Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

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Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 18

by Frederick Turner


  Away—too slowly, somehow, and the rain

  Upon the concrete dances slowly up

  In languid sheets, and doesn’t know where to flow.

  To one side the ground falls rapidly off

  And through the haze an ocean far below

  Wobbles with huge and oily swells; a boom

  Like the deepest bass tells of its impact.

  Here the sounds, too, are strange; the falling rain

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  Thumps on the mosses like a sodden drum,

  And now a thunderclap—for what else could

  It be?—batters and trundles in the sky,

  But no earthly thunder could shake your feet

  And diaphragm, and drop its resonances

  So down below the audible frequencies

  To where the ear can feel and cannot hear,

  As does this Jupiterian cacophony.

  The sea is lit by orange radiance

  In a broad track, like a hurricane dawn;

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  And now a brief break in the clouds shows something

  The eye scarce credits, if it understands;

  It seems as if the planet were cut off

  Short of its due horizon, or as if

  The ocean, without fuss, were pouring out

  Over the sunken lip or selvage of the world;

  But out beyond that edge there is a portent

  Like a pillar of a cloud or fire,

  Or both at once; a cone, tilted away,

  As if you saw it from below, has torched

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  Into the swagged clouds of that nether sky

  A silent blast of fire and blue-white vapor

  Lit in its depths with salmon-pink and gold.

  There’s action at the sort of Quonset hut

  That stands beside the airstrip; radars turn,

  A beacon starts to flash, floodlights come on,

  Making the landing field a dance of droplets.

  Above there is another roll of thunder;

  But this is more prolonged and purposeful,

  And soon a racing shape dips through the clouds,

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  With blinking lights and a squat, stubby wing;

  It banks and turns; a set of flaps come down;

  It touches, bumps, and rolls out to a landing.

  The airlock of the hut cracks with a sneeze,

  The vapors thicken into wisps, and through them

  Two human shapes appear in pressure suits.

  They walk toward the shuttle with that lope

  The Martian gravity invites, and as they do,

  The shuttle airlock opens, and a ramp

  Unfolds, down which twelve figures stumble;

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  They’re led by their new hosts into the shelter.

  Within it’s bright and warm, with potted plants

  Crowded in corners, as if there were no room;

  And battered metal furniture, replaced,

  It seems, at intervals, by chairs and closets

  Made out of living plants; their shining wood

  Taking the odd baroque design—of seat

  And leg, and bark-hinged door—their makers wrote

  Into the coded blueprint of the genes.

  The first to get their suits off are the two

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  Who met the shuttle, Beatrice and Charlie;

  The next, a newcomer, is Tripitaka.

  The moment he has stepped out of the suit

  Beatrice faces him. His heart forgets

  To beat; her eyes are scorching in her face.

  She strikes her enemy across the cheek,

  And he, his nose running with the hoarse blood,

  Drops to his knees before her, like a knight

  Yielding allegiance to a chatelaine.

  It’s five years since the funeral of Chance,

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  And Don John/Tripitaka has observed

  The most meticulous and purest penance,

  Paid the bloodprice in work and suffering.

  After the impact of the comet Kali,

  The UN sought to overthrow the treaty.

  The planet’s government, technology,

  Economy had felt the consequence

  Of choosing to deny all innovation,

  And its exhausted soils could not support

  The aging populations of the faithful.

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  Increasingly it came thus to depend

  On biomass imported from deep space,

  From solar orbital farms that the Van Riebecks

  Had hollowed out of captured asteroids.

  The government had seized the earthside holdings

  Of VRE as soon as war broke out,

  Thus cutting off much of its revenue;

  Now, since the war, the Company,

  Failing to get redress for this proceeding,

  Had raised its prices for the biomass.

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  The Terran government then claimed the right

  To tax the garden-satellites, and when

  The taxes were not paid, to confiscate them.

  A navy was prepared for this purpose.

  So Tripitaka and his followers

  Who’d offered fealty to the Martian cause,

  And been assigned, while training for space work,

  To picket duty in the Lunar orbit,

  Now volunteered to take the post of guard

  And keep the tax-collectors from the farms.

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  And in those skirmishes many he’d led

  To service and to glory in the stars

  Died in his sight; the point-man of his squad,

  A somber, faithful Thai; Billy Macdonald

  Of the Kellies, who gave Don John his name;

  The black-belt sergeant of the women’s camp,

  Whose name I don’t recall, but Tripitaka

  Loved her in his way, as one who held

  That perfect warrior’s fidelity

  To what she deemed her duty, and who knew

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  Her own strength and honored that of others;

  She was a railgun sentry and was burned

  When the main fleet came through the picket line.

  By now the space war had become so draining

  To both economies that boarding tactics—

  Hand-to-hand struggle in the nightmare drift

  Of quarter-gravity environments—

  And their expense of soldiery, paid off;

  And in the fighting in the concave fields

  Of Orbital Farm Five, grief-struck and thus

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  Incautious, Tripitaka took a wound

  Deep to the belly, and one to the head

  That almost did for him. To expiate

  One crime, he has committed many; now

  He kneels so scarred in soul as well as body

  Before his dark Madonna that it seems

  There can be no forgiveness in the world.

  But Beatrice’s blow, it seems to Charlie,

  Who watches this with interest, has already

  Pardoned where it most stung, and is a sign

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  Of Beatrice’s genius of heart—

  The genius he loves her for, the sense

  She has of how the breath of life is kindled,

  And if it be extinguished, how restored.

  Queens and madonnas must be capable

  Of an unconscious theater—or is it

  Conscious, this unerring innocence

  Of gesture, this schoolgirlish subtlety?

  Chance had this knack as well, to shed his skin,

  Thinks Charlie, and to start his life anew.

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  It thunders overhead, and breaks the spell.

  Charlie says tactfully “Let’s go downstairs.”

  They hang the suits up and descend the spiral

  To the deep airlock of the Syrtis base.

  A cavern hal
f a mile across; lit to a haze

  And dazzle by a thousand sunlike lamps

  Whose merry light beats on a crowd of treetops

  Of many species, standing in open groves

  With grassy hummocks in between. “Now why,”

  Asks Charlie, “Must our paradises all

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  Resemble golf-courses? Did the primordial

  Anthropoids hunt with their sticks and stones

  Some rabbit-warren in Gondwanaland?”

  But Tripitaka stands amazed, as once

  Aeneas did in Virgil’s grand romance,

  In Carthage, where the frescoes told of Troy;

  For these walls too, irregular and cracked

  As they are, bear a wandering history

  Painted in brilliant oxides, cupreous

  And ferrous, ocher, lampblack, limestone white:

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  And there he sees the first landings on Mars,

  The wise coyotes of New Mexico,

  Ganesh inside the guts of a computer,

  Beatrice dancing, and the plains of Mars

  Just as they looked before the fungoids came;

  And there was painted Chance’s fall at Vassae,

  The comet flaming on the funeral,

  And Tripitaka, too, caught in a battle

  Upon the far hills of Australia.

  Some of the newer images are strange

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  To him, especially the human birds,

  Like flying babies in the painted trees.

  Beatrice smiles at last. “Ah, yes, the cherubs.

  They are a puzzle for our visitors.—

  But here they are in living truth to prove

  Our painter was still sober when he did them…”

  And there they are indeed: three little angels,

  Darting and floating in the buoyant air,

  With feathery wings and that complacent look

  That children quite unconsciously assume

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  When doing something skilled and pleasurable.

  Two of them, ten years old, are clearly twins.

  The boy is blond, built like a polevaulter,

  And somber in his looks; the elder girl,

  Her hair now darkening to golden brown,

  Shocks Tripitaka’s heart with a resemblance:

  Beatrice as she might have been, a girl

  Riding the roan mare at the family ranch.

  There is the same fierce heat about the eyes.

  The younger boy is truly like a cherub:

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  His hair is white gold, and he’s chubbier

  Than his companions; four years old perhaps,

  And wobbles still a little in the air.

  They swoop and perch before the visitors.

  “These two you know,” says Beatrice; “and this

  Is their half brother and their cousin, if

  You can work that out.—But I thought you knew?

  Charlie and I got married long ago;

  This is our bad boy Chance, who almost beat us

  To the altar, if the truth be known.

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  Charlie gave me the strangest wedding-gift:

  He let him take the old Van Riebeck name.”

  Despite the lightness of the conversation, tears

  Lie close behind the eyes of Tripitaka,

  Tears he’s not known for almost twenty years.

  The spirit of the strange man he has murdered,

  Now, it seems to him, breathes in the mouth

  Of this flushed, lovely child; and Beatrice,

  Who was the argument of all his wars,

  Is bound in full joy to another man;

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  But yet that Beatrice is enfleshed anew

  In Freya’s daughter, dark-eyed Irene.

  This is not all. Irene has at last

  Before her one of her sworn enemies:

  The killer of her grandfather; to blame

  In part for her own mother’s, Freya’s, death;

  But still a hero in her nation’s cause,

  The warrior that she would wish to be;

  And Tripitaka sees her trouble, and

  Again he kneels, and murmurs “Pardon me,

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  Madam,” to the child. But she turns away,

  Her own confusion hidden by the gesture;

  For in her hatred there is mingled something

  She does not understand, and her disgust

  At his deformity is tinged with sweetness.

  But Wolf shakes Tripitaka by the hand,

  And welcomes him, as might a prince of Mars.

  And now the other strangers are presented;

  Young men and women, part of the exodus

  From Earth of those whose spirit called to them

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  For a transcendence of the edge of things;

  An exodus whose myth was Tripitaka,

  Who sold their goods and pasts and livelihoods

  To buy plantations in a fantasy.

  They walk across the dainty-flowered grass

  To a low timber building by a grove;

  Here they are turned over to Ganesh,

  Who herds them to his lab and starts his briefing.

  “You guys all know about the first few years,

  From twenty-fifteen when the project started

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  To twenty-thirty-five, the comet year.

  We needed pressure then, to trap the sun

  And greenhouse it to melt the permafrost.

  With heat the CO2 inside the caps

  Would gasify, and push the pressure up—

  It all goes round in circles, just like life.

  The thermal equilibrium within

  The troposphere would break, and storms would dig

  The dust from Hellas and the other plains,

  Mid-latitude depressions mix the gunk

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  All the way round the sky. Dust is a greenhouse

  Too, if there’s not too much of it. So how

  To get the heat we needed for the pressure

  Needed for the heat? We used albedo.

  The first bacteria just darkened up

  The surface—and especially the caps—

  To stop enough reradiation out

  Of the planet to get the cycle going.

  We helped it all along with little strikes

  From comets, ringstuff—what we could lay hands on.

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  Planetmaking’s not a precise art.

  Then we got oxygen-excreting algae

  And sowed them in the mulch the first bugs made

  By dying of the heat they generated.

  They used the carbon in the CO2

  To make their bodies, and just shat the ox—

  If you’ll excuse me, ladies—into the air.

  At this stage though it didn’t matter much

  What kind of junk was present in the sky,

  But like I said at first, the key was pressure:

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  We’d started with around six millibars,

  Less than a hundredth of the earth’s, and reached,

  Twenty years later, one-eighth atmosphere.

  We had a window now for liquid water

  Where it was hot enough to melt but not

  So low in pressure that it boiled away.

  And then we sowed the molds and funguses.

  “Kali was like a swift kick in the pants.

  It gave us heat and water, and volcanoes;

  It rained carbonic acid for six weeks;

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  We got our little oceans—Boreal’s

  The one you saw outside, it’s full of weed.

  The thing we needed then was nitrogen.

  There was some NH3—ammonia—

  In Kali, but the real source was here:

  Outgassing from the neovulcanism.

  That’s what you saw outside: Mount William
Blake,

  Flaming off Nox right now, I shouldn’t wonder.

  The club-ferns and the cycads are the next

  We have on the agenda. You’ll be out

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  On seeding crew as soon as you get settled;

  It’s not as easy as bacteria—

  We can’t afford to seed the barren ground.

  “The pressure’s up to half an atmosphere.

  It’s hot enough to sunbathe in the tropics,

  But that is not a thing I would advise.

  The big job now is cleaning up the air:

  There’s photochemicals I never heard of,

  Ketones, aldehydes, carboxyls, methane.

  It’s like a sunny day in old L.A.…”

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  After this lecture, Tripitaka hangs

  Behind the rest to ask some questions.

  He feels for this unlikely character

  A kinship: as the warrior is bound

  To duty and the perfectness of action,

  So is the scientist committed to

  Something we can’t call truth exactly, but

  An honor of the factual understanding;

  And techne is a variant of act.

  Perhaps, moreover, Tripitaka feels

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  Attracted to another who has known

  The strangerhood of piebald parentage.

  “If it would violate no confidence,”

  He starts, “I would be grateful if you’d tell me

  Something about the life of Charlie Lorenz.”

  “Yo. Old Uncle Charlie. Well sir, if that’s

  Your way of asking about Beatrice,

  I could just save the time and stick to her.”

  At this perception Tripitaka flushes;

  Is almost angry, with a new respect.

  330

  “No. Please let us speak of Charlie Lorenz.”

  “Okay. Charlie was born in ’91,

  In Halle, in what was East Germany.

  Karl Friedrich Lorenz was his name I think.

  He failed to graduate from Wittenberg:

  The Neo-Greens, who were the ruling party,

  Abolished the Ethnology degree.

  The Neos differed from the older Greens

  As much as Nazis did from Socialists;

  They thought his studies could be used to prove

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  Human innate superiority

  To other natural beings—anathema.

  He took the line of the Good Soldier Schweik,

  Played dumb with the authorities, and switched

  To Ecology. If they’d known he meant

  Practical ecology, they’d have stopped him.”

  “The Neo-Greens—didn’t they come to power

  When Germany was reunited, or…?”

  “They were the secret price of unity.

  Charlie’s got little jests on them: the one

 

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