We knew we'd make a home on
Mars
as soon as we'd littered it with classical names:
Cerberus, the Mare Sirenum,
Hellas,
the Vallis Marineris, Utopia.
In this adamic frenzy of naming
we named every boulder
we decorated with lichen,
we named every rusty riverbed we filled with
water,
and we named the icy comets we rained upon the poles.
This was a new world
with a new geography, or rather, areography.
Making the wind and rain was easy,
making a habitable
world, terra-forming,
was just global warming on purpose,
the hard part was turning all that
dusty regolith into soil,
we didn't call Earth earth for nothing;
the red podzols of Uchronia
weren't the rich dark loam of the Ukraine.
But eventually the seabeds brimmed with comet water,
the rice paddies of Olympus Mons rippled
under the light of two dark
moons.
from ectogenesis to athanasia,
we were born in vitro to live forever,
breathing in the anachronisms
of all our Graeco-Roman barbarisms,
Australopithecines watching televisions.
It really ought to have worked,
a planet as a 1960s housing
estate,
a concrete paradise till the architect's-model figurines
pop out for
a miniature slash in the lift.
Or perhaps the flaw in the plan was this:
that we let the private sector
get hold of the weather.
Well, next thing we knew
we'd discovered obsolete physics
loitering
in the quantum fluctuations of empty space
and so pulled Levity out of
the Ether
to power firefly suns round Jovian satellites
where the names are Norse,
Japanese, Inca.
We swam in the geysers of Triton,
admired Pluto's fat
pink crescent
and visited the rings of Saturn,
even though the rings of Saturn
had, by this point, got really rather
touristy.
And it's always day in space so finally
we took a long
cold look at the Sun:
does that wasteful burner really represent rational
resource use?
And we separated the light from the darkness.
Imagine a great sphere enclosing the Sun
made of useless
Jupiter and debris,
an inner surface you could stand on
with a Mediterranean climate and
many rivers to name,
and an outer surface you could stand on
from which we turned our eyes
to the rest of skies
like idiot gods.
And standing on our artificial Earth
we looked around
and said:
"This has been basically a nomenclatural problem
in that the grandiosity
of our neologisms
has disguised the paltriness of our ambitions.
So, convinced we were
exploring infinity we have only
brought the stars indoors
and created nothing
but an enormous prison."
© 2005
See also:
The
Mars Society
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