Collected Short Fiction, page 626
But idealist or cynic, whatever the attitude of the individual, the whole question of political maneuvering had be’-n remote. It was something that took place far off, high up—not in the life of Boysie Gann.
Not until now.
Machine General Abel Wheeler leaned forward from his desk and rapped out the words: “I must know this. Do you know who sent the Writ of Liberation?”
Gann shook his head. “Sir, I’ve never even seen it. I don’t know what it says.”
“Foolish threats, Major Gann! An insane promise to stop the sun’s light. A warning to the Planner and to the Machine that freedom must be restored—hah! And yet—” the man’s steel eyes grew colder and more distant still, as he contemplated something far away—“it seems that there is something behind the threats. For the sun is indeed stopped.”
He paused. Boysie Gann blinked. “Stopped? The sun? Sir, I don’t understand. . .”
“Nor do I,” rasped the general, “but that does not matter. What matters is the security of the Machine. It matters particularly to me, since I am entrusted with its defense. This Writ of Liberation is a threat; I must protect the Machine against it. If I am successful, I will receive . . . a suitable reward. To those who can help me . . .” He glanced about his spy-tight room, leaned farther forward still, and merely mouthed the words: “I can offer them rewards, too, Major Gann.”
His steel eyes stabbed restlessly about the room, then returned to Gann. “Major,” he said. “I need you for a friend.”
Gann was still turning over in his mind what the general had said about the stoppage of the sun. The sun? No longer shining in the sky? It was hard to believe. He shook himself free from the questions that were burning at him and said uneasily, “I hope to be your friend, sir. But I still know nothing of the Starchild!”
The general nodded like a metronome. “You will be questioned again,” he rapped out. “This time, directly by the Machine, through one of its servitors—a human who has taken the Machine’s communion and speaks directly to it. This will perhaps help you to remember certain things. It may even be that from the questions the acolyte asks, you may be able to deduce other things—perhaps even make a guess at things that are stored in the memory banks of the Machine that even I do not know. If so.” he said, his face a bronze mask, “I will be interested. The choice is yours. My friend or my foe—and even now,” he said, his bronze jaws hardening, “I have power enough to punish my foes.”
He opened the switches again, glanced at his communications screens, nodded, tapped out an answer, and turned once more to Gann.
“You will go now to Sister Delta Four,” he stated. “There your direct link questioning to the Machine will begin. Major, look at this!”
Unexpectedly he raised his right fist. It clenched like a remote manipulator into a bronze hammer. “This hand,” he droned somberly, “once belonged to someone else, an unplanned traitor who threw a bomb at the Planner. His aim was poor. He missed the Planner but his bomb shattered my own right hand.
“My hand could not be repaired by the surgeons, so it was replaced. With the hand of the would-be assassin.” The bronze fist slammed against the console.
“Gann, remember this! If you fail to serve the Machine in the way that is first required, you will serve it in some other way—more than likely in the Body Bank!”
VII
The radar-horned guards were waiting.
“Come on, Risk!” growled the NCO in charge, and once again Boysie Gann was thrust and dragged through the long gray halls, into the elevators, out again—and left to wait in a bare gray room.
Only for a moment. Then the guards came back, looking angry and confused. “Come on, Risk!” growled the NCO again—he seemed to know no other words, be able to speak in no other way—and Gann was taken out again.
A girl was standing in the doorway, telling her sonic beads, her head bent. She wore the robe and cowl of one of the Machine’s communing acolytes, one of those adepts who had learned the Mechanese that the Machine now spoke in preference to any other language, whose very brain centers were open to the touch of the Machine. As they passed she spoke to one of the guards. “Orders changed!” he said roughly. “Come along if you like—we’re going to the Planner!”
Gann hung back, trying to turn and see her, but the NCO shoved him ahead. He could hear the girl’s oddly melodious voice, not so much speaking as chanting Mechanese in the quarter tones of her sonic beads, but could not make out her words.
She would be—what had General Wheeler called her? Sister Delta Four. The one who was to interrogate him.
But he was going instead to the office of the Planner himself!
In all his years of life under the Plan, Boysie Gann had never seen the Planner in the flesh. Few had. There was no need, with communications reaching into every home, even every room under the Plan—and the Planner was something more than human, removed from even the condescending social intercourse of emperors.
Gann shivered slightly. He was already assuming the attitudes of the convict of any land or time. He feared change. He dreaded the unknown. And the Planner represented a very large unknown quantity indeed.
Again the tunnels, again the high-velocity drop of the elevators. Again Gann was thrust into a tiny room and left there.
He was somewhere far underground. Listening, he could hear no sound except the muffled murmur of air from the duct overhead. The walls were an unpleasant yellowish gray—no longer quite the sterile Technicorps color, but tinged with Planner’s gold. Gann wondered if it was deliberate, or if it was merely that this cell was so old, its occupants viewed with so little favor, that the baked-in coloring of the walls had yellowed with age. The ceiling gave a cold gray light. There was only one bare metal table and one bare metal chair.
The security collar was hard against his throat. Gann sat down and laid his head on the table. His bruises were beginning to stiffen and ache. His brain was whirling.
Confused images were filling his mind. General Wheeler and his menacing hints of reward. Quarla Snow’s space-ling, and the pyropods. Julie Martinet. A daytime sky with the sun somehow gone out . . . the sunlike fusorian globules in Colonel Zafar’s blood . . . Julie Martinet again, and Quarla Snow.
He lived again the endless frightening drop that landed him in the bowels of the planet Earth, among the memory banks of the Machine. He saw again sterile Pluto’s vistas of ice, and the great slow spin of Polaris Station.
He thought of the Writ of Liberation and wondered at the love for freedom of the Planless men of the Reefs—the love for freedom—the freedom to love . . .
He thought again of Julie Martinet, and submerged himself in memories of the Togetherness resort at Playa Blanca, the slight, dark girl he had heard signing, then-golden dawn together on the beach, with the taste of salt spray on her lips. He could see her face as clearly as if she were in the room with him.
“Julie,” he whispered, and she opened her lips to reply . . .
“Come on, Risk!” she said queerly—roughly. “Get up! Move!”
The radar-horned NCO was shaking him angrily. “Risk! Wake up!”
Gann shook himself. He had been asleep. His arm was numb and tingling where his head had rested on it.
He was still dazed as they dragged him out of the cell, into another room—larger, brighter, furnished in splendor. It was all gold. Gold tapestries on the wall, showing the spinning worlds of the Plan of Man. Gold light fixtures, and gold trays on the golden tables. The floor a carpeting of gold, the furniture upholstered in a golden fabric.
A guard stood by him at each side, gripping his arms. They brought him to the center of the room and stood there, waiting, while the NCO went to a gold-arched door and whispered to a Technicorps officer in the uniform of the Planner’s guard who stood there. The officer nodded impatiently and held up a hand.
The radar-horned guard turned and signaled to his men. Wait.
Boysie Gann was very sure, without being told, of where they were. Beyond that door was the Planner himself.
They were not alone in the room. Turning his neck—the grip of the guards did not allow him to turn his body—he saw that the acolyte girl, Sister Delta Four, was in the room, kneeling on a golden hassock, telling her sonic beads. She was slight. What small sight he could get of her face, under the great soft cowl, was oval, grave, and pale. Her loose black robe fell to the floor around the hassock. Her cape bore the luminous emblem of those who had undergone communion with the Machine—the symbolic ellipses of electronic orbits intertwined.
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.
TO BE CONTINUED
Starchild
Second of Three
The worlds of men were defenseless before the strangest creature ever spawned in space—the Starchild!
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE . . .
Machine Major Boysie Gann is assigned to duty on Polaris Station, the artificial sun-satellite orbiting far beyond Pluto that constitutes one of the Plan Worlds’ picket stations protecting the inner planets from the Reefs of Space. He discovers that his commander, Colonel Zafar, is involved in some undercover activity, but before he can do anything about it he is captured and marooned on one of the Reefs. There he meets a hermit, Harry Hickson, who feeds him, shelters him-and disappears.
A girl from the Reef settlements, Quarla Snow, rescues him, but when he tells her about Harry Hickson she refuses to believe him. For she knows Hickson very well . . . and she knows that Harry Hickson has been dead for years.
Yet there is no doubt in Gann’s mind that the man he saw is the same Harry Hickson! The mystery is beyond solving for him, but it is only one part of a greater mystery. For Harry Hickson is linked with the strange religious cult, the Church of the Star, and somehow connected with that church is a queer, unbelievable, almost legendary figure called the Starchild. Who is the Starchild?
No one knows. What is the Starchild? No one can say.
Gann’s life in the Reefs does not last long enough for him to solve these mysteries. Quarla’s father, a doctor, receives a new patient, who is Colonel Zafar-dying-rambling deliriously about the Starchild and about strange powers. And yet it is not all delirium, for something happens that is beyond all Gann’s powers of understanding: He finds himself falling, falling-and alights 20 billion miles away, on Earth, in the sacrosanct headquarters of the Planning Machine.
Gann has no idea how he got there. When he is discovered by guards, they know no more than he, but they accuse him of being the Starchild. Gann protests he is not—that the Starchild is only a myth in any event.
But he learns that the Starchild is no myth. That has been proved once and for all.
The Starchild has sent an ultimatum to Earth, calling on the Plan of Man to relinquish its total control over humanity under ·threat of frightful reprisals . . . and as proof of his powers, the Starchild has threatened to extinguish the sun and a dozen near stars for a period of time.
And the threat was made good. Whoever or whatever the Starchild is, he has the power to halt the mighty atomic fusion engines that fuel the stars!
VIII
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 . . .”
