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Authors: John Boyd
Tags: Science-Fiction
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painting, madonna and child, until she looked over at him and her lips curled silently around the word, “Beast!”
He watched her tune the instrument, her deft fingers flicking over the bridge, her ears cocked for the sounds. Every movement seemed impressed with her own peculiar grace, and it was delightful to sit and watch her even though she was pouting and angry.
Finally, she turned to him. “I wanted to sing you some old English and Scottish ballads to demonstrate a very simple meter in the same context as the ancient epic poems, that is, oral. Originally, poetry was written to be chanted. I planned to do this to give you some flavor of the preromantic verse, but now I’m doing it to collect your wits.”
At the moment, nothing could have appealed to him less than a ballad, but he did not wish to arouse the anger of this half-vixen, half-goddess, so he pretended an interest.
His interest wasn’t pretended for long.
Her voice was weak and its range limited, but its enunciation was clear and its timbre low-pitched and vibrant.
As all else about her, it was a wedding of opposites, husky yet plaintive.
She played the guitar well, and her voice was adequate for the songs she sang. Obviously, the ballads were not written for virtuosi of the voice.
Though sentimental and sad, the songs were unabashedly sentimental, and there was little morbidity in their sadness. They delighted in death and partings. “Barbry Allen” told of two who died for love, and rose trees, growing from each grave, climbed a church wall to tie themselves into a lovers’ knot, a highly improbable phenomenon but charming to think about. Another spoke of a gentleman by the name of Tom Dooley who murdered a female and had to hang. With rare good humor, the crowd at the foot of his gallows exhorted him to hang down his head and cry.
Listening to her and watching her, it seemed impossible that this girl was the same who had pounded him in rage and frustration only minutes before. Mated to her, a man would know contrasts; after being emotionally tossed about by the gales of her beauty and wit, he could always enter the quiet harbors of her gentleness and her arts.
At that moment, he caught the first glimmerings of an idea which he knew was shot through with peril to himself, to her, and to their dynasties. But the idea was before him, and he had to consider it. The idea considered was a resolution made.
He would stake a legal claim on the territory of her heart. Some way, somehow, though it meant circumventing the sociologists, deluding the geneticists, and subverting the State, he was going to be legally mated to Helix.
Slowly, he lifted the official biography of Fairweather from his lap and kissed the book.
Chapter Five
Christmas came early that year, or so it seemed to the student with the vast problem. He was surprised to land that secret batches of eggnog had been prepared in the dormitories. Absently, he hummed a carol now and then, merely to keep up pretenses, as his mind probed at his problem with the fearfulness of an octopus approaching the sinking bulk of a killer whale.
To jump genetic barriers was an impossible feat. To jump them and land in a predetermined spot, out of five hundred million spots on the North American continent alone, was an impossibility cubed. Even the attempt to subvert state policies to personal ends could result in an S.O.S. at least, and in exile to the planet Hell at most.
Insanity was a relative state, and he, at least, knew he was insane. Other factors were in his favor—his father’s knowledge and his growing awareness that the omniscient state was not an abstraction but an agglomeration of sociologists, psychologists, and priests, professions which ranked far lower on the Kraft-Stanford Scale of Comparative Intelligence than theoretical mathematicians.
His Great Idea struck him during a bull session in the dormitory room on the last Friday before the holidays.
Students had drifted in and out for
He watched her tune the instrument, her deft fingers flicking over the bridge, her ears cocked for the sounds. Every movement seemed impressed with her own peculiar grace, and it was delightful to sit and watch her even though she was pouting and angry.
Finally, she turned to him. “I wanted to sing you some old English and Scottish ballads to demonstrate a very simple meter in the same context as the ancient epic poems, that is, oral. Originally, poetry was written to be chanted. I planned to do this to give you some flavor of the preromantic verse, but now I’m doing it to collect your wits.”
At the moment, nothing could have appealed to him less than a ballad, but he did not wish to arouse the anger of this half-vixen, half-goddess, so he pretended an interest.
His interest wasn’t pretended for long.
Her voice was weak and its range limited, but its enunciation was clear and its timbre low-pitched and vibrant.
As all else about her, it was a wedding of opposites, husky yet plaintive.
She played the guitar well, and her voice was adequate for the songs she sang. Obviously, the ballads were not written for virtuosi of the voice.
Though sentimental and sad, the songs were unabashedly sentimental, and there was little morbidity in their sadness. They delighted in death and partings. “Barbry Allen” told of two who died for love, and rose trees, growing from each grave, climbed a church wall to tie themselves into a lovers’ knot, a highly improbable phenomenon but charming to think about. Another spoke of a gentleman by the name of Tom Dooley who murdered a female and had to hang. With rare good humor, the crowd at the foot of his gallows exhorted him to hang down his head and cry.
Listening to her and watching her, it seemed impossible that this girl was the same who had pounded him in rage and frustration only minutes before. Mated to her, a man would know contrasts; after being emotionally tossed about by the gales of her beauty and wit, he could always enter the quiet harbors of her gentleness and her arts.
At that moment, he caught the first glimmerings of an idea which he knew was shot through with peril to himself, to her, and to their dynasties. But the idea was before him, and he had to consider it. The idea considered was a resolution made.
He would stake a legal claim on the territory of her heart. Some way, somehow, though it meant circumventing the sociologists, deluding the geneticists, and subverting the State, he was going to be legally mated to Helix.
Slowly, he lifted the official biography of Fairweather from his lap and kissed the book.
Chapter Five
Christmas came early that year, or so it seemed to the student with the vast problem. He was surprised to land that secret batches of eggnog had been prepared in the dormitories. Absently, he hummed a carol now and then, merely to keep up pretenses, as his mind probed at his problem with the fearfulness of an octopus approaching the sinking bulk of a killer whale.
To jump genetic barriers was an impossible feat. To jump them and land in a predetermined spot, out of five hundred million spots on the North American continent alone, was an impossibility cubed. Even the attempt to subvert state policies to personal ends could result in an S.O.S. at least, and in exile to the planet Hell at most.
Insanity was a relative state, and he, at least, knew he was insane. Other factors were in his favor—his father’s knowledge and his growing awareness that the omniscient state was not an abstraction but an agglomeration of sociologists, psychologists, and priests, professions which ranked far lower on the Kraft-Stanford Scale of Comparative Intelligence than theoretical mathematicians.
His Great Idea struck him during a bull session in the dormitory room on the last Friday before the holidays.
Students had drifted in and out for
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