The Starchild

  The STARCHILD

  Frederik Pohl

  and

  Jack Williamson

  BALLENTINE BOOKS • • NEW YORK

  Published by Ballentine Books

  November 1965

  &

  August 1973

  Cover Jacques Wyrs

  Acknowledgments

  A much shorter version of Starchild appeared in serial form in Galaxy Magazine © 1964, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  Chapter 1

  It was the day, the hour, and the moment of Earth's vernal equinox ... and the near stars blinked.

  A dozen of them flickered at once. Blazing Sirius and its dense dwarf sister. The bright yellow twins of Alpha Centauri. Faint red Proxima ... the distant sparks of Eta Eridani and 70 Ophiuchi A ... the bright Sun itself.

  The vast cosmic engines declared a vacation in their processes: the fusion of smaller atoms into large, the flow of surplus mass into energy, the filtration of that energy through layered seas of restless gas, the radiation of their atomic power into space.

  By the shores of Earth's oceans, within the crater walls of Luna, on the sands of Mars and the ringed satellites of Saturn, out past the Spacewall to the Reefs, the great billion-headed human race stirred and shook and knew fear. The whisper spread out into the galaxy, propagated at the speed of light: "The Starchild!"

  That was the way it began.

  The flickering of the neighbor stars -lasted only a moment, and it was seen first on the Reefs nearest each star.

  Then slow Pluto caught the twinkle of 70 Ophiuchi A while Neptune, lumbering in its dark orbit on the far side of Sol, was the first to catch the dimming of white-hot Sirius. On Earth, where the fat old Planner sat chuckling on his golden chair, every momentary pulse of darkness arrived at once. His chuckles stopped. His pouchy face darkened. As his astronomers reported in, he exploded in wrath.

  His first reports came from a hardened station in the zone of twilight on the planet Mercury, where sliding concrete doors uncovered a pit beneath a saw-toothed crater rim.

  A silvered dome pushed out of the pit, out of the ragged shadow, into the white blaze of the near sun. The barrels of a dozen optical and radio telescopes, pyrometers, telescanners, and cameras thrust out at the great orb, under the blazoned slogan that the dome displayed to the universe in letters of cast bronze:

  THE MIGHTIEST REWARDS

  THE MOST FAITHFUL

  And inside the insulated, refrigerated observatory, three astronomers watched a thousand boards and gauges and dials. They were waiting.

  For they had been warned.

  The senior officer on duty lifted his eyes from a chronometer dial and growled, "Five minutes!"

  The other two men squinted at their instruments in silence. The grizzled Technicaptain peered at them through the pale lighting of the screen that dominated the glitter of instruments. On it swam the visual image of the sun, golden and engorged, reaching out with fat, slow tendrils or superheated gas as it lay above the rock-fanged horizon of the planet Mercury.

  "Yeah," he grumbled, half to himself. "We're ready."

  The junior member of the team was a lean young Technicadet, an ambitious young man already embittered by the harsh facts of survival and promotion in the Technicorps. He dared a comment: "Ready for nothing, if you ask me. This is idiot business!"

  The senior officer rolled a yellowed eye toward him, but said nothing.

  "So?" murmured the third man. He was a plump little Techtenant who had found a satisfying philosophy in his recent promotion. "The Machine's business is idiotic, then?"

  "Now, look! I didn't mean—"

  "No. But you didn't think, either. The Machine discerns the greater plan; we only execute the parts. If the Machine attaches importance to this fanciful creature, the Starchild, then we may not question its motives."

  The Technicadet gestured at the huge solar globe angrily and cried, "Look! What could put that out?"

  The Techtenant shrugged, and the senior officer said only, "Four minutes."

  The cadet's military courtesy was worn thin under the abrasion of their long, tense vigil. He scowled at his telemetering pyrometers and grumbled, "Not a flicker! We've been here three miserable weeks, and we haven't seen a thing."

  The Technicaptain rumbled, "We'll stay here three years if the Machine orders it. The Machine is above injustice or error. The Machine was built to rule the Plan, and it is guarded against human blunders."

  "Oh, yes, sir. But we've seen nothing at all," cried the Technicadet. "No Starchild. No major sunspots—or whatever it is we are supposed to expect"

  "Practice patience," advised the fat captain. "Or you may find yourself serving the Plan more personally. There is always a need for spare parts in the Body Bank! Three minutes."

  The Technicadet subsided grudgingly apologetic. All three men sat strapped hi their observation chairs, watching the great golden image of the sun. Wreathed in its red coronal streamers, pocked in its middle latitudes with a trail of small black spots, it hung over the black horizon like a god's eye. The instruments around them clicked and murmured.

  "I remember," the Techtenant said at last, as if to himself, "when that Sun was only another star in the sky. No brighter even than great Vega."

  The Technicadet cried eagerly, "You were out in the Reefs?"

  'Two minutes," growled the captain, but his eyes were on the young Techtenant.

  He nodded. "Looking for my sister's ... boyfriend?

  Fiancé? Looking for Boysie Gann. Because he was looking for the Starchild. And we didn't find either of them."

  The cadet said simply, "I've never seen the Reefs."

  "A beautiful thing," said the Techtenant. "There are spiked forests of silicon plants, shining with their own light. Like jewels, and sharp enough to shred your space-suit. There's a growth that makes great brain-shaped masses of pure silver. There are thick stalks of platinum and gold, and there are things like flowers that are diamonds."

  The cadet's breathing was suddenly loud. The grizzled old captain turned to look at him, all his recent scorn now frozen into longing—and a sort of fear. He snapped: "Pay attention to your work, man! The Reefs are dangerous business!"

  "Yes, sir," the Techtenant agreed earnestly. "I saw a great beast like a nightmare, shaped like a scorpion, huge as a horse—"

  "No, you fool! Dangerous to the Plan of Man. There is something there that nearly destroyed us once. If the Starchild has his way—"

  He stopped himself and said only, "One minute."

  The Techtenant reddened. "I'm sorry, sir. I certainly did not intend to seem unplanned. I don't mean to suggest that those savage nomads beyond the Spacewall are worth considering, even if they do believe the Starchild to be more than human."

  "Tend your instruments!" The captain set the example, resolutely taking his eyes from the men and the screen, clamping them on the bank of gauges and dials before him. A vagrant thought stirred his mind of the blond Togetherness girl who had first whispered the name of the Starchild to him. What had become of her? The Body Bank?

  —But there was no time for that. It was only seconds now.

  In spite of all the insulation and the cold air sighing from the vents, the dome was suddenly stifling. The captain felt a trickle of perspiration running down his sides. 'Twenty seconds!"

  The captain stood with his eyes frozen on the black chronometer needle that raced to meet the red, still one he had set. When they touched it would be the vernal equinox on Earth. And the Starchild's threat would be proved an empty bluff... or would not.

  Suddenly the whisper of the instruments changed. A camera shutter began clicking gently.

  'Ten seconds!"

  The shielded floor lamps shut themselves off. Only
the instrument lights rivaled the phosphor glow from the image of the great yellow sun in the screen.

  "Five seconds!... Four!... Three!..."

  Twenty reels of tape began to spin shrilly in the darkness; the breathing of the men was like sobs.

  'Two!... One!...

  "Zero!"

  The captain gulped and rubbed his eyes.

  There was a dimming. Then the filters went down, and then there was a burst of flame—then darkness.

  The lights were gone. All of them. The Sun's image had winked out. He heard a gasp from one of the other men, then a shout. "The Starchild! He's done it!"

  And the other man sobbed, "We're blind!"

  That, too, was how it began. But there was more.

  Like a ripple from a pebble dropped into a still pond, a wave of darkness spread out from the sun. Three minutes after the instant of the vernal equinox it reached that clucking camera in the dome on Mercury, unseen by those sightless eyes.

  In not quite three more minutes, it struck the men watching from the orbital stations above the eternal hot, dank clouds of Venus. A falling shadow of fear, it darkened their screens, whitened their faces, silenced their talk. But their instrument lights remained visible. They had not been blinded by that last great burst of light from the Sun.

  Eight minutes from the Sun, the wave of blackness washed over Earth. All across the sunward face of the planet a crushing night came down. Bewildered, men paused and fumbled through the endless seconds before the city lights came on. Terror electrified those who had heard the whisper of the Starchild's threat. On the dark side of Earth and on Luna, astronomers blenched as their near, familiar stars flickered. Some had heard whispers of the Starchild too, and of a Writ of Liberation. Others merely knew that the images in their great spaceborne mirrors, or in the scopes that peered up from Earth's highest mountains, suddenly were missing familiar points of light.

  They came back ...

  But the Sun did not. Not then. Not for half an hour and more, and while it was gone there was panic.

  To the Planner on his great golden chair the news came and quenched his chuckling good humor. His huge soft face turned pale with fear.

  To a man named Boysie Gann, locked hi the dungeons of the Machine, no word came—but he knew. For he heard a guard whisper to another, "The Starchild!"

  To a girl with haunted dark eyes, telling whispering sonic beads before a console of the Machine, the word came in a language that Man had not invented, and few men could understand. Her name was Delta Four, and she did not fear. She did not care at all... .

  And that was how it began for them, and the wave of darkness raced on into infinite space.

  Twelve minutes from the Sun it swept Mars, halting the dedication of an enormous new project to extract oxygen and water from the dead crust of the planet. The Deputy Planner of Mars, a poorly planned individual who had seen the Writ of Liberation with his own eyes, snatched a gun from his honor guard and shot himself.

  During the following quarter hour that shadow bathed the asteroids, terrified a few, left others unconcerned. For either they did not know, being buried in the mining shafts that hollowed out the precious cores of the tiny planets, or they were so dazed and uncaring with the eternal hardship of their toil that nothing could frighten them again.

  The racing wave of light overtook the scattered outposts of the Plan on the Moons of Jupiter, It darkened Saturn's rings, swallowed the satellites of Uranus and Neptune. It fell upon the Spacewall Command complex on distant Pluto, where only those whose eyes fell upon the Sun by chance noticed it—but they were afraid.

  It drowned the Spacewall itself—more web than wall, a net of far-scattered stations whose laser beams and patrol craft kept watch on the little-known infinities beyond, alert to guard the Plan of Man against vagrants from the Reefs, or such enemies as the Starchild.

  A wave of unexpected terror, it sent the crews of a thousand slow-wheeling spaceforts shouting to their emergency stations. It awakened sirens and horns on ten thousand lonely patrol ships. It set the laser beams winking with a million signals of confused alarm.

  A day or so beyond Pluto it washed the frontiers of the solar system, the snowball protoplanets of solid methane and ammonia that the distant gravitational arms of the Sun had never gathered into actual worlds.

  And then at last, days beyond that last fearful outpost of the Plan, it began to bathe the Reefs of Space.

  Out on the reefs, those living asteroids grown through unending ages by the minute fusorian organisms, feeding on the thin seas of interstellar hydrogen, the wave of shadow no longer meant terror. It was only another event in a life that was filled with danger and surprise.

  On one lonely worldlet a prospector stopped to peer in annoyance at where the Sun had been. He fumbled hi his pack for a luminous crystal of fusorian diamond, and bent over his drill again.

  On another reef a lay preacher in the Church of the Star glanced at his watch, then at the sky. He was not afraid when he saw that Sol was gone from its accustomed position. He had been expecting it

  He left his work to face the blue blaze of Deneb, knelt, whispered a few words of supplication and thanksgiving. Calmly then he bent back to the unfinished space boot on his last, for he was by trade a cobbler.

  The shadow washed over a grave, but no one saw it No one could have, for no one was there. Not even the cadaver; the grave was empty.

  The shadow rested lightly on a city of stern, hardfaced refugees from the Plan of Man—on a great cluster of reeflets where a mighty space armada was being fashioned from fusorian steel—on a girl named Quarla Snow, who stood watching it flicker out with tears bright in her eyes.

  On another living rock, a herdsman stood guarding a calving member of his herd from a flight of marauding pyropods. Lying behind a sheltering ledge of organic iron, one eye on his parturient spaceling while he searched out the armored killers with frugal flashes from his laser gun, he failed to notice that the Sun had gone out. That was how it began, for every man, woman and child alive.

  And thirty-nine minutes later the Sun began again its mighty outpouring of heat and light, but the wave of brilliance that followed the dark looked down on a changed solar system.

  The Sun's atomic engines ran again. Hydrogen fused into helium through the carbon cycle. Filtered energy flowed toward the solar surface. Radiation poured into space.

  Three minutes from the Sun, the wave of radiation crashed against that insulated dome on Mercury. It was recorded by the clucking camera, analyzed by the thousand automatic instruments. Sobbing with joy—or fear! —the blinded astronomers flashed the word to Earth: The Sun lives again!

  But its light reached Earth before their message.

  That first rebirth of light brushed a high mountain on Earth, where the Planner sat on his golden chair, the gray metal falcon that perched on his shoulder darting a red-eyed glare about the room, whirring its steel wings. The Planner was staring at a sheet of creamy parchment that bore the heading:

  WRIT OF LIBERATION

  It had been delivered to him by the hand of one of his own guards, who had found it at his door. It said:

  The Starchild requires the release of all of his followers who are held in the service of the Plan of Man by security collars.

  The Starchild requires that all of his followers who have been consigned to the Body Bank for salvage shah" be restored to their original state, and then that they too shall be released.

  The Starchild finally requires that the barrier called the Spacewall shall be dismantled, and that free passage between the worlds of the Plan and the Reefs of Space shall be permitted.

  The Starchild is aware that the Plan of Man considers itself invulnerable, and thus he has arranged a warning demonstration. At the moment of the vernal equinox on Earth the Sun will be extinguished. Twelve near stars will blink.

  If the Planner fails to meet the Starchild's requirements after this demonstration, further measures will be taken. These will res
ult in the destruction of the Plan of Man.

  "Unplanned nonsense," groaned the Planner. "Impudence! Treason!"

  A tall Technicolonel said uneasily, "Sir. We must take measures—"

  "Measures," grumbled the Planner while his steel falcon clashed its pinions. "What does the Machine say?"

  A girl in a hooded gown said, "No data, sir." Her voice was like distant music, her expression serene.

  "No data! Find me some data! Find who this Star-child is! Tell me how he did this thing—and how I can stop him from doing it again!"

  The Technicolonel coughed. "Sir, for some years we have had reports of a Church of the Star. A new religion, apparently springing from the Reefs—"

  "Always the Reefs! They should have been destroyed twenty years ago!"

  "Yes, sir. But they were not. And the pioneers—that is, sir, the tramps and vagabonds on the Reefs—they invented new superstitions. They worship, I believe, the star Deneb. Alpha Cygni—the star at the top of the Northern Cross. They have imagined a paradise on the planets that they imagine to orbit around it. They wish to migrate there, or some of them do—though at maximum drive for conventional spacecraft," he continued earnestly, "they might average some one per cent of the speed of light, in which case Deneb, at four hundred light-years distance, would not be reached for forty thousand—"

  "Get to the point!" cried the Planner fretfully. "What about the Starchild?"

  "Well, sir we had heard rumors of such a person in our investigations of this cult. Some time ago we decided to send a ... uh ... a special investigator to secure intelligence concerning him and it. The investigator's name was Boysie Gann, sir, and—"

  "Bring him to me! Is he here on Earth?"