Finches of Mars

‘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?’

‘Hang on. There’s still something …’ Simpson had what they called 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 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.’