The Last Starship From Earth

by John Boyd

  Haldane III interrupted. “I’d like to see us mathematicians get some of the adulation given to the sociologists and psychologists, but I hardly think Fairweather would make a good subject.”

  “Why, Dad?”

  “Among other things, he dealt with hardware, instruments and physical phenomena. He was somewhat of a manual worker, not entirely a pure theorist I wouldn’t advise Fairweather as a subject Would you excuse me a moment. Helix?”

  As his father rose to leave, Haldane made a rapid decision. Of late his research had led him to believe more and more in the validity of his mathematics of aesthetics, but he had put too much effort in his search for the girl to be thwarted by his integrity. Before Haldane III had passed through the door, Haldane IV had conquered his principles.

  He leaned forward. “I’ll help you.”

  “I knew you would.”

  “Listen, Helix. I’ve got to talk fast Something happened to me that day on Point Sur. Ever since, I’ve felt like a charged electrode without a negative pole. I’ve been unhappy and happy about it. Am I an atavistic poet or a Neanderthal mathematician? You’re an expert. You tell me.”

  Her facile face revealed gentle understanding and gleeful amazement. “You’ve fallen in love with me!”

  “I haven’t fallen anywhere! I’ve soared like an acidhead skylark. Shelley, Keats, Byron, I know how they felt. I’m a nova to their street lamps I’ve got the black belt!”

  “Oh, no,” she shook her head. “The primitives knew all about what you have, and they called it ‘puppy love.’ But it’s merely a symptom. If the germ incubates properly it develops into what the primitives called ‘mature companionship,’ where the male and female enjoy being together.”

  “Oh, no,” Haldane demurred, thinking there were gaps in her knowledge, “I know about that, but this is in my mind. I enjoy just looking at you, and touching you.”

  He reached over and took her hand. “It’s fun just to hold your hand.”

  “Unhand me,” she whispered, “before your father returns.”

  He complied, noticing that she could have drawn her own hand back just as easily, but she had not. He slumped back in his chair. “I wanted to tell you something about my heart being like a singing bird, but it didn’t come out that way.”

  He did not know the human voice could carry such gentleness until he heard her answer. “Don’t worry, Haldane. You’ve told me more than you know, and every morning of my life will start with the song of your acidhead skylark.”

  Three valuable seconds ticked by in silence. Helix was the first to speak. “Forget you’re a stuttering poet and be the precise mathematician. Figure, quickly, some way to help me write the epic of Fairweather, for I’ll never help you ungild the lilies of my heart.”

  He had long since planned his answer.

  “Meet me in the morning, at nine o’clock, at the fountain on your campus.”

  She nodded, and lifted her coffee to her lips as his father re-entered the room.

  Haldane arose at seven Sunday morning and took almost an hour to shave twice, trim his nails and toenails, shower, soap, rinse, resoap, rerinse, dry himself, splash his face with aftershave lotion and dry his hands on his bare chest. He was sparing of the hair cream, using just enough to give his hair a sheen.

  Naked before his mirror, he stood for a moment flexing muscles made lithe by judo training. He selected the grey tunic flecked with silver thread with the silver M-5 stitched above the left breast, his matching overcoat with the pale silver lining, and his grey boots of reinforced chamois. His trousers were of grey, fleece-lined denim with a triple-stitched codpiece.

  Dressed and standing before the mirror, he reluctantly admitted that he looked every inch the eighteenth-century boudoir hero. His thin, sensitive face reminded him of John Keats, except for the hair. That full, blond thatch, with a mere innuendo of a wave, was Byronesque, and the eyes, cool, gray, and objective, focused with the calculating ease of a pragmatist to the empirical method born.

  Donning his overcoat with a flourish, he wheeled and strode into the kitchen, where he doffed the coat and breakfasted standing up and bent far over the bar lest crumbs stain the burnished sheen of his tunic.

  Redonning the overcoat, he departed the ancestral demesne, knowing the patriarch, slumbering in his chambers, would awaken to assume his son had gone for early mass, and Dad would be three-fourths correct.

  Enroute to the campus, he drove beside the marina. On his left, the pastel towers mounted Nob and Russian Hills. On his right, a fresh breeze spanked the buttocks of wavelets undulating atop the bay. Above him, clouds no bigger than the breasts of girls accentuated the blue. It was a brisk, stimulating eighteenth-century day.

  He parked and cut across the campus through the trees. As he neared the fountain, the film of branches thinned with decreasing distance, and he saw her.

  She was standing by the fountain reading a book, wearing a shawl instead of a cape and dressed in a skirt that had obviously been ironed under her mattress.

  Chagrined by his own finery, he edged from the cover of the trees.

  She looked up and smiled, extending her hand as he neared her. He bowed and kissed the hand.

  “Spare me the chivalry, Haldane,” she said, withdrawing her hand quickly. “We have bird-watchers on this campus.”

  “I wore my Sunday go-to-mass clothes.”

  “I felt you would,” she said, “so I dressed differently to keep people from assuming we had been to church together.”

  “You’re as clever as you are fair. Are you chilly?”

  “A little.”

  “What are the books?”

  “The thin one’s the poetic works of Fairweather, and the heavy one’s an anthology of nineteenth-century poetry.”

  “Oh,” he said, trying to hide his resentment of the books. He had almost forgotten the reason for their meeting, and the reminder was disappointing. It was as if she had brought little brother along.

  “We don’t have to talk about them in this cold,” he said, and explained to her about Malcolm’s apartment and how he had come to acquire it. He gave a verbatim report of his conversation with his roommate without editorializing on the motives behind his conversation.

  She thought the idea sensible.

  “You take the big book and walk north, and I’ll go back the way I came. If we’re being watched, whoever sees us will think we met for me to give you a textbook. Now handle the book with care, for it’s a family heirloom. I’ll delay for a few minutes before I go to the apartment.”

  “Dad didn’t care for your choice of subject, did you notice?”

  “I expected his reaction.”

  “How so?”

  “I’ll tell you at the apartment.”

  “You’re not frightened?”

  “I am, a little,” she confessed.

  “The risks are only as great as we make them.”

  “It’s not our meeting being reported that I fear. It’s something else, more important, that I’ve found in the books. Go now, but don’t look back.”

  He turned and strolled down the mall, whistling. To any casual onlooker he was merely a student who had borrowed a book from another student and gone about his business.

  He whistled to allay his own concern. On her face he had seen a deep-seated anxiety rather than a passing fear. Whatever it might be that she had found in the books, she was troubled.

  Helix was impressed by the Malcolm apartment.

  After she had taken off her coat and laid the books on the divan, she bubbled with comments. “Look at the gorgeous view!… Isn’t this carving adorable?… I thought you were supposed to dust!”

  He had not seen the apartment since his first inspection. He shrugged his shoulders. “It needs a woman’s touch, and so do I.”

  She was gazing out the window as he walked up behind her and put his arms about her. She turned to him, her face tilted.

  He kissed her.

  Heretofore, he had nev
er particularly valued a kiss as a thing in itself. Mates and brothers and sisters kissed. The V kiss had not been one of the major weapons in his arsenal; in fact, he had deplored the ritual as unsanitary although he had bowed to the convention. Kissing this girl was definitely pleasant, and he was lingering to the point of procrastination when she pushed him back.

  To his chagrin and consternation, he saw that her face was set in the impersonal lines of formality, and her voice was flat as she recited: “As a female citizen bearing on my tunic the insignia of the professional, it is my duty to hold the seed within me sacred to the purposes of the state. I shall be feminine at all times but at no time womanly except in the presence of the mate selected for me by the Department of Genetics.”

  She paused, now, looking at him, rather than through him, and her eyes flicked downward for a split second. “We are not going to risk declassification. One of us has to be strong, and some instinct tells me it will not be you.”

  Standing before her, he knew his plans had gone awry, not so much by what she had said as by the way he felt. His reaction to her had been total.

  She was to the girls at Belle’s Place what a philharmonic orchestra was to a banjo, but an orchestra had a string section and in his response to the nuances and range of the emotions she aroused in him, he took pride rather than shame in the tremor which had frightened her. He desired her with self-admitted desire encompassed by a greater desire to guard her from harm. He would never permit the blithe lad he had been two months before to carry out his plan and endanger this girl.

  So he donned his mask and answered her, “I agree with you, citizen, that it is folly for a professional to endanger the social welfare for a tremor in the loins…”—he paused at the familiar phrase, and heard his voice, as something apart from him, veer off from his recital of the creed—“… even though that tremor might be the expression of the highest sentiments of the human heart and be as free from the dross of flesh as an eagle in its flight.”

  He resumed the creed: “… and he who is willing to sacrifice so much for so little has tarnished his honor and his dynastic line, and traduced the state.”

  Suddenly he grinned, and a wild authority rang in his voice. “I agree with you because you’re such an agreeable girl, but if you were to lean forward and whisper, ‘Come, Haldane, defrock and deflower me,’ I would agree with you, also, and with a helluva lot fewer words.”

  She laughed outright.

  “You’ve heard both versions,” he said, “mine and theirs. Remember my version, won’t you? You can get the official version from those silverfish at Golden Gate when their hands start fluttering accidentally against your hips.”

  “Why, silly, you’re jealous!”

  “I’m not jealous! It makes me crave soda-water when I think that some of those alleged males probably come early to classes to watch you walk in and stay late to walk out behind you. And the profs aren’t above a little hoggle-oggling, either. I bet you could get straight A’s if you wrote your answers in Sanskrit.”

  She was giggling as she pointed an imperious finger at the sofa. “Sit down! It’s not the lechery of poets that I fear; it’s the virility of mathematicians.”

  She sat down, at the far end of the sofa, and said, “We’ve got to establish policy. No more Sunday meetings. I spend my Sundays in Sausalito with my parents, and a break in habit patterns would be suspicious. No telephone calls. Phone calls only, and let those be short. And we should limit our meetings to one hour only on Saturday. And we should stagger the time of the meetings, setting the time each preceding Saturday.”

  “You’re shrewd,” he said.

  “I’ll have to be. If anyone in authority found out about this and assumed the worst, we could be psychoanalyzed.”

  “I don’t want to go through that, again,” he said.

  “You have been, then?”

  “Mother fell out of the window when she was watering flower pots on the ledge. I was a child when it happened. I didn’t know any better, so I blamed the flower pots. When I pushed them off the ledge with a broomstick, one of them hit a pedestrian. I was analyzed for aggressions.”

  “You must have had a student analyst,” she said. “But back to now. Have you read any of Fairweather’s poetry?”

  “No, and deliberately no. I’m not out of the woods in the eighteenth century, yet. Your boy, Moran, helped me a lot, but when I come to the master, I want to understand his language.”

  “You’ve certainly overestimated the poetic power of our noble hero.” She handed him the small volume. “Open it and read to me at random any quatrain.”

  He opened the book and read:

  It was so cold the snow squeaked underfoot

  And random gusts drew skirrs

  From surface snow which skittered off the scree

  To eddy into drifts against the firs.

  “His language isn’t difficult,” she said, “is it?”

  “He uses a few words that I wouldn’t use in talking, but the reason I wouldn’t use them is that my friends wouldn’t understand me if I did.”

  “What do you think of the subject?”

  “The snow scene?… I like it. I’ve always had a weakness for snow so hard it skirred when it skittered off a scree. None of this mushy slush for me, that goes ‘slurp’ when it hits.”

  “But there are no symbols,” she protested.

  “Some folks like symbols. Some don’t. I can’t stand symbols in snow scenes. I like my snow pure and unadulterated.”

  “A poem should mean something besides the obvious,” she said. “Now, turn to page 83.”

  He turned to the page to find the familiar title, “Reflections from a Higher Place, Revised.” But there were only four of the hues she had quoted at Point Sur, their depth augmented by decorative rows of asterisks.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  He tells us, standing on His place,

  That he who loses wins the race,

  That hemlock has a pleasant taste,

  That parallel lines must meet in space

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  “You told me you thought it was the Sermon on the Mount,” she said, when he looked up from the page, “and the editor thought so, too. The editor capitalized ‘He’ and took out the lines about blessing by murder which wouldn’t have been appropriate for Jesus.

  “Another item: asterisks usually mean deletions. The editor makes them resemble decorations which suggests to me that he was arranging a cover story for his act. If someone were to come to him and say, ‘Look, this isn’t a complete poem,’ then he could say, ‘Yes, but I made a note of it. See the asterisks.’

  “The man who would have had to say that, the editor of that volume, is the chief of the Department of Literature. His signature makes the work authoritative. But why would the head of the department edit a book by an obscure poet?”

  “Fairweather was a state hero,” Haldane reminded her.

  “But not in poetry. Furthermore, the title of that book is The Complete Poetic Works of Fairweather I. That title is completely false.”

  “Girl, you’re accusing a state authority of censorship and misrepresentation.”

  “Precisely. It’s horrifying, but it’s true! Take the other book, carefully, and you’ll find another Fairweather poem in it, a poem not even mentioned in The Complete Poetic Works.

  “That book is an anthology of nineteenth-century poetry. It’s been out of print for over a hundred years, a family heirloom, and it’s probably the only copy in the world. Look on page 286.”

  He turned to the page carefully. The sheets were brittle with age, but the old letterpress type was still beautifully legible.

  He found the poem. Its title alone would have stamped it as pure Fairweather: “Lament of a Grounded Star Rover.”

  You could trace our course through the Milky Way

  By our wake of thundering light,

  But they called us home as we heeled the keelr />
  Round Ursa Minor’s bight.

  (The Weird Sisters had taken, they said,

  The web of the galaxy

  To weave it into fairer strands

  On the loom of destiny.)

  Uranus had been to our dragon ship

  As the Pillar of Hercules,

  And Orion’s flare was a beacon buoy

  That led to the Pleiades,

  Where veiled Merope mourns apart

  And scans the skies in vain

  For her mortal loves who returned to her.

  But come not back again.

  You err but once when you ride the light.

  Stout hearts must con that helm.

  All men grow sad and some go mad.

  For the voids can overwhelm.

  But, God, if I could, I would launch my keel

  And dare, again, that sea;

  For the Weird Sisters have taken my stars

  To weave a shroud for me.

  As Haldane bent his head to the page, his mind grasped the first image of the poem—it was accurate and true with more than truth to think of a laser ship throwing behind it a wake of thundering light—and suddenly he too was yearning for the far sweep of the stars, bemoaning the final betrayal of Merope, she who loved a mortal and so died, and regretting and resenting the shroud that had been woven for the valiant old star rover who wanted to go back, even if it meant space madness and death. Giants had walked this earth a century ago.

  But Helix wanted symbols… Merope, of course, represented the lost dreams of romance, a fact he would not have recognized two months earlier.

  “Did you find any symbolism?”

  Urgency in her question turned it into a plea. She was looking to him for reassurance that the state was all-benign and truthful as she had been taught.

  “Merope was one of the Seven Sisters who fell in love with a mortal and was exiled from heaven…”

  “And the three Weird Sisters are the fates,” she said, almost impatiently, “but those are mythical allusions, a method of writing that went out of style with that impossible John Milton.