Finches of Mars. Brian Aldiss

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      ‘Comfort. We were drinking the local wine. He said, this priest said, without thinking, that sometimes he woke in the night and burned with desire for Carmen. I was sleeping with her. I knew well what the poor fellow meant …’

      Prestwick paused.

      ‘But after all, so many women …’ He let the sentence trail away into the godless night. ‘I felt we’d got it wrong – the West. I mean, got it wrong.’ He lapsed into silence.

      ‘I make it sound as if I lived in that village for years. I was only there for two days. I didn’t like the rats. We’ve gotten so squeamish. But somehow Carmen – really the whole place, I guess – it started working on my mind.’

      Simpson said, simply, ‘I envy you.’

      ‘Carmen …’ Silence fell between them, except for the sipping noises.

      ‘I see what you mean,’ said Simpson eventually. ‘Yes. The place sounds like a film set. The Simple Life. But what if you get ill? Or your kids? And her ex – miserable slob. Did she get the clap attended to?’

      ‘I couldn’t live there. Nor could you, I imagine. I got my dose cleared up back home.’

      Simpson was reluctant to enter into further conversation. ‘Let’s switch the recorder off, shall we?’ he suggested, but hesitated as Prestwick continued, undeterred.

      ‘I couldn’t – we couldn’t live in Chile. Ghastly place, ghastly politics, to be honest. We owe a whole heap to the Magna Carta. But just think of the world we do live in. We’re inculcated, if that’s the word I want. Inculpated? Our minds – well, look, as far as we know our brains were jerry-built over the ages from brains of – crikey! – brains of sea monsters – sea monsters and then, later, a form of ape. And for all endeavours–’

      Simpson groaned. ‘Stop it right there, Bob. I’m sick of being told we’ve all come down from the trees. We are no longer apes and there’s the difference. Did you ever meet an ape who was a hydrologist? A president of a bank, okay, but not a hydrologist.’

      ‘No, no, I wasn’t off on that tack, mate. I was going to say that, thanks to Charles Darwin and others, we have been released from the Old Testament. I rejoice in that. We came from simple villagers, believing Earth was the centre of the universe. The prospects of evolution are far more thrilling than almost any other theory ever dreamed up …

      ‘But … we seem still to need faith. A faith. Any faith. And I suspect our brains – urh! the brains of modern man – are stacked full of an erroneous faith. Office bumf … Faith in information. Information about everything, anything. Its birthday may have been the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, way back when.

      ‘Since about then, we have craved to know … quantum theory, mass, energy, time, space, neurons, protons, СКАЧАТЬ