Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  When the doctor comes close again, I say: “My eye. Can I see?” He is quick to push my fingers away from the eyepatch. “For the present, you must use only your left eye. You’ve undergone brain surgery. If you take off that patch now, the consequences could be very serious, let me warn you.”

  I think he is being deceptive about the eyepatch. Why?

  The black-haired girl asks me: “Have you remembered anything more?”

  “Yes. Before Atsog fell, we heard that Johann Karlsen was leading out a fleet, to defend Sol.”

  All of them stare at me, hanging on my words. But they must know better than I what happened.

  “Did Karlsen win the battle?” I plead. Then I realize that we are prisoners still.

  I weep.

  “There’ve been no new prisoners brought in here,” says the doctor, watching me carefully. “I think Karlsen has beaten the berserkers. I think this machine is now fleeing from the human fleet. How does that make you feel?”

  “How?” Has my understanding failed with my verbal skills? “Good.”

  They all relax slightly.

  “Your skull was cracked when we bounced around in the battle,” the old man tells me. “You’re lucky a famous surgeon was here.” He nods his head. “The machine wants all of us kept alive, so it can study us. It gave the doctor what he needed to operate, and if he’d let you die, or remain paralyzed, things would have been bad for him. Yessir, it made that plain.”

  “Mirror?” I ask. I gesture at my face. “I must see. How bad.”

  “We don’t have a mirror,” says one of the women at the sink, as if blaming me for die lack.

  “Your face? It’s not disfigured,” says the doctor. His tone is convincing, or would be if I were not certain of my deformity.

  I regret that these good people must put up with my monster-presence, compounding all their other troubles. “I’m sorry,” I say, and turn from them, trying to conceal my face.

  “You really don’t know,” says the black-haired girl, Who has watched me silently for a long time. “He doesn’t know!” Her voice chokes. “Oh—Thad. Your face is all right.”

  True enough, the skin of my face feels smooth and normal when my fingers touch If the blackhaired girl watches me with pity. Rounding her shoulder, from inside her dress, are half-healed marks like the scars of a lash.

  “Someone’s hurt you,” I say, frightened. One of the women at the sink laughs nervously. The young man mutters something. I raise my left hand to hide my hideous face. My right comes up and crosses over to finger the edges of the eyepatch.

  Suddenly the young man swears aloud, and points at where a door has opened in the wall.

  “The machine must want your advice on something,” he tells me harshly. His manner is that of a man who wants to be angry but does not dare. Who am I, what am I, that these people hate me so?

  I get to my feet, strong enough to walk. I remember that I am the one who goes to speak alone with the machine.

  In a lonely passage it offers me two scanners and a speaker as its visible face. I know that the cubic miles of the great berserker machine surround me, carrying me through space, and I remember standing in this spot before the battle, talking with it, but I have no idea what was said. In fact I cannot recall the words of any conversation I have ever held.

  “The plan you suggested has failed, and Karlsen still functions,” says the cracked machine voice, hissing and scraping in the tones of a stage villain.

  What could I have ever suggested, to this horrible thing?

  “I remember very little,” I say. “My brain has been hurt.”

  “If you are lying about your memory, understand that I am not deceived,” says the machine. “Punishing you for your plan’s failure will not advance my purpose. I know that you live outside the laws of human organization, that you even refuse to use a full human name. Knowing you, I trust you to help me against the organization of intelligent life. You will remain in command of the other prisoners. See that your damaged tissues are repaired as fully as possible. Soon we will attack life in a new way.”

  There is a pause, but I have nothing to say. Then the noisy speaker scrapes into silence, and the scanner-eyes dim. Does it watch me still, in secret? But it said it trusted me, this nightmare enemy said it trusted in my evil to make me its ally.

  Now I have enough memory to know its speaks the truth about me. My despair is so great I feel sure that Karlsen did not win the battle. Everything is hopeless, because of the horror inside me. I have betrayed all life. To what bottom of evil have I not descended?

  As I turn from the lifeless scanners, my eye catches a movement—my own reflection, in polished metal. I face the flat shiny bulkhead, staring at myself.

  My scalp is bandaged, and my left eye. That I knew already. There is some discoloration around my right eye, but nothing shockingly repulsive. What I can see of my hair is light brown, matching my two months’ unkempt beard. Nose and mouth and jaw are normal enough. There is no horror in my face.

  The horror lies inside me. I have willingly served a berserker.

  Like the skin around my right eye, that bordering my left eye’s patch is tinged with blue and greenish-yellow, hemoglobin spilled under the skin and breaking down, some result of the surgeon’s work inside my head.

  I remember his warning, but the eye-patch has the fascination for my fingers that a sore tooth has for the tongue, only far stronger. The horror is centered in my evil left eye, and I cannot keep from probing after it. My right hand flies eagerly into action, pulling the patch away.

  I blink, and the world is blurred. I see with two eyes, and then I die.

  T staggered in the passage, growling and groaning his rage, the black eyepatch gripped in his fingers. He had language now, he had a foul torrent of words, and he used them until his weak breath failed. He stumbled, hurrying through the passage toward the prison chamber, wild to get at the wise punks who had tried such smooth trickery to get rid of him. Hypnotism, or whatever. Rename him, would they? He’d show them Thaddeus.

  T reached the door and threw it open, gasping in his weakness, and walked out into the prison chamber. The doctor’s shocked face showed that he realized T was back in control.

  “Where’s my whip?” T glared around him. “What wise punk hid it?”

  The women screamed. Young Halsted realized that the Thaddeus scheme had failed; he gave a kind of hopeless yell and charged, swinging like a crazy man. Of course T’s robot bodyguards were too fast for any human. One of them blocked Halsted’s punch with a metal fist, so the stout man yelped and folded up, nursing his hand.

  “Get me my whip!” A robot went immediately to reach behind the sink, pull out the knotted plastic cord, and bring it to the master.

  T thumped the robot jovially, and smiled at the cringing lot of his fellow prisoners. He ran the whip through his fingers, and the fingers of his left hand felt numb. He flexed them impatiently. “What’sa matter, there, Mr. Halsted? Somethin’ wrong with your hand? Don’t wanna give me a handshake, welcome me back? C’mon, let’s shake!” The way Halsted squirmed around on the floor was so funny T had to pause and give himself up to laughing.

  “Listen you people,” he said when he got his breath. “My fine friends. The machine says I’m still in charge, see? That little information I gave it about Karlsen did the trick. Sol is lost. Boom! Haw haw haw! So you better try to keep me happy, ’cause the machine’s still backing me a hunnerd per cent. You, Doc.” T’s left hand began trembling uncontrollably, and he waved it. “You were gonna change me, huh? You did somethin’ nice to fix me up?” Doc held his surgeon’s hands behind him, as if he hoped to protect them. “I couldn’t have made a new pattern for your character if I had tried—unless I went all the way, and turned you into a vegetable. That I might have done.”

  “Now you wish you had. But you were scared of what the machine would do to you. Still, you tried somethin’, huh?”

  “Yes, to save your life.” Doc stood
up straight. “Your injury precipitated a severe and almost continuous epileptoid seizure, which the removal of the blood dot from your brain did not relieve. So, I divided the corpus callosum.”

  T flicked his whip. “What’s that mean?”

  “You see—the right hemisphere, the dominant one in most people, controls the right side, and handles most judgment involving symbols.”

  “I know. When you get a stroke, the clot is on the opposite side from the paralysis.”

  “Correct.” Doc raised his chin. “T, I split your brain, right side from left. That’s as simply as I can put it. It’s an old but effective procedure for treating severe epilepsy, and the best I could do for you here. I’ll take an oath on that, or a lie test—”

  “Shuddup! I’ll give you a lie test!” T strode shakily forward. “What’s gonna happen to me?”

  “As a surgeon, I can say only that you may reasonably expect many years of practically normal life.”

  “Normal!” T took another step, raising his whip. “Why’d you patch my good eye, and start calling me Thaddeus?”

  “That was my idea,” interrupted the old man, in a quavery voice. “I thought—in a man like yourself, there had to be someone, some component, like Thad. With the psychological pressure we’re under here, I thought Thad just might come out, if we gave him a chance in your right hemisphere. It was my idea.

  If it hurt you any, blame me.”

  “I will.” But T seemed, for the moment, more interested than enraged. “Who is this Thaddeus?”

  “You are,” said the doctor. “We couldn’t put anyone else into your skull.”

  “Jude Thaddeus,” said the old man, “was a contemporary of Judas Iscariot. A similarity of names, but—” He shrugged.

  T made a whistling, snorting sound, a single laugh. “You figured there was good in me, huh? It just had to come out sometime? Why, I’d say you were crazy, but you’re not. Thaddeus was real. He was there in my head for a while. Maybe he’s still there, hiding. How do I get at him, huh?” T raised his right hand and jabbed a finger gently at the corner of his right eye. “Ow. I don’t like to be hurt. I got a delicate nervous system. Doc, how come his eye is on the right side if everything crosses over? And if it’s his eye, how come I hafta feel what happens to it?”

  “I divided the optic chiasm, too. It’s a somewhat complicated—”

  “Never mind. We’ll show Thaddeus who’s boss. He can watch with the rest of you. Hey, Blacky, c’mere. We haven’t played together for a while, have we?”

  “No,” the girl whispered. She hugged her arms around herself, nearly fainting. But she walked toward T. Two months as his slaves had taught all of them that obedience was easiest.

  “You like this punk Thad, huh?” T whispered, when she halted before him. “You think his face is all right, do you? How about my face? Look at me!”

  T saw his own left hand reach out, and touch the girl’s cheek, gently and lovingly. He could see in her startled face that she felt Thaddeus in his hand; never had her eyes looked this way at T before. T cried out and raised his whip to strike her, and his left hand flew across his body to seize his own right wrist, like a terrier clamping jaws on a snake.

  T’s right hand still gripped the whip, but he thought the bones of his wrist were cracking. His legs tangled each other and he fell. He tried to shout for help, and could utter only a roaring noise. His robots stood watching. It seemed a long time before the doctor’s face loomed over him, and the black patch descended gently upon his left eye.

  Now I understand more deeply, and I accept. At first I wanted the doctor to remove my left eye, and the old man agreed, quoting some ancient Believers’ book to the effect that an offending eye should be plucked out. An eye would be a small price to rid myself of T.

  But after some thought, the doctor refused. “T is yourself,” he said at last. “I can’t point to him with my scalpel, and cut him out, although it seems I helped to separate the two of you. Now you control both sides of the body; once he did.” The doctor smiled wearily. “Imagine a committee of three, a troika inside your skull. Thaddeus is one, T another—and the third is the person, the force, that casts the deciding vote. You. That’s the best I can tell you.”

  And the old man nodded.

  Mostly, I do without the eye patch now. Reading and speaking are easier when I use my long-dominant left brain, and I am still Thaddeus—perhaps because I choose to be Thaddeus. Could it be that terribly simple?

  Periodically I talk with the berserker, which still trusts in T’s greedy outlawry. With their fleet ruined by Karlsen, the machines now search for new ways of attacking humanity. This one means to counterfeit much money, coins and notes, give the money to me, and deliver me in small launch to a highly civilized planet, relying on my greed to weaken men there and set them against each other.

  But this machine is too damaged to watch its prisoners steadily, or it does not bother. With my freedom to move I have welded some of the silver coins into a ring, chilled this ring to superconductivity, and put it in a chamber near the berserker’s unliving heart. Halsted tells me we can use this ring, carrying a permanent electric current, to trigger the launch’s C-plus drive prematurely, and tear our berserker open from inside. We may damage it enough to save ourselves. Or we may all be killed.

  But while I live, I, Thaddeus, rule myself; and both my hands are gentle, touching long black hair. END

  SIGN OF THE WOLF

  It struck like a wolf from out in space—and the men were defenseless against it!

  The dark shape, big as a man, came between the two smallest of the three watchfires, moving in silence like that of sleep. Out of habit, Duncan had been watching that downwind direction, though his mind was heavy with tiredness and with the thoughts of life that came with sixteen summers’ age.

  Duncan raised his spear and howled, and charged the wolf. For a moment the fire-eyes looked steadily at him, appearing to be a full hand apart. Then the wolf turned away; it made one deep questioning sound, and was gone into the darkness out beyond the fires.

  Duncan stopped, drawing a gasping breath of relief. His charge had not been courage. The wolf would probably have killed him if it had faced his charge, but it did not yet dare to face him in firelight.

  The sheeps’ eyes were on Duncan, a hundred glowing spots in the huddled mass of the flock. One or two of the animals bleated softly.

  He paced around the flock, sleepiness and introspection jarred from his mind. Legends said that men in the old Earth-land had animals called dogs that guarded sheep. If that were true, some might think that men were fools for ever leaving Earth-land.

  But such thoughts were irreverent, and Duncan’s situation called for prayer. Every night now the wolf came, and all too often it killed a sheep.

  Duncan raised his eyes to the night sky. “Send me a sign, star-gods,” he prayed, routinely. But the heavens were quiet. Only the stately fireflies of the dawn zone traced their steady random paths, vanishing halfway up the eastern sky. The stars themselves agreed that three-fourths of the night was gone. The legends said that Earth-land was among the stars, but the younger priests admitted such a statement could only be taken symbolically.

  The heavy thoughts came back, in spite of the nearby wolf. For two years now Duncan had prayed and hoped for his mystical experience, the sign from a god that came to mark the future life of every youth. From what other young men whispered now and then, he knew that many faked their signs. That was all right for lowly herdsmen, or even for hunters. But how could a man without a genuine vision ever be much more than a tender of animals? To be a priest, to study the things brought from old Earth-land and saved—Duncan hungered for learning, for greatness, for things he could not name.

  He looked up again, and gasped, for he saw a great sign in the sky, almost directly overhead. A point of dazzling light, and then a bright little cloud remaining among the stars. Duncan gripped his spear, watching, for a moment even forgetting the sheep. The tin
y cloud swelled and faded very slowly.

  For centuries now the berserker machines had warred on Earth-descended man. Automatons loosed in some forgotten war, the machines moved as raiders through the galaxy, destroying whatever life they could find and overcome.

  One such machine slid out of the interstellar intervals toward Duncan’s planet, drawn from afar by the Sol-type light of Duncan’s sun. To turn life into death was a berserker’s function, and this sun and this planet promised life.

  The berserker machine was the size of a small planetoid, and its power was immense, but it knew well that some planets were defended, and it bent and slowed its hurtling approach into a long cautious curve.

  There were no warships in nearby space, but the berserker’s telescopes picked out the bright dots of defensive satellites, vanishing into the planet’s shadow and reappearing. To probe for more data, the berserker computers loosed a spy missile.

  The missile looped the planet, and then shot in, testing the defensive net.

  Low over nightside, it turned suddenly into bright little cloud.

  Still, defensive satellites formed no real obstacle to a berserker. It could gobble them up almost at leisure if it moved in close to them, though they would stop long range missles fired at the planet. It was the other things the planet might have, the buried things, that held the berserker back from a killing rush.

  Also it was strange that this defended planet had no cities to make light sparks on its nightside, and that no radio signals came from it into space.

  With mechanical caution the berserker moved in, toward the area scouted by the spy missile.

  In the morning, Duncan counted his flock—and then recounted, scowling. Then he searched until he found the slaughtered lamb. The wolf had not gone hungry after all. That made four sheep lost, now, in ten days.