Free The Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd

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