Dark Benediction

Janna is tall and her hair is the color of flame, and her parts are softly constructed. She wears white coveralls like Teacher’s. She comes with a box of tools, and she hums a multitonal tune while she works. Sometimes she speaks to me, asking me to try this control or that, but otherwise she is forbidden to converse. I like to hear her humming in her low rich voice. I wish that I could sing. But my voice is without inflection, monotonal. I can think a song, but I cannot make it with my speakers.

“Teach me that song, Secon Janna,” I asked boldly one day. It was the first time I had dared to speak to her, except in a routine way.

It frightened her. She looked around at all my eyes, and at my speakers, and her face was white.

“Hush!” she muttered. “You can’t sing.”

“My thoughts sing,” I said. “Teach me the song and I shall dream it next sleep. In dreams I sing; in dreams I have a singing organ.”

She made a funny noise in her throat. She stared for a long time at the maze of circuit wiring which she had been testing. Then she glanced at a special panel set in the wall of my cabin. She moistened her lips and blinked at it. I said nothing but I am ashamed of the thing that lies behind that panel; it is the thing that makes me capable of disobedience and illogic. I have never seen it but I know it is there. They do not allow me to see it. Before they open the panel they blind my eye mechanisms. Why was she looking at it? I felt shame-pain.

Suddenly she got up and went to look out the ports, one at a time.

“There is no one coming,” I told her, interpreting her behavior by some means that I do not understand.

She went back to her work. “Tell me if someone starts this way,” she said. Then: “I cannot teach you that song. It is treason. I did not realize what I was singing.”

“I do not understand ‘treason’. But I am sad that you will not teach me.”

She tried to look at me, I think—but did not know where to look. I am all around her, but she did not know. It was funny, but I cannot laugh—except when I am dreaming. Finally she glanced at the special panel again. Why does she look there, of all the places.

“Maybe I could teach you another song,” she said. “Please, Secon Janna.”

She returned thoughtfully to her work, and for a moment I thought that she would not. But then she began singing—clearly, so that I could remember the words and the tune.

“Child of my heart,
Born of the stellar sea,
The rockets sing thee lullaby.
Sleep to sleep to sleep,
To wake beyond the stars….”

“Thank you,” I said when she was finished. “It was beautiful, I think.”

“You know—the word ‘beauty’?”

I was ashamed. It was a word I had heard but I was too uncertain of its meaning. “For me it is one thing,” I said. “Perhaps for you another. What is the meaning of the song?”

She paused. “It is sung to babies—to induce sleep.”

“What are babies, Secon Janna?”

She stared at my special panel again. She bit her lip. “Babies—are new humans, still untutored.”

“Once I was a new machine, still untutored. Are there songs to sing to new machines? It seems that I remember vaguely—”

“Hush!” she hissed, looking frightened. “You’ll get me in trouble. We’re not supposed to talk!”

I had made her angry. I was sad. I did not want her to feel Trouble, which is perhaps the Pain of TwoLegs. Her song echoed in my thoughts—and it was as if someone had sung it to me long ago. But that is impossible. Teacher behaved adiently toward Janna in those days. He sought her out, and sometimes came inside me while she was here, even though it was not a teaching time. He came and watched her, and his narrow dark eyes wandered all over her as she worked. He tried to make funny sayings, but she felt avoidant to him, I think. She said, “Why don’t you go home to your wives, Barnish? I’m busy.”

“If you were one of my wives, Janna, maybe I would.” His voice was a soft purr.

She hissed and made a sour face.

“Why won’t you marry me, Janna?” She laughed scornfully.

Quietly he stole up behind her while she worked. His face was hungry and intent. He took her arms and she started.

“Janna—”

She spun around. He dragged her close and tried to do something that I do not understand in words: nevertheless I understood, I think. She struggled, but he held her. Then she raked his face with her nails and I saw red lines. He laughed and let her go.

I was angry. If he had a Pain Button I would have pressed it. The next day I was disobedient and illogical and he hurt me, but I did it anyway. We were in space and I pushed my reaction rate up so high he grew frightened.