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

“Now, turn to page 83.”
    He turned to the page to find the familiar title, “Reflections from a Higher Place, Revised.” But there were only four of the hues she had quoted at Point Sur, their depth augmented by decorative rows of asterisks.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
    He tells us, standing on His place,
    That he who loses wins the race,
    That hemlock has a pleasant taste,
    That parallel lines must meet in space
    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
    “You told me you thought it was the Sermon on the Mount,” she said, when he looked up from the page, “and the editor thought so, too. The editor capitalized ‘He’ and took out the lines about blessing by murder which wouldn’t have been appropriate for Jesus.
    “Another item: asterisks usually mean deletions. The editor makes them resemble decorations which suggests to me that he was arranging a cover story for his act. If someone were to come to him and say, ‘Look, this isn’t a complete poem,’ then he could say, ‘Yes, but I made a note of it. See the asterisks.’
    “The man who would have had to say that, the editor of that volume, is the chief of the Department of Literature. His signature makes the work authoritative. But why would the head of the department edit a book by an obscure poet?”
    “Fairweather was a state hero,” Haldane reminded her.
    “But not in poetry. Furthermore, the title of that book is The Complete Poetic Works of Fairweather I . That title is completely false.”
    “Girl, you’re accusing a state authority of censorship and misrepresentation.”
    “Precisely. It’s horrifying, but it’s true! Take the other book, carefully, and you’ll find another Fairweather poem in it, a poem not even mentioned in The Complete Poetic Works .
    “That book is an anthology of nineteenth-century poetry. It’s been out of print for over a hundred years, a family heirloom, and it’s probably the only copy in the world. Look on page 286.”
    He turned to the page carefully. The sheets were brittle with age, but the old letterpress type was still beautifully legible.
    He found the poem. Its title alone would have stamped it as pure Fairweather: “Lament of a Grounded Star Rover.”
You could trace our course through the Milky Way
    By our wake of thundering light,
    But they called us home as we heeled the keel
    Round Ursa Minor’s bight.
(The Weird Sisters had taken, they said,
    The web of the galaxy
    To weave it into fairer strands
    On the loom of destiny.)
Uranus had been to our dragon ship
    As the Pillar of Hercules,
    And Orion’s flare was a beacon buoy
    That led to the Pleiades,
Where veiled Merope mourns apart
    And scans the skies in vain
    For her mortal loves who returned to her.
    But come not back again.
You err but once when you ride the light.
    Stout hearts must con that helm.
    All men grow sad and some go mad.
    For the voids can overwhelm.
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