Read Online Finches of Mars by Brian W. Aldiss - Free Book Online

Neither beg nor boast. See if they are researching a quicker way to get supplies out to Tharsis.’
    As the group shook hands and put cheek to cheek, the Grey Wolf had pressed her lean cheek to the Terrier’s whiskery one.
    Those who lived in the towers took exercise. Tennis was popular. Sport itself did not entirely exercise their minds. But they feel themselves to be closer to the mystery. The mystery was alluring, even obsessional. Nor was it easy to define. But there certainly was a mystery.
    â€˜Life is the invisible elephant in the room,’ as someone put it.
    The mystery lodges in the skulls of humans.
    See, here’s a man. It’s night and he sits by a small fire in a forest. The seasons are turning; it grows colder. His woman lies by his side, not asleep but with no speech or movement. The man has a dog, part wolf, on a leash, made restless by the crackle of burning sticks.
    These three beings are in a continent almost uninhabited. It is full of trees. The trees grow straight, in silent competition, one with another. The man tears branches off the trees to burn, to keep him warm. He sits there, hands out to the blaze. He thinks. He is attempting to think about the mystery.
    He can’t even name it, but he feels its presence.
    Enormous lengths of time, lengths beyond human visualisation, stand between the present and that moment when the universe exploded from a nothingness—nothingness also beyond human visualisation. The illuminations of that distant beginning have sunk into almost complete night. Fires burn out.
    Yet the dust and debris of that beginning still continue to fly outwards. The universe, to use a phrase we almost understand, continues to expand. We label some of the clusters of blazing material galaxies. Stars are lit in these galaxies, yet throw no light on their meaning.
    Suppose there is no meaning in a galaxy and we are just wasting our time. No meaning in a galaxy—or in the whole universe? Why should there be? The strange thing is that human entities who worry about this question exist. It may be that mind lends meaning. Is that what mind is for? We have to live, to die; neither is a voluntary process. Yet we find what happens between birth and death important, to have meaning.
    The wily squirrel, clearly a conscious being, prefers its tree. But we have come down from the trees to face—or to invent—the mystery alone.
    So human life, let us say for a moment, has meaning. Does that mean also that the existence of viruses holds a meaning for them? Animals certainly have minds. But no concept of Mind.
    These days, we can departmentalise this mystery into scientific, religious and philosophical slots—even if we believe that all three departments form one invisible elephant in our thinking.
    And another elephant. The telescope at Tampa had actually managed to pinpoint Nemesis, the Massive Solar Companion—in fact a dull dwarf star. It proved that Earth had been a component in a binary system, without an inkling of the fact, throughout all history and prehistory.
    And if there is no understanding, then what meaning can there be in human life? Or supposing the universe has a meaning—supposing it is its own meaning—does that give human life meaning? And what if ‘meaning’ itself holds no meaning?
    Here we ask questions which are sometimes put less naively round the desks and tables in the settlement, in the evening relaxation period, except in Singa-Thai, where they dance.
    We hope the questions probe the mystery more clearly than does the man squatting by his fire in the great forest of the night on that forbidding continent. But do they get closer to answers?
    A mathematician, by name Daark, works on Noel’s computer. His character has changed since his life on Earth. He had a partness and two children, but his career was failing. On Tharsis, a measure of remorse makes him a solitary in the crowd. It was he who had built on Madame