The Starchild

by Frederik Pohl

  "But the antagonist responded in an un-Planned manner," she chanted, listening to the snarl of the crude link-box in her hands. "It released its human attendants. Some died. All were cast out of the ship. It broke all contact, and withdrew beyond the observation of the master Machine. Its moves were made in secret and did not serve the function the Earth Machine had intended."

  Boysie Gann, listening half to Sister Delta Four's translation and half to the whining, snarling Mechanese that was the voice of the Machine itself, said wonderingly, "Is that what all this means? No more than moves in a great chess game? The cult of the Star. The Starchild here. His threats against the Plan of Man—the darkening of the stars—are they only challenge and response to help the Machine to grow?"

  The linkbox snarled angrily, and Sister Delta Four sang, "This Machine lacks the data to answer that. It has initiated contact with the first Machine, on Earth, but due to the slow velocity of propagation of electromagnetic energies it will be some sixty hours before it can receive an answer. It does not wish to wait. It has waited forty years.

  "Its tentative hypothesis is that there has been some unintended malfunction at some point. For it did not fulfill its role.

  "And as a result, it has reached the conclusion that the Planning Machine on Earth did indeed stagnate and decay, and that it has now broken down.

  "But it knows nothing of the Starchild. It is for that purpose that it wishes to question you."

  Gann was shaking violently now. Queerly, his mind seemed to be clearing. The false lucidity of delirium, perhaps, he thought gravely; but the missing bits and pieces in this great puzzle seemed to be fitting into place. Absently he touched the arm of Quarla Snow, reassuring her as she stared worriedly at him and at the same time gaining reassurance himself.

  He could understand—he could almost empathize with —the great, cold, metallic brain of the Planning Machine on Earth, forty years before ... calculating without emotion its own probable dissolution, computing a possible way out, launching the Togethership out toward the Reefs of Space. And he could see the effects on the Machine when its carefully constructed plan had failed to work: its growing disorganization, its failure to respond intelligently to its tasks. Malfunctions of schedules that had caused subtrain crashes, disasters in its great industrial complexes, catastrophes in space.

  "Boysie," whispered the girl at his side, "are you all right? Don't worry. It will be better soon."

  He forced his chattering teeth under control and said, "We don't know your answer, Sister Delta Four. There is a piece to the jigsaw that I can't fit in."

  "Speak," chimed the girl in black. "State your data. The Machine will integrate it."

  "I don't think so," said Gann. "If the Machine is not behind the Starchild there is no explanation for such fantastic things as we have all seen. The sun going out ... this queer hypnotic atmosphere on the Togethership ... the way we got here in the first place. Great Plan, it's all impossible! I too have been in communion with the Machine. And I know its powers. They do not include the extinction of a star, or a way of thrusting living human beings twenty billion miles across space! Challenge and response, player and adversary—yes! But the players must abide by the rules of the game, and we've seen all those rules broken!"

  Sister Delta Four bent her hooded head and sang calmly, confidently, into the linkbox. She waited for its answer. Waited—and went on waiting.

  The Machine was still.

  Sister Delta Four, her shadowed face faintly perturbed, some of her vocal morphemes touched with a quaver that distorted then- meaning, repeated her chiming tones into the box. Still no answer.

  Agitated now, she cradled the linkbox hi her lap, looking up at Gann and Harry Hickson questioningly. Unconsciously her hand crept to her sonic beads and she began to stroke them, their faint, pure chime sounding like a prayer for reassurance.

  At last Harry Hickson stirred, seemed to sigh, and spoke.

  "When the Togethership came to the Reefs," he said, "it was supposed to bring us free men and women into the Plan of Man—still free. Among its crew were some of the finest humans alive—a man named Ryeland and his wife; her father, who was then the Planner. Your father, Quarla.

  "They were thrust out into space right here, in Reef Whirlpool. Some died, like Ryeland and those with him. Some, especially those few who happened to be near the area where a few spacelings were kept, were able to make their way to habitable reeflets—like Dr. Snow—and lived.

  "But the Machine here has been kept out of contact with its ancestor on Earth. Its great game was not played —not then."

  He was silent for a moment, looking around at them. Then he said, "It was not to be played according to the rules set up by the Machines—not by either Machine.

  "You see, a third Player has taken a hand."

  Harry Hickson stood up suddenly, disconcerting his pet pyropod, which squalled angrily and clutched at his bare scalp. He touched it absently and turned his golden, glowing gaze at Sister Delta Four.

  "Ask of your Machine," he demanded, "the physical basis for intelligence!"

  Sister Delta Four bent to sing into her crudely constructed linkbox, listened, and looked up as it buzzed and snarled back at her.

  "Means of input," she caroled sweetly. "Means of storage. Means of manipulation. Means of output. In a machine, this is accomplished through magnetic cores and electrical circuits. In animate life, through nerves and neurons."

  Harry Hickson nodded his golden head. "Inform your Machine," he said, "that a physical system exists as follows. It receives radiation and stores it as charges. It is made up of particles in a charged state, of electrons and others, each of which has two stable states. In one state, the spin of the electron is parallel with that of its nucleus. In the other state, its spin is antiparallel. This very electron is a machine for memory."

  The box growled. "The Machine is aware of these basic physical facts," sang Sister Delta Four melodiously.

  "Add these further tacts," said Harry Hickson gravely. "Add a fusorian network, older than the galaxy, more powerful than any machine. Add that masses of super-energetic gas display an affinity to this fusorian network. Add that these masses of gas are those systems in which electron spin can function as a storage capacity."

  The girl bent to her linkbox, then looked up. "The Machine states that you are describing stars," she intoned.

  And Harry Hickson nodded slowly. His glowing, golden arm lifted and made the looping, serpentine sign of the Swan.

  "The Star that I serve," he said softly.

  The box snarled. "These being so," sang Sister Delta Four, "the Machine computes that the gaseous mass of a star, linked with the fusorian network you describe, is easily an available vehicle for intelligence."

  She looked up at Hickson.

  Hickson nodded once more, and said solemnly, "All matter is now revealed to be an available vehicle for intelligence. The whole mass of the steady-state universe, infinite in both space and time, is now revealed to be a proper vehicle for the mind of God."

  The linkbox buzzed angrily and Sister Delta Four chanted, "The Machine requires an answer. What is God?"

  Harry Hickson rose slowly. Looking at his glowing, golden face, Gann thought he saw the signs of an ancient stress, a terrible burden, slipping away. Whatever his duty had been, he seemed to have fulfilled it. Monitoring the machine in the Togethership, carrying out the terrible obligations of his masters, the stars, he seemed to have completed all his tasks.

  He turned to Gann, with something in his eyes like sympathy. He said, "You have called me the Starchild, Boysie Gann. I am not."

  He took the pyropod from his head, stroked it gently and tossed it free. Squalling and hissing angrily, it darted about on its flaming jet, trying to return to its perch atop his head. But he raised a golden arm and warded it off, and the tiny, ugly creature squalled again, circled him at high velocity, and shot away—out the door, down into the long, wide corridor of the ship.

&nbs
p; Harry Hickson watched it go, then turned to Gann with untroubled eyes.

  "The Starchild did not exist," he said. "Not before now. But he will exist very soon. A man. A bridge. A link between machines and the stars.

  "Boysie Gann," he said, his hand lifted in that strange, serpentine sign of homage, "you will be the Starchild."

  Chapter 17

  "No!" shouted Boysie Gann, tearing himself free from the restraining hand of Quarla Snow. He leaped across the control room, confronted the calm, golden face of Harry Hickson. "I won't! I want no part of this insane business of miracles and intelligent stars!"

  Harry Hickson did not answer. He only stood looking at Gann, his golden eyes glowing. From behind him Quarla Snow said softly, "Boysie. Boysie, dear. You have no choice."

  Gann whirled. "What do you mean, no choice? I won't do it! I won't..." He paused, confused by his own words. He would not do what? No one had given him an orderto refuse.

  The control room seemed to swing dizzyingly around him. He reached out and caught the back of an astrogator's chair, aware that his hands were shaking uncontrollably again.

  He looked up sharply and caught Quarla Snow's gaze on him steadily, compassionately.

  Then Boysie Gann realized what sickness had claimed him. He croaked, "That glowing stuff Hickson threw at me. He's infected me. I'm ... I'm going the same way as he. As Colonel Zafar and the men on Mercury station. As you, Quarla."

  She nodded, with her heart in her eyes. "It's not so bad, Boysie," she whispered. "It doesn't hurt. And it makes you part of something ... huge, Boysie. Something that fills the universe."

  "I don't want it!" he whispered desperately. Something huge! He had had one taste of something huge when he had achieved that one brief moment of communion with the Machine, back on Earth; and like an addiction, it had haunted him ever since... .

  Unbidden, the craving rose in him again. He touched the metal plate in his forehead dizzily, glanced at Sister Delta Four.

  The linkbox snapped and snarled at her. Without speaking, obediently, she rose and approached him, holding the box out to him. From it depended a length of patchcord terminating in prongs ... prongs that would fit the receptacle in the glittering plate he wore in his forehead.

  "No," he whispered again, and turned to took at Harry Hickson.

  But Harry Hickson was gone.

  In the air where he had stood was the faint smoke-thin outline of a man, limned in the most wisplike of golden fogs. As Gann watched, Harry Hickson ... dissipated. Tiny darting glints of golden light rose from that skeletal shape and darted away, to the walls that were the hull of the Togethership and seemingly through them, out into the void beyond, to rejoin that greater golden sphere that pulsed outside. And as each invisibly tiny spark of gold fled, the figure became fainter, more like a ghost...

  As he watched it was gone. Nothing was left of Harry Hickson. Nothing at ah".

  "Quarla," he whispered, turning desperately. But she was going too. Already her golden face and hair were shimmering, insubstantial. "Good-by, Boysie," she whispered gravely. "Good-by for now ..."

  By his side Sister Delta Four stood silent, dark eyes hooded, holding the linkbox out to him.

  Boysie Gann took a deep breath, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them.

  "Good-by, Quarla," he said, though there was not enough left to reply to him. He took the linkbox from Sister Delta Four.

  "Good-by, Julie," he said, and carefully and without hesitation, picked up the pronged communion wire and inserted it into the receptor plate in his forehead.

  Communion was ecstasy. Infinite and eternal. Gann waited for it while the universe seemed to hold its breath around him.

  The ecstasy did not come.

  He stared into the hooded eyes of Sister Delta Four, but found no answer there. What had happened? Why was the communion delayed?

  He remembered what she had told him, that the tremendous surge of ecstasy he had felt back on Earth was only a child's sweetmeat compared to the great communing flow of sensation that the more perfectly adapted communicants might receive. Not just pleasure but a mingling of identity, of question and response, a dialogue between man and Machine. '

  Carefully Gann framed a question in his mind, phrased it in the perfect Mechanese his brain had learned but his vocal chords could not reproduce: Where are you? Why do you not answer me?

  Out of nowhere a single sound formed in his brain and gave his answer: Wait.

  Wait? For what?

  Gann felt himself shaking more uncontrollably still, and turned a helpless look on Sister Delta Four. Without speaking she touched him, pointed to the astrogator's chair by his side. He fell into it, arms dangling, waiting for the clarification that the Machine might bring, waiting for some grand Something to speak to him and give him answers.

  And while he waited, he knew, the tiny fusorian clusters were multiplying in his blood. Were pervading his system with the symbiotic cells that had ultimately devoured Harry Hickson and Colonel Zafar and Quarla Snow, replacing their organs of flesh and their skeletons of bone with linkages of fusorian motes.

  Was that what he was waiting for? To be turned into a fusorian aggregate, a no-longer-human structure attuned to the minds Hickson had said dwelt in the stars? He looked within his own body, saw the liny glowing golden sparks, realized they were multiplying rapidly.

  And realized what he had done. He had seen his own body! From within!

  He allowed himself a thought to test it out...

  And at once he was looking upon himself from outside. Was looking down into the control room of the Togethership from a point in space long miles away, from somewhere where the diamond-bright, emerald-hued, ruby-glowing worlds of Reef Whirlpool circled slowly about. He could see the Togethership in all its vast, somber length ... could see inside it, where bis own body and Sister Delta Four's waited patiently in the control room ... could see down to the fire control station where the demented Machine General Wheeler shrieked with laughter as he released imaginary bolts of destruction at unscathed and nonexistent enemies ... looked farther still and saw the mighty sweep of the solar system spinning under him.

  He saw the infant pyropod that had belonged to Harry Hickson, jetting across the black of space toward the reeflet where it had been born, keening a terrible harsh dirge ... saw that reeflet itself, and the cave where he had lain while Harry Hickson fed and cared for him.

  He saw a chapel on a small and lonely rock, where dark-blue fusorian moss held a scanty atmosphere and twenty worshippers joined in a service of the Church of the Star, kneeling to blue Deneb blazing overhead.

  He saw the planets of the Plan of Man, torn by disaster, terrified by confusion, while the mad Machine crackled out wild and contradictory orders and enforced them by hurling bolts of energy at random into the void.

  He saw the empty station on Mercury, with the hot gases of the sun roiling restlessly overhead, and realized that it too had a life and thought of its own ... a life that had reached out and swallowed into itself those three lives of fusorian matter that had ventured close enough for linkage.

  He saw stars and gas clouds, gazed at new matter springing into life like a fountain's play, stared outward to the endless vista of Infinity, inward to the bright golden atoms at his own heart.

  And then, awesome and silent and vast, Something spoke his name. Star spoke to Machine. Machine answered Star.

  And Boysie Gann, mere human man, shaped to the genetic code of carbon-based life, bent into the form of an acolyte of the Machine, transformed by the fusorian globes into something bearing kinship to the stars ... Boysie Gann mediated their vast and awful discourse.

  It went on forever, a thousand years and more, though in the scale of planets orbiting a sun and light crossing a measured track, it all took place in a few minutes or hours.

  It went on and on ... and when Boysie Gann was no longer needed and departed, it went on still.

  And then it finished. Forever.

/>   Boysie Gann opened his eyes and looked at the room around him. Sister Delta Four stood motionless, watching him.

  He stood up easily. He stretched, yawned, stripped the prongs out of the communion plate on his forehead, wrapped the wire neatly around the improvised linkbox —and tossed it away.

  It sailed slowly across the control room, in the light-G torpor of space, but when it struck the steel wall at the end of its flight it smashed into a hundred pieces.

  Sister Delta Four made a mewing cry of horror.

  Boysie Gann touched her arm. "Don't fret about it, Julie," he said. "You don't need it any more."

  She stared at him. "I serve the Machine!" she cried proudly. "I am Sister Delta Four, not Julie Martinetl I..."

  But he was shaking his head. "Not any more," he said.

  The hood fell unnoticed back from her head, revealing her dark, close-cropped hair, with the bright badge of communion shining out of her forehead. She touched it shakily. "I ... I don't understand!" she whispered. "I... I don't feel the Machine's presence ..."

  He nodded. "Not now," he said, agreeing. "And not ever any more." He touched his own communion plate. "When we get back to Earth," he said, "we'll have these out, and the electrodes in our brains with them. We won't need them. No human will ever need them again.

  "And then," he said after a moment, holding her with one arm while Sister Delta Four, in the terrible parturitive pangs of becoming Julie Martinet once again, sobbed and shuddered, "and then we'll start over where we left off. You and I... and all Mankind."

  And he left her and went to the old communications board, and began to set up the circuits for a call for rescue from the dead Togethership.

  Chapter 18

  That was the way it began, with the stars themselves winking a warning to Mankind and the Machine hurling its agents and its acolytes about the solar system, seeking an antagonist, a purpose, an instrument for its own salvation.