The Last Starship From Earth (6 page)

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.

“I’m concerned because this anthology is on microfilm, and data analysis would have produced the poem from the archives when Fairweather’s poetic works were being compiled. Can you see any reason why this poem should be censored?”

He had not known that there were three Weird Sisters. Helix was confusing herself by poetic forms. There was nothing in the book to prevent Fairweather from turning an allusion into a symbol. With growing awareness of the meaning of the poem, he realized what Fairweather had done.

“You overlook one fact, Helix,” he said. “Editors edit. No editor would include this jingle in a work of poetry.”

His idea registered, and she relaxed.

“I think you’re right, Haldane. Yes, I’m sure you are. And the deletions could have been made for the same reason. For a while, I had begun to suspect censorship, which would mean there was something rotten in the state of the State.”

She was visibly relaxed now, her intelligence and her conditioning reintegrated.

“Next Saturday, I suggest we meet at ten. I’d like you to help me consider the rhyme scheme I should use in my poem. To brush up on the background, I’ll check out the official biography of Fairweather, and I’d like to suggest that you read in the general history of Fairweather’s times.

“Meanwhile, I’m afraid we’re going to have to use this period for the cleaning of the apartment. In the six weeks you’ve been coming here, you must have intended the dust to lie fallow for next year’s crop.”

As he rummaged in the broom closet for the dust mops, Haldane’s face was set in lines of serious thought.

He knew who the Weird Sisters were, and he knew what Merope meant, and he knew with unequivocal certainty that the poem had been censored. The symbols Helix missed were there in all their dreadful implication: there was something rotten in the state of the State.

After they parted, Haldane did not go home immediately. He drove to the entrance of the Golden Gate Bridge and walked onto the span, choosing the ocean side.

For more than an hour he leaned against the guard rail and watched a fog bank roll in from the ocean. It moved slowly, a sheer-faced cliff of mist from beneath which the ocean pulsated, coming toward him in widely separated rollers that slapped the pontoons beneath him with a
sough-sough
.

On his left the Presidio was finally lost in the shroud, and at his right the western slope of Tamalpais went under, but it was the ocean which fascinated him most; flat, oily, sinister, it pulsated from beneath the fog bank.

Once that sea had called to men and men had answered, but that was long ago, long, long ago. Then, monsters had slithered in its depth and winds had tortured its surface, but the men had come, and the breed of man who challenged the sea had died with the sea’s terrors. Now, the only men who plied its routes were the sailors of the freighter submarines which glided fathoms below, indifferent to the storms that moiled the surface.

Then space had called, and there were men who would have answered, but the Weird Sisters had canceled the probes and the stars which should have been the new universe of man had become man’s shroud.

He stood on the apex of man’s destiny, in the best of all possible societies on the best of all possible planets, yet some atomy in his being still cried for worlds to conquer. He was not satisfied. Ineffable longings stirred a fever in his blood.

He longed for Helix with yearnings beyond Helix, for she had triggered forces in the chambers of his mind where the darkness was seeking light.

As the wisps of fog curled over the bridge, growing thicker, flicking on the bridge lights, he turned and walked back toward the land. His footsteps sounded hollow on the deserted bridge, and he felt intensely alone.

For a moment, he felt he was not returning to San Francisco but entering a dark land peopled by hostile men. Without inner prompting, a line of overwhelming immediacy leaped from the thousands of lines he had read in the past months, a fragment accentuating his exile from a suddenly alien earth, and he spoke the line aloud into the fog:

“Childe Roland to the dark tower came…”

Helix phoned him on Friday.

He was alone in the room after taking a shower when his phone buzzed. Assuming some schoolmate was calling, he took it from the pocket of his robe and said, “Haldane.”

He was startled to hear her voice, saying, “Citizen, I’m sorry to inform you that the volume you requested is on the proscribed list.”

His voice held no pretense at cool officiousness as he blurted out, “Madam, he built the pope!”

“Nevertheless, his biography is proscribed. Citizen, you realize this will interfere with the project.”

He cared not an icicle on Hell for the project, but with nothing to justify their meetings, Helix might cancel them.

Suddenly his voice rang with authority, “I have other sources of information, Madam. Will you be open Saturday?”

“If arrangements are made beforehand, we open on Saturday. I believe you have an appointment, have you not?”

“Yes.”

“Then I have a suggestion for a secondary topic which I hope to offer to you tomorrow.”

“Thank you. Madam, and good day.”

He sat on the edge of his bed, seething and angry with the sense of a man who has been defrauded by a petty trickster.

He could understand why no one had mentioned that Fairweather wrote poetry. It was information not germane to his subjects, and he had never asked the question. But this was different.

He had spent two years here, studying the ideas of a man who had contributed more to mathematics than Euclid or Einstein, a man who had contributed more to theology than Saint Augustine, a man buried in a hero’s grave in Arlington, yet he had never read a subordinate clause in a footnote in any text which hinted that Fairweather had ever been under a cloud from the Church.

Was history a state secret?

He had an ace, and he would play it.

Haldane III, as a department member, would have access to such information. Two weeks ago he would have asked his father straight from the shoulder why the Church had the gall to proscribe the biography of the man who had assembled the last representative of Saint Peter on earth, but now he would have to move with circumspection. Haldane III might suspect from the question that his son had continued an illicit relation with their dinner guest.

Such suspicions might prove fatal to his plans. If his premonition on the bridge last Sunday was true, his father would be in the enemy’s camp.

On his way home, he stopped by a sporting-goods store to make a purchase and arrived after his father. During dinner, Haldane challenged him to chess. “To make it worth my time, I’ll play you double stakes.”

He almost made a tactical error. His father jumped at the offer, and Haldane won the first game. The double gin ,was so potent that it almost rendered him incapable of losing the second.

His father won the third game so decisively that he was able to remark, “Chess separates the mathematicians from the ribbon clerks.”

After two more victories, Haldane III was criticizing his son’s whole system of play with sweeping grandeur. “Attack! Aggressiveness is the spirit of the game, and the queen is the crux. Chess is a matriarchy built on the power of the female, and whoever cannot control the power of the female loses his virility, is emasculated as a chess player.”

Haldane appreciated his father’s comments because he was needing all the assistance he could get in figuring out losing moves.

Meanwhile, he was gathering courage to steer the conversation into areas that would help him solve the riddle of Fairweather’s proscription.

To maintain a semblance of a contest, he won, and tapped his courage from the same barrel from which sloshed his father’s omniscience on chess. He suddenly realized he was wasting vast amounts of tact and diplomacy on a conversation which Haldane III would not even remember on the morrow.

“Dad, why is the official biography of Fairweather proscribed?”

“Maybe because he experimented with antimatter?”

“He lived before the experiments were outlawed.”

“You’re right! Your move.”

Haldane moved his king, putting it in jeopardy.

His father studied the board.

“Then why was it proscribed?”

“He got into a fight with Pope Leo XXXV. Leo tried to excommunicate him. But the sociologists backed Fairweather. Not that they liked Fairweather, mind you. They figured Leo was bucking for more power. He was a popular pope. With the faithful behind him, who knows?”

Haldane waited excruciating moments while his father did not check the king when he finally moved.

“But a pope wouldn’t bring excommunication proceedings against a state hero without a powerful reason.”

“You’re absodamnlutely right, son. Your move.”

Haldane moved his king into checkmate on the line with his father’s queen, but his father moved a pawn diagonally and blocked the check.

Haldane moved one back and two over with his castle.

“Why did they let him invent the pope?”

“Big struggle going on in the triumvirate back in those days. Soc and Psych ganged up on the Church. They welcomed Fairweather’s invention. Henry VIII, the head sociologist, knew he sure as hell didn’t have to worry about political maneuvering on the part of a computer Check!”

Haldane castled for the third time.

“Why did Leo want to censure Fairweather?”

“State secret, son. Your move.”

“I just moved. Dad. I castled.”

“If it’s all so confidential, why is his biography simply proscribed?”

“It was degutted first. Proscription was just a sop to the Church.”

It had taken a high degree of skill mixed with illegal moves to do it, but he had his father in a position where any move he made would result in checkmating his son. There was a mocking half-smile on Haldane III’s face, a silent cry of impending triumph, as he studied the board. Haldane cut through the train of delicious thoughts that were coupling in the old man’s mind and asked, “Do you think you could get that biography for me? It might be interesting.”

“Get it yourself,” he waved an impatient hand toward his study. “It’s in there, on the top shelf… Checkmate!”

He came early to the Malcolm apartment to check for hidden microphones and to arrange a dozen roses he had brought in a brass urn near the foyer. When he finished his tasks, he sat down on the sofa and began to reread the biography he had read into the late hours of the night before.

He heard her pause by the roses when she entered, and he pretended to be engrossed in the book. He looked up to see her rearranging the flowers. “They should be spread more. This old patriarch should be given the dominant position.”

With a few movements, she was transforming his lumpish arrangement into a harmonized design.

He walked over and kissed her neck. “Personification is a poor literary device.”

“The teacher is being taught. You’re clever.”

“Clever, quick, and devious.” He steered her to the sofa and pointed to the book he had laid there. She reached down and picked it up, almost with awe. “His biography.”

“Dad lent it to me.”

“Surely you didn’t talk to him about Fairweather?”

“He won’t remember. The doctor recommended a drink or two before bedtime for his hypertension. Last night was very tranquil.”

Vexation fretted his face. “If he were a man of loose faculties, he never would have been named to the department.”

“He had sense enough not to talk about state secrets. He almost did, and then he clammed up.”

“Did he tell you why the biography was proscribed?”

“As a sop to the Church. Pope Leo tried to excommunicate him, but Soc and Psych stopped the pope.”

“Does the biography discuss the incident?”

He looked away.

Last Sunday she had been horrified by the thought that the state was capable of practicing censorship in the best of all possible worlds, and he had lied to protect her beliefs. Her life had been conditioned to the belief that the state was all-benevolent, and he wondered if he had the right to test that belief, to endanger her sanity.

But she was a professional, not Pavlov’s dog, and she was dedicated to the search for truth. Did he have the right to censor unpleasant truths in his dealings with her? If he remained silent, he would become an ally of that which he contested and dishonor the mystique which bound him to her.

Deliberately, he answered. “It mentions the incident only in general terms. You see. Helix, before the Fairweather biography was proscribed, it was censored.”

“You know there is censorship, then?”

“I’ve known it since last Sunday,” he admitted.

He thought he saw relief flicker in her eyes, but the emotion was lost in an expression of concern—for him.