And follow Chance into the blazing stars.
And if it were a prophecy, then I
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Should not desire that it be divine.
For all the legacy I wish to leave
Is that those after me might be set free;
I’d wish my gift to be the death of bondage,
Even the bondage of my words, if one
Were so constrained by them that the wellspring
Of native novelty should cease to flow;
For what is liberty but to create?
Would you prefer a novel, then? No space-travel,
No adolescent fantasy, no risk
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Of obsolescence by the brute event?
What would you pay? The characters must be
What you would call believable; their acts
Driven by some automatism you
Can recognize, and being pictured, can
Condone as human, psychological.
How we twist, struggle, scrabble at the earth,
Take any path that we might not be free.
Freedom terrifies us. To be free
Is to make, to love, to make all things new.
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Praise adolescence for at least the grace
To fantasize the unbelievable,
To row upstream against psychology,
To play against our probability.
But this is shrill. Give me that calm, you friends,
You inexhaustible daughters of joy,
That calm that the spindle turns upon,
The gold calm of the fertile mustardseed;
And let me show a symbol, a made thing.
Out over Saturn; white with a smooth grain;
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Impossible to tell how far away;
A child’s top, but double-ended; a spool,
A bobbin, naked of thread, slowly spinning;
A form as elegant as is the field
Electromagnetism weaves itself,
But pinched-waisted—an hourglass or a viol;
And our first thought was right—it’s made of wood,
Beech heartwood by the look of it, and huge—
Those shadows that the pointlike sun casts through
Its slender waist are vast, those pores and eyes
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With lights behind them, spacious apertures
Like Gaudi’s Catalonian grotesque,
Broad windows lipped with driftwood wings of bone,
Or flanged for their heavy crystal lenses.
The shadows are lit pink by Saturn’s rings.
At one end, at the center of the disc,
There is a dimple like a graphic function;
And out of it a beam of pure white light
(Tainted and rendered visible, as if a dust
Had wandered through a sunbeam, by a trace
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Of plasma fluorescing as it cools)
Shoots ruler-sharp a thousand miles behind.
About the other end—is this a vessel,
And is this the prow?—there’s a vaguer aura,
Some puddling of the light of distant stars,
That must bespeak the presence of a power
That bends the laminate of time with space.
This ship’s a living tree turned inside out.
Chance’s and Beatrice’s engineers
Of genes and cellular development
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Shaped her in secret from mutated mast
Gleaned from a windy coppice by the Glyme,
And fed her sunlight, water and sweet air
As she obeyed the new geometry
Spelled out for her in double helices.
Given enough organic chemicals the tree
Might grow to be a planetoid, a world;
Its barrelvault of heartwood, ten feet thick,
Protecting an environment of green
And leafy springtime branchiness within.
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Let us explore the great aft lobe together:
Its inner rim is deep with rich black soil
In which the rootweb flourishes upon
The wastes of this self-fed economy;
A hadean acreage where mushrooms grow,
And the moist air is ripe with fertile spores.
A glassite axle towers from stern to stem
Containing the machineries of hell
(Where Blake might lead a skeptic angel if
He would impose his vision on that spirit),
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Whose function is to suck in through the intake
The planetary gas and comet-dusts
With an electric funnel twelve miles wide,
And, like a ramjet, burn this vaporous fuel
And turn its nuclear substance into light;
Light whose reaction mass indeed is small
But whose velocity, and thus momentum,
Could scarcely be improved on by an angel.
The incandescent torch the vessel wields
Is wing and sword at once, a drive or weapon;
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And harnessed to an asteroid or comet
Becomes a miner’s pick or welder’s arc.
The forrard lobe is full of windowlight;
Part from the radiance of ancient Sol,
Part from the fusion furnaces behind
The glasswall of the axle at the core.
Conservatory of eternal dawn,
It’s laced with stories out of beechen green
Where human dwellers, like their ancestors,
Have made their lairs in clusters or alone
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Among the silvery sensitive and bescarred boles
Of the bright emerald monoforest.
The tree is grafted with a second life:
Orchards of apples, figs, and mangotrees,
A fruit-lit orangery like a street
Of Christmas lanterns, garlanded with flowers;
The air’s bright with the screech of colored birds.
A little prairie by a concave lake
Pastures a herd of somnolescent cows;
A net of streambeds carries runoff when
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The huge vessel changes its momentum,
And irrigates these arched slopes of eden.
Above, the dweller sees a detailed map
Of what lies on the far side of his world,
A map which is also reality,
Pierced by the mullions of the distant light.
The ship is named Kalevala, and smells
Of lemon trees and showers and cooking-smoke;
And like the clippers of the southern seas
Creaks when the press of speed is on her, so
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A music haunts its pinched harmonic sphere,
A sweet groan like the sound of sea or wind.
And as we watch, the fiery torch goes out.
The ship’s commander, Ximene de Vivar,
Has given orders to the main computer
To put the vessel in a grazing orbit
About the equatorial belt of Saturn; now
The braking burn is over, and the ship
Coasts to its rendezvous within the ring.
Immensity beyond immensity.
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Where’s “below”? The world-arch of glittering flakes,
Salmon-colored, above a further ring
Of heart-besieging blue? But no below
Could be so glassy, so translucent, Cin-
Derella’s slipper, Christmas-tree bauble-
Colored, like Hark-the-Herald-Angel wings.
“Below” must be the other, that which the eye
Avoids, lest the whorls of the inner ear
Be rapt with vertigo, seduced to fall
Into its ever-coiling lakes of oil,
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Its oceanic paisleys, fractal-trimmed
With fringes of eddies, turned inside out,
So that their crimson-ocher linings show
Pretty regurgitations and inversion layers,
Each one a hurricane, Pacific-sized.
Does the ear feel kinship with that bellowing,
Oracle-cave, labyrinth-dizzy place,
That it so yearns to fall there? Look not down,
Says the eye, who, bound, must take control.
Lucky for us it is so silent here
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Above the howling toil of planet-work;
But had we sensors as the ship has, that
Can strain the wavebands for their wailing myths,
We might be mesmerized by what they said,
The ineffable meaningless word they
Almost articulated, Saturn’s Voice,
That we might never come among our kind
Again, and be the servants of a god.
Ah, but see now. The terminator sweeps
Across the planet’s face. The darkside’s lit
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By ringlight, but that golden glow is met
From below with a more sinister fire:
Diffused, a leprous magic white in fits
Of netted spreadings breaking out and fading
To show, beneath a further veil, cold glows
Dimmed by their distance in the middle air:
Storm-lightnings in continuous discharge.
Down there the thunder’d break the human ear
Spill its warm ichor to the acid wind;
But it’s as beautiful as one entire
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And perfect opal in the ear of God.
Captain Vivar, her hands at the controls
Of the ship’s telescope array, is searching
That clot or twist within the ring wherein
Tumbles the moonlet named S26.
It will be renamed Kali the destroyer,
Creator of the worlds; but it must first
Be broken into halves and slung around
The gravitation well of father Saturn.
No greater weapon ever was conceived
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Nor fashioned by the gentle human hand;
This is the task Ximene has been commanded
By that faint voice whispering Armageddon.
And there it is. A drift of icebergs clears
To show that huger moon, a battered spheroid
Thirty miles in radius, brilliant
With pikes of yellow ice, pitted with scars,
Cracked with the tidal forces of its past
Encounters at close perihelion.
And now it vanishes. The planet’s shadow
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Swallows its moon, and with a blaze of color
Stranger than any earthly evening, lit,
It might be, by Krakatoan suns, but
Brief, brief, the broad limb slams the sunlight shut.
Ximene is patient. When the light returns,
She must give orders, be the cool commander.
Now it is time to get a little sleep.
She stands, flips off the viewscreen, turns to leave.
Ximene is tall, a willowy strength of waist,
A pale clear face like a middle-aged saint;
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Black hair and bright black eyes. As if a mirror
Stood before her suddenly, but one
Which had the power of turning age to youth,
Another woman looks her in the face.
Her daughter Marisol. “No. I can’t do it.
I see this comet every time I dream,
Falling in blood upon the home of man.
Even the threat of such a holocaust
Is evil worse than any they have done.
It makes us just like they are. Help me, mother.”
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“Are you refusing, Marisol, to lead
The anchor team tomorrow, as you warned?”
“Yes, mother. And I’m asking for your help.”
Ximene is suddenly as tired as death;
She makes the usual arguments-—that they
Will never let the comet fall to Earth;
That it enforces reasonable claims;
That Kali is creator as destroyer;
That the planned flight of this enormous missile
Will take it down to Mars to be the source
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Of Martian oceans and of Martian skies;
That a mid-course correction still is needed
To let the weapon fall upon the Earth;
That threats of sacrifices just as dark
Have been the driving-force of history—
But as Ximene looks in her daughter’s face
The logic seems to waver and run pale
Like water-painting under pouring rain.
And Marisol sees how it is with her,
And feels her mother’s weakness as her own;
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She wishes she could give away some sign
Permitting an agreed means of escape,
Whereby the moral pressure might be eased—
Even an open break, the invocation
Of the codes of discipline and command—
So that Ximene can call the ship’s gendarmes
And, honor satisfied on both sides, clap
A mutinous junior officer in irons—
And Marisol, her conscience quieted,
Might sit out actions which she half-connives
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By following the antique roles of conflict.
But she must make it all as hard as she
Can make it for her mother; ethics here
Allows for no compassion, when the world
Itself, the ground of all morality
Is made the pawn of struggle and the forfeit
If some unhappy hero fails to flinch.
And Ximene knows her daughter, and knows too
In one long moment of insight and care
How Marisol has chosen to impale
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Her own deepest love on the icy horns
Of sacrifice, and further, how that choice
Is as her mother taught her how to be.
And whether it’s better to destroy the race
Rather than lose the meaning of the race,
Which is to make—to master, mother, mate,
And matter to, the world—or if the race
Alive transcends all causes that it makes;
Or whether that eternal trial of loves,
Between Antigone and Creon, or
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Between Lear’s way and that of naked Tom,
The trial itself! be what must count the most;
Ximene now knows again what she will do.
“Lieutenant de Vivar, you disobey
An order and are thus a mutineer.
Consider yourself under ship’s arrest
Until such time as you are brought to trial.”
And now as she had half-expected, there
Is a pistol in Marisol’s right hand;
And as Ximene steps forward to be shot
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Or take the weapon by an act of violence
She sees with grief a possibility
More terrible than any yet; her daughter
Is collapsing, and can’t shoot; and Ximene
Has beaten down what she would, more than any
Outcome in the world, have straight and tall
And peerless in her world of moral will.
But at the final instant Marisol
Raises the gun again to fire; too late;
The mother’s trained karate kick disarms her;
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The next moment the room is full of guards.
And now Kalevala has rendezvoused
With Kali, and a cloud of smaller craft—
Lighters, cable-layers, command modules—
Descends towards the surface. Anchor-points
Are drilled, the ship made fast, its plasma-jet
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Directed at the surface of the object;
All personnel withdraw to watch the burn;
A white actinic light comes on, like dawn,
Turning at once to green, violet, peacock
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As the hot sublimed gases fluoresce.
Soon fire blossoms on the farside, as
A burning glass will sear a paper through.
The ship is moved, the process is repeated,
Until a web of narrow shafts is driven
Throughout the planetoid. Next, sappers drop
Toward the surface in their freight modules
Manhandling with their stubby arms the blunt
Black cylinders of demolition charges;
And these are heavy nuclear munitions
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Designed for mining in the asteroids.
The charges set, the shafts tamped shut, the ship
Withdrawn a thousand-some kilometers away,
Ximene waits for the launch window to open.
The ship’s computer works in nanoseconds;
Any error here will add up to
A million miles a little later on.
Around the waist of Kali there’s a flare
Of unenduring light. And then she’s two;
One the reaction mass to drive the other:
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Now Chance has got his hammer in his hand.
The account of the trial now resumes, in the form of excerpts from the testimony for and against the accused. Various legal, scientific, moral, theological and philosophical aspects of terraforming are explored. We must guess the identity of some of the speakers, but they obviously include members of the Van Riebeck family, Orval Root, an expert witness from the Audubon Society, a scholar of medieval law, and an Ecotheist theologian; the voices of the prosecuting attorney and the attorney for the defense, Chance’s lawyer Giambattista Vico, are also heard. The Martian forces announce that the ice moon of Saturn, now named comet Kali, is on a collision course with Earth. Though in reality aimed at Mars, the comet is seen and intended to be seen as a veiled threat to gain the release of the Van Riebeck Enterprises leadership.
Scene iii:
The Trial
Words from the trial of Chancellor Van Riebeck:
“If it’s against the law,” says Charlie Lorenz,
“To use recombinant gene splice techniques
To generate new forms of life, then we
Must punish those who choose the sweetest apple
And save its seed to grow another tree;
Dog-breeders must all go to jail; the bride
Who chose her groom because his face and limbs
Were handsome to her, his mind admirable—
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So that she wished, as people say, to bear
This good man’s child—must stand condemned with Chance.
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 11
