Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars
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Might be called garden without gardener)
Stood to receive such watering as this,
Such fiery fertilizer, ash or sulphur,
Scattered by the careful human hand.
The funeral party hurries for the ships;
Each in her own way says farewell to Chance
And takes her place and buckles herself in.
Beatrice feels his spirit heavy in
Her bones, as if a host organism
Grew along the pathways of the body,
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Sprouted like vines or ivy in the brain.
The fairy Virgin-mother in her—veiled
Until now, mourning like a votary
Over a wounded god, or like a princess
Wooed, betrayed, abandoned on an island—
Seems to wake now after these two years’ mourning
And feel the shroud discumbered from her face,
And open up her eyes to see sweet Life
Take her by the hand and call to her
To come, come away from the land of shadow.
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Her eyes are full of tears, but focus now
Upon the passenger beside her, who
In her brown study she had not observed.
It’s Charlie; he is holding her white hand,
And smiling gravely in her face, and now
All her affection for this dear old friend
Has given way to a new recognition.
But Freya’s ghost will not be exorcised.
Wolf and Irene sit by Sumikami
Who, with her toils and grief, has gone to sleep.
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Serious beyond the time of children
These twins unweeping lay on hands and swear
To catch and kill their wicked grandmother
And make their uncle pay too with his life
For Chance and for their mother’s name and honor
Only by this can their abandonment
Be rendered fitting, as a sacred debt.
And Tripitaka, as the agent, must,
Their fierce grey eyes meet and agree, pay too.
As for Ganesh, this journey is his first
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Beyond the confines of his native planet,
And from the time when, as a child, he’d build
Elaborate models of old-fashioned tanks
And blow them up with home-made gelignite,
He loved the crisp techniques of planned destruction;
So cometstrike cannot arrive too soon.
He watches from the port the groaning planet,
The haired portent, its wild and boreal tail
Twisted by Mars’s weak magnetic field;
His grief forgot, the sole annoyance now
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Is that his uncle Charlie is concerned
With Beatrice, and will not watch with him.
On Phobos a provisional headquarters
Has been set up for the Mars colonists.
Here they will watch the strike and celebrate
Both wake and fiery baptism together.
Now zero hour approaches and they gather
Before the viewscreens in the control tower.
The planet’s face below is veiled with dust
That coils and spirals under layers of air
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Unturbid still, so that the globe hangs there
Like a great crystal ball against the heavens.
As Kali clears the limb for the last time
They see its ragged tail turned inside out;
Now with the tidal stress and the first wisps
Of atmosphere, rendered as hard as glass
By relative velocity, the comet
Spalls and disintegrates, its volatiles
Like the aurora, fluorescing wildly;
Its fragments, incandescent now, leave trails
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Eccentric as the tracks of particles
Within the cloud or bubble chamber; some
Skip like a slate on water and fly off;
Others burn up, and others find their mark
And in white beacons strike the planet’s surface.
The head, meanwhile, has boiled into a sun
Of utterly unbearable luminance;
The screens go dark to compensate; a globe
Of radiance, a brief new hemisphere
Superimposed upon the planet’s hull
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Has sprung to being, as the blaze of insight
Bulges upon the cortex like a dream.
A mushroom grows within this troubled marble
(Silent up here upon the studio
Of void), and now beneath it, through the smoke
They see a white plate spread, of molten stone,
Its lip an instant’s mountain ten miles high,
Which as it grows fades into cherry-red,
Crimson, maroon; then dies, to leave a ring
Within a torn ring of fantastic hills
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Above a wakened core. A shock-wave swifter
Still has like a thunderclap gone out
Across the world; thinning toward the gross
Diameter and gathering force again
Like a sea-wave within a jetty’s funnel,
It closes to the point-antipodes
Of its original and bounces back,
Collapsing on return the tree of cloud
That towers over Chance’s, Freya’s, graves.
Now the new gases of the planetoid
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Burst into flame with Mars’s native air;
A firestorm rages round the globe, as blue
As hydrogen balloons set on a flare;
The funguses, which briefly ruled this world,
Bum to a fertile ash; a great cloud forms;
Last, from Noachian skies, there falls the rain.
The planetside observers pass this news
In various wavery channels from their caves;
And in the room an old time Houston cheer
Goes up, as techies push away their screens
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And set about the delicate procedure
Of popping and of drinking good champagne
Under extreme low gravity conditions.
And so the wake begins; for Chance’s dust
Mingled with Freya’s is a fallout now
Upon a soil ready at last for planting
With the green loveliness that is the breast
Of all the animals, not least ourselves.
The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.
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Now I must tell a thing that may give scandal:
The ways of men and women can be strange.
The party is possessed—as the wine flows
And old friends look into each others’ faces
And see the freedom there, the undimmed fire
Of passionate intentions, and the riddle
Of the spirit’s unpredictability—
With the sharp rut of wanton Aphrodite.
They’ve been campaigning long, these pioneers;
Their bodies, scarred with their endeavors, burn
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Too with the youth that unbent hope and strife
And victory can give, and with pure grief,
When tears have carried all the poisons off
And left the mind’s shore clean as tidal sand.
Hilly Sharon and Marisol have quarreled
Over the use of force in planetmaking.
The quarrel turns to laughter by and by,
For Hilly is a raconteur and tells
His favorite war story on himself,
How in the Marineris swamp campaign
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His suit got fouled and would not circulate
The body liquids, and he nearly drowned
In urine, all alone among th
e Eeks;
How he surrendered to them, and their faces
When he had cracked the seals of his suit;
And how he got away by playing dead.
Hilly has brown eyes and a tan upon
His cheeks, where the sun visor does not cast
Its shadow; he is small, and Marisol
Is an inch taller, with her willowy waist
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And beautiful long hands and slender feet.
Sex in her stateroom in near-zero grav
Is like the hot collision of two planets;
And later, drunk, the guerrilla general
Loses his way and falls asleep, afloat
Upon the floor of Ximene’s room as if
He were a half-leaked hydrogen balloon
Left over from a children’s party; where
Ximene, who’d always fancied him, is pleased
To find him later, and misunderstanding
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His intent, seduces him gorgeously
That night, as naked as a seal, and twice.
Ganesh has found a pretty programmer
Who has admired his work and does not mind
The shyness of the gangly teenager.
Saddest of all to tell, Charlie and Bea,
After they’ve read a story to the twins
And tucked them up in bed, and the old nurse
Sumikami’s settled down to sleep,
As is her habit, tied down like a bale
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Of silk—after the last drink and the last
Retelling of an old joke Chance once told,
Charlie and Bea feel in their chests the tightness,
The sweet trickle of liquid fire, the smile
So lovely that the breath must fail, of love,
Of that renewing of the world that makes
It unpredictable by any instrument
But its own course and outcome in itself.
Out of this moment then, this node of time,
There springs the origin of many stories,
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Which, if we follow them, will bring that prophet
To the world whose voice may still redeem
Our moiety of it from spirit-death.
Charlie’s brown hands and capable shoulders,
His muscled knees and quick Teutonic grin
Pay worship to this virgin of the full
Bosom, the small shriek of her deepening laugh,
The white flesh and the mounds of bright black hair.
Sometimes the world pays up for its long waiting,
Its thwarted fall through the ages; sometimes
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We come up bump on the sweet belly of things.
Act III
The Mutiny of the Gladiators
Meanwhile Garrison has sought the fleshly love of Tripitaka and has been rejected; and because of an encounter with a Greek girl Tripitaka has realized that he is in love with Beatrice.
Scene i:
Tripitaka and Garrison
For many days after the death of Chance
The warrior Tripitaka has been still;
Except when prompted by the court inquiry
Or called upon by Garrison to tell
What his instructions were, and whence, and how
His father died. It seems to Tripitaka
That he lives in a country far from home,
And the weather alters, bringing a chill
More like an autumn than the end of summer
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In the Peloponnese, and days of rain.
His practice in the martial arts forgone,
That former energy has turned to dreaming;
He dreams of the failed priest his father, of
The girl who would not have him in his sickness,
Of the sweet sleep he slept when in the hands
Of Chance’s doctors he was healed and tainted;
And then he dreams of Beatrice again,
And Beatrice each night comes to his side
Dressed in a white garment like a shroud,
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His sabbath-bride, his symbol of election.
But sometimes Beatrice has the face of one
He knows so intimately, cannot place,
Perhaps the family image of Kwannon
That blessed the Geisha house where he was left
When Sumikami worked to earn their living.
At first this way of life is not unpleasant,
Though it feels as if he’d forgotten something,
Something important which should have been done,
Or it’s as if an illness like consumption
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Buoys up his spirit as it wastes his flesh;
But later, as his tour of duty drags,
And the comet shows in the evening sky,
As treaty terms are hammered out, and last,
The three remaining rebels leave for Taos,
A dreadful anguished languor comes on him.
Garrison hardly sleeps at all. He seeks
Out Tripitaka all the time, but gets
But little comfort there. He pays a visit
On Ruhollah, who is in high good humor
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At his trial’s progress, and hears his words;
The drug merchant whispers thin and fine
About the freedom that they know who act
Without the reference of myth and code;
For all such furrows in the soil of will
Must canalize the pure ichor of
Uncaused intention into tyranny.
For Garrison, whose furies have begun
To sing their woven and long song of scream,
The Chiffre, the ineffable zero,
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Seems to make all at one and calm his soul.
The officer of Tripitaka’s guard,
Meanwhile, has noticed that his finest soldier
Has something on his mind. He gives him leave
To visit Athens, tells him to relax
And find a bit of female company.
So now the warrior wanders in the town
Of Theseus and Alcibiades
And sees the hilltop where the sun lingered
On the night of the death of Socrates.
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The city, like most cities of the world
These days, is oddly quiet and dim. The Church
With its injunction of humility,
Its invocation of that latent force
In men and women, to discount themselves
And be the parents’ child, or curl up dead
Before the predator, or be an egg,
Has left its print on every part of life.
The old religions, golden Orthodoxy,
Crimson Catholicism, splendid Jewry
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With its blacks and fires, even white Islam,
Subdue themselves to mediocracy.
And those whose wishes are so fierce that they
Refuse to take the proffer of a life
Lived in the comfort of the second-rate
Have the recourse of penth the noble drug
That makes us perfect in the bonds of joy.
That year (to take up the historic mode)
Marked the inflection of our global culture
Into the Ecotheist dominance.
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The Californian baroque that we
Celebrated not many months ago
Was now already waning, as the laws
Forbidding useless decoration in
Such things as housing, transportation, clothes
Soberly took effect upon the culture.
Today the fashion in the scholar caste—
A mere shadow of its former self—
Is demographics, whose statistical
Explanatory power seems absolute;
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And we may use this method to describe
The changes in the cities of
the world.
From eighteen fifty until twenty ten
We saw the Tertian Step, that octuple
Growth in the population of the world—
One to eight billion—and its leveling off
Shortly thereafter to a new plateau.
The sigma curve we use now to describe
The Step is perfectly symmetrical.
The curve’s components are a fevered swell
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Of children and starvation at the start,
A middle period of youth and wars,
And at the end a time of elder calm
(The young a tame reserve among the old).
And the wars, the pogroms of the century,
The killing fields, the passions of belief,
Had purged the human genotype of much
That might have made for the remarkable
In men and women. We must see our own
Van Riebecks and our Sumikamis as
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Survivors of the bloody human spirit
In an age when the tired race wished to rest;
Who could not live within a finished world,
And would not buy a heaven with the drug,
Nor drug themselves with Ecotheism;
Who chose the venture and the crazy hazard:
The transformation in the fields of Mars.
But these remarks break the historian’s rule
Of objectivity and balanced judgment.
It was the noblest dream of humankind
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To live in peace and balance with our world;
To put away starvation and disease,
And make a decent life for all the people.
Chance and his enterprises threatened all
That we’d achieved in human happiness,
If happiness may be relief from pain,
Relief from the long pain of incompletion,
From any gap between the is and ought.
How sweet is the calm of uncompetition!
The balm of endless defeat, how gentle!
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With Tripitaka gone, Garrison turns
A little mad. Like medicines that mock
Their patient by the briefness of their respite
From the pain, the counsel of Ruhollah
Deadens the raw place only so that ulcers
May thicken there to torture him again.
The drug merchant, meanwhile, is losing interest
In this glum gangling troubled acolyte,
And, sensing victory, makes plans to leave.
For now the World Court prosecution’s case
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Is fast unraveling before the logic
Of the young Ecotheist lawyers whom
Ruhollah has recruited for his cause;
The drug, they say, is purely natural;