Finches of Mars by Brian W. Aldiss

was not well enough for such irritating banality. He heard his heart thudding in his ears. ‘But still–’ he began, only to find he could not complete the sentence. He did not even know what the sentence was going to be. ‘Still …’
    The doctor mopped Barrin’s forehead with a damp tissue. ‘I was always struck by that passage in Plato’s Republic . About the shadows seen in the cave? I expect you know it.’
    In feeble irritation he whispered he had never heard of Plato, in the hope she would cease talking.
    She regarded him as a special case, one recognised by the King’s medal. To have been to Mars and back earned her respect, yet she felt that behind that compulsion (as she saw it) lurked illusion.
    Even as she told him Plato’s analogy, Barrin felt himself drifting away.
    It was indeed a striking analogy, so striking that it had lived for something like twenty-five centuries. Some people have been imprisoned in a large cave since childhood. They are unable even to move their heads and must always stare in front of them. (Just like us, she said.) Somewhere behind them bright lights shine. Between the bright lights and the prisoners is a raised walk. Free persons pass along this walk. Their shadows are thrown on the cave wall at which the prisoners have no alternative but to stare. Were they to hold a discussion with one another concerning life, they would assume that those shadows before them were the real, the only, things. They would make of them what sense they could.
    â€˜So, my dear Barrin, do you not see that truth could prove to be nothing but mere shadows?’
    He made no response. She felt for his pulse. There was no pulse.
    â€˜Just as I talk to you, my dear, now but a shadow,’ she said with sorrow.
    Late in the afternoon, when the doctor was off duty, she sat grieving with her partner by the fountain in their garden, attempting a light meal. There were butterflies on the buddleia and a nuthatch in the rhododendron bushes.
    She said, ‘Barrin was the first, the only , person to reach Mars and return here. Oughtn’t we to start a fund to raise a statue to him? Better than that medal, which hardly anyone saw … You don’t seem to grasp how unique his achievement was?’
    â€˜Get on with your gazpacho, dear,’ her partner said.
    Barrin’s death took up a lot of air space. Another rival for attention was the invasion and take-over of Greenland by Russo-Musil forces. The world was so full of disturbances that the fate of Greenland seemed unimportant. It was not a particularly popular tourist resort. The leader of the invasion, and now the president of the state, was Colonel Ketel Mybargie, his name sounding quite friendly. He had announced, ‘We have taken over Greenland for spiritual purposes. This we trust will benefit all native Greenlanders.’
    Most of the world, with troubles of their own, were prepared to be reassured by these words, unaware that native Greenlanders had already been reduced almost to single figures.

9
    Life Elsewhere?
    The squealers produced varieties of uncomfortable news.
    In the Middle East, President Iduita Gane admitted to, indeed boasted of, the desecration of Westminster Abbey, carried out on the grounds that it had become a refuge for gay men. More seriously, the small university in ‘Lhasa’, Tibet, withdrew from the UU, pleading poverty. Since the university was under direct Chinese control, this move was seen as a first reprisal for the attack on a visitor at the West’s tower gate.
    A counter move was also reported. The Florida universities, a group calling itself ‘Tampa’ within the UU, were celebrating the anniversary of their sighting of Earth’s companion sun, ‘Nemesis’. They offered a peace-making infusion of finance to ‘Lhasa’. The offer was ‘being considered’.
    In small print at the bottom of the flash, it was announced that