The Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd Read Free Book Online

and answered her, “I agree with you, citizen, that it is folly for a professional to endanger the social welfare for a tremor in the loins…”—he paused at the familiar phrase, and heard his voice, as something apart from him, veer off from his recital of the creed—“… even though that tremor might be the expression of the highest sentiments of the human heart and be as free from the dross of flesh as an eagle in its flight.”
    He resumed the creed: “… and he who is willing to sacrifice so much for so little has tarnished his honor and his dynastic line, and traduced the state.”
    Suddenly he grinned, and a wild authority rang in his voice. “I agree with you because you’re such an agreeable girl, but if you were to lean forward and whisper, ‘Come, Haldane, defrock and deflower me,’ I would agree with you, also, and with a helluva lot fewer words.”
    She laughed outright.
    “You’ve heard both versions,” he said, “mine and theirs. Remember my version, won’t you? You can get the official version from those silverfish at Golden Gate when their hands start fluttering accidentally against your hips.”
    “Why, silly, you’re jealous!”
    “I’m not jealous! It makes me crave soda-water when I think that some of those alleged males probably come early to classes to watch you walk in and stay late to walk out behind you. And the profs aren’t above a little hoggle-oggling, either. I bet you could get straight A’s if you wrote your answers in Sanskrit.”
    She was giggling as she pointed an imperious finger at the sofa. “Sit down! It’s not the lechery of poets that I fear; it’s the virility of mathematicians.”
    She sat down, at the far end of the sofa, and said, “We’ve got to establish policy. No more Sunday meetings. I spend my Sundays in Sausalito with my parents, and a break in habit patterns would be suspicious. No telephone calls. Phone calls only, and let those be short. And we should limit our meetings to one hour only on Saturday. And we should stagger the time of the meetings, setting the time each preceding Saturday.”
    “You’re shrewd,” he said.
    “I’ll have to be. If anyone in authority found out about this and assumed the worst, we could be psychoanalyzed.”
    “I don’t want to go through that, again,” he said.
    “You have been, then?”
    “Mother fell out of the window when she was watering flower pots on the ledge. I was a child when it happened. I didn’t know any better, so I blamed the flower pots. When I pushed them off the ledge with a broomstick, one of them hit a pedestrian. I was analyzed for aggressions.”
    “You must have had a student analyst,” she said. “But back to now. Have you read any of Fairweather’s poetry?”
    “No, and deliberately no. I’m not out of the woods in the eighteenth century, yet. Your boy, Moran, helped me a lot, but when I come to the master, I want to understand his language.”
    “You’ve certainly overestimated the poetic power of our noble hero.” She handed him the small volume. “Open it and read to me at random any quatrain.”
    He opened the book and read:
It was so cold the snow squeaked underfoot
    And random gusts drew skirrs
    From surface snow which skittered off the scree
    To eddy into drifts against the firs.
    “His language isn’t difficult,” she said, “is it?”
    “He uses a few words that I wouldn’t use in talking, but the reason I wouldn’t use them is that my friends wouldn’t understand me if I did.”
    “What do you think of the subject?”
    “The snow scene?… I like it. I’ve always had a weakness for snow so hard it skirred when it skittered off a scree. None of this mushy slush for me, that goes ‘slurp’ when it hits.”
    “But there are no symbols,” she protested.
    “Some folks like symbols. Some don’t. I can’t stand symbols in snow scenes. I like my snow pure and unadulterated.”
    “A poem should mean something besides the obvious,” she said.