Finches of Mars Read online

  15

  An Hour’s Friendship

  Gerint was a silent man usually, of middle age, much of whose time was spent drawing and redrawing maps of the local terrain. He had recently taken to growing a beard, confining it to chin alone.

  Gerint would have liked to look more Russian. He had a friend in the Russ-East tower whom he visited on various occasions.

  The Russians organised their Martian exile independently. From the beginning they had rejected the idea of reducing their names to cyphers. They used their computers to control comfortable conditions within the tower. They had a small library, at least a couple of shelves, of books—mainly of Leo Tolstoy’s novels—in their old physical guise. They also had a studio in which etchings and engravings and some pastels were being created. Some of these works could be exchanged for UU tokens with other towers.

  Because of this exchange, Gerint had met with the librarian. They had immediately found interests in common.

  Gerint’s friend served as librarian and researcher into Russian history. His name was Vladimir Gopman. He showed Gerint a brilliant book on ‘The Hermitage’ in St Petersburg. The Hermitage contained over three million works of art and artefacts. The two men pored over this beautiful work together.

  ‘Very strong on Matisse,’ Vladimir commented.

  ‘Yes. But I don’t see any Gauguin, and I remember a wonderful room in the Hermitage full of Gauguins. The Picassos are amazing. His Woman with a Fan is extraordinary, don’t you think?’

  Gerint agreed. ‘And a superb Caravaggio …’

  ‘Frankly, I am homesick for such beauty,’ said Vladimir. ‘Can such glory ever occur again? And now Russia has broken up into four states.’

  ‘Many of these artists who depicted such wealth and elegance so brilliantly were poor. Here on Tharsis we have institutional poverty, yet such art can never emerge without the real thing. All this is something I deeply miss.’

  ‘This is why we have become friends,’ said Vladimir. ‘It is having something in common. But we had to come to Mars to meet that something.’

  This suggested a greater kind of intimacy to Gerint than he could easily manage.

  ‘Let me ask you, Vladimir. Time’s short. I suppose you are conversant with that splendid tone poem of Borodin’s, ‘In the Steppes of Central Asia’? It might have been composed with Mars in mind!’

  Vladimir shook his shaggy head. ‘I’ve never heard of it. Perhaps Borodin offended someone. But most men here care nothing for works of art.’

  Gerint nodded. ‘In our tower it’s the same. Many important questions engage us. Questions of personality and reality. Of inwardness. But art? A complete blank …

  ‘A woman tried a poem on us. Not at all popular … Of course, it probably wasn’t a very good poem. But I … I liked it … Well, in two days’ time I am taking an expedition out over Tharsis, but somehow I doubt we shall discover any Hermitages.’

  ‘We are not allowed expeditions in case we escape!’ They both chuckled.

  ‘To be exiled from exile is really something.’

  A warden entered the room. ‘Sorry, men. Time’s up.’

  They had been allowed half an hour’s Visiting Time.

  As Gerint trudged back to the West tower, he muttered to himself, as if Vladimir were present, ‘I’m a renegade. Ardent heathen and lecher that I was, I miss Christianity. Not the preaching, but all the splendid art and music that emerged from the Christian religion over the years. There’s nothing of that here.’

  Communication with the Chinese tower had been limited and terse for months. Much discussion had been taking place concerning the disgrace Phipp had brought to the West’s relations with the Chinese. It was finally decided that a small delegation should go to the Chinese tower to apologise and, if the apology were accepted, to talk of closer relationships between the towers.

  Phipp was restored to his role as door guardian, but only because no one else was available to take on the task. While this meant his release from confinement, Phipp, who had never been popular, had become shunned.

  At a time when his drinking water had become inexplicably less than pure, Phipp strove to re-establish himself and remarked to Rooy, ‘Water, the Bread of life …’

  ‘He was groping blindly for profundity,’ said Rooy, grinning. ‘“Water, the Bread of life …”’ And with much laughter the quotation ascended the tower floor by floor until it reached the astronomers, amongst whom laughter was not greatly encouraged.

  The fact was that once the existential thrill of actually being on a planet other than Earth had become blunted by custom, routine had set in. Routine and the dominating question of stillbirths had allowed ‘boredom’—that withered word—to flourish.

  16

  Shap’s Lecture

  The morning Brightener in the West tower was occupied on a particular day by Shap, one of the women in Astronomy, speculating on the significance of the normon.

  Shap patted her hair down before beginning her talk.

  ‘Our terrible crisis here on Tharsis is, of course, the death of babies, the impossibility of life for them … The crisis appals our corporate mind like a dead child itself.

  ‘But I must speak of the astroscience that is my occupation.’

  Pausing, Shap patted her hair again, took a deep breath and began to talk in a less fluting voice.

  ‘So, the normon. It takes a while for any new angle to be checked. The name itself may be changed. Various fresh tests have to be undergone before a paper appears in Nature. So far we have received support only from Chunderhof in New Delhi, where Knablo Mukurrji has arrived at the same understanding as we, in his researches. We are not talking Higgs Boson here.

  ‘For a surprisingly long time, we humans have accepted that nothing can travel faster than light. However, we now believe this not to be the case, and that within—or let’s say beside—light, there’s a track relating to but separate from light, faster by far than light. That’s our normon. It’s more of a strip than a particle as we at first believed.

  ‘Findings so far seem to show that a multiplicity of normons exist. We appear to have detected one that approaches Mars before veering off into the galaxy.’

  One of Shap’s listeners interrupted to say, ‘So if you could travel by it, you might travel back in time?’

  ‘We don’t know as yet,’ Shap responded. ‘We do know, as someone once said, that the universe is strange, and stranger than we can imagine. It’s a pity we still use the term “space”—very old-fashioned—for the great teeming ocean of particles surrounding us.’

  She then became more technical, talking slowly, seeming to relish the minutiae of the research. Phipp left the chamber. Then another member followed, and another. Finally the talk was over and the remaining audience left the hall.

  Noel had been listening with Troed, the chief engineer, and Iggog.

  ‘She lacks lecture skills,’ said Troed lightly, smiling.

  Responding, Iggog said, ‘The crowd was bored. You can easily learn a few lecture skills. A bit of humanity helps. She could have told us who this original Norman was.’

  Noel paused outside her door. ‘I trust you two realise that Shap was struggling with a concept—an enormously troubling concept … Well, it troubles me! She can see that if the hypothesis is correct, then we are not living in the universe we thought we were. We’re living in a quite different universe.

  ‘And my belief is that she struggles to conceal this idea, so as not to frighten the troops …’

  17

  Interlude: A Farewell To Families

  One of those ‘troops’ was Tad, a fairly recent arrival, having landed on Mars on the convoy only just before Sheea’s traumatic baby. His story had begun as mundanely as any other colonist’s … Tad Tadl and his partness, Ida Precious, stood in a cosy little room where plain nylon curtains hung down
to a polished floor. On a small table in one corner were a squealer and a DTV set. Their home was in Reading, England. Outside, the big city’s roar could be heard. By the tall window hung a cage containing a canary, staring out from its perch. The canary’s wings fluttered slightly, as if it wished to escape from what it witnessed.

  Tad and Ida, who were buying the house, were arguing with one another. Tad claimed that he had a hunger to see Mars. ‘I’m the new generation! They’ve been there nearly ten years. The colonists are well-established by now.’

  Ida had at first agreed, citing a fact she had read that development of eyes had promoted the dawn of intelligence, and it was intelligence that insisted the human race should occupy its neighbour in space. In species such as plants and fungi, among the innumerable eyeless types, intelligence had not evolved.

  ‘That is the case, obviously,’ Tad had said. ‘It’s only among the chordates you find intelligence. Who knows if, among the various bugs we inevitably take with us to Mars, intelligence may develop? Things are going to be different.’

  ‘That’s what’s exciting. That’s the lure,’ she had said.

  Tad put a hand on Ida’s breast and made greedy gobbling noises.

  The hand of a man, the paw of a bear, the wing of a bird, all have an evolutionary relationship, all serve purposeful behaviour. But on the Moon, only the hand of man is to be found.

  A Western recession was now in its third year, growing deeper, afflicting even bank managers. Shoots to the Moon had in consequence been cut from once every six months to once every ten. Tad had booked their flight long ago, on one of those new graceful Chinese space planes. Now he was embarking on the Moon lift without Ida. He tried not to think of her.

  In recent days she had become silent. Tad had done his best to draw her out; Ida had closed her eyes and shaken her head. She would not accept his embraces.

  Finally, she had burst into speech. ‘It’s no good. I don’t want to go to bloody Mars! Why should anyone want to go to bloody Mars? Have they got coffee shops there? Movies? Gardens, streets, hotels? Music? Anything living or lively? Not a bit of it! Sorry, Tad—you go alone if you must!’

  And she had a job in a lousy bank.

  He found himself now seated in a crowded vehicle. Men and women were there, mainly in the twenties-to-forties age range. Few of them talked, some held hands, all were aware of the challenge of the enterprise on which they were already embarking.

  While the complex mass of energy-driven proteins and fats constituting their brains held knowledge of the adventure in which they would play their part, their bodies were tense with apprehension. The lunar vehicle pulsed with it. The passengers, men and women, had already exchanged their own currencies for UU tokens. Farewells to families had been made and those embraces were finished with. They had already begun a final departure from Earth.

  The Moon was a busy place. The side facing Earth was littered with speedroads and factories and tourist hotels. It was estimated that something close to four million people now lived on the Moon for periods of not more than a statutory ninety days—a period in which health was not undermined by the light gravity.

  Tad Tadl and those who had travelled up with him were lodged in the spartan Adios Hotel, in the city-nexus of Armstrong. Here, meals were graded to become more parsimonious day by day.

  Tad’s family had come to say farewell to him and watch the big launch. His two younger brothers were bubbling with excitement and envy. His mother was choking back tears, but complimented him adoringly on his courage. Father, Tad’s beaky-nosed father, had been told not to exercise his disapproval of the entire project. A powerful-looking man, he nevertheless did what his wife told him. ‘A sad loss to the family, old boy,’ was the nearest he got to voicing his feelings. Tad patted his father’s back. ‘I never did please you, pop. You’ll sleep easy once I’m out the way.’

  ‘Indeed we won’t, love,’ said mother. Father said nothing. He blinked rapidly. With the rocket launched, Tad’s mother burst into tears.

  And when the crying ceased, her sense of something missing from her life continued.

  On Luna, while awaiting the Mars craft in its orbit, the would-be exiles exercised and were lectured to.

  Their main lecturer was a plump and cheerful man, by name Morgan Reece. Over his large torso was draped a T-shirt, the message on which read ‘SAME OLD SHIT? NO—DIFFERENT SHIT’.

  ‘Yes, I’m lucky Morgan Reece, and I will retain both parts of my name,’ he said. ‘You will all lose your surname; some may be given new names assigned by computer, the easier to keep tabs on you in your new existence. Also, this way, you are less likely to think of your families. Homesickness doesn’t pay off. You’ll be on your way to Mars within the week, when your birth names will remain behind as kind of ghost-memories of your earthly existence.

  ‘That goes for you too, Tompkins, dear …

  ‘Right now, I’m taking the opportunity to tell you about things which you may already know. Bear with me.

  ‘I will start by quoting a twentieth century philosopher, Bertram Russell—who has left both his names behind. The good Bertram said, “Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving”. Quite so. Otherwise, we might fly to the planets on gossamer wings. As it is, we are flying blind, evolution-wise. Don’t imagine further development has come to a grinding halt, because that just ain’t how the system works.

  ‘One of the reasons you lot are schlepping off to Mars is because you can no longer bear to believe in things that just ain’t so. Unlike most of the nutcases around here.

  ‘Someone died for our sins over two thousand years ago. Well, that one hasn’t worked out, has it?

  ‘Think big. You already think big in confronting a perilous trip into unknown difficulties. I hope to add to your stature by talking about the universe itself. Mind and intelligence are under threat. China has to confront nuclear aggression from North Korea. Ingushetia has been reduced to ruin. The Libyans have accidentally blown themselves up—could happen to anyone, provided they were stupid enough. The lovely island of Bali has become a battleground.

  ‘A large part of Westminster Abbey has been destroyed by a suicide-bomber, as you know. Almost unreported, Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria are at war. There is civil war again in Ireland. Need I go on? Bitter tribal wars continue in Somalia, the Congo and elsewhere. This is yet another Dark Age among the many of the past. Stupidity seems to prevail.

  ‘And yet we know how precious intelligence is, how men have fought for its continuance over the ages. To manage to quit this Earth is an act of courage and intelligence. Why is the operation so difficult? Why, we ask after two centuries of searching, is a minor little planet like our Earth the only home of intelligence? As far as we know, that is, despite all the guessing games we’re good at.’

  Morgan Reece paused for a moment, chewing over how he might put across his next point most effectively.

  ‘And if all this really is the case, then it implies—no, it means—that all the stars in the universe, which number about ten billion trillion, exist for the sake of our intelligence and our limited way of life only. Come on, who’re you kidding?

  ‘In my next lecture, I shall be more technical—this is just an introduction to that torture. But we can see that the size of the galaxy is related to the length of time of its existence. That’s time enough for there to be plenty of carbon around. Carbon provides the basis for all life forms. Is that by design, or did it just so happen?

  ‘There is less oxygen than carbon in circulation. Which is as well, I’d say, or otherwise, catching fire from the sun, the whole scheme of things might go up in smoke.

  ‘From our point of view, it is a misfortune that Mars has no oxygen, whatever was the case in the past. There is much we do not yet understand. By living on Mars you will discover much more. Understand more.

  ‘No oxygen,
no water. Until this last century and the intolerable over-population of our world, water was plentiful here on Earth. And just think—water is a contradiction of nature. Generally speaking, solid forms are heavier than liquid or gaseous forms of the same material. Not so with water. Ice is lighter than water. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t it something more than just lucky?

  ‘Were it otherwise, in cold water the ice when it formed would sink. The coldest water, becoming heavier, would also sink. Thus ice would accumulate. Oceans would become solid ice. And so in a matter of years, we would have a frozen world, on which intelligence, life itself, would be impossible.

  ‘Does this mean that certain chemical reactions have been skewed so that we can live? It’s a big, big question. Why used young lads to leave their homes to go a-wandering? To discover the big world, of course. As you all are about to do.

  ‘Same old shit? No, like I say, “Different Shit” …’

  Tad wondered what a bank contributed to any higher form of knowledge. He thought longingly of Ida. Soon, she and her wretched bank would be millions of miles away.

  Everyone was losing a lover or a family.

  Finally this body of men and women was lifted from the city of Armstrong to the orbiting space vehicle Confu. The Confu weighed ninety hundred tons, almost twice the weight of the RMS Titanic, which had sunk centuries earlier.

  The real significance of this operation still echoed the confidence and consternation caused by the departure of the first colonising ship for the Red Planet—some years back now—to carry a brave freight of the elite and adventurous who had signed away any chance of returning to their natal planet. Yes, they faced hardship but, no, not decline.

  Many an onlooker was unable to decide whether this long farewell marked a loss or a gain in the terrestrial story. The future itself posed something of the same dilemma: those of a more pessimistic nature looked towards it with gloom, while the optimists anticipated good things to materialise. As far as terrestrial activities went, there was justification for both views.