Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars
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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.
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“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