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glass-topped table under tne 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
248
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 tune 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.
Jjiside 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.
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"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."-
Her warm smile tantalized him.
"If you study well, perhaps we can take that swim "
He tried the third law of mechanized education forced bun to try but they
never took the swim.
A time came when Julie vanished. He heard a hiss of air and felt a sudden icy
draft against bis sweating nakedness.
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Back in the training center, he squirmed across the slick pink membrane of the
sensor-effector
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his cold coveralls, and scrambled down the flimsy metal ladder.
"Good night, sir." The plump young Techtenant looked bored and sleepy now.
"See you next shift, sir."
He wanted terribly never to see the Techtenant or the trainer again, because
they meant that he was going to be wired for communion. He wanted desperately
to run away somehow to get back to
Quarla Snow and the clean Reefs of Space.
But he was exhausted and guarded and imprisoned . . . he didn't know where . .
. perhaps beneath a mile of solid rock . . . perhaps beneath the sea. He did
his stint of calisthenics and took a steaming shower and sweated out the chow
line and went to his tiny, tile-walled room to sleep.
Suddenly a gong was thundering. It was time to get up, to let them shave his
head again, to strip and smear himself with that sticky jelly, to return to
the womb of the Machine. ...
And a time came, in the trainer, when Julie Martinet or the projected image
of her gave him a test and, smiling, told him that he had passed.
"You have earned communion now. You are ready to be born again."
He almost gasped that he didn't want communion. But he bit his lip. He kept
silent until Julie's bright unage vanished and air valves roared and a cold
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