Evalina Wills, née Chaudhuri, Indian wife of Billy Wills and mother of Ganesh.
Kuniko, abbess of the Jakko-in temple where Sumikami seeks spiritual help.
Sachiko, Tripitaka’s first girl friend.
Nishiyama, Tripitaka’s instructor in the martial arts.
George “Guts Fer Garters” Grace, training sergeant for the Australian Olympic War team.
“Bill,” poetry reviewer for a major American newspaper, sent to cover the story of Tripitaka’s participation in the trial of Chance.
Pyotr Markov, presiding judge in the World Court trial of Chance and Freya for treason and high crimes against the environment.
Iatroyannis, a doctor and curator of the ruined temple of Apollo Epikouros at Vassae; a friend of Chance.
Yanni, a teenaged girl and Olympic War groupie Tripitaka meets in Athens.
Billy Macdonald, a corporal in the Ned Kellies, the Australian Olympic War team; he gave Tripitaka his nickname “Don John;” died in the orbital farm wars.
Kung, leader of the Thai Olympic force and general of the allied forces of Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Papua, and Thailand in the war with the Indonesians.
“Scooter,” nickname of one of the two Ecotheist chaplains imposed on the allied Olympic War team; a cause of the Mutiny.
General Maghreb, commander of the Terran fleet sent to destroy the Arkship.
Simmy, one of Garrison’s homosexual lovers.
Ortiz, another of Garrison’s homosexual lovers.
Liam, Chance the Younger’s eldest son.
Chronology
1951
Birth of Sumikami’s mother
1968
Birth of Sumikami
1974
Birth of Billy Wills
1977
Birth of Evalina Chaudhuri
1980
Birth of Chance
1985
Birth of Rose (Gaea)
1991
Birth of Charlie
1992
Birth of Orval Root
1995
Birth of Ximene de Vivar
2001
Birth of Hilly Sharon
2002
Marriage of Chance and Rose
2004
Birth of Freya
2007
Birth of Beatrice
2008
Birth of Garrison
2011
Birth of Tripitaka
2013
Birth of Ganesh
Birth of Marisol
2015
Chance appointed to Ares Project
2017
Chance buys Devereux for Rose
2020
Terraforming begins in secret
Chance hires Charlie
2028
Charlie and Freya married
Appointment of Ganesh to research position in Van Riebeck Enterprises
2029
Birth of Wolf and Irene
Estrangement of Chance and Rose; Rose renames herself Gaea
2030
Mars seeded with first bacteria
2032
Arrest of Chance and Freya
Beginning of Martian Revolution
2033
Mars seeded with funguses
2034
Trial of Chance and Freya
Release of Comet Kali from Saturn orbit
Deaths of Chance, Freya, Root
Olympic War and Mutiny
2035
Concordat of Taos
2036
Funeral of Chance and Freya
Fall of Comet Kali on Mars
Marriage of Charlie and Beatrice
Birth of Chance the Younger
2040
Coming of Tripitaka to Mars
2044
Marriage of Garrison and Bella
2045
Birth of Flavius
2046
Irene seduces Tripitaka
The Ark War
Finding of the Lima Codex
Death of Tripitaka
BIRTH OF HERMIONE THE SIBYL
2047
Breathable air on Mars
Beatrice begins the work of gardening
2059
Irene attempts suicide
Beginning of the mission of the Sibyl
2061
Chance the Younger marries Rosie Molloy
2066
Death of Gaea
2068
Flavius attempts assassination of the Sibyl
Death of Irene
Death of Sumikami
2070
Murder of Garrison
2151
Genesis epic begun
General Summary of the Story
The story covers the major historical events of the next hundred years. A group of scientists and technologists, led by Chancellor (“Chance”) Van Riebeck, is charged by the United Nations with the scientific survey of the planet Mars. Using theories derived from the Gaia Hypothesis, they clandestinely introduce hardy genetically tailored bacteria into the Martian environment with the intention of transforming the planet into one habitable by human beings.
The Earth has at this time fallen under the theocratic rule of the Ecotheist Movement, which divides human beings from the rest of nature and regards all human interference with nature as an evil. Chance and his followers are captured and put on trial, and war breaks out between the Martian colonists and the home planet. Though Chance and others lose their lives, the colonists are able to gain their independence by threatening to drop a moonlet on Earth.
After a bitter renewed struggle led by the hero, Tripitaka, the colonists obtain a complete inventory of Earthly lifeforms. With their help, and inspired by Beatrice Van Riebeck, they complete the terraforming of the planet. A religious leader, the Sibyl, is born to the colonists; her teachings reconcile the ancient mystical wisdom of the Earth with the new science and cultural experience of Mars.
Genealogy of the Van Riebeck Family
Act I
The Origins of the War
How this poem was communicated to me I cannot say. Its poet will not be born for over a hundred years, and the events he describes will not occur until fifty years hence, if then. Nevertheless I have recorded his words, adding before each scene a brief account of the plot as far as I understand it.
As the poem opens the teller of the story calls in despair to his muses, his heroes and heroines, and to the divine forces they express. The Sibyl—whom we will hear of later—intercedes and gives him the power to speak. He has chosen the ancient epic meter of the English language used by Shakespeare and Milton, and in the fashion of Homer and Virgil he begins with a classical invocation of the powers that inspire poets.
Now the story itself begins. Chance Van Riebeck, the entrepreneur who is attempting to change the surface of Mars by biological engineering, and Freya, his daughter and colleague in the enterprise, are hunted down by United Nations troops near the south pole of Mars. Orval Root, a former officer of Chance’s but now in alliance with the U.N., offers terms to Chance and Freya. They surrender on condition that they be permitted to defend themselves in a hearing against the charges brought against them, namely, that they have in disobedience to their superiors irreparably damaged the Martian environment by introducing Earthly bacteria, under the guise of scientific research. Orval Root, because of his love for Freya, accepts the conditions stipulated by Chance.
Scene i:
The Capture of Chance
Listen! I must tell of the beginnings,
Of corpses buried in the walls of worlds,
Of how those men and women worth a story
Burn and consume the powers they’re kindled by;
And how their acts, mortal and cast away,
Are crystalled in the melt of history,
But their live selves are lost and gone forever
To leave a safer and a duller age;
Of how only the silence of the holy
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sp; 10
Can still the creaking agony of time;
How holiness is broken every spring
Bursting in laughter to the throat of years.
But. But it is so hard to do again
What at the first was playtime for the gods,
Nymph borne by goatfoot over a green stream;
It is a deposition now as heavy as
The unhelpful body of one loved and dead.
I am not any more—none of us is
Now in this place of ciphers we inhabit—
20
Worth those I sing, therefore the song the more
Should lift as if that past dawn were alive;
The very words twist into mockery
The story I must tell, and try to fall
Into the knowing anecdote of motive,
Disillusion’s inexpensive wisdom.
Some strength beyond my own must raise words’ rod
Over the parting seas, the hosts of locusts,
Lest grief for the loss of the remarkable
Weighed down with a forgetting of the soul
30
Loosen the arm that wields them, and make falter
The voice that breathes them through this land of shadow.
What shall I call You, You unanxious Ones,
You Whose desires, so perfectly exhausted
By creation, as perfectly replenished,
Set cool into the very shape of being?
I feel Your feathers brush me in Your passage;
Almost I feel the muscles of my breast
Twitch with the wingbeat. How is it for them
In whom the current of Your dreadful breathing
40
Comes and goes as their own, as natural
To them, whose love and rage are unremitting
As Yours are?—Or do we all, the partial
And the completed, the clogged and struggling
As I am, and those pure who seem to fly,
The addict and the saint, do we all make
It up as we go along, try to hold
The brief, well-lit moods long enough to work,
And sit out the blanks, the darks,
The half-lights of craving, worldliness, spite?
50
If so, their fatal talent is the rarer,
Who act the semblance of such certainty;
And the grief’s greater when they come to nothing.
Whom shall I call on, deathless Ones Whose wars
Are fought out in the flesh of those You favor?
If I could read the pattern’s meaning, read
The light-swift scribble of Your fractal line
Whose denser filling of Your inexhaustible
Interstices constitutes being in time,
I’d be among those heroes that I sing;
60
Divided as I am, I bespeak them
That I celebrate to speak, pray, for me.
Out of the very future of the poem
Blows on a breeze a sacred scent of roses.
Sibyl, prophet, I know it is your incense,
The woodsmoke of your holy fire, the breath
Of living vapor from your waterfalls.
Show us a vision how you came to be.
What is this foul place where the sun is shrunk
To a pinhead over the close horizon?
70
—This plain of inky slush, black as the sludge
Oozing like ordure from a well of oil?
Here is no good footing, in this darkest
Of ways, this malebolge, this ass-pontine slough;
Under the slime is a grey-white ice, ice
Not of water only but of the air;
Above this waste the sky, though, is a fan
Of colors, like a courting peacock’s tail,
Blue at the world’s rim by the midnight sun,
Dimming to crimson zeniths where the stars
80
Shine through the red veil like new eyes through blood;
One star chiefly, Jupiter in his caul.
Five shadows, scarcely distinguishable,
Darkness on darkness, but sharp-edged like blades,
Stream out across the plain and fall upon
The far side of a shallow valley, where
A slow sewer carries its sumps away.
Shadows of men. They are the makers of
This desolation, these cocytean swales.
What must they be to be guilty of such
90
An ugliness? Nature herself is sick,
To vomit up her tartaruses so
From fields never before nor since to turn
So dolorous a face upon their heaven.
The five casters of shadows have no faces,
But painted masks of gold that bear emblazoned
These plains of Mars, the raw fire of the sun.
What sign of who they are? The silver spacesuits
Are spattered with the filth of their endeavor,
But sigils and a few words can be read.
100
On helmet and shoulder each bears a logo:
VER—“spring”?—“truth”?—but the E appears reversed
And dropped, and the whole stands in a circle
So no doubt it is “V.R.E.” that’s meant,
Van Riebeck Enterprises. On their arms
A smaller acronym’s embroidered, not in green
As was the first, but red. TCSB:
Trades Congress of Spacefaring Bioen-
Gineers. But these desecrators are weary;
Only the one with the word CHANCE across
110
His breastplate, and the slight one who may be
A woman, FREYA written on her suit,
Do not bow down or stumble in their march,
Though all are heavy laden and bear weapons:
Old fashioned police riot guns, Winchesters
Bulkily modified about the breech.
Every so often one will look behind,
And sure enough, over the edge of the world,
A line of armed pursuers has appeared.
Harsh breaths in the helmet radios.
120
The one called Chance, with an embroidered rose
Upon his gauntlet, is the first to speak.
“They will have landed up ahead as well:
We can’t keep going. Blackett was hurt bad
Back at the dome; he isn’t saying much,
But his suit leg, I think, is full of blood.
Do we give up or do we stand and fight?”
The man with BLACKETT on his suit lays down
His pack and sits on it. “I’m finished if
It’s hiking that you need. Leave me behind.
130
I’ll take a couple with me, buy some time.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere without you,”
Freya says. But Chance holds up his hand.
“You men signed on to work but not to fight.
If anyone wants out, the contract’s void.
It’s us they’re after; honor says go home,
Your families need you. Read the Union rules:
That’s what they say too.” One of the men
Growls like a sheepdog under his breath:
“Sure. And what about our friends back at the dome?”
140
Another: “Yeh. It wasn’t we but they
Who blew the pressure in a life-support.
That’s against union rules, if you talk union.”
The third man says: “I got no family.
Just looking now to get a UN scalp.”
It comes to Freya. “As your daughter, Chance,
I say we surrender; what’s more to me
Than your life? As a member of the Board
Appointed your executive in charge
Of this South Polar Terraforming Region
150
I say again we quit. Bu
t as a servant
Of the Spirit, which you taught me to be,
I say we fight: and that is where I stand.”
“The lady gets my vote,” says Blackett quietly,
And one by one the other men agree.
“All right,” says Chance. “Now this is what we’ll do.
When the Cheyenne once, under Little Cloud,
Were caught in the prairie by the cavalry
Like we are, they took cover in a swamp,
And showed the troopers only noses, eyes,
160
And rifle barrels; so well hid they had
To get artillery to dig them out.
What’s seeded here? Sulfur bacteria,
Ferments, methanogens, and blue-green algae.
Volutans, Chrysea, Aquatilis
And Cryptovaginata make a mat
Or mantle, don’t they, that should stop a bullet…?”
An ultimatum on the public band:
“This is the Expeditionary Force,
United Nations Secretariat.
170
Lay down your weapons and come out. If not,
We open fire.” But there is no reply.
A minute passes. Then the order comes;
A single shot. In the thin air of Mars,
Still scarcely a tenth of an atmosphere,
It sounds like a knock or click, just as if
One of the old leviathans of Earth
Were sounding for his prey across an ocean.
Thin chatterings of automatic fire
Succeed, birds gathering for winter.
180
Nine troopers rise behind the hilltop
And in the feeble gravity make strides
Slipping and gliding down the slope like dreams.
How can I speak the poison of this place
Hunter and hunted must drink down in silence,
A billion black kilometers from home?
Limbs formed in the Eden of our planet,
That glows now on the far side of the sun,
Mouths suckled on mother’s milk in some
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 3
