The Last Starship From Earth

by John Boyd

  “Fairweather did not design them as prison transports. He gave them to mankind as a bridge to the stars, but the Weird Sisters, Soc, Psych, and the Church, called them back from the stars. When the executives withdrew the space probes, Fairweather did the only thing that he could do; he salvaged the ships and the remnants of their crews.

  “Those repulsive spacemen are the blood brothers of your romantic poets.

  “The Acheron and the Styx, jumping in time warp between us and Arcturus, are the legacy Fairweather left us. If we can ever again rise to the heights our forefathers reached, those ships will be waiting to take us to the stars.”

  “Haldane, you’re a strange and wonderful boy, but you cannot be objective about Fairweather.”

  “I can be objective about anything… I’ll grant your thesis that Fairweather could have murdered his son. Can you match my objectivity?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Slowly, he cornered her. “Can you look at your own death objectively?”

  “As objectively as any male!”

  “If I told you that I loved you and was willing to die for that love, would you, with your knowledge of lovers, concede my sincerity?”

  “That was one of the tenets of the lover cult. I’ll accept it in theory, but I would never casually ask you to do it.”

  “Are you unselfish?”

  “I like to think so, but I’d never volunteer the information if I weren’t.”

  Her answers had snared her in his trap of sophistry, and he sprung the trap. “To paraphrase you, I’m going to ask you to match your unselfishness with my unselfishness, for I’m going to volunteer to die for you, and I ask you to listen with your vaunted objectivity.”

  So he heard himself dispassionately outlining his plan to merge their categories and mate. For the first time, he detailed to her his mathematical theory of aesthetics as applied to literature, and from his opening sentence she caught the implications. He knew this, from the anxiety and sadness in her eyes. Though much of what he said was in mathematical terms, she listened with a focused and intent silence that told him she understood. Only once, when he was explaining the mathematical weights given to the parts of speech, did she interrupt with a question in a voice that rang hollowly in her throat.

  “What weight did you give the nominative absolutes?”

  He explained, and detailed the courses she must take for her master’s degree and her Ph.D. in order to merge their categories in the new category. Then, after an hour and a half, he was finished.

  She turned her eyes from his face and looked through the window at the bay, now brilliant from sunlight beaming through a rain-rinsed sky. “Dark, dark, in the blaze of noon!”

  She turned to him in the sad resignation of surrender.

  “I wanted to open a door for you, and one for me. I wanted to bring to this tired old planet its last bright-eyed love. I thought our love could flourish, just a little while, in the desert. But there was a tiger in the oasis.

  “For a long time, the climate of earth has been growing colder for us poets. No wonder the flame that warmed us has died. Oh, I’m not completely innocent. I fanned your flame for its inspiration to me, and now I find that I’m burning, too.

  “So do I turn from the ashes of my fathers and the temples of my gods? Yes, because I’m not a fool who starves her love only to feed her pride.

  “And you. If you fail, you’ll be exiled to Hell. If you succeed, a few more human beings are dehumanized.”

  “But if I succeed, you and I will live and die together.”

  “Since I love you to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, this is not a decision for my reason to make. It’s a matter of my being. I accept your offer.”

  He did not rise to give her a ceremonial kiss. He sagged back in the seat. The deed was done, the pact was pledged, and surrounding the inner core of his determination he felt an aura of farewell. He felt as Columbus must have felt as he sailed past the Pillars of Hercules, or as Ivanovna must have felt as the particolored globe of her native earth dwindled beneath her, a feeling of finality tinged with fear.

  He lifted his face to Helix. “There is one fact I must know. Is it possible for the founder of a new category to define the genetic requirements? Logically, the answer is yes, but if the answer is no, we can curse God and die.”

  “How can you find out?”

  “I can ask my father.”

  “If he suspects this plot, he’ll issue a verbal edict,” she warned, “and the world’s last lovers never will have experienced the act of love.”

  When she made the remark, it was lost in the whirl and seethe of his thoughts, but later, as Christmas neared and his long separation from her during the holidays gave him more time to remember and to analyze her remarks, he read into her words a promise and a desire.

  From her home in Sausalito, she sent his father a respectful Christmas card which let Haldane know of her thoughts. He himself, after buying the yearly offering of gin for his Father, was done with Christmas shopping. The week before Christmas and the week before New Year’s were both spent in reading.

  He read the complete works of John Milton because he remembered the venom in her phrase, “that unspeakable John Milton,” and he wondered why the poet had aroused her contempt. He loved the sonorous phrases in the stilted language of that era, and he particularly admired the character of Lucifer in Paradise Lost. There was a man!

  He knew, now, that such a work would be banned by the state, but it was written in an era before Lincoln had brought about the political hegemony of the United Nations. Long before any overtones of treason or deviationism could affix themselves to the poem, it had established itself as a classic, and Satan kept his status as the Prince of Darkness.

  Reading further into Milton’s works, he ran across the line, “Dark, dark, in the blaze of noon,” and remembered that Helix had quoted it when she was under stress from his suggestion. He felt like calling her and asking, “If you detest the poet, why do you quote him?”

  His relations with his father were very, very circumspect. He was an astonishingly obedient and respectful son, playing chess constantly and losing ten percent of the time. Not until Sunday after New Year’s Day, his last night at home, did he feel the time was right for him to cash a dividend on his exemplary behavior.

  Over the chessboard, he asked, “Dad, do the geneticists ever cross-breed categories?”

  “When the need develops. We were having trouble, some years back, with interplanetary navigators succumbing to space madness. They bred a female mathematician to a long-distance runner. His pulse beat was about half that of a normal man, and he had the nervous system of a turtle. The idea was to breed them to get a torpid mathematician. Three times they were bred, and each time the offspring was a nervous turtle. The dam got attached to her children and jumped when they put the last one to sleep, and the sire kept running.”

  Haldane studied the board and moved his knight.

  He was in a position to checkmate in three moves, and he knew his father would see the pattern; but while his father was warding off the knight, the bishop, still in its original position, was the main threat.

  As Haldane figured, his father moved into a defensive position to guard against the knight.

  Haldane moved the bishop.

  His father, desperately on the defensive, sought to counteract the bishop’s move. Haldane, watching his father think, said, “Have you ever heard of a mating at the request of a professional himself?”

  “Fairweather’s the only one I ever heard of.”

  His father had brushed the question aside to concentrate on the board.

  Haldane spoke again. “Suppose two members of a working team, in different categories, were particularly well-coordinated in their work effort…”

  “The sociologists would know it!”

  “Would they recognize a petition from the team members?”

  There was the question, put bluntly but camouflaged
by casualness. The answer came maddeningly slowly, and it was incomplete. “Possibly. It would depend on the circumstances.”

  His father moved to counter the bishop. Haldane moved his knight and said, “Check!”

  Haldane III wetted his lips and studied the board. There was a solution to his problem. He could sacrifice his castle and free his queen to check his son which would demand that his son sacrifice his knight.

  Haldane waited for the flickering half-smile followed by a study of his son’s alternatives. When it came, Haldane asked, “If an anthropologist were to run across some aspect of a primitive culture that he thought might throw light on present-day problems—that is, if his studies veered into the field of social anthropology—could he then petition the sociologists for a sociologist for his mate rather than another anthropologist?”

  “Suppose! Suppose! What the hell you getting at?”

  Haldane III’s attention shifted from the chessboard to his son, his eyes blazing, a pallor suffusing his face.

  “Christ, Dad, can’t I ask a hypothetical question without your jumping on me with both feet?”

  “Let me give your hypothetical question a hypothetical answer. If a genuine social need was evinced in such a petition, it would be considered. If there was the slightest ground for suspicion that such a petition was based on sexual attraction, a thorough study of both principals would be made with a view toward uncovering regressive tendencies. If a professional is found to be atavistic, he or she is reduced to the proletariat and sterilized by the order of the State.

  “Any professional who brought such a petition might well be writing his own death warrant. This danger would be doubled if the petition were for extracategorical breeding. It would be trebled if the proposed merger involved an art and a science. It would be a predetermined fact if the categories were mathematics and poetry!”

  His father knew!

  All the old antagonisms toward his father coiled in his mind, but caution stayed his hand.

  Feigning casualness, he said, “That’s a pretty specific answer to a hypothetical question.”

  “I don’t like to see a man beat around the bush. Your mother thought I was an opinionated fool, but I was always honest. Now I’m going to give you a little honest paternal advice. Forget that girl Helix!”

  “Why bring her into this?”

  “Don’t act so innocent! Did you truly think I wouldn’t wonder why art and I started to get so much attention from you, especially after a Sappho with an abacus under her arm practically forced herself into my apartment? Epic poem of Fairweather—what a dodge!”

  Sarcasm yielded to sincerity in his father’s voice. “Listen, son. Those genetic laws protect us. Without them, every moony-eyed teen-aged frail would be spewing defective offspring from any passing sperm source who buttered her vanity. Their bastards would be up to our navels.

  “The laws protect you. No amateur facility has the capabilities to produce a quality product at the price the pros charge, and when you go to the goat’s house for wool, you always end up paying twice the price for shoddy.

  “The laws protect me. I don’t want to see a red X at the end of the line of Haldane merely because my son is an inept merchandiser on the frail market.”

  Haldane resented the sneering reference to his merchandising ability from a man who had tossed a diamond onto a five-and-dime counter. “You seem more proud of that line than of me!”

  “Why not? You and I are just fractions in a continuum, but the name we bear means something.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be a cipher in a series. Maybe I’d like to be the sum of the digits.”

  “My god, what arrogance! If you were a child, I might sympathize with your prattle. If you have no regard for your dynasty, at least think of your own intellect. If you, by any act, deprive society of the services of that mind, you’ve committed a crime against humanity.”

  “If I have grave doubts about the worth of society, then anything I contribute to it is a sin against myself.”

  “ ‘Grave doubts about society’! Who are you to doubt society? You’re only twenty. Are these the ideas you’ve been picking up from that frail?”

  Haldane rose, his body tense, his face white. “Listen, old man, I’m tired of you calling her a frail.”

  “You want me to tell you what she is?”

  Gently Haldane stepped back from the table. Carefully he placed his chair in its proper position. Almost gingerly he walked into the library and gathered his books into a neat pile. He secured the books tightly, forming a looped handle with the belt.

  He got his cloak from the closet, took his books, and walked through the living room, toward the entrance.

  His father rose and followed him to the door, asking, “Where are you going?”

  “I’m getting out of here before I break your neck.”

  Haldane III was suddenly gentle.

  “Listen, son. I apologize for my anger. I have no grievance against the girl except as a force acting on you. I enjoyed being the focus of her peculiar power, but she is not of us. She isn’t old, I know, but she was never young. In your innocence, you’ve placed yourself under the sway of a Delilah.

  “It isn’t she that I’m concerned with, but you. You’re my son, my only replacement…”

  “Dad, we’re miles apart. Yes, I’m your replacement. After me comes Haldane V, stamped with the same parts number. We’re parts in a computer! Fairweather’s humanism was shown in his irony when he turned God into a solid-state computer.

  “What’s our purpose? Where are we going? After all, this is the best of all possible societies on the best of all possible planets.”

  “Don’t you believe that?”

  “Not any more.”

  Haldane III sat down on the sofa. A dazed look was on his face. “She did this to you.”

  “She did nothing. She asked questions, and I found the answers. Your society, the computing machine, has dehumanized everything, even the relationship between you and me. But Dad, I’m going to beat the machine. Fairweather did it, and so can I!”

  “Sit down! I want to tell you something.”

  Despite his father’s monotone, there was something burning in the voice that commanded obedience. Haldane sat down.

  “You think Fairweather I was the last humanist. Pope Leo XXXV was the last humanist.”

  His father ceased speaking for a moment as if trying to gather his thoughts. His eyes focused on some distant object, and his breath came in rasps. “I’ll tell you a state secret. Fairweather fathered a monstrosity by that proletarian mate, Fairweather II, a being who created more evil on this planet than any evil since the Starvation. Despite the evil of Fairweather II, Pope Leo brought excommunication proceedings against Fairweather I because he betrayed his own son to the police.”

  Again there was the silence marred by the breathing. Finally, he continued, “I want you to know this because if you are correct in your arrogance, if you are capable of duplicating his feats, I want you know what kind of model you have chosen.

  “Pope Leo considered the betrayal a moral wrong. He brought charges against Fairweather on purely human grounds. The sociologists and psychologists argued that Fairweather I had put his social duty above his moral duty. They won. The pope lost. But Fairweather I sent his own son to Hell.”

  “How did you learn this?”

  Suddenly the shards of Haldane III reassembled into the cold hauteur of the professional. “Are you questioning the knowledge of a department member, student?”

  “I’ve earned the right to question such a charge against Fairweather, department member!”

  “Get out!” Authority burned in every line of Haldane III’s face.

  Haldane grabbed his books and strode past him, but he turned in the doorway, sick with fury and despair.

  There sat the destroyer, unbending, uncompromising, a gin-drinking, chess-playing, evil old man. He hated Helix. He hated his wife. He hated his son. Now he hated the memo
ry of Fairweather!

  With his brain churning, Haldane said, “Tell me, did my mother fall from that window, or did she jump?”

  His father crumpled back onto the sofa. Pain replaced anger. He closed his eyes and waved his hand in a gesture of futility and defeat as Haldane slammed the door behind him.

  Driving back to the campus, his anger left him, and as his rage subsided he knew that it had been the last tropical storm before an advancing ice age of his mind. The king was dead, destroyed by Haldane’s sure knowledge that his father had spoken the truth, and Helix was a snow maiden lost in the frozen mists. Fairweather, that worse-than-filicide, was a pope-building sycophant of the Church.

  He wanted to pray to something, but in the vast desolation only the ghosts of old gods snickered. Yet, even as he adjusted to this sub-subarctic of the spirit, an aurora borealis flickered and then flared into a dazzling display of rustling light which sent his blood singing through his veins.

  LV2 = (−T)

  If he could prove that, he would need no gods to pray to!

  Then the lights flickered out. It was true, and he knew it, but no laboratory on earth had the facilities to permit its demonstration.

  His thoughts swung back to the ice field.

  Chapter Six

  Haldane’s first Monday lecture, on stress analysis, bored him under ordinary conditions. Originally he had selected the dull subject with a boring lecturer as a buffer for his Monday morning aches. Now, fatigued from a sleepless night, he found it doubly difficult and doubly necessary to concentrate on unemotional facts lest the despair that skirted the periphery of his consciousness gain complete control.

  That mighty edifice of thought which he had planned to erect in secret had been bared by the offhand deductions of his father. Now Helix would flee from him, leaving him nothing but his shattered self-esteem because the poetess had been right and the mathematician wrong about Fairweather. Then there were the shards of that shattered idol who had betrayed humanity in such a monstrous manner.