Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars
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“Trip, there’s a meeting at the wind balloon”
(Ganesh’s nickname for the village hall)
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“And you’re the star.—So what’s the ritual?”
But Tripitaka shakes his head and smiles.
Can he be purged still by deserved shame?
If not, there will be time. He rises, follows.
It’s a full town meeting. Everyone’s there.
Beatrice, mayor pro tem, nominates Charlie
To chair the session. “So. The word is in.
The Terran government has offered terms.
We get the tissue cultures, but we pay.
They get the moonbase, the orbital farms
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And all but one of our Earth satellites.
This means we’d have no foreign currency
To pay for what we buy in Terran markets.
We would be poor, ladies and gentlemen,
And that is how our dear cousins want it.”
Someone calls out: “What do you recommend?”
“If you ask me,” says Charlie seriously,
“I think it is a lousy deal. For them.
They’d sell their birthright for a mess of pottage.
But let me call upon Ganesh, to say
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Why we should take the offer as it stands.”
“You’ve seen this planet flying off the handle,”
Says Ganesh, “The fire-blights, the spasm-storms,
The photochemical carcinogens,
Clogged oceans, freezes, cacofeedback loops.
Not all my fault, whatever Wai-Kwong says—”
There is a laugh at this; Wai-Kwong is Nesh’s
Grouchy but brilliant lab assistant—“Some
Was the fault of our missing genotypes.
The planet’s breaking out, trying to die,
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Seeking conditions of stability,
And we can’t hold it back a whole lot longer.
By now the angiosperms—the flowering plants—
Should have been started, but we have no bees.
We need the parasites that clean the bees.
We need some tailored krill to eat the plankton.
We need the hosts to grow the symbiotes
That make the gases that protect the rest
Of us from cosmic rays and ultraviolet.
We have a gene that makes organic freon
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But no suitable beastie to plant it in.
With enough freon in the tropopause
We can sit here on Mars and toast our toes
In the best greenhouse in the solar system.
We need those cultures. And as for the cost,
I priced it out. To build a cat from scratch
Without a genome to template it on
Would cost the entire gross global product
Of the Earth for fifteen years. Kitty is cheap
If you’ve got blueprints. If not, even krill
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Will run you into trillions pretty quick.
What Earth is offering, if they only knew it,
Is the most valuable property
In the universe. The whole shooting match.
The works. The ball, the ballbat and the park.”
There are those who are yet to be convinced.
The seedcorn of genetic information
Lies useless if its economic food
Is totally cut off; can Mars afford
To cut the last umbilicum to Earth
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So early, and to venture forth alone?
At what cost should the colonists insist
On carrying the household gods of life
Out of the dying city? And what if
The Terrans, as they have before, should cheat,
And either send a batch of useless samples
Or seize the Arkship on its voyage home?
These matters must be noted by the movers
Of the question, and considered; but at length
The vote is taken: to accept the deal.
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All over Mars town meetings such as this
Are coming to the same conclusion. “Now
The question is, whom do we send, and how,”
Says Beatrice. “What we propose is this.
Kalevala must be our Ark; she is
The largest of our treeships, though she’s slow
Compared to the new designs. She’ll be skippered
By Commodore Vivar, whom you all know;
Hilly Sharon will lead her garrison.
The science officer will be Ganesh;
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He won’t accompany the outbound trip
But take a faster vessel and be there
To check the cultures’ authenticity.
There will be five armed ships to form an escort,
And we are asking Tripitaka”—here
She turns to him, her face grave with the trust
Of all her people—”to assume command
Over the whole task force, and to bring back
The precious seed of our inheritance.”
A silence. Tripitaka rises from
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His chair, buries his face within his hands,
And then sits down again. Which betrayal,
Out of the many he may choose among,
Will be the least? At last he looks up, speaks.
“Yes, I shall do what you have asked of me.”
Then, in an undertone that few can hear:
“And if I fail, so let my name and being
Be driven out from all your habitations.”
There is no meeting now between the lovers;
Both know that something’s broken that cannot
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Be put together. Tripitaka walks
On that last day before his passing from it
Upon the green hills of the chosen planet.
His little flier rests on a mossy hilltop;
Southeastwards, whence he’s come this calm morning,
Enormous sloping tablelands of forest
Broken and stepped by airy precipices
Blood-red and sheer, where faults have cleft the stone,
Fall to a glassy ocean, pink as jade,
Reflecting in its milky mirror certain
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Islets yet nameless in the boreal sea.
Beyond them, from the far edge of the world
Looms up into the violet sky of Mars
A vague outline of impossible scale:
The ringwall of the Kali Crater System
Whose five concentric circles brand this world
As ours, upon its northern hemisphere.
He turns west, and the albedo changes,
The sky now purple opposite the sun,
And here the mesas of the Nilosyrtis
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Rise like pink ghosts into the morning air,
Iced like a cake with groves of emerald.
Southwards the mountains rise, and rise again,
And as he slowly spins, the Gulf of Isis
Hung over by the tiny blazing sun
Comes into view once more. The light is like
A rich and brilliant twilight, or the dimmed
Warmth of a winter noon in northern Europe;
Or like the painter’s shift, who may not lay
A brighter pigment than his whitest white
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Upon a canvas of Arcadia
(Which, being so, should be a well of light);
And yet, the painter knows, even that white
Must be diminished by the glazes—by
The varnish, if the work is to endure—
And so he darkens every color to
A velvet chiaroscuro in his palette,
And softens all the details in the shade,
And saves the sharpness and the clarity
For that bright s
hip caught in the blaze of noon,
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Beside the rocky antre in the bay,
And those arbutus leaves with backlighting
That glow like neon in the canopy;
And keeps the clot of white for that bright lozenge
Of the sky and sea where the painting’s lines
Meet, at the point of vanishing, infinity.
But the man’s heart will not cease its tormenting.
He must speak to Irene, but his mind
Gives him no guidance as to what to say.
His greatest eloquence would be his death;
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But the imperative of that creation
All of them serve and hold to be their bond
Will not allow him to desert his post.
He knows to offer her a lover’s compact,
That cozy and conspiratorial
Recourse, favored of those who hold the act
Of sex to be the paramount endeavor
Of the race, would be anachronism;
Would indeed sell the work that they accomplished.
There on the fresh tatami mats among
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Her silks and milkwhite limbs, at less than cost.
He knows the subtlety of a Van Riebeck
Vengeance, and its promise for the future,
Its impositions, its inhuman call
For what cannot be satisfied with love.
And Tripitaka is content with nothing
Less, and feels the fierce euphoria
Of playing with the masters of the game.
When he returns to base, a note is waiting
On the plain threshold of the fighting-floor.
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“There is no need to speak. I saw the shirt
You wore when you were summoned to the council,
And know what it is for. Sensei, I thank you
For the great teaching you have given me
And bow to you upon your enterprise.”
So she has made it easier for him.
He knows that this farewell will be forever.
Next day he boards the shuttle for the Fleet.
Irene shuns his embarkation, but
She watches when the ships light up their torch.
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Ten days later she misses a period.
Act IV
The Gardening of Mars
Wolf and Irene are invited to study at Oxford University. Irene, discovering her pregnancy, decides to terminate it; Beatrice, told of this by their doctor Vasco de Perez, and having recently learned that she herself has become sterile, arranges to receive the fetus secretly into her own womb. Wolf and Irene come to Oxford; they discover the existence of the Lima Codex.
Scene i:
Wolf and Irene
And eight days after that, she and her brother
Each receive letters by the teleprinter.
Wolf’s is crested with a cardinal’s hat
In scarlet, and Irene’s has a shield
Bearing a chevron and armorial birds.
These are their acceptances from Oxford:
Full scholarships to Christ Church and St. Anne’s.
Now Oxford University, as often,
Has hung behind the times through good and ill,
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And, largely independent, has ignored
Or chastised with its snobbish irony
The zealotry of Ecotheism.
It has remained a place where learning happens
Often despite the efforts of the dons.
The elders have decided that the children
Of the Mars colonists must carry back
The classic wisdoms of the human race
So that the tragedy of history,
That fertile uterus of future time,
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May be continued in the generations.
Not twenty miles from Oxford, Devereux
Lies under heavy snow this winter dusk.
The chapel, dusty and unused, with smells
Of mildew, candles, and a ghost of incense,
Lost corner of the world, is mildly lit
By the white snow underneath the windows;
And coats of arms in crimson and in gold
Lend to the cold glow on the whitewashed arches
Warmer and dimmer tones. It’s very quiet.
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The pasturelands between the ancient oaks
(Neglected now, with holes and broken limbs)
Are trackless, humped, and white. The drawing-room
Must be the only warm place in the house.
The office staff are all on holiday;
Gaea has got a coke-fire in the grate
That sends up sweet fumes by the mantelpiece
Where angels carved by Grinling Gibbons play
Their viols and trumpets to an onyx herm.
“Since, Garrison, you always seem surprised
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By what I do,” says Gaea patiently,
“I’m going to tell you in advance what we
Are planning to defeat the new attempt
The Martian rebels have initiated
To sack our biological inheritance.
We need and truly own the orbital farms,
And cannot act until they’re in our hands.
That moment we will seize their so-called Ark,
Whatever it may cost in arms and men;
Their grotesque plans will thus at once collapse
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And then the restoration can begin.”
Garrison watches her amazed. She limps
To the sideboard, gets him a glass of sherry.
“I’m going to be retiring fairly soon.
The trouble in my veins is coming back.
I want your project to be to explain
To the core congregations what we’ve done.”
Garrison knows it will not be worthwhile
To comment on this news. He takes it then,
But feels an ache, a hunger, curious
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And yet familiar, but stronger now;
Like the withdrawal symptoms of addiction
Or like the empty place where pain should be
In one whose cancer has been numbed by drugs.
He hurries home; there, through the window, sees
His boy, arms out, running to Bella; but
For many months now that mammalian sweetness,
That lactose wholesomeness, has been to him
A bitter herb, a foul emetic purge.
The cold air is a little comfort to him;
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He turns away, and gets into his car.
Mindless, without the heater on, he drives
Northeast until he penetrates the suburbs
Of the sprawled, rotting Birmingham complex;
He drives on into lights and shops and crowds
And parks the car by the old Bullring Center.
In Prince’s Wine Bar he finds what he wants;
A Babycham laced with penth, and a youth
Called Simmy, with the shaved head, pantaloons
And pink eye-makeup of the Pringletoes.
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These, being the most lost and unfortunate
Of human beings, are sacred to the Church,
For hopelessness in any form is holy;
And it is thus that Garrison atones
For loving Gaea, as he knows he must.
This has become a tale of sicknesses.
Consider, though, that in the act of increase
All creatures are most naked to decay;
Corruption riots in the spawn and milk
And branched tubules of fertility.
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All of these lesions of the commonplace,
All the torn folk that die into these lines,
Are necessary to the immortal spasm
By which the new world will come into being.
Beatrice, eve
n, has a secret flow
Of pain, a blood-abundance when the lost
Moon of earth comes to the full again;
And her devotion to the Virgin leaves
Her white, exhausted with her mensal faith;
This cannot be an ill, for could the sign
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Of a perennial fecundity
Be anything but good? But after Chance
No other children come, and anxious Charlie
Makes her consult a doctor for her troubles.
Now whether on her many travels in
The naked radiance of outer space,
Or whether, in the weak protection of
The Martian atmosphere, crippled by lack
Of earthly seed, an errant cosmic ray
Pierced to her egg-place, or if tainted air,
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Smelling of ozone, burning, or perfume,
Brewed from the alien sky and sun had seeped
Into the air she breathed, the tests display
The giant cells of deathless carcinoma
Burgeon and pair among her ovaries,
And multiply beyond hope of repair.
The operation now is safe and simple
But it leaves her sterile; it seems to her
The Virgin has forgotten or betrayed her;
And her recovery is slow and weak.
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Charlie alone knows what has happened to her,
But cannot help; formerly frank and careless
Of secrets, now she hugs this to herself.
Nor is it simply sickness that has wrought
This change in her. The mortal moon she serves
Seems to be all eclipsed, her eyes which once
Burned in her face like brandy, now are turned
Inward, as stars that having burned their fuel,
Fall through the dark zones of their own enchantment.
For Beatrice half consciously has known
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Of the devotion Tripitaka paid
To her, and, as a woman, felt it
Like an invisible and tonic vapor,
A painful and sweet edge to the turn of things;
And she’s not failed to see the change in him,
The way her step-daughter has marked the place
Where she alone had stood. Her sickness then
Only confirms the cruelty of time;
And is it not, she thinks, quite just that she
Be chastised by the very principle
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She worshipped—absolute presence here and
Now, surrender to the passage of the world,
Sacrifice always, in the flame of life
Of aging organisms to the young?
Is she not like the ragged nuptial salmon