The Road to Mars: A Post-Modem Novel (1999) (3 page)

“Latin,” said Carlton, “
nemine contradicente
, unanimously, with one accord, with one voice, with one consent, one and all, nobody against.”

“Ah, you mean both of us,” said Alex.

“And me,” said Carlton.

Alex shook his head, warning Lewis. The tin man always thought he had a vote.

“Unfortunately, dear Carlton,” said Lewis, “you do not have a vote.”

“Don’t start,” said Alex.

“I should have a vote, I am more intelligent than you,” said Carlton.

“Well, you may be more intelligent than us, but sadly you lack testicles.”

“I have tungsten carbide testicles,” protested Carlton.

“Well, there you have it,” said Lewis.

“Females don’t have testicles and they have a vote.”

“Females,” said Lewis patiently, “despite being very strange in their own way, are human. That is why they have a vote and you do not.”

“It’s not fair.”

“I didn’t make the rules.”

“It’s DNAcism.”

“Carlton, shut up.”

“Okay,” said Alex, “his vote counts half. That’s two and a half to none. I declare the motion carried. The Road to Mars it is.”

Blessed are the peacemakers.

At my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.

—
Andrew Marvell

Time, as we know, is a relative concept (no jokes, I beg you, about how it passes much more slowly with relatives). To sit on a spacecraft while it inches along the 400-million-mile time line between Saturn and Jupiter is to be aware of just how much time there is in the Universe, let alone how much space. Space and time are not at all the same thing, as anyone who has sat between a fat man and a bore can attest. One occupies space, but oh, what acres of time the other one wastes. And though our space is limited, our time limitations are what drive us crazy.

Time, time, it takes eons of it to get anywhere in this damn Universe. There’s no getting around it. All that sci-fi bullshit, going to light speed, sir. Yeah right, light speed for 5,000 years gets you about as far as a nearby star. Big deal. Worm holes in space? More like assholes in space.

My point, and there is one, I assure you, is that buckets of time have to be gone through to get anywhere in space and that while they slowly plough this lengthy space-time furrow, Lewis fishing or talking to the shrinkbot, Alex playing endless interactive games—during these nine long months while they journeyed inwards towards the sun, something very significant began to happen: Carlton began to study comedy.

He was taking a correspondence course in communication for his masters degree when it first occurred to him what a truly peculiar thing Alex and Lewis did for a living:
their job was to make humans bark
. Why did they do that? What’s more, why did humans so enjoy barking together? What made it so popular, and finally and most irritatingly, why couldn’t he understand it? He appreciated that comedy was something endemic in Homo sapiens, and that they felt both proud and protective of it, but he didn’t understand what purpose it served, or why it existed or what evolutionary value it might have. So during these long, slow months of travel, Carlton began to study the living comedy petri dish in front of him, to wit Alex and Lewis. He began to take notes on their behavior, collating material for his thesis.

At first he took notes purely for himself, to avoid upsetting Alex and Lewis, who were as testy as a pair of mother hens, because their odd responses intrigued him. For example, they were constantly saying “Get out of here.” He would obediently leave the room only to discover moments later that
this was not what was wanted at all
. It wasn’t a command to get out of there, but some kind of ironic observation. The difficulty was how to tell the difference. How was a perfectly logical machine to understand irony? It was impossible to spot irony without understanding irony, and yet how could he understand irony without spotting it? He would speed-read the entire works of Jane Austen in ten minutes in the hope of illumination, but without luck. If you don’t recognize irony, you can’t see it, and you can’t see it if you don’t recognize it. This Catch-22 was not resolved at all when he turned to Fowler. In his classic volume
Modern English Usage
he read, “Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that, hearing, shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more and of the outsiders’ incomprehension.”

The more he read that sentence, the more he identified with that outsider’s incomprehension. Was it possible that the very definition was ironic? He puzzled away at understanding it as they churned their way slowly through the endless night of space. No time. No days. No weeks. No weekends. Lewis watching endless ball games, Alex punishing his body running, cycling, or climbing.

“As long as it keeps you off the Hello Sailors,” said Lewis.

“Bitch,” said Alex.

He had one sex doll. Just one. He rarely took it out, but Lewis had found it and showed it to the Washing Machine. She was an old machine who went around cleaning, picking up clothing, muttering and complaining to herself, like a middle-aged lady from Queens, aching and kvetching. She drove Alex nuts.

“Take a look at this, Mrs. Greenaway,” Lewis had said, handing her the small pliant and, I must say, attractive doll.

She looked puzzled at the foot-high curvaceous blond figure.

“
Oy vey
. What’s this?” she had said.

“Press it,” said Lewis.

She pressed the little figure.

“Yo, Mama,” said the doll. “Ya wanna play with me?”

“It’s a toy yet?” said Mrs. Greenaway.

“Want I should remove a few clothes?” said the toy, seductively beginning to vamp like a tramp.

“God forbid! I have enough to wash already,” said the Washing Machine.

Mrs. Greenaway wouldn’t let Alex hear the last of it.

“What is it again, some kind of a toy? At your age you still play with toys.”

“Just leave it alone, Mrs. Greenaway.”

“You’re a child yet? You want I bring you some proper toys. That I have lived to see the day when, hey.”

Alex switched her off.

Lewis laughed and went back to watching endless football games on the floating TV screen. The TV followed him as he wandered through the ship eating bowls of cereal. Alex heard him occasionally screaming “Yes!” when someone scored. Alex preferred to sit in the galley and mainline coffee. It was his only remaining vice. He had tried everything else and found he could control nothing. Now he stuck to espresso. Occasionally they swam in the gravity pool, under the great dome of the stars, and then sat in the steam room tossing around a few comedy ideas, at which point Carlton would tune in and take notes. He downloaded these notes while they slept, puzzling his blond head for hours over what they were doing. What made them think frogs were funny? Why did they always laugh when they said “tits?” What exactly was so hilarious about passing gas from the lower intestine? Carlton’s trademark eyes, one green, one brown, focused intently on the problems of comedy, and the basic question,
what on earth was it?

His first approach to understanding humor was linguistic. Is comedy, he wondered, a recognition of the ambiguities and pitfalls inherent in speech? He read that comedy is the last thing you learn in a language. Henri Bergson observed that to make the French laugh, you have to know their language backwards, but Carlton did know French backwards; he was a computer, he could even
speak
French backwards and it didn’t help at all. He knew this because he tried speaking French backwards to a chef in a French restaurant who not only didn’t laugh; he became very angry and threw him out. So he was no closer to understanding what made the French laugh. Thank God he didn’t try German. Even in English it is very hard for a computer to pick up when someone is being funny. For example, take the simple question “Is your disc hard or floppy?” Now to a computer that has only one set of meanings, but to humans there are all sorts of secondary meanings, largely to do with innuendos about mating, that are lurking behind the words. There at once you have the difference between human beings and machines. Computers are not easily capable of spotting innuendo. It’s like Carlton’s problem with irony. How is a computer to discern what humans instinctively understand from the context of what is being said? As Carlton himself put it in a revealing passage, “Computers don’t poop, fart, fuck, or laugh, and cannot detect irony. These then are the distinguishing characteristics of humanity.”

He had got as far as this in his thinking when a soft buzz told him they were approaching New Sydney, a large Stanford Torus within the Jovian system.

“Do you have a criminal record?”

“Good heavens, I had no idea one was still required.”

—
British Joke About Entering Australia

Bringing a vessel into port when you have been floating for months with nothing closer to you than 70,000 miles is like threading a needle after crossing the Antarctic. They hadn’t so much as seen another ship in two months. Now a vast doughnut-shaped Torus wheeled below them, with hundreds of small craft buzzing around its harbor. Their attention was immediately focused on the
Princess Diana
, a monstrously large solar cruiser, the flagship of the Keppler fleet. It was the most gigantic cruise ship they had ever seen. It stretched for almost three miles, totally obliterating their view of Jupiter. Around its various entry ports little boats weaved in and out, picking up passengers to ferry them ashore. Its massive size meant it was unable to dock anywhere, and its orange-colored ferries served as both lifeboats and tenders. It was a cruciform cruiser, which is a technical way of saying that in section it was X-shaped, with four massive arms, each bedecked with enormous terraces, a shape which guaranteed the most number of outside cabins, providing the occupants with staggering views of the Milky Way. Where the four arms intersected, Alex could see leisure parks and playgrounds with people swimming and golfing and jogging. It was about to carry 10,000 passengers around a three-year cruise of the planetary system. Lewis was hoping for at least one gig on board, maybe even a regular contract.

“But it’s a floating geriatric home,” protested Alex. “Who else has the time to float around the solar system?” It was a good point. Attractive though the solar system is, it still takes years to get around. Elderly ladies were attracted by the bridge, the young male crewmen, and the desire to see more of the solar system into which they were born, before they were recycled as hydrocarbons. Muscroft and Ashby had passed their electronic audition with a carefully edited tape of their performances in which some of the ruder parts of Alex’s dialogue were tastefully eliminated. Now they faced an interview with the cruise manager of the ship, Mrs. Johnston, who was legendary amongst artistes and bookers as a dragon lady of ferocious bad will. Since the
Princess Di
was vast and consumed so much entertainment amongst its four huge decks, this would be an open call that would attract hundreds of artistes to New Sydney.

They passed through the banks of revolving doors on the giant double air locks which separated the parking levels from the surface of New Sydney. There were murals of kangaroos and crocodiles and vast ochre paintings of the outback between huge ads for Coca-Koala. Inside the arrival hall they banged into a short individual in a riot of unmatched clothing, topped with startling green hair. A small stubby cigar was clamped between his teeth. Alex sent him flying.

“Hey, careful brother,” said the individual, not in the least concerned by the impact.

“Whoa, holy shit, it’s you.”

It was Booper, one of the wilder comics on the circuit. He was extreme even by alternative-comedy standards, and had been known to resort to extraordinarily dangerous areas in comedy (such as setting fire to the orchestra, which is usually a no-no). Offstage he was the mildest and gentlest of men, but onstage he was wild. This transformation always amazed Carlton, who could not believe that the soft-spoken, shy young man was the ranting loony who stomped about the stage spitting venom. But that was often the way with entertainers. The shy ones were the ones to look out for.

“Hey, bud, what’s up?” said Boo, dusting himself off and hauling Alex into a bear hug. “You here for the cattle call?”

“You too?” asked Alex.

“You know me, man, I thrive on rejection.” It was true he had about as much chance of being booked on board a cruise ship as a stripper in the Vatican, but he loved challenges and was optimistic beyond all sense. He was telling Alex about his latest exploits on a cheap week’s booking at Caesar’s Phallus, a nightclub which bordered on the bordello.

“Oh man, you have no idea how low it was. I kid you not, avoid it like the plague.”

“Mechanical hookers?”

“Oh yeah, sure, but at least they were more intelligent than the crowd. It was so cheesy the management offered to pay me in blow jobs.”

“You turned it down,” said Lewis sarcastically.

“Sure. How would I pay my agent?”

He was quick, no question. He pulled out a hologram photo of two pumpkins with eyes and hair and carrots for noses.

“Seen my kids?” he laughed.

It was a regular gag of his.

“Well, at least they got your looks,” said Lewis.

“Rim shot,” said Boo, not the least fazed by the gag turning on him.

“Come on, Alex, we have serious business to attend to.” Lewis had no time for Boo. He thought him ill-mannered and his comedy offensive.

“Keep taking the colon cleanser,” said Boo cheerfully to him. “Maybe you’ll loosen up one day.”

“What do you see in him?” asked Lewis as they lined up to enter the country.

“He’s funny,” said Alex.

“He’s not funny, he’s just rude.”

“I like him,” said Alex. “He takes risks.”

“Well, there’s no risk they’ll book him,” said Lewis.

Above their heads a gigantic 3-D screen faced arriving passengers with the grossly magnified features of the diva Brenda Woolley. She was
the
singing sensation of the mid-planetary system, and had been for almost thirty years. She was now, alas, at that dangerous age of denial in the female star which Alex called “the Peter Pancake Syndrome,” where youth was replaced by makeup. In her case a bricklayer might have laid it on, for on the giant screen with her mouth stretching for a high note, it was not a pretty sight.