Finches of Mars

by Brian W Aldiss

  They could take their turn on Gerint’s next expedition. Gerint was the man in charge of arranging monthly explorations of Martian territory. He was currently organising the next one; yet there were still some who feared the airless emptiness of the outside world.

  People clung to their offices in preference to the barrens comprising the Tharsis bulge and beyond.

  A middle-aged woman called Thirn, who ran a small stall on the ground floor in which UU tokens could be exchanged, spoke up. ‘Back when I was young, I used to have a stall on the sea front. I sold everything—spades, buckets, sticks of rock. Everything. It was fun. My brother helped. The holiday-makers could scarcely drag their kiddies away …

  ‘I was a shy little thing then. Still am.’ She giggled. ‘I had a boyfriend once. He was called Terry Willington. I let him make love to me once at the back of the shop … It was over so quickly. I don’t think he loved me.’

  Weekly UU councils were held on Earth, and in some respects there were similar to the Brightener on Mars. One of the topics on this particular day began with a medical discussion. Bringing up what felt like almost irrelevant history, the unexpected deaths from dermatomyositis of Simpson and Prestwick, over a decade before, were discussed. No fully satisfactory explanation had ever been reached. The illness had attacked heart and lungs and destroyed the men on the trip back from Mars. The earlier hypothesis was that they had been carrying the virus of the disease with them on the expedition. In hindsight, it was almost certainly just the cumulative stress of the journey.

  Although the lives of Simpson and Prestwick were well over, their presence lingered as part of history. Their old truck stood unrusting on the shield as their memorial.

  14

  The Mad Horse & Ooma’s Sad Poem

  Adrien Amboise had always avoided taking part in any speculation about the death of the two men. He had accepted a role with the gloomy title of Director of Selections; his duty was to see that only those with learned and balanced dispositions qualified for habitation in the new Martian settlement. That early calamity did not interest him. Their work had been prior to his appointment, their employment only temporary. His interest lay elsewhere.

  Amboise was a keen rider, with Dark Rider, a horse of his own. He and a friend, the Catholic Bishop Claude Metaillié, had been taking a break from the pressures of work, riding together high on the Massif Central. There the wind blew warmly and little habitation distracted them. Sometimes they said almost nothing to each other; conversation broke out only over the meal and the wine they shared in one little auberge or another. The subject then generally concerned the presence of God, in which the bishop believed and Amboise did not.

  It was with a determination to speak on that very subject that Amboise entered the terrestrial hall that morning.

  The medical discussion closed, a short break was taken, after which the Director of Selections was announced.

  He began without preamble. ‘Two nights ago, I was staying with a friend in a hamlet called Le Dous. There’s a moderately comfortable auberge with stabling for horses. We had ridden there on our horses and had seen them properly settled in before we showered and dined.

  ‘I was awakened in the small hours of the night by a knocking noise I identified as a horse kicking at his wooden stall—the stables were in part beneath our bedroom. The noise continued intermittently.

  ‘I took my torch and went down to see what was troubling Dark Rider, my horse.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir, but what has this to do with the matter of selection?’ a young woman on the board asked.

  ‘A great deal, as you shall shortly hear.’

  Amboise went on to describe how he had turned left at the bottom of the stairs. A little tiled stub of passage led to the stable door. As he laid his hand on the door, a strange feeling of anticipation overwhelmed him, a feeling of exhilaration and extreme fear. Both emotions seemed to clash together like cymbals as he pushed open the door to see the stallion standing there on its hind legs, its front hooves waving, its dark eyes gleaming in darkness, foam and froth dripping from its open jaws. As some of that expelled liquid splashed across Amboise’s cheek and neck, he dropped his torch in shock. It shone feebly across sodden cobbles, stamping hooves.

  He could only speak the name of his horse.

  It roared an answer. ‘I am come to you.’

  There was a rail for Amboise to cling to while asking weakly, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Wickedness is in many bodies. Intelligence is an ally of wickedness. Wickedness grows like a green ear of wheat!’ The great roar of voice rose to the equivalent of an equine shout, so that Amboise shrank back against the wall.

  ‘Wickedness proliferates. Wickedness is spread by intelligence. Nor is all innocence free from wickedness. Is there not a book which tells mankind that it has dominance over all other creatures? Do we not suffer from such wickedness, do we not bleed and die?’

  Struggling against that terrible roar, Amboise said, ‘Have I not loved you and fed you and cared for you?’

  ‘None of those things. You have only used me and abused my nature for your own gratification.’

  The torch was trampled on and dimmed and failed. Only a slender glimmer of moonlight entered the stable, revealing a haunch here, a tossing mane there, a spark elsewhere, darkness overwhelming everywhere.

  Tossing its head this way and that, Dark Rider now spoke shudderingly in a quiet voice, saying that mankind had dreamed of and created hell. ‘There is no hell, no heaven. Not even in this stable where I am imprisoned. Those things exist only in the mind of man.’

  It seemed to the human trembling there that those words ‘the mind of man’ echoed on and on, even as that the splinter of moonlight lessened.

  That great maned head came down to prod his chest. It declared that now mankind had discovered another hell it could occupy. That it was taking great pains to exile there people who would live only in discomfort, creating, spreading, new wickedness.

  At a signal from the chairman, the police guard came and took a hold of Amboise’s right arm.

  ‘You are sick, sir, and we shall get you swiftly to the hospital. Do not struggle—no harm will come to you.’

  Amboise did struggle. As he struggled, he screamed that he must say what he must say. That the great animal had spoken—spoken with the voice of God.

  He believed that there in the stinking dark, in the stench of hay and harness and urine, he had heard the voice of God.

  The Almighty declared he was not mighty. As his son had been crucified, so he too had power only in the hands and minds of men. And now he was confronted by a new scientific wickedness in that Amboise, Director of Selections, had accepted the rule that no holy persons or those who believed in salvation, or those who struggled against evil for good, or those who endeavoured to be kind, those who did not flog horses or their own kind, those who dressed penitentially and witnessed the wickedness in themselves—all these were confined to what had been once a green globe that was now like a condemned house, on fire and burning fast.

  All this was within the compass of Amboise’s command. God himself was perishing in the blaze.

  ‘Wickedness! My wickedness! I heard it from my horse’s mouth. I wish to resign, I will resign. I will live no more in this position of advantage I have striven for–’

  They were dragging him away, three men assisting the police guard, the chairman phoning the mental hospital to alert them to the incoming patient.

  Then they all sat there, looking down at the delicately carved wood of the table, not speaking.

  ‘The poor man is insane,’ one of the women councillors said at last.

  No one there would even venture an opinion.

  Only after a long silence did the chairman say, as if it solved everything, ‘I have been informed that the horse involved will be shot in the morning.’

  T
he sitting broke up and the members of the committee went into the lounge to discuss Amboise’s bizarre outburst.

  Albrik Li of Sichuan Sanctuary University spoke. ‘The Director of Selections suffered an hallucination. God, even if he exists, does not speak through the voice of a horse.’

  But a man from a department of the Tamil Restitution University disagreed. ‘We Hindus respect Ganesh, patron of learning … Ganesh the elephant, son of Shiva and Parvati, with one broken tusk …

  ‘We also venerate our monkey god, so why not a horse?’

  Albrik Li stuck his nose in the air. ‘Oh, but these are fairy tales, not to be taken seriously …’ He added, ‘I do not go to church. All the same, I love nature.’

  ‘We don’t really care at all about nature,’ said Judy Bellenger, Inspector of Colleges. ‘Otherwise we would not have ruined it. As for religious feeling, that also we have ruined. Religion has now become involved with patriotism—a refuge of scoundrels, as I believe Samuel Johnson said … God—the Christian God—has become something of a refugee. Is he returning?’

  She was bored by her own question, knowing it to be unanswerable. She propped her chin on her hand and stared out of the window. A number of people down there were marching along with banners, disrupting the traffic. She could read the words on the banners: ‘Ban the Bombshell Surrock’. Cops stood on the sidewalk, unmoving, weapons at the ready … She thought, What does it matter if God is returning or has left for good? The wretchedness of people always remains. She thought of the pain in her left side.

  ‘Never mind the bloody theology,’ she said. ‘The question is: What we do about our colleague Amboise and his talking horse?’

  ‘Or what we do about ourselves,’ said a wag from Innsbruck Research, setting down his coffee cup.

  ‘Or about God,’ said Judy Bellenger. ‘We don’t want Him on Mars. They have trouble enough.’

  At the Brightener on Mars, some disquiet was also in evidence.

  Ooma spoke. Her dark unkempt hair straggled over her neck and face as if she were a drowned mermaid.

  She said, in her low husky voice, ‘We exiles are forced into a situation of unreality. The Brightener hour only imprints falsity upon us.

  ‘Thirn, you talk about your seaside stall as if it were a little paradise. Excuse me, but I cannot believe it. Did not your customers ever force their kids howling from the shop? And were you content in yourself, still there, selling trashy goods, shutting up late in summer? A narrow life, surely? With the great grey sea on your doorstep.’

  Noel asked Ooma what point she was making.

  ‘I’m not attacking Thirn. But to my thought, our situation is a pretty dismal one. Why should the human race talk so much about happiness and advancement? Why? Because they are things we can’t have. Sadness and loss are things we can have. We should accept them as our lot. Then possibly life would be—well, scepticism and stoicism are great qualities, of far more worth than pretence.’

  Thirn said, ‘What makes you such an authority on life? I liked my little shop, whatever you may say. And my brother. And my boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh, him again! Was that the only guy you ever had?’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t told you about him.’ Thirn sounded close to tears.

  Ignoring her remark, Ooma said, ‘I was originally of Swedish stock. At least, my great grandfather was Swedish, or part-Swede. He was known as a womaniser, but also as a poet. Many of his poems deal with life as full of confusion and human wretchedness, and were widely appreciated—for their truth as well as for their rhyme-schemes. Wretchedness was respected in those days. And as for yourself, you suffered and died young.

  ‘Sven Langkrist—that was my great-grandfather’s name—Sven won an award from a society then held in high esteem, the Soldiers of Anomie and the Acidulant, who scorned verse about flowers or landscape, or happy things in general.

  ‘He travelled widely, eventually to marry an English prostitute—a good woman, the family always said—and wherever he went Sven found people much the same: people whose lot was not particularly fortunate and who got by in life as best they could.

  ‘If you will permit me, I will read you his prize-winning poem. It’s dated now, but it does express an anomie which, to my mind, we tend to suppress these days—to our detriment. I shall play you a recording I made on my screamer before leaving Earth. The poem seems to be set in the East, which Sven loved. Maybe in Kuala Lumpur.’

  Ooma switched on a recording.

  The avenue yields up its fumes by starlight,

  Unpeeling filthy wrappings layer by layer.

  No sleep but harbours something of tomorrow.

  No time-checks, please, and not an uttered prayer.

  Be circumspect! Your smiling next-door neighbours

  Prise up your floorboards when the night bat flies.

  Hold tight your genitals in sleep. Meanwhile,

  Moonlight stains the shutters of closed eyes.

  And those who come like lovers in their saris

  To imitate the antics of the past

  Will fill their lanes with anybody’s banners:

  Repentance dies. Dawn waits. Her breath comes fast.

  At least the whores are better dressed this year:

  Though we perforce are always on the thrust,

  Ripping the fabrics from their tender yonis

  In quest of deeper landscapes, charged with lust.

  The prick of pleasure functions like a piston

  Where action merely generates distaste –

  Orgasm, payment: can they cancel out

  One moment in annihilation’s waste?

  Is feeling then a gateway to disaster

  Or is it sense that signals us to doom?

  While sex, that carnivore, eats what it jousts with,

  The ape invades the drawing room.

  Delight is scarcely longer than a letter;

  Disgust’s a library. And yet, and yet –

  All Shakespeare’s plays paint folly,

  To flesh the stage on which our acts are set.

  Impatience follows swiftly on our play.

  Pay up, and face the suckling light alone!

  What have we got, replacing scented night?

  Email, false front, memos, the phone …

  Our modern man with modern fears complete

  Must face the life of lust with armoured eye.

  The torrid brothel world holds symbols:

  Condoms and foreskins hanging out to dry.

  ‘Seven days shalt thou labour’

  To fight thy way through purgatory

  Not understanding, hoping, coping

  With your own immodest story.

  A beggar woman crouches on a stone

  While passers-by unheeding go their ways.

  Her company, a mangy mongrel

  For the hideous evening of her days.

  This city once knew dawns of livid splendour.

  Pollution now rags out the sky in grey.

  Do men who rise and shower and drive to office

  Know how their lives have been processed away?

  For those of us who sleep in nature’s doorways

  And close our pockets to society’s bills

  The stones are cheeks whereon we rest our temples –

  Meanwhile, the city crawls towards the hills.

  Some ghosts may through night’s banyan thickets filter,

  But waking finds a world still upside down.

  By chance, the map we rescued from the gutters

  Proved street plan to another unknown town.

  This ranked array of shops and tawdry theatres

  Drugs us with fantasies. Say, in that bank

  Are there not squads of dusky mistresses

  Who have the whit
e man still to thank?

  I heard a footfall in the smallest hour.

  When starting up I thought I saw your face.

  But to my challenge came the wistful answer:

  ‘I’m here, but you are in another place.’

  Once I was true and you my pure delight,

  Your flesh and spirit played my tender host.

  But then—your arms were closed to me for ever.

  I’m rudderless while you are but a ghost.

  Although faint hope may serve as sail and anchor

  The sea is hourly storming up the strand.

  The candle gutters in a lifeless window.

  Missing your heart, I still seek for your hand.

  Spectres that through our mazes find their way

  Have little coin but circumstance:

  On waking we remember only music,

  Bare thigh, dark hair, that look askance.

  Newborn, the sun at mosque and supermart

  Proclaims that day’s the flower of midnight’s seed.

  The Muslims pray. The rest of us rise up

  To face once more the tasks of human need.

  ‘Life’s not like that here,’ said Iggog, turning up her nose.

  ‘More’s the pity,’ said Gerint. ‘Short of oxygen, short of reality …’

  ‘Typical bit of Scandinavian misery,’ Iggog responded.

  Offended, Ooma said, ‘I’d say simply—honest. You can’t see Wordsworth or any British writer writing so strongly of a lost life.’

  Waiting afterwards for the elevator, Iggog said, ‘The guy who wrote that poem—taking advantage of women as per usual …’

  ‘No,’ said Daark in response. ‘He was keeping them in business. Else they might have starved. Look, I think you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder—if you actually think about it, the poet is in pain, condemning himself.’

  Iggog contemplated Daark from under her thick brows. ‘We’ll have a chat about this some time.’ Daark inclined his head; he had discovered the normon. He could cope with anything.

  On the whole, most people were annoyed that they had been forced to listen to Ooma’s poem.

  Poetry was one item which had not reached Mars. That river had run dry.