Finches of Mars (16 page)

29

Questions of Evolution

The sickening news of Mangalian's death, now only too real, had still to reach Tharsis, when a small matter arose which had to be dealt with. Sheea had reported to the sick bay with a black eye. The pupil of the eye had possibly been damaged. Sheea, more than a year after her loss, still suffered depression; at the show of sick bay compassion, she broke down in tears.

Gossip immediately started.

‘No doubt this is the work of Phipp,' said Lock, who even on the ship had shown herself to be no friend of the man. ‘He should be locked up.'

‘It's that same old problem still bugging Phipp,' Herrit said. ‘Sheea refuses to say who made her pregnant. Finally, Phipp lost it, and hit her—hard.

‘He
does
suffer from jealousy.'

‘Typical male,' joked Rasir. ‘Can't get our own way, so hit out. We men always cause trouble. The Chinese have got their figures right—ninety percent of them in their tower are female.'

‘And the head of them, Gongcha, is in love with one of our males,' said Stroy. ‘The trouble with men is too much testosterone—overactive testicles.'

‘We understand you almost came in touch with the largest prod on record.'

Stroy laughed. ‘Almost but not quite. Now I wish I had had a look at it! His problem must be some kind of lack of male hormone plus elephantiasis.'

‘In other ways, Ficht seems a fairly normal man, and he's got a high I.Q. Why does he want to show his prod about? Is it despair or is it pride?'

‘Generally, men flash their prods about from pride or lust.'

‘And why must we be so private about our privates?' Rasir asked.

‘Well, I've often wondered whether men will be disappointed when you see this precious secret thing of ours,' offered Stroy.

Noel's musing were on a different level. ‘Women rarely fight among themselves, although it does happen. Men are stronger, presumably an indication that they were born to hunt. Men fight. Men have something they need to achieve. Manhood. Armies have traditionally been for men only. Brave men. It's a way of initiation into male company, presumably a hangover from early days in tribal Africa, where a youth had to go out and kill a lion with his bare hands, or fuck a female gorilla …'

‘Yeah, with a bare prodkin start it all …'

Stroy said, ‘I've always understood that male and female psychologies are more similar than different. That's why the diverse psychologies can submerge happily into one—during a love affair, for instance—at least for a while.'

Noel nodded curtly and returned to her quarters. She had a woman sharing the sleeping arrangements, but did not greatly enjoy her loss of privacy.

Rasir remained interested in the conversation concerning diverse psychologies.

‘Witness Tad and Gongcha,' he said. There was laughter—some of it rather envious—round the table.

‘What do you mean, “witness”? Are you a Peeping Tom?'

‘Pity there's no third sex,' Stroy said. ‘The more sex the better.'

‘What would a third sex do?'

‘It could act as umpire …'

‘Oh, I was as sick as a—what gets frightfully sick?—sick as a pig. I would never go through that again.' Tuot was telling Daark of her experience in the new pregnancy roundabout. She went on to elaborate just how sick she had been and the other pregnant girls too.

‘So we're back to square one again,' said Daark, cutting her short.

‘It's funny, 'cos Mars is rotating and that doesn't make us sick,' said Tuot.

‘We ought to go down to the basement and consult the engineers. Maybe they could adjust the speed.'

Tuot shuddered dramatically. ‘I wouldn't go back in there for all the tea in China. As for that little rapscallion, Squirrel …'

A day after the fire, and the beginning of Martian summer, there were still some survivors of the Sud-Am catastrophe outside the West tower and other towers, huddling around spare air tanks they'd either recovered, or been given. Somehow they seemed just a cloud on the horizon. Meanwhile, the catastrophe itself cast gloom over the occupants of the West tower. Aymee wanted to discuss the case, knowing a decision was urgent.

‘We are all upset about the fire at Sud-Am tower. Many people have perished, people like us. Surely, we must do something regarding this unhappy situation.

‘We await instructions from UU. Why is that? Does kindness need instruction?'

She snorted in a minor key. ‘But we are too busy fixing the water filter now we've seen the critters that pee in it …

‘And of course Thirn has been bathing in it …'

‘Meanwhile, we don't forget the more serious and abiding problem facing us, our inability to reproduce on this benighted planet. Dying now in a fire, or dying at some point in the future—this whole mission's a waste if we don't have children. The whole prospect of exploration of the solar system hinges on our bringing forth a new generation—a generation not native to Earth.'

‘Shortly before we left Luna for Mars,' Aymee said, ‘I went to see an opera by Lyizaz called
Steel to Saturn
. The music was remarkable but the story, as so often is the case in opera, is absurd. Our hero falls in love with a mysterious woman who has arrived on Earth from the moons of Saturn. As it happens, our hero's son, Cando, has gone into space and nothing has ever been heard of him since.

‘When there is a terrible storm—with much use of cymbals—our hero rescues the mysterious woman from a flood. They make love and only afterwards does she reveal that she is a metal being.

‘They have an all-metal child and then go to the mother's home on Titan, the moon of Saturn where her kind live. Our hero finds that his son is living safely there. Everyone rejoices. The end!'

Many people in the auditorium laughed with scorn.

Aymee continued. ‘You don't need me to tell you that, although the singing is good, the music beautiful and the scenery ingenious, the story is as soppy as can be. Leo Tolstoy in his essay “What is Art?” mocks an opera with a similar kind of plot. Disguises are generally needed to drag us through three acts.

‘But think again of
Steel to Saturn
. Perhaps there is some meaning to it after all. We may need to change—I mean change our natures—to get to the further planets. To mutate. Indeed, we may be undergoing a terrible storm, the death of all our precious babies, before we are fit to travel further, as we hope to do, if only as far as Jupiter and its moons.

‘Evolution is a continuous process. We see many examples. Can anyone offer me an example?'

Doran was the first to respond. ‘It happens I was born in a non-country, a kind of evolution in its own right. My country had been called Yugoslavia. Everywhere was still unsettled and my family took me to live on a Croatian island. The lizards there had developed a stronger jaw-movement—bite, in other words—than the lizards on neighbouring islands, because the vegetation was lusher and stronger. Indeed, one of them bit me. I can vouch for the stronger bite …'

He spoke in his usual rather off-hand way. While the audience was chuckling at his last remark, Doran added, ‘I suppose better known than my agony, for which evolution is to blame, there's the case of the African elephant and its shorter tusks, that Daark spoke of before.'

Others started shouting that bacteria were surviving antibiotics at an alarming rate.

Aymee held up her hands. ‘Okay, that will do. We can't find any cure for the stillborn baby syndrome, but it
will
be solved for us. Just wait for five years. Our wombs will have adapted to the environment. Think of the womb as an elephant's tusk! Our foetuses will also have figured things out. We shall be child-rich. I'm taking bets!'

To her amazement, the audience began cheering.

It seemed they would never stop.

It came as a surprise to Aymee to find that even the most learned of her companions had not read Darwin's
Origin of Species
, although they understood and took Darwin's conclusions for granted. She had a grand old book by Alan Moorehead on disc. She played this disc to those who would listen. Many of them were particularly interested in what was said about Darwin's discoveries when the
Beagle
was moored in the Galapagos Islands.

‘The finches were dull to look at, and made dreary unmusical calls. All had short tails, built nests with roofs, and laid white eggs spotted with pink, four to a clutch. Their plumage varied within limits: it ranged from lava black to green, according to their habitat …

‘It was the variety of their beaks that so amazed Darwin. Clearly the birds had found different foods available on different islands. By this time he must have realised that he was on the edge of a remarkable and disturbing discovery …'

‘You see,' Aymee said, ‘we are like the finches—“according to their habitat”—on the edge of an evolutionary brink. These therapsid-creatures are old. We are new! Be proud!'

Among those not attending this discussion were three persons in particular, Noel, who still awaited word from UU on what they should do for the Sud-Am refugees; Ficht, whose break time it was, and who slept in his bunk with his penis lying along his leg like a tame snake; and Tad, who was cuddled up with his ivory-skinned love, Chang Mu Gongcha, lying face to face, taking in her breath and her beauty.

It would hardly have interested this pair of lovers, who had grown so close, to read in Darwin's
The Descent of Man
that ‘the mental characteristics (of races) are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties.'

As for their physical and sexual differences, it was largely this exoticism which attracted the one to the other: xenophobia stood on its head.

Lock was a quiet woman, but here she was moved to comment on Aymee's final point. ‘After humanity emerged from Africa, some tribes went to Europe and some to Asia. Those who journeyed to the West found a forested terrain. Those who journeyed eastwards found the bamboo, that invaluable and versatile plant.

‘These two groups were apart from each other—hardly known to each other—for many centuries. They did finally meet, Netherlanders and British on one hand, Chinese on the other. Had they failed to meet for only a few millennia more, geography would have seen to it that two subspecies developed.

‘Meaning what? Meaning that cohabitation and copulation would have remained possible but the production of children—just as in our case here and now—might have been non-viable.

‘So every time love-making between East and West takes place, it marks a unity between the two contrasting environments, and a celebration of it.'

From the audience came a woman's voice, asking what of those who went neither east nor west but north.

Lock suddenly recalled a lewd joke from her school days in Estonia. Putting on a Continental accent, she said, ‘Lucky Alphonse, he is in ze middle …'

30

Precious Discoveries

Another expedition was preparing to set out, leaving by the rear exit of the tower to avoid survivors of the Sud-Am catastrophe—there was an unspoken guilt that they had done nothing to help them for days. Noel, having finally learned of Mangalian's death, received a message from him on her private squealer. An underling or substitute must have forwarded it belatedly. Noel hesitated before opening it. Her heart beat faster since, despite the chiding tone of the message, she believed she heard in it a response to her love for him, the one man for whom she had felt any deep sexual warmth.

The message said: ‘You know as well as anyone the need for change, for improvement, in the human species—improvement in particular in moral qualities. Of course we understand the dangers from disease of contact with the pet-loving Sud-Ams. Nevertheless, such is our hope, our thirst—which I know you share, dear Noel—for our moral growth, the West must, absolutely must, give those sad survivors refuge at once, however the West tower may suffer as a result.

‘My hope and heart are with you. Mangalian.'

His voice ceased.

Noel flung the pod against the wall. As it fell to the floor, she rushed over and trampled on it.

‘The hypocrite!' she cried. ‘Why should we who are healthy embrace those who are sick? Are we who are here not in danger enough? I'll have none of it. He can keep his damned heroism in his grave!'

Later she announced to all and sundry that orders had come from UU not to let a single Sud-Am refugee into the tower.

‘They brought disaster on themselves by deliberately disobeying the rules regarding the keeping of pets. So they must suffer from the infringement. Our lives are harsh enough.'

This announcement was in general greeted with relief, but there were more than a few who saw the edict as defying all that true civilization stood for.

Worse was to follow. A terse report arrived, on two suicide bombs exploding in quick succession inside Harvard University buildings. The oldest American university, founded by an English settler in the seventeenth century, was forced to close its doors to allow extensive restoration to take place. All external funding was temporarily placed on hold, including the bi-annual contribution to the UU.

Then another report, following the first report only a few minutes later. It announced briefly that the results of Herbert Ibn Saud Mangalian's post-mortem revealed that he had been tortured before death.

Reading this latest report, Noel found herself torn apart. She picked up the pod she had trampled and kissed it before stowing it away in a drawer.

Many other inhabitants of the tower had cried at Mangalian's death, some hiding their tears, some proud to show them.

The Mars colony and the UU itself were now in deep trouble, despite the excitement caused by the discovery of Martian life.

Haddod in the observatory, clutching his folded arms to his chest, said, ‘We're sunk, aren't we? They're bound to let us down now.'

‘What is more disgraceful,' Ficht replied, ‘is that behind the project which brought us to Mars was the hope, even an expectation, of getting to the moons of Jupiter. Two more generations of technological development and I believe we would have made it.'

‘Huh. So what now?' Haddod hardly expected an answer, but Ficht provided one. ‘As far as I can see, the alternatives are simply that we—or most of us—get ferried back to Earth. Rescued. Or that we are all left here to rot. Shipwrecked. The latter alternative is decidedly the more likely of the two.'

All up and down the tower, people were coming to the same conclusion. Robinson Crusoe had had it easy.

Now every man and woman in the crowd experienced themselves as solitary beings, each with a finite life span, faced with failure. Muttering perhaps a phrase to themselves over and over:

Future like a blank beach

Always this same sad half-light

Why didn't I screw her when I had the chance?

My ‘Petty Proceedings'—who will remember it?

Why did I say ‘No' to him that lecherous night?

Something in me I cannot reach

Oh, mother dear, you'll need a carer soon

I kissed her. I felt her. Oh, her juice, her breath …

My boundaries dissolving into the blankness

At least we're all—all heroes. Trail-blazers

Metanipoko, yes, regret, sublimity, at least we've known it

‘Mars as the Abode of Death' …

Sea lavender, the beach, little white shells, the tide coming in fast

What is it to die? Far lesser thing than living

Too bad living doesn't last.

But Gerint was a single-minded man, who kept on doggedly. His preparations for the next expedition were almost complete. Only the oxygen cylinders remained to be charged, and that would be done immediately before they set out. Sensing that there might never be the opportunity for another expedition, Gerint himself was determined to go on this one.

‘Come on, girls! This is going to be the expedition to end all expeditions!' He escorted his partness, pretty Dr Gior into his office and locked the door. She was already taking down her overalls.

‘Darling!' he said. They rushed at each other.

‘A quickie,' she said. He went down on her first.

Equipped with masks and wearing tough yixiing huaheng outfits, the company set out, seven women and four men. Leaving by the rear of the tower, they came across a man propped against the wall in a sitting posture.

‘He's sick,' said Rooy.

‘He's dead,' said Dr Gior. She could feel no compassion as the hormones of sex still streamed in her mind.

As he prodded the body, Rooy saw that fire had burnt much of the man's clothes. It was clear that this was a Sud-Am body. In the almost complete vacuum, corruption would be slow to gain a hold.

With Mons Olympus distant at their backs, the group made their way south-eastward, across a strip of Hesperian-age flow plain. The going was slow. They had not explored in this direction before. Several of them thought there was nothing new to be discovered.

Many flows could be traced for a mile or more. Some of them, coalescing, formed broad overlapping sheets, where progress was easier. Not that ease was exactly what they sought.

The flows sometimes gave way to low-cratered territory, where some ruined crater walls were reminiscent of ruined terrestrial castles. Some of the going here was dangerous, where half-concealed channels ran, shadows adding to the difficulties of negotiation. Gerint himself, his mind part preoccupied with other things, slipped and fell into one such channel. A cloud of dust stirred up about him.

The other members of the group, once they saw that Gerint was unharmed, moved back, avoiding the dust. Gerint heaved himself on to his hands and knees. He felt what he took for pebbles. Taking hold of one, he brought up into the uncertain light a green stone.

He was about to throw it away when Stroy told him to hang on and jumped down into the channel with him.

‘It could be valuable,' she said.

‘But not on Mars!'

‘No, it's a—hell, I forget the name.'

Stroy began digging with her hands. Soon she brought up another green stone, similar to the first one but slightly larger.

Another plunge and up came a blue-ish stone, and then another. These stones she held up to the light. They glittered with a purple richness.

‘You know what these are?' she asked. ‘Tanzanite! That's the name! Unless I'm mistaken, this purple stone is known as Tanzanite. I came across it in Jaipur when I was working there. It's quite precious. We'll take this lot back and look them up. They should fetch a good price.'

As he climbed out of his hole, Gerint said, ‘They're worth nothing here.'

‘Have you never heard of the export business?'

The group went no further. They turned back for the tower.

The Sud-Am corpse was still sitting by the rear door where they had left him, quite elegant in death.

Stroy laid the jewels on the desk before her while the others watched. Gior picked one up, polished it, held it close to her eye.

A wakipurr produced figures concerning the stones.

Tsavorite, also known as green grossularite, of the garnet family—a stone has recently fetched up to $9000 per carat, on account of its rarity—1000 times rarer than diamond.

Tanzanite (pronounced tan-zan-ite), a variety of the gemstone zoisite, can appear blue or purple or yellow from different angles. Stones of Tanzanite have been fetching up to $4000 per carat, on Earth, in spite of depression and deflation.

Some geologists believe these rare stones were formed more than 580 million years ago.

‘Five hundred and eighty million years ago!' Stroy breathed. ‘How I adore such incomprehensible bundles of time …'

‘This could be the saving of us,' said Noel, withholding the excitement from her voice. ‘We need as many of these jewels as we can gather. Gerint, can you form up another expedition at once to collect as many of these precious objects as possible? You all realise, don't you, that with these—well, these amazing gifts—we could buy our own university?'

All present beamed at one another. Later, it was Noel alone who, thinking of Mangalian, wept to herself. She determined that if the precious stones fetched the prices they hoped for, she would use some of the money to pay for the erection of a statue at the tower gate to commemorate Mangalian and his work.

In the end, only one consignment of precious stones made it back to Earth. As the transport ship returned from that first round trip with enough supplies for several decades, and bearing a delegation of biologists, and as Herb stowed away in the opposite direction, lines of communication suddenly dropped. The worst fears of the Tower dwellers were realised, in their moment of triumph.

Earth's fate remained a mystery. Eventually, after months of panic and recrimination, the thoughts of all in the towers turned to survival.

Long slow Martian years had passed. Once again, as of yore, Aymee and Rooy were enjoying their daily walk and exercise.

The lighter gravity of this world, which had proved such a barrier when colonisation began, was now proving a blessing. That taxation of weight which bears earthlings to early graves was in part alleviated. By terrestrial reckoning, Aymee and Rooy were several centuries old. Here, they bore their age lightly. Meeting them on their stroll, one might mistake them for reasonably youthful. Aging had not affected fertility, conception was as easy as ever. Foetuses were getting stronger and staying longer in the womb. The stillbirth problem was not yet resolved, but all had a sense that soon, soon this would change.
They
had adapted to Mars, children must be next. They had time.

Change marked their surroundings. Over the long chilly years, oxygen manufacture had been increased. The towers had developed and expanded, but no more had been built.

Now, beside the path where the couple were walking, vegetation grew. That vegetation was of a kind which, long ago, had fuelled and fed the ancient dynasties of China, the bamboo.

The venerable couple passed Gongcha and Tad, riding in a carefree way on a light tractor.

As it happened, Rooy and Aymee were going in one direction and the younger pair in the other.

And so it transpired, appropriately enough, that it was this younger pair who were about to encounter—as a later phrase had it—‘History riding in the guise of the Future'.