Harry Hickson watched it go, then turned to Gann with untroubled eyes.
"The Starchild did not exist," he said. "Not before now. But he will exist very soon. A man. A bridge. A link between machines and the stars.
"Boysie Gann," he said, his hand lifted in that strange, serpentine sign of homage, "you will be the Starchild."
17
"No!" shouted Boysie Gann, tearing himself free from the restraining hand of Quarla Snow. He leaped across the control room, confronted the calm, golden face of Harry Hickson. "I won't! I want no part of this insane business of miracles and intelligent stars!"
Harry Hickson did not answer. He only stood looking at Gann, his golden eyes glowing. From behind him Quarla Snow said softly, "Boysie. Boysie, dear. You have no choice."
Gann whirled. "What do you mean, no choice? I won't do it! I won't . . ." He paused, confused by his own words. He would not do what? No one had given him an order to refuse.
The control room seemed to swing dizzyingly around him. He reached out and caught the back of an astrogator's chair, aware that his hands were shaking uncontrollably again.
He looked up sharply and caught Quarla Snow's gaze on him steadily, compassionately.
Then Boysie Gann realized what sickness had claimed him. He croaked, "That glowing stuff Hickson threw at me. He's infected me. I'm . . . I'm going the same way as he. As Colonel Zafar and the men on Mercury station. As you, Quarla."
She nodded, with her heart in her eyes. "It's not so bad, Boysie," she whispered. "It doesn't hurt. And it makes you part of something . . . huge, Boysie. Something that fills the universe."
"I don't want it!" he whispered desperately. Something huge! He had had one taste of something huge when he had achieved that one brief moment of communion with the Machine, back on Earth; and like an addiction, it had haunted him ever since. . . .
Unbidden, the craving rose in him again. He touched the metal plate in his forehead dizzily, glanced at Sister Delta Four.
The linkbox snapped and snarled at her. Without speaking, obediently, she rose and approached him, holding the box out to him. From it descended a length of patchcord terminating in prongs . . . prongs that would fit the receptacle in the glittering plate he wore in his forehead.
"No," he whispered again, and turned to look at Harry Hickson.
But Harry Hickson was gone.
In the air where he had stood was the faint smoke-thin outline of a man, limned in the most wisplike of golden fogs. As Gann watched, Harry Hickson . . . dissipated. Tiny darting glints of golden light rose from that skeletal shape and darted away, to the walls that were the hull of the Togethership and seemingly through them, out into the void beyond, to rejoin that greater golden sphere that pulsed outside. And as each invisibly tiny spark of gold fled, the figure became fainter, more like a ghost. . .
As he watched it was gone. Nothing was left of Harry Hickson. Nothing at all.
"Quarla," he whispered, turning desperately.
But she was going too. Already her golden face and hair were shimmering, insubstantial. "Good-by, Boysie," she whispered gravely. "Good-by for now. . ."
By his side Sister Delta Four stood silent, dark eyes hooded, holding the linkbox out to him.
Boysie Gann took a deep breath, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them.
"Good-by, Quarla," he said, though there was not enough left to reply to him. He took the linkbox from Sister Delta Four.
"Good-by, Julie," he said, and carefully and without hesitation, picked up the pronged communion wire and inserted it into the receptor plate in his forehead.
Communion was ecstasy. Infinite and eternal. Gann waited for it while the universe seemed to hold its breath around him.
The ecstasy did not come.
He stared into the hooded eyes of Sister Delta Four, but found no answer there. What had happened? Why was the communion delayed?
He remembered what she had told him, that the tremendous surge of ecstasy he had felt back on Earth was only a child's sweetmeat compared to the great communing flow of sensation that the more perfectly adapted communicants might receive. Not just pleasure but a mingling of identity, of question and response, a dialogue between man and Machine.
Carefully Gann framed a question in his mind, phrased it in the per-feet Mechanese his brain had learned but his vocal cords could not reproduce: Where are you? Why do you not answer me?
Out of nowhere a single sound formed in his brain and gave his answer: Wait.
Wait? For what?
Gann felt himself shaking more uncontrollably still, and turned a helpless look on Sister Delta Four. Without speaking she touched him, pointed to the astrogator's chair by his side. He fell into it, arms dangling, waiting for the clarification that the Machine might bring, waiting for some grand Something to speak to him and give him answers.
And while he waited, he knew, the tiny fusorian clusters were multiplying in his blood. Were pervading his system with the symbiotic cells that had ultimately devoured Harry Hickson and Colonel Zafar and Quarla Snow, replacing their organs of flesh and their skeletons of bone with linkages of fusorian motes.
Was that what he was waiting for? To be turned into a fusorian aggregate, a no-longer-human structure attuned to the minds Hickson had said dwelt in the stars? He looked within his own body, saw the tiny glowing golden sparks, realized they were multiplying rapidly.
And realized what he had done. He had seen his own body! From within!
He allowed himself a thought to test it out. . .
And at once he was looking upon himself from outside. Was looking down into the control room of the Togethership from a point in space long miles away, from somewhere where the diamond-bright, emerald-hued, ruby-glowing worlds of Reef Whirlpool circled slowly about. He could see the Togethership in all its vast, somber length . . . could see inside it, where his own body and Sister Delta Four's waited patiently in the control room . . . could see down to the fire control station where the demented Machine General Wheeler shrieked with laughter as he released imaginary bolts of destruction at unscathed and nonexistent enemies . . . looked farther still and saw the mighty sweep of the solar system spinning under him.
He saw the infant pyropod that had belonged to Harry Hickson, jetting across the black of space toward the reeflet where it had been born, keening a terrible harsh dirge . . . saw that reeflet itself, and the cave where he had lain while Harry Hickson fed and cared for him.
He saw a chapel on a small and lonely rock, where dark-blue fusorian moss held a scanty atmosphere and twenty worshippers joined in a service of the Church of the Star, kneeling to blue Deneb blazing overhead.
He saw the planets of the Plan of Man, torn by disaster, terrified by confusion, while the mad Machine crackled out wild and contradictory orders and enforced them by hurling bolts of energy at random into the void.
He saw the empty station on Mercury, with the hot gases of the sun roiling restlessly overhead, and realized that it too had a life and thought of its own ... a life that had reached out and swallowed into itself those three lives of fusorian matter that had ventured close enough for linkage.
He saw stars and gas clouds, gazed at new matter springing into life like a fountain's play, stared outward to the endless vista of Infinity, inward to the bright golden atoms at his own heart.
And then, awesome and silent and vast, Something spoke his name. Star spoke to Machine. Machine answered Star.