Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars
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(Its dissipation with its origin,
No intervening happening between
To measure how it passes) as may be
Within this universe of mutual
Approximations?—where the only being
Is the difficulty and decay
That marks the finest and most mortal drama,
The most unreconciled, the most in pawn?
Won’t Root get to the point? Have they caught Chance?
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And Freya too? But made some promises?
What promises? “Listen to him, Garrison;
He’s lying, and he knows we will renege.
He wants to rescue Freya for himself.
He thinks that he can talk her out of it
And save her soul and win her from her father.
She’s just as dangerous as Chance is; more,
Because younger. Root underestimates
Not only her, but Chance. Chance planned all this.
Root underestimated Lorenz too—
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Never underestimate Herr Charlie:
Why did she marry him if he’s so harmless?
Freya will eat this Orval Root alive.”
“Mother,” says Garrison, “I didn’t know
That you were after Freya too. She is
Your daughter and my sister. Can’t we do
Whatever we must do without—” “Don’t think,
Garrison, leave that to me. Now we have them,
Don’t we owe it to Nature to destroy
Her enemies? And Charlie too; and we
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Had better gather in your other sister,
The pretty one, the favorite, the butter
Wouldn’t melt in her mouth one, Beatrice.
Even the Pimple, the boy genius,
Ganesh—he is too clever to be safe.”
To Garrison she seems a lovely demon,
Never more beautiful and all alive
Than when, wrought by her possession, she speaks
In runs and hesitations, flashingly,
Not loathed even at her most serpentine,
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For the vitality of very nature
Forks out at her eyes and makes her holy.
She can be plain enough, as she is now,
A mobcapped queen in a crumpled nightgown:
Her brown hair with coarse strands of viral white;
A feverish flush under her brown skin
That shines despite the fine-blown net of cells;
Her limbs’ flesh falling slightly from the bone;
Her heavy breasts gone whiter in their cleft.
“Mother, it’s all come further than I thought,”
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Says Garrison; “I feel the pull of forces
Out of my grasp, that draw me to dark ends
Smelling of blood, and worse, but sweet. Yes, sweet.
Might we defending what we know is good
Be strangers to ourselves and to each other?
Fall from the ordinary paths of conscience?
Why are we doing this? Tell me again.”
“If you were half the man your father is
You wouldn’t waste the precious time with doubts.
He doesn’t hesitate. That’s why he must
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Be stopped: he opens doors that can’t be closed.
Listen again. The ecotheist faith
Tells us that Nature is our loving mother;
That in Her service Jesus died for us
Showing the way of self-abasement to
The cup of acquiescence in Her will;
That all the pattern of all holy forms
Was stored up from eternity in Her;
And innovation is the cacogen,
The cancer that eats out Her loving body,
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Brought, by our fall, into the world of light;
And the chief evil that afflicts Her is
Technology, its blight and vicious pride.
Don’t you see that in Chance your father? How
He roots the sweet groin of your mother Nature?
How in the evil ecstasy of art
He thinks himself above both man and God?
We are all equals in the universe;
To celebrate the glory of one man
Over another is to disobey
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The laws of Nature and ecology.
Would you go back, in moral similitude,
To the foul times when we, the master race,
Butchered the Indians, the Blacks, the Jews?
When the brute male, with his proud pink chopper,
Strutted like Agamemnon on the web
Before his slave-girls to the sacrifice?
Remember how we slew the gentle whales,
The giant mother full of milk before
Her innocent bewildered calf, and made
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Those citizens of Eden bear the rage
We leveled against God’s Leviathan,
And boiled their holy corpses for their oil?
Consider, if he had his way, we’d eat,
As we once did, the limbs of fellow-beings;
Ghouls, resurrect out of the mummied flesh
The extinct forms of the mammoth and the elk
And the quagga, and the titanothere?—
He claimed, before the Council, that he served—
A blasphemy—the ends of Mother Nature
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By bringing back the lives our sins had shed;
That Techne should repair the wounds it made;—
Doesn’t this show how dangerous he is,
That he is seeking to conceal or pay
The debt we owe to Nature, and wipe out
By our aspiring sin the very sin
We do when we escape the bonds of nature?
Isn’t this why the Council ruled that we
Must keep as the sign of our wretchedness
All the corrupt technology we’ve made,
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Not adding nor subtracting the least jot
Of our long penance over Nature’s wounds,
Lest either we should hold the sin too light
Or overween that we might pay it off?
If you will not believe your mother yet,
Think how the sovereign virtue, pity, tells
You to hate that man and his daughters for
Their insult to the poor common man.
For they would, like the fiery lords of old
Show to the ordinary folk a mirror
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Wherein they see the gorgeous idols of
The hero and the genius and the lover;
And so make miserable those whose lot
It would be, in a world that Chance commanded,
To serve, to be the foot-soldiers, the slaves.
All those that claim themselves extraordinary
And promise it to others, must be damned.
Pity for the great mass of men demands it.
If you’re my son you’ll do your clear duty;
Privileged yet, to be enabled thus
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To give so much, father and sisters, to
The loving One we wounded with our crimes;
Unworthy to be chosen so to give.
“Your qualms, if less than manly, may be useful,
Though, it now occurs to me. That you
Find it repugnant to make Freya pay
The price of her besottedness with Chance
Suggests that Root will more than do the same,
Given his old infatuation with her.
We must tell Root our plan that she stand trial
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In dock with her father where she belongs,
Lest he betray us and so let her go.”
She turns now to the keys of the transmitter,
While Garrison, ignored, must stand behind her,
Ashamed at h
is gauche tallness, his nightclothes,
His face, even, that wears the look of one
Who has attained his dearest wish and now
Groans, for it tastes of ash and bitterness.
The heavy lamp beside his hand could smash
Her skull; horror; he flings himself away.
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Now she begins to dictate carefully
The terms on which Chance will be brought to trial;
Freya is to be held in custody
And brought back too as a material witness.
Follow the signal back across the voids
To the cramped temporary dome at Lowell;
Night in the southern hemisphere of Mars.
Better accommodation there is none:
The other bases of Van Riebeck Enterprises,
Alerted to the moves of the UN,
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Have, under standing orders, closed their ports
And armed themselves with makeshift weaponry
Awaiting word from Chance or from his aides.
Captives and captors have small privacy.
Stripped of their armor they must know each other
As close as friends. Let me describe them then.
Root is as hairy as poor Esau was
In the hard story of Jacob. His head
Is all slopes and blockish Egyptian planes;
His shaven countenance shines painfully;
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A fundamentalist from Alabama,
His eyes are slanted, hooded, like a girl’s,
The self behind alert for injury,
And his small stout arms stand out helplessly.
Chance is a short dark man, now fifty-two,
With a scarred face and brilliant brown eyes
That turn with a frank question to your own;
His hair is black and curly, with no gray;
He’s agile, quick, but with great breadth of shoulder,
Hands neat and deft; laughs easily and long.
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At first sight Freya has inherited
Little from either parent. She is small,
Fair, with a fur of short blond hair, green eyes,
Large hands and head, with a wolf’s high cheekbones.
But soon the acute observer might perceive
The very quickness and dispatch of Chance,
Gaea’s demonlike fluency of speech,
Her father’s easy strength of shoulder-blade,
A trick he has of folding with his fingers
Some scrap of paper into curious shapes;
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Her mother’s nose; her father’s clear white skin.
While Root reports to Earth, the prisoners
Are locked up in a storeroom whose curved wall
Groans as the dome shrinks with the cold of night.
At last Root has got through with the transmissions,
And comes to give the news to Chance and Freya.
He can look neither of them in the eyes,
But tells them blankly they must go to Terra
Where Chance is to stand trial. At that Chance grins.
“It takes one’s breath away, this Earthly honor.
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You must feel privileged,” he says to Root,
“To be the instrument of policies
Of such mysterious integrity
That even the faithful are demonstrably
Tested in their faith, like Abraham.
Or was this masterstroke of strategy
Entirely your idea?” Root flushes, blinks,
Then stares at his tormentor. “Listen, Chance.
You and your men are murderers; society
Withdraws itself from you; contracts are void
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When made under duress, as this one was.”
“So we are in a state of nature, are we?”
Chance replies. “Your Ecotheist friends
Maintain that nature is the source of law.
They would be grieved to hear you say
That law derives from human ordinance.”
“I am a scientist and not a lawyer.
I do my duty—” “Ah, a specialist,”
Says Chance. “Then might I speak to someone who
Can take responsibility for what he does—
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A free agent, perhaps, a human being?”
“You use your cleverness to excuse your crime.
This is what the religious mean by Satan.
Look at your pride, your pretty bullying,
Never contented, trying to make others
As unhappy as you are, even Freya,
Whom you are dragging with you in your fall.”
Now Freya turns on him. “What you can’t stand,”
She says, “is the sick thought that he is free.
No, it’s not even that. It’s that he is
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Greater in all respects than you can be;
You are too small to celebrate the joy
He has in being, but too big to bear
The knowledge that in all experience
He has gone further and prevented you.”
“Nobody can go further than the truth,”
Root says in pain to Freya, whom he loves,
“All human progress can only approach
The perfect laws that lie behind the world,
That brought it into being, are no more
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Nor less than they were from eternity.
Freya, it’s not too late. Don’t throw yourself
Into illusion with him, to the burning.
Come back. There is still time.” “And what is time?”
Asks Chance, for Freya, bored, will not reply:
“Can it mean anything when there are no
Surprises, no whole new lawfulnesses,
No new contracts, covenants to be made?
This is the mere beginning of the world,
Its overture, its first birdsinging dawn.
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Who knows what falls, what bright redemptions may
Burst from the fresh volcano of the time?
Might not the Enemy Himself, bright Lucifer,
Be saved one day and sit at the right hand
Of the divine Joke-master of the game?
Might we be Him, the demon, and might not
That demon be the role of God when He
Acts out His comedy, His tragedy
Here in the mortal, only flesh of time?
—Kingdom of Heaven’s like a mustardseed,
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Remember, the new bottles, the new wine.”
Root feels the grief rise in his bitter gut,
And a deathlike weariness passes through him;
And Chance looks sharply at him, sees his pain.
His old friend almost cannot bear to live,
Life is so difficult for every man;
And Chance’s anger ebbs away at once
With pity for this mortal creature who
Stands there indeed with power of life and death
Over the man who so distresses him.
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The captor has become the prisoner,
And the betrayer is the one betrayed.
Chance takes his enemy within his arms,
And gently speaks. “Orval old son, come on;
It can’t be helped, I know you have to do
What you must do, and it will soon be over.”
But Chance, in all his pity, will not yet
Reveal the plan that he has long prepared:
The beacon planted on Olympus Mons,
Its timer triggered when they left the swamp;
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Its signal to go out unless the voice
Of its master speak on the air the code
That will deactivate its programming;
The slow pump-bomb that cannot be defused;
The powerful transmitter t
hat it drives
Which must, to all the bases of Van Riebeck Enter-
Prises broadcast, over and over again,
The roaring of an electronic god
Speaking the word agreed among themselves
Whether on Mars or in the Asteroids,
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Or in the Jovian Moons: ARMAGEDDON.
We meet Ganesh Wills, whose work in computer synthesis of evolving live organisms has been essential in the creation of bacteria that will survive in the Martian environment; also Charlie Lorenz, Chance’s planetary ecologist and husband of Freya. Warned by Chance’s beacon, they escape arrest in San Francisco. Charlie evades UN pickets at the Van Riebeck ranch in New Mexico by running with his friends the coyotes; and he joins his sister-in-law there, Chance’s other daughter the paleobiologist Beatrice Van Riebeck. Ganesh escapes into orbit on a shuttle rocket.
Scene iii:
Ganesh, Charlie, Beatrice
A sound scholar of those eventful times
Might reconstruct without malapropism
The flying slangs that doodled on the air
Pregnant of new anachronisms, traps
For the linguistically unwary, signs
And countersigns issued from who knows where.
The amateur, upon the other hand,
Makes plausible stand in for accurate,
Since Ganesh Wills cannot be understood
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Without a sense of language tumbling
And bubbling from the mold, as if the spirit
Sported fresh incarnations into being
At the hot edge of the semiconductor.
Picture the Willses chez eux in Sausalito,
Their tract house so banal that it’s bizarre—
Set there among the Moorish minarets,
The haciendas, hobbit-holes, and yurts,
The houseboats and the yellow-painted dachas,
The Schwarzwald hunting lodges and the domes
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That cluster round the north shores of the Bay.
Billy “Tosher” Wills, our hero’s father
Raises gigantic spuds in his backyard
Nourished to elephantiasis
On dark decoctions mixed of milk and stout
And horse manure and ashes and fish-meal
Peppered with potash, nitrates, phosphorus:
With these he wins Bay Area garden trophies.
His wife, nee Evalina Chaudhuri,
A name unapt to the pentameter,
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Suspects he spends a richer milt than malt
Upon these fruits of—so to say—his loins.
The fruit himself, Ganesh, is seventeen:
Lives in the stygian “family room” beneath
The regions of more normal human beings.
There at his galleries of chips and cores