To settle the possession of a man
Between two women, who as child and mother
Are rivals in the oldest love and war.
Now Tripitaka hates to lose his Chief,
Who’s worked so well in loading up the ship;
But there is nothing for it. He decides
To transfer Hilly to another post,
Commander of the task force escort fleet,
And take the garrison command himself.
Thus judges always must chop up the baby.
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Wolf tells Irene about what he’s found;
Her eyes shine and she is very silent.
At once she checks the files for herself,
Then questions Wolf on what he understands
By the phrase “data code,” as it is used
Referring to the content of the Codex.
“I would suppose, some international
Convention formed to classify the genes,”
Says Wolf, who’s puzzled by his sister’s query
And by the fierce excitement of her manner.
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“Donkey! Jackass!” she hisses, in high humor,
“Don’t you see yet?” She calls up from the files
The entry under “Cloned Gene Sequencers.”
Wolf takes one look and now he understands.
Fragments of DNA from chromosomes
Tagged with a dye, and graded in their length
By their phoresis through a gel, may be
Illuminated by an argon laser
And read off like a poem or narrative,
Nucleotides for letters, codons for words.
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The Lima Codex is no catalog,
But the true book of all that breathes on earth.
It is what it refers to; played upon
A keyboard of nucleic acids, it
Will sing the very animals to life.
It was the data file Cold Warriors
Constructed their malign chimeras on;
“If it can still exist,” Wolf breathes in awe,
“It must be the Old Testament of Mars.”
And could this poem speak itself to being,
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Then its interpretation might be such
As those so vital codes; not to be read
Upon a page nor analyzed by scholars
Of the writing schools, but played out in
The actions of a ring of men and women,
Singers and sung, or danced into a drama,
Shadowed upon a wall or screen where walls
And screens may blaze into a fact as warm
As is the breath of a delivered child.
But if its codes may live, then just to read
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Works alchemies upon the brain that form
From the inchoate chemistry of blood
New molecules as like to sperm as songs
Are like to chants about the holy altars;
The word’s made flesh in many hidden ways.
Or is it as my enemies might say,
A poisonous chimera, and the snake
Whose teeth are sown in every age to be
Reaped then as strife and human misery?
Wolf and Irene book a coded call
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To tell Ganesh of their discovery.
And now the hardest period of research begins:
To find the hiding place of the great codex.
When Ganesh calls they only have one clue:
A reference to the letters BBI.
Ganesh is brusque and breezy. “Hello children.
This better be important.” “It’s important,”
He agrees after perhaps twenty words.
“If it exists, that list is all I need.
All these specimens only ice the deal.
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We’ve got a launch window to observe,
Though, and the codex might have been destroyed.”
They tell him of their clue. “That’s it!” he says.
“Biblioteca Biologica
Internacional, in Lima, Peru.
Call Giamba Vico. False identities.
Fly to Peru and see what you can find.”
As student tourists, then, they walk the streets,
Bleary and sleepless, of Pizarro’s city;
The pale blue air of morning, like a crystal
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Tinged with the green of certain desert skies
Preserves and focuses the pilasters
And broken pediments of the baroque,
Their white stucco cracked by the last earthquake.
The library seems to have disappeared.
A taxi-driver, on the other hand,
Knows of the place, agrees to take them there.
The taxi climbs the monstrous barren slopes
East of the city, in the Andean foothills,
And stops beside a modernistic ruin.
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Above, the cyclopean buttresses
Of condor-haunted cordilleras rear
Into an ageless sky. Below’s a maze
Of not quite rectilinear avenues
In monster stones rounded like pillows but
Set so precisely each to each that one
Might not insert a knifeblade in the cracks:
The ruined city of Pachacamac.
But these ruins seem to be inhabited.
Though it is very silent, so the wind
170
Flutes hoarsely in the crevices, a face
As ancient as a turtle’s peers and turns
Behind an unglazed window, and a shape
Covered in shapeless black, a bowler hat,
Hobbles from one door to another. Wolf
Feels a weariness of time and life;
The great shallow basin in the bare land
Skulled with the eyeholes of the extinct Inca
Is full of bent and speechless human beings.
Here the earth’s old and poor have come to die.
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Behind him is a massive sculpted house
With stooped lintels of gigantic stone,
The trapezoid forehead the builders gave
The sun kings as a sign of total rule.
To his surprise he realizes now
The architect of this was of our age,
Cunning to match this rare commission with
The art of her or his long dead godfathers,
And so perhaps speak in that quietest voice
Which rulers cannot hear unless they listen.
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But like the city, glassless holes stare out
Even from this most fortresslike of piles;
The bronze doors hang from their pins, and the faces
With their sunblind eyes move within the shades.
In greenish stains, where the bronze letters stood,
Their Art Deco shapes still discernible,
Wolf and Irene read: BIBLIOTECA
BIOLOGICA INTERNACIONAL.
Wolf and Irene pass the gloomy news
To the Kalevala. And when the ship
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Obedient to the flows of force and mass
That open up a passage through the heavens
Lights up its long torch, that for several minutes
Casts from the darkened Andes moving shadows,
The twins are sleeping an exhausted sleep.
Gaea meanwhile receives a visit from
The Chief Commissioner of the world church:
Bengt Andersson, with his kind white eyebrows
And his archaic ceremonial garb,
The slacks, tie, and sportcoat of a pundit
210
On a mid-twentieth century TV forum
Or nature series, or religious show.
The courtesies are deep upon both sides;
Garrison joins their aides about the screen.
And as they watch, the symbols representing
Orbital farms and Martian satellites
Blink from dull red to green as their crews leave
And then to blue as UN troops move in.
As soon as the last red spot is extinguished
The eyes of Gaea and the Commissioner
220
Meet with the frankness of unprurient power.
The nod is given, and from a hundred silos
Slides the armada they have long prepared.
These are crude ships, built for but one thing only:
To spill and burn the cargo of the Ark.
Electronic elegance and tech-
Nical sophistication, cybernetics,
Even if still within the arts of Earth,
Are wasted on a vessel to contend
With software that Ganesh has taught to pierce
230
The subtlest countermeasures, and to find
Through heterodyning frequencies the chink
Into the central pathnames of control.
These ships burn hydrazine and work by wires
And levers, and are armed with heavy guns
Firing projectiles from a cordite shell
That will explode on contact or by means
Of simple fuses burning to the charge.
At close range even crudest electronics
Can be fused out by EMP, as if
240
The heat of Martian genius melted wire.
The ships are lethal, armored, vulnerable,
As packed with men as eggs are packed with meat;
The strategy must be to board and fight
And take the needed losses going in.
Any conceivable success must cost
Thousands of lives, billions of Earthly treasure;
But what are lives and treasure but to spend?
The moment that Irene wakes, she knows
That something’s wrong. They cannot just give up.
250
Perhaps the library was moved; perhaps
The Codex still exists. She wakens Wolf:
He feels the same. Discreet enquiries at
The University of San Marcos
Yield nothing useful; to pursue the matter
Would be to risk suspicion and exposure.
They go back to the ruins; in halting Spanish
Ask an old woman where the books have gone.
A blue streak of Quechua is all they get.
But now she takes Irene by the arm
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And leads her to a half-blind ancient man
Whose fluent Spanish and whose fair command
Of English make him a rare scholar here.
He tells the Yanquis that he heard them say
The books were going somewhere—Africa—
Zimba or Zamba, he could not be quite sure.
Wolf pokes around and finds a broken crate
Abandoned in the dry and stinking stacks
Among a pile of periodicals.
On it he makes out an address: Centre
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For Life-Science Records, Mwinilunga District,
Zambia, Central Africa. “That’s it,”
Irene says in quiet triumph. “Let’s get going.”
The mass detectors of the arkship escort,
Used to evade the larger meteors
That are encountered in the Asteroids,
Now give the first sign of the Terran sortie.
A swarm of objects shows up on the screens,
Massive but electronically dead.
The fleet’s computers calculate the mix
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Of laser, railgun, and evasive action
That best averts the threat, but as they do so
Some of the warheads bloom in globes of plasma;
The instruments of the Kalevala
Are blinded momentarily, and one
Of the missiles takes out an escort vessel.
No more surprises. Now the Terran fleet
Comes in behind its barrage; Tripitaka,
Cold and ready for them, has perceived
A boldness and simplicity of planning
290
That he suspects is Gaea’s work, his old
Mistress and close instructress in the arts
Of treachery ennobled by its cause.
Ganesh’s software net grasps out in vain,
But soon the clumsy vessels of the Earth
Are popping like ripe fruit within a tree
That little boys with catapults have chosen
To practice on with their forked dangly weapons.
And each time one of them erupts, it spews
Into the hard explosive suck of space
300
That pops a human head like watermelons,
A great grained juice of young humanity
As one might burst a colony of maggots
With a soft slide from the back of a spade.
The rebel gunners do not feel the crime,
Caught up as they must be by the huzzah
And fiery wine of mortal contestation
That renders life as trembling-precious as
The solemn alchemy of death itself;
But Tripitaka’s soul receives the charge
310
Of debt and karma as a battery
Will mount toward the redline of its melting.
Still the Earth ships come on; he had not thought
There possibly could be so many of them.
Within their hulls it must be like the decks
Of ancient dreadnoughts or ships of the line:
A hell of noise and smoke and running men;
Babble of prayer, as it might have been
In those urine-soaked trenches of Iran
When the mad Ayatollah called his children
320
Of the Islamic revolution to Jihad.
And now from time to time a Terran shell
Finds its way through the lace of fire stitched down
By the Arkship’s cold battle computers.
Two more of the escort ships are hit,
One of them crippled badly, as they’re cast
In sacrifice before the holy spool
Of the Kalevala, the womb of life.
Over a half of the great Terran fleet
Remains, and now the range is swiftly closing.
330
As if the colors somehow are reversed,
The dawn sky blazes not with red but blue;
A sweet and painful blue that burns still deeper
Reflected in the reaches of the river.
It is the ground that’s red; the whole valley
Is delicately scaled with scarlet cannas,
Turned by the morning breeze from pink to crimson;
Then a tremble, and a pink catspaw spreads.
The sparse spring rains of Africa have come
And even the umbrella-trees, the stand
340
Of brachistegias, the sugarbushes,
Are scarlet or vermilion with spring:
Their buds and new leaves sticky with the sap
And not yet turned to summer’s tender green.
Here the most frenzied colors come with birth,
Not death and fall, as in the northern year.
Wolf and Irene reel upon the slope,
Exhausted, having jetted to Lusaka,
Changed in Solwezi to a chartered plane
And bumped by battered taxi to this place.
350
Giamba has sent a courier to Lusaka
To meet them off the plane and to provide them
With introductions and identities
From the Max Planck Institute in Seewiesen,
Together with a clearance from the church;
They are Canadian seminarians
Studying animal behavior as
It is predicted by the play of proteins
Nominated and controlled by genes.
They’ve ended up here at six in the morning
360
With rucksacks full of dirty clothes, clutching
Two paper bags containing airline snacks,
Waiting for the Institute to open,
And, strangely, happy as they’d never been
Since childhood and their first try at their wings.
For they have found again that intimacy,
Brother and sister, more than man and wife,
Womb-mates and knowers of each other’s thoughts,
Insiders of whatever world they travel,
Because each knows the other is awake
370
And taking in with that familiar strangeness
All he might miss, as if the other were,
Personified, that easy connaissance
Of the unnoticed that we call our home.
Sweetest of all, they are conspirators,
And in awed admiration for each other’s
Courage, address, and perspicacity,
They find those warm grave pleasures of respect.
Built out of brick in an anonymous style,
To house material the Church would hide
380
Here in this lonely corner of the world,
The Institute’s a compound of low buildings.
As they walk slowly through the dewy cannas,
It falls away behind a gentle rise.
A hissing roar that seems to rise and fall
Grows all about them; the Zambesi rapids.
Here in a hundred rills and torrents pours
The great clean river through a scarp of granite;
Where tiny islands, dark with somber trees,
Are covered thick with sallow orchises,
390
And a long wide blue-white fight of wild water
Half an inch deep scrolls up against a boulder
High as a house; and sparse grass golden-green
Blows shining on the edge of granite plains.
They eat their odd breakfast upon a rock,
Then, holding hands, like young Adam and Eve,
They climb the slopes toward the Institute.
And now it’s all absurdly easy. “Yes,
Seewiesen called us. You’ve got rooms and carrels.
You’ll find the disk recorders that you asked for.”
400
Three hours later they have the Lima Codex.
The battle in space continues. Terran forces board Kalevala. Hearing of the discovery of the Codex by Wolf and Irene, Tripitaka recognizes that he must cover their escape to Mars by staging a last stand. He sends Hillel Sharon in a fast escort ship to ferry Ganesh Wills, whose knowledge will be essential in decoding the Codex, to safety on Mars. Sharon’s mistresses Ximene and Marisol decide to stay behind and die with the arkship. Tripitaka’s interrupted ritual suicide is resumed. Wolf and Irene, learning of the death of the arkship, decide to avenge it by killing their grandmother Gaea before they leave the Earth. We learn of the strange love between brother and sister. They find they can consummate neither it nor their revenge; but their mercy serves them well, inasmuch as it is Gaea who persuades the Ecotheist council to permit the repatriation of Martian civilians left on Earth. Wolf and Irene thus escape with the disks containing the Codex.
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 23