Collected Short Fiction, page 636
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 facts,” 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.
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.”
XVII
“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 order to 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 all.”
“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 tiny 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 his 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 Martinet! 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.
XVIII
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.
It began with shadow spreading across the worlds of the Plan of Man, and it ended with the bright light of the mighty stars illuminating a new road for humanity.
The Machine had been playing a game with itself, for want of another opponent; then, in that long, thundering dialogue between stars and Machine, the game ended forever. The Machine had come late to its game, and found the board filled.
That was how it began . . . and that was how it ended. With the legend of Lucifer, and the story of pain and evil . . . and the eternal hope for good.
The Machine sat too late at the gaming table, and found all the places filled . . . with the stars, linked in their fusorian net, and with then-Adversary. No longer entrapped in the animal amniotic fluid of his birth . . . no longer slave to the Machine . . . no longer prey to the fusorians . . . the Antagonist was ready to play.
Long ages past, the stars had given him birth, but now he was of age. He was ready to assume his station, his rank and his name.
His station—Adversary to the stars themselves.
His rank—equal of the universe.
His name—Mankind. END
1967
Nowhere Near
1 THE MAN WHO LIKED MACHINES
NOWHERE NEAR was the name of a point in space. Five black light-years from our Legion base at the closest star, sixty more from old Earth, it was marked by the laser beacon and little else. A relief ship came once a year—when it could get through the anomaly.
The last Legion ship had not got through, and half our personnel were overdue for rotation. Odd types, they had volunteered because they had expected to enjoy loneliness and mystery and danger. Most of them had found long ago that they did not.
Our supplies came late, on a private craft chartered for the emergency. A paintless but powerful geodesic flyer, the Erewhon looked like a scarred veteran of less legal missions. Her captain was a squat, shambling man, hard of eye and close of mouth—the sort of civilian likely to need refuge in the hazardous fringes of Nowhere.
Instead of the men and women we needed to relieve our weary crews, she brought only two passengers—an old soldier and a girl. A queer story and a queerer riddle came with them. The story—all I could learn of it—was told to me by Captain Scabbard when he came aboard the station with a sealed pouch of orders from our sector base.
The old soldier and the girl, as he told the story, had boarded the chartered flyer in some haste, along with then odd cargo, just before it lifted.
Trouble came with them.
His spacemen were not the finest sort, Captain Scabbard admitted. They were not used to discipline, and he suspected that some of them were relieving the hazardous tedium of the long voyage to Nowhere with smuggled drugs. They baited the old soldier and tried to make love to the girl.
They were used to free companions, the captain said, and they couldn’t understand such a girl. Her proud aloofness just inflamed them. Even the ship’s mate joined the game. On the mate’s watch, they got the soldier drunk, locked him in his stateroom and attacked the girl in her room.
Captain Scabbard was still confused about the ending of the story. The girl had disabled two of her attackers, with some unexpected trick or weapon. Angered, the others became uglier than ever. She screamed for the soldier.
