And Boysie Gann, mere human man, shaped to the genetic code of carbon-based life, bent into the form of an acolyte of the Machine, transformed by the fusorian globes into something bearing kinship to the stars . . . Boysie Gann mediated their vast and awful discourse.
It went on forever, a thousand years and more, though in the scale of planets orbiting a sun and light crossing a measured track, it all took place in a few minutes or hours.
It went on and on . . . and when Boysie Gann was no longer needed and departed, it went on still.
And then it finished. Forever.
Boysie Gann opened his eyes and looked at the room around him. Sister Delta Four stood motionless, watching him.
He stood up easily. He stretched, yawned, stripped the prongs out of the communion plate on his forehead, wrapped the wire neatly around the improvised linkbox—and tossed it away.
It sailed slowly across the control room, in the light-G torpor of space, but when it struck the steel wall at the end of its flight it smashed into a hundred pieces.
Sister Delta Four made a mewing cry of horror.
Boysie Gann touched her arm. "Don't fret about it, Julie," he said. "You don't need it any more."
She stared at him. "I serve the Machine!" she cried proudly. "I am Sister Delta Four, not Julie Martinet! I. . ."
But he was shaking his head. "Not any more," he said.
The hood fell unnoticed back from her head, revealing her dark, close-cropped hair, with the bright badge of communion shining out of her forehead. She touched it shakily. "I ... I don't understand!" she whispered. "I ... I don't feel the Machine's presence . . ."
He nodded. "Not now," he said, agreeing. "And not ever any more."
He touched his own communion plate. "When we get back to Earth," he said, "we'll have these out, and the electrodes in our brains with them. We won't need them. No human will ever need them again.
"And then," he said after a moment, holding her with one arm while Sister Delta Four, in the terrible parturitive pangs of becoming Julie Martinet once again, sobbed and shuddered, "and then we'll start over where we left off. You and I. . . and all Mankind."
And he left her and went to the old communications board, and began to set up the circuits for a call for rescue from the dead Together-ship.
That was the way it began, with the stars themselves winking a warning to Mankind and the Machine hurling its agents and its acolytes about the solar system, seeking an antagonist, a purpose, an instrument for its own salvation.
It began with shadow spreading across the worlds of the Plan of Man, and it ended with the bright light of the mighty stars illuminating a new road for humanity.
The Machine had been playing a game with itself, for want of another opponent; then, in that long, thundering dialogue between stars and Machine, the game ended forever. The Machine had come late to its game, and found the board filled.
That was how it began . . . and that was how it ended. With the legend of Lucifer, and the story of pain and evil . . . and the eternal hope for good.
The Machine sat too late at the gaming table, and found all the places filled . . . with the stars, linked in their fusorian net, and with their Adversary. No longer entrapped in the animal amniotic fluid of his birth ... no longer slave to the Machine ... no longer prey to the fusorians . . . the Antagonist was ready to play.
Long ages past, the stars had given him birth, but now he was of age. He was ready to assume his station, his rank and his name.
His station—Adversary to the stars themselves.
His rank—equal of the universe.
His name—Mankind.
ROGUE STAR
1
The sudden light hurt his eyes and woke him rudely from a dream of Molly Zaldivar. Clutching blindly for support, he found only warmth and yielding softness. A panic sense of dislocation dazed him.
"Monitor Quamodian!"
That sweet, synthetic voice restored his sense of place. The Exion research station. The human habitat on the planet Exion Four. The cybernetic dwelling he had built to share with Molly, before she went away. He was in it all alone, floating in the null-gee capsule of his sleeper, a naked foetus in a pink plastic womb.
"Monitor Andreas Quamodian!" The sleeper's bright robot voice grew more intense. "The speaker has a transfac message for you."
He grunted his hurt protest and clung to his fading dream of Molly. Somehow he had found her. He'd been fighting Cliff Hawk, to take her back. Somehow, unbelievably, he'd been winning. . .
"Monitor, please!"
He squirmed inside the padded cocoon, groping to recover that good feeling. He wanted to recall his breathless sense of triumph over Hawk, his blood-speeding certainty that Molly wanted him to win.
But all the circumstances of the dream vanished as he grasped for them. Painfully awake, he had no idea where in all the clustered galaxies Molly and Cliff Hawk had gone. He couldn't imagine any real-life situation in which he could hope to beat Cliff Hawk, nor could he quite believe that Molly would ever want him to.
His squinted eyes came open on his image in the sleeper's mirror. Too much belly. Too little muscle. A round bald spot on top of his head. He turned away from his soft plump whiteness.
"I wish you hadn't waked me," he muttered at the sleeper. "I'm not on duty. I don't want any calls. Just put me back to sleep."
"But, sir!" the machine reproved him sulkily. "You can't ignore this message. The sender rated it urgent. The index code implies crisis on an interplanetary scale, with probable danger to billions of your fellow human creatures."
"Great Almalik!" He blinked at the pink folds of pulsating plastic. "Where's the message from?"
"The central zone," the sleeper said. "The local address is Planet 3, Star 7718, Sector Z-989-Q, Galaxy 5. . ."
"That's Earth!"
"A local name, perhaps," the sleeper said. "We don't record such unofficial designations."
"I should know. Earth's my native planet. Give me the message."
"It's coded personal and confidential," the sleeper protested. "You'll have to accept it from the speaker."
"Get me up," he said. "I'll accept it."
While the machine was getting him up, he tried to imagine who on Earth the message could be from. Not his parents, certainly. They had accepted the symbiotic way of life while he was still a child. Lately they had migrated to a human colony in Galaxy 9. Secure in the Starchurch, they would never need anything from him.
Molly Zaldivar?
Wild hope struck him when he thought of her. Though he had never learned where she and Hawk went from Exion, he knew they were both natives of Earth. Perhaps she had come back home. Perhaps she was through with Hawk. Perhaps she really wanted him!
He smiled fondly at his recollection. Molly Zaldivar, five years ago. A tall lively girl, who sang and accompanied herself on an Earth guitar. A girl loved by many a being on the planets of Exion, where they first met —even though they both had come from Earth.
It was easy for him to know why he loved her: the laughter in her voice, even when she sang the saddest ballads of the old mother world, the skin tones that changed oddly from warmest ivory to tawny gold under the queer shifting light of the triple star. But—half the students did not "hear," at least on the audio frequency range used by human beings; many of them did not see with "visible" light. Yet all were fond of Molly Zaldivar.
The three had been together in the tiny group of Earth people Dr. Scott had gathered to work in his stellar section. Andy Quamodian, already serious, already pudgy, dark and slow. Molly Zaldivar, like a golden flame, her bright hair catching ruddy glints from the red giant component of Exion, her dark eyes flashing the violet light of the dwarf. And—Cliff Hawk.