White mars by Brian W. Aldiss & Roger Penrose. Chapter 17, 18

He sighed at such a vulgar display of hope. ‘You speak like that, yet I can see you’re sick. I’m sorry – but you have merely to gaze from this window to perceive that this is a dead planet, a planet of death, and that we live suspended in a kind of limbo, severed from everything that makes existence meaningful.’

‘This is a planet of life, as we have discovered – where life has survived against tremendous odds, just as we intend to do.’

He pulled his nose, indicating doubt. ‘You refer, I assume, to Olympus? You can forget that – a piece of impossible science invented by impossible scientists enamoured of a young Aborigine woman.’

‘Ships will be returning here soon,’ I responded. ‘The busy world of terrestrial necessity will break in on us. Then we shall regard this period – of exile, if you like -as a time of respite, when we were able to consider our lives and our destinies. Isn’t that why we DOPs and YEAs came here? An unconsidered life is a wasted life.’

‘Oh, please!’ He gave a dry chuckle. ‘You’ll be telling me next that an unconsidered universe is a wasted universe.’

‘That may indeed prove to be the case.’ I felt I had scored a point, but he ignored it in pursuit of his gloomy thought.

‘I fear that our destiny is to die here. Not that it matters greatly. But why can we not accept our fate with Senecan dignity? Why do we have to follow the scientists and imagine that that extinct volcano somewhere out there, out in that airless there, is a chunk of life, of consciousness, even?’

‘Why, there is evidence—’

‘My dear Jefferies, there’s always evidence. I beg you not to afflict me with evidence! There’s evidence for Atlantis and for Noah’s flood and for fairies and for unidentified flying objects, and for a thousand impossibilities … Are not these absurd beliefs merely unwitting admissions that our own consciousness is so circumscribed we desire to extend it through other means? Weren’t the gods of the original Greek Olympus one such example, cooked up, as it were, to explain the inexplicable? I suspect that the universe, and the universes surrounding it, are really very simply comprehended, had we wit enough to manage the task.’

‘We have wit enough. Our ascendancy over past centuries shows it.’

‘You think so? What a comfortable lack of humility you do exhibit, Jefferies! I know you seek to do good, but heaven preserve us from those who mean well. Charles Darwin, a sensible man, admitted that the minds of mankind had evolved – if I recall his words correctly – from a mind as low as that of the lowest animal.’

Attempting a laugh, I said, ‘The operative word there is evolved. The sum is continually ever greater than its parts. Give us credit, we are trying to exceed our limitations and to comprehend the universe. We’ll get there one day.’

‘I do not share your optimism. We have made no progress in our understanding of that curious continuity that we term life and death since – well, let’s say, to be specific, because specificity is generally conceded to be desirable -since the Venerable Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History some time in the seventh century. I trust you are familiar with this work?’

‘No. I’ve not heard of the book.’

‘The news has been slow to reach you, n’est ce pas? Let me quote, from my all too fallible memory, the Venerable Bede’s reflections on those grand questions we have been discussing. He says something to this effect. “When compared with the stretch of time unknown to us, O king, the present life of men on Earth is like the flight of a solitary sparrow through the hall where you and your companions sit in winter. Entering by one high window and leaving by another, while it is inside the hastening bird is safe from the wintery storm. But this brief moment of calm is over in a moment. It returns to the winter whence it came, vanishing for ever from your sight. Such too is man’s life. Of what follows, of what went before, we are utterly ignorant.”‘

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