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 time," 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 linkbox, 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 Spacewall . . ." 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 warily—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 link-box, 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 hps he had kissed so long ago. "Sorry. I can't help you. He's dead."
"The Machine rejects this data," she sang. "Did you not ask this unplanned man how he removed the collar?"
"I don't know how," he admitted. He paused, hoping to see some living spark in her eyes. But there was none. The black box whirred ominously. "I think he was a convert to the Church of the Star," said Gann hurriedly. "I think—that is, as I understand it, his power was thought to come from Deneb."