The Rakehells of Heaven. John Boyd
legs. Red had not seen a soap opera for over five months.
When Papa drove us to Montgomery to board the plane for Mandan, Red, gazing out of the car window, commented idly, “Jack, I can see why there are so many mulattoes around these parts.”
On the plane to Mandan, I faced our coming lift-off with the calmness of one whose fate was in other hands, but Red was raring to go. After marriage and Jackson, the void offered no perils for O’Hara.
We lifted off from the Mandan pad near midnight, January 3. He tied his green leprechaun above the instrument panel and said a few words aloud to Mary while I spoke silently to Jesus. Since I was flight commander because of my higher academic rating, I ordered Red to take the con.
The night was moonless. The air seemed crystallized by the cold. Beneath a vault of stars the prairies stretched white around us to the rims of the world. Above us, Cassiopeia beckoned as the window onto Lynx slowly opened and we completed the chant of spacemen.
“Power on?”
“Power on.”
“Struts clear?”
“Struts clear.”
“Ports closed?”
“Ports closed.”
“Ignite pods!”
“Pods ignited.”
“Countdown commencing!”
Red’s face in the glow from the panel reflected only joy as he repeated aloud the readings on the panel: “Four, three, two, one . . . zero. Here goes nothing!”
Glare from our pods on the snow dimmed the stars as the ship creaked from the stress of the launch and Gs forced us back into our rests. We were rising, and inside me a sense of purpose was rising.
“Pods away!”
Our ship lurched and surged as the assist pods dropped and the lasers cut in, and the sough-sough of their pulsing chimed oratorios through my being.
“Cepheus three points off the port bow, Captain,” Red sang out. “On course for Lynx.”
As I watched Uranus drift astern, I knew that my own course was not plotted on the ship’s flight-recorder, but it lay as clear in my mind as that triangulated on the star chart before me.
As the gold of the stars shifted to violet and the blackness before us grayed, as our weight stabilized to the constant acceleration of one gravity, Red turned and asked, “Well, Jack, my lad, how about going below for a cup of java?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
So vast are the meadows of the void that the bleat of one lamb can be lost. It was not given me to know that my voice would be amplified and reinforced by the most unlikeliest of channels. In my exaltation and pride, I could not foresee—and no one could have guessed—that the boy who unlocked himself from the seat beside me would become, in the fullness of time, the god of a far galaxy.
CHAPTER THREE
Time telescopes nearing the speed of light and ceases at the Minkowski Barrier, but the hiatus must be filled. For me, entering the one-space continuum meant mediation, the Scriptures, prayer and reading Navy Regulations. Red chose the four horsemen of romantic poetry, Keats and Shelley, Yeats and Fraze, reruns of soap operas procured from the culture bank and Navy Regulations.
Red spoke little of his marriage and in his infrequent references to Thelma she was “my little angel.” His term of endearment became suspect in my mind, however. Once I attempted to engage him in a discussion of the Christian concept of Heaven, but he dismissed the subject. “Lord spare me, Jack, from Heaven with its angels and deliver my soul to Fiddlers Green.”
Fiddler’s Green is the paradise of space sailors, a meadow whereon the brooks flow with whisky and maidens gambol in birthday dress.
Because I understood O’Hara, I made no attempt to convert him. Full well I knew that O’Hara was beyond the capabilities of any fledgling evangelist.
We had taken the Scout’s Oath and were pledged to spend a measure of the one-space in the study of Navy Regulations, particularly the codes governing the classification of alien humanids. Man was the standard of measurement in the universe, and if the aliens qualified as homo sapiens, their planet was exempt from occupation by the Interplanetary Colonial Authority. Alien status was determined by the high command on the basis of scouting reports.
Qualifications were strict, touching on many aspects of the alien, his person, his organizations and even his taboos. Humanid societies must use water closets (social), and there must be separate water closets for male and female (taboos). To be classified as homo sapiens, a humanid had to possess an opposing thumb, and a belief in a Supreme Being, such Supreme Being not to exceed a triune godhead, and statute law and order must exist among humanids. Reading over the qualifications, it struck me that the only item overlooked was that the postulant was not required to wear saddle oxfords.
Biological practice was a particularly vulnerable area for alien claimants to human status. An ability to cross-breed with Earthmen was an understandable requirement, but even that was invalidated if the gestation period was less than seven months or more than eleven. Coition must occur face-to-face. Group participation disqualified. Public nudity disqualified. Oral contact with primary erogenic zones disqualified. Reading over that list caused me to rock with laughter: Red O’Hara could not have qualified as a human being under the alien codes.
I took the biological section of the codes across the passage for Red to read. He read them gravely, closed the manual and handed it back to me. “No matter, Jack,” he said. “I’ll continue to think of you as a human being.”
Let him without sin throw stones.
As midshipmen, we had been exposed to the study of Navy regs, but the pressure of classes prevented any in-depth analysis and midshipmen habitually skipped footnotes. In the section concerning alien governments, there was a footnote that aroused my curiosity. It read: “Addendum. See Public Law 36824—I.C.A.”
With microfilms of Earth laws and legal systems in the ship’s culture bank, Red and I went below and flashed P.L. 36824—I.C.A. onto the viewer.
To qualify as members of the World’s Brotherhood, inhabitants of an alien planet must possess a defense system with capabilities for interspace warfare sufficient to relieve Imperial Earth of the responsibility for the aforesaid planet’s defense.
As I clicked off the viewer, Red commented, “The message from Earth is clear—if you can’t defend yourself, we’re coming after you. Jack, these codes aren’t designed to qualify a planet for brotherhood. They’re designed to disqualify.”
I disliked the subversive tone of Red’s remark. “Government policy is not our responsibility,” I said. “It’s not for us to question the law but to obey.”
“You’re absolutely right, Jack,” Red said, “for reasons of personal sanity. If you’re going to worry about the sins of the flesh as instrument of such policy, you’re as crazy as a man cleaning the ashtrays in a car careening through a crowded schoolyard.”
“ ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,’ ” I quoted, but in truth I could not be too condemnatory. Already I was planning in my heart to do a little fudging on Caesar myself.
Throughout my inner turmoil within the hiatus, the flawless technology of Earth continued to function. Our laser thrust slowly died. Mass loss weight. For a little while, O’Hara and I floated free, playing basketball in the ship’s gym and using each other as balls. Then our retro-jets phased in and we returned to the deck as deceleration replaced acceleration. Finally we came again into light and time, but the configuration of the stars was strange. A new galaxy hung in the sky and the Milky Way was a point of light astern.
“The luck of the Irish” is no chimera. When we surveyed the galaxy on the screen, Red looked over