The Starchild

by Frederik Pohl

  In that mighty furnace, each second, lakes of solar hydrogen flashed into helium, pouring out energy. Each second, every square centimeter of its enormous surface hurled six thousand watts of power into the void.

  On the sunward side of Mercury, molten tin and lead ran like water in fissures of baked and ovenlike rock. On its dark side the thinnest of atmospheres, boiled from the rock by the solar radiation, smashed free of it by the impact of meteorites, carried some tiny warmth to relieve what was otherwise a freezing cold nearly as absolute as that of Pluto.

  On the terminator line the Plan of Man's string of observatories maintained a precarious existence, the searing heat before them, the killing cold behind.

  "There!" rasped General Wheeler, stabbing a finger at the screen. "Terminator Line Station Seven! Now we'll see about this Star child!"

  The great Plan cruiser, dancing in the thrust of its reactionless motors, slowed, halted, kissed the seared rock, and came to rest in the shadow of a silvery dome that reached out toward the sun with the barrels of telescopes and pyrometers, stared toward it with the great blind eyes of radio telescopes and masers. Over its entrance blazed the sign:

  THE MIGHTIEST REWARDS

  THE MOST FAITHFUL

  General Wheeler laughed sharply. "Faithful to whom, eh? To me, Gann! Trust in me!"

  Boysie Gann glanced at him without expression, then at Sister Delta Four. She was mute and uncaring, her eyes hidden in the folds of her dark cowl. Gann shook his head but said nothing. In his heart he thought: Mad. He's as mad as the Machine.

  Tubular entranceways were groping slowly toward them from the dome, found the airlocks of the cruiser, met and sealed themselves.

  The hatches opened.

  Gann stood up. "Let's go. All of us. I... I don't know what we'll find."

  He waited and General Wheeler stalked past him, elbows and knees stiff as the linkages of a reciprocating engine. Sister Delta Four approached the lock, then hesitated and looked at Gann.

  She threw a series of tonal symbols at him, her voice crisp and pure as bells.

  Gann said hesitantly, "I ... I don't understand. As you said, I'm only about half educated. Something about a ... a man? A relative?"

  Sister Delta Four said in English, "I asked you to be careful, Major Gann. There is a brother here who is of unstable emotion."

  "I don't understand," said Boysie Gann. The girl did not answer, only nodded remotely and passed on into the entranceway, into Terminator Station Seven.

  As Gann followed her he heard General Wheeler's rasping roar, "Hello there! Anyone! Isn't anyone here?"

  The general was standing atop an enameled steel desk, peering around in all directions. Behind him were banks of electronic instruments, arranged in long rows like lockers in a gymnasium; they purred and hummed and flashed with lights, ignoring the presence of the general. The desk itself was part of a small office suite. It was deserted.

  "I don't understand," rapped the general. He climbed down, picked up a phone from a desk, and stabbed circuit buttons at random, listened briefly, then flung it down.

  "There's no one here," he said, brows gathered in irritation and anger. "A joke? Would this Starchild dare joke with me?"

  Gann said, "What about the rest of the station, General?"

  "Search it!" barked the general "You too, Sister! There must be someone! The doorway to the Reefs—the key to the Togethership—I will not let them escape me!"

  Gann looked forebodingly at Sister Delta Four, but she did not return his gaze. Obediently, her fingers telling her sonic beads, she chose a doorway and entered it, her dark cowl moving as she scanned the rooms beyond for signs of life. Gann shrugged and selected an area of his own and began the search.

  He could hear General Wheeler's angry shouts, and the purr or whine or click of the automatic machinery of the observatory, keeping its instruments pointed at selected areas of the Sun, tabulating the results. He could hear the distant whine of pumps, the sigh of air in the vents. There were no other sounds. The observatory seemed to be deserted. Gann moved through a chamber of record storage, where stacked drawers of magnetic tape reels held the information gleaned from countless machine-hours of solar study, glanced into what might have been a recreation room, found himself in the main observation chamber.

  No one moved. No voice challenged him.

  "Hello!" he cried, echoing General Wheeler's fading voice. There was no answer.

  The normal complement of a nearly automatic station like this one was small—half a dozen men, perhaps even fewer. Yet it was hard to believe that some disaster had overtaken them all at once...

  Or so Gann thought

  Then, turning, he saw the disaster.

  There were three of them—three men, piled like jack-straws behind a work desk, before a closed and locked door. They were unmistakably dead.

  The one on top, supine, sightless yellowed eyes staring at the ceiling, was a grizzled older man in the uniform of a Technicaptain. Of the other two Gann could tell little except for their insignia—a Techtenant and a cadet, one plump and young, one young and oddly familiar.

  Gann bent and touched them. There was no pulse. No breath. Yet the bodies still seemed to be warm.

  Perhaps it was only his imagination, he thought. Or the warmth of the room—cooled by the circulating refrigerated air from the pumps, yet still so close to the blazing Sun.

  He heard a faint sound, and jerked his head up, frowning, listening.

  It was not one sound. There were two. One he identified'—the faint tones of Sister Delta Four's sonic beads. In her own search of the dome, by some other route, she was coming near.

  But what was the other sound? It seemed to come from nearby, though muffled. He turned his head and stared at the locked door. Could it be from behind that? It seemed to be a sort of closet or record-storage chamber. It was massive, and the locks that held it would not respond to any unauthorized key. Yet now he was sure of it: there were sounds behind it, sounds like the distant murmur of life.

  Sister Delta Four entered the room, saw him, hurried over to stoop swiftly over the three bodies.

  When she looked up her eyes were dark. She sang. "You need not fear him after all, Major Gann."

  Boysie Gann blinked. "Fear whom?"

  "The brother," the girl intoned. "He is dead. His un-Planned emotions need not concern you any longer."

  "Brother? But—" Then Gann stopped in mid-sentence. Understanding began to reach him. He reached for the body of the Technicadet, turned the flaccid head. The face was one he had seen before.

  "Your brother!" he cried.

  Sister Delta Four corrected him. "The brother of Julie Martinet. The brother of this body, yes. As you see, he is dead." Her dark eyes were mild and unconcerned, as .if she were commenting on the weather.

  Beyond the jackstraw heap of bodies the thick square door still hid the source of the tiny sounds, but Gann put them out of his mind. Julie Martinet's brother! He could see the resemblance, the same grave eyes, the same shape Of the jaw ... In Sister Delta Four, it completed a perfect oval; in the boy it gave him a strong chin under a dreamer's face.

  Boysie Gann saw that, and he saw something more. He bent close, incredulous. But there was no doubt. Under the pallor of death, under the uncaring vacancy of the face, there was a hint of color. Golden color. Almost luminous. Gann turned quickly to the other corpses. The same! Like Machine Colonel Zafar, like Harry Hickson, like the beasts of the Reefs, the three dead Technicorps men gleamed faintly, goldenly, like a brass helmet's reflection of a distant sun.

  He drew Sister Delta Four after him and sought and found General Wheeler, told him in short sentences what he had seen.

  "The same golden color, General," he said. "It's fatal. Or ..." He hesitated, remembering. Harry Hickson had died of the disease, yes. But he had lived again.

  He brushed that thought out of his mind. "Fatal," he repeated. "It's a fusorian infection, I think. If you put a drop of their blood under a m
icroscope you would see little fusorian globules, flickering with golden light. Some sort of symbiosis, Dr. Snow said. But fatal..."

  General Wheeler rasped, "Fusorian, you say? The Reefs, then! Do you know what that means to me, Gann? It means the Starchild! My information was not wrong. He's here!"

  "But he can't be," Gann protested. "We've searched the station, the three of us, and we saw no one."

  And Sister Delta Four echoed him, "We saw no one, General. No one at all but the dead."

  "Dead or alive, he's here," growled the general. "I'll find him! I'll make him lead me to the Togethership!"

  Boysie Gann remembered the sounds behind the door. He said, "There is one place, General. One place where ... someone might be. Behind the bodies was a door—"

  "Come on!" shouted Wheeler, not waiting to hear him out, and led the way like an animated machine, arms flailing, harsh breath rasping. Gann and the girl had found him far from the observatory room, down in the subterranean storage spaces of the dome, poking and shouting into recesses of canned food and unused spools of tape. Even in Mercury's light grasp it was a long, hard, running climb back to the instrument room, and even Sister Delta Four was gasping for breath before they made half the distanceback. Then they all stopped, panting, staring at each other. For all of them had caught the same sound—the distant rumble of caterpillar tracks, carried faintly through Mercury's rock and the structure of the station.

  It was the entranceways, the long tubular protuberances through which their ship had been linked to the lock of the observatory dome. They were in motion. Either another ship had arrived ...

  Or their own ship was taking off!

  "Let's go!" cried Boysie Gann, and they ran the remaining distance faster than before.

  The great door was standing open and the bodies were gone.

  General Wheeler and Gann turned without words and searched the room, under desks, behind cabinets, even inside the servicing hatches of the instruments themselves. "They're gone," said Gann at last, and the general echoed his words: "They're gone."

  Another voice said, "They've taken your ship, too."

  Gann and the general spun around. Sister Delta Four had not troubled to search the room with them. She had gone through the door, into a tiny, steel-walled cubicle v that had evidently been designed for holding the most important records in safety in the event of some disaster or . mischance to the station. What it held now was another sort of treasure entirely. It was a girl, her lips white where they had been gagged, her arms still trailing ropes that Sister Delta Four had not finished taking off her. "They took your ship," she repeated. "All three of them. They opened the door for me—and left"

  Gann hardly heard what she was saying. Something else was filling his mind. Honey-haired, softly tanned of skin, eyes blue and bright... be knew that girl.

  The girl in the observation dome in Mercury was the girl he had left weeks and billions of miles from here and now. It was Quarla Snow.

  Chapter 14

  In the bright, refrigerated dome the pumps poured cooling air in upon them, but the great storm-racked globe of the Sun that hung in the viewing screen seemed to beat down on them as if they were naked on Mercury's rock.

  Quarla Snow reached out and touched Boysie Gann's arm. "I thought you were dead," she said wonderingly, and her eyes went toward Sister Delta Four, kneeling beside her, patiently, absently rubbing Quarla's chafed wrists.

  "Never mind that," said Gann. "How did you get here? Was it—the Starchild?"

  Quarla shook her head, not in denial but in doubt. "I don't know. After you disappeared I set out to look for you."

  General Wheeler, at one of the optical telescopes, rapped angrily, 'There! I see the villains! Between us and the Sun!" He studied the controls of his instruments furiously, selected a switch and turned it. The great image of the Sun hi the screen danced and dwindled as the field of vision of a new telescope replaced the old one.

  They saw the Plan cruiser that had brought them, already very remote in the black, star-sprinkled sky that surrounded the blazing globe.

  "I wonder who's piloting it," murmured Boysie Gann.

  "Those criminals you saw here!" Wheeler barked. "Playing possum! They fooled you! Now they've taken our ship and we're marooned."

  "General," said Boysie Gann earnestly, "I don't ask you to believe me, but I was not fooled. They were not pretending to be dead. They were dead."

  "Impossible," rasped the general. "Look at the idiots! They're heading straight for the Sun. The ship isn't designed for photosphere temperatures! They'll kill themselves!"

  Gann turned wearily back to Quarla Snow. "You said you went looking for me. Why?"

  She flushed and looked away. She did not answer the question. She said, "Colonel Zafar died. My father reported it—it was dangerous, you see—and he took the body into Freehaven for examination. He did not know what had become of you. Neither did I. But ... I thought I could find you."

  Sister Delta Four got up quietly, crossed to the girl's Other side, began to rub circulation into the other wrist, Quarla went on, her eyes avoiding Boysie Gann's. As she spoke she looked sometimes at Sister Delta Four, sometimes at General Wheeler, sometimes at the great hanging orb of the Sun and the Plan cruiser that was moving slowly toward its long, tentacle-like prominences.

  She had gone outside, she said, and called her spaceling. Then she brought Harry Hickson's pyropod out into the open air, released it, watched it circle them twice, then arrow off into space itself ... and, riding the spaceling, she had followed it.

  "After you disappeared and Colonel Zafar died, it seemed to go crazy," she said. "Raced around the house— J thought it was looking for you. And I thought it might find you, if I set it free."

  "The Starchild!" boomed General Wheeler. "Get to the Starchild, woman! Did you ever find the Starchild?"

  She hesitated. "I think I did," she said at last. "I think I met the Starchild in the heart of Reef Whirlpool."

  Reef Whirlpool—not a planet, not a sun, not a comet. Not even a Reef in the true sense. It was something that partook of some of the elements of all of them. It had begun as a Reef, no doubt. It orbited Sol like a planet, if a distant one; like a comet, most of its bulk was gases. And it burned with hydrogen-helium fusion at its core, like a star.

  Basically Reef Whirlpool was simply a bigger, denser cluster of Reefs than most of those stepchildren of Sol. Given time and additions enough, it might someday become the heart of a star.

  Its angular momentum was enormous; some stronger force than gravity kept its parts from flying into space. The Reefs that composed it were older and ... stranger than those outside. Pyropods in queerly mutated forms swarmed in and around it. Its central portions had never been visited by man, not even by the explorers of the Reefs.

  It was a place of terror and legend. The life that it harbored had been a long time evolving.

  Straight as an arrow the baby pyropod that once had belonged to Harry Hickson hurtled toward Reef Whirlpool—and behind it pursuing, barely able to keep its glowing blue-white trail in sight, followed Quarla Snow on her spaceling.

  "I was afraid," she said soberly. "We passed a mating swarm of pyropods. Then ten thousand of them together, wheeling in space in a single body. If they had seen us and pursued we wouldn't have had a chance. But it was too late to worry about that ... and I was even more afraid of Reef Whirlpool."

  'The Starchild, girl!" cried General Wheeler. "Now!" His eyes were fixed angrily on the screen, where the Plan cruiser was coming closer and closer to the Sun, one great curved prominence seeming almost to lick up toward it like a reaching tongue of flame.

  "We reached Reef Whirlpool," said the girl, "and there I lost Hickson's pyropod. But Bella—that's my spaceling —Bella seemed to know where he had gone. We went in."

  From nearby in space, Reef Whirlpool looked like a tiny galaxy, its separate reeflets glowing each with its own hue, like bright, soft stars against the dark. The rim of the disk was dar
k—dead rocks and fragments. There, Quarla thought, were the nesting places of the pyropod swarms. She could feel the spaceling shudder, its limpid eyes wide and glazed with fear. But it went on.

  "Bella didn't seem able to help herself," said Quarla Snow. "She seemed to want to go right on—to her own destruction—or to something she feared even more."

  "Like those fools in my ship," rapped General Wheeler. "Is that where the Starchild was? In that Reef?"

  Quarla Snow hesitated. "I don't know. Truly, General Wheeler, I don't know what I saw in the Reef. I know that I saw a great many things that weren't there."

  "Illusions?" the general demanded. "You were hallucinating?"

  She nodded uncertainly. "Yes ... No. I don't know. I only know I saw things that couldn't have been there. One of them was Harry Hickson, and I knew he was dead. Another was Colonel Zafar. And another—why, Boysie, one of them was you."

  They were deep in the core of Reef Whirlpool now. The spaceling's frenzy grew. They were long past the outer rim of rock where the pyropods nested, but there was something ahead that terrified Bella more than the tunneled nests of the beasts.

  "It's all right, honey," said the voice of her father in her ear.

  She cried out and stared around her. He was not there. No one was there, inside the tiny envelope of air the spaceling carried with them as they fled through dead, airless space.

  "Go on, darling," said another voice. It was the voice of the man she had just seen disappear in a whirlpool of light, the man she was seeking, Boysie Gann.

  And a third voice: "Quarla, girl! Don't hang back now!" And that was the voice that terrified her most of all, for she knew it, though she had not heard it in a long tune and knew its owner was dead. It was the voice of Harry Hickson.