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 anywhere 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 in 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 in 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!"
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 time 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."