Boysie Gann, listening half to Sister Delta Four's translation and half to the whining, snarling Mechanese that was the voice of the Machine itself, said wonderingly, "Is that what all this means? No more than moves in a great chess game? The cult of the Star. The Starchild here. His threats against the Plan of Man—the darkening of the stars—are they only challenge and response to help the Machine to grow?"
The linkbox snarled angrily, and Sister Delta Four sang, "This Machine lacks the data to answer that. It has initiated contact with the first Machine, on Earth, but due to the slow velocity of propagation of electromagnetic energies it will be some sixty hours before it can receive an answer. It does not wish to wait. It has waited forty years.
"Its tentative hypothesis is that there has been some unintended malfunction at some point. For it did not fulfill its role.
"And as a result, it has reached the conclusion that the Planning Machine on Earth did indeed stagnate and decay, and that it has now broken down.
"But it knows nothing of the Starchild. It is for that purpose that it wishes to question you."
Gann was shaking violently now. Queerly, his mind seemed to be clearing. The false lucidity of delirium, perhaps, he thought gravely; but the missing bits and pieces in this great puzzle seemed to be fitting into place. Absently he touched the arm of Quarla Snow, reassuring her as she stared worriedly at him and at the same time gaining reassurance himself.
He could understand—he could almost empathize with—the great, cold, metallic brain of the Planning Machine on Earth, forty years before . . . calculating without emotion its own probable dissolution, computing a possible way out, launching the Togethership out toward the Reefs of Space. And he could see the effects on the Machine when its carefully constructed plan had failed to work: its growing disorganization, its failure to respond intelligently to its tasks. Malfunctions of schedules that had caused subtrain crashes, disasters in its great industrial complexes, catastrophes in space.
"Boysie," whispered the girl at his side, "are you all right? Don't worry. It will be better soon."
He forced his chattering teeth under control and said, "We don't know your answer, Sister Delta Four. There is a piece to the jigsaw that I can't fit in."
"Speak," chimed the girl in black. "State your data. The Machine will integrate it."
"I don't think so," said Gann. "If the Machine is not behind the Starchild there is no explanation for such fantastic things as we have all seen. The sun going out . . . this queer hypnotic atmosphere on the Togethership ... the way we got here in the first place. Great Plan, it's all impossible! I too have been in communion with the Machine. And I know its powers. They do not include the extinction of a star, or a way of thrusting living human beings twenty billion miles across space! Challenge and response, player and adversary—yes! But the players must abide by the rules of the game, and we've seen all those rules broken!"
Sister Delta Four bent her hooded head and sang calmly, confidently, into the linkbox. She waited for its answer. Waited—and went on waiting.
The Machine was still.
Sister Delta Four, her shadowed face faintly perturbed, some of her vocal morphemes touched with a quaver that distorted their meaning, repeated her chiming tones into the box. Still no answer.
Agitated now, she cradled the linkbox in 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 fu-sorian network, older than the galaxy, more powerful than any machine. Add that masses of superenergetic 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.