The Starchild

by Frederik Pohl

  He dared not risk Zafar's recovering consciousness and identifying him. Yet his every loyalty to the Plan of Man demanded that he take every chance to learn more about Zafar from the colonel's disjointed ravings.

  Dr. Snow made it easy for him, without knowing it. "You, boy!" he snapped. "Stay out of here. Quarla too! May be contagious ... But stay where I can find you if I need you," he added, bending over his patient.

  The two of them stood at the door of the emergency room, Quarla's hand, forgotten, in Boysie Gann's. "He's bad, Boysie," she whispered. "Don't know what it is. I haven't seen anything like that since Harry—" Then she stopped, and went on, in a different tone, to the men who had brought him: "You'd better wait until my father's examined him. You might have been exposed."

  In the emergency room Dr. Snow was lifting a bimetal thermometer out of Zafar's slack, mumbling mouth. Boysie Gann strained to hear what the man was saying, but all he could catch were words like "... trap for minds ..." "... living dust and lying dreams ..."

  Dr. Snow's expression was serious. "High," he muttered, then glanced toward the group at the door. "Quarla!" he called. "You'll have to compound an injection for me. Standard broad-spectrum antibiotics, afebrilium, analgesics. Call his weight—let's see—ninety kilos. And make the dosage maximum."

  Quarla nodded and hurried to the pharmacy room, while Snow bent back to the man. Even at this distance, Gann could see that the former Machine Colonel's face was contorted in agony and fear. There was more than sickness in Zafar's wild muttering; there was terror. He pushed himself erect, eyes staring, and shouted: "Graveyard of the galaxy! Starchild! Beware the trap! Beware your heart's desire!" Then Quarla was back with a spray hypodermic. Her father took it from her, pushed her out of the room again, and quickly injected the man.

  Zafar slumped back onto the examining couch, eyes closing, still mumbling to himself.

  The doctor watched him for a second, then came toward the group at the door. "He'll sleep for a while," he said. "Nothing else to do at this moment. We've got to see how he responds to the drug."

  The man who had brought him said, "Doc, what is it? Are we all going to ..." But Dr. Snow was shaking his head.

  "I can't answer your question," he said. "I don't know what it is. But I don't think you're in any danger. I've seen only one other case like this, three years ago. But I was exposed, and so was my daughter, and several others —and no one was infected."

  He hesitated, glancing at Gann. Then he said abruptly, "The other case was Harry Hickson, Mr. Gann. It killed him."

  Boysie Gann started to speak, then nodded. "I understand."

  "Do you?" Dr. Snow's voice was heavy with irony. "I don'tl I don't understand at all. Let me show you something—then tell me if you understand!" He stood away from the door, reached out a hand, and switched off the lights in the emergency room. "Look!" he cried. "Do you understand that?"

  The four in the doorway gasped as one. "Father!" cried Quarla, and the men swore softly. Inside the emergency room, in the semi-darkness Dr. Snow had brought about, Mohammed Zafar's leather-colored skin was leather-colored no longer. Like the spilled blood of the spaceling Gann had seen murdered, Zafar's skin was bright with a golden glow! His face shone with the radiance of a muted sun. One wasted hand, dangling out of the sheets, was limned in a yellowish, unsteady light like the flicker of a million flashing fusorians.

  Quarla choked, "It's ... it's just like Harry, Father!"

  The doctor nodded somberly. "And it will end the same way, too. Unless there's a miracle, that man will be dead in an hour."

  He sighed and reached to turn the light on again, but there was an abrupt hissing, swishing sound and something darted past them, over their heads. "What the devil!" cried Dr. Snow, and turned on the lights.

  Something was on the dying man's head, something that scuttled about and glared at them with hot red eyes, like incandescent shoebuttons.

  "Father! It's Harry's—I mean, it's the pyropod! The one Boysie and I brought back!" cried Quarla Snow.

  Gann said tightly, "Look! He broke the chain." Then he laughed shakily. "Harry would be pleased," he said unsteadily. "At last the thing's learned how to fly."

  Machine Colonel Zafar lived longer than the hour Dr. Snow had promised, but it was obvious that the extra time would not be very long. He was sinking. For minutes at a time he seemed hardly to breathe, then roused himself Jong enough to mumble incoherent phrases like "The Starchild! But the Swan won't help him ..."

  Snow was working over his laboratory equipment in the corner of the room, pausing every few minutes to check his patient's breathing, and shake his head. He summoned Quarla and Gann to him and gestured to a microscope.

  "I want to show you something," he said, his face somber and wondering. "Look." And he stepped aside.

  Quarla looked into the slim chromed barrels of the microscope, then lifted her head to stare questioningly at her father. He nodded. "You see? Mr. Gann, look."

  Slowly Boysie Gann took her place. "I'm not a scientist, Doctor," he protested. "I won't know what to look for."

  But then he was looking through the eyepieces and his voice stopped. He did not need to be a scientist. The spectacle before him, standing out clear in three dimensions in the stereoscopic field of the microscope, was nothing he had ever seen before.

  Straw-colored erythrocytes and pale eosinophiles floated among colonies of benign microorganisms that live in every human's blood. Rodlike and amoeboid, radial or amorphous, all the tiny bacteria were familiar, in a vague, half-remembered way, to Gann.

  All but one.

  For dominating the field were masses of globular bodies, dark and uninteresting-looking at first, but bursting under his eyes into spurts of golden light. Like the luminous plankton of Earth's warm seas, they flared brilliantly, then subsided, then flared again. It was like tiny warning lights signaling disaster in the sample of the sick man's blood—hundreds of them, perhaps thousands—so many that the field of the microscope was brilliantly illuminated with a flickering golden glow.

  "Great Plan!" whispered Boysie Gann. "And this is what made him sick?"

  Dr. Snow said slowly, "It is the same thing I saw in Harry Hickson's blood. Just before he died."

  He took his place at the twin eyepieces and glanced for a second at the tiny golden spheres. "Fusorians," he said. "It took me a month with paper chromatography and mass spectrograms to verify it in Harry's blood, but that is what they were. Colonies of fusorian symbiotes gone wild. They're killing him."

  He stared blankly at the microscope, then roused himself and hurried back to his patient. Machine Colonel Zafar was gasping for breath, his eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling, his fingers working aimlessly, his whole skin suffused with that golden glow.

  "Quarla!" rapped Dr. Snow. "Seal the room! We'll give him a positive partial pressure of oxygen! ... It won't save his life," he added wearily, "but it may prolong it—by minutes, at least."

  The girl hurried to close the door tightly against its resilient seals, while her father adjusted valves on his mediconsole. Boysie Gann heard a "white" sound of hissing gas and felt a quick increase of pressure in his ears. He swallowed and heard Quarla's voice, queerly distant, say, "Father! He's—he's trying to get up!"

  Machine Colonel Zafar was sitting up. His eyes were less remote, -his breathing easier in the hypobaric atmosphere. But the golden glow was even more intense, the perspiration streaming from his brow.

  And his eyes were on Boysie Gann. "You!" he cried. "Swan take you! Get back to the Machine, you traitor!" And he made the curious looping gesture with his arm that Gann had seen in Harry Hickson ...

  And then Boysie Gann remembered what the star was that lived in the heart of the Swan.

  "Alpha Cygni!" he cried. "Deneb! The star in the constellation of the Swan!"

  Zafar fell back on an elbow, glaring at him. "Your dirty mouth profanes the sacred name," he hissed. "The Starchild will punish you. In the heart of the Planner's citadel—i
n the bowels of Terra, where the Machine plays with its human toys—the Starchild will seek out and destroy its enemies!"

  His eyes closed and he gasped for breath. Gann looked at Quarla and her father, but their expressions were as clouded as his own. "Starchild?" whispered the girl. "Father, do you know what—"

  The doctor rumbled, "No, Quarla. I know nothing. Only rumors. A myth that there is a Starchild, and that he will bring the faithful of the Church of the Star home to Deneb's planets one day."

  "No rumor!" shouted the glowing, golden man, and he paused to cough hackingly. "The Starchild lives! I've seen him in the heart of the Whirlpool! He has touched me with his radiant hand!"

  But Dr. Snow was beside him, thrusting him back down on the bed, hushing him. "No!" cried Zafar wildly. "Don't stop the word of the Starchild! See here!"

  And with a convulsive effort he drew out of the pouch of the one garment he still wore a stiff, cream-colored sheet of parchment. "The Writ of Liberation!" he shouted. "The Starchild gave it to me to send to Earth. And I send it—now!"

  The pyropod that had belonged to Harry Hickson scuttled wildly about, its red eyes bright orange in the high-oxygen air. It hissed and shook its scales; and Zafar's 'eyes, too, were almost orange, glowing with tiny, dancing golden atoms, even in the pupil. They seemed blind—or fixed on something far more distant than the walls of the doctor's clinic.

  Boysie Gann felt a shudder, as if the floor of the room were shaking. It had not moved.

  He staggered and thrust out a hand to support himself, yet there was no motion. 'To Earth!" cried the sick man, and threw the sheet of paper from him. "Swan, carry it! Starchild, guide it! To Earth ..." He broke off.

  The doctor tried again to calm him, but the dying man thrust him aside. "To Earth!" he cried. "And you—spy, traitor, slave of the Machine! Swan take you ..."

  Gann opened his mouth to say something, anything, but words would not come. The room lurched again, more violently. Sickeningly. The others did not seem to notice, yet the shock came again. He stumbled and almost fell, caught himself and reached out instinctively for the fluttering sheet of paper Zafar had thrown into the air.

  It slipped away from him ... and disappeared. One moment it was there. The next moment it was gone. Where it had been Gann saw a queer flow in the atmosphere, like flawed glass, spinning.

  The whirlpool grew. It enlarged and came near him, and the room moved around him once more. Frantically he tried to leap back, to save himself, but he was falling, falling into the whirlpool ... falling ... and falling ...

  He fell for what seemed to be a thousand years while the room turned queerly dark and disappeared. Quarla's worried face, the doctor's look of shock, Mohammed Zafar's dying glare of hate—all disappeared, and around him he saw the dim shapes of stars and planets, of galaxies and dust clouds, rippling and glowing ...

  He fell for a long time, through what seemed to be a distance of billions upon billions of empty, airless miles.

  And was.

  For when the falling stopped and shaken and frantic he staggered to his feet, he fell flat and cut his face, bloodied his nose against a gray, soft-lighted metal floor.

  He was in full-earth gravity.

  He was on the Reefs no longer. He was on a planet. And around him stretched long empty corridors of metal walls and spinning tapes and glittering lights. Machine Major Boysie Gann was home at last. He was in the catacombs under Earth's surface that housed the mighty electronic masses of the Planning Machine.

  Chapter 6

  And that was how it began for Boysie Gann, with a twenty-billion-mile drop that landed him in a place where no one could possibly be, in the heart of the Machine.

  A warm wind blew between the narrow walls of the corridor. There was a faint distant hum, overlaid by the whir and hiss of rushing tape, the drone of enormous far-off machines. Gann stood up, gasping with the effort of moving his new weight—nearly a hundred kilos, when for months he had had to carry only a fraction of that, or none. He looked around, dazed.

  He was in a long corridor. At the end of it, hundreds of yards off, was a brighter light that seemed to be a room.

  He stumbled toward it, stanching the flow from his nose with the back of a hand, coughing and tasting the acrid blood at the back of his mouth.

  The gray light turned out to come from a strange round chamber, its roof a high concrete dome. The great floor was broken with little island clusters of consoles and control panels, unattended. The wall, almost circular, . was pierced with twenty-four dark tunnels like the one he had come from.

  Gann leaned dizzily for a moment against the frame of the door through which he had entered. Then, summoning his strength, he shouted, "Help I Anyone! Is anybody here?"

  The only answer was a booming echo from the great concrete dome, and the distant whirring of the tapes.

  The control stations were empty, the corridor vacant.

  Yet as Gann stood there he began to feel that the place was somehow alive. As the echoes died away his ears began to register fainter, more distant sounds—a muffled mechanical murmur, a hum and whir. All the corridors , were as empty as the one he had left. He peered into them one by one, saw nothing but the endless banks of computing equipment, the jungle of thick cables that roofed them.

  Almost on tiptoes, humbled by the immense hush around him, Gann went to the circular islands of consoles in the middle of the chamber. One unit, glowing with illuminated dials and buttons, faced each radiating tunnel. He stood entranced, watching the race of indicator lights across the face of each console.

  He had never seen this place in his own person before, yet it was all familiar to him, had been repeated a hundred times, from a hundred angles, in the texts and visual-aid lectures at the Technicorps academy. He was in the very heart of the Planning Machine—the most secret, the most elaborately guarded spot on nine planets. The nerve center of the Plan of Man.

  And the Planning Machine did not even know he was there!

  That was the fact that most shook Boysie Gann, almost terrified him, not only for himself, although surely he was on dangerous ground—men had gone to the Body Bank for far less. His fear was for the Plan of Man itself. How was it possible?

  With all its storage of facts on every act of every human being in the Plan—with its great taped mass of data covering every field of knowledge, every scientific discovery, every law—the Planning Machine seemed to have no way of telling that an unauthorized human being was at large in its very heart.

  Gann found himself sobbing. Dizzied, he clutched at the edge of the nearest console and frantically tried to make sense of the unfamiliar glitter of dials and scopes and racing lights. There was a linkbox! For a moment he was hopeful—yet the linkboxes to the Machine were meant only for those who had received communion, who wore the flat plate in their skulls that gave the Machine access to their cranial nerve centers. Dared he use the linkbox?

  But what else was there? Gann thought swiftly, crazily, of punching a button at random—throwing a switch— turning a dial. Any small change would alert the Machine. Serving robots or human techs would be there in moments.

  Then his eyes caught sight of a small, flat red plate, bearing a single bright-lit button, and one word. It was at the top of the console nearest him. The single word was STOP.

  He stood staring at it for a long moment, forgetting to breathe. If that plate meant what it so clearly, unequivocally said, he had it in his power to ... to...

  To stop the Machine.

  Machine Major Boysie Gann, Technicorps academy graduate, veteran of the spy school, trained and toughened against the worst a solar system could produce, found himself babbling in terrified hysteria. Stop the Machine! The thought was unbearable.

  He flung himself on the linkbox, found a switch, wept, babbled, and sobbed into it. He was not speaking in the Mechanese that the Machine had developed for the links —didn't know it—would have forgotten it if he had known it He was literally terrified, as nothing in
his life had ever terrified him before.

  When the squad of Plan Guardsmen in Machine gray came boiling out of the access elevators, racing down the corridors, their weapons at the ready, they found him slumped on the floor, all but unconscious.

  Boysie Gann nearly died right then, with twenty bullets in his body. But the Techtenant in command issued a sharp order. He peered wonderingly at Gann, restrained his men, thought for a second, then shook his head. "Don't hurt him," he growled. "Or not so he can't talk! Let's get him up to the security office—fast!"

  For four days Boysie Gann was questioned around the clock by the brawniest bullies in the Technicorps, and they were not gentle with him.

  He answered all their questions—told the absolute truth—-and paid for it with the impact of a club against his kidneys, a kick in his ribs. They knocked him unconscious a dozen times, and each time he revived again with a hard-faced medical orderly pulling a hypodermic out of his skin, brought back to face more interrogation.

  Finally they let him sleep—not because they were satisfied with his answers, but because the medics feared he would die.

  When he awoke he ached in every part of his body. He was strapped to an operating table. The Body Bank, he thought at first in a surge of panic. But it was not the Body Bank; it was a prison. Clearly the medics had been working on him. Although he ached, he could move. His toes curled, his fingers responded to his brain. His eyes opened and moved where he willed them.

  Only one thing was different: there was a cold, hard pressure around his neck.

  The security collar that Harry Hickson had removed so easily had been replaced.

  Men were all around him, removing the straps, forcing him to his feet. "You! Risk," growled one of them, a radar-horned NCO with a chin that was stubbled blue with beard. "On your feet! You're going to talk to the general."