The Last Starship From Earth

by John Boyd

  “Yes, my son, I think it could have happened even to Our Blessed Savior, for he was acquainted with women of whom it might be justly said that chastity was the least of their virtues.”

  It was an unusual remark from a priest, but it underlined Father Kelly’s “regular fellowness” and Haldane was able to relax slightly. If he had a preference in priests, he preferred the regular fellows, even though he had found that their regularity was often strained to the point of irregularity.

  “Now that you mention it. Father, I’m sure that Jesus must have been as attractive to females as he was to males.”

  Suddenly the priest turned and looked directly at Haldane, those eyes pinning the prisoner against the wall. “My son, do you repent your sin?”

  Kelly’s sudden piety after his freewheeling impiety caught Haldane off guard, and his friendly feelings toward the priest were slashed by the word “sin.”

  “Father, I regret, surely… But…”

  “But what, lad?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it as a sin. I had only thought of it as a civil offense.”

  Again, the affable smile came over the priest’s face. “No, I wouldn’t suppose you would judge it a sin. Not a man alive likes to admit he’s sinful.”

  He looked away, this time toward the door, his chin slightly tilted, and the held gesture flooded Haldane with insight. Father Kelly was a vain man. He had walked to the window to get the best light, and now he was showing his profile.

  When he turned again to Haldane, his plastic features had shifted. There was hauteur in his eyes and primness in the lines of his lips. “You can’t judge, but I can. Mathematics is your business; morality is mine. I tell you bluntly, my son, carnality is a sin.”

  “Father,” Haldane unconsciously felt his lips grow primly decisive, “I have known carnality in its manifold forms, in the houses sponsored by the state, and my relations with the girl bore the same relation to those experiences as the sacred bears to the profane.”

  “You misjudge the relationship,” the priest said harshly. “The affair was carnal, and, being carnal, it was sinful. We sin when we hurt someone we do not wish to hurt. You have hurt yourself, the girl, and the state. Your sin is threefold.

  “You have sinned, my son, and you will spend the rest of your life doing penance. Whether you spend it in prayer or not is up to you. Our Holy Mother does not wish to see you punished. She wishes to forgive you. But there can be no forgiveness if there is no recognition of the sin.”

  Strange lights flickered in his eyes. Fervor grew in a voice that rose and fell, filling the cell with its vibrations. Then the priest looked away, tilting his profile.

  “Father, I’m not being punished by the Church. I’m being punished by the state.”

  “Ours, my son, is a triune state. The Church is its third leg.”

  “Then, sir, if I am being punished by the state, the Church is sinning against me.”

  “My son, I said that to sin is to hurt someone we do not wish to hurt. The state wishes to hurt you.”

  “Father, you just said Our Holy Mother does not wish to punish me.”

  “My reference was to Mary, my son.”

  Kelly’s sophistry coupled with his self-adulation triggered antagonisms in Haldane. He remembered Flaxon’s warning to project humility, but no image could be projected to this monument of piety because it was so intent on its own projections that all incoming signals were drowned by the signals going out.

  Haldane could not resist matching sophistries, so he posed a question in full meekness, with his voice reeking of humility. “Father, Jesus told us to love one another. Does the Church wish to punish me because I have loved another?”

  Father Kelly reached in his cassock and brought out a flat case of cigarettes. Walking over, he offered one to Haldane, who refused, partly from fear that he might light the filter end. Father Kelly lit his own and returned to the north light.

  He had not answered, but the bent head demonstrated that he was meditating the problem, and the slightly superior smile on his lips told Haldane that he was not meditating the profundity of the question but how best to phrase it to a simpleminded mathematician.

  Haldane did a little meditating himself. He didn’t like to pass moral judgments on experts in morality. Besides, his interest now was purely clinical; he had a researcher’s desire to find how the thought processes of the priest worked. But he was intrigued by the possibility that Father Kelly had received divine grace and had overlooked the package which was lost among the other gifts that God had heaped upon him.

  Father Kelly looked up, smoke curling from his nostrils. “My son, when Jesus said, ‘Love one another,’ he meant precisely that. We must love one another strongly enough to respect each other’s social rights. When you attempt to bring unauthorized life upon this overcrowded planet, you are not loving me. Jesus said, ‘Let us love one another.’ He did not say, ‘Let us make love to one another.’ ”

  He could not match sophistries with this man. The priest was matchless, on earth or in heaven. Haldane had skirted the edge of disaster by baiting him, for that veering mind, energized by righteousness, might seize on him as an apostate, even an anti-Christ, and his case would be ruined.

  He lifted humble gray eyes to the black beads of the priest. “Thank you, Father, for enlightening me.”

  In a twinkling, the hound of heaven became the shepherd surrogate gazing benignly on his lamb. “Come, my son, let us pray.”

  They knelt and prayed.

  Brief though the ceremony was, it had a tremendous effect on the priest. Father Kelly XXXX had arrived in Haldane’s cell as a lissome, smiling, regular fellow; he walked out as a one-man ecclesiastical procession.

  Brandt, the sociologist, was Haldane’s third interviewer.

  “Was that Father Kelly ahead of me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Haldane, observe the wisdom of the state. When it comes to miscegenation, that man’s an expert.”

  “You know him.”

  “I was once a member of his parish, but I fled with my mate—I hope before it was too late.”

  Suddenly Brandt’s attitude changed to one of serious concern, backed by a candor that was refreshing after Kelly’s histrionics. “Haldane, you’re in a bad way. It was damned careless to get caught. The state expected great things of you. For a man with your brains… Let it pass.

  “There’s a lot here I don’t understand. How the impregnation occurred is beyond me. Without it, I could have gotten you off with a reprimand… And Cal has one of the best houses in the state.

  “I checked with Belle, incidentally, She was thunderstruck, angry, and sad. You had that house sewed up. She told me the other students were amateurs compared with you.

  “Hell’s sleigh bells! How did you ever fall in with a professional, and a poetess at that?”

  “She was helping me on a research project.”

  “Research! What were you researching, the copulatory rhythms of female poets?”

  “Nothing as interesting as that. Basically, I was working on an idea that would have eliminated her category completely.”

  “With her help?”

  “She didn’t get the social implications. I’d started out to help her write a poem on Fairweather, but when we found out that Fairweather’s biography was on the proscribed list, we gave up on him. I persuaded her to help me invent an electronic Shakespeare.”

  “It’s easy to see how you persuaded her… Now, I’m in favor of eliminating nonfunctional categories, but weren’t you arrogating privileges that didn’t belong to you? We in the department decide on which categories to eliminate or create.”

  “Yes, sir. But you’re talking in terms of completed projects. This idea was only in the tentative stage.” Haldane slapped his fist against his palm. “Brandt, you may think I have delusions of grandeur, and I would not have presented this idea to you until the program could be demonstrated, but I know you would have accepted the idea. Hel
l, the pressure from the Department of Education would have killed you if you had turned it down. It would have come through channels, but I would have spread the word, unofficially.”

  “Perhaps we would have,” Brandt agreed. “I’ve got about five categories on my fist, and poetry’s one of them.”

  He rubbed the side of his neck speculatively, and Haldane waited while he gathered his thoughts. Suddenly he placed both hands flat on the table and leaned toward Haldane.

  “I’ve got a proposition, Haldane. I’m the foreman of this jury. Theoretically my job’s administrative, but in cold fact I swing a lot of weight. I’m offering you a deal, straight across the table. After tomorrow you’ll be a working stiff, so you won’t be able to testify against me, so I speak without fear of prejudice. Follow me?”

  Haldane nodded.

  “I’m prepared to recommend to the judge that you be permitted the highest degree of clemency. That means you choose any job you wish not associated with professionals. With a project such as yours, it means that you can continue to work on it. As a privileged prol, you’d be given working facilities and raw materials.”

  “What’s the gimmick?” Haldane matched his language with the surprisingly blunt language of the sociologist.

  “The gimmick is this: you can continue to work on your project provided you work concurrently on a project of my choice.”

  Haldane alerted. There had been no change in Brandt’s open and easy manner, but his fingers, undulating over the table-top, reflected his inner tension.

  Haldane said slowly, “What is the concurrent project?”

  “Eliminate the Department of Mathematics.”

  “That’s my department!”

  “Correction. That was your department.”

  Fighting to control his facial expression, Haldane asked, “What makes you think I could?”

  “Dean Brack told me you were his top theoretical man. If you could do it in literature, mathematics should be easy. We have computers that can solve any mathematical problem we’re interested in, but we need a translating machine to convert verbal instructions into mathematical concepts.”

  Haldane flinched at the idea, but his instincts told him that Brandt was correct. A cybernetic translator could be built. But why had the suggestion come from Brandt? Surely mathematicians had thought of it before.

  And nothing had been done about it!

  “Hell, I could do it with one hand, but why eliminate the department? It’s far removed from yours.”

  “Greystone’s pushing to reopen the space probes. If space were to be opened up, society would become dynamic, expanding, exploratory. Social values would lose out to scientific developments. We’ve got to guard against that possibility.”

  So Haldane was not alone in his dream of reasserting the spirit of man. Vast forces were joined in conflict in the upper reaches of government, and he was being asked to join the wrong side.

  “Suppose I failed?”

  “You’d be relegated to general assignments of your own choosing.”

  “If I succeeded?”

  “We would attack again.”

  “Attack what?”

  “The Department of Psychology.”

  “Brandt,” he said, trying to manage a smile, “if you succeeded in eliminating categories wholesale, there wouldn’t be anything left to govern, so you’d eliminate yourself.”

  “I’ll worry about that!” Brandt’s voice was harsh.

  “Suppose I refused?”

  “Then you take your chances with the judge—unprejudiced, of course, but still chances.”

  Brandt was offering him immortality, the immortality of a Marquis de Sade or a Fairweather I.

  No doubt such propositions had been offered to thousands of mathematicians in the last two and a half centuries but only one had accepted. Brandt was offering him immortality, or a chance to die in a noble tradition. Unknown to Brandt, there was a third card face down on the table which could eliminate Brandt, but Haldane might be eliminated first. Himself he was willing to risk, but not the Department of Mathematics, not with Greystone in it.

  “Run along, Brandt. I’m no Fairweather I. I won’t build your pope.”

  Brandt arose and left. There was no farewell handshake.

  At the lunch break, Haldane mulled over the interviews.

  After Flaxon’s drilling, he felt like an overtrained athlete. He had braced himself for an onslaught of penetrating questions cleverly designed to trap him into revealing atheistic, atavistic, or antisocial attitudes. Instead, he had had a fumbling conversation with a senile old pedagogue, been subjected to the ranting of a religious fanatic, and offered a bribe by a sociologist.

  Only in one prediction had Flaxon been wrong. The sociologist had not been verbose; on the contrary, his speech had been very much to the point.

  He thought he had held to the image of an eager young student who had inadvertently gone astray, but none of the jurors seemed particularly interested in his image. They had their own problems.

  Haldane looked forward to the psychologist, and he was not disappointed.

  Glandis VI, his fourth interviewer, belonged to a line stretching back to the very beginning of selective breeding. He was blond, shy, and hardly older than Haldane. He wore the manner of a professional hesitantly—he was deferential.

  After shaking hands, Glandis turned the chair around and sat in it backward with his arms folded over the back, his eyes roving over the cell. “A psychologist is supposed to have empathy, and I have plenty for you.”

  “I need it. This was a rough jolt… Incidentally, you aren’t the first psychologist I’ve dealt with professionally.”

  “Have you been psychoanalyzed?”

  “Back when I was six or seven…” Haldane told him the story about the flower pots.

  “That explains the microphone. It’s worried me more than Helix has. As a matter of fact, I have no trouble at all understanding Helix. She’s very nice. One might say, in rhyming slang, she is an outstanding member of the Berkeley Hunt.”

  Although he was not familiar with rhyming slang, Haldane suspected the compliment was very personal, but he was interested in the psychologist’s remark from a legal point of view. Flaxon had said that the girl would not be personally involved in his trial.

  “Did you see her?”

  “Like a fool, yes. I’m not familiar with jury duty, and I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to talk to her. But she didn’t hurt your case. All she wanted to talk about was Sigmund Freud, and all I wanted to do was listen.

  “That girl really reads. She’s read more Freud than I have. Right now, she tells me, she’s getting a lot of consolation out of reading the poetry of that Browning woman… Says it does her good to read about another woman’s troubles.”

  His heart warmed to the message that Helix had gotten to him. All she could hope to say was crystalized in the sonnet, “How Do I Love Thee,” and it was her legacy to him.

  Haldane even warmed to the unconscious bearer of the message, who was rambling on boyishly. “I tell you, Haldane, you can’t sublimate the libido completely. When I was about seventeen I had this strange but strong reaction to a daffy female named Lolopratt. She carried around a Pekingese in her lap and talked baby-talk. I’ll never forget that Peke, Flopit she was called. The little bitch bit me.

  “Did I kick the dog? Not on your life. I learned babytalk. Can you imagine a girl like Helix talking babytalk?”

  “Helix is a brilliant female, but I never thought of her as an opposite sex until the day of the funeral.”

  “Oh, no?” Glandis’ remark was a question marked by a skeptical grin. “I would say that you need psychoanalysis.”

  “Well, I didn’t think of her to the point of getting declassified.”

  “Y’know,” Glandis said, “sometimes I think punishment for miscegenous conception is out of line. Take the offspring, I say, rear it, and refuse the parents mating privileges.

  “Give the offsprin
g a chance. It’s possible the little bastards would make professional material.”

  “You’ve got an idea there,” Haldane agreed, spontaneously. “Why not just deny the parents their quota of children and see what happens to the child. Mathematically it’s almost impossible to breed for a specific personality trait with more than a hundred million variables in any one fertilized ovum.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Glandis said, “but the geneticists have something in their favor. Look at the old Jukeses and Kallikaks, look at the present-day Mobile Blacks. Look at race horses.”

  “There are traits, outside of physical features,” Haldane pointed out, “which might be the result not of genes but of parental environment. Culture’s a more important factor. The world’s greatest mathematician might be rolling a wheelbarrow right now.”

  Glandis slapped his leg in agreement. “You’ve got a point. Environmentalists never had a fair hearing. That Freud’s responsibility! If we’d listened to Pavlov…

  “You know why the environmentalists never got a chance? Because the robber barons gained control and made genetics a sub-department of Biology, answerable to Sociology. If Psychology had control of breeding, some surprising things might occur.”

  “We’d better not discuss those things,” Haldane warned him, “for they verge on criticism of the state.”

  “This is a privileged conversation,” Glandis said airily, “and to me the state is the Department of Sociology.”

  “I take it you don’t care for sociologists?”

  “Oh, I like them all right as individuals. Some of my best friends are sociologists. But as a group they rate low on the Kraft-Stanford scale, only two grades higher than us, and we rate fifth from the bottom.”

  Haldane grinned at the candor. “If your two categories rate so low on the group intelligence scale, how is it you’re one and two in the hierarchy?”

  “We’re social thinkers. Other categories are like sheep, nibbling at the grass in their own pastures but never lifting their heads to look over the fence. You mathematicians, for instance, are happy little fetuses in the womb of your own problems. You don’t take the broad view.