Low rust-hills of a marshy world.
No people we can see. Like we saw
dolphins, Africans, women! The
people men don't see could fill a globe.
Earthlings build
tractor-tread
cities to crawl across the bog,
borough-sized
water-bugs.
I visit one that offers me a job.
Stumbled on a secret! Stashed
deep in the Civic Fridge
I find a time-bottle sealing the moment
a saboteur set off the Bomb.
Here, cradle the glassy bubble:
head-size, under a pound; within,
diodes glare. The box is live,
self-Caesarian, oping to bare
searing light! The trigger's too
compact to be atomic: antimatter.
Utter negation of all, that gleam
frozen, caught--in millisecond one!
What if the bubble fails? For years
they've cradled latent doom.
|
"But why cart it with you? Why not
just set it in the Barrens
and let it
blow?"
The Mayor, a handsome thirtyish
woman all too human: "We
can't be sure how big
the blast would
grow.
And even if the egg blew deep
in the Barrens, native
life would
burn."
True. And as I love people, art & science
so I slighted their simpler lives.
Just as good white men
once ruled their
slaves. And
wives.
For all this world's unpeople
she bears the adder's egg.
Her town crawls on, gravid with
the cyst of fire and death.
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