Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  They were seated, Shen-yang at a little distance from the old man and his table, upon which he seemed to like to rest his calloused, age-grooved hands, as if it were a lectern.

  “And did you have a pleasant journey across the ocean?”

  “Pleasant enough. I marvel at how well your air service runs. It must be difficult to keep it going.”

  The old man appeared pleased. “Mr. Shen-yang, there is really no secret to how we keep things going. We rely not upon our machines but upon our people. That is why we shall win this war in the end.”

  Shen-yang thought to himself that had his aircraft failed in midflight, no mass of a hundred or a million peasants rushing out to catch him in their arms would have helped in the least. So, on a surface level, what the old man had just said was nonsense. But Shen-yang thought that there were other levels in the statement, and in those other levels somewhere there was truth.

  Still, he was not going to let it pass unchallenged. “You do have machines, though, and to some extent you do depend upon them.”

  “We use complex machinery when it is available and when it suits our plans. We do not use it when it is not suitable; therefore we do not need it, and our victory does not depend upon it.”

  If this old man, thought Shen-yang, tells me that this mountain we are under will turn to jelly in the next minute, my mouth will fall open with surprise when it does not. Dare I—can I—say to this man that the war is over?

  The leader, after a courteous pause, was going on. “The enemy, on the contrary, has all along relied upon machines to crush us. That is why he must fail in the end.”

  “Your losses no doubt have been terrible.”

  “They have been great. I myself have walked for a kilometer on the dead bodies of my people, because there was no space between dead bodies to put down one’s feet. That was after the blast and firestorm at Kinjanchunga. But it is not huge losses that sap a people’s will.” Whatever words the old man said seemed to come out of his mouth engraved upon eternal slabs of granite. “What saps their will is a too-great concern with things that do not matter.”

  Shen-yang hitched his hard chair a little closer. “What matters—” he began and had a thought in mind that he could never afterwards recall because it was melted in a vast disruption of the world. A blue-white welder’s torch came on to seal the sky, with one electric flick, across the entrance to the cave, and Shen-yang had a mad and trivial thought I didn’t mean it about the jelly, and then the whole mountain made a fist and struck him in the mouth.

  His chin was bleeding. Both of his ears now rang numbly. What sound had just come and gone was already as far beyond memory as it had been beyond hearing in its passage. He got up from where he found himself on hands and knees on the smooth cave floor and saw the High Leader, a fussy housekeeper, setting up his small table and his own old chair again. If the leader had been in the least damaged, or even excited by the blast, he did not show it.

  With commotion, there were suddenly a dozen, a score, of frightened men’s and women’s faces looking in around one rocky comer and another. Not one looked for a moment at Shenyang, but he was free to study them—the faces of people who had briefly felt their souls in peril but who were once more convinced of their salvation when they saw their God was still alive, unhurt, and with His people.

  The old man had a sharp, practical-sounding question or two for them, in the local tongue, which Shen-yang could not follow. Answers were received and orders issued. The people as they turned away now looked elated by this new challenge.

  Turning back to his guest, the old man addressed him once more in their common tongue. “More missiles may be on their way. It seems the Condaminers have tagged you with a tracer of some kind for them to home on, something our own search devices failed to detect, planted on you, your clothing, or perhaps your luggage. Doubtless they calculated that you would be having a talk with me shortly after your arrival here. To kill me, they will spare no effort.” He turned toward the rear of the cave, gesturing Shen-yang to follow. “Their superior technology, you see. And you see that again it avails them nothing.”

  Around a fold of rock, an aide was standing by an open door. A moment later the three of them were descending in an elevator, which looked as neat as anything in Hondurman’s foreign ministry.

  “Here we will be safer.” After the old man had said that, no missile in the world would dare to touch them.

  When they got out of the elevator at its lowest level, Shen-yang looked about him, at the size and shape of the place in which he found himself, at the instruments ranked below the clock and the leader’s portrait, at the texture of the walls that spoke to an expert eye of super-toughness.

  The leader looked at him, started to say something, and then waited, bright eyes probing.

  “This is what we used to call a technicians’ bay,” Shen-yang announced in a slow voice. “And—through that door—there will be an intercontinental ballistic missile waiting in its silo.”

  His host made a grave gesture of assent.

  “You have them, then,” said Shenyang. “Do you really have a thousand?”

  Again, the confirmation.

  “Then, all this time . . . why didn’t you fire them when you could?”

  “When I could, Mr. Shen-yang?” The leader’s face shivered into a thousand wrinkles, became that of a smiling, wise old demon. And he raised, on a chain that hung around his neck, the carven symbol of his party and his faith. Shen-yang could see the tiny studs projecting from it, coded secretly no doubt, so that one man alone possessed the power, day or night, to. . . .”

  “When I could? There is nothing to prevent my firing them now—more than eleven hundred strategic missiles. But I chose not to fire, forty-six years ago. And as of this moment, that is still my choice.”

  Shen-yang felt more dazed by those absent blasts than by the real ones he had endured. “To—to save the atmosphere—?”

  The old man smiled. “No, we can survive that, too, if need be. Our people’s medicine is working on the problems and will solve them. Besides, already only the resistant ones of us are left. No, we have another reason for not launching.

  “Our greatness is born of great adversity and nurtured on it. When we have blown away the Condaminers’ cities and more than half their lives, what is left of them will be stronger and harder to defeat than they are now. Why, Mr. Shen-yang, should-I so strengthen my foe? Their leaders, in their hearts, would be delighted if I did.”

  Shen-yang thought of Vellore, indefensibly open to the sky, to cruise missile and MIRV, to laser-reflecting warheads. He thought of the buried, hardened nerve centers and wondered if Hondurman himself ever came up above the ground.

  I want to go home, thought Shenyang, with a physical revulsion for this place so strong he almost started for the elevator. Away from this world of madmen.

  The aide was approaching, a bright red wireless communicator of some kind in his hand. The old man took it with a nod and said into it at once: “Do you call now to see if I am still alive?” Even as he spoke, there came another godlike blast far above; the living rock around them shook and trickled powder. “Of course I am alive. How can you slay a man, who is an idea first of all, with a machine?”

  A few more words were exchanged. Then the fleshy old arm held out the device to Shen-yang. “There is someone who wishes a few words with you.”

  When he held the thing for his own use, Hondurman’s face was visible in its little screen, and Hondurman’s voice came through. “My government’s deepest apologies, Mr. Shenyang, if any military action of ours has in fact endangered you. Of course you knew that you were entering a combat zone—”

  “I’m still alive,” he interrupted. “By the way, you were right about the missiles here.”

  A slight bow was visible. “It appears that you too were right, all along. Our Council of Ministers has just been reorganized, and it now agrees to the Ungavan conditions for peace talks to resume. Our new governmen
t deplores the latest launchings, disclaims responsibility for them, and will take disciplinary action against the officers responsible. Our official position is that the war is essentially over and the situation must be normalized before our world rejoins the galaxy.”

  “I was right about its being over, yes. But wrong about one other thing.” Shen-yang paused. “So, you’re changing leaders to get the peace talks going? That’s what losers do, you know.”

  The eyes in the small screen were haunted. “And just what else, sir, did you suppose we were?”

  THE GAME

  Khees rarely looked at the overseers’ towers without seeing in them a fanciful resemblance to chess rooks. Instead of four, there were six great rooks here, each one standing on its own corner of a vast patchwork territory of lifeless land; and the patched land, busy with friendly machines, still obscured here and there by blotches of poison mist borne in the thinned and ruined air, was not divided into regular squares; some kind of fairy chess instead of the regular variety. His imaginative thoughts about the towers had not, in the six months he had been on planet Maximus, ever got much farther than this point. Chess was not Khees’ great game, and he knew little of its history.

  Today he was conducting an informal tour of the rehabilitation project for Adrienne, who had just arrived on-world, and whom he had not seen in over two standard years. At the moment they were outside, wearing dust-repellent jackets and special breathing masks.

  “Actually the capital stood more than a thousand kilometers from here, before the attack. But this will be a finer site in several ways for the new city, so we decided to put the monument here as well.”

  “That was a good idea. Yours?” It was marvelously flattering, and more than that, the attention that Adrienne was giving him today.

  He chuckled. “I’m not sure. We talk things over a great deal.” Khees and twenty other people had been here for half a year, overseeing an army of machines employed in starting to undo the devastation wrought by the raiding-berserker fleet in an hour or so, a little more than a standard year ago. “Let’s go inside again. In here we have the first of our new atmosphere.”

  They passed through an airlock into a great, inflated, transparent structure, where they could remove the masks that had protected them against the poison residues of the attack, which still maintained an uncanny lifelessness across the open atmosphere. It was not only human life against which the berserkers fought; the commands built into those unliving killers by their ancient and unknown programmers decreed that all life must be destroyed. For many thousands of years the berserkers had ranged the galaxy, replicating themselves, designing new machines as needed, always methodically killing. And now, for a thousand years and more, Earth-descended humanity, dispersed on more than a hundred worlds, had fought against them.

  Inside, Adrienne tossed her mask into a rack and looked about, shaking out long hair of fiery red with a brisk twisting of her slender neck. “Enormous,” she remarked. The inflated dome of clear plastic, that from outside had seemed so tall, looked flat when seen from inside, so long and broad was it in relation to its height. Almost a kilometer away, beyond a pleasant view of green—

  fringed paths and ponds, the half-finished monument rose, remaining truncated at the top until the atmosphere had been restored and the confining plastic dome could be removed. SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF, words said across the monument’s front, and then a blankness. Khees, whose job mostly involved other matters, didn’t know just how it was going to look when finished. Half a million dead, all the citizens of Maximus who had stayed behind to fight, would provide an impressive number of names to fit in, even if not all of them were known.

  “And beautiful,” Adrienne concluded, completing her first look round the place. “You’re doing a fine job here, Khees.”

  “This will be the central park of the new capital someday. It isn’t my project, though. The machines I oversee are working thirty and forty kilometers away.”

  “I meant all of you who work here,” said Adrienne quickly. Was there just a little regret in her voice, as if she wished she could credit him with the park?

  She took his arm and they walked along a path. A few Earthbirds, singing, flew overhead. In the distance a pair of Space Marine officers were approaching from the direction of the monument, uniforms immaculate, weapons slung on shoulders as required for full-dress ceremonies.

  Adrienne said: “So, down there at the other end is obviously where the Chief is going to lay the wreath. Where will he enter the dome, though? From here it would be too long a walk. We want to control the time factor as much as possible.” She was thinking aloud, asking herself the question; it was one of the problems that she, as a member of the advance landing party charged with seeing that the planned ceremony ran smoothly, was going to have to answer.

  Khees ran a nervous hand through his own curly black hair. “So, how is it working for the great man?”

  “The Chief? He really is, you know.”

  “I don’t suppose you can be elected to lead the Ten Planets without some ability. The war has certainly gone better since he’s been in office.”

  “Oh, he has leadership ability, of course. But I meant humanly great. I suppose the two often go together. He really does care about people. These wreath-laying trips of his to all the battle sites are not just for show. He had tears in his eyes at the last ceremony; I saw them. But how is it with your job, Khees?”

  “All right.” He shrugged. “A lot of people are a lot worse off. I’m not out in the front line fighting berserkers.”

  “Still, I don’t suppose you get much chance to do what you like best.”

  Now he looked at her carefully. “No. Actually, no chance at all.”

  “One of the Marine officers who came in the advance party with me has a minor master’s rating. When he found out that I knew you—he already knew you were here—he begged me to see if I could get you to play a game.”

  “A minor master? Who?”

  Adrienne sighed faintly. “I thought that’d catch your interest. His name’s Barkro. I didn’t ask his numerical rating—I suppose I should have realized you’d want to take that into consideration.”

  He had—as so often in the past—the feeling that the more he talked with Adrienne, the farther apart the two of them got. “Oh, I’ll give him a game. That is, if we can come up with six players—I doubt he’d be interested in any lesser variations. Are you going to play, too?”

  She smiled and took his hand. “Why not? I won’t have much work to do. And an old boyfriend of mine once taught me how. He even claimed that I had the potential to be pretty good at it someday.”

  “If you practiced enough, I said. And if you could eliminate a little psychological block or two.” Now he was holding both her hands and smiling back at her. On first seeing her an hour ago it had hit him, how much he’d really missed her. And now minute by minute the feeling was growing stronger.

  “Well sir, I didn’t think my psychological block was all that terrible.”

  “There was something about it rather nice, from my own point of view.”

  And shortly they were walking on again. She said: “I haven’t had the time for any practice at The Game . . . speaking of time, though, are we even going to have enough of it to play? I mean, all of us in the Chiefs party are going to be lifting off again just about twelve hours from now.”

  He calculated. “Let’s see—LeBon and Narret will play, I’m sure. One more—Jon Via, probably. Trouble is, most of us who will want to play are going to be at least nominally on duty much of the time. We do six hour shifts, alone in the towers, as a rule . . . what time will the Chiefs shuttle land?”

  “About ten hours from now.”

  “Once he lands we’ll all be busy—no way out of that.”

  “Can’t you trade shifts with non-players?”

  Khees grimaced mildly. “I don’t think so. We’re short-handed right now, with a bunch of people out on the frontier with o
ur boss, and they won’t be back until just about the time the Chief comes down. No real reason we can’t play while we’re on duty in the towers, though. It’s not that demanding a job most of the time. Only reason the towers have to be manned at all is that early on here we had a couple of accidents, and now the Boss insists on having permanent observation posts where human eyes can get a direct overall view of the project, at least a good part of the time.”

  “What do you do on the night shift?”

  He grinned. “The best we can.”

  “Your machines are not as self-sufficient as they could be, I gather.”

  “It’s the old problem.” With the example of the berserkers constantly in mind, human beings on all worlds were afraid to give their own machines, however benignly programmed, nearly as much in the way of general intelligence and self-sufficiency as technology allowed.

  “In the Game, will we use the honor system as regards computer help?”

  “Of course.” Khees felt a little disappointed, almost injured, by the question. If you were serious enough about the Game to play it well, you weren’t going to cheat, certainly not in that crude a sense. Would an athlete tie servolifters to his wrists, and then take pride in winning a weight contest?

  “Silly of me to ask . . .”

  “It’s all right. Look, Ade, I’ve got to get back up in my tower. The Boss just might call in checking up; he takes his overseers’ duties rather seriously.”

  “Then he Won’t approve of a Game during duty hours.”

  “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  “What if he tunes in his radio later and hears us playing?”

  “We’ll use light-beam communication, tower to tower. I’ll start getting things set up for play. Want to come along? That’ll be against regulations also, but . . .”

  “Love to, but I have a thing or two I must get done myself before we start frittering our time. Where am I going to be when we play?”