Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

by Frederick Turner

And strange peripherals he plies his trade;

  The ancient term “computer nerd” finds here

  Its archetype, the Hacker Platonized.

  Billy was born in 1974,

  40

  The late son of an Indian Army sergeant;

  He stayed in India as a tea-planter,

  Went native, married the plump Evalina;

  No children came, and so a restlessness

  Drove them to knock about the world until

  While visiting the aborigines

  In Queensland once they slept beside the shrine

  Called Maker Of The Seeds in their strange tongue,

  And—miracle—there Mrs. Wills conceived.

  After some wandering the three fetched up

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  In an apartment in South San Francisco.

  Ganesh turned out to be a prodigy;

  A genius in spatial mathematics

  And in computers maybe something more.

  Then Charlie Lorenz found him, just fifteen,

  A senior at San Francisco State,

  Told Chance about him, and the boy was hired

  For enough pay to buy his folks a home.

  Ganesh was playing on the school computer

  A game which was the key to life on Mars:

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  The last piece of the puzzle to be solved

  Whose pattern is the seed of a new world,

  That garden whose bright gates were closed so long.

  What tone then should I take to tell these things?

  The spirit moves in a mysterious way:

  Sometimes by the winged little phallus-gods,

  The Daktyls, the gremlins of mechanism,

  The fingers of a boy of seventeen.

  The boisterous ghost of Melville be my guide,

  Who knew the polyp-god, and built the ship

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  Whose wood could only be American;

  We should not know whether to laugh or weep

  Or pray, or rant, or dance, or pass the mustard.

  Ganesh’s eyes, then, large behind their lenses

  Stare from each side of an enormous nose;

  A sprinkling of acne mars his cheeks;

  The dark brown skin bequeathed him by his mother

  Stretches on knobby bones and gangling scrawn;

  But look back at the eyes and see a gleam

  Of wit, intelligence; and even charm.

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  A call comes through for Ganesh on the phone.

  It’s Charlie Lorenz in New Mexico:

  He’s speaking from the old Van Riebeck home

  In Taos where the maguey is in flower.

  “It’s uncle Charlie. Problems for the brain.”

  Charlie still has a faintly German accent.

  “Our new baby: a sulfur bug which gives

  Accelerated photosynthesis

  That we are tailoring for phase sixteen.

  Routine photolysis in Martian soil,

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  It seems, won’t be enough. Just like they did

  Three point five gigayears ago on Earth,

  Those damn oxygen sinks sop it all up:

  Beatrice showed us, with the banded rocks.

  We need some chemistry. These bugs will strip

  The hydrogen from water to unlock

  Their sulfates from the nicotinamides

  And belch pure oxygen—” “Yea, Charlie,” Ganesh says;

  “But what’s the hitch?” “We want an organelle

  That can’t be reconstructed from the fossil.

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  Have you got anything like that for me?”

  “Not in realtime. Might I should speed things up?

  The tank is pretty quiet now, but I

  Could feed some fancy shit into the core

  That should get action in an hour or two.”

  “I’ll be right there. See you in San Francisco.”

  Our hero has the time to nix the raster

  (Slang for a ‘copter), take a car instead.

  Now in these prancing ‘thirties of nostalge,

  Of crinolines, of top hats, and the waltz,

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  The roads glittered with Panhards, Benzes, Cords,

  Rumbleseat Oldses, classic Studebakers;

  ’Nesh drives a cream Bugatti Crown Royale.

  He tools this hog across the Golden Gate,

  Heads for the Novus Ordo (and again

  I must translate: the flanged pyramid

  Of the old Transamerica building),

  The western office of Van Riebeck Enterprises;

  Hauls down her polished nose into his space.

  Charlie fresh off the tube is stooped and smiling,

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  His face brown, his hair untimely white;

  He straightens, like a German, to his height,

  When Ganesh shakes his hand—the eyebrow flash,

  The nod, the quick stare out of the brown eyes.

  At once he’s led through to the terminal.

  The game Ganesh invented at thirteen

  Might with some profit be called a disease.

  It was a program that would reproduce,

  Copy itself across a memory core,

  Infect the local operating system,

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  And worm its way from RAM up into ROM.

  Its vector was the disk; and human beings

  Were now the rats that carried on the plague.

  It was a battle program and would fight

  Any suppression code sent down to clean

  A core choked up with copies of itself.

  Ganesh had called it ZO; in a few weeks

  Half San Francisco caught this software AIDS.

  Only Ganesh knew how to disinfect

  The clogged and crashing hardware of the Bay;

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  The trade community on bended knees

  Promised a new computer for the school;

  Bought with this ransom, Ganesh, mollified,

  Produced his antidote, DOCTOR FEEL GOOD.

  The Doctor was the first selectrophage;

  It ate the tagged code of the enemy

  And recognized and left the rest unharmed.

  But now Ganesh was hooked. He’d loved his ZO;

  He wondered if the program could be taught

  To learn from its defeats, adapt, become immune.

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  Suppose each copy came out different;

  The Doctor might not recognize them all.

  Or what if every copy had a skin

  About its program space, that did not give

  Away the nature of the code within.

  The skin might be expendable, and grow

  Again, and even learn and change, to face

  The changing nature of the outer threat.

  What if—Ganesh, fourteen years old, had felt

  The stirrings of a pubertal unrest—

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  The copies could combine, swap information,

  Spawn generations of a fitter strain?

  “Let’s take the tour,” Ganesh suggests to Charlie,

  And switches on the big screen of the tank.

  “I changed sulfox parameters an hour ago.

  I’ve got it wired for sound since you were here.”

  The moan and whistle of an echo sounder;

  Jamming; the munch of programs being eaten;

  A shrill mating call; territorial song.

  Behind the screen things drift and wait and spasm.

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  “Look! There’s a dozer coming through. He’ll just

  Browse through this sector for the weed and krill.

  But you can see he’s sick. He’s caught a virus

  Bugged with a randomizer organelle,

  Doesn’t know how to clean it from his genes.

  A humperdumper screwed him, I would guess.

  There’s lots of them about. They simulate

  The phe
romones of programs hot to mate

  And do a memory dump into their cores.

  Look. That’s a possum, only playing dead.

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  Now we can’t see. Excelsior or fluff.

  Or maybe toejam simply silting up:

  That’s crude bacteria no one wants to eat—”

  There is a bang, a blinding flash of light.

  “How about that? Artillery. Now watch.”

  In the cleared space a program now appears,

  Swims with her pseudopods toward a reef

  Of “coral”—skeletons of programs, dead

  But nutritive and full of information;

  Then as she feeds, a bud swells up and bursts,

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  And a small daughter spreads and swims away.

  Charlie gives Nesh a look. “What is all this?

  You’re showing off. Take me to Mars.” “OK,”

  Says Nesh reluctantly. “To quarantine.”

  His flying fingers flutter on the keys

  And the screen changes to a murky brown.

  Ganesh turns up the gain and scans around.

  Electrodyes have tagged the chemistry.

  A blur of purple tells him he has found

  The sulfur process he is looking for.

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  He zeroes in. “It’s still too primitive,”

  Says Charlie sadly. “Don’t you fret your mind,”

  Ganesh replies. “I’ve put in new equipment

  And I can run this whole environment

  Faster by five orders of magnitude.”

  He hits a switch. In simulated time

  Ten million years go by; a generation

  Lives and dies in thirty nanoseconds.

  “Now let’s see.” The pace of time slows down.

  This time the web of purple organelles

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  Is brilliant and well-defined. “That’s it,”

  Says Charlie, lights his filthy briar;

  “Let’s get hard copy, beam it to the ranch.”

  That very moment there’s a warning chime

  And the great control board, ganged as it is

  To Novus Ordo’s central processor,

  Lights up all over with Priority.

  The white dish that stares up to the southeast

  From the bayside wing of the pyramid

  Has caught through the violet and azure dusk

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  Of this cool summer California evening

  (So swiftly do the mindgames that we play

  Abolish the tedium of afternoons)

  A signal relayed from the satellite

  That hangs forever over Amazonas:

  A word driven by a dying pump across

  The tidal chaos of the gravid sun:

  GEDDON ARMAGEDDON ARMAGEDDON

  A catch. All other times behind the corner;

  Like death, or the lit girl face of the bride,

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  Or the harsh new voice of the newborn child,

  Or the judge’s sentence, or the first blood

  Of puberty or battle, it strikes dumb.

  Ganesh has thrown a bank of switches to;

  Charlie is on the phone, speaking slowly;

  A veetol aircraft shrieks above the flange,

  VRE on its veered flank caught by the dusk light;

  Then they are tumbling up into its belly

  Into the rational comfort of its lounge,

  And the racket clamps out as the door seals.

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  Nesh has sowed softworm programs in the air

  And tracker radars have gone green and blind.

  The ghostshine fans angle to vertical,

  The liquid crystal airspeed window blurs;

  Police in pale blue uniforms burst through

  The yellow doorway of the landing pad.

  Lady of destructions, I know your face,

  Skulled years as it is, as it were my own.

  You danced that evening barefoot on the stones,

  The megalithic sandstones of the house

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  In Taos where seven full generations

  Of the American Van Riebecks lived

  And died. Beatrice. Your broad white girl face

  With its brown eyes, like Leonardo’s picture

  Of the lady Ginevra, your black hair

  In its wild abundance, they stop my mind.

  And this house is a house of lovely faces:

  That one who has just bowed and retired,

  Having at last settled the twins to sleep,

  Must soon enough bear our insistent gaze.

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  The mistress dances on her little feet;

  She too has heard the wail of Armageddon;

  She knows the sensors show a net of foes

  Waiting to catch her friends and family;

  She dances for the fairy Virgin Mary.

  And Mary-Kali is the god she seeks

  In the violence of the earth’s first life-womb;

  When the ancestral clays were cast aside

  By volatile calyptral ribosomes

  Whose bodies were such souls as might remember

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  The form the body took, and resurrect

  Their fragile, stinging shapes, thirsty for time;

  Beatrice Van Riebeck studied stones from when

  The universe was younger by a third

  And in their faces saw the birth of life

  And of life’s twin, the labyrinths of time;

  She knew those ages when our Terra groaned

  With poison freed by photosynthesis

  Whose sharp mephitic breath that slew the slimes

  Would, as sweet oxygen, be sucked for fuel

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  By the expedient eukaryotes

  Betraying, as life must, their ancestors.

  She watched the chordates kill the jellyfish,

  And knew the great defection from the sea,

  And praised the crafty mammals, nepotists

  That gave unfair advantage to their kin

  And so saw off the gorgeous dinosaurs

  With their antique vacuous headpieces.

  All life was a flame of joy and betrayal.

  The holiest love and tender sacrifice,

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  The baby at the breast, the arts of peace,

  Were the most finished, fiercest weaponry

  To carve a kingdom in the time to come.

  Moon rises pink like copper in a sky

  Polished out of obsidian. As if

  The land had curled up at the edges to

  Bask in her Mayan radiations, all

  New Mexico springs into dark relief.

  Bea feels it inside, goes out to watch,

  Breathe the smell of a desert garden, snakeskins,

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  Rocks split by sunheat, resin, cactus, sage;

  Aloes cracked open so their green flesh weeps

  An odor alien, obscene, and pure.

  A cool air comes from under the veranda;

  Disheveled mounds of warmed wisteria

  Are white as hammered tin, cut out in shapes

  Where potted lemon trees have cast their shadows.

  It’s one of those nights when coyotes howl;

  She feels their rough fur in her blood, and sees

  With their own superstitious moonglazed eyes.

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  Bea rocks almost with vertigo,—as always,

  Here, where the whole floor of the country, bearing

  Upon it plains of stones and piñon, leans

  Downward a hundred miles into the dark—

  How may one keep one’s footing on the slope;

  But the ranch house holds on, its massive eaves

  Joined of huge timber silvered like driftwood,

  Lintels of cypress, squared sandstone walls;

  And, setting the level in perspective, ride

  The gaunt limbs of the Sa
ngre de Cristo range.

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  But Beatrice is suddenly aware

  Of a new light that glares upon the land;

  She backs away to see over the house

  Where, as she knows, beyond a precipice

  An isolated mesa of this scarp

  Notched with the charred cubes of a pueblo fortress

  Is hung as if no chasm intervened

  Over a crowded quadrant of old stars.

  A hill of fire, twinkling, veiled, enormous

  Billows over the mountain; above that

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  A blinding coal draws out its torched arrow,

  Which, flocked and granular with turbulence,

  Grows to a pillar, softens, drifts, and turned

  By the winds’ helix of the upper air

  Fades fluorescent into northern light.

  She cries out softly that “They’ve got away,”

  In that stopped-diapason note her voice

  Takes on in triumph or in tragedy;

  And then the battering strobe of shock strikes dumb

  All thought but those the feet and belly know:

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  A rumble scarcely recognized as sound.

  A hand laid gently on her elbow; she starts, turns

  To Charlie’s thin face smiling in the fire.

  Mimed questions; but he hurries her inside.

  “Ganesh took up the shuttle; he will try

  To circumvent the orbital patrols.

  I’m staying here where I can be most useful.

  We have much work.” “Sit down and tell me first:

  How did you make it past the polizei?—

  They’ve got the place staked out in infra-red.”

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  “A little trick I learned from reading Homer.

  I started out by pissing on a tree…”

  They’d ditched the raster by the Rio Grande,

  Said their goodbyes and set out in the night.

  Charlie headed straight for coyote country;

  Started to mark his trail the way they do.

  He stopped and put his nose up in a croon;

  Almost at once his old friends had arrived.

  And there they were, whining in the moonlight:

  Lucky, Minette, the Broonze, and Sukey Tawdry;

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  Saint Louis Woman, Jack, and Mister Smooth,

  The Duchess, and Oddjob the alpha male.

  Charlie put out his muzzle to be mouthed,

  Ritualized a bite at Jack the Knife,

  Sniffed at each welcome ass that was presented,

  And turned his neck to show his caudal flash.

  There was such cheer and pleasure at his coming,

  Never so much besnuffling, growling, love,—

  When Charlie asked them if they’d run with him

  (Though Charlie’s rank was beta in the pack)

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  What could they do, yearlings or dominant,