by John Boyd
The Last Starship from Earth
John Boyd
Dedicated to the memory of
Henry Tudor VIII
EXCERPT FROM THE Johannesburg Address
Though fondly we hope and fervently pray that this great scourge of war shall speedily pass, still we must not derogate the promise of the laser science so misused by the lesser angels of our nature.
Acceleration of light quanta, while sweeping aside old boundaries of physical science, issues grave warnings to the social sciences. We may yet disenthrall ourselves from history to become the judges of our own past—gods of ourselves, as it were.
Let us then so conduct ourselves in the right, as we are given to see the right, that these generations shall not vanish from the annals of time.
A. LINCOLN
Chapter One
Rarely is it given man to know the day or the hour when fate intervenes in his destiny, but, because he had checked his watch just before he saw the girl with the hips, Haldane IV knew the day, the hour, and the minute. At Point Sur, California, on September 5, at two minutes past two, he took the wrong turn and drove down a lane to hell.
Ironically, he was following his roommate’s directions, and if there was one thing he had learned in two years at Berkeley, it was that students of theological cybernetics didn’t blow right from left. He was driving down to see a working model of a laser propulsion pod, and Malcolm had told him that the science museum was off the road to the right, across from the art gallery. He turned right and found himself in the parking area for the art gallery, across the road from the science museum.
Self-respecting students of mathematics rarely visited art galleries: but there it beckoned, its entrance esplanade curving up from the parking lot to a point of rock where the building, reminding him of a gull launching itself into flight, was cantilevered over the Pacific two hundred feet below.
It was a pleasant day. A breeze standing in from the ocean tempered the sunlight. The verandah of the building commanded a wide view of the ocean to the northwest. He looked at his watch and decided he had time to spare.
He had parked his car and headed toward the entrance when he saw the girl ahead of him. Her stride was long, and her hips swayed slightly with each step as if her pelvis were a cam which created an interesting moment of force around its axis. It was several microseconds before the aesthetics of her motion intruded on his consideration of its mathematics. Proletarian girls used such a sway as a lure, but this girl wore the tunic and pleated skirt of a professional.
He slowed to keep a few paces behind her as she passed through the entrance into the rotunda and stopped to loot at a painting. Anxious for a view of her frontal geometry, Haldane walked up beside her and, as she studied the painting, inspected her unobtrusively. He saw chestnut hair gleaming with highlights, a firm but rounded chin, eyebrows arched in a clean line above hazel eyes, a long neck, high, erect breasts, and a flat stomach planing into the long V of her thighs.
She turned, suddenly, and caught his gaze. Feigning a questioning look, he threw his hand toward the painting. “What is it?”
In the manner of the professional, she looked through him, not at him, as she answered, “It depicts motion.”
He threw what he hoped was a practiced glance toward the canvas and said, “Well, the lines seem to move.”
Her words were stamped from her lips. “It spins. it upsets my stomach.”
He glanced down at the A—7 stenciled on her tunic. The A meant that she was a student artist, but he did not know what subclass seven meant—possibly that of art critic. “I’ve heard that tea is a remedy for nausea. May I treat you to a cup of first aid?”
Her face was still impassive, but her eyes were focused on his. “Do you usually accost females in art galleries?”
“Ordinarily I work the churches, but today is Saturday.”
The eyes were laughing from the mask. “You may buy me a cup of tea if you wish to waste credits on an extracategorical virgin.”
“Saturday’s my day for virgins.”
He led her onto the verandah and chose a table close to the railing from which they could look directly down on the surf at the base of the cliff. As he seated her and snapped his fingers for the waitress, he said, “I’m Haldane IV, M-5, 138270, 3/10/46.”
“Helix, A-7, 148361, 13/15/47.”
“From the minute I spoke to you, I figured you were Swedish, but what does the seven mean?”
“Poetry.”
“You’re the first in that category I’ve ever met.”
“There aren’t many of us,” she said, as the waitress rolled a tray to the table. “Sugar and cream?”
“One lump, please, and a dash of cream… It’s tragic that there aren’t more of you,” he said, admiring the fluid harmony of her arm and wrist motion as she dropped his lumps.
“How gracious of a mathematician to speak thus of poetry.”
“I wasn’t talking about that stuff. I was just regretting that you’ve got such a narrow selection of mates to elect from. You’ll probably end up with some lank-haired boy bard who’ll leave you alone in the meadow while he wanders off to declaim to some scraggly buttercup.”
“Citizen, you are atavistic,” she reproached him, and her voice dropped an octave. “But I’m sympathetic to primitive emotions. My specialty is eighteenth-century romantic poetry… Did you know that before the Starvation there was a cult of inseminators called ‘lovers’ and that one of the greatest of them all was a poet, Lord Byron.”
“I’ll have to look him up.”
“Don’t let your mother catch you reading him.”
“She couldn’t. She’s dead, from an accidental fall.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m fortunate. I have foster parents, but both are alive and they dote on me. My parents were killed in a rocket crash…
“But you amaze me that you know so little about my category. One of your big mathematicians, an M-5 if I remember correctly, wrote poetry which I never cared for but the intelligentsia seem to read. Perhaps you’ve heard of Fairweather I, the man who designed the pope?”
“Citizen, are you trying to tell me that Fairweather I wrote that… poetry?” He looked at her with genuine amazement.
“Don’t be so shocked, Haldane. After all, diddling with ditties is not dalliance with a damsel.”
Now he was shocked, horrified, and pleased. He wasn’t sure of the word “damsel” but he could interpolate, and he knew that for the first time in his life he had heard a female originate a witty remark. Moreover, it was the first time in his life he had ever heard a female professional not in a house of recreation volunteer so titillating a witticism from behind such a titivating façade.
In this girl, he had found the square root of minus one.
“I’ve got a right to be shocked,” he said, hiding his immediate confusion behind a deeper-seated confusion. “My field is Fairweathian mathematics. I’ve studied the man ever since I was in grammar school. I came down here today to look at a model of a laser pod he invented in that museum across the road. I know he had the most inventive mind that ever existed, with the exception of yours and mine, but not a one of my professors, not a teacher, not a fellow student, nor even my father ever mentioned that he wrote a line of poetry. Up until right now, I thought I was the most unauthoritative expert in the world on Fairweather I, so you will pardon me if I seem a little groggy.”
“I’m sure that no one was trying to keep it a secret from you,” she said. “Perhaps none of your professors know it. Perhaps they are ashamed of it, and in this instance, I think, they would have a right to be.”
“Why so?”
“I’m happy your man succeeded in mathematics, an
d I know he did quite well in theology, but in my opinion he failed miserably as a poet.”
“Helix, you’re a smart girl. I wouldn’t think of disputing your knowledge in your field, but anything that man did, he must have done superbly. I wouldn’t know an anapest from an antipasto, but if he wrote it, it was good.”
“Proof of the pile is in the protons,” she said. “I have a photographic memory, and the only thing he ever wrote that I can quote are lines a very old man told me when I was a little girl, and they were told in the context of a curiosity rather than as a poem.”
“Recite it for me.” He was suddenly interested.
“The title’s almost as long as the poem,” she said. “He called it ‘Reflections from a Higher Place, Revised.’ It goes:
Since you are tortured on a rack of time compressing,
I’ll murder you, beloved, as my final blessing.
You grew too old too young.
Speech has stilled your tongue.
Summoning all my social grace
I mix the hemlock to your taste.
He told us from another place
That he who loses wins the race.
That parallel lines all meet in space.
Yet, love, I’ll mourn your angry face.
She moued disapproval. “He dotes on those silly little paradoxes such as racks compressing and blessing with murder. It’s all sheer nonsense.”
Haldane thought for a moment. “It sounds like he’s rephrasing the Sermon on the Mount modified by Einstein’s General Theory. ‘He who loses wins the race’ is another way of saying ‘The meek shall inherit the earth.’ That would explain the title, too. The ‘higher place’ is the Mount, and the reflections were ‘revised’ by Einstein.”
She looked at him with amazement and admiration. “Why, Haldane IV, you’re a Neanderthal genius! You’re right, I’m sure. Neither the old man nor I ever thought of that, and your interpretation would account for the living dead.”
Now he was amazed. “Who are the living dead?”
“Oh, you know, the Hell exiles, the official corpses.”
Her answer brought him back to earth. “What have they got to do with it?”
“The old man, a blood relative of mine, used to know one of those Gray Brothers who put the exiles on the Hell ships. This was back in the days when they walked aboard, and this monk was saying he was having a rough time because halfway up the gangplank a female felon got hysterical—who wouldn’t?—and started to scream and fight.
“The monks were getting the worst of it when some man up ahead in the line shouted back, ‘He who loses wins the race, and parallel lines all meet in space.’
“When the man said that, she quieted down and went aboard as if she were taking a solar-system ship to another planet… I see, now, that he was giving her religious consolation in shorthand.
“Still, I prefer Shelley. Have you read his ‘Ode to the South Wind’?”
Haldane listened, but a part of his mind kept returning to Fairweather’s subversive hobby. Every man to his own avocation, but it was ironical that the poem which braced the exiles was written by the man who had invented the propulsion system which hurled them to the frozen planet called Hell, discovered by Fairweather’s probes and named by Fairweather, obviously just as he felt a paradox coming on.
Helix was a freshman at Golden Gate University and planned to teach in her category. She was eager to discuss her field of study, and her interest carried him along with her. Lovelace and Herrick, Suckling and Donne, Keats, Shelley, the archaic names came as easily to her tongue as the names of friends, and she quoted them in mirth or nostalgia. Her voice sounding above the surge of the surf wove around him a feeling for golden beginnings, and he was touched by a sense of history.
Finally the slanting sunlight carving shadows on the mountains westward aroused them to the knowledge that they must go.
She walked ahead of him across the verandah, and watching her walk, he called, “What was that one about the sceptered race?”
“Ah, what avails the sceptred race,
Ah, what the form divine,
What every virtue, every grace?
Rose Harmon, all were thine.”
“That’s you. Helix,” he shouted with gusto, “from back here.”
“Hush, you silly nut! Someone might hear you.”
He walked with her to her car and held the door for her. “Haldane, you have the gallantry of Sir Lancelot.”
“You didn’t tell me about him. Would you be brave enough to meet me some evening in San Francisco, like tomorrow night, and tell me about this Sir Lancelot in some appropriate setting, say the tap room of the Sir Francis Drake?”
“How do you know I’m not a policewoman?”
“How do you know I’m not a policeman?”
“I was thinking of your safety,” she smiled. “I can take care of policemen.”
With a wave of her hand, she was gone.
He walked slowly back to his car, thinking that there must be something wrong with his body chemistry. He had sat and talked for a while with a girl who was swallowed, forever, by the vast anonymity of San Francisco; yet he had been happy in her presence, and now he was sad.
He drove his car onto the highway and engaged its pilot with the Berkeley band, enjoying the surge of power that told him the road was clear for miles ahead. Leaning back as he flicked along between gray mountains and the blue sea, he indulged in a rare moment of introspection.
Somewhere in the matrix of humanity eastward, where even the crags of the Rockies housed the abodes of human beings, there was a girl of eighteen who would be chosen for him by geneticists. She would be shock-haired and square-jawed, no doubt, as were most female mathematicians. Witty she might be, and kind, fully worthy of all devotion, but from this point onward she would have one drawback—she would not be Helix of the Golden Gate.
As the car dipped into a grove and the long shadows of the redwoods flicked their latticework beneath him, Haldane savored the bittersweetness of farewell. He was twenty, and it was twilight, and he had said ‘good-by’ forever to a girl who had come to him as a Deirdre had come to Irishmen of old, in such beauty and with such grace that flowers had leaned toward her as she walked. Then she had left him, and the winds of September rustling past his speeding car sang ballads of times when men had walked the earth as kings, of times three hundred years removed from this year of Our Lord… His red warning light snapped him out of the reverie.
They were always working on those magnetic bands, tearing them out and laying them back in. Well, he consoled himself, as he took the wheel for manual steering, he could use a little exercise.
When Haldane entered the room he shared with Malcolm VI, his roommate was working at his desk with a row of figures projecting a probability curve for the occurrence of blue-beaked parakeets over a given number of generations and commencing with a given number of progenitors.
“Hey, Malcolm, guess what!”
“What?”
“I met a lady on Point Sur, full beautiful, a fairie child. Her stride was long, and her eyes were bright, and her words were wild. She was a poet. Ever meet that category?”
“There’s a clutch of them over at the Golden Gate. Fell in with a brood, once, whilst on a mild drunk along the Barbary Coast. Listening to their talk is quaffing beakers of moonshine. By the holy feedback, they’re weird sisters, pale brothers, all.”
“This one was vive la different.”
Haldane threw himself on his bunk, rolled to his back, and cupped his head in his clasped palms. “Yea, holy brother, her field is primitive poetry, and she’s picked up a lot of information that wasn’t in that history book I read.
“When she quotes that love poetry, you can hear the old dulcimers melting them pleasure domes of ice, and damsels start wailing for demon lovers.”
“Sounds like she’s doing research for Belle’s Place.”
“With her, it’s antiquarianism, so it’s legal. Say, did
you know our boy, Fairweather, wrote a poem?”
“Do you jest?”
“I jest not.”
“By the overheated tubes of the pope, Haldane, I think you’re touched. You’d better take a quick trip down to Belle’s and purge yourself of subversive thoughts. Besides, I’m in need of assistance.”
“You still on that chromosome chart?”
“Yes.”
Haldane rose, walked over, and looked down at the equations Malcolm had scrawled beside the chart and then at the chart. Various lines of symbols diverged from a base, and at intervals along the lines a blue X marked the occurrence of blue-beaked parakeets. A few of the symbols were circled with O and the line stopped.
In Denver, Washington, Atlanta, geneticists worked over such charts, but for a far different purpose than that inherent in Malcolm’s exercise. Once Haldane had taken an elective in genetics and had seen the human charts on professional dynasties. Occasionally there would be blank areas where no births occurred, and, infrequently, the blank areas followed a red X with the notation S.O.S.—Sterilized by Order of the State.
Looking down at Malcolm’s chart, Haldane did not think of these things, but they were a part of his memory. What he thought, he voiced. “Talk about poets talking moonshine! You’ve been given a problem with the answer inherent in the proposition. Don’t figure it step by step. Just solve for the blue X, and let the rest follow… this way…”
“But I’m supposed to kill off random samplings of parakeets, at least one dead for every twenty. What happens if an eagle swoops down and eats this parakeet here?”
“That’s your choice. You’re the eagle. But remember, a blank means a crumpled little mass of feathers that will wing no more through the golden sunlight.”
Malcolm looked up at his roommate. “You’d better go down there, boy. One afternoon with a poet and you have subconsciously considered dalliance outside your category which is miscegenation; you’ve implicitly questioned the policies of the state, which is deviationism; and you’ve made light of your own profession which reflects on your esprit de corps.”