Blue Mars

‘But why. Michel? Why is she like that?’

Michel shrugged.

After a long pause he said, ‘No doubt it is complex. But she was mistreated as a girl, did you know that?’

Sax shook his head. He tried to imagine what that meant.

Michel said, ‘Her father died. Her mother married her stepfather when she was eight. From then on he mistreated her, until she was sixteen, when she moved to the mother’s sister. I’ve asked her what the mistreatment consisted of, but she says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Abuse is abuse, she said. She doesn’t remember much anyway, she says.’

‘I believe that.’

Michel waggled a gloved hand. ‘We remember more than we think we do. More than we want to, sometimes.’

They stood there looking into the caldera.

‘It’s hard to believe,’ Sax said.

Michel looked glum. ‘Is it? There were fifty women in the First Hundred. Odds are more than one of them was abused by men in their lives. More like ten or fifteen, if the statistics are to be believed. Sexually violated, struck, mistreated … that’s just the way it was.’

‘It’s hard to believe.’

‘Yes.’

Sax recalled hitting Phyllis in the jaw, knocking her senseless with a single blow. There had been a certain satisfaction in that. He had needed to do it, though. Or so it had felt at the time.

‘Everyone has their reasons’ Michel said, startling him. ‘Or so they think.’ He tried to explain – tried, in his usual Michel fashion, to make it something other than plain evil. ‘At the base of human culture,’ he said as he looked down into the country of the caldera, ‘is a neurotic response to people’s earliest psychic wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist in a narcissistic oceanic bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then some time in late infancy we come to the awareness that we are separate individuals, different from our mother and everyone else. This is a blow from which we never completely recover. There are several neurotic strategies used to try to deal with it. First, merging back into the mother. Then denying the mother, and shifting our ego ideal to the father – this strategy often lasts forever, and the people of that culture worship their king and their father god, and so on. Or the ego ideal might shift again, to abstract ideas, or to the brotherhood of men. There are names and full descriptions for all these complexes – the Dionysian, the Persean, the Apollonian, the Heraclean. They all exist, and they are all neurotic, in that they all lead to misogyny, except for the Dionysian complex.’

‘This is one of your semantic rectangles?’ Sax asked apprehensively.

‘Yes. The Apollonian and the Heraclean complexes might describe Terran industrial societies. The Persean its earlier cultures, with strong remnants of course right up to this day. And they are all three patriarchal. They all denied the maternal, which was connected in patriarchy with the body and with nature. The feminine was instinct, the body, and nature; while the masculine was reason, mind, and law. And the law ruled.’

Sax, fascinated by so much throwing together, said only, ‘And on Mars?’

‘Well, on Mars it may be that the ego ideal is shifting back to the maternal. To the Dionysian again, or to some kind of post-Oedipal reintegration with nature, which we are still in the process of inventing. Some new complex that would not be so subject to neurotic over-investment.’

Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborated a pseudo-science could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics. But what they did not understand was that physics, while admittedly complicated, was always trying very hard to become simpler.

Michel, however, was continuing to elaborate. Correlated to patriarchy was capitalism, he was saying, a hierarchical system in which most men had been exploited economically, also treated like animals, poisoned, betrayed, shoved around, shot. And even in the best of circumstances under constant threat of being tossed aside, out of a job, poor, unable to provide for loved dependants, hungry, humiliated. Some trapped in this unfortunate system took out their rage at their plight on whomever they could, even if that turned out to be their loved ones, the people most likely to give them comfort. It was illogical, and even stupid. Brutal and stupid. Yes. Michel shrugged; he didn’t like where this train of reasoning had led him. It sounded to Sax as if the implication was that many men’s actions indicated that they were, alas, fairly stupid. And the limbic array got all twisted in some minds, Michel was going on, trying to veer away from that, to make a decent explanation. Adrenalin and testosterone were always pushing for a fight-or-flight response, and in some dismal situations a satisfaction circuit got established in the get hurt/hurt back axis, and then the men involved were lost, not only to fellow feeling but to rational self-interest. Sick, in fact.

Sax felt a little sick himself. Michel had explained away male evil in several different ways in no more than a quarter of an hour, and still the men of Earth had a lot to answer for. Marsmen were different. Although there had been torturers in Kasei Vallis, as he well knew. But they had been settlers from Earth. Sick. Yes, he felt sick. The young natives were not like that, were they? A Marsman who hit a woman or molested a child would be ostracized, excoriated, perhaps beaten up, he would lose his home, he would be exiled to the asteroids and never allowed back. Wouldn’t he?

Something to look into.

Now he thought again of Ann. Of how she was: her manner, so obdurate; her focus on science, on rock. A kind of Apollonian response, perhaps. Concentration on the abstract, denial of the body and therefore of all its pain. Perhaps.

‘What would help Ann now, do you think?’ Sax said.

Michel shrugged again. ‘I have wondered that for years. I think Mars has helped her. I think Simon helped her, and Peter. But they have all been at some kind of distance. They don’t change that fundamental no in her.’

‘But she – she loves all this,’ Sax said, waving at the caldera. ‘She truly does.’ He thought over Michel’s analysis. ‘It’s not just a no. There’s a yes in there as well. A love of Mars.’

‘But if you love stones and not people,’ Michel said, ‘it’s somehow a little … unbalanced? Or displaced? Ann is a great mind, you know—’

‘I know—’

‘—and she has achieved a great deal. But she does not seem content with it.’

‘She doesn’t like what’s happening to her world.’

‘No. But is that what she truly dislikes? Or dislikes the most? I’m not so sure. It seems displaced to me, again. Both the love and the hate.’

Sax shook his head. Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for the twenty-first … and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. Application of heat, pressure build-up, pressure displacement, venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind was more like – what? – an ecology – a fellfield – or else a jungle, populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black holes. Well – a bit grandiose, that – really it was more like a complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better – weather-storm fronts of thought, high pressure zones, low pressure cells, hurricanes – the jetstreams of biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds … life in the wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.

‘What are you thinking?’ Michel asked.

‘Sometimes I worry,’ Sax admitted, ‘about the theoretical basis of these diagnoses of yours.’

‘Oh no, they are very well supported empirically, they are very precise, very accurate.’

‘Both precise and accurate?’

‘Well, what, they’re the same, no?’

‘No. In estimates of a value, accuracy means how far away you are from the true value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A hundred plus or minus fifty isn’t very precise. But if your estimate is a hundred plus or minus fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, it’s quite accurate, while still being not very precise. Often true values aren’t really determinable, of course.’

Michel had a curious expression on his face. ‘You’re a very accurate person, Sax.’

‘It’s just statistics,’ Sax said defensively. ‘Every once in a while language allows you to say things precisely.’

‘And accurately.’

‘Sometimes.’

They looked down into the country of the caldera.

‘I want to help her,’ Sax said.

Michel nodded. ‘You said that. I said I didn’t know how. For her, you are the terraforming. If you are to help her, then terraforming has to help her. Do you think you can find a way that terraforming helps her?’

Sax thought about it for a while. ‘It could get her outdoors. Outdoors without helmets, eventually without even masks.’

‘You think she wants that?’

‘I think everyone wants that, at some level. In the cerebellum. The animal, you know. It feels right.’

‘I don’t know if Ann is very well attuned to her animal feelings.’

Sax considered it.