Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

by Frederick Turner

  He would not even kiss her, though she sought

  Occasion for the touch of lip and lip.

  She came to him when he was lying sick;

  A fresh breath of springtime she was to him

  Out of another world, and would have touched him;

  Now it occurred to him what he must do,

  And told her in weak words of his condition.

  Poor Sachiko, an ordinary girl,

  Could think of nothing but polite escape,

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  And after due commiseration, fled.

  But that year other things were happening.

  Charlie and Freya then were newly married,

  Chance was on Mars leading the Ares Project,

  And Beatrice, inexplicably sad,

  So that she snapped at her acquaintances

  In a way quite unusual for her,

  Decided she would take a Wanderjahr

  And follow certain arts that she had loved

  Before the great art of archaic life

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  Had claimed her for its own. She said goodbye,

  Left the Van Riebeck ranch at San Luis Rey

  Where she was born, and flew to Italy.

  She stayed three troubled months in Europe; still

  She never breathed a satisfying breath;

  She even tried a visit with her mother

  At Devereux in England; but by then

  The family estrangement was too deep

  And Garrison was very bad for her.

  Some restless prompting took her to Japan,

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  And there she sought a tutor in the dance;

  She visited the Jakko-in, and met

  The Abbess Kuniko, who recommended

  A certain Sumikami for her teacher.

  Only a day had passed since Sumikami

  Offered her own life for that of her son.

  There in the little garden Beatrice

  Saw for the first time that all-suffering face

  She recognized to be her Sensei’s face.

  The inner beauty of a step, a turn,

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  A weak appearing sway of the long waist,

  The way the story must consume the dance

  Utterly, so that style and image are

  As pat as the grace of an animal—

  These took up all their time; until one night

  Beatrice heard a sigh from the next room.

  The dancing mistress denied all inquiry,

  But one glance at her face told Bea the truth,

  And when a Van Riebeck insisted, few

  Knew how to turn the tendency aside.

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  As one who shyly shares her richest treasure

  Or one who shows a great wound in her side

  Poor Sumikami drew the screen and let

  Her pupil gaze on her beautiful son.

  Now Bea knew what to do. Charlie had just

  Hired Ganesh Wills to simulate a life

  That might endure the hellishness of Mars;

  Bea would hear no refusal; Sumikami

  And her feverish boy were flown at once

  To San Francisco; Nesh was summoned, showed,

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  Got interested, grinned. “Yo. Gotcha. What

  You want’s your quick, dirty, technical fix.

  Right? Let’s run your virus on the speedup tank.”

  Charlie flew in to map the chromosomes,

  But Tripitaka lay unconscious now;

  Five days later Ganesh had found the site

  Where the protein masquerade might be broken.

  For one month Charlie played the hormone keys;

  Nesh tried them in his circuits’ antiworld.

  At last they found an antibody, cloned

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  In a chimera of the patient’s cells

  With a rare lupus trained to recognize

  The retrovirus’s Achilles’ heel,

  That would, sown in the marrow of the bones,

  Breed like a T-cell, hunt the enemy,

  And bind its meaning to the virus’ code.

  They passed it on to Tripitaka’s doctors

  Who were suborned by the Van Riebeck money

  To carry out an operation banned

  Both by the A.M.A. and by the Council;

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  Within a month the boy regained his strength,

  Could be found practicing karate-do;

  But from that moment a disfigurement,

  A grey pelt of mycotic skin, would spread

  Upon his neck and groin from time to time,

  The sign of cleansing from the greater ill;

  The treatment left his mother with no blemish.

  Now Tripitaka had his first desire:

  Beatrice sent him to Australia,

  The University of Adelaide,

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  To study verse, theology and war;

  And he was chosen as a candidate,

  The next Olympiad, to represent

  His new nation in the Olympic Wars.

  But Sumikami stayed to be the tutor

  To her friend Beatrice of the fireblack eyes;

  They lived at San Luis Rey with Charles and Freya,

  And when the babies came she was their nurse,

  Their co-mother when Freya went to Mars—

  So this, then, is the lady in the silk

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  Who sleeps by the flushed children in their dream.

  The poem turns to the Olympic Wars, those gladiatorial contests by which international military disputes are now settled, and to Tripitaka's training as a warrior in the Olympic team of Australia, his father’s nation. Garrison is sent by the Ecotheist Church, which increasingly dominates world politics, to check the ideology of the warriors. He witnesses a bout of unarmed combat between Tripitaka and a visiting martial arts expert and falls in love with Tripitaka. Tripitaka is selected as a guard at the World Court. Ganesh is captured by the UN.

  Scene v:

  Tripitaka

  A hundred miles. There is a time before

  The first fierce thrust of the sun through the thorn trees

  When the bulbed frogs of night have fallen silent

  And the Tasman cicadas are dead still;

  The harsh or sweet birds of the nether dawn

  Pipe down for a while before the sky’s beak,

  The maker of shadows, the slow firekite;

  And a dead quiet presses on the plain.

  A wrong light grows in the west; and if you turn,

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  Surprised, you see a molten lens of blood

  Sealed fast upon a mask-black monolith

  Which not a moment earlier had been

  A pale confection out of pinkened cream.

  Sunstrike. The cap of Flinders Dome will catch

  The first dawnbeam before a hundred miles.

  But the shaft levers downward very swiftly;

  And as it hits the flagpole there’s reveille,

  And the old Jack with the Southern Cross breaks

  With a martial clamor from the pole.

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  Two flanking flags shake free: the pale blue world

  Skeleton of the United Nations,

  The seven linked rings of the Olympic Games.

  The compound comes to life; the sleep-eyed lads

  Tumble out into line and dress their ranks;

  The bronze sun shines in their clear tanned faces.

  A god is surely present, with his arms

  Clanging with the breezed flagpoles on his back

  And the fresh light blazing in the thorns

  From his disheveled dingo-colored beard.

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  This means boy’s blood in dust; he does not mind.

  Here stands the famed Ned Kelly Company,

  The bastards that they call Australia’s finest;

  Their noses and their sandy eyelashes

  Under the pinned-u
p brims of their bush hats

  Make one line under the cold scrutiny

  Of sergeant major “Guts Fer Garters” Grace.

  This was the last political idea

  Before the coming of the Ecotheists:

  So that we might not burn the world to dust

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  And ourselves with it by our most-loved weapon

  —That white proof of reducibility

  Of all complexities of good to light—

  We sought a ritual whereby at the last

  Disputes of nations might be arbitrated;

  And saw that we had found its parts already

  In three old institutions of our species.

  First, trial by combat served as law when we

  —No superordinate authority,

  In Hobbes’s state of nature to each other—

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  Must needs compose some long festered trouble;

  And often weregild, ransom, or a tribute

  Made the adventure worth the victor’s hazard.

  Next, nations had vied in the Olympic Games

  To prove the might of their humanity

  Since Pindar sang of the Olympians;

  Might not the game of War become a game

  Where some who sought it might find trial in death

  And save the timid masses from their rage?

  And last, the terrorist, who had already

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  Taken his trade to the Olympic stands,

  Whose mind as evil, bloody, and insane

  As anything our demons have possessed,

  Seemed to the genius of the times to give

  A twisted answer to the people’s terror:

  For this was the one form of human conflict

  That could not be deterred by atom bombs,

  And therefore by a triple paradox

  Was safest for our human species-life.

  Send then the terrorists to the arena,

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  Said the wise cowards of the billioned world;

  Let them, the scapegoats, do for us what we,

  Our malice tamed by terror, cannot do;

  And we may through the witchcraft of the press

  Take our orgasms in spectatordom

  And find, in others’ sacrifice, release.

  One of the faces at attention there

  Is strangely masked, like a film negative:

  A skin as dark as Lucifer’s, blond hair,

  The refined cheekbone of a Cherokee,

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  But over one side is a flocculence

  Of leprous grey. They call him Don,

  A name inexplicable till one knows

  His comrades’ sense of humor, who soon saw

  In his fanatic chastity a name:

  Don Juan, which became Don John and then Don.

  For Tripitaka does not lack admirers

  Despite the saving blemish of his flesh;

  Something about him, fatal as a blade,

  Draws the shy Sheila-girls of Alice Springs;

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  And there are some who weep, perverse perhaps,

  To touch the lupus of his lonely body.

  But Don John is a priest or anchorite

  In this respect; there is a friendship with

  A black-belt sergeant in the women’s camp,

  But this is in the way of the profession,

  And something else has brought them both together:

  She too is in the Ecotheist church.

  Don John has bought a chevron with his art;

  When camp began, the martial arts instructor

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  Had tested his recruits until they broke—

  You who have never known the trial of body

  Must attend closely to the tale, for here

  The nature of the Prophet is revealed,

  As fleshly discipline at least in part—

  And Tripitaka took the monstrous test

  As if it were a feast or wedding night.

  First, up at four o’clock before the dawn,

  For thirty miles of quickmarch in full gear,

  Guts in a jeep, yelling encouragement,

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  Waving a half-full soft drink from the cooler,

  “Forgetting” every rest stop that he’d promised,

  “Losing his way” with studied puzzlement,

  Striking in fresh implausible directions,

  Anxiously hurrying to get back in time;

  Yet even such a march, if you’re in shape,

  Will give you times of pleasant comradeship,

  Moments of invincible vigor, as

  The young body feels the pull of its strength;

  Perhaps a great sweet doughy cloud, growing

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  Up into the blue and over the sun;

  But then, after enough time to stiffen up,

  To be called out again to do the most

  Brutal raises, pushups, situps, squats;

  Then they must stand, their rifles at arms’ length,

  And Guts goes in and quite forgets about them,

  And an hour later finds out his mistake

  And chides himself for being such a juggins

  But thinks it quite amusing after all.

  At such a time the agony is all

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  The mind can know, that and its will to hold,

  For one more count of sixty, or until

  The body passes out and solves the problem,

  The quivering, spasmed muscles in their place.

  But now a fit of pique from sergeant Guts;

  He’s lost, he says, that day out in the outback

  His favorite cigar, in a white tube;

  They must all go and look for it, although

  The dark is coming on. And five miles out

  He finds it in his pocket: very droll.

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  There was one present at this exercise

  Who was a stranger to the life it meant

  And thought the sarge a sadist, and believed

  The exercise designed to break the will

  And freedom of the individual;

  But as he watched the young men’s faces burn,

  And as the young men fainted on the road

  And as the unruly imagination

  Stole through their bodies to their fiery minds

  He felt a shiver fall across his bones

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  And said to himself, I must change my life.

  It was as if he’d suffered what they suffered;

  And if you have endured it you will know

  The sense of the first honest contact with

  The world, the freedom from your death, the flight

  Of the enfranchised will above its shell,

  The calm of full extension, and the dwelling

  Of the spirit utterly in flesh.

  And Sergeant Grace was, in that gross charade

  The shaman sometimes plays, when holy Buddha

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  Takes the name “shit on a stick,” the dark priest

  Of karmic incarnation into men.

  Garrison van Riebeck was the stranger

  Who watched that ritual of blood and sun;

  And two days later he would see the trial

  In unarmed conflict of the new recruits.

  That was in 2030; Garrison

  Was twenty-two and Don John was nineteen.

  Part of the catch the Ecotheists made

  When Rose van Riebeck parted ways with Chance

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  Was Garrison their son. He saw the light

  One day while hiking in the Pentland Hills;

  He’d crossed the barren swale of a great fell

  Under a grey sky of slow-moving cloud,

  And came upon a place he thought a copse

  Formed naturally along a clear brown burn;

  His mood, lightened by days of solitude,

  Turned to a sour grief when
he knew the place

  A garden gone to seed. So even here

  The dirty hand of Man had set its smear:

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  And under the humped greyness of the sod

  He found a stump of fluted Doric marble.

  The garden was a neoclassicist’s:

  You’ve heard of Ian Hamilton Finlay,

  The great despairing poet of the eighties,

  Whose house the State had razed, to batter out

  The seed of the Arcadian he sowed.

  Now in the heart of this decaying garden

  Garrison found a patch of weeded ground

  As if a child had dug a little ring of earth

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  And planted there a clump of yellow daisies,

  A plaster Virgin Mary, and a jar,

  And a dead rose it hoped might grow again.

  Rage poured suddenly through his body, that

  Even the child of Man, an innocent,

  Should show the same ambition to despoil,

  To interfere, to drag its gross concerns

  Into the high sanctuaries of nature;

  Both love for the nameless child and cold justice

  That would have run a sword into its body

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  If it had been permitted, rose in him.

  The more pity the child should be destroyed:

  It did not choose the cancer in its genes.

  And in that moment of renunciation

  Of all that makes us human, Garrison

  Felt a deep peace to come upon his soul;

  And saw how God desired an empty world,

  Clouds going over, a hare sitting up.

  Two days later Garrison had joined

  His mother in the Ecotheist church;

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  As was their custom with celebrities

  (And all Van Riebecks figured in the Press)

  The church elders conferred on him at once

  A visible position and a task:

  To test for purity and for correctness

  The officers of the Olympic Wars.

  And so when the recruits lined up within

  The dojo in the white gi of their craft,

  To meet the master of the martial arts,

  Under the anxious eye of Sergeant Grace,

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  The young warriors feared for poor old Guts,

  Lest he be made a target of the church.

  The students—none was a novice in this,

  The second oldest, second loveliest

  Of all the dances of the human world—

  Must now compete to earn the doubtful pleasure

  Of meeting in kumite with the master.

  In their political naivety

  It seemed to them they fought not for themselves

  But for their sergeant, who was under trial.

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