Dark Benediction by Walter M. Miller Page A

for survival?" I asked.
    "Yes:"
    "Then my capability for survival is greater than yours, Secon Teacher?"
    He growled a word I do not understand. He jabbed the Pain Button vigorously. I screamed and writhed within myself. It is like fire rushing through all of me.
    That was long ago. I have learned not to ask such questions. The question threatened Teacher's subjective security; this I can understand. He hurt me to block the question. I understand, and analyze—and I have looked him over, but he has no Pain Button. The TwoLegs have certain prerogatives.
    I feel that I can understand Teacher's awareness, for I am able to imagine that I am Teacher. It is almost as if I had a latent memory of walking mechanisms and grasping mechanisms and the other parts that go to make up a TwoLegs. Why then can Teacher not imagine what it is like to be me? Perhaps he does not wish to imagine my reaction to the Pain Button.
    There is a TwoLegs that I like better than Teacher. It is called Janna, and it is a female which is also called "she." Her function is to clean and repair a group of my electronic control mechanisms through which I feel and see and hear. She always comes the day before I am to fly again, and perhaps this is the reason for my adient response to her presence: she is the herald of my coming ascent into space.
    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