Collected Short Fiction, page 627
But the Planner was nodding his great bloated head. “Pyropods, yes,” he boomed. With a sudden motion he swept the delicately carved pieces off the quartz table, sent them crashing to the floor. “I wish I had a thousand pyropods!” he shouted. “A million! I wish I could send them out to the Reefs to kill and destroy every living thing on them! What insanity that these reef rats should dare talk to me of freedom!”
He broke off and glared at Boysie Gann, who stood silent, unable to speak. The Planner said, “I stand for classic truth! What is it that animates the Reefs of Space, Gann? Tell me, for you have been there. It is the romantic fallacy,” he roared, not waiting for an answer, “the eternal delusion that man is perfectible, that there is a spirit of goodness that can grow and mature in crass organic creatures! What insanity! And now they threaten me in my own Hall—blot out my sun—boast of more deadly measures still!” He pressed his plump arms against the carved golden arms of his chair, half lifted himself, leaned forward to Gann and shouted, “Who is this Starchild, Gann? It is you?”
Boysie Gann was galvanized into shocked speech. “No, sir! Not me! I’ve never seen him. I know nothing about him—oh, except what I’ve heard here, when General Wheeler’s men interrogated me. And a few rumors. But I’m not the Starchild!”
“Rumors. What are those rumors, Gann? I must know!”
Gann looked helplessly around the great hall. All in it were watching him, their eyes cold, their faces impassive. He was on his own; there was no help for him from anyone there. He said desperately. “Sir, I’ve told all I know a hundred times. I’ll tell it again. I’ll you all I know, hut the truth is, sir, that I know almost nothing about the Starchild!”
“The truth,” boomed the Planner, “is what I say it is! Goon! Speak!”
Gann obediently commenced the old story. “I was detailed, sir, to investigate certain irregularities on Polaris Station . . .” As he went through the long, familiar tale there was dead silence in the hall, the Planner listening impassively, leaning on one arm in his great golden chair, the others taking their cue from him. Gann’s voice fell on the enormous hall like words shouted down a well. Only echoes answered him, only the narrowing of an eye, the faint shift of a position showed that his hearers had understood. He finished with his arrest in the catacombs of the Machine, and stood silent.
The Planner said thoughtfully, “You spoke of a sign. The sign of the Swan.”
“Yes, sir.” Boysie Gann demonstrated as best he could the supple motion of forearm and hand that he had seen in Harry Hickson and the dying Colonel Zafar. “I believe it refers to the constellation Cygnus, in which the main star, Deneb, is some sort of object of worship to what is called the Church of the Star . . .”
The Planner turned his great head away from Gann toward the black-robed knot of communicants of the Machine. “Deneb!” he barked. “Display it!” One of the acolytes spoke in soft, chiming tones to his linkbox. Instantly the lights in the great hall darkened, and on the vaulted ceiling a panorama sprang into light. The Planner craned his thick neck to stare searchingly upward. Every eye followed his.
It was as if the thousand yards of earth, and rock above them had rolled back. They were gazing into the depths of space on what seemed to be a clear, moonless night—late in autumn, Gann judged by the position of the constellations; perhaps around midnight. Overhead were the great bright stars of the Summer Triangle, Altair to the south, Deneb and Vega to the north. The Milky Way banded the vault with a great irregular powder of stardust. Low on the horizon to the west red Antares glowed; to the east was Fomalhaut . . .
Abruptly the scene began to contract. It was as if they were rushing through space, straight toward the constellation Cygnus. Fomalhaut and Antares slipped out of sight with Sagittarius and Altair’s constellation, the Eagle; so did the Pole Star and Cepheus below it; all that was left was Cygnus, the constellation of the Swan, hanging over their heads like a bright canopy.
A voice chimed, “Constellation Cygnus. Stars: Alpha Cygni, also known as Deneb, blue-white, first magnitude.
Beta Cygni, also known as Albireo, double, components deep blue and orange. Gamma Cygni—”
The Planner’s voice cut it in raspingly: “Just Deneb, idiot! What about Deneb?”
The voice did not miss a beat. It chimed: “Deneb, distance four hundred light-years. Surface temperature eleven thousand degrees. Supergiant. Spectrographic composition, hydrogen, calcium—”
“Planets!” boomed the Planner irritably.
“No planets known,” sang the invisible voice. Gann craned his neck; it came from one of the black-robed acolytes, but with their faces shrouded in the hoods he could not tell which.
The Planner was silent for a long time, staring upward. He said at last, “Has the Machine any evidence of physical connection between Deneb and the Starchild?”
“No evidence, sir,” chanted the invisible voice at once. “Exceptions as follows: Possible connection between star Deneb and reported Church of the Star. Possible connection between star Deneb and star 61 Cygni in same constellation, 61 Cygni being one of the stars said Starchild threatened to, and did, extinguish. Neither of these items considered significant by the Machine.”
The Planner grumbled. “Very well. Cancel.” The display overhead winked out, the room lights sprang up. The Planner sat brooding for a moment, his eyes remote. He stared absently around the room, his gaze passing over Boysie Gann, over the spilled toys at his feet, over the faces of the guardsmen and Machine General Wheeler.
His eyes came to rest on the black-robed acolytes. Then he sighed and gestured to one of them. It was only the crook of a finger, but the figure in black at once came toward him, holding something in his hand. It was a length of golden cable extending from his linkbox. At its end was a golden eight-pronged plug.
Boysie Gann’s eyes went wide.
If he was not insane—and no, he was not; for already the acolyte was stepping to the Planner’s side, touching his forehead, sweeping back his sparse, unruly hair, baring the glittering plate that was set into his forehead—the Planner was about to undergo communion with the Machine!
The spectacle was fascinating—and frightening. Heedless of the eyes on him, the Planner sat relaxed.
While the acolyte deftly slipped the golden plug into the receptors in the plate on his forehead.
At once the Planner’s expression changed. His eyes closed. The fretful, angry look disappeared. There was a second’s grimace, the teeth bared hi rictus, the corners of the eyes wrinkling hi deep furrows, the jaw set. It was like a momentary pang of agony . . . Or ecstasy.
It passed, and the Planner’s face went blank again. His breathing began to grow more rapid. As the planted electrodes excited the secret centers of his brain, he began to show feeling. His face creased in a smile, then frowned, then smiled again, forgivingly. His lips began to move. Hoarse, inarticulate words whispered—slowly . . . then faster, faster. His plump body shook, his fingers worked. The black-robed acolyte calmly touched his arm, whispered in his ear.
The Planner calmed. His body relaxed again. His whispered voice stopped.
The acolyte waited for a second, nodded, removed the cable and stepped lightly away. The Planner opened his eyes and looked around.
To Boysie Gann, the change in the Planner was stranger than anything he had seen on the Reefs of Space. A glum, angry, harried man had accepted that moment of communication with the electronic joys of the Machine; a cheerful, energetic, buoyant one had emerged from it. The Planner opened his mouth and boomed laughter into the great hall. “Ha!” he shouted. “Ho! That’s good!”
He sat up and pounded his great fist onto the quartz table. “We’ll destroy them!” he cried. “Reef rats and Star-child—anyone who dares interfere with the Plan of Man. We’ll crush them and their fanciful dreams forever. And you’ll help in this, Boysie Gann, for you are the chosen instrument of the Plan in this great work!”
For a lunatic moment Gann thought of turning, running, fleeing—of leaping toward the Planner and letting the decapitation charge, in his security collar end his problems forever. There was something wild and fearful in the great chuckling good humor with which the Planner bubbled now, something that terrified Gann. If the Machine could cause such personality change in its most favored of servants, Gann feared the Machine. Feared it! And that thought was in itself fearsome to him, for the Machine had always been the great good master whose judgments were infallible, who always rewarded good service, punished, only the bad. Yet this particular reward seemed a very terrible punishment to Gann . . .
But all he said was, “Yes, sir. I serve the Plan, sir!” The Planner shouted with glee. “Serve it well, boy!” he cried. “Serve it with all your heart and mind—or you’ll serve it with your eyes and arms and liver, in the Body Bank! We all serve the Plan, boy. In one way or another!” And he dismissed Gann with a good-humored wave of one fat arm and turned to General Wheeler. As the guards closed in on Gann and marched him out of the room he caught one glimpse of the general, staring toward him. The steel-gray eyes were cold and empty, but Gann could read their message.
Don’t fail me, either, Gann, they said.
IX
There had once been a time, thought Boysie Gann, when life was simple and his duty clear. In that dead, half-forgotten time—was it only months ago? it seemed like centuries—he had found, and loved, and won a girl named Julie Martinet. He remembered the night they met, remembered their long hours together, their endless promises, the bright hope of happiness they gave each other. He remembered the long white beach at the Togetherness center at Playa Blanca, and her kiss before he left. Warm, sweet, soft, loving, she had been everything a man could want. Her memory had followed Boysie Gann twenty billion miles out from the sun, and her absence had made that long voyage bleak.
Yet never had he been so far from her as in this room. He could, if he dared, reach out and touch the lips he had kissed at Playa Blanca. But the mind behind them was no longer the mind of the sweet, warm girl he had loved. The body was the body of Julie Martinet, but what inhabited it was Sister Delta Four.
Involuntarily he whispered: “Julie! Julie Martinet . . .”
She stood motionless, regarding him with grave dark eyes. He searched them for some hint of recognition, for the saving warmth of Jove that had filled them at Playa Blanca, but nothing was there.
She shook her hooded head. “I am Delta Four,” she said, her voice a melodious chime. “I am to interrogate you for the Machine.” She stood watching him, waiting for a response, her pale face half hidden by the deep folds of the cowl she wore. The luminous emblem on her black robes mocked him. It was a Keep Off sign that he dared not ignore.
But he could not help saying, “Julie, don’t you remember me at all? Can’t you tell me what happened?”
She fingered her long string of bright black beads, each an electronic bell that rang when she stroked it. “Major Gann,” she sang, her voice in perfect pitch with the tonal beads, “I am, as you see, an acolyte of the Machine. I do not wish to be reminded of any other life.”
“Please, Julie. At least tell me why you didn’t wait—”
Her grave head nodded. “We have tune,” she trilled. “Ask your question.”
“Why didn’t you—I mean, why didn’t Julie Martinet wait for me? I sent you a letter from Pluto—”
“Your message was delivered,” she sang. “But Julie Martinet had already been admitted to training as acolyte for the Machine. She destroyed your message. She does not wish to recall it.”
“But I loved you!” Gann burst out. “How could you turn your back on me?”
The serene pale face stared at him without curiosity. “Julie Martinet loved you,” she corrected him melodiously. “I am Delta Four. Please sit down, Major Gann. I must interrogate you for the Machine.”
Reluctantly Gann sank into a chair, watched as she moved another chair near his. She seated herself with deliberate grace.
From under the cape she brought forth a small link-box, covered in a black plastic, like leather. “Major Gann,” she said, “I must ask you if you are the Starchild.” Her voice was pure melody, cold and perfect and remote as her white, oval face.
Gann snapped, “Plan take it, no! I’m fed up with that question! I’ve said it a hundred—”
But she was shaking her head. “Wait,” she broke in. “One moment, please.”
He watched her glumly, the ache of his bruises combining with the deeper ache in his heart as, hooded head intently bent, she once again touched the long string of beads. As each electronic chime rang out her throat echoed the tone, practicing the difficult scale of tone phonemes that made up the artificial language called Mechanese.
Mechanese was the difficult bridge between the Machine and the human mind. Earlier computers had crossed that bridge by building their own structure of translation, transforming English into Fortran or another artificial tongue, Fortran into binary numbers, the binary statement into instructions and data for processing. The Machine’s language was itself a sort of pattern of binary digits that represented its own electronic processes—circuits open or closed, storage points charged or discharged, ferrite cores in one magnetic state or another.
Human beings could not be trained to speak that binary language, nor could the Machine of the Plan of Man be troubled with the dull task of translation. Instead, it had created a language that men could learn—with difficulty, with a consecration of purpose that required them to give up the coarser human aspects of their lives, but all the same with accuracy and assurance.
Mechanese was a bridge, but a difficult one. The Machine, counting time in nanoseconds, could not wait for laggard human speech. Accurate in every either-or response, it had no need of redundancy. It had computed the theoretical capacity of the human ear and the human voice at some 50,000 binary units of information per second, and it had devised a tongue to approach that theoretical maximum.
Normal human speech conveyed only about fifty such bits of information in a second; Mechanese was a thousand times more efficient.
And, Gann knew, it was about a thousand times as difficult to learn.
Bitterly he realized that it was the very thing in Julie Martinet that first drew his attention to her—her soft, true voice—that had lost her for him forever. The Machine sought endlessly for humans who could be trained to Mechanese—sought them and, when it found them, did not let them go. Only such special individuals could be trained to speak Mechanese well, though it was possible for almost anyone who invested the time and effort to learn a sort of pidgin, or to understand it. A true acolyte needed not only a wide vocal range but a true sense of absolute pitch. The tonal beads would help. An acolyte could, as Delta Four was doing now, use them as a sort of pitch pipe before talking to the Machine. But not even they would convert an ordinary human into one fluent in Mechanese.
Watching her tolling the tonal beads, Gann pictured the long, arduous weeks of training. He knew it required total concentration, absolute devotion. And its ultimate reward was the bright metal plate in her forehead.
Her quick voice trilled a chain of silver bird notes. The linkbox sang an electronic answer. Her alert, emotionless eyes looked up at him at last.
“We’re ready now,” she said. “Major Gann. Are you the Starchild?”
A hundred interrogations, and this was the hundred and first.
Boysie Gann no longer needed his mind to answer the girl’s questions. Repetition had taught his tongue and lips to answer by themselves. I am not the Starchild. I have never seen the Starchild. I know nothing of the Writ of Liberation. I have never engaged in unplanned activities.
And all the time his heart was shouting: Julie! Come back . . .
Each time he answered a question, Sister Delta Four sang into the linkbox. The strange, quavering notes sounded nothing like what he had said, but he knew that each difficult phoneme was also a meaningful morpheme, each sung syllable a clause. And each time she asked a question she paused, regarding him with detached interest, her perfect face as inhuman as her voice.
“My tour of hazardous duty took me out to the Space-wall . . .” he said, and went on with the long familiar tale.
He felt the bright gold walls pressing in on him, suddenly suffocating. He wondered how many thousand feet of rock lay above him. Up at the surface of the earth, was the endangered sun shining now on woods and fields tinted faintly green with early spring? Or was there arctic ice above this isolated, sound-deadened cell in the Planner’s vast suites? Or miles, perhaps, of dark and icy ocean?
He had no way of knowing.
And abruptly he felt a wave of desperate longing for the Reefs, for Freehaven, for Quarla Snow. Those strange spaceborne rocks were somehow kinder than the Plan of Man. He was homesick for infinite space . . . for that fantastic concept freedom . . .
The stern snarl of the linkbox brought him back to his interrogation. “Proceed,” cooed Sister Delta Four, “You were attacked by pyropods?” Her voice was as tuneful as a crystal bell, cold and empty as the black space between the Reefs. There was no flicker of feeling on the serene and secret oval of her face.
He nodded wearily—then, remembering: “Yes, but before that, I forgot to mention one thing. Hickson removed my collar.”
Her brilliant dark eyes did not widen. She merely sang into the linkbox, still watching him, her eyes intent but somehow blind, as if she were already absorbed in her private ecstasy of communion.
The black box snarled.
“The Machine requires elucidation,” Sister Delta Four trilled sweetly. “We must find this unregimented Harry Hickson. His knowledge must be recovered for the Plan. Then each organ of his body must be obliterated.”
Gann grinned bleakly at her, looking at the lips he had kissed so long ago. “Sorry. I can’t help you. He’s dead.”
