The Multiverse

by Andrew Wynn Owen

  Sectarian, too keen for power;

  Hard décor glinting black on gold,

  We gargled Schnapps atop the fascist’s tower;

  Or, when a kind

  Samaritan rang up, we merely

  Sliced off a bacon rind

  And chomped on tortured carcass more severely.

  Yet even all of that, sized up with what’s in store

  (Apocalypse,

  Which, blank, accelerating, slips

  Through every gap), is nothing. Unprepared,

  Dreamy, we nosedive on. A stranger holds the floor,

  Unseen because so strange,

  And has declared,

  ‘I know you may not want to. Spare a little change.’

  Mars

  Concerns about humanity on Earth

  Continue. If a meteor

  Can boil the atmosphere,

  Our safety’s not assured. If all our art,

  Technocracy and dash, the human métier,

  Crumbles in fire,

  Then for

  An aeon dazzling stars

  With all their precious stores

  Of fuel

  Could, fruitless, fail

  To be admired by any loving mind.

  Blank loss of Eden, vacuumed consciousness –

  Our jostling joys fulfil

  Old dreams deep pattern made.

  We freight the self-inspecting universe.

  Sci-fi aficionados long ago

  Predicted what would mark

  Our next sublime frontier.

  They saw we’d leave the planet where we grew

  And, honing our space architectures, make

  Engine and tyre

  To tour

  The shifting slopes of Mars.

  Above life’s hopeful maze

  Of doubt,

  Unbound delight

  Electrifies the skyline of forevers

  We cannot comprehend with spans so short.

  Departing from this dot

  Of roses, thorns, and clovers,

  The Martian holocene awaits our heat.

  Just eighty days of travel get us there.

  Skylights on Arsia Mons

  Open to lava tubes

  Where quarters, greenhouses, a water store

  Can be installed, with iron and nickel mines

  Running as ribs

  To hubs

  Where steel is manufactured.

  In time, when we’ve perfected

  A knack

  That can connect

  Supply lines with our 3D printers, then

  Cities and roads will sprawl this second world.

  That early bottleneck

  Is pressuringly thin

  But, on the other side, we’ll reap reward.

  What statues shall we build when we arrive?

  Will there be new resolves

  Not to depict our own

  Distinctive bodies? Will the sculptors rave

  Instead for ten-dimensional preserves

  That swell the town

  And yawn,

  Defiant, disconcert-

  -ing, in and out of sight?

  Or will

  We choose to wall

  Our minds around with restless struggling limbs

  Like Pompeii plasters stuck on regolith,

  To illustrate our well

  Established hope, which climbs

  Tirelessly, always striving for new birth?

  More distant future promises fresh prizes:

  A planet terraformed,

  Earth’s human-life-support

  Copied at last by an extended process,

  Augmenting soil until it can be farmed,

  Stocking a port

  Replete

  With gently lapping waves

  Where juicy seaweed writhes

  As if

  In honour of

  Robots that rove the artificial shore

  Smoothly designed by us, strange works of nature

  Who’ve clambered up the cliff

  Of truth enough to share

  Creation’s task, so thrive our arts of nurture.

  Extremophiles no sunbeam ever stroked,

  Beneath an arid crust,

  Will glimmer from our torches.

  Accelerando, as chalked contrails streaked

  Our skies, so tumbling bots will skim the crest

  Of dunes. Their touches

  In reaches

  Unseen, unstudied, will

  Feed the eternal well

  Of fact

  Where we have flocked

  So long in search of longed-for understanding.

  Sleek satellites, above the fresh clouds’ blear,

  Will view the slow effect

  Of our fastidious tending:

  Blood red, plant green, then oceanic blue.

  Still, threat gains magnitude each passing year.

  Cold motives we have known

  Persist in muffled caves.

  We will be injured but we shall inure

  To horrors that do not yet have a name.

  Discovery cleaves

  Our lives

  And yet the lips of custom

  Will speak for those who kissed them.

  We grow

  And make the law

  Afresh according to our changing needs.

  An interplanetary species will

  Require a surge of new

  Designs. The human nods.

  Machine intelligence must help as well.

  Yes, this is where we aim: another planet.

  Many lithe minds have asked

  What we should lionise,

  And here exists an answer, one so plain it

  Astounds with clarity. Shall we be whisked

  Through emptiness

  And noise

  To summit megaliths,

  Slowly raising Klieg lights

  On Martian

  Settlement, mission

  Accomplished, or be swallowed in time’s mist

  Like almost every species that has lived?

  This is a trial of passion.

  We will do what we must.

  Bring life to Mars and then bring Mars to life.

  The Scientist

  Before the time of skiing on Europa,

  Enceladus still a far-flung starry dream,

  When humankind had met no interloper

  To shake its trust in being God’s only scheme –

  When hope was cheap (since all the wildest hoper

  Concocted was a proton-bashing beam),

  When life was good, before the hadron drama,

  A scientist lived and labbed in Alabama.

  It’s said she changed her body to a vapour

  And surged, at hurtling speed, across the prairie

  Dispersing dust and ruffling reams of paper

  So jottings fluttered free above the airy

  September clouds. Her particles could caper

  And coalesce as an engorged canary

  Which chirped – before her molecules defaulted

  To human form, with wing and thorax malted.

  She set a gauze of copper near the sun

  To gather photons whizzing off its centre,

  Which made a fleet of flying saucers run

  In fluctuating orbits. Each would enter

  Its perihelion before it spun,

  With bleeps of data, free, to its inventor

  Who plugged these findings in a database

  Comprised of maps for charting outer space.

  She programmed microscopic drones to fill

  Their pores with water, and transport the load

  To desert regions, where each cell would spill

  A droplet, till a gushing river flowed.

  She bioengineered, with chlorophyll

  Embedded in a goat’s genetic code,

  An animal that synthesized the light

  And grew, in hours, to an ungainly height.

  And then
she launched a harvester in motion

  To capture hurricanoes as they blew

  Across the wide and wet Atlantic ocean

  And redirect them– where? Ah, no one knew

  But sometimes when a town was in commotion

  From seismic devastations, quick winds flew,

  Like valkyries, to help, and air would bubble

  As gusts restored old buildings from the rubble.

  Later, she rode a chariot made of glass

  And dragged about the ozone-layer by Boeing,

  Diffusing thunderclouds and dribbling sparse

  Evaporation trails of purple, flowing

  Horizon to horizon. When the grass

  Absorbed their showers, each spikelet started sowing

  Sentient saplings, clustered in societies

  That grew to breed high-yielding crop varieties.

  She fixed a laser to a diplodocus

  Constructed out of fibreglass and fossil,

  Then rode it round the town. It was a locus

  Classicus for her to shove colossal

  Boulders, when thinking, in volcanoes: focus

  Came easy watching quartz and lava jostle.

  That’s how she chanced on fresh techniques to mould

  Confectionary, and cured the common cold.

  Controlled manipulations of dark matter

  Allowed her to reverse the flow of time:

  She set a sludgy pig’s head on a platter

  And watched it reassemble from the grime.

  She caged a fly and spider: watched the latter

  Cough up the former, shrink, and uncombine

  The interwoven tightropes of its home.

  She made her hair retangle through a comb.

  Another of her marvellous inventions

  Distinguished large and small infinities

  And weighed up cosmological contentions,

  Concluding that, for speculative ease,

  ‘The Multiverse’, with all its many tensions

  And the glamour that it gives the lightest breeze,

  Awards the most discursive weltanschaung,

  A world of trillion-tasselled sturm-und-drang.

  She carved a chamber in which gravity

  Altered according to one’s state of mind:

  It was a vivid wonderment to see

  A sapling leave its clod of soil behind

  And levitate across a vacancy

  To feed an antelope that was confined

  And, growing hungry, startled to discover

  Its food approaching like a much-missed lover.

  Experiments with time proved her undoing.

  Sure, she could travel – but who really knew

  How far one’s present self was misconstruing

  Precisely what one’s future self would do

  Or wish to do? This problematic gluing

  Of future yearning (judged by what one knew

  Was probable) to present hope produced

  An attitude both fearful and confused.

  And yet she would and should and did continue,

  Concocting bots and bugs and neuromatic

  Computers, quantum monsters made of sinew

  And nanotubule, shambling through her static

  Test-spaces. She’d a ray to look within you

  And pinpoint thoughts and feelings: an ecstatic

  Shudder, a moment of unravelling doubt,

  A movement that prompts the moment when you shout.

  But no one, as we know by now, is simple.

  No one is not in some way complicated.

  The smoothest skin can rupture with a pimple.

  Our oceans will, one day, be dessicated.

  A nun, come Friday nights, discards her wimple

  And boozes freely. Even Time – dilated,

  Contracted – will, with spatial twisting, differ

  At certain points, like swirlings in a river.

  She was obsessed with Death. Or rather, not

  With Death itself, but with its dissolution.

  She wished to put a kibosh on the rot

  That saps us everywhere, this foul pollution

  Ubiquitously found, which cools the hot

  And heats the cool, and proves us Lilliputian

  Flies to be swatted. Champions of dissection,

  We lack – still, still! – the art of resurrection.

  The overthrowing of the overthrowing;

  The great undoing of the great undoer;

  The banishment of nothing’s bleak unknowing;

  The numinous pursuit; the reconstruer

  Of what informs us that we should be going;

  The fight against what makes us thinner, fewer,

  And more despondent year on weary year.

  The death of Death. The death, perhaps, of fear.

  So she conducted many a detailed test

  To study Life and how it might be held.

  She mapped the way bacteria divest

  Unneeded nutrients, how cells are swelled,

  And how flagella mobilise the quest

  Through microscopic landscapes. She compelled

  All fields. She had a lithe celestial air.

  Who was Verona? What had made her care?

  Verona’s parents were intense, utopian:

  Her mother, pure Romantic philosophe;

  Her dad, a physicist, anti-entropian.

  On summer evenings they’d sit late and quaff

  Smirnoff together, two straws like fallopian

  Tubes that extended to a single trough.

  As they got smashed, their brilliant minds would glisten

  And young Verona dropped her toys to listen.

  Her toys, which were bizarrely whirring things:

  A helter-skelter made of ammonite,

  A schooner with retractable glass wings,

  A futuristic baton-wielding knight,

  A tin containing ultraviolet strings

  Which she could weave to trip and trick your sight,

  And a stack of space-age doodads from her dad,

  Designed at Cal Tech when he was a grad.

  But now she was a grown-up, all alone,

  And dedicated to those tricky arts

  Which humankind first called on to see stone

  And stick make fire. She held the many parts

  Of earthly knowledge in that fertile zone

  Behind her eyes, where synapse-linkage darts

  Between ideas and, in the course of time,

  Discovers separate realms that seem to rhyme.

  Phenomenologists would journey far

  To witness one experiment in action:

  She’d lock a putrid aardvark in a jar

  Filled with potassium and some extraction

  Shipped in by shuttle from a distant star.

  It fizzed and fulminated till reaction

  Gave way to calm: subsiding foam revealed

  A living aardvark, every lesion healed.

  About her other triumphs, I will speak

  At greater length hereafter: how she flew

  Through far-flung galaxies on just a weak

  Duracell battery; how she laughed and threw

  Convention to the solar wind to peek

  Inside our sun; and how she followed through

  On manifold harmonious inventions

  That filled the news reports in higher dimensions.

  The Centrifuge

  1. The Mechanism

  ‘Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a steadying, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and whatever is centripetal in mind and body.’

  Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry

  Since time is flying everywhere I look,

  I take this opportunity to pause.

  You, centrifuge, my futuristic book,

  You heart of chrome, with ventricles of gauze,

  I choose your spin to execute my chores,

&
nbsp; To order what I cannot separate

  And formalize the thoughts I cogitate.

  You are my whirring, whirling wizard’s cup,

  My stern reminder, carpe diem-ator,

  You brighten, gladden, buck, and giddy up,

  You organise the work I must do later –

  You are the schemer of your own creator!

  You are my vessel, I your alchemist,

  You conjure turn and counterturn and twist.

  You mortar and I pestle what you cluster,

  You muster and I master what you show.

  You cut the mix, you cleave the huff and bluster,

  You travel nowhere but you always go –

  You hem your margins like La Rochefoucauld.

  I tangent where you indicate the line

  And follow where your filigrees entwine.

  I spirograph around your inspiration,

  I take the cues your curlicues suggest,

  I draw the line you drop in conversation,

  I siphon off what you have coalesced.

  You are my desktop mécanique céleste,

  My adumbrator and my in-the-groove –

  You move in circuits and those circuits move.

  So, centrifuge, my counsellor of state,

  Enlarge the problems, show them to me plain:

  Uncover all the ways of thinking straight

  And lead me down discernment’s dusty lane.

  You are my second body, other brain!

  I am Cincinnatus, you are the plough –

  Let matter follow where we furrow now.

  2. Time

  ‘Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river.’ –

  Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A New Refutation of Time’

  If what is due to happen is decided

  By noughts and ones, or macromolecules,

  I’m happy not to know. Life’s many-sided!

  The future rolls and rollicks and unspools –

  I’ll follow silver, but no golden, rules.

  Tempus fugit? Oh, well let it go!

  I would it were not, but it must be so.

  Yes, time accelerates, the more you sweat.

  Proportion is a nifty-fingered rogue