Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

by Frederick Turner

  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;

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  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.

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  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;

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  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.”

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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,

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  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,

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  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.

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  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

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  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?

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  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;

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  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;

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  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.

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  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.

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  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;

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  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.”

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  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

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  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

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  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.

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  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

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  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

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  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.

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  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

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  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,

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  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,

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  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

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  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;

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  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;

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  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