – learned behaviour, of course … Now she’s gone and it’s too late to make amends.’

Because I was afflicted by a migraine, Belle Rivers and Crispin Barcunda conducted the debate on sex and marriage. The motion was opposed by John Homer Bateson and Beau Stephens.

Bateson began in his most flowery manner: ‘To look back over the history of matrimony is to recoil from the cruelty of it. Love between a man and a woman hardly enters into the picture. It all comes down to a question of property and dowry and enslavement, either and most probably of the woman by the man, or of the man by the woman. As a woman by name Greer or Green said last century, “For a woman to effect any amelioration in her condition, she must refuse to marry.”

‘I would say too for a man to attain the detachment that wisdom brings, he also must refuse to marry. He must quell the lust to possess, which lies at the base of this question. The woman, until recently, was legally bound to give up everything, her freedom, even her name, while the man was supposed to give up his freedom of choice and to apply himself, sooner or later, to the expense of the rearing of the children he conceived on his wife.

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