‘By that time, we must have our mini-utopia up and running. Just to be a shining example to Earth, to which most of us wish to return.’
‘Then maybe on Earth, as in good old Wallace’s island community, the ideal might be reached, where each man scrupulously regards the rights of his fellow man.’ As he spoke, Crispin gazed earnestly and short-sightedly into my eyes. ‘Like not shooting him or fucking his wife.’
He was a good man. Talking with him, I was convinced we could become a better, happier, humanity – without the pathetic need of saccharine/strychnine drips.
‘Now you’d better go and coopt Skadmorr,’ he said. ‘She’ll lower the average age of Adminex by a few years!’
I was up early next morning. Runners and the semi-flighted were already about in the streets, exercising. Although we had yet to solve the question of the Martian date line, we had solved the problem of dividing up the days and weeks. Mars’s axial rotation makes its day only sixty-nine minutes longer than Earth’s day. In the time of EUPACUS, an extra ‘hour’ of sixty-nine minutes had been inserted to follow the hour of two in the morning. This was the ‘X’ hour. The other hours conformed to the terrestrial twenty-four.
The innovation of the ‘X’ hour meant that at first terrestrial watches had to be adjusted every day, until an ingenious young technician, Bill Abramson, made his reputation by inserting what he called ‘the “X” trigger,’ which suspended the momentum of watches and clocks for sixty-nine minutes every night, after which they continued working normally as before.
Since an hour is basically the way we measure our progress through the day, there were few complaints at this somewhat ad hoc arrangement. But it did mean that human activity restarted fairly early in the day.
Taking in the scene around me, I could only appreciate the change from the city on Earth I had left, with its gigantic byzantine structures housing thousands of people, walled in like bees in their cells with Ambient connections supplying many of their needs, the facades of these structures awash with pornographic images once sun had set. Below those great ragged skylines, below the coiling avenues, lived the impromptus, subsisting on the city’s grime, anaesthetised by the free porntrips overhead.
But here, under our low ceilings, was a more hygienic world, where coloured plastic ducts were running in parallel or diverging overhead, with jazzy patterns in rubber tiles below our feet and stylised lighting. Birds flew and called among the plant clusters at every intersection. It was at once more abstract and more human in scale than terrestrial cities. I recalled an exhibition I had attended in my home city hall of the paintings of an old twentieth-century artist, Hubert Rogers. Those visions of the future that had so inspired me as a young man were here realised. I recalled them with pleasure as I hopped on a jo-jo bus.
So it was just before six o’clock that I called on Mary Fangold at the hospital for a coffee. I liked to talk over events with this reasonable and attractive woman – and incidentally to visit my adopted daughter, whose implanted leg was now almost completely regenerated.
The first person I encountered was Kathi Skadmorr. She was striding out of the gym with a towel round her neck, looking the picture of health.
‘Hi! I was watching your discussion of the prevalence of violent and sexual material. I thought you were talking sense for once.’ She spoke in a friendly way, regarding me through those dark, lash-frilled eyes of hers. ‘What we usually do in private should remain private. Ain’t that what you were saying? It’s pretty simple really.’
‘Bringing about the change is a problem, though. That’s not simple.’
‘How about telling people to keep it quiet?’
‘It’s better to get people’s consent rather than just telling them.’
‘You could tell them, then get their consent. Remember the old saying, Tom: Once you get folk by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.’ She giggled.
‘So what are you doing here, so early in the morning?’
‘I came over from the science unit to see Cang Hai. Then I did an hour’s work-out. Are you visiting your daughter?’