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Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

Page 10

by Frederick Turner


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  My son; you’re only doing what you ought.”

  “Why do you speak to me?” asks Tripitaka.

  “I am your guard appointed by the Court.

  If you want water or a pen and paper,

  Just say so and I will fetch it for you.”

  Chance shrugs his shoulders and they set off down

  The evening hillside to the World Court compound.

  Tomorrow there will be a change; at last

  The long preliminaries have concluded,

  And opening arguments will now be heard.

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  Chance’s son Garrison is to be there;

  He has not seen him for some years, and is,

  If Chance is ever thus, something afraid.

  The witnesses will be arriving too:

  Charlie Lorenz, Beatrice, Ganesh Wills,

  And Orval Root whose promise has been broken,

  And Gaea/Rose Van Riebeck in her triumph,

  In her bright, bitter, principled triumph

  Over the rapist of the holy world.

  Chance cannot sleep that night. His airy doze

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  Under the gleaming leaves has stirred his blood;

  An undertow of memory has drawn

  Him out beyond his depth, too weak to fight it.

  He scarcely listens to his lawyer’s case,

  And stares with feverish intensity

  At his son’s face, as if he sought the time

  When he had issuance from the holy place

  Whence Chance is now for ever turned away;

  And then he tries to look at Gaea-Rose,

  And cannot, and he tries again, and can;

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  It hurts him like a billy to the groin

  With hopeless love, love of what hates him, love

  That must know how it cripples where it loves.

  Bill the reporter notes this glance and files

  A piece on Chance’s interest in the trial,

  His hope that family loyalty will save

  His hide and profits from the People’s case.

  But it is otherwise. To tell the truth

  Chance has forgotten all about the trial.

  When questioned formally about his name,

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  Profession, present address and his plea,

  His answers are correct but quite distracted.

  Rosalind Redgrave, Rose of Coventry,

  The poet of the English revolution,

  Is all his study now and all his trial.

  There are some other meetings too. Charlie

  And Freya meet each other’s eyes across

  The courtroom; Charlie smiles as if to say,

  My girl we’re in hot water now, and Freya lifts

  Her head, and stares into his eyes like one

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  Who knows the time is short before their parting.

  The night before, she wept as she’d not done

  These twenty years; for Sumikami brought

  Her twins, Wolf and Irene, to the cell,

  And they at first had cried with fear at this

  Spaceburned woman from the winds of Mars,

  Whom they acknowledged theirs with horror lest

  The powers she wielded might be given over

  Into their own unready hands, to sear

  Or heal; her breasts ached for the touch of those

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  That she would never suckle now, for loss

  Attends every enaction of the will,

  And that which is is bought by living branches

  Torn from the tree of time and burned for fuel.

  But Charlie’s gentle face is full of grief

  For what he sees in Freya’s; so she smiles

  At him, and for the benefit of those

  Wise gentlemen and ladies of the press

  Who are deputed to inspect such things

  She sends a vulgar wink across the room.

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  And there’s Ganesh. The big t-shirt revival

  Has not escaped his notice; he’s got one

  That reads CONTEMPT OF COURT upon the front

  And SORRY DIDNT MEAN IT on the back.

  Tripitaka watches him amazed:

  This creature from another world has saved

  His life, and by purely technical means.

  Something like hate, the hate of man for insect,

  Makes Tripitaka shudder; something else,

  Which, if he knew it, was the dawn of laughter,

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  Lightens the warrior’s heart; confuses him.

  He looks at Sumikami for relief,

  But she has turned her countenance away;

  And Beatrice is there, her black hair like

  A cloud about her fierce madonna face;

  Now Tripitaka’s eyes, falling in pain

  From his mother’s closed presence, catch upon

  The spread hands of Beatrice as she stares

  At her father full of reproach and love;

  And in as many seconds Don John knows

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  Another of the gods that trouble men:

  The ancient shot of jealousy and shame.

  Despite her mother’s efforts, Beatrice

  Has not been brought to trial, for Chance has sworn

  Untruthfully that she was innocent;

  And, which the court counts more, the evidence

  Of her direct involvement in the rape

  Of Mars is such as might discredit what

  The court, and behind it, the church’s wisdom

  Is trying to establish as a crime.

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  She’s here under protective custody,

  A witness for the People, and the judge

  And prosecuting counsel are advised

  To keep her off the subject of the birth

  And early history of life upon

  This planet, lest it seem too natural

  To imitate those origins on Mars.

  Chiefly she will be questioned on the clones

  Of prehistoric animals she’s grown;

  The subject has made headlines in the press

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  Arousing public horror and concern.

  (Two weeks later Beatrice will reply

  To prosecution questions on this theme

  Just as the church had hoped, with hot contempt:

  “If we are playing God, so much the better;

  We might improve his work this time around.

  If he’s our real father, he’ll be pleased.”)

  That evening Garrison, who’s interested

  In all addictions, and whose power within

  The Ecotheist church provides

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  A key to many opportunities,

  Visits Ruhollah the merchant of delight.

  He goes to be appalled but stays to listen,

  And the next night he invites Tripitaka.

  The old man in his cell is brown and wizened,

  As merry as a grig, and his eyes twinkle;

  His hooked nose is as long as Lucifer’s,

  And he speaks softly in a strong French accent.

  Ruhollah is an exponent of Chiffre,

  Like Sufi to Islam, a mysticism—

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  A heresy—of Ecotheism.

  “Why,” asks Ruhollah, “My devout young friends,

  Should purity reside even in Nature?

  Is not the world of nature one of eating?

  Is it not vile that one being’s life should flow

  From the appropriation of another’s?

  Nature is but a pit of mouths, a nest

  Of bellies brewing acids into gas;

  That sin we stand condemned of was committed

  At the accursed beginning of the world.

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  We are the fragments of the Enemy,

  The demiurge who would rebel at God,

  And take ki
netic form from the potential,

  The sea of sightless light in the beginning;

  And he, the Angel, fell into the shape

  Of sensual energy and grossest matter,

  Away from that perfection he enjoyed

  At first in those transparent fields of light.

  The ground state of the world is all potential,

  And since the cause is fuller of that essence

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  That gives effect its being, than the effect,

  All action is a fall and a declension

  Into the brute adultery of time.

  The Ground is pure and indeterminate;

  Is the white joy of unenactedness;

  The big bang where the laws of time all fail;

  The place we must return to, to be saved.”

  “But what,” asks Garrison, dismayed, “about

  The innocence of nature? I can see

  How human beings are to blame; I know

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  Myself the gulfs of consciousness,

  The slimy things that grow inside the skin

  Of candor and apparent honesty;

  But as for nature, she is pure, she must be.

  Matter has no awareness what it is.”

  Now Tripitaka listens silently;

  His eyes glitter and his kendo hand

  Wanders to touch the lupus of his cheek.

  But still Ruhollah speaks again, and smiles.

  “Is not the nature that you so admire

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  That which your senses in their corruption

  Pick out to find delectable and pure?

  And if your senses, calibrated as

  They are by that depraved and self-suborned

  Selfconsciousness you loathe, were given you

  As your inheritance by nature too,

  Are they not prone to partiality,

  To hanker for the mother of their form?

  And is not consciousness itself the last

  Of many gross conceptions on itself

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  That nature practiced long before the birth

  Of humankind, its monstrous masterpiece?”

  “What then is pure?" asks Garrison despairing,

  And Tripitaka breathes the same breath through.

  “The Chiffre,” says Ruhollah; “Nothing is

  Pure; seek out that nothing and you will see.”

  “How?” “Break the incestuous cycle of reward

  By which the human brain maintains its act

  Of self-sustained desire and memory.

  My humble product, for which I am on trial,

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  Penth, is the way to perfect innocence.

  Take it and learn the nullity of saints.

  The gross diameter of thought will shrink,

  Collapse, and you will be as a point is,

  Without dimension, taint, or history.”

  And is not this Ruhollah speaking truth?

  And are not the Savonarolas of

  The world the fire that purifies its pride?

  Is not the quality of culture measured

  By the addictions that it can withstand?

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  These boys will seek the drug and the dark way

  Of this integrity, and we shall see

  What, if there is such, they can set against

  The full attainment and death of desire.

  Chance in his cell yearns like a teenager

  After his queen of night, his shadeblack rose.

  In ’02, on a visiting appointment

  At Merton, lecturing in chemistry,

  A Wunderkind of only twenty-two,

  He’d lunched in the graduate common-room

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  And found the window-seat he liked, that looked

  Across the Meadows, taken by a poet.

  Her profile threw the plane-trees out of focus

  And left a line across the Cherwell woods

  That Chance could not forget. Personal being,

  Like that dense tincture that can dye a lake

  Of water with a grain, the subtle toxin

  Added to the pipes that slays a city,

  This was the young American’s, the chemist’s

  Drug, besetting sin, his wry addiction.

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  Rosalind Redgrave was the name upon

  The oak he took such care to pass, the name

  On the notebook that he found one day upon

  The window seat, with its dark crown of poems;

  The name on the posters promised to speak

  At the small rallies against Ecotheism

  That Oxford held before they were closed down;

  And who but she must be his paramour.

  He had made good, American as he was,

  Upon the opportunity of the book,

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  And soon they might be seen in duffle-coats

  Across the ice mists of the Magdalen deerpark,

  Brushing a white rime from the iron railings

  With those gloved hands that were not holding hands.

  And in the spring they walked the Windrush valley

  Where combs of giant beeches fletched the hills,

  And colors, passionate as that brown and blue

  Which blazes from a pool befilmed with oil,

  Blew in the airscape, the ploughed fields, the streams.

  (Cream tea in the dreamvillages of stone;

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  Kisses that taste of lipstick and of love.)

  Meanwhile, alerted by the codeword ARMAGEDDON broadcast by Chance’s beacon, the men and women of Van Riebeck Enterprises arm themselves against the UN. They take and hold the planet Mars, certain industrial and agricultural satellites, and a base on the Moon. The treeship Kalevala, under the command of Ximene de Vivar, and loyal to Chance, displaces one of the ice moons of Saturn from its orbit and sets it on a course towards the inner planets Mars and Earth. Ximene’s daughter Marisol, a lieutenant, mutinies against her mother’s orders, but the mutiny is put down.

  Scene ii:

  The Fashioning of the Comet

  MAGEDDON ARMAGEDDON ARMAGEDDON.

  The message has gone out in rings of light

  And the flung seeds of Van Riebeck Enter-

  Prises stir and form for coming battle.

  The factories in solar orbit, armed

  Lightly with industrial grade lasers

  Are safe enough; their distance is their shield.

  Moonbase at Plato is a stony fortress,

  The crater glacis mined for ground attack;

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  And its great railgun, used in peace to lob

  Materiel into a close earth orbit,

  Now dominates the shining lunar sky.

  (Nevertheless the ringwall is besieged,

  The close horizon lit by glares of fire,

  And giant wrecked machines like dinosaurs

  Leave dolorous carcasses upon the plain.)

  Of twelve space islands strung around the earth

  In synchronous orbit, seven are VRE;

  Revolts break out on two, timed by the church

  20

  To coincide with the arrests on Mars.

  They are successful, for the management

  Will not endanger the civilians.

  (They will become island theocracies,

  A half-heretical embarrassment

  To orthodoxy, but the shock troops of

  The Ecotheist movement, and its conscience.)

  In the first weeks of unpreparedness

  Two more of the space stations are attacked

  With ground-launched nuclear missiles, and destroyed.

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  Over Ceylon and Ecuador two new suns shine

  With the radiance of ten thousand souls

  Screaming as their glassbound meadows bum.

  The other three have time to fortify,

  Outposts upon the frontiers of the Earth.

/>   On Mars Van Riebeck’s forces, though outnumbered

  By UN expeditionary troops,

  Achieve a series of quick victories

  Generalled wisely by Hillel Sharon,

  The tough little sabra Chance left in charge.

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  The Earthly troops are forced to the defensive,

  And soon their last redoubt, the Tharsis Plateau,

  Is stormed by toughened miners of the Firm.

  Further out still, the ships en route between

  The zones of Mars and of the asteroids,

  Must test their loyalties to cause or hope,

  And many little wars with fist and wrench

  Are fought along their loud cramped corridors.

  In general the further out the ship,

  The greater is its lean to VRE;

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  And Chance’s promises are best believed

  Among the distant moons of Jupiter.

  And I who tell this tale must be betrayed,

  For there is one of you at least who will

  Be so distressed by some great loneliness

  Or by the bitterness of this your scourge

  Or by the rank impossibility

  Of setting side by side within the mind

  The fields of Oxford and the fields of Mars

  That you will break this little game we play

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  And perhaps in secret or perhaps at large

  Carry my words and name to those who will

  Know well how to deal firmly with such things.

  Poor science-fiction. Last muse of the gods,

  The late child, stepchild, of our legendry;

  Doomed by the moment of its breath, as acts

  Upon a stage without a camera

  Are reeled off into death by their performance,

  And give themselves away so foolishly.

  A divine prophecy remains in force

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  Not despite human efforts to avoid it,

  But through them, through the human second-guessing

  Of how the oracle intends us to

  Impale ourselves upon our fate, and be,

  Like Oedipus, dragged to the sin

  By the fine thread of a noble conscience.

  But human prophecy, poor science fiction,

  Is void once known, and in the very instant

  Of its statement just another act

  Whose consequences take their chance with all

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  The countermeasures of its enemies.

  Thus it is dated at the moment of

  Its saying, and becomes a lively art.

  But this my poem is no prophecy

  Unless the savage indignation of

  Its exhortation to those shades, its readers,

  Should be construed a possibility

  That we might take the glory road at last,

 

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