The Last Starship From Earth

by John Boyd

  “Now, that’s what I call small talk,” she said.

  His fingers tapped her kneecaps.

  “You’re built along the lines of a Gothic arch,” he said, “with the perspective of your limbs drawing the attention upward…”

  “Limbs?” She interrupted.

  “Archaic for legs Back to the Gothic arch: its lines were designed to draw one’s attention toward heaven.”

  “Now is this flattery,” she asked, “or is it a lecture on Gothic architecture?”

  “Helix!” He patted her knee reprovingly. “You’re supposed to be a poet. That’s symbolism. I’m telling you, old-style, that your sacrolumbar area is heavenly.”

  She shook her head. “Either you’re a poor poet or I’m poor at understanding symbols. Give me another example.”

  “Very well. We’ll consider your limbs as monads. This right one is strong, well muscled. You must do a lot of running.”

  “Is that supposed to be flattery?”

  “In a manner,” he explained. “Actually, it’s what they called a veiled compliment. When a girl does a lot of running, that means she’s usually being chased.”

  Her rigid arm around his shoulder relaxed slightly and she smiled. “Some primitive instinct tells me you’re getting closer to the general area of courtship.”

  Encouraged, he stroked the underside of her knee and felt Gothic compulsions grasp his fingertips. “Your skin is as satiny as silk.”

  “Is silk satiny, or silky?” she asked, alert as always to mixed figures of speech. But he noticed a quickened tempo to her breathing which inspired him to improvisations.

  “Keep your satin-fingered silkiness below the skirtline,” she said and added, “Don’t. Stop.”

  Her word-order confused him. He wondered if she meant “Don’t” and “Stop” or “Don’t stop.” If she wanted him to stop, he reasoned, she could always push him away; instead, she was clinging more firmly than ever, almost hysterically.

  “Oh, Haldane, please stop.”

  She was weeping, and he hadn’t wished to make her cry. Besides, she was definitely asking him to stop, so he disengaged himself and arose to light another cigarette, carefully lighting the nonfiltered end. He noticed that his hand trembled slightly, and he laid the cigarette down to remove his handkerchief from his tunic. Strangely, a simple exercise in ancient courtship had given him an insight into history—he could understand the population explosion. Bending to dab her eyes, he knew that, had she been even slightly receptive, he might have committed miscegenation, despite his self-promises.

  She opened her eyes and looked up at him with hostility. “Were you at one of those houses before you came here?”

  Perplexed by her irrelevancy, he answered bluntly. “I haven’t since Point Sur.”

  She must have believed him. “We were saved by yoga,” she said. “I challenged your yoga, and I would have lost.”

  It was Haldane’s turn to feel hysteria. Sitting beside her, he said, “But, Helix, there wasn’t any yoga. I’m wearing an athletic supporter. I’m under restraint.”

  He was sliding an arm around her waist when she doubled up her fist and began to pound him on the chest, weeping again. “You beast! You crude, deceitful beast. All the time, you let me think it was I. All the time, I was trying to beat yoga…”

  She quit pounding him and dropped her face to her hands, sobbing. Gently he reached over, placed an arm over her shoulders, and reassured her, “Helix, you whipped him to a frazzle.”

  She threw his arm away and jumped to her feet, walked over to a chair, sat down, and glared at him. “Don’t you ever touch me again, you beast.”

  His mind whirled. She was genuinely angry with him because he had obeyed her a moment before, and once he had explained why, she had become angry with him for doing what she had formerly been angry with him for not doing. He threw up his hands in despair. “Helix, let’s look at this matter rationally,” he said, “and forget the eighteenth century. Come back and let me hold your hand, and I’ll apologize for my deceit and my irrational behavior. There are a few other refinements of the ritual which might enlighten you when it comes to writing…”

  She shook her head stubbornly. “No, if it happened once, it would happen again. You’re in love, you nut. Here”—she reached down, picked up the Fairweather biography, and tossed it toward him—“read about your god, you saint of mathematics.”

  “I have no gods. I’m a born loser, and the gods were all triumphant. Jesus, Fairweather, Jehovah, they’re all winners. The only ball team I cheer is the Baltimore Orioles. Only one moment of my life was granted me to look on the face of beauty, and beauty thumbed her nose.”

  She was not listening. Her eyes were looking away and fuming. Her kneecaps, primly touching, pointed away from him.

  He sat mute, Fairweather forgotten on his aching lap.

  Finally, she rose and went into the foyer, looking down on him with haughty coolness, holding herself primly erect and more than an arm’s length from him as she passed, her hips not swaying half an inch from the perpendicular. As she passed into the foyer, her hands swooped over the vase of roses, touching them lightly with a caress of infinite grace.

  She came back into the room carrying a guitar, moving with wariness past the couch where he sat. She resumed her seat in the chair, and the lines of her body relaxed in soft arcs around the instrument. As she hummed a note and struck the strings, she reminded him of a painting, madonna and child, until she looked over at him and her lips curled silently around the word, “Beast!”

  He watched her tune the instrument, her deft fingers flicking over the bridge, her ears cocked for the sounds. Every movement seemed impressed with her own peculiar grace, and it was delightful to sit and watch her even though she was pouting and angry.

  Finally, she turned to him. “I wanted to sing you some old English and Scottish ballads to demonstrate a very simple meter in the same context as the ancient epic poems, that is, oral. Originally, poetry was written to be chanted. I planned to do this to give you some flavor of the preromantic verse, but now I’m doing it to collect your wits.”

  At the moment, nothing could have appealed to him less than a ballad, but he did not wish to arouse the anger of this half-vixen, half-goddess, so he pretended an interest.

  His interest wasn’t pretended for long.

  Her voice was weak and its range limited, but its enunciation was clear and its timbre low-pitched and vibrant.

  As all else about her, it was a wedding of opposites, husky yet plaintive.

  She played the guitar well, and her voice was adequate for the songs she sang. Obviously, the ballads were not written for virtuosi of the voice.

  Though sentimental and sad, the songs were unabashedly sentimental, and there was little morbidity in their sadness. They delighted in death and partings. “Barbry Allen” told of two who died for love, and rose trees, growing from each grave, climbed a church wall to tie themselves into a lovers’ knot, a highly improbable phenomenon but charming to think about. Another spoke of a gentleman by the name of Tom Dooley who murdered a female and had to hang. With rare good humor, the crowd at the foot of his gallows exhorted him to hang down his head and cry.

  Listening to her and watching her, it seemed impossible that this girl was the same who had pounded him in rage and frustration only minutes before. Mated to her, a man would know contrasts; after being emotionally tossed about by the gales of her beauty and wit, he could always enter the quiet harbors of her gentleness and her arts.

  At that moment, he caught the first glimmerings of an idea which he knew was shot through with peril to himself, to her, and to their dynasties. But the idea was before him, and he had to consider it. The idea considered was a resolution made.

  He would stake a legal claim on the territory of her heart. Some way, somehow, though it meant circumventing the sociologists, deluding the geneticists, and subverting the State, he was going to be legally mated to Helix.

  Slo
wly, he lifted the official biography of Fairweather from his lap and kissed the book.

  Chapter Five

  Christmas came early that year, or so it seemed to the student with the vast problem. He was surprised to land that secret batches of eggnog had been prepared in the dormitories. Absently, he hummed a carol now and then, merely to keep up pretenses, as his mind probed at his problem with the fearfulness of an octopus approaching the sinking bulk of a killer whale.

  To jump genetic barriers was an impossible feat. To jump them and land in a predetermined spot, out of five hundred million spots on the North American continent alone, was an impossibility cubed. Even the attempt to subvert state policies to personal ends could result in an S.O.S. at least, and in exile to the planet Hell at most.

  Insanity was a relative state, and he, at least, knew he was insane. Other factors were in his favor—his father’s knowledge and his growing awareness that the omniscient state was not an abstraction but an agglomeration of sociologists, psychologists, and priests, professions which ranked far lower on the Kraft-Stanford Scale of Comparative Intelligence than theoretical mathematicians.

  His Great Idea struck him during a bull session in the dormitory room on the last Friday before the holidays.

  Students had drifted in and out for most of the afternoon, mixing eggnog with ribaldry and jests with earnest discussions. Haldane, alone in the group, leafed through a Lives of the Popes he had given Malcolm as a present in exchange for a bathrobe. He had discovered that Pope Leo, the last human pope, had established the order of proletarian priests, called the Gray Brothers, who were admitted to the brotherhood without formal education in theology. It was a humanitarian act that did not mesh with his attempts to excommunicate Fairweather; Haldane, interested, called over, “Say, Mal, how about my borrowing this book over the holidays?”

  “Sure, but bring it back. It’s a Christmas gift.”

  Almost simultaneously, the guests and brandy disappeared, and Malcolm and Haldane had the room to themselves. Malcolm invited Haldane to accompany him on a skiing holiday in the Sierras. “Great fun, boy. Icy air on your cheeks, crunch of snow under your skis, and the crack of breaking legs.

  “We’ll hole up in Bishop. If things get dull, we can take a helitrip up to the Holy See. As long as you’re practicing celibacy, you might as well get in with the priesthood. Maybe you could check the pope’s circuits.”

  Haldane wondered if the invitation were purely social or if his roommate, sensing Haldane’s nonconformist tendencies, was genuinely concerned with his spiritual welfare.

  “Thanks for the invitation, but I have a lot of reading.”

  “Don’t tell me… the aesthetics of mathematics… or is it the mathematics of aesthetics? I keep getting the input confused with the output.”

  As Haldane shaved preparatory to leaving for home, he remembered that Helix had pointed out the logic of reversing the input, and he knew he had already been working on the project which would put him into an entirely new category, one into which Helix could fit as easily as a cog on a meshed wheel.

  He would design and build an electronic Shakespeare, one which, logically, would demand the co-development of literary cybernetics.

  Helix would take cybernetics as an elective.

  He sang a little tune as he finished shaving, and Malcolm, hearing him from the room, asked, “What kind of song is that?”

  “One our ancestors sang.”

  “Bloodthirsty progenitors, we have.”

  He had been singing the nonsensical ditty:

  Lizzie Borden took an ax

  And gave her mother forty whacks.

  When she saw what she had done,

  She gave her father forty-one.

  His singing reflected a subconscious shot through with trepidation, for he was dreading what he had to tell Helix on Saturday.

  How did one graciously present a girl with an ax to kill the ancestors of her spirit?

  That evening over chess, Haldane stalked his father’s knowledge, using candor as a blind. “In reading Fairweather’s biography, I wondered how he could mate with a worker.”

  “Rank has its privileges.”

  “When you mated, how many females did you interview?”

  “Six. That’s about par for a mathematician in one area. I always liked Orientals, and if I’d had rocket fare to Peking, you’d be Eurasian.”

  “What made you choose mother?”

  “She said she could play chess… Don’t divert me. I think I’ve got you beaten.”

  Saturday howled into San Francisco. Russian Hill, Nob Hill, and Telegraph Hill jutted into an underbelly of clouds and were as lost as plowshares scudding through black loam. Rain squalls pounded the bay, and Alcatraz was bloated by mists.

  Helix floated in like a hymn to intellectual beauty, books under her arms and ideas brimming in her eyes.

  “Fairweather’s trial was held in November of 1850. His mate died in February of that year. According to the mating schedule, she would have been in her mid-forties, so she did not die of natural causes. It’s possible, even probable, that whatever caused her death also caused the trial. Fairweather did something terrible that year, if she jumped. Do you agree that it’s a logical possibility that she jumped?”

  “A logical probability. She was mated to a man whose ideas she could not have shared, because there are not fifteen men in the world today who can grasp the full implications of his theories.”

  “Good! Now there remains the figure of Fairweather II, their son. He is mentioned only as having been born and having entered the profession of mathematics. Nowhere is there again mention of him. We know he lived past the age of twenty-four because he was admitted to a profession. At that time, his parents had been married twenty-eight years. Statistics show that most females jump between the ages of thirty and thirty-six when it is marital dissolution that is the motive for suicide. So the chances are that she didn’t jump because she couldn’t understand her husband’s ideas. It little mattered, since they had brought him, and thus her, international prestige. We must assume that she committed suicide for another reason.

  “What could Fairweather have done that caused his wife to commit suicide and the Church to bring excommunication proceedings against him? What could he have done that so created remorse that he would lick the boot that kicked him? What remorse could be so vast and so genuine as to be regarded as penitence by the Church, and thus permit Pope Leo to again open the doors of the Church to the repentant sinner?”

  She got up from the sofa and walked away from him, turning to face him. “Logic guides me to only one choice—filicide. Fairweather murdered his own son. Remember, ‘Summoning all my social grace, I mix the hemlock to your taste.’ ”

  “Oh, Helix,” he almost roared his protest, “you’re reading personal motives into the most impersonal, universal mind that ever existed.”

  She shook her head. “You’ve erected a god in your mind. You believe Fairweather capable of nothing but divine behavior. I faced the possibility that the state could practice censorship. Match your courage with mine, and face the facts of logic.”

  “I can back you up with the information that Pope Leo was humanitarian,” he said, “but logic will trip you. If Fairweather had murdered his own son, he would have been excommunicated.”

  “Not if there was legal doubt”—she stressed the word ‘legal’—“which would have got him the support of Soc and Psych. They are concerned with legality, while the Church is concerned with morality. If he put piranhas in the swimming pool without telling his son… you follow?”

  “Yes,” he agreed, “but Soc and Psych would not buck the church on mere legalities.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t they?” she flashed. “What was the life of a half-breed prol to them? Nothing! What would the manner of his dying mean to the Church? Everything!

  “Now, suppose Soc and Psych wheeled into line, not to protect Fairweather I so much as to oppose and crush the Church. Suppose they
hit on the Fairweather trial as a cause célèbre. What would they gain?”

  So his father, with vaster knowledge than hers, had hinted. His interest keyed higher as she walked over and picked up the history book.

  “I’ve marked the passage. Listen: ‘In the conclave of February 1952, redistribution of authority gave the Church complete spiritual authority over those not professing the faith’—remember, there were still a few Buddhists and Pharisaic Jews back in the first half of the nineteenth-century—‘and full police power was invested in the Department of Psychology while the judicial functions were delivered to the Department of Sociology.’ That shift was probably the direct outgrowth of the Fairweather trial.”

  Haldane leaned back on the sofa. She had done a splendid job of analysis, but she was reasoning like a female, intuitively. She had set up a theory and then gone looking for the facts to support it, rather than let the facts set up the theory.

  “Judged purely on the basis of his work,” Haldane said, “Fairweather was a great humanitarian. Humanitarians don’t murder.”

  “Humanitarian!” Helix moved over and sat on the ottoman before him, as if she were begging him to understand her attitude.

  “As children, you and I were required to watch the arrival and departure of the Hell ships. Remember those horrible gray slugs dropping out of the sky. Remember those spacemen waddling toward the cameras, heavy-jawed and thick-bodied, like toads oozing out of the primordial slime.

  “Remember the Gray Brothers in their cowls, keening their liturgies as they carried the living dead up the long gangway of that ship? Remember the thud as the last port clanged shut like the door of a tomb? Remember those happy moments of our childhood, Haldane?

  “Those little exercises in conditioning by terror, those little television shows we had to watch even though we awoke screaming at night, those ships, those crews, all came from the brain of Fairweather. Do you call that humanitarian?”

  “Helix,” he said, “you’re looking at this purely from the viewpoint of a sensitive girl who was frightened. Even as a boy, I was never afraid to look at those ships, because they weren’t Hell ships to me. They were starships.