The Starchild

by Frederik Pohl

  Illusion?

  It had to be illusion. Hickson was dead. No one was there—no one in sight, and no possibility that someone could be lurking out of sight, beyond Bella's envelope of air. For outside that elastic sphere there was nothing to carry a voice's sound.

  Yet that illusion stayed with her. "Don't fret about pyropods, girl," advised the voice, slow, rough, kind— Harry Hickson's own, she was sure of it. "Get on with it! We're waiting for you."

  She remembered some words the dying Colonel Zafar had said: "... mind trap . , . beware your heart's desire ..." There was a warning there.

  But she could not take caution from the warning; will she, will she, the spaceling was carrying her deeper and deeper into Reef Whirlpool, with the gleam of lesser reef-lets darting past them as they flew, glittering diamond fungi, luminous blue polygons, jungles of incandescent wire, glowing nightmare worldlets for which she could find no name.

  And then they were at what she knew was the core.

  A great ship swung emptily about, huge as the whole Reef of Freehaven, giant, lethal weapons staring out of open ports. It was in free orbit at the heart of Reef Whirlpool. Its weapons were unmanned. Its drives were silent.

  "Great Plan!" shouted Machine General Wheeler, wild with excitement. "The Togethership! It had to be the Togethership!"

  Quarla Snow looked at him, faintly puzzled. "That was the name it bore, yes. Your ship, General?"

  The general cackled with glee. "It is now! My ship—my Machine that's been locked in its holds—and my worlds, as soon as I reach it! You'll take me there, woman. You'll lead me to the Togethership! When I've made myself the master of the Planning Machine it carries I'll be back here on the Plan Worlds. Not just a general—not even a Planner—I'll rule the Machine itself! I'll—" He broke off, staring at Boysie Gann. "What's the matter?" he rapped. Gann said, "How do you propose to reach it, General?" The general's face darkened. He scowled at the screen, where his cruiser, now hopelessly beyond his reach, seemed to be dodging around the great solar flare that had developed in the moments while they were watching. "Go on," he growled. "I'll find a way. I'll get the Togethership, and then ... Never mind! Go on."

  Around that great battlecraft of the Plan, painted dead black for camouflage in space, studded with laser scopes and bristling with missile launchers, there was a queer golden mist

  Quarla looked, and looked again. It was like a fog of liquid gold. Like a golden cloud.

  Impossible that there should be a cloud in space, even here. Yet she saw it. And at its heart was a great golden sphere, larger and brighter than the elfin Reefs, more perfectly round.

  Like a laser burst hurtling to a target, the spaceling drove toward it. Quarla cried out in terror, for as they raced toward it its surface seemed to lift to meet them. A bulge appeared and grew, became a tentacle reaching toward them. And the phantom voice of Harry Hickson said roughly, "Quarla, honey! Don't be scared. Come on!"

  She could not have stopped if she had tried. Bella was out of control.

  The voice was surely illusion, yet Quarla found it reassuring. Her horror ebbed. Queerly detached, she watched the bulge on the golden surface swell and divide into three parts. Each stretched out until it became a bright golden snake. She watched them coil toward her ...

  They struck.

  Hot yellow coils whipped and tightened around her.

  Yet there was no pain. There was even less fear. The living ropes of gold hauled her in like a hooked trout, down to that golden sphere, and her calm and detachment grew. Even the spaceling had lost all of its fear. Nestling into the hot, contracting coils, Bella purred like a huge kitten. She was drowsy.

  Quarla was drowsy too. She thought she heard Harry Hickson speaking to her again—calmly but urgently— telling her things of great importance. You must go, child, he seemed to say, you must go to this place and do that thing. Yon must avoid these. Then you must return here...

  It was greatly soothing to hear his calm, wise voice. Quarla Snow slept

  She slept, and tune passed... .

  "And," she said, "when I woke up, I knew what I must do. I had to come here and fetch you. All of you. He wants you to come to him."

  General Wheeler rasped, "The Starchild! He's the one you mean, eh?"

  But she was shaking her head obstinately. "I don't know that. I only know what I must do. Only"—her expression became worried—"the men were here and they were afraid of me. They locked me up. They would not listen."

  Sister Delta Four sang, "Major Gann. General Wheeler. Miss Snow. Have you observed the screen?"

  They turned as one, startled, staring at the screen.

  Up there hung the Sun. The bright prominence that had grown so swiftly was huger still. It overhung the shape of the fleeing Plan cruiser with the three men who should have been dead—overhung it like a crested wave, like the hood of a striking cobra.

  And like a snake it was striking.

  The Plan cruiser had changed direction—too late. Slow though the great, jetting tongue of flame seemed in the screen, its movement was miles per second. Twist and turn though it would, the cruiser could not escape. The prominence touched it.

  The tiny black shape disappeared.

  Boysie Gann found himself shaking, heard the metallic, monotonous steady cursing of the general by his side. The cruiser had been swept out of space. Slowly the incredible tongue of flame began to fall back toward the mottled surface of its star, the Sun.

  The general recovered himself first. The coppery spikes of his hair, his flat bronze features, his whole expression showed resolution. "All right," he said. "We don't have to worry about trying to get that ship back any more. It's gone. Question is, how do we get out of here? Second question, how do we then get to the Reefs—and the Togethership?"

  Sister Delta Four sang proudly, "There will be no difficulty in that. The Machine has said that the gateway to the Togethership is to be found here."

  The general fixed his steel-gray stare on her. "But where? Out that airlock? Onto the rock of dayside Mercury? We'd fry in minutes. Or do you suggest we fly?"

  He stopped in mid-sentence, bronze face frozen, then turned on Quarla Snow. "Those beasts of yours! What became of them? The spacelings, or whatever you called them."

  But Quarla was shaking her head. "This near the Sun, Bella would never live," she said. "The radiation would destroy her—and us, too, if we were in her air capsule. And anyway, she's not here."

  "Then how?" cried the general. "There must be a way! Both messages—the Starchild's and the Machine's—they both said this was the way."

  Quarla said softly, "And so it is, General. That is why I came here, to fetch you to the Reefs. I don't know how. I only know it will happen."

  The room seemed to lurch.

  It caught all of them off guard. They turned to look at each other with varying expressions of surprise and fear.

  "I think," said Boysie Gann grimly, "that we've found our gateway." He knew that sensation, had felt it before, knew that in the powers it involved the long climb outward to the orbits of the Reefs was only a matter of moments.

  He was not afraid. In fact, there was almost relief in the knowledge that soon they would be facing the presence that had dislocated a solar system. Yet something was troubling him, some question of the last few moments, something that had been asked but not answered.

  He felt the room lurch again, and the lights grew distant and dim. Then he remembered.

  "Why, Quarla?" he croaked hoarsely.

  The girl of the Reefs looked at him affectionately. "WhyWhat, Boysie?"

  "Why were they afraid of you? You said the men herefeared you. Why?"

  The room seemed to shake and twist itself, as if viewed through a defective glass. The lights were leaving them— or they the lights, as if new quanta of space were being born between them, separating them without motion like the recession of fleeing galaxies.

  And then Gann saw the answer. Quarla did not need to speak. His eye
s told him what had terrified the three men in Terminator Station Seven.

  In the dwindling light Quarla alone stood forth bright and clear—her face, her arms, her body shining brightly...

  With a golden glow.

  Chapter 15

  They tumbled through space endlessly and forever, and then they stopped.

  They had arrived. They were all together in a wondrous new world.

  All about them hung the slowly spinning worldlets of Reef Whirlpool, jewels of emerald and ruby, glowing gems of white light and blue. There was the slowly pulsing golden sphere that had captured Quarla Snow. And there the great battleship of the Plan, the Togethership.

  Quarla Snow had described the ship, but she had not made them see its immensity. The vessel was huge.

  Boysie Gann saw it, and saw too that they were not alone.

  A ton of rushing mass hurtled toward them and stopped in midflight, squealing happily. A glowing red nose nuzzled Quarla Snow. "Bella!" cried the girl, and patted the tawny velvet fur. She murmured to Gann, "My spaceling. We're in her envelope of ah-, you see. Without it we'd not live a minute here."

  General Wheeler rapped, "Get your sentimental reunion over with, woman! Can this beast take us to the Togethership?"

  "We're going there now," said Quarla Snow. "See for yourself, General."

  They were. Gann could see it now, see the great battlecraft growing as they drew close. They were in free fall within the spaceling's vital capsule, all four of them in loose and tumbling attitudes, Quarla with one hand on the spaceling's coat, Sister Delta Four, proud and dignified even in the sprawl of zero-G, Machine General Wheeler, careless of everything around him but his goal, his steel-gray eyes fixed on the looming Together ship.

  The battlecraft of the Plan was more distant and more immense even than Gann had realized. It grew into a long planetoid of sleek black metal, hanging suspended in the space between the glowing golden sphere that dominated Reef Whirlpool's core and the tumbling worldlets that brightened the sky about them. The four circled it and found the valves of a lock yawning open at its base, circled by the jutting black cylinders of the six great drive units that had thrust it up from Earth.

  It did not seem to have been used in all those years. It had an abandoned and empty look.

  The spaceling, without direction, seeming compelled by some outside force, took them straight into those valves, and halted.

  The entry port of the Togethership was as big as a three-story house. As they entered, luminous rings around its walls sprang into soft gray light. The great valves moved silently, remorselessly shut behind them.

  They were enclosed in a wall of steel.

  All around them the walls were pitted and scarred, as if from some enormous battle of the past. There had been no such battle, Gann knew. What could have done it? Could it have been meteorites, over the decades that the locks had hung open?

  General Wheeler saw his look and rapped, "Pyropods! They've been chewing at my ship! By the Plan, I'll root out every filthy one of them—"

  The general was right, Gann realized. Not only right, but seething with anger. It had become his ship, containing his copy of the Planning Machine. And with it he intended to make all the worlds of the solar system his planets... .

  Darkly, Boysie Gann realized that there were more dangerous things in this ship than pyropods.

  He became aware of a sighing, rustling noise, and saw that the lock was filling with air. The spaceling's vital capsule -no longer protected them from the void; they were in a breathable atmosphere. The spaceling realized it even before he did. She flicked her seal-like tail and darted away; raced back, her red nose glowing with joy, whimpering with pleasure. She played games with the bright-leafed vines she had carried in her air-envelope— the curious Reef plants that were part of the elaborate evolutionary device that enabled a warm-blooded oxygen-breather like herself to survive in naked space. She rolled the waxy, luminous tendrils into a huge ball, tossed it with her glowing nose, chased it across the lock, caught it with her broad velvet tail...

  "Belial" called Quarla Snow, affectionately stern. "Come back here! Behave yourself!"

  But the spaceling was playfully obstinate. She flashed across the lock and back, racing toward them like the charge of a pyropod, missed them by inches, returned to the inner wail—and there, at the far end of the lock, discovered a crevice that had not been there seconds before. Mewing excitedly, the spaceling slid its supple body through the narrow opening and was gone.

  A way was open into the rest of the ship. The same machinery that had turned on the lights and closed the outer valves had now opened a passage inside.

  "Hah!" shouted General Wheeler. "At last! The Machine is waiting for me!" And he was gone almost as rapidly as the spaceling.

  More slowly, the others followed—Quarla Snow, on the track of her pet, Boysie Gann, Sister Delta Four, a somber figure in black at the rear of the procession. A pseudo-gravity field of a tenth of a G or so gave them footing but spared them much of the effort of moving their bodies up the winding shafts from the lock. Even so, Gann was winded trying to keep up with the racing, driving general.

  They were in a shaft seeming to extend endlessly upward. Then they passed a point of change-of-thrust of the pseudo-gravity and it became a dizzy abyss into which they were falling, until their protesting bodies oriented themselves to the new kinesthetic sensations and accepted it as a level hall. A cold current came along it, setting them to shivering, a breeze out of a cave, with a faintly unpleasant reek, dusty and bitter and dry.

  A faint murmuring vibration was borne by the air current along the tube.

  Quarla Snow moved closer to Boysie Gann. Unconsciously he touched her shoulder, hurried past her. Whatever the sound was, it could wait.

  The general was out of sight.

  Gann stepped up his pace, gasping for breath. The air was thinner here than he was used to, as if the old refresher tanks were running dry. He glanced around and found himself at a numbered landing, where the gray light faintly showed a sign, MESS C.

  Long tables stretched off into darkness, where crewmen in flight must have stood to eat their meals.

  Gann stopped and waited for the girls to catch up with him. "The general's gone," he said. "After his Planning Machine. I ... I think he may find it, and I'm afraid of what may happen if he does." He glanced at Quarla, the concern on her face caused mostly by worry about her vanished spaceling, and at Sister Delta Four, whose hooded eyes showed no expression at all. He said, "If the Machine on this ship is half as powerful as the one on Earth—and they say it is more than that, an exact duplicate—then Wheeler just might rule the solar system with it."

  Quarla Snow said only, "What do you want us to do?"

  "Split up. Find him. He's armed, of course. Don't try to handle him yourself, either of you. Just scream—good and loud—so I can find you."

  Sister Delta Four's pure, chiming voice was like a breath of reason. "You are not armed either, Major Gann. You will he no more able to cope with him than we."

  "Let me worry about that! Just find him if you can ... What's the matter?"

  "Nothing is the matter, Major Gann," said Sister Delta Four, her face still hooded.

  "Not you. Quarla. What is it?"

  Quarla said unhappily, "It ... it can't be dangerous, Boysie. I mean, you don't have to worry."

  Gann laughed sharply, unable to help himself; her reassurance was so pathetically out of place.

  "No, I mean it, Boysie. After all, we're not here by accident, I was sent to bring you. All of you. The ... the Starchild, if that's who it was that sent me—he'll know how to handle the general."

  "I don't intend to take that chance," said Gann grimly. "Quarla, go on down the passage, Julie, follow her, check all the side ways. I'll look around here and follow."

  He was halfway through the ancient mess hall and the girls out of sight before he realized something.

  She didn't correct me when I called her J
ulie, he thought. And wondered why.

  Gann found himself shaking as he followed the polished guiderails between the endless rows of long, high tables —not with fear but exhaustion. Exhaustion and something else.

  The more fatigue tried to slow him down, the more it weakened his control, the more he remembered that one incredible moment-long lifetime of ecstasy the Machine had given him in those last few minutes before it had gone mad. The longing was almost physical. He understood Sister Delta Four's addiction. She must be suffering far more than he—her addiction longer standing, and if what she had said was true, at a far higher pitch. Perhaps that was why she had seemed strained... . And Quarla Snow. The girl was sick! That golden glow had meant death to Machine Colonel Zafar and to the three in the Mercury observatory ... death, or something far more terrifying than death.

  He forced his mind away from both girls and onto his quest. It was vitally important to find the general. Gann cursed himself for not having anticipated the problem. Yet there was little he could have done; when all was said and done, the general had had the arms, not he, Not that the general needed them as far as Gann was concerned, not as long as he wore the security collar. He touched it absently. Freedom ... a world without collars ... a world where men could five like men, not like the Machine's cogs ...

  He jerked his hand away, appalled.

  He realized he had been wandering among these benches for minutes! What was the matter with him? Why was his mind wool-gathering?

  It could be fatigue, he thought. Or hunger. He glanced around; he was in the galley for Mess C. But no drop flowed when he tried the taps at die sinks. The pantries and lockers gave him no more. Neat labels on bins named the foods they should have contained, but every bin was empty.

  No matter. Boysie Gann pushed that thought out of his mind, too, and resumed his search.

  Mess B and Mess A were equally spotless and equally bare. There was nothing else on that level.