Starchild

By Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson

 Book Two of The Starchild Trilogy

Who is the Starchild?
The super computer behind The Plan of Man has received an ultimatum: release humanity from the rule of The Plan or the Starchild will turn off the stars and the Sun.
The Plan of Man was devised to help humankind exist in peace and safety. But it has resulted in a highly regimented society where personal freedom is sacrificed to the needs of the state. It worked fairly well until the Reef was discovered.
The Reef is a vastly huge space reef built by the tiny fusorians. It teems with life and air and warmth, strange plants and animals and has room for everyone who might want to go there. But The Plan won't allow that. And that is what the Starchild will change, despite the best laid plans of The Plan as is shown when the Starchild follows through with his threat and briefly extinguishes the stars and the Sun.
And so we have Boysie Gann, sent by The Plan to a space station near the Reef. He is meant to discover who the Starchild is and where he dwells. His mission is covert because The Plan thinks some of the men stationed there are no longer loyal. Too late, Boysie discovers that The Plan's suspicions are correct and Boysie gets shanghaied and wakes up to find himself on the Reef, being cared for by a kindly stranger and his baby dragon-like creature called a pyropod. His mission has come to a sorry end and before much longer The Plan has captured him and now he is accused of disloyalty and the dreaded iron collar is fastened around his neck.  He is even
accused of being the Starchild himself.
In order to get at the secrets The Plan thinks are concealed in Boysie's brain, he is placed into training for direct mind-to-mind communication with the super computer behind the The Plan of Man. In the first book in the series, The Plan communicated by means of paper tape. But in this story, communication has advanced to a tonal kind of communication, a kind of singing to the computer that requires extensive training. Boysie is forced through a  crash course so he can be plugged directly into the computer by means of a socket inserted surgically in his forehead. But just as his training is coming to its conclusion, the Starchild launches an attack on the facility and unleashes pyropods, spreading death and chaos.
After the attack is defeated, once again poor Boysie, who fought valiantly against the pyropods, is accused of being the Starchild. But despite the suspicions against him, Boysie is once more sent out on a mission, a mission to find the lost spaceship, the Togethership, which is supposed to contain a super computer that is the twin of The Plan computer. Using that ship and its computer, The Plan will go after the Starchild.

This was an OK story. A bit chaotic. The whole thing about the tonal communication with the computer was another miss and as jarring as the use of paper tapes in the first story, The Reefs of Space.  I also didn't really understand the how the being dead yet not being dead mechanic worked. Boysie is tended to by a kind man when he find himself injured and abandoned on the Reef. But he then finds out that man has been dead for years. He also encounters a man who he knows was executed in the past. There is also some indication that Boysie somehow is in two places at once. It not really explained, or if it is, I didn't get it.