Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

by Frederick Turner

To settle the possession of a man

  Between two women, who as child and mother

  Are rivals in the oldest love and war.

  Now Tripitaka hates to lose his Chief,

  Who’s worked so well in loading up the ship;

  But there is nothing for it. He decides

  To transfer Hilly to another post,

  Commander of the task force escort fleet,

  And take the garrison command himself.

  Thus judges always must chop up the baby.

  80

  Wolf tells Irene about what he’s found;

  Her eyes shine and she is very silent.

  At once she checks the files for herself,

  Then questions Wolf on what he understands

  By the phrase “data code,” as it is used

  Referring to the content of the Codex.

  “I would suppose, some international

  Convention formed to classify the genes,”

  Says Wolf, who’s puzzled by his sister’s query

  And by the fierce excitement of her manner.

  90

  “Donkey! Jackass!” she hisses, in high humor,

  “Don’t you see yet?” She calls up from the files

  The entry under “Cloned Gene Sequencers.”

  Wolf takes one look and now he understands.

  Fragments of DNA from chromosomes

  Tagged with a dye, and graded in their length

  By their phoresis through a gel, may be

  Illuminated by an argon laser

  And read off like a poem or narrative,

  Nucleotides for letters, codons for words.

  100

  The Lima Codex is no catalog,

  But the true book of all that breathes on earth.

  It is what it refers to; played upon

  A keyboard of nucleic acids, it

  Will sing the very animals to life.

  It was the data file Cold Warriors

  Constructed their malign chimeras on;

  “If it can still exist,” Wolf breathes in awe,

  “It must be the Old Testament of Mars.”

  And could this poem speak itself to being,

  110

  Then its interpretation might be such

  As those so vital codes; not to be read

  Upon a page nor analyzed by scholars

  Of the writing schools, but played out in

  The actions of a ring of men and women,

  Singers and sung, or danced into a drama,

  Shadowed upon a wall or screen where walls

  And screens may blaze into a fact as warm

  As is the breath of a delivered child.

  But if its codes may live, then just to read

  120

  Works alchemies upon the brain that form

  From the inchoate chemistry of blood

  New molecules as like to sperm as songs

  Are like to chants about the holy altars;

  The word’s made flesh in many hidden ways.

  Or is it as my enemies might say,

  A poisonous chimera, and the snake

  Whose teeth are sown in every age to be

  Reaped then as strife and human misery?

  Wolf and Irene book a coded call

  130

  To tell Ganesh of their discovery.

  And now the hardest period of research begins:

  To find the hiding place of the great codex.

  When Ganesh calls they only have one clue:

  A reference to the letters BBI.

  Ganesh is brusque and breezy. “Hello children.

  This better be important.” “It’s important,”

  He agrees after perhaps twenty words.

  “If it exists, that list is all I need.

  All these specimens only ice the deal.

  140

  We’ve got a launch window to observe,

  Though, and the codex might have been destroyed.”

  They tell him of their clue. “That’s it!” he says.

  “Biblioteca Biologica

  Internacional, in Lima, Peru.

  Call Giamba Vico. False identities.

  Fly to Peru and see what you can find.”

  As student tourists, then, they walk the streets,

  Bleary and sleepless, of Pizarro’s city;

  The pale blue air of morning, like a crystal

  150

  Tinged with the green of certain desert skies

  Preserves and focuses the pilasters

  And broken pediments of the baroque,

  Their white stucco cracked by the last earthquake.

  The library seems to have disappeared.

  A taxi-driver, on the other hand,

  Knows of the place, agrees to take them there.

  The taxi climbs the monstrous barren slopes

  East of the city, in the Andean foothills,

  And stops beside a modernistic ruin.

  160

  Above, the cyclopean buttresses

  Of condor-haunted cordilleras rear

  Into an ageless sky. Below’s a maze

  Of not quite rectilinear avenues

  In monster stones rounded like pillows but

  Set so precisely each to each that one

  Might not insert a knifeblade in the cracks:

  The ruined city of Pachacamac.

  But these ruins seem to be inhabited.

  Though it is very silent, so the wind

  170

  Flutes hoarsely in the crevices, a face

  As ancient as a turtle’s peers and turns

  Behind an unglazed window, and a shape

  Covered in shapeless black, a bowler hat,

  Hobbles from one door to another. Wolf

  Feels a weariness of time and life;

  The great shallow basin in the bare land

  Skulled with the eyeholes of the extinct Inca

  Is full of bent and speechless human beings.

  Here the earth’s old and poor have come to die.

  180

  Behind him is a massive sculpted house

  With stooped lintels of gigantic stone,

  The trapezoid forehead the builders gave

  The sun kings as a sign of total rule.

  To his surprise he realizes now

  The architect of this was of our age,

  Cunning to match this rare commission with

  The art of her or his long dead godfathers,

  And so perhaps speak in that quietest voice

  Which rulers cannot hear unless they listen.

  190

  But like the city, glassless holes stare out

  Even from this most fortresslike of piles;

  The bronze doors hang from their pins, and the faces

  With their sunblind eyes move within the shades.

  In greenish stains, where the bronze letters stood,

  Their Art Deco shapes still discernible,

  Wolf and Irene read: BIBLIOTECA

  BIOLOGICA INTERNACIONAL.

  Wolf and Irene pass the gloomy news

  To the Kalevala. And when the ship

  200

  Obedient to the flows of force and mass

  That open up a passage through the heavens

  Lights up its long torch, that for several minutes

  Casts from the darkened Andes moving shadows,

  The twins are sleeping an exhausted sleep.

  Gaea meanwhile receives a visit from

  The Chief Commissioner of the world church:

  Bengt Andersson, with his kind white eyebrows

  And his archaic ceremonial garb,

  The slacks, tie, and sportcoat of a pundit

  210

  On a mid-twentieth century TV forum

  Or nature series, or religious show.

  The courtesies are deep upon both sides;

  Garrison joins their aides about the screen.

  And as they watch, the symbols representing


  Orbital farms and Martian satellites

  Blink from dull red to green as their crews leave

  And then to blue as UN troops move in.

  As soon as the last red spot is extinguished

  The eyes of Gaea and the Commissioner

  220

  Meet with the frankness of unprurient power.

  The nod is given, and from a hundred silos

  Slides the armada they have long prepared.

  These are crude ships, built for but one thing only:

  To spill and burn the cargo of the Ark.

  Electronic elegance and tech-

  Nical sophistication, cybernetics,

  Even if still within the arts of Earth,

  Are wasted on a vessel to contend

  With software that Ganesh has taught to pierce

  230

  The subtlest countermeasures, and to find

  Through heterodyning frequencies the chink

  Into the central pathnames of control.

  These ships burn hydrazine and work by wires

  And levers, and are armed with heavy guns

  Firing projectiles from a cordite shell

  That will explode on contact or by means

  Of simple fuses burning to the charge.

  At close range even crudest electronics

  Can be fused out by EMP, as if

  240

  The heat of Martian genius melted wire.

  The ships are lethal, armored, vulnerable,

  As packed with men as eggs are packed with meat;

  The strategy must be to board and fight

  And take the needed losses going in.

  Any conceivable success must cost

  Thousands of lives, billions of Earthly treasure;

  But what are lives and treasure but to spend?

  The moment that Irene wakes, she knows

  That something’s wrong. They cannot just give up.

  250

  Perhaps the library was moved; perhaps

  The Codex still exists. She wakens Wolf:

  He feels the same. Discreet enquiries at

  The University of San Marcos

  Yield nothing useful; to pursue the matter

  Would be to risk suspicion and exposure.

  They go back to the ruins; in halting Spanish

  Ask an old woman where the books have gone.

  A blue streak of Quechua is all they get.

  But now she takes Irene by the arm

  260

  And leads her to a half-blind ancient man

  Whose fluent Spanish and whose fair command

  Of English make him a rare scholar here.

  He tells the Yanquis that he heard them say

  The books were going somewhere—Africa—

  Zimba or Zamba, he could not be quite sure.

  Wolf pokes around and finds a broken crate

  Abandoned in the dry and stinking stacks

  Among a pile of periodicals.

  On it he makes out an address: Centre

  270

  For Life-Science Records, Mwinilunga District,

  Zambia, Central Africa. “That’s it,”

  Irene says in quiet triumph. “Let’s get going.”

  The mass detectors of the arkship escort,

  Used to evade the larger meteors

  That are encountered in the Asteroids,

  Now give the first sign of the Terran sortie.

  A swarm of objects shows up on the screens,

  Massive but electronically dead.

  The fleet’s computers calculate the mix

  280

  Of laser, railgun, and evasive action

  That best averts the threat, but as they do so

  Some of the warheads bloom in globes of plasma;

  The instruments of the Kalevala

  Are blinded momentarily, and one

  Of the missiles takes out an escort vessel.

  No more surprises. Now the Terran fleet

  Comes in behind its barrage; Tripitaka,

  Cold and ready for them, has perceived

  A boldness and simplicity of planning

  290

  That he suspects is Gaea’s work, his old

  Mistress and close instructress in the arts

  Of treachery ennobled by its cause.

  Ganesh’s software net grasps out in vain,

  But soon the clumsy vessels of the Earth

  Are popping like ripe fruit within a tree

  That little boys with catapults have chosen

  To practice on with their forked dangly weapons.

  And each time one of them erupts, it spews

  Into the hard explosive suck of space

  300

  That pops a human head like watermelons,

  A great grained juice of young humanity

  As one might burst a colony of maggots

  With a soft slide from the back of a spade.

  The rebel gunners do not feel the crime,

  Caught up as they must be by the huzzah

  And fiery wine of mortal contestation

  That renders life as trembling-precious as

  The solemn alchemy of death itself;

  But Tripitaka’s soul receives the charge

  310

  Of debt and karma as a battery

  Will mount toward the redline of its melting.

  Still the Earth ships come on; he had not thought

  There possibly could be so many of them.

  Within their hulls it must be like the decks

  Of ancient dreadnoughts or ships of the line:

  A hell of noise and smoke and running men;

  Babble of prayer, as it might have been

  In those urine-soaked trenches of Iran

  When the mad Ayatollah called his children

  320

  Of the Islamic revolution to Jihad.

  And now from time to time a Terran shell

  Finds its way through the lace of fire stitched down

  By the Arkship’s cold battle computers.

  Two more of the escort ships are hit,

  One of them crippled badly, as they’re cast

  In sacrifice before the holy spool

  Of the Kalevala, the womb of life.

  Over a half of the great Terran fleet

  Remains, and now the range is swiftly closing.

  330

  As if the colors somehow are reversed,

  The dawn sky blazes not with red but blue;

  A sweet and painful blue that burns still deeper

  Reflected in the reaches of the river.

  It is the ground that’s red; the whole valley

  Is delicately scaled with scarlet cannas,

  Turned by the morning breeze from pink to crimson;

  Then a tremble, and a pink catspaw spreads.

  The sparse spring rains of Africa have come

  And even the umbrella-trees, the stand

  340

  Of brachistegias, the sugarbushes,

  Are scarlet or vermilion with spring:

  Their buds and new leaves sticky with the sap

  And not yet turned to summer’s tender green.

  Here the most frenzied colors come with birth,

  Not death and fall, as in the northern year.

  Wolf and Irene reel upon the slope,

  Exhausted, having jetted to Lusaka,

  Changed in Solwezi to a chartered plane

  And bumped by battered taxi to this place.

  350

  Giamba has sent a courier to Lusaka

  To meet them off the plane and to provide them

  With introductions and identities

  From the Max Planck Institute in Seewiesen,

  Together with a clearance from the church;

  They are Canadian seminarians

  Studying animal behavior as

  It is predicted by the play of proteins

  Nominated and controlled by genes.


  They’ve ended up here at six in the morning

  360

  With rucksacks full of dirty clothes, clutching

  Two paper bags containing airline snacks,

  Waiting for the Institute to open,

  And, strangely, happy as they’d never been

  Since childhood and their first try at their wings.

  For they have found again that intimacy,

  Brother and sister, more than man and wife,

  Womb-mates and knowers of each other’s thoughts,

  Insiders of whatever world they travel,

  Because each knows the other is awake

  370

  And taking in with that familiar strangeness

  All he might miss, as if the other were,

  Personified, that easy connaissance

  Of the unnoticed that we call our home.

  Sweetest of all, they are conspirators,

  And in awed admiration for each other’s

  Courage, address, and perspicacity,

  They find those warm grave pleasures of respect.

  Built out of brick in an anonymous style,

  To house material the Church would hide

  380

  Here in this lonely corner of the world,

  The Institute’s a compound of low buildings.

  As they walk slowly through the dewy cannas,

  It falls away behind a gentle rise.

  A hissing roar that seems to rise and fall

  Grows all about them; the Zambesi rapids.

  Here in a hundred rills and torrents pours

  The great clean river through a scarp of granite;

  Where tiny islands, dark with somber trees,

  Are covered thick with sallow orchises,

  390

  And a long wide blue-white fight of wild water

  Half an inch deep scrolls up against a boulder

  High as a house; and sparse grass golden-green

  Blows shining on the edge of granite plains.

  They eat their odd breakfast upon a rock,

  Then, holding hands, like young Adam and Eve,

  They climb the slopes toward the Institute.

  And now it’s all absurdly easy. “Yes,

  Seewiesen called us. You’ve got rooms and carrels.

  You’ll find the disk recorders that you asked for.”

  400

  Three hours later they have the Lima Codex.

  The battle in space continues. Terran forces board Kalevala. Hearing of the discovery of the Codex by Wolf and Irene, Tripitaka recognizes that he must cover their escape to Mars by staging a last stand. He sends Hillel Sharon in a fast escort ship to ferry Ganesh Wills, whose knowledge will be essential in decoding the Codex, to safety on Mars. Sharon’s mistresses Ximene and Marisol decide to stay behind and die with the arkship. Tripitaka’s interrupted ritual suicide is resumed. Wolf and Irene, learning of the death of the arkship, decide to avenge it by killing their grandmother Gaea before they leave the Earth. We learn of the strange love between brother and sister. They find they can consummate neither it nor their revenge; but their mercy serves them well, inasmuch as it is Gaea who persuades the Ecotheist council to permit the repatriation of Martian civilians left on Earth. Wolf and Irene thus escape with the disks containing the Codex.