Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (52 page)

Half your time in VR, and the other half pharmed-out on Som,

Eight different houses on four worlds, and none of them counts as a home.

I had a half billion then, but I didn’t consider it mine;

I brought out the Red Ox logo again and made it up into a line.

I used my money as grav-assist, to slingshot me to the high road,

But you—you’re content just to shed it, as if it’s an onerous load.

Weak, a liar, and idle, and mean as a spaceship stray,

Nosing for scraps in the galley, a whelp who’s blind to the way.

I’m sick of the whole bad business. I want to go back where I came.

Hav, you’re my son—or you’re Mary’s, and at least you carry our name.

I want to lie by your mother, though she’s dark and she’s far, far away,

And since Law forbids it, you’ll take me, and so you will earn your pay.

You’ve a million a year in my will, if you think that that is enough;

But I know your taste, and your wife’s too – an expensive sort of love.

And you know I’ve more than a billion, not too far short of two;

And if you want to earn it then there’s things you’ll have to do.

The Lex Ulanova forbids flying inside Venus’s span;

But that’s where my woman is floating, and you must deliver her man.

Take out the
Mary Anna
—I’ve fuelled and maintained her for this,

Jettison me near my wife; let us float till we bump-to and kiss.

Because although she is lost, unmarked, floating hopeless to find,

Yet fate
will
bring us together, despite that we’re dead, cold and blind.

Trajectories are random and space, don’t I know it!—vast,

But we will have eternity to float and to fall and to pass.

The Ulanovs want their monopoly, and I wish them the luck of the brave,

But I’m not trying to steal their pig iron; I’m looking for a grave.

I’ll be content with the blank of space; no churchyard, shroud or bell,

For the wife of my youth shall clutch me—and the rest can go to hell!

She died in an instant, son, and that fact kept her spirit pure,

And Fate is not so cruel that I’m kept from her ever and more.

Her beauty outlasted the vacuum, the decompression, the burn.

Never seen death yet, my Havel? … Well, now is your time to learn!

An Asteroid Homesteader’s Song

Three generations have gone by

And my granddaughters shall give birth

Before I ever come to fly

To holy Earth.

Crowned by old time, grey, blue and white,

Like marble worked by the devout;

The citadel from which the might

Of humankind flowed out –

Where poured out, once, as wounds pour blood,

A stream of folk on rocket wings,

And Earth’s long-cultured hardihood

In arduous things:

Strong, wrapped in spaceship metal, kin

To folk at all the sky’s four quarters:

Age after Age, all orbits spin

Through us, Earth’s daughters

Who, exiled from the tightly curled

And thick-aired gravitational heart,

Lack limbs with strength to stand the world

Or break apart.

But still we steer by Earthly beacon

And still hold faith with what Earth taught;

For though our limbs and lungs may weaken

Our hearts do not.

The Moon Miners

We worked, digging down slant and delving deep from Copernicus’ crater

And each of us working a ten hour day, and grinding his Excavator.

Our suits’ remote commanding the drills, tunnelling lasers and Chutes,

Six foot men are small as dwarves besides those mechanical brutes—

Moon miners, paid to tunnel, the regolith over us all;

The only sounds our helmeted breath, the world coloured black and pall.

The cavern as wide as Vitruvian Man’s stretched fingertips might just touch;

Each morning meeting the frozen rock, each evening leaving it dust.

And the days on the moon are a fortnight long and are hotter than boiled lead

And the nights are exactly as long again and cold as the thoughts of the dead.

And the dust is fine as sea-beach sand, where breakers turn onto their side—

But the moon’s an oceanless beach, and parched, and rockfall’s the only tide;

Pebbles and rocks and meteors that come crashing out of blank sky;

And millennia come between each splash, and that surf is deathly dry.

Hurtling down, smashing and crashing, and milling rough rock into dust,

An anvil of land and myriad hammers, and so the topography’s crushed.

Soundlessness, vacuum, eerie and dark, confusion of far and near:

The miner toils in his cell spurred on by ‘we’re building a
city
here!’

Die-cut shadows dance in the blackness thrown by the welder’s spark;

There are twenty types of moonrock, lads, but a thousand types of dark—

A thousand kinds of darkness there, and the cold comes on up through your boots:

The lunar hilltops are bleak; for sure; but it’s bleaker by far at their roots.

We’d dug the main chamber, and sealed the sides with Palmact agent and Glue

And we’d paved the floor with laze-planed stones, and fitted these flags to the true.

And the echoless cavern reared eerily over us, arc-lit, hooped and tall.

Shadows seemed made of elastic, and stretched, flitted and slid on the wall.

Our suits were black as pure charcoal up from the boots to the helmets’ peaks;

A thing you’ll know about moondust, perhaps, is just how vile it reeks:

It stinks with the taint of sulphur, of a gunpowder fashioned in hell,

And you never quite rid yourself of it, clean, though you scrub down ever so well.

So we eat and we sleep; and ready ourselves, and it’s back sublunar again—

Though it’s hard and ill-paid and dangerous too, yet we’re
Lune
women and men.

And so we dug on, and the Vaters moved, jabbed blades, with dig and sweep,

On earth they’d have clanked, hissed and grumbled; but here all was quiet as sleep.

We drove three new tunnels, went downward slow, and aimed for the moon’s still heart …

But we found what we never thought to find, and it clattered our world apart.

We’re Lune, and we’re proud of that fact, though our suits bear House sigils now—

This is
our
world, and if you want digging we’re the ones who know how.

We’ll take the Merchant House’s money, let them supply new kit,

But ours are the hands, and the minds and the lives we take down into the pit.

Ours are the lives: the pit is a deadly-dangerous workplace, and deep;

You need not think us your slaves, you Housers, though you have bought us cheap.

A human who’s gone in the moon and crawled through the grave-holes there

Is indifferent to threats as to money—for miners are hard to scare.

But scared I was, for all my vaunting, by what my Vater dug through,

And my heart near stopped, and my breathing froze and my monitor light burned blue.

....

[The MSS breaks off at this point]

The Interplanetary Rebel’s Hymn

You who govern Venus, where the disk is smooth and grey:

The Ulanovs rule your System—but you’re greater, far, than they!

Now as the laws are questioned and the police sloops blast and glide,

Mithras, lord of the planets, give strength to those who died.

You who govern mottled Earth, a disk of white and blue,

The doorway men knocked first at, and which many have passed through;

Left behind some millions stumbling, g-force dulled and drowse,

Mithras, lord of the planets, keep us all true to our vows !

You who govern Mars, where rust has reddened the terrain,

There you died immortal; immortal there you rose again!

Where thin air and low g corrode the strength of gods of war,

Mithras, lord of the planets, make them mighty as before!

Asteroid governor and shepherd, where worlds cross and clash

And billions eke out life in caves of granite and of ash,

Subjected, spurned, though full of heart; tied by the Ulanov rope,

Mithras, lord of the planets, give our Revolution hope!

You who govern Jupiter, cold simulacrum star,

God of midnight spaces: here your truest faithful are.

Give us word that you will lead us rushing back into the Light,

Mithras, lord of the planets, let us stand up for your right!

Written Upon The Flank of a Spaceship

Engineers made me

To betray my pilot

On my first fight.

To gather iron

From close the sun

I am sent.

The iron I gather

Comes to the Ulanovs

Out of deep gravity.

Like a coal-coloured fish

Then it descends

Into deep gravity.

It is not used

For goods or gear,

But for The Law.

The iron I gather

Rulers covet

For an ill use.

I am shaped as a sword

Sharp with whitefire

Cooled in vacuum.

The iron I gather

Is drawn up

Out of deep gravity.

Like a coal-coloured fish

Then it descends

Into deep gravity.

It is not given

For goods or gear,

But for The Law.

Moon Poem (Lucian, 1969)

Three mmen sat in the topmost room

Of a great white tower a mile high:

Their words were slant, their counting wrong,

They spurned the earth and sought the sky.

Their tower’s foundation cracked and ruptured,

Blood-red fire and a roar of "kill!"

But falling meant a falling upward

To land on the top of the moon’s round hill.

Two men got where they meant to go:

It took six nights and never a day–

A blank land blacker than waterless snow,

Its air already breathed away,

Its dust ground down by mortar-pestle:

Day and night a fortnight long,

Their only home a pot-shaped vessel,

Their armoured suits and helmets on.

They marked the sand with booted feet,

They found the blackness of the night

Indifferent to cold or heat,

Insensible to dark or light.

They measured mountains tip to root,

They tilled and sowed the ashen loam,

Tasting the pith of their silver fruit

Beneath the glaucous eye of home.

But one man travelled further yet,

Beyond the seas and past the hill

To where the sky is an oubliette

With a straightened view of absolute chill.

He looked down over a barren place,

A bootless blank, a crescent uncrossed,

A perfectly cratered and desert waste,

Where only breathless moon-sand was.

And looking back in his solitary pass

Behind the unpainted face of the moon

He thought: "were that sand but turned to glass

How mighty a lens could be ground and hewn!

How minute the view it would gift me of

My birthly world of women and men—

I’d magnify the atoms of love

And comprehend spiritual oxygen!"

Believe unclouded sight is best:

Vacuum’s a medium most unblind.

A man remoter than all the rest,

His homeland deepest and longest behind,

Found his pure lens a cataract white,

His blackface moon stark upside down:

Contentment’s a mode of ballistic flight

That yearns at the apex to fall back down.

The Ulanov Law

There’s those who’d speak against it, the enduring Ulanov Law;

And some would call out leaders tyrants, criminals and more—