The Starchild

by Frederik Pohl

  The guards wrenched him straight again. One whispered to the other across him, "Watch! She's going to go into communion."

  Even in his precarious position Gann could not help wanting to see. He had never before been with an acolyte during communion. It was something to be desired—and dreaded.

  If the deadly security collar around his neck was the stick that the Machine had invented to enforce the Plan of Man, the communion plate was the carrot that rewarded faithful service.

  Gann knew what it looked like. He thought he had caught a glimpse of it in the forehead of Sister Delta Four, the bright metal disk grafted into the skin, starred with its black pattern of holes that accepted the prongs of the communion plug.

  He knew that communion was supposed to be the perfect experience. The communion plate was only its exterior symbol. It was in the brain itself that the delicate stereotaxia of the Machine's neurosurgeons had done their finest work. Through electrodes wired to the plate in the forehead, the Machine requited its deserving servants with tuned electronic stimuli. Its messages flowed directly into the pleasure centers of the brain.

  The perfect experience—for it had no taint of reality to corrupt it, no bill presented in the form of exhaustion or physical damage—no substance! It was the quintessence of pleasure. Stripped of tactile, visual, olfactory— of all sensual complications—it was the great good thing that men had always sought, and found imperfectly as a side effect of eating, or drinking, or inhaling the crisp air of a "mountain morning, or sex. It was all of them, distilled and served up in a tidy package, received through a bright metal plate.

  It was so perfect, thought Boysie Gann wildly, that it seemed somehow wrong ...

  "She's getting ready!" whispered one of the guards, and Gann ventured to turn his head again to see.

  He succeeded—only for a moment, but he succeeded. The guards were watching too, and loosened their grips just enough for him to turn.

  Sister Delta Four lifted the black hood to uncover her forehead. There on the smooth white skin he saw the bright metal disk—saw it, trembled, looked away—looked back again, and saw clearly what his mind had rejected.

  He saw the face of Sister Delta Four.

  There was a hoarse whisper from the doorway. "Let's go!" The guards started, and jerked him away, thrust him facing forward so that he saw the radar-horned NCO with a face like fury, beckoning them angrily, signaling that the Planner was ready for them now.

  But Boysie Gann fought them, struggled like a wild man. "No!" he shouted. "Wait!" And he battled the astonished guards, trying to turn, to go back to the girl whose serene face he had seen, eyes closed, lifting the communion plug to her forehead.

  The guards lashed out at him, struck him. He hardly felt the blows. He turned, breaking free of one of them, colliding heavily with the other so that they fell sprawling on the thick golden rug, the other guards leaping toward them. But as they fell, Gann saw the face again.

  He had been right. There was no doubt. Sister Delta Four was Julie Martinet.

  The girl he loved was now no longer entirely human. Her vows were no longer to him. She was an adjunct to the Machine, as dependent on it for her every bit of life and thought as some remote-directed subsea mining dredge ... and as little a part of the race of men. Julie Martinet had become a part of the machine.

  Chapter 8

  If the catacombs of the Machine were the nerve center of the Plan of Man, then the great State Hall of the Planner was its heart. Huge as a hangar for jetless spacecraft, ornate as a Pharaoh's tomb, it housed the most powerful man in the history of the human race, and it was worthy of him. The walls were paneled in gold. Crescent-shaped lunettes were frescoed with scenes of the nine planets and a thousand lesser worlds on which the Plan of Man reigned supreme.

  In the great hall a score of attendants waited on the Planner's will: his personal physician, three black-robed Mechanese acolytes with their linkboxes and tonal beads, a dozen guards. The Vice-Planner for Venus was there, an efficient little engineer whose nose and ears were out of scale, seeming to have come from some gigantic donor. So was Machine General Wheeler, fixing Boysie Gann as he entered with a steel-gray stare.

  No one spoke.

  Dominating the great hall, on a huge golden chair, was the Planner himself. He was staring, lost in thought, at a great quartz table on which stood scores of fantastic metal and crystal toys.

  Gann found himself standing in the center of a great tesselated floor, alone. His guards had halted behind him. He waited for the Planner to notice him.

  But the Planner's eyes were on his toys. He sighed and stretched out a hand to them, stacking them in military rows as absorbedly as any five-year-old with his lead soldiers; he formed them in columns and marched them across the clean gleaming quartz.

  The figures were dragons. They were monsters from storybooks, and creatures too incredible ever to have been in a story. Some were mirror-bright, some black. Many were in gorgeous rainbow hues. They had no wings, nor had they legs. Their heads were the heads of monsters, some with teeth like sabers, some with curious frayed flower-petal faces, like the muzzle of a star-nosed mole.

  Boysie Gann had never been close to the Planner before. He could not help being a little disappointed. The Planner was only a man! An old, fat, flabby man at that—and, thought Gann privately, a bit of an eccentric too.

  Yet the Planner was the voice of the Planning Machine itself. It was impossible for the Machine to falter in its judgments, impossible that its chosen instrument be anything less than perfect Of course, there were the recurrent rumors about the present Planner's predecessors—old Planner Creery, for example, who had fallen into error in attempting to allow the Reefs of Space entry into the Plan of Man under their own conditions ... Swiftly Gann rejected that thought. This was no place to be thinking treason!

  He turned his mind to the stabbing pain that had pierced him in the anteroom when he had found the girl he loved, Julie Martinet, changed into a priestess of the Machine, Delta Four. How had it happened? Why had it happened?

  The Planner raised his great round head and stared at Boysie Gann. "You," he rasped. "Do you know what these are?"

  Gann swallowed and stuttered. "Y-yes, sir," he got out. "I mean, I think so. I mean, some of them look like pyropods. The creatures that prey on the life in the Reefs of Space, sir ..."

  But the Planner was nodding his great bloated head. "Pyropods, yes," he boomed. With a sudden motion he swept the delicately carved pieces off the quartz table, sent them crashing to the floor. "I wish I had a thousand pyropods!" he shouted. "A million! I wish I could send them out to the Reefs to kill and destroy every living thing on them! What insanity that these reef rats should dare talk to me of freedom!"

  He broke off and glared at Boysie Gann, who stood silent, unable to speak. The Planner said, "I stand for classic truth! What is it that animates the Reefs of Space, Gann? Tell me, for you have been there. It is the romantic fallacy," he roared, not waiting for an answer, "the eternal delusion that man is perfectible, that there is a spirit of goodness that can grow and mature in crass organic creatures! What insanity! And now they threaten me in my own Hall—blot out my sun—boast of more deadly measures still!" He pressed his plump arms against the carved golden arms of his chair, half lifted himself, leaned forward to Gann and shouted, "Who is this Starchild, Gann? It is you?"

  Boysie Gann was galvanized into shocked speech. "No, sir! Not me! I've never seen him. I know nothing about him—oh, except what I've heard here, when Genera] Wheeler's men interrogated me. And a few rumors. But I'm not the Starchild!"

  "Rumors. What are those rumors, Gann? I must know!"

  Gann looked helplessly around the great hall. All in it were watching him, their eyes cold, their faces impassive. He was on his own; there was no help for him from anyone there. He said desperately. "Sir, I've told all I know a hundred times. I'll tell it again. I'll you all I know, hut the truth is, sir, that I know almost nothing about the Starchild!
"

  "The truth," boomed the Planner, "is what I say it is! Goon! Speak!"

  Gann obediently commenced the old story. "I was detailed, sir, to investigate certain irregularities on Polaris Station ... ." As he went through the long, familiar tale there was dead silence in the hall, the Planner listening impassively, leaning on one arm in his great golden chair, the others taking their cue from him. Gann's voice fell on the enormous hall like words shouted down a well. Only echoes answered him, only the narrowing of an eye, the faint shift of a position showed that his hearers had understood. He finished with his arrest in the catacombs of the Machine, and stood silent.

  The Planner said thoughtfully, "You spoke of a sign. The sign of the Swan."

  "Yes, sir." Boysie Gann demonstrated as best he could the supple motion of forearm and hand that he had seen in Harry Hickson and the dying Colonel Zafar. "I believe it refers to the constellation Cygnus, in which the main star, Deneb, is some sort of object of worship to what is called the Church of the Star ..."

  The Planner turned his great head away from Gana toward the black-robed knot of communicants of the Machine. "Deneb!" he barked. "Display it!" One of the acolytes spoke in soft, chiming tones to his linkbox. Instantly the lights in the great hall darkened, and on the vaulted ceiling a panorama sprang into light. The Planner craned his thick neck to stare searchingly upward. Every eye followed his.

  It was as if the thousand yards of earth, and rock above them had rolled back. They were gazing into the depths of space on what seemed to be a clear, moonless night—late in autumn, Gann judged by the position of the constellations; perhaps around midnight. Overhead were the great bright stars of the Summer Triangle, Altair to the south, Deneb and Vega to the north. The Milky Way banded the vault with a great irregular powder of stardust. Low on the horizon to the west red Antares glowed; to the east was Fomalhaut...

  Abruptly the scene began to contract. It was as if they were rushing through space, straight toward the constellation Cygnus. Fomalhaut and Antares slipped out of sight with Sagittarius and Altair's constellation, the Eagle; so did the Pole Star and Cepheus below it; all that was left was Cygnus, the constellation of the Swan, hanging over their heads like a bright canopy.

  A voice chimed, "Constellation Cygnus. Stars: Alpha Cygni, also known as Deneb, blue-white, first magnitude.

  Beta Cygni, also known as Albireo, double, components deep blue and orange. Gamma Cygni—"

  The Planner's voice cut it in raspingly: "Just Deneb, idiot! What about Deneb?"

  The voice did not miss a beat. It chimed: "Deneb, distance four hundred light-years. Surface temperature eleven thousand degrees. Supergiant. Spectrographic composition, hydrogen, calcium—"

  "Planets!" boomed the Planner irritably.

  "No planets known," sang the invisible voice. Gann craned his neck; it came from one of the black-robed acolytes, but with their faces shrouded in the hoods he could not tell which.

  The Planner was silent for a long time, staring upward. He said at last, "Has the Machine any evidence of physical connection between Deneb and the Starchild?"

  "No evidence, sir," chanted the invisible voice at once. "Exceptions as follows: Possible connection between star Deneb and reported Church of the Star. Possible connection between star Deneb and star 61 Cygni in same constellation, 61 Cygni being one of the stars said Starchild threatened to, and did, extinguish. Neither of these items considered significant by the Machine."

  The Planner grumbled. "Very well. Cancel." The display overhead winked out, the room lights sprang up. The Planner sat brooding for a moment, his eyes remote. He stared absently around the room, his gaze passing over Boysie Gann, over the spilled toys at his feet, over the faces of the guardsmen and Machine General Wheeler.

  His eyes came to rest on the black-robed acolytes. Then he sighed and gestured to one of them. It was only the crook of a finger, but the figure in black at once came toward him, holding something in his hand. It was a length of golden cable extending from his linkbox. At its end was a golden eight-pronged plug.

  Boysie Gann's eyes went wide.

  If he was not insane—and no, he was not; for already the acolyte was stepping to the Planner's side, touching his forehead, sweeping back his sparse, unruly hair, baring the glittering plate that was set intp "his forehead—the Planner was about to undergo communion with the Machine!

  The spectacle was fascinating—and frightening. Heedless of the eyes on him, the Planner sat relaxed.

  While the acolyte deftly slipped the golden plug into the receptors in the plate on his forehead.

  At once the Planner's expression changed. His eyes closed. The fretful, angry look disappeared. There was a second's grimace, the teeth bared hi rictus, the corners of the eyes wrinkling hi deep furrows, the jaw set. It was like a momentary pang of agony ... Or ecstasy.

  It passed, and the Planner's face went blank again. His breathing began to grow more rapid. As the planted electrodes excited the secret centers of his brain, he began to show feeling. His face creased in a smile, then frowned, then smiled again, forgivingly. His lips began to move. Hoarse, inarticulate words whispered—slowly ... then faster, faster. His plump body shook, his fingers worked. The black-robed acolyte calmly touched his arm, whispered in his ear.

  The Planner calmed. His body relaxed again. His whispered voice stopped.

  The acolyte waited for a second, nodded, removed the cable and stepped lightly away. The Planner opened his eyes and looked around.

  To Boysie Gann, the change in the Planner was stranger than anything he had seen on the Reefs of Space. A glum, angry, harried man had accepted that moment of communication with the electronic joys of the Machine; a cheerful, energetic, buoyant one had emerged from it. The Planner opened his mouth and boomed laughter into the great hall. "Ha!" he shouted. "Ho! That's good!"

  He sat up and pounded his great fist onto the quartz . table. "We'll destroy them!" he cried. "Reef rats and Star-child—anyone who dares interfere with the Plan of Man. We'll crush them and their fanciful dreams forever. And you'll help in this, Boysie Gann, for you are the chosen instrument of the Plan in this great work!"

  For a lunatic moment Gann thought of turning, running, fleeing—of leaping toward the Planner and letting the decapitation charge, in his security collar end his problems forever. There was something wild and fearful in the great chuckling good humor with which the Planner bubbled now, something that terrified Gann. If the Machine could cause such personality change in its most favored of servants, Gann feared the Machine. Feared it! And that thought was in itself fearsome to him, for the Machine had always been the great good master whose judgments were infallible, who always rewarded good service, punished , only the bad. Yet this particular reward seemed a very terrible punishment to Gann ...

  But all he said was, "Yes, sir. I serve the Plan, sir!" The Planner shouted with glee. "Serve it well, boy!" he cried. "Serve it with all your heart and mind—or you'll serve it with your eyes and arms and liver, in the Body Bank! We all serve the Plan, boy. In one way or another!" And he dismissed Gann with a good-humored wave of one fat arm and turned to General Wheeler. As the guards closed in on Gann and marched him out of the room he caught one glimpse of the general, staring toward him. The steel-gray eyes were cold and empty, but Gann could read their message.

  Don't fail me, either, Gann, they said.

  Chapter 9

  There had once been a time, thought Boysie Gann, when life was simple and his duty clear. In that dead, half-forgotten time—was it only months ago? it seemed like centuries—he had found, and loved, and won a girl named Julie Martinet. He remembered the night they met, remembered their long hours together, their endless promises, the bright hope of happiness they gave each other. He remembered the long white beach at the Togetherness center at Playa Blanca, and her kiss before he left. Warm, sweet, soft, loving, she had been everything a man could want. Her memory had followed Boysie Gann twenty billion miles out from the sun, and her absence
had made that long voyage bleak.

  Yet never had he been so far from her as in this room. He could, if he dared, reach out and touch the lips he had kissed at Playa Blanca. But the mind behind them was no longer the mind of the sweet, warm girl he had loved. The body was the body of Julie Martinet, but what inhabited it was Sister Delta Four.

  Involuntarily he whispered: "Julie! Julie Martinet ..."

  She stood motionless, regarding him with grave darkeyes. He searched them for some hint of recognition, forthe saving warmth of Jove that had filled them at PlayaBlanca, but nothing was there.

  She shook her hooded head. "I am Delta Four," she said, her voice a melodious chime. "I am to interrogate you for the Machine." She stood watching him, waiting for a response, her pale face half hidden by the deep folds of the cowl she wore. The luminous emblem on her black robes mocked him. It was a Keep Off sign that he dared not ignore.

  But he could not help saying, "Julie, don't you remember me at all? Can't you tell me what happened?"

  She fingered her long string of bright black beads, each an electronic bell that rang when she stroked it. "Major Gann," she sang, her voice in perfect pitch with the tonal beads, "I am, as you see, an acolyte of the Machine. I do not wish to be reminded of any other life."

  "Please, Julie. At least tell me why you didn't wait—"

  Her grave head nodded. "We have tune," she trilled. "Ask your question."