Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars
Page 10
160
My son; you’re only doing what you ought.”
“Why do you speak to me?” asks Tripitaka.
“I am your guard appointed by the Court.
If you want water or a pen and paper,
Just say so and I will fetch it for you.”
Chance shrugs his shoulders and they set off down
The evening hillside to the World Court compound.
Tomorrow there will be a change; at last
The long preliminaries have concluded,
And opening arguments will now be heard.
170
Chance’s son Garrison is to be there;
He has not seen him for some years, and is,
If Chance is ever thus, something afraid.
The witnesses will be arriving too:
Charlie Lorenz, Beatrice, Ganesh Wills,
And Orval Root whose promise has been broken,
And Gaea/Rose Van Riebeck in her triumph,
In her bright, bitter, principled triumph
Over the rapist of the holy world.
Chance cannot sleep that night. His airy doze
180
Under the gleaming leaves has stirred his blood;
An undertow of memory has drawn
Him out beyond his depth, too weak to fight it.
He scarcely listens to his lawyer’s case,
And stares with feverish intensity
At his son’s face, as if he sought the time
When he had issuance from the holy place
Whence Chance is now for ever turned away;
And then he tries to look at Gaea-Rose,
And cannot, and he tries again, and can;
190
It hurts him like a billy to the groin
With hopeless love, love of what hates him, love
That must know how it cripples where it loves.
Bill the reporter notes this glance and files
A piece on Chance’s interest in the trial,
His hope that family loyalty will save
His hide and profits from the People’s case.
But it is otherwise. To tell the truth
Chance has forgotten all about the trial.
When questioned formally about his name,
200
Profession, present address and his plea,
His answers are correct but quite distracted.
Rosalind Redgrave, Rose of Coventry,
The poet of the English revolution,
Is all his study now and all his trial.
There are some other meetings too. Charlie
And Freya meet each other’s eyes across
The courtroom; Charlie smiles as if to say,
My girl we’re in hot water now, and Freya lifts
Her head, and stares into his eyes like one
210
Who knows the time is short before their parting.
The night before, she wept as she’d not done
These twenty years; for Sumikami brought
Her twins, Wolf and Irene, to the cell,
And they at first had cried with fear at this
Spaceburned woman from the winds of Mars,
Whom they acknowledged theirs with horror lest
The powers she wielded might be given over
Into their own unready hands, to sear
Or heal; her breasts ached for the touch of those
220
That she would never suckle now, for loss
Attends every enaction of the will,
And that which is is bought by living branches
Torn from the tree of time and burned for fuel.
But Charlie’s gentle face is full of grief
For what he sees in Freya’s; so she smiles
At him, and for the benefit of those
Wise gentlemen and ladies of the press
Who are deputed to inspect such things
She sends a vulgar wink across the room.
230
And there’s Ganesh. The big t-shirt revival
Has not escaped his notice; he’s got one
That reads CONTEMPT OF COURT upon the front
And SORRY DIDNT MEAN IT on the back.
Tripitaka watches him amazed:
This creature from another world has saved
His life, and by purely technical means.
Something like hate, the hate of man for insect,
Makes Tripitaka shudder; something else,
Which, if he knew it, was the dawn of laughter,
240
Lightens the warrior’s heart; confuses him.
He looks at Sumikami for relief,
But she has turned her countenance away;
And Beatrice is there, her black hair like
A cloud about her fierce madonna face;
Now Tripitaka’s eyes, falling in pain
From his mother’s closed presence, catch upon
The spread hands of Beatrice as she stares
At her father full of reproach and love;
And in as many seconds Don John knows
250
Another of the gods that trouble men:
The ancient shot of jealousy and shame.
Despite her mother’s efforts, Beatrice
Has not been brought to trial, for Chance has sworn
Untruthfully that she was innocent;
And, which the court counts more, the evidence
Of her direct involvement in the rape
Of Mars is such as might discredit what
The court, and behind it, the church’s wisdom
Is trying to establish as a crime.
260
She’s here under protective custody,
A witness for the People, and the judge
And prosecuting counsel are advised
To keep her off the subject of the birth
And early history of life upon
This planet, lest it seem too natural
To imitate those origins on Mars.
Chiefly she will be questioned on the clones
Of prehistoric animals she’s grown;
The subject has made headlines in the press
270
Arousing public horror and concern.
(Two weeks later Beatrice will reply
To prosecution questions on this theme
Just as the church had hoped, with hot contempt:
“If we are playing God, so much the better;
We might improve his work this time around.
If he’s our real father, he’ll be pleased.”)
That evening Garrison, who’s interested
In all addictions, and whose power within
The Ecotheist church provides
280
A key to many opportunities,
Visits Ruhollah the merchant of delight.
He goes to be appalled but stays to listen,
And the next night he invites Tripitaka.
The old man in his cell is brown and wizened,
As merry as a grig, and his eyes twinkle;
His hooked nose is as long as Lucifer’s,
And he speaks softly in a strong French accent.
Ruhollah is an exponent of Chiffre,
Like Sufi to Islam, a mysticism—
290
A heresy—of Ecotheism.
“Why,” asks Ruhollah, “My devout young friends,
Should purity reside even in Nature?
Is not the world of nature one of eating?
Is it not vile that one being’s life should flow
From the appropriation of another’s?
Nature is but a pit of mouths, a nest
Of bellies brewing acids into gas;
That sin we stand condemned of was committed
At the accursed beginning of the world.
300
We are the fragments of the Enemy,
The demiurge who would rebel at God,
And take ki
netic form from the potential,
The sea of sightless light in the beginning;
And he, the Angel, fell into the shape
Of sensual energy and grossest matter,
Away from that perfection he enjoyed
At first in those transparent fields of light.
The ground state of the world is all potential,
And since the cause is fuller of that essence
310
That gives effect its being, than the effect,
All action is a fall and a declension
Into the brute adultery of time.
The Ground is pure and indeterminate;
Is the white joy of unenactedness;
The big bang where the laws of time all fail;
The place we must return to, to be saved.”
“But what,” asks Garrison, dismayed, “about
The innocence of nature? I can see
How human beings are to blame; I know
320
Myself the gulfs of consciousness,
The slimy things that grow inside the skin
Of candor and apparent honesty;
But as for nature, she is pure, she must be.
Matter has no awareness what it is.”
Now Tripitaka listens silently;
His eyes glitter and his kendo hand
Wanders to touch the lupus of his cheek.
But still Ruhollah speaks again, and smiles.
“Is not the nature that you so admire
330
That which your senses in their corruption
Pick out to find delectable and pure?
And if your senses, calibrated as
They are by that depraved and self-suborned
Selfconsciousness you loathe, were given you
As your inheritance by nature too,
Are they not prone to partiality,
To hanker for the mother of their form?
And is not consciousness itself the last
Of many gross conceptions on itself
340
That nature practiced long before the birth
Of humankind, its monstrous masterpiece?”
“What then is pure?" asks Garrison despairing,
And Tripitaka breathes the same breath through.
“The Chiffre,” says Ruhollah; “Nothing is
Pure; seek out that nothing and you will see.”
“How?” “Break the incestuous cycle of reward
By which the human brain maintains its act
Of self-sustained desire and memory.
My humble product, for which I am on trial,
350
Penth, is the way to perfect innocence.
Take it and learn the nullity of saints.
The gross diameter of thought will shrink,
Collapse, and you will be as a point is,
Without dimension, taint, or history.”
And is not this Ruhollah speaking truth?
And are not the Savonarolas of
The world the fire that purifies its pride?
Is not the quality of culture measured
By the addictions that it can withstand?
360
These boys will seek the drug and the dark way
Of this integrity, and we shall see
What, if there is such, they can set against
The full attainment and death of desire.
Chance in his cell yearns like a teenager
After his queen of night, his shadeblack rose.
In ’02, on a visiting appointment
At Merton, lecturing in chemistry,
A Wunderkind of only twenty-two,
He’d lunched in the graduate common-room
370
And found the window-seat he liked, that looked
Across the Meadows, taken by a poet.
Her profile threw the plane-trees out of focus
And left a line across the Cherwell woods
That Chance could not forget. Personal being,
Like that dense tincture that can dye a lake
Of water with a grain, the subtle toxin
Added to the pipes that slays a city,
This was the young American’s, the chemist’s
Drug, besetting sin, his wry addiction.
380
Rosalind Redgrave was the name upon
The oak he took such care to pass, the name
On the notebook that he found one day upon
The window seat, with its dark crown of poems;
The name on the posters promised to speak
At the small rallies against Ecotheism
That Oxford held before they were closed down;
And who but she must be his paramour.
He had made good, American as he was,
Upon the opportunity of the book,
390
And soon they might be seen in duffle-coats
Across the ice mists of the Magdalen deerpark,
Brushing a white rime from the iron railings
With those gloved hands that were not holding hands.
And in the spring they walked the Windrush valley
Where combs of giant beeches fletched the hills,
And colors, passionate as that brown and blue
Which blazes from a pool befilmed with oil,
Blew in the airscape, the ploughed fields, the streams.
(Cream tea in the dreamvillages of stone;
400
Kisses that taste of lipstick and of love.)
Meanwhile, alerted by the codeword ARMAGEDDON broadcast by Chance’s beacon, the men and women of Van Riebeck Enterprises arm themselves against the UN. They take and hold the planet Mars, certain industrial and agricultural satellites, and a base on the Moon. The treeship Kalevala, under the command of Ximene de Vivar, and loyal to Chance, displaces one of the ice moons of Saturn from its orbit and sets it on a course towards the inner planets Mars and Earth. Ximene’s daughter Marisol, a lieutenant, mutinies against her mother’s orders, but the mutiny is put down.
Scene ii:
The Fashioning of the Comet
MAGEDDON ARMAGEDDON ARMAGEDDON.
The message has gone out in rings of light
And the flung seeds of Van Riebeck Enter-
Prises stir and form for coming battle.
The factories in solar orbit, armed
Lightly with industrial grade lasers
Are safe enough; their distance is their shield.
Moonbase at Plato is a stony fortress,
The crater glacis mined for ground attack;
10
And its great railgun, used in peace to lob
Materiel into a close earth orbit,
Now dominates the shining lunar sky.
(Nevertheless the ringwall is besieged,
The close horizon lit by glares of fire,
And giant wrecked machines like dinosaurs
Leave dolorous carcasses upon the plain.)
Of twelve space islands strung around the earth
In synchronous orbit, seven are VRE;
Revolts break out on two, timed by the church
20
To coincide with the arrests on Mars.
They are successful, for the management
Will not endanger the civilians.
(They will become island theocracies,
A half-heretical embarrassment
To orthodoxy, but the shock troops of
The Ecotheist movement, and its conscience.)
In the first weeks of unpreparedness
Two more of the space stations are attacked
With ground-launched nuclear missiles, and destroyed.
30
Over Ceylon and Ecuador two new suns shine
With the radiance of ten thousand souls
Screaming as their glassbound meadows bum.
The other three have time to fortify,
Outposts upon the frontiers of the Earth.
/> On Mars Van Riebeck’s forces, though outnumbered
By UN expeditionary troops,
Achieve a series of quick victories
Generalled wisely by Hillel Sharon,
The tough little sabra Chance left in charge.
40
The Earthly troops are forced to the defensive,
And soon their last redoubt, the Tharsis Plateau,
Is stormed by toughened miners of the Firm.
Further out still, the ships en route between
The zones of Mars and of the asteroids,
Must test their loyalties to cause or hope,
And many little wars with fist and wrench
Are fought along their loud cramped corridors.
In general the further out the ship,
The greater is its lean to VRE;
50
And Chance’s promises are best believed
Among the distant moons of Jupiter.
And I who tell this tale must be betrayed,
For there is one of you at least who will
Be so distressed by some great loneliness
Or by the bitterness of this your scourge
Or by the rank impossibility
Of setting side by side within the mind
The fields of Oxford and the fields of Mars
That you will break this little game we play
60
And perhaps in secret or perhaps at large
Carry my words and name to those who will
Know well how to deal firmly with such things.
Poor science-fiction. Last muse of the gods,
The late child, stepchild, of our legendry;
Doomed by the moment of its breath, as acts
Upon a stage without a camera
Are reeled off into death by their performance,
And give themselves away so foolishly.
A divine prophecy remains in force
70
Not despite human efforts to avoid it,
But through them, through the human second-guessing
Of how the oracle intends us to
Impale ourselves upon our fate, and be,
Like Oedipus, dragged to the sin
By the fine thread of a noble conscience.
But human prophecy, poor science fiction,
Is void once known, and in the very instant
Of its statement just another act
Whose consequences take their chance with all
80
The countermeasures of its enemies.
Thus it is dated at the moment of
Its saying, and becomes a lively art.
But this my poem is no prophecy
Unless the savage indignation of
Its exhortation to those shades, its readers,
Should be construed a possibility
That we might take the glory road at last,