Finches of Mars

by Brian W Aldiss

  ‘Nine point four feet below surface.’

  Prestwick wondered to himself what it would be like to have to live here. He’d been to some bleak places back home. Here, there was nothing­ but bleakness, water or no water …

  Simpson came and stared over his comrade’s shoulder at the screen.

  ‘Okay! Good! We need something nearer surface, but without being frozen solid.’

  On the sweep again, they watched green delta-like traces close into a single strip. It then become faint and vanished. Simpson scratched his head.

  ‘We’ve struck an area.’ He spoke surprisingly calmly.

  Stopping the machine, Prestwick asked, ‘Retrace?’ Both men had reacquired their usual poise.

  ‘Hang on. There’s still something …’ Simpson had a dedeaf to his forehead. Faintly came an intermittent boom and a faint low plop, such as a leaky tap might make, dripping into a puddle. The noises faded away and then returned, the tap noise slightly louder now.

  ‘Something’s going on. Can only be water.’ Simpson shivered. The sound was not a friendly one. ‘Couldn’t be horse piss,’ he added.

  Prestwick by now had a dedeaf to his forehead too. He pulled a face at his partner. Both were well aware they were isolated on an unfriendly planet and this discovery would extend their stay. It was a disappointment—another week finding nothing and they would have been on the way back home. In time for Christmas. However, it was a well-paid stretch of employment.

  ‘Go on a bit,’ Simpson told the truck. ‘Slowly, okay?’

  They growled onwards, watching the screen. Suddenly the green strip was back on screen. It fattened. A thin green vein ran off from it, disappearing at the side of the screen. The sound too had changed; the dedeafs brought a noise as of someone humming tunelessly in a deep voice.

  The strip widened, becoming marrow-shaped.

  ‘Depth down to surface?’ Simpson asked.

  ‘Nineteen point nine to surface,’ reported the truck.

  He sighed. ‘And to bottom?’

  ‘Twenty-eight … correction … twenty-nine to bottom.’

  The two men exchanged glances.

  ‘Small reservoir? Not bad.’

  ‘Better mark it. We can map the extent later.’

  They climbed out and stood there on the lee side of the truck until the truck extruded a coloured peg containing internal figures which could be read by any other truck, should such a thing ever come this way.

  It was a melancholy thought. The expedition was no more than that. Nothing might ever come this way again. Simpson shuddered inside his uniform.

  The hydrologists laid a track. When a map was drawn up, a spider-like effect was apparent, with small streams leading off a reservoir of considerable size. The men were neither pleased nor displeased. Instead, they decided to take a rest.

  ‘We’re not as young as we were—even you,’ said Prestwick.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ said Simpson.

  It was a struggle to climb into the small bunk beds. They slept in their clothes—breathing masks, boots and all. Simpson went outside, peering over the roof of the truck. Mars was like an old black-and-white illustration, such as one saw in the bygone newspapers of the early Twentieth Century. A few shapes, mysterious and malign, stood here and there—emblems of a cosmic disorder. Some distance ahead of Simpson stood his wife, Katie, motionless.

  Simpson called to her, but sound did not carry. As he moved towards her, his boots grew heavier. He thought some white thing drifted above him, but could not raise his head to look.

  ‘My God, it’s lovely here!’—he had meant to say ‘lonely’ rather than ‘lovely’. ‘It’s the graveddy,’ he told himself. ‘Makes the lippers frabby.’

  Olympus Mons lay somewhere ahead of him. Like a tit. Katie’s tit.

  ‘Katie!’ he called. Defying the laws of perspective, she became smaller as he approached. Her head was pointed. She had no face. She wore a trailing frock. He broke into a run. ‘Wait! Wait!’

  She did not move. She dripped.

  Katie was simply an icy pinnacle. A rocky spike adorned with a garment of multiple frosts. A thing to be hated rather than loved.

  ‘Oh, don’t do this,’ Simpson begged.

  He looked round in despair. The world was empty. High above, a tiny distant spark moved.

  ‘You must be Swift … Named by Jonathan Deimos.’ He spoke in a whisper. He had enlisted for this venture to escape his loneliness after his wife’s death. But here it was echoing with loneliness: a whole planet full of it …

  He found himself looking about, eyes half closed, dreading to see something, nothing. His wife would never visit Mars. This was a place of which God had never heard. So it had remained vacant and unwanted. Up For Sale. He fell to his knees.

  It was impossible to say how greatly his way of life had changed since Katie had died. He lay in a kind of paralysis. Absurd to say he did not care about Katie; absurd not to say how much more … interesting … life had become.

  Suppose it had been Katie just now and he who was dying. Dying in the snow …

  Prestwick was leaning over him. He asked, ‘You all right, mate?’

  Simpson returned to consciousness as if from the depths of an ocean. ‘What a dream! What a hellish place Mars is! Why should anyone want to come and live here? It’s like a fucking cemetery.’

  Prestwick remarked on the noise Simpson had been making, and advised him to take another sleeping pill, before changing the subject. ‘Do you remember when astronomers thought there was a major planet out beyond Pluto? Then they said it didn’t exist, but instead there was a planet they called Eris. They’ll be trying to get to Eris next. It’s beyond the Kuiper Belt.’

  Simpson made nothing of this, his mind being still filled with the sludge of his dream. ‘Jesus, I could do with a drink. The bastards might have granted us a bottle of rum.’

  ‘Ah, but rum costs. The bastards didn’t send us here to drink.’

  ‘Sodding teetotallers, that’s what …’

  Silence fell between them until Prestwick pressed a button on the robotruck. ‘Get us two coffees, will you?’

  ‘Coming up.’

  When Prestwick spoke again, he sounded rather tentative. ‘They are certainly paying us well enough for this job. I’m still paying off putting my two boys through college. But there have always been aspects of this job I hate.

  ‘For instance, if this UU project goes through, religion on the planet will be banned. Anyone getting here will have to be atheists.’

  ‘They can give the place to the devil for all I care.’

  Prestwick hunched himself up in his bunk. ‘No, look, I want to talk seriously. We’ve got on okay. Now I’m a bit older, I start to try to think more deeply. Needs, regrets, desires … The way the impression section of your brain works. As a youngster, I was always too busy getting laid. Remember when we first met in Chile? I picked up—or I was picked up by—a woman who called herself Carmen. It was intended to be a one-night stand, but somehow we got a liking for each other. It was odd. Suddenly from impersonal to personal. She had a nice laugh.’ He was thinking, No one as yet has ever laughed on Mars …

  ‘Carmen! I’d do anything for a laugh in those days. I caught a rickety old coach out to her place. She held my hand with her rough hand. My hand so smooth—two worlds meeting—I felt a bit ashamed. Anything foreign excited me. I always had a hard on.

  ‘Carmen lived in a little village outside Santiago. She’d come into the city pro tem because she heard there were foreigners visiting and she thought that a bit of whoring could raise some necessary cash. So it did. But her place … She was dog poor, poor darling. She lived in one room and next door was a sort of lean to—a stall with a corrugated iron roof where she kept a little cart and a donkey on a tether.’

  ‘You and your memories!’
Simpson scoffed. ‘At least it’s better than you moaning about the constipation, and your sodding painful testicles!’

  ‘I can’t tell you how excited I was to be there with her. This was the real world—even to the extent that I got a mild dose of the clap off her. We slept on cushions. She had had a bloke, but he had left her directly the baby was born. Her ma looked after the kiddie when Carmen was away. And she fed the donkey. Her old mum knew what bastards men could be.

  ‘Carmen took it all in her stride. Massive good nature. Heavy but neat little tits with stretch marks. She expected men to be shits who would leave their women to make out and bring up the kids. She worked hard as a carrier with her little donkey cart … Oh, sorry, Henry, I’ve got carried away, going on like this. It was just such a—oh, a rich experience.’

  ‘I wonder what percentage of women live more or less as Carmen did. There are plenty worse places than Santiago,’ said Simpson.

  ‘The way she looked at you when you woke in the morning. Eyes like a lioness … Christ, I should stop this. I’m going on for sixty—not a kid any more. But some women you never forget.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Simpson, yawning. ‘I had rather a posh hotel tart when we were in Santiago. Delicious in bed, but she meant nothing to me. Warm enough inside but cold outside.’

  The coffee arrived in two small sealed plastic cups.

  ‘The point I’m getting at,’ said Prestwick, as he sipped the flavourless liquid, ‘is that Carmen knew nothing. She knew nothing of all this vast heap of cleverness we know all too well. The whole urban thing. Yet she knew so much we don’t know. When there would be an hour’s electricity, where the river water ran pure, how the old donkey was feeling today, how you mended an axle, how to shit and piss without giving offence, how to have a little fire without burning the fucking place down, how to bake … oh, a thousand things. All to do with survival. How to keep in with the priest. A priest whom I met, by the way. Priests are always ill-spoken of, but this priest was a real holy man. He’d help if Carmen had a spot of trouble with the donkey’s hooves, for instance.

  ‘If Carmen or her ma complained, he’d say, “Never mind, Jesus got himself crucified for less …”

  ‘I had a chance to talk with this priest. His name was Festa, or so I seem to remember. You see, I still recall it after all these years. He said that men were fools. They did not respect women, the givers of life. He said there were some women who had special qualities. He named Carmen as an example. He said, there was a comfort—that was his word—a comfort when you thought about her. Not sexual attraction, because as a priest he should not experience sexual attraction. But even when she was away, still that feeling of comfort.

  ‘Comfort. We were drinking the local wine. He said, this priest said, without thinking, that sometimes he woke in the night and burned with desire for Carmen. I was sleeping with her. I knew well what the poor fellow meant …’

  Prestwick paused.

  ‘But after all, so many women …’ He let the sentence trail away into the godless night. ‘I felt we’d got it wrong—the West. I mean, got it wrong.’ He lapsed into silence.

  ‘I make it sound as if I lived in that village for years. I was only there for two days. I didn’t like the rats. We’ve gotten so squeamish. But somehow Carmen—really the whole place, I guess—it started working on my mind.’

  Simpson said, simply, ‘I envy you.’

  ‘Carmen …’ Silence fell between them, except for the sipping noises.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ said Simpson eventually. ‘Yes. The place sounds like a film set. The Simple Life. But what if you get ill? Or your kids? And her ex—miserable slob. Did she get the clap attended to?’

  ‘I couldn’t live there. Nor could you, I imagine. I got my dose cleared up back home.’

  Simpson was reluctant to enter into further conversation. ‘Let’s switch the recorder off, shall we?’ he suggested, but hesitated as Prestwick continued, undeterred.

  ‘I couldn’t—we couldn’t live in Chile. Ghastly place, ghastly politics, to be honest. We owe a whole heap to the Magna Carta. But just think of the world we do live in. We’re inculcated, if that’s the word I want. Inculpated? Our minds—well, look, as far as we know our brains were jerry-built over the ages from brains of—crikey!—brains of sea monsters—sea monsters and then, later, a form of ape. And for all endeavours—’

  Simpson groaned. ‘Stop it right there, Bob. I’m sick of being told we’ve all come down from the trees. We are no longer apes and there’s the difference. Did you ever meet an ape who was a hydrologist? A president of a bank, okay, but not a hydrologist.’

  ‘No, no, I wasn’t off on that tack, mate. I was going to say that, thanks to Charles Darwin and others, we have been released from the Old Testament. I rejoice in that. We came from simple villagers, believing Earth was the centre of the universe. The prospects of evolution are far more thrilling than almost any other theory ever dreamed up …

  ‘But … we seem still to need faith. A faith. Any faith. And I suspect our brains—urh! the brains of modern man—are stacked full of an erroneous faith. Office bumf … Faith in information. Information about everything, anything. Its birthday may have been the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, way back when.

  ‘Since about then, we have craved to know … quantum theory, mass, energy, time, space, neurons, protons, DNA, cosmology, geology, the credit card, the simple screamer. All bits of information sprawling about our desks. These constitute our faith. God the Father, God the Son, etc., have been banished in favour of—what, exactly? Well, the Economy, the godless, thankless Economy …

  ‘And like the faithful anywhere, any time, we don’t realise how much it all costs to the human spirit.

  ‘Carmen—a Catholic, she was paying with the clap. So are we, mental clap, exile on Mars …’

  ‘You’re ranting,’ Simpson wanted to say, but refrained.

  Henry Simpson was unaccustomed to discussions of this kind. It was true that after the death of his wife he had gone less frequently to the golf club and more often to an art club, where all kinds of matters were discussed, but he was still reluctant to enter into argument with Prestwick. He said, in a way that seemed feeble even to himself, ‘But we have so many advantages. I was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s, but it was cured. We’ve put the past behind us for present advantages, surely …’

  ‘You don’t like talking about the past, just as you don’t like the thought of being descended from apes?’

  Simpson was beginning to feel strained. He spoke with some anger. ‘I read novels of the present day. I doubt if I’d read a novel of the Tenth Century, even if there were such a thing.’

  Prestwick produced a paperback of an old-fashioned kind and pressed his light to burn brighter.

  ‘Henry, would you mind if I read you a bit of something? It’s a life of a woman of the Twelfth Century, written later, after her death. I brought it with me although I’ve read it a couple of times before. It fascinates me because the lives it depicts are so different from ours of today, and yet both different and similar. It’s the life of a woman who became known as Christina of Markyate.’

  ‘I may fall asleep,’ Simpson warned.

  ‘Don’t worry. I shall kick you if you do. This young lady who became known as Christina lived her life as a virgin. Different from today, different from my Carmen. Anyhow, that’s what she did, what she was determined to do. She became a “Bride of Christ”. Not that he ever seemed to take a blind bit of notice of her.

  ‘She was a bright girl, her parents were as difficult as could be, in quite a modern way. So this modest and deeply religious girl became betrothed to one Beorhtred. She had been tricked and openly swore she would not be defiled by Beorhtred’s carnal embraces. Not likely today!

  ‘Her father drags her before the Prior, who asks, “Why should you bring this dishonour to your
parents?”’

  Simpson looked out into the Martian darkness, where stars burned, and kept silent.

  ‘Christina’s answers are splendid; she says to the Prior, “You who are supposed to excel in the knowledge of scripture, must judge how wicked a thing this would be, should my parents enter me into a marriage I never wanted, and make me unfaithful to Christ, He who knows of the vow I had made in my childhood.”’

  Stifling a yawn, Simpson said, ‘She may speak well, as you say, but those were lives lived on false premises. All very well for the Twelfth Century, not now.’

  ‘What I’m trying to argue is that, yes, the premises were false, but no less false are the premises of today. Shall I continue?’ Prestwick tweaked a page.

  ‘Her parents, as the book says, “did not know how to see beyond worldly possessions”. That has a contemporary ring about it, wouldn’t you say? But at every instant, despite the cruelty of her parents, she remained, as she always said, a “Bride of Christ”. A virgin, in fact.’

  ‘Nowadays, she would have treatment for frigidity,’ said Simpson, with a grin. ‘Jesus, it’s uncomfortable here. You can’t even scratch your arse on this bunk.’

  ‘Yes, and these days her parents would be judged guilty of violence against their daughter. But the daughter would nevertheless be harmed. We read of such cases in the screamers every day.’

  ‘Well, cut it short. What happened then?’

  ‘Bad bishops have never been a novelty. With the assistance of one of them, Beorhtred gained power over her. He jeered at Christina in his hour of triumph. She asked him a question. “Tell me, Beorhtred, and may God have mercy on you, if another were to come and take me away from you and marry me, what would you do?” To which he replied in brutish fashion, “I wouldn’t put up with it for a moment as long as I lived. I would kill him with my own hands if there were no other way of keeping you.”

  ‘So she replies—I love this—she replies, “Beware then of wanting to take to yourself a Bride of Christ, lest in His anger He slay you.”’