Aktau Badawi said, in his halting English, ‘My family is from Iran. My father has a big family. He has no employ. His brother – his own brother – was his enemy. He travels far to get a job in the Humifridge plant in Trieste, on a distant sea, where they make some units for the fridge wagons. After a two-year, we never hear from him. Never again. So I must care for my brothers.
‘I am like Kissorian has said, second brother. I go north. I work in Denmark. Is many thousand kilometres from my dear home. I see that Denmark is a decent country, with many fair laws. But I live in one room. What can I do? For I send all my monies to home.
‘Then I do not hear from them. Maybe they all get killed. I cannot tell, despite I write the authorities. My heart breaks. Also my temper. So I rather do the community year in Uganda in Africa. Then I come here, to Mars. Here I hope for fairness. And maybe a girl to love me.’
He hung his head, embarrassed to have spoken so openly. May Porter, a technician from the observatory, sitting next to him, patted his arm.
‘Labour markets require high mobility, no doubt of that,’ she said. ‘Careers can count very low in human values.’
‘Human values?!’ exclaimed Badawi. ‘I don’t know its meaning until I listen today to the discussions. I wish for human values very much.’
‘Another thing,’ said Suung Saybin. ‘Food warehouses dominate cities because, once a machinery of supply is established, it is hard to stop. Small shops are forced out by competition. Their closure leads to social disorder and the malfunction of cities. The bigger the city, the worse this effect.’
A little Dravidian whose name I never learned broke in here, saying, ‘There is always the excuse given by pharmaceutical manufacturers. They profit greatly from the sale of fertilisers and pesticides that further decimate wildlife, including the birds. My country now has no birds. These horrible companies claim that improved crop yields are necessary. This is one of their lies. World food production is more than sufficient to feed a second planet! There are 1.5 billion hungry people in the world of today, many of them personally known to me. Their problem is not so much the lack of food as lack of the income with which to purchase food already available elsewhere.’
Dick Harrison agreed. ‘Don’t by this imagine we’re talking only of starving India, or of Central Asia, forever unable to grow its own food. The most technologically advanced state, the United States, has forty million people on the breadline – forty million, in the world’s largest producer of food! I should know. I came from New Jersey to Mars to get a good meal…’
After the laughter died, I continued.
‘The all consuming machinery of greater and greater production entails deregulation of worker safety laws and health provisions. In our lifetimes we have seen economic competition increasing between states. They must grow monstrous to survive, as trees grow to eclipse a neighbour with their shade. So bad capitalist states drive out good, as we see in South America. Greater profits, greater general discomfort.’
At this point, I was unwilling to continue, but my audience waited in silence and expectancy.
‘Come on, let’s hear the worst,’ Willa Mendanadum, the slender young mentatropist from Java, called down the table.
‘Okay. The three concealed discomforts we have mentioned occasion much of the unhappiness suffered by terrestrial populations. They form the undercurrents behind the headlines. Where remedies are applied only to the headline troubles – capital punishment for murder, private insurance for accident, abortion for unwanted babies – they do little good. They merely increase the burdens of life.
‘Why are they not thrown out and deeper causes attended to?
‘The answer lies in Popular Subscription, our fourth impediment.’
‘Now we’re getting to it,’ said Willa. Someone hushed her.
‘What it means, Popular Subscription?’ asked Aktau Badawi.
‘We are conditioned to subscribe to the myths of the age. We hardly question the adage that fine feathers make fine birds, or that young offenders should be shut up in prisons for a number of years until they are confirmed in misery and anger. When witch-hunts were the thing, we believed in witches or, if we did not believe, we did not like to speak out, for fear of making ourselves silly or unpopular.