Beech-shaded suburb where the sprinklers turn;
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Eyes tuned to the spectrum of that nurse,
Green-breasted Earth, her sweet forgiving flesh,
All bent now to the imposition of
Competing codes of law upon the void.
The hunted, buried in the new world’s wall,
Up to the helms in ordure, know that comfort
Which comes from never having to depart
From this place where they are, as the dying
In hospital need make no more arrangements,
Nor stir themselves abroad, for their plain work
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Is indeed to do naught else than to die;
Or as in hell the unrepentant know
That there’s no need for good behavior now.
The hunters, gulping air from their converters,
Are caught mid-stride by terror or by bullet,
And tumbled end for end to splay at length
On hillside or the verges of the slough.
One of them cracks an air-seal, breathes his guts
Out into the semi-vacuum; breathes in
With his last breath a taste sour and corrosive;
210
Humankind’s first breath of Martian air.
A stray shot has caught one of the defenders:
The union man—his poor head’s all exploded,
The great molecules of the human soul
A fertile protein for the fields of Mars.
The lonely man weeps into his helmet:
And Chance weeps too, both for his own and those
Of the other party, allies in this:
To have died that the new world might be born.
Balked for a time, the hunters call a parley.
220
Now Chance demands with whom he has to deal.
Beside the spokesman from the EPA,
His UN escort from the lunar base
And their commander, there’s a World Court Proctor,
Gasping and unaccustomed in his suit;
Two smooth professional gentlemen—
A World Bank auditor and an assessor
Who share a private band; an unnamed man
In the arms of Van Riebeck Enterprises;
A team from CBS with cameras;
230
And a tough quiet US Federal Marshal
On her last tour of offworld police duty.
—It seems important, Freya notes to Chance,
That all formalities should be observed:
They must still think the legal ice is thin.
“Who is the Company man?” Chance asks Freya
“Who do you think our traitor has to be?”
“We’ll find out,” Freya says. “Another thing:
There’s no one from the Ecotheist Church.
That means they have to play it by the book.”
240
Chance grunts and opens up the public channel.
The spokesman is almost apologetic;
English accent; underneath, the strain
Of condescension Earthers feel for those
Gauche and enthusiastic offworld types—
The Foreign Office eyebrow at the seer,
The liberal’s at the crass entrepreneur.
“We do appreciate how you must feel,
Having no doubt lost friends back at the dome.
Resistance here was understandable
250
And will be so accounted by your jury;
But we did not intend to ‘blow’ the dome.
Believe us that you will be treated fairly,
And that your case indeed is far from hopeless,
If you now yield yourselves to just arrest.
Surely honor is satisfied; you’ve made
Your gesture for the ‘Earthside’ media.”
“Well,” says Chance, “how do we answer him?”
A laugh. Then: “Was he talking to us, chief?”
“Then I suppose not,” says Chance, does not bother
260
To crack the Transmit on the public band.
The spokesman waits, then clears his throat and says:
“We’ll give you half an hour for your decision.”
After a short while Freya speaks her thoughts:
“Do you remember how in Dorset once
When we were at the bio-conference
At Sherborne where Sir Walter Raleigh founded
His academe under the greenwood tree?—
How we went walking on our weekend off,
And plodded up that long hill through the wood
270
And the wind was roaring through the treetops
But it was still and sheltered here below?—
And how that strange light shone through the thornbushes
Far too low down to be natural?—
And how that dreadful racket grew, just like
A rocket taking off, or a tornado,
And we pushed through into the end of the world?—
Three hundred feet over the English Channel,
Remember, and the sea brilliant green
And brilliant brown from tearing at the cliff,
280
And all in motion, and the wind blowing
So hard you could scarcely throw yourself off
If you tried, and the hollows in the rows
Of waves were blinding mirrors of the sun?
And up the Windgate—that’s what it was called—
A column of white sea-scour blew like dreams?—
And how you said then, Chance, that when we rested
In the shelter of the cliff’s lip, the gorse
And blackberries and little nests of flowers
Between us and the edge were like one’s house,
290
One’s family, one’s car, one’s friends, one’s work,
But what was on the other side was Death?”
Chance has no time to answer, for a crackle
Announces further UN overtures.
“Listen. To help avoid more loss of life,
A friend of yours has asked to talk to you,
Empowered to offer honorable terms.”
“If he’s a friend, let him speak for himself,”
Says Chance. Freya, surprised, says to her father:
“Should we do this? It’s obvious they’re in trouble.
300
Couldn’t we wait them out?” “No, Freya. They
Have the tempo; our death’s our only card.
The threat of it may give us a finesse.
They have to get us back to have their trial
And justify their acts before the public.
It’s either talk or take our own lives now
While we still can, before our air goes sour.”
The next voice that they hear is quite familiar.
“So what did you expect? Chance, you betrayed us
With your promises. You said it was science
310
When what you had in mind was playing God.
You spent the public money on an image,
And monkeyed with the private parts of nature
To make yourself a place in history.”
“I might have guessed it, if I could believe it,”
Chance replies. “Old friend, old comrade in arms,”
—For it is Orval Root, his right hand man,
The science administrator of the Program—
“Couldn’t you wait the bad times out with me?
Couldn’t you trust the promise of our vision?
320
Was it too much to ask you, that you might
For friendship’s sake—imagination’s sake–
Let up a little on the righteousness?
Yes, I suppose it was. You were afraid.
I see now how this duty must have choked you,
How brave you were to bite back your
compassion,
To expiate the sin of loving me.”
And now of those on both sides he demands
And gets a private channel with his friend;
But Root breaks out at once: “I never loved you;
330
Perhaps I thought I did; I never knew you;
How could I love the thing I do not know?
You used me and the others. Even now
You try to use your daughters. You transformed
Your Freya, whom I loved, into a monster;
If you’re sincere, give her back to her mother.”
“So Rose must be behind all this; but then
They call her Gaea now,” says Chance. He’s silent;
Raises the woven rose upon his glove
Where if glass did not hinder, he might kiss;
340
Such thoughts as these pass swiftly through his mind.
All those I loved when I was twenty hate me;
I have prepared a furnace for myself and must
Step in to the uttermost. She knows that I
Am a lord of death, that at my death I
Would choose, offered eternal life, to pass
Into the full absence of being; she knows
I’m happy, and I always have been happy,
So that I wish exactly what I have
And every moment is my immortality.
350
Strange how this fire of being betrayed is a
Rough cordial to me. I drink it down.
But it surprises me the world could be
So violent, the spring could be so cold.
“You’re quiet. Do you see what you have done?”
Asks Root. “But I did not come here to judge,
But to negotiate on behalf of those,
The humble ones, that lie beneath the shadow
Of your grotesque conceits, your enterprises
In the entrails of our poor mother nature.
360
This is the offer—not one I would make:
I would sit out your filthy ritual
Of suicide, and face the consequences,
Unless there were a way to break the bond
You hold your followers by—but yes, the offer.
You to yield yourselves into custody,
With no admission of arrest or guilt;
To agree to join negotiations
Whose designed end will be to terminate
All your control over the Ares Project;
370
Additionally, you shall order all
Your employees elsewhere upon the planet
To lay down arms and wait for our decisions.
We to guarantee your lives and freedoms;
Not to transport you from the planet Mars
Without your free consent, nor to encumber
Nor to break up Van Riebeck Enterprises.”
“But what about the terraforming program?”
“The planet to be sterilized, restored
To as close an image as is possible
Of its true holy God-created nature.”
380
Chance groans in soul: “So you’d abort this child,
The first new world our species has conceived?”
Root is at last abashed before the grief,
Blasphemous as it is, of the old man.
But in the twist, the very hemorrhage
Of torn love, Chance’s subtle thought clings on,
Its muscle drawing energy from pain.
He knows that they are lying, but that Root
Has an honor of his own that may
390
Out of the father’s wreck rescue the daughter.
“Very well,” at last Chance forces out.
But lest Root think him too easily won
He qualifies his terms with a condition
That there should be a hearing, here on Mars,
Where he, Freya, and his peers in the venture
Might for one last time argue and defend
The case in science and theology
For making Mars into a paradise:
The hunters’ park we dreamed of in the cave
400
Of transubstantiation into men.
Gaea Van Riebeck, Chance’s estranged wife, and their son Garrison, both of the Ecotheist Church and therefore hostile to Chance’s attempts to transform the Martian surface, receive the news of Chance’s capture. Overcoming Garrison’s objections, Gaea insists that Root break his promise not to bring Chance and Freya back to Earth to stand trial. Chance, finding as he expected that he has been betrayed, activates a prearranged alarm beacon set to raise his followers to rebellion throughout the Solar System.
Scene ii:
Gaea and Garrison
That was a hundred twenty years ago;
The choices of the likes of you and me
Have brought us where we are, where we may see
The glory road go on into the stars,
Into those cloudy, wind-torn hemispheres
That we have shut the window on forever
And must watch others take, while we cry out
When this one falls, or that one finds her Grail;
Crowd at the theater, beat our hands together.
10
And before that, and before that, were choices
Each of which sprung a branch of the green Time;
And this branch is the ghostly Virtual
Of one in which we took the glory road;
But there is nothing which is not, in this
Wildest and most intentional of worlds;
All possibles are thinly actual;
It is the choice, the act, that mutes the strands
That will not lead the way of melody;
And so I raise my voice, and call to you
20
Against the whispers of the vale of death:
To graft, graft back by your acts, this cut stem
To the sweet current of the human vein.
Even to play the audience, the reader, is
To step for an hour into laws, permissions
Demanding other being than we own;
Redeemed as those just pagans were redeemed
Who walked in the master’s comedy beneath
The bright dome of the fallen human light.
And every act acquires its mortal being
30
Only by fruiting in an audience;
The least iota of God’s body, that
We call a photon, is invisible
Until it dies upon a retina
Or gives its virtual existence up
To energize some atom’s outer shell:
What’s light if it’s not visibility?
Consider then the audience that marks
From the great, green, blue-shelled fruit of the Earth
The pulses of these late events on Mars.
40
Among the golden hills of Oxfordshire,
Between the swift Glyme and the Evenlode,
Where Grim’s Dyke marks the boundary that once
Banned the primeval forest from the fields
And gardens of a Roman villa, stands
The great house and estate of Devereux.
The Tudor hall is built of Cotswold stone;
Vanbrugh added wings and a facade
By very much more handsome, though, than fine;
Placed on a minor eminence where the wise Brown
50
Grouped giant elms, and of a lesser stream
Fashioned a greater, which by his nice art
Spread to a water sketched by Constable.
Despair and taxes wrung it from the line
That won it twice, once from the house of York,
Once from the Roundheads of Sir Thomas Fairfax.
Chancellor Van Riebeck bought it for his wife
In twenty seventeen to save it from
The Ministry of Public Recre
ation;
Restored the gardens of Enlightenment,
60
Built a great greenhouse for experiment
Into alternate Edens of his dream;
And sought by this gift of a little world
To buy a Rose to wear among the stars.
And Rose Van Riebeck lives here still, but now
She’s changed her name to Gaea; and the place
Has changed too. Their only son, Garrison,
Dwells with his mother, serves her enterprises.
They’ve given the house as headquarters of the
Environmental Protection Agency,
70
United Nations Secretariat.
The tenets of the Ecotheist Church
Frown on the hubris of the gardener,
And so the grounds have all gone back to nature.
The dainty little artificial ruin
Of Aphrodite’s temple on its isle
Is ruined now in earnest, choked with nettles;
The branched menorahs of the espaliers
In riot, yield but stony little pears;
The knots unrecognized—unless a lover
80
Of design unearthed their fragile Troy—
Are only mounds under the willowherb;
The unpruned roses have forgot their grafts
And their base stocks have sprouted lupine briers;
And in the terraces of turf and urns
Stand architect-designed prefabs of glass
And grey cement, to house the office workers,
Bicycle sheds, toilets for men and women.
Gaea and Garrison her son live here
In the cold ground floor of the old east wing;
90
Cold, for the fires are never lit these days
In the ghostly elegant fireplaces,
Tuscan marble veiled with dust. Garrison
Wakes with a choked cry: dreams of soldier-boys
Stripped to the waist to wash; camaraderie
That turns to brutal violence when they find
He is not one of them, not one of them
At all, and they deal with him as a woman,
A woman who must bear the name of soil.
The cry wakes Gaea, as it has before;
100
That very moment there’s a roaring chatter
From the autoprinter: the news from Mars.
She rips the hard copy from the machine,
Switches to aural mode, bites her ring finger;
Garrison comes in, like a sleepy boy
Pale with a fever or a sickly conscience.
Orval Root’s voice. As usual Gaea chafes;
The modulated light takes twenty minutes,
There can be no immediate reply.
Time itself cannot move fast enough;
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For is not light as simultaneous
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 4
