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Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

Page 3

by Frederick Turner


  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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  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

 

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