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Sister Delta Four sat quietly unmoving, her eyes fixed on him, before him.
He was beginning to feel himself again. With the return of strength there
returned the question of the two women, so unlike yet so much in his thoughts.
He said, "Julie, Sister Delta Four, if you'd rather. Do you know that what
General Wheeler said is true? That the Machine is mad?"
Her perfect face, half hidden in the cowl, did not change expression. "I know
that is what the general said," she sang.
"But it is mad, Julie. The Starchild has wrecked it Now it is wrecking the
Plan planets. Do you still want to serve it?"
"I serve the Planning Machine," she chimed sweetly, her dark eyes cool and
empty.
"Because of the bliss of communion? I understand that, Julie. Don't forget" he
touched the
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...2001-03%20-%20The%20Starchild%20
Trilogy.txt (120 of 206) [12/28/2004 10:49:11 PM]
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/LoPL%20full%20...child%20(3
)/Starchild%2001-03%20-%20The%20Starchild%20Trilogy.txt glittering plate in
his forehead "I've felt it too."
There was a flicker in her eyes, almost an expression of indulgent amusement
as she looked at him.
But she only said, in her voice like the sound of bens, "What you felt, Major
Gann, is only a shabby imitation of what the Machine gives its true servants.
For you are only half a servant The
Machine has not opened its mind to you."
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Puzzled, Gann asked, "You mean . . . mind-to-mind linkage? Communication with
the what could you call it? with the thoughts of the Machine?"
She only shrugged. "It is something of that sort, perhaps," she said
indifferently. "You cannot know." She
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sang a quick chiming chorus of tonal morphemes. Gann tried to follow, but was
lost almost at once.
"You said something about the ... the soul?" he guessed. "The soul of the
Machine?"
"You see? I am sorry fo you, Major Gann," she said. "More for you than for
myself. Since you have destroyed my linkbox I cannot reach the Machine, but
some day perhaps I will find another linkbox.
You will never attain it"
Machine General Wheeler had been dozing while they spoke. Now Gann became
aware that the general was awake and listening to them. When he saw Gann's
eyes on him, the general sat up and laughed raspingly, like an ancient,
ill-kept machine.
"A fool," he said, hurling one bright, contemptuous look at the girl. "And
you're another, Gann.
You're not fit to survive, either of you."
"I survive if the Machine desires it," chimed the girl clearly. "I will cease
when the Machine no longer needs me."
The general ticked off a nod and turned to Gann. "You see? And what is it that
keeps you alive?"
Gann said seriously, "I don't know." He got up, moved restlessly about the
cramped quarters of the
Plan cruiser, his step light and imprecise in the tiny gravity its jetless
thrust supplied. He said, "Out on the Reefs they talk about freedom. I'm not
sure, but . . . Yes. I think it is that hope that keeps me going now, the hope
that freedom is real, and good."
The general laughed again. Without passion, as if playing back an ancient tape
recording in his brain, he said, "The Planner I just killed understood
freedom. He called it 'the romantic fallacy.' Freedom is what permits the
dirty, Planless nomads of the Reefs to eke out their wretched lives. It is a
myth."
"I saw happy men and women on the Reefs," said Boysie Gann softly, less to the
general than to himself.
"You saw animals! They believe that men are good. They believe that mere human
men and women, left to their own un-Planned devices on any drifting rock
somewhere in space, can somehow find within themselves the natural springs of
morality and intellectual enlightenment and progress. They are wrong!"
He blinked at Gann and the silent, composed girl. "Men are evil," he said.
"The givers of laws have always known
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that men are essentially bad. They must be goaded into whatever good they
display. Our Plan of Man was created to defend this classic philosophy the
cornerstone of all civilization. The Plan recognizes the evil in man. It
forces him to goodness and progress. There is no other wayl"
Mercury, the hell planet, lay before them.
The guiding sensors of their Plan cruiser reached out with fingers of
radiation to touch the planet, the Sun; sought reference points by optical
examination of the fixed bright stars; scanned the limbs and poles of Mercury,
and accurately fixed the proper point on the terminator line of the sun's
radiation. Then, satisfied, or in whatever state passes in a machine for
satisfaction, it completed its landing corrections and directed the cruiser
into a landing orbit.
The great naked fire of the Sun hung only thirty-odd million miles away three
times as close as to
Earth, its mighty outpouring of light and heat nine times as great. Its
surface was mottled with great ugly spots, leprous with the scaly markings
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called faculae and granulations. It was painful to watch, bright and blinding.
Machine General Wheeler moved a hand angrily, and the vision screen obediently
blotted out the central disk, like a solar eclipse; then they could see the
somber scarlet chromosphere, the leaping red arches of prominences, like
slow-motion snakes striking at the void and, surrounding all, the white
blazing radiance of the corona.
In that mighty furnace, each second, lakes of solar hydrogen flashed into
helium, pouring out energy. Each second, every square centimeter of its [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]