The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey DoddGratacap, L. P. (Louis Pope)
Science
The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd
Gratacap, L. P. (Louis Pope)
Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction
"All night, all day, the choruses kept on with intermissions, but the
singers change. This musical facility is the mental or emotional
characteristic of the Martian. There is more in music than you
earthlings know or dream of. It is a part of the immortal fiber of men,
and in Mars it _creates_ matter, for the slow assumption of material
parts, as I have said, is propagated and accomplished by music, and the
parts thus made are the most perfect expression of matter the divine
form of man or woman can know, I think. They are tuned to health, to
beauty, to inspiration, but all of this you shall know.
"So I went down the steps into the city. I was with a group of spirits
who noticed me, and whom I noticed, but as yet the listless, strange,
doomed expression was on our faces, and though memory was beginning to
light its fires within us, though the transmission of viewless particles
of matter into our fluent bodies of spirit had begun, though mind and
desire were awakened, not a word passed our shining lips, and we moved
on in silence.
"The City of Light is often called in the Martian language also the City
of Occupation, for here the forming spirits work. I have told you that
as _consolidation_, through Music and Light, goes on, the aptitudes or
tastes are awakened, and this first birth of desire in Mars carries the
spirits off from their ivory seats in the Chorus Halls to the City,
where like an animal ferreting its purpose by intuition, they seem
impelled whither their needs are best satisfied.
"I now know that the City of Light is generally divided,--not exactly,
but as association would naturally impel, into four quarters, the
quarter of art, the quarter of science, the quarter of invention, the
quarter of thought. This is simply that the artists, the scientific
minds, the designers, and the philosophers are somewhat by themselves.
The population of the City of Light is made up of a fair, white race of
Martians, and of the forming spirits. As the forming spirits attain
materialization through occupation, they may remain in the City or go
out into the other cities, and into the country to work and live.
"Besides the quarters I have mentioned, there is the business section
and the offices of the government.
"In the light of all I have learned since I came, I may at once explain
something about the actual life and social organization of this strange
world.
"The Martian world is one country. There are here no nationalities. The
center of the country is in the City of Scandor, quite removed from the
City of Light. Business is carried on as with you on the earth, but its
nature and its physical elements vary, as you will see. There is a
circulating medium, banks and business enterprises, but it is more
veiled, more hidden, less, far less, insistent than with you. A great
socialistic republic is represented in Mars, and the limits of
individual initiative are very narrow. Still they exist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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