by Adam Roberts
For the wife of my youth shall clutch me—and the rest can go to hell!
She died in an instant, son, and that fact kept her spirit pure,
And Fate is not so cruel that I’m kept from her ever and more.
Her beauty outlasted the vacuum, the decompression, the burn.
Never seen death yet, my Havel? … Well, now is your time to learn!
An Asteroid Homesteader’s Song
Three generations have gone by
And my granddaughters shall give birth
Before I ever come to fly
To holy Earth.
Crowned by old time, grey, blue and white,
Like marble worked by the devout;
The citadel from which the might
Of humankind flowed out –
Where poured out, once, as wounds pour blood,
A stream of folk on rocket wings,
And Earth’s long-cultured hardihood
In arduous things:
Strong, wrapped in spaceship metal, kin
To folk at all the sky’s four quarters:
Age after Age, all orbits spin
Through us, Earth’s daughters
Who, exiled from the tightly curled
And thick-aired gravitational heart,
Lack limbs with strength to stand the world
Or break apart.
But still we steer by Earthly beacon
And still hold faith with what Earth taught;
For though our limbs and lungs may weaken
Our hearts do not.
The Moon Miners
We worked, digging down slant and delving deep from Copernicus’ crater
And each of us working a ten hour day, and grinding his Excavator.
Our suits’ remote commanding the drills, tunnelling lasers and Chutes,
Six foot men are small as dwarves besides those mechanical brutes—
Moon miners, paid to tunnel, the regolith over us all;
The only sounds our helmeted breath, the world coloured black and pall.
The cavern as wide as Vitruvian Man’s stretched fingertips might just touch;
Each morning meeting the frozen rock, each evening leaving it dust.
And the days on the moon are a fortnight long and are hotter than boiled lead
And the nights are exactly as long again and cold as the thoughts of the dead.
And the dust is fine as sea-beach sand, where breakers turn onto their side—
But the moon’s an oceanless beach, and parched, and rockfall’s the only tide;
Pebbles and rocks and meteors that come crashing out of blank sky;
And millennia come between each splash, and that surf is deathly dry.
Hurtling down, smashing and crashing, and milling rough rock into dust,
An anvil of land and myriad hammers, and so the topography’s crushed.
Soundlessness, vacuum, eerie and dark, confusion of far and near:
The miner toils in his cell spurred on by ‘we’re building a city here!’
Die-cut shadows dance in the blackness thrown by the welder’s spark;
There are twenty types of moonrock, lads, but a thousand types of dark—
A thousand kinds of darkness there, and the cold comes on up through your boots:
The lunar hilltops are bleak; for sure; but it’s bleaker by far at their roots.
We’d dug the main chamber, and sealed the sides with Palmact agent and Glue
And we’d paved the floor with laze-planed stones, and fitted these flags to the true.
And the echoless cavern reared eerily over us, arc-lit, hooped and tall.
Shadows seemed made of elastic, and stretched, flitted and slid on the wall.
Our suits were black as pure charcoal up from the boots to the helmets’ peaks;
A thing you’ll know about moondust, perhaps, is just how vile it reeks:
It stinks with the taint of sulphur, of a gunpowder fashioned in hell,
And you never quite rid yourself of it, clean, though you scrub down ever so well.
So we eat and we sleep; and ready ourselves, and it’s back sublunar again—
Though it’s hard and ill-paid and dangerous too, yet we’re Lune women and men.
And so we dug on, and the Vaters moved, jabbed blades, with dig and sweep,
On earth they’d have clanked, hissed and grumbled; but here all was quiet as sleep.
We drove three new tunnels, went downward slow, and aimed for the moon’s still heart …
But we found what we never thought to find, and it clattered our world apart.
We’re Lune, and we’re proud of that fact, though our suits bear House sigils now—
This is our world, and if you want digging we’re the ones who know how.
We’ll take the Merchant House’s money, let them supply new kit,
But ours are the hands, and the minds and the lives we take down into the pit.
Ours are the lives: the pit is a deadly-dangerous workplace, and deep;
You need not think us your slaves, you Housers, though you have bought us cheap.
A human who’s gone in the moon and crawled through the grave-holes there
Is indifferent to threats as to money—for miners are hard to scare.
But scared I was, for all my vaunting, by what my Vater dug through,
And my heart near stopped, and my breathing froze and my monitor light burned blue.
....
[The MSS breaks off at this point]
The Interplanetary Rebel’s Hymn
You who govern Venus, where the disk is smooth and grey:
The Ulanovs rule your System—but you’re greater, far, than they!
Now as the laws are questioned and the police sloops blast and glide,
Mithras, lord of the planets, give strength to those who died.
You who govern mottled Earth, a disk of white and blue,
The doorway men knocked first at, and which many have passed through;
Left behind some millions stumbling, g-force dulled and drowse,
Mithras, lord of the planets, keep us all true to our vows !
You who govern Mars, where rust has reddened the terrain,
There you died immortal; immortal there you rose again!
Where thin air and low g corrode the strength of gods of war,
Mithras, lord of the planets, make them mighty as before!
Asteroid governor and shepherd, where worlds cross and clash
And billions eke out life in caves of granite and of ash,
Subjected, spurned, though full of heart; tied by the Ulanov rope,
Mithras, lord of the planets, give our Revolution hope!
You who govern Jupiter, cold simulacrum star,
God of midnight spaces: here your truest faithful are.
Give us word that you will lead us rushing back into the Light,
Mithras, lord of the planets, let us stand up for your right!
Written Upon The Flank of a Spaceship
Engineers made me
To betray my pilot
On my first fight.
To gather iron
From close the sun
I am sent.
The iron I gather
Comes to the Ulanovs
Out of deep gravity.
Like a coal-coloured fish
Then it descends
Into deep gravity.
It is not used
For goods or gear,
But for The Law.
The iron I gather
Rulers covet
For an ill use.
I am shaped as a sword
Sharp with whitefire
Cooled in vacuum.
The iron I gather
Is drawn up
Out of deep gravity.
Like a coal-coloured fish
Then it descends
Into deep gravity.
It is not given
For goods or gear,
Bu
t for The Law.
Moon Poem (Lucian, 1969)
Three mmen sat in the topmost room
Of a great white tower a mile high:
Their words were slant, their counting wrong,
They spurned the earth and sought the sky.
Their tower’s foundation cracked and ruptured,
Blood-red fire and a roar of "kill!"
But falling meant a falling upward
To land on the top of the moon’s round hill.
I am in love as giants are
Who look upon the earth’s true star;
The restless bee must leave the hive
If it desires to thrive.
Two men got where they meant to go:
It took six nights and never a day–
A blank land blacker than waterless snow,
Its air already breathed away,
Its dust ground down by mortar-pestle:
Day and night a fortnight long,
Their only home a pot-shaped vessel,
Their armoured suits and helmets on.
I am in love as giants are
Who look upon the earth’s true star;
The wicked bee must leave the hive
If it desires to thrive.
They marked the sand with booted feet,
They found the blackness of the night
Indifferent to cold or heat,
Insensible to dark or light.
They measured mountains tip to root,
They tilled and sowed the ashen loam,
Tasting the pith of their silver fruit
Beneath the glaucous eye of home.
I am in love as giants are
Who look upon the earth’s true star;
The heartless bee must leave the hive
If it desires to thrive.
But one man travelled further yet,
Beyond the seas and past the hill
To where the sky is an oubliette
With a straightened view of absolute chill.
He looked down over a barren place,
A bootless blank, a crescent uncrossed,
A perfectly cratered and desert waste,
Where only breathless moon-sand was.
I am in love as giants are
Who look upon the earth’s true star;
But a bee with no hive will die alone,
However high he has flown.
And looking back in his solitary pass
Behind the unpainted face of the moon
He thought: "were that sand but turned to glass
How mighty a lens could be ground and hewn!
How minute the view it would gift me of
My birthly world of women and men—
I’d magnify the atoms of love
And comprehend spiritual oxygen!"
I am in love as giants are
Who look upon the earth’s true star;
But a bee with no hive will die alone,
However high he has flown.
Believe unclouded sight is best:
Vacuum’s a medium most unblind.
A man remoter than all the rest,
His homeland deepest and longest behind,
Found his pure lens a cataract white,
His blackface moon stark upside down:
Contentment’s a mode of ballistic flight
That yearns at the apex to fall back down.
I am in love as giants are
Who look upon the earth’s true star;
But a bee with no hive will die alone,
However high he has flown.
The Ulanov Law
There’s those who’d speak against it, the enduring Ulanov Law;
And some would call out leaders tyrants, criminals and more—
But I say it’s a noble thing, uniting rich and poor,
With rich men most in need of its protection!
A population trillions-strong, from Jupiter to Venus:
There’s bound to be some friction in the bonds that link between us.
And though most folk would never think of acting contravenous
There’s others stand in need of strong correction.
I grew up in a bubble forty-hundred metres wide
With every kind of flowering plant growing up the side;
I grew there as a farmer, with a farmer’s stubborn pride
Which suffering has yet to rid me of;
And sprouted long-limbed, nimble-fingered, though my bones were weak
A lad who knew of garden-farming long ere I could speak;
And only sun was needful, and a wall that did not leak,
And strenuous labour offered up from love.
Our legless cows were special-bred to float and chew the herb
And days were spun from certainty that no doubt could disturb:
For live and love and labour—they are all the selfsame verb,
And binds a bubble-crowd into a nation.
But then the Strangers came. They planned to steal our ice away;
They stayed to eat our fruit and cream, and drink our wine and whey,
Till, drunk, they jettisoned our cows ‘to join the milky way’
And killed and raped amongst the population.
A little while they tired of self-indulgence and grew bored—
That cruel satiety of men who’ve fed, and drunk and whored
Whose only pleasure now is putting children to the sword—
Blood’s a greater stimulant than wine.
They tapped man’s old delight in carnage, havoc in their eyes;
And filled the air with blood-drops like a parody of skies;
Inventive tortures, pain both sport and that sport’s prize;
Suns burn, but agony’s a fire few outshine.
And then they left, abruptly, just as rough as they’d arrived;
And from five thousand only hundreds had survived;
And of those few were none who were not burned, or knifed,
And of my family, only I still breathing.
Some voted we should quit, and others said we should rebuild
And make some sacred compost-use of loved ones who’d been killed;
But only I insisted that The Law should be fulfilled—
And only I the one who ended leaving.
They’d thieved or wrecked our sloops amongst their other many wrongs
And it was eighteen months before a trader chanced along;
Till then I helped the others—mended, sang the commune song,
Though my heart was already out in space.
I begged a ride to Haag; there I joined a freighter crew
And served six months, and found more work, and hauled, and packed, and flew;
Whatever any owner wanted doing I would do
And so I joined the engineering race.
I saved such credits as I could, although not over-paid,
And all the time I asked and listened to what others said,
And that way learned the best way to get legal charges laid
Against the perpetrators of the crime.
Then one day I was on the moon, my latest contract done.
I took a breath, and offered up a new prayer to the Sun,
And rode the capsule where the SysAdmin(Law) rails run,
To go and tell my story to the police.
They made me wait eleven days, and took a hefty fee,
And listened to my crime report most pro/confessionally
And then they gave a RACdroid-witnessed legal code to me
‘To efficate insurance claim release’.
I told them that my world was far too poor to be insured—
And that my hope was Justice, not monetary reward,
That justice should be more than what the wealthy can afford,
For crime’s a solar-system-wide pollution.
They didn’t scoff, or laugh: they only—sadly—shook their heads.
‘We’re not such foes of idealism as some maintai
n,’ they said.
‘But law’s a practical matter, and all your friends are dead.’
And so I left without my restitution.
I left there sombre; took the capsule back to Kepler Dome;
Sat and looked on star-blind darkness, thinking of my home.
Pondered getting drunk on wine, or—worse—pharmed-out on Som
But then, thank Ra, I held myself in check.
I told myself: ‘they’re policing trillions with finite resource;
There must be a better algorithm than ‘remorse’
To provide the most efficient usage of their force
To separate the target from the speck.
Now: those who’d hurt my world—well, I still had their DNA
(They’d left enough of it behind); a data dossier—
And I could have them brought to justice, if—if—I could pay.
And that was when I had my revelation.
Those men were wicked who had caused my people injury;
But they had also punished us! A black epiphany—
We had deserved our punishment—for crimes of poverty.
The poor can never claim the rights of nation.
The truth that intermediates humanity is—war.
This is the righteous truth embedded in Ulanov Law:
That of all crimes the worst one is the crime of being poor.
This the thing that most earns prohibition.
The Ulanovs have many ways to guard the System’s health;
And seventy percent of justice works its way by stealth.
The surest way to hurt your foes is: take away their wealth.
And so I gave my life a brand new mission.
For ten years I worked harder than my rivals; saved as well;
I built myself a small but profitable trade cartel,
And those who crossed me came to my employ—or went to hell.
And there were precious few to dare oppose.
I gave the police financial help, and they were pleased to get it.
And none of them gainsaid my plan, when I had up and said it:
For Fairness comes from God, but Justice?— it depends on credits.
And I made sure to get me lots of those.
Some crave wealth to add more to the bulk of things they own;
And some to soak their bodies in indulgence to the bone;
But I craved me a future in which I brought Justice home,
And buying that was money I’d well spent.
If took me ten full years before I brought things to a head,