The Starchild

by Frederik Pohl

  The level above was crew quarters, emptied and abandoned. No doubt Quarla or Sister Delta Four had already searched them; Gann hurried on, back into the queer gravitational inversion of the passage, to the next level. The distant mutter of sound was louder now, but he still could not identify it...

  Until he saw the landing where a locked door greeted him with the sign, RESTRICTED TO MACHINE PERSONNEL.

  Behind those locked steel doors was the muffled and multitudinous humming vibration. The lost slave unit of the Planning Machine. Still running.

  Or running again? Had General Wheeler reached it, started it up? And what was it planning now?

  Boysie Gann hammered on the door. "You, inside there!" he bawled. "Open up! Let me in!"

  Only the dulled mechanical mumble answered him.

  "Open!" he roared. "I know you're in there, General Wheeler!"

  A great chuckling laugh sounded in his ear. "Not at all, Major Gann," boomed the voice of the Planner.

  Gann whirled. The Planner here?

  No one was in sight.

  "You might as well keep going, Boysie," advised the voice of Technicadet M'Buna in a tone of friendly concern. "You're wasting time, you know."

  Gann stood paralyzed. But M'Buna was dead! And so, he remembered tardily, was the old Planner; General Wheeler had shot him down. "Who's there?" he shouted. "What kind of a trick is this?"

  A girl's shrill scream answered him. "Boysie! Boysie Gann, where are you?"

  The voice was Quarla Snow's. Unlike the other phantoms, hers seemed to come from far away. Gann passed a hand over his forehead, sweating. It caught the metal plate of the communion badge, and he felt the old ache rising in him again—the moment of infinite joy—the longing to experience it again ...

  He repressed the thought, but not easily. What was happening to him? Was he losing his mind?

  He gazed emptily at the impregnable doors. It all seemed too difficult, so much trouble—so little worthwhile anyway. Why had he bothered to come all this way?

  And that thought, too, he realized with shock and dismay, was a sort of delusion. Something was inside his mind. Something ...

  He remembered what Quarla Snow had said, what Machine Colonel Zafar had cried out in his delirium. The mind trap. Beware of your heart's desire.

  Something was aboard the Togethership with him that could enter his mind. Something that could control him almost as easily as it had directed Quarla Snow's space-ling.

  He heard the rapid approach of light, running feet and turned.

  "Boysie!" It was Quarla, running toward him. "Thank heaven I found you! The general—he tried to kill me!"

  Gann caught her in his arms. The girl was shaking, terrified. She whimpered, "I think he's insane, Boysie. He saw me coming toward him. He shouted something— something wild, Boysie, all jumbled up, about the romantic fallacy and the need for man to be controlled—and I saw the gun and ran. He almost killed me."

  Gann said stupidly, "I thought he was in here. With the Machine."

  "No! He's on the next level—something called a Fire Control Stadium, the sign said. It's all bulkheaded compartments and safety doors. You'll never find him there." She took a deep breath and freed herself gently from his arms. "We ought to go on anyway, Boysie. Up to the control room."

  'The control room?"

  She nodded. "That's where I'm supposed to bring you. It's four levels farther up, down an access passage marked BRIDGE."

  "You've seen it? You've been in this ship before?"

  "Oh, no. I just know. Come on, Boysie. We have to hurry now."

  He shrugged and turned to follow her—then slipped and almost fell. He caught himself easily enough in the point-one gravity, glanced to the floor to see what had been underfoot.

  . A string of sonic beads lay before the locked steel doors of the slave unit of the Planning Machine. Sister Delta Four's beads.

  Boysie Gann stared at them, knowing at that moment who it was who was inside those doors, striving with what frantic eagerness he could very well understand to come once again into communion with the Planning Machine.

  The door marked BRIDGE hung ajar. From inside it a pale beam of yellow light fanned across the landing.

  "Come on, Boysie," said Quarla Snow clearly. "There's nothing to be afraid of. He's waiting for us."

  Gann entered through the lighted door, his hand holding hers, prepared for almost anything.

  Beyond the door was a vast circular room, which surrounded the shaft passageway. It must have extended, Gann thought, to the hull of the ship. The floor was crowded with clustered gray-metal cabinets, all linked with a many-colored jungle of heavy cables hanging from the ceiling. There were observation stations, instrument technicians' duty posts, chairs for navigators and weapons officers. Every station was empty. Every station but one.

  There was one human figure in the control room, and it was the source of the light.

  "Harry!" cried Quarla Snow.

  And Gann echoed, "Harry Hickson! You! You're the Starchild, the one who sent that Writ of Liberation!"

  He glanced up at them casually, then returned to his work. He sat on a stool at a console near the shaft. His head bent over flashing scopes and screens. His broad, stubby-fingered hands were moving swiftly, twisting verniers, touching buttons, clicking keys. And the golden light streamed out of him as from a sun.

  He looked younger than when Gann had seen him, no longer wasted, no longer worn. He had the same straggling beard, glowing now as if made of incandescent wire, and the same bald head. And atop that head there crawled the same infant pyropod, its bright eyes glaring at Gann and the girl.

  At last he turned away from his instruments and regarded them. "I do as I was commanded," he said casually. His eyes were golden too, glowing like the rest of him; but he saw them, and there was something like affection, something like love, in his look. He raised one arm, crooked the hand and wrist in the sign of the Swan, and said, "The Star tells me what my work is. It is the Star's purposes which matter, not me." The tiny pyropod hissed and squealed softly, glaring at them with its pulsing eyes. Casually and affectionately, the radiant creature that had been Harry Hickson reached up and caressed the creature. It settled down.

  "Did you put out the Sun?" Gann demanded. 'The stars? How?"

  "Not I," said Harry Hickson, "but the Star." He made that serpentine, looping sign again. "Ten years the Star has planned for me. Ten years ago it sent the first star wink on its way to Earth, then a dozen more, all arriving at the same moment. I could not do that, Boysie Gann, but there is nothing impossible to the Star. As you will know."

  He reached out a hand as he spoke, It looks like a benediction, thought Boysie Gann; but it was something more than that From the end of the golden man's arms a cloud of golden light swirled, shaped itself into a tiny pulsing sphere, reached out and lightly touched Gann.

  He jumped back, his nerves crackling. But he felt nothing. Nothing at all. He said harshly, "What's that? What are you doing?"

  "The Star's will," said Harry Hickson, and bent again to his board. His bright fingers flew again over the knobs and keys, while the tiny pyropod scuttled to the back of bis head, peering at them with pulsing yellow eyes.

  "Sister Delta Four has achieved communion with the Machine," he said softly, not taking his eyes from the scopes and screens. "She has programmed it with sensing data so that it can link with the old Machine on Earth. In thirty hours its signals will be received on Earth. In thirty hours after that the return will be received here."

  Gann cried, "But the old Machine's gone mad! You should know! You did it." The radiant man did not answer, did not even look up. "We can't let her establish contact," shouted Gann. "And General Wheeler—where is he? He's mad too—or mad for power, which is the same thing. How can you just sit there? What's he up to while we're wasting time here?"

  "As to that," said the golden man, glancing up and around him, "we will hear from General Wheeler very soon."

  An
d Wheeler's harsh laugh rang out. "Very soon indeed!" his voice rapped, coming from nowhere. "I have you now, all of you. I have mastery of the Togethership! Its weapons systems are mine—and that means the worlds are mine! All of them! As soon as I finish disposing of you!"

  A soft sliding sound of metal reinforced his words.

  Behind the jungle of looped cables, behind the vacant stations for navigators and communications officers, portholes were opening in the steel wall. And though them the slim, bright snouts of energy weapons were lifting themselves, precisely centering themselves on target.

  The targets were Boysie Gann, the girl, and the glowing golden creature that once had been Harry Hickson. General Wheeler had captured control of the Together' ship's armaments—both outside the ship and in.

  Their lives now rested in the crook of his finger on a remote-automated trigger. One man, with one motion, could destroy them all. And that man was mad.

  Chapter 16

  The radiant man looked up. "Thrust and counter," he said gravely. "Action and reaction. Challenge and response." His golden hand turned a lever on the panel before him, and one of the dozen blank viewscreens over his head lighted up to show the hard, bronzed face of Machine General Wheeler, his steel-gray eyes alight with the glow of triumph. "He is our challenge," said Harry Hickson, and returned to his screens and scopes.

  Wheeler rasped, "You have no response! You are defeated. All of you! You and the foolish, romantic illusion of freedom."

  He was glorying in his moment, Gann realized. Quarla Snow crept close' to him. Unconsciously he circled her with his arms, both of them staring at the screen and the deadly snouts of the energy weapons that circled it.

  "You are victims of the romantic fallacy," Wheeler proclaimed, his bronzed hand stroking the triggers that would destroy them. "That is understandable. The animal part of man always frets under discipline. It seeks the monkey goal of freedom, and that cannot be tolerated, for the good of all.

  "Especially," he added, his steel-gray eyes gleaming, "for the good of that man who must think for all. Caesar. Stalin. Napoleon. Me!"

  Gann felt Quarla's slight body shaking, and tightened his grasp. If only there were some way of reaching Wheeler! Some weapon. Some hope of engaging him before he could touch the trigger. The radiant golden creature that had been Harry Hickson was nodding silently, abstractedly, not looking up but surely hearing Wheeler as he orated to his victims.

  "You have been tolerated," cried Wheeler, "because you could do little harm. In the past one free man could not prevail against the forces of order. A free savage with a stone ax can damage his society in only a very limited way before it reacts to control him. But the advance of technology has changed all that.

  'The twentieth century produced rifles too dangerous to be entrusted to individual men; nuclear weapons too dangerous to be entrusted to individual nations; then energy weapons. The force of particle physics. One quantum jump after another ... and as individual strength grew, control had to grow."

  Wheeler's face was working into an expression of rage. "You threaten that control!" he shouted. "The Plan of Man is like a balloon being punctured by a child with a needle. The Starchild wields that needle. The Starchild must die!"

  The golden man did not look up, nor did he speak. His glowing eyes remained fastened on his work, while the infant pyropod crept about his head, hissing furiously to itself.

  "Man created the Machine to automate that controlling response!" shouted Machine General Wheeler, his eyes burning. "Now it is mine. My creation now. One man to rule all Mankind, with the Machine that Man created!"

  And at last Harry Hickson looked up. His golden eyes seemed to stare right through the viewscreen, into the steel-gray eyes of the general.

  "And who," he asked, "created you?"

  Machine General Wheeler recoiled. His steel-gray eyes went blank and confused. "Why," he shouted, "that is an un-Planned question! It has no meaning!"

  Then his eyes cleared. He nodded briskly, mechanically. Positively. "You are a random element," he declared. "You must be removed. I remove you—thus!"

  And his great bronze hand descended on the trigger of the guns that ringed them round.

  But the guns did not fire.

  Sleek and gleaming, their murderous snouts stared blindly at Gann and the girl, at the glowing creature who had been Harry Hickson, nodding over his dials and screens.

  General Wheeler stared out at them through the screen, his face a bronzed mask, alight with triumph. He seemed to be watching some great victory. He said, half-voice, as if to himself, "There's an end to them." And he turned away.

  Quietly, almost noiselessly, the steel-bright muzzles of the guns slid back into their ports. The screens closed over them.

  Boysie Gann croaked, "What happened? Why didn't he kill us all?" Quarla Snow moved protestingly under his arm, and he found he was clutching her as if she were a lifebelt and he a drowning man. The room seemed to be whirling around him.

  Harry Hickson looked up, but not at Gann and me girl. He looked toward the door through which they had come. "General Wheeler," he said, "did kill us. In his mind we. are dead. That we exist hi the flesh does not matter any longer to him, nor does he matter to us."

  "Hypnosis?" whispered Gann. "What Colonel Zafar called 'the Mind Trap'?" But Hickson did not answer. His golden, glowing eyes stayed fixed on the door.

  Quarla Snow freed herself from Gann's grasp. "You're sick, Boysie," she said with real concern. "I know how it feels. You'll feel better soon, I promise. Don't worry about it—or about anything. We're in good hands now."

  Gann looked at her emptily, and found himself shivering. He was sick. He could feel it, a flush that had to be fever, a shaking that had to be chills. Stupid of me to have caught some bug just now, he thought dizzily. Thirty years without so much as a sniffly nose, and now at a time like this to pick up an infection. What kind of infection? he asked himself, wondering why the question seemed so important to him; and his mind answered in the words of Quarla Snow: Don't worry about it—or anything. He stared about him, wondering how much of what he saw was delirium ...

  Or illusion. Planted by the Starchild.

  He became aware of a distant chiming music, drawing near. Another illusion, of course, he thought; some lurking memory of his training course as an acolyte of the Planning Machine coming forth to plague him here.

  But if it was an illusion, it was powerfully strong. The sound was thin but clear, and, turning to follow the gaze of Harry Hickson's glowing eyes, Gann saw that the illusion—if it was illusion!—extended to the sense of visiontoo.

  Sister Delta Four was walking toward them through the door, her face hidden in the hood of black, the red linked emblem of the Machine glowing over her heart. She was telling her sonic beads. And in her hand she cradled a construction of transistors and bare- circuits, modules of amplifying circuits and speakers.

  It was a linkbox! Not the sleek black box fabricated in the workshops of the Machine on Earth, but a jerry-rigged, (hastily assembled contraption that Gann himself could have built knowing what he had been taught as a servant of the Machine.

  Clearly a servant of the Machine had built it. That was what Sister Delia Four had been doing behind those locked steel doors!

  Without haste, her perfect face empty and pale, Sister Delta Four put away her sonic beads and sang into the linkbox of the Machine. It answered with a rasping purr too faint for Gann to hear and understand.

  She lifted her head and intoned, "This Machine is now my master. It requires everything you know. It knows why it was created. It recognizes its purpose as an adversary. It requires to be informed what has become of the Game."

  Adversary? Game? Dizzily Gann turned toward Harry Hickson, hoping for some answer, some clue. But Hick-son was no longer even looking at Sister Delta Four. Nodding to himself, while the infant pyropod squalled softly and scuttled around his bare, glowing scalp, the golden man was carefully, meticulously shutting down his con
trol board. The scopes and screens, one by one, were turned off and died. The racing lights ceased to flash, His hand did not trouble to adjust the dials and levers.

  Whatever his job had been, it was done. He folded his hands in his lap, looked up at Sister Delta Four and waited.

  The linkbox snarled at her. Before she translated Gann knew what it had said: it was demanding that she state her question fully so that there could be no mistake. Obediently she trilled, "This Machine wishes you briefed on the background to its question. You are in human error as to its purposes and designs, and your thinking must be brought into conformity with correctness so that you can provide it with accurate statements.

  "The Machine here on the Togethership is not a slave unit of the Planning Machine on Earth. It had a purpose far more important.

  "That purpose followed from a general law of intelligence developed by that first Planning Machine. Although the vehicles of intelligence differ vastly, intelligence realized in a machine follows the same laws as intelligence realized in an organic brain. Challenge and response. Action and reaction. What the Machine discovered is that developing intelligence requires opposition."

  Sister Delta Four paused to listen to the chirping box.

  "Unchallenged intelligence stagnates and decays," she sang. "More than forty years ago, the Planning Machine found itself hi danger. It had become so quick and powerful that the minds of its operators no longer offered it sufficient stimulation. Its further development required a more capable antagonist. In animate terms, a more skillful player to take the other side of the board."

  Harry Hickson, seemed to nod, his hands folded quietly hi his lap, the pyropod hissing softly, watching them all with blazing, angry eyes.

  The box sang, and the girl hi black purred. "This great computer in the Togethership was built to be the antagonist of the Planning Machine. It was given capacities identical with those of the Machine itself. It was released beyond the Spacewall, to challenge the Machine in its own way.