‘Um, yes. Yes, I am.’
She then asked me what I made of Cang Hai’s Other, her mental friend in Chengdu. I had to admit I had really not considered it. Her Other did not impinge on my life.
‘Nor apparently does your daughter,’ she said with a return to her earlier asperity. ‘She really loves you, you know that? I believe she has an unusual kind of consciousness, as I have. Her Other may be a kind of detached reflection of her own psyche. Or it may be a little encapsulated psyche within her own psyche, like a – a kind of cyst within her soul. I’m studying it.’
At this juncture, Mary appeared. She was direct as usual and told us to enter her office for coffee and a talk. ‘But it had better be a brief talk. Say twenty minutes at most. I have a lot to do today.’
As we sat down, I asked Kathi if her unusual kind of consciousness was also a ‘cyst within her soul’. I used her phrase.
‘My consciousness embraces an external. It embraces Mars. It’s all to do with the life force. I’m a mystic, believe it or not. I’ve been down into the gullet, or maybe the vagina, of this planet, into its bladder. I have nothing but contempt for those thirty or however many it was who committed suicide here. They were prats. Good that they died! We don’t want people like that. We want people who are able to live beyond their own narrow lives.’
‘They were all victims, cut off from their families,’ Mary Fangold said.
‘They didn’t do their families much good by killing themselves, did they?’
She crossed her long legs and sipped at the mug of coffdrink Mary had brought. Almost to herself, she said, ‘I thirst for what Tom proposed – the mind set free!’
Mary and I started to talk together, but Kathi cut us short, speaking eagerly. ‘You should get rid of all this flaunting of sex, as you say. Sex is just a recreation, after all, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Nothing to be obsessed about. Once you get it out of the way you can fill everyone’s minds with real valuable things, mental occupations. Without TV or the other distractions, we can be educated in science in all its branches. We must learn more, all of us. It’s urgent. “Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe” – you remember that saying? Education throughout life. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’
Somehow I did not take that opportunity to invite her to join Adminex. I felt she might be too disruptive. However Kissorian asked her a few weeks later. Kathi turned down the offer, saying she was not a committee person. That we could well believe.
Kissorian had a piece of gossip too. He said Kathi was having a love affair – ‘frequently in the sack’, was his way of putting it – with Beau Stephens. We thought about that. Beau at this time showed little ambition, and was working on the jo-jos.
I realise that I have made little mention in this record of Cang Hai, who had attached herself to me. Certainly she is devoted, and it is hard not to return affection when it is offered without condition. She became increasingly useful to me, and was no fool.
Of course she was no substitute for Antonia.
Cang Hai’s Account
9
Improving the Individual
In hospital I learned to walk with my artificial leg. At first it had no feeling; cartilage growth was slow. Now the nerves were growing back and connecting, giving a not unpleasant fizzy sensation. When I was allowed out of hospital for an hour at a time, I took a stroll through the domes, feeling my muscle tone rapidly return.
Attempts had been made to brighten the atmosphere of our enforced home while I had been out of action. The jo-jo buses were being repainted in bright colours; some were decorated with fantastic figures, such as the ‘Mars dragon’.
Glass division walls were tanks containing living fish, gliding like sunlit spaceships in their narrow prisons. The flowering trees recently planted along the main avenues were doing well. More Astroturf had been planted. Between the trees flitted macaws and parrots, bright of plumage, genetically adapted to sing sweetly.