Brian Aldiss - Finches of Mars

‘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 Kate had died.

He lay in a kind of paralysis. Absurd to say he did not care about Kate; 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.