The Starchild

by Frederik Pohl

  He was out of it all.

  His black-uniformed escorts let him sit with them at a table in a nearly deserted mess hall. A sleepy Togetherness girl yawned as she served them. He ate no food. He drank two cups of black coffee that left a lingering bitterness in his mouth.

  He joined five other stunned and sleepy trainees who must have come from another barracks. They carried their gear into a military subtrain, and carried it off again. They marched past a scowling sentry into another cavernous 'training center.

  Gann left his gear hi a tiny tile-walled cell and reported to a cadaverous Machine Major who wore the piebald scars of a Venusian anaerobic parasite. The major returned his salute stiffly, with a black-gloved hand.

  "Congratulations, Major Gann."

  Staring at the gaunt major who was shuffling through papers on bis desk, Gann saw that the neat black glove was no glove, but the black skin of a salvaged hand.

  "You have successfully completed Phase Two of your service training in Mechanese." Peering at that black, borrowed hand, Gann scarcely heard the words. "You have been assigned here for Phase Three, which consists of mechanized instruction."

  A faint smile twisted the major's yellow patched face. "Your test scores were unusual, Major Gann," he I added. 'The Machine has commended you. You ought to be a proud and happy man."

  Gann had swayed backward when that cold fact struck him. He was not a proud and happy man. He stood speechless, breathless, shuddering with a secret horror.

  "You have come a long way, Major Gann." The yellow scars turned the major's smile into a rictus of agony. "You have escaped the danger of salvage. You have moved far toward the highest reward." Wistfully his black fingers touched his own seamed and mottled forehead, where he had no communion receptacle of his own. "You are very fortunate, Major Gann!"

  Gann stood swaying. Suddenly the harsh-lit room and the gray-cased computers and the piebald major seemed unreal. Terribly real, in his own spinning mind, the cold, bright scalpels and saws of the surgeons were carving out space for the socket in his own forehead. They were drilling into the crown and the temples and the base of his shaven head. They were probing with thin, cruel needles for the centers of sensation. They were coldly violating the most secret privacy of all his being... .

  He wanted to scream.

  "Is something wrong, Major Gann?" The gaunt major rose anxiously. "You look ill."

  "Nothing, sir." Groping for himself, he grinned faintly. "You see, I didn't know that I had passed Phase Two. I thought we were in a salvage center."

  "You'll soon get over that." The major's rictus grew more hideous. "With your record, you're as good as already wired for communion. I wish I were in your place."

  "Thank—" He tried to wet the sandpaper dryness in his mouth and throat. "Thank you, sir!"

  The Mechanese trainer was a ten-foot pear shape, fabricated out of bright aluminum. Swung in massive gimbals of gray-painted steel, it stood in a windy, gloomy cavern, under a water-stained concrete vault. Thick black cables and hoses snaked from it to the gray-cased control console at the tunnel mouth.

  "There she is, sir!" The instructor was a plump young Techtenant with a pink baby face, wide blue eyes, and a bright communion plate set in his forehead. "The perfect teaching machine!"

  Gann was queerly unsure of that. Smeared all over with a sticky jelly, wearing only loose gray coveralls, he hesitated at the tunnel mouth, staring uncomfortably up at that huge metal pear.

  "Step right up, sir." The Techtenant gave him an innocent grin. "Strip off your robe and slip right in." The round blue eyes flickered" at him inquiringly. "All ready, sir?"

  He was wet and clammy with the jelly, and the coveralls were thin. Suddenly he shivered in the cold steady wind that blew out of the tunnel. He didn't really want to learn Mechanese. He didn't want to be rewarded with electrodes in his brain. But he gulped and said that he was ready.

  The Techtenant touched something on the console. Air valves wheezed. That great metal pear tipped in the gimbals, opening like a sliced fruit. He stared at it, frozen, tingling, fascinated.

  "Move ahead, sir." The Techtenant touched bis shoulder respectfully. "Up the ladder. Strip off. Just lie down on the sensor-effector sheath." He chuckled easily. "Most students are a bit uneasy at first, but you'll find it fits you, sir."

  Gann caught his breath and climbed the metal ladder. The rungs felt cold and sticky to his naked feet. The wind blew cold on his shaven head, and a sudden bitter taste of stale coffee came back from his stomach into his throat

  He stripped off the coveralls and crept uneasily out upon the bright pink membrane that lined the pear. It rippled beneath him, warm and slimy and almost alive, propelling his naked body into its central cavity.

  "All set, sir?"

  He attempted no answer to that cherry hail, but he heard another hiss of escaping air. The hinged upper half of the pear closed down. Warm constrictions of that pliant membrane caressed him into place. Total darkness seized him, in a hot and suffocating grip.

  He tried to scream, and had no breath...

  But then there was air for his lungs. He saw a pink glow of light through his closed eyelids.

  He opened them, and saw Sister Delta Four.

  Really, he supposed, it must have been only a projected image of her, but she looked alive enough. He knew this had to be an image because she wasn't in the buried training center. But she seemed to be. Robed and hooded and carrying her black link box, she was walking down a palm-fringed coral beach that looked queerly like the Togetherness center at Playa Blanca.

  And he was walking with her.

  The clinging effectors of the trainer duplicated every sensation: the hard, cold, yielding firmness of the wet sand, the tingling heat of the high sun, a cool puff of ocean breeze. He heard the dull boom of surf against the breakwater, and caught a sharp whiff of rotting seaweed and then a hint of Julie's perfume—for she was speaking to him now, in the warm, remembered tones of Julie Martinet.

  "Here we are," she was saying, "for your first lesson in the Mechanese Learning Device, Mark Eight. This instrument is very nearly the last possible word in educational efficiency. If you co-operate, I'm sure you'll find the experience exciting and profitable." Her bright face smiled at him, tempting under the hood.

  "Now," she said, "we are ready to begin your introduction to the technical vocabulary of Mechanese. It is built upon a principle of economy already familiar to you: one syllable for one sentence. Obviously, that requires a large number of syllables. The total vocabulary of Mechanese, as we compute it, is more than a billion monosyllables—more than a billion one-sound sentences."

  He stopped on the beach—or it seemed that he did, for the synthetic experience created by the trainer had made him forget that he was any where" else. Cold brine hissed over his bare feet, crumbled the hard sand beneath them, rushed back down the slope.

  "I can't do it," he protested. "I can't memorize a billion words!"

  Her soft laugh checked him. "You'll be surprised!" Her voice was a song, even when she spoke the old, familiar language. "You'll be surprised what the trainer can make you do." The sea breeze caught and lifted her hood, so -that he had a sudden glimpse of the bright plate set in her forehead. Even hi that mild tropic air, it made him cold and ill.

  "Actually, though, you don't have to memorize a billion words," she said. "No more than a child has to memorize every possible sentence in English. All you must learn is how to construct the Mechanese monosyllables from combinations of a, few thousand phonemes. You must learn to hear and understand very small distinctive variations hi length and stress and pitch and a few other simple features of articulation."

  "But I can't!" Feet planted in the wet sand, he waited until she turned back. He didn't want to learn, though he could scarcely tell her that. He was seeking secretly to defend himself from those cold probes that would be piercing his brain when he knew Mechanese. "I can't learn to utter a billion different words."

  "
You'll be surprised," Her laugh was as melodious as her voice. "Let's begin."

  He shook his head stubbornly, trying to remind himself that the sharp white sand wasn't real, that the salt-scented wind wasn't real, that Julie herself wasn't real.

  "Do co-operate," she urged him softly. "If you're a good student, we can go for a swim a little later on." Her eyes held a teasing promise, and her deft white hands made a fetching gesture, as if to toss away the robe and hood. "You must co-operate."

  Her oval face turned suddenly sober.

  "If you don't, you'll be sorry." Her voice turned slow and faint and sad. "I don't like to remind you of the third principle of mechanized instruction—but the greatest reward is the end of pain."

  She shrugged, and her quick smile dazzled him. "Let's begin I"

  They began with the verbal glides, the slight inflections of tone that meant tense and mood and voice and person and aspect. She trilled the difficult syllables. Trying faithfully to imitate them, he was soon reminded of the third law of mechanized learning.

  Even the tiniest error brought a twinge of pain, and his errors were frequent and great. Even when he responded instantly with a phoneme that seemed to him precisely like the one she had uttered, it was often .painfully wrong.

  For he wasn't really on that dazzling coral beach. He was sealed inside the great metal pear of the trainer, with its flexible effectors caressing every inch of his really naked body. They could numb him with cold, sear him like fire, crush him with pressure.

  They often did. The slightest error snatched him away from warm beach and Julie Martinet, into a special mechanical hell where he strove with all his being to earn that supreme reward that was the end of pain.

  Sometimes he was trapped aboard a crippled rocket that was falling into the sun. The air was screaming out of the meteor-riddled hull, so that his lungs labored against an agony of suffocation. Cruel light blazed through one jagged hole, blinding, searing, unendurable. The wrecked compartment was a super-heated oven, in which his broken body roasted—but still he heard the voice of Julie Martinet. It came to him faintly through a laser amplifier. Sweetly it sang the combined phonemes of the syllables he had to learn. Sobbing for his breath, he struggled to make each correct response—and he felt the laws of automated learning at work all around him.

  When he was wrong, the fire of that devouring sun became instantly more terrible. When his answer was correct, within the narrow limits accepted by the Machine, the searing heat decreased and his struggling lungs found some tiny breath of precious air.

  Whenever he got enough answers correct, that nightmare was interrupted. He was back on that dazzling beach with Julie Martinet. She promised him that cooling swim in the surf, or led him toward the tall, cool drinks waiting on a small glass-topped table under the palms, as they began another difficult lesson.

  Always, before they reached the glasses or the surf, he had made another error. Each wrong response was instantly inhibited, according to the stern laws of automated learning—though the punishments varied, as if the Machine were experimenting to find what kinds of pain were most effective.

  Sometimes he lay sweating in a hospital bed in a floating station in the murky upper air of Venus, gasping for his breath in the thick, hot smog, an infection of the anaerobic parasites eating like acid into his flesh—with Julie's voice cooing monosyllabic Mechanese from his bedside radio.

  Sometimes he was pinned by a rockslide in a cave beneath the cold side of Mercury, with a boulder crushing his chest and ice-cold water dripping into his face and great slimy, phosphorescent worms crawling over him, deliberately devouring him—with Julie's voice, near him in the dark, singing the syllables he had to learn.

  Always his correct responses were instantly reinforced with some slight reward. Always a sufficient cumulative total of acceptable responses earned him at least a brief relief from pain. When he came back to Julie, she was always sympathetic. Her cool hands caressed him; and bright tears of compassion shone in her eyes.

  "Poor dear," she murmured. "I know it's very hard for you. But you must never give up. Just remember what we're striving for. When you've learned enough, you'll receive communion too. We'll be together, then. Let's try another lesson now. If you do well enough, perhaps the Machine will let us take that swim."

  He always shivered when she spoke of communion, or when he caught a glimpse of the bright plate in her forehead. He was careful to say nothing about that secret fear, but sometimes he wondered if the Machine, with its sensors against every inch of his body, might not detect it.

  For his fear of communion kept growing, like some evil, unearthly weed, until it was more terrible than the synthetic hells that the trainer made to punish his worst errors. It lurked like some hideous hard-scaled pyropod in the shadows of his mind, haunting him until he begged Julie to let him out of the trainer.

  She laughed at him.

  "Really, you are very lucky," she assured him brightly. 'The trainer is a new device. Mechanese was very much harder for me, because I had to learn without it. With the trainer you can't help learning. Just keep trying; you'll reach communion in no tune at all."

  He didn't dare to tell her that he didn't want communion.

  'Truly," she bubbled joyously, "the trainer is the womb of the machine. Inside it you are being mechanized. Your inefficient random human responses are being eliminated. You are learning precision and efficiency and speed. When you are born again, out of the trainer, you will be a perfected child of the Machine."

  He tried not to shudder.

  "Now let's begin with the nominal structure," she urged him brightly. "You have already mastered the Machine's basic analysis of the universe as process. Mechanese has no nouns or verbs, but only things-in-process. Remember?"

  Afraid of the baking heat in that wrecked ship, the burning fire of that parasitic infection, the gnawing mandibles of those phosphorescent worms, he nodded hastily.

  "For example," she trilled, "there is only one basic nominal for any object of solid matter. Such aspects as material, size, shape, and use are indicated by inflection. But it is not a noun, because the verbal intonations always convey the sense of process, so that each possible monosyllabic form is a complete statement."-

  Her warm smile tantalized him.

  "If you study well, perhaps we can take that swim—"

  He tried—the third law of mechanized education forced bun to try—but they never took the swim.

  A time came when Julie vanished. He heard a hiss of air and felt a sudden icy draft against his sweating nakedness.

  Back in the training center, he squirmed across the slick pink membrane of the sensor-effector sheath, climbed into his cold coveralls, and scrambled down the flimsy metal ladder.

  "Good night, sir." The plump young Techtenant looked bored and sleepy now. "See you next shift, sir."

  He wanted terribly never to see the Techtenant or the trainer again, because they meant that he was going to be wired for communion. He wanted desperately to run away—somehow to get back to Quarla Snow and the clean Reefs of Space.

  But he was exhausted and guarded and imprisoned ... he didn't know where ... perhaps beneath a mile of solid rock ... perhaps beneath the sea. He did his stint of calisthenics and took a steaming shower and sweated out the chow line and went to his tiny, tile-walled room to sleep.

  Suddenly a gong was thundering. It was time to get up, to let them shave his head again, to strip and smear himself with that sticky jelly, to return to the womb of the Machine... .

  And a time came, in the trainer, when Julie Martinet —or the projected image of her—gave him a test and, smiling, told him that he had passed.

  "You have earned communion now. You are ready to be born again."

  He almost gasped that he didn't want communion. But he bit his lip. He kept silent until Julie's bright image vanished and air valves roared and a cold wind caught him as he was finally born from the Machine.

  Half-dazed and reeling—his
mind whispered despairingly to him—he found himself in his cot. He did not know how he got there. He knew only something was wrong: there was some new scent in the atmosphere, some hardly perceived whisper of motion, as if someone were waiting outside his room for him to be asleep.

  Then the anesthetic gas that had been piped through his pillow took effect. He slept. Deeply.

  When he woke he felt a minor but nagging ache in the skin and the bone of his forehead. He was in another room—green-walled, surgical.

  He did not have to touch his forehead to know that while he slept the surgeons had been at work, she hair-thin electrodes slipped into the micrometrically located centers of his brain, the bright badge of communion implanted on his brow.

  In the mammalian brain exist bundles of nerves and specialized tissue which control mood and emotion, as well as those which control motor activities, homeostatic regulation, conscious thought, and the various other activities of that three-pound mass of hypertrophied tissue.

  One such area is the pleasure center. Slip a fine platinum electric wire into it by stereotaxic surgery. Feed it a carefully measured, milliampere-tiny surge of electricity. The result is ecstasy! Fit a laboratory animal with such an electrode and with a key it can operate, and it will go on pressing the key, pressing the key, pressing the key ... it will not-pause for food or drink or fear ... it will sear itself with delight until it collapses of exhaustion, and will awake only to press the key once more.

  The jolt of ecstasy that tore through Boysie Gann's being in that first moment of awakening with the communion plate in his forehead and the electrodes embedded in his brain was like nothing he had ever imagined. It was taste, feeling, odor, and light; it was the wild delight of sex and the terrifying joy of daredevil sport; it was all the things he had ever known at once, magnified unbearably. Time stopped. He was adrift hi a turbulent sea of sensation... . Eons and lifetimes later, he became conscious of humanity again. He was back in his body. The tides of quintessential pleasure had receded from around him, and left him aching and dry.