The Last Starship From Earth (8 page)

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.

“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!