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

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