Of Berserkers, Swords and Vampires

by Fred Saberhagen

  Never mind. it was time to follow the planeteers' motto: Go Down and Find Out.

  Gates and Brazil now faced a final quick Medical & Psych exam in a ship's corridor. Brazil had long since given up trying to startle the psych doc by giving to the inevitable weird question an even weirder answer.

  "I'd swear you were sane if I didn't know you better," the doctor told him this time. "Pass on."

  They fitted themselves into the suits of Armor, Light, Space, and Ground, that had been selected for this job. The suits included among their accessories flotation bubbles that when inflated enabled the wearers to maneuver with supposed ease through water. The suits now received a quick semifinal test.

  Captain Dietrich was waiting in the berth that was almost filled by the fifteen-meter-long stubby bulk of scoutship Alpha. Gates and Brazil juggled checklists and fishbowl helmets to offer him each an armored paw to shake. The Captain said something about good luck.

  The two planeteers climbed through the scout's hatch, twisting sideways with practiced movements to meet the ninety-degree shift in artificial gravity between mother ship and scout. Gates climbed on toward the control room while Brazil stayed to seal the hatch. On planet they would of course use an airlock. Engines started. Ship's power off and disconnected. All personnel out of berth. Ready for sterilizing.

  Lethal gas, swirling around the scout's hull, was mostly pumped away to be saved and reused. Then a blast of ultraviolet, more intense than the raw Sol-type sunshine outside, bathed the inside of the berth. No microorganisms must be carried down into atmosphere.

  Strapped and clamped into control room chairs, ports sealed, watching the tiny world of the berth by video screen, Gates and Brazil were nearly ready. The berth door slid open on schedule, and what was left of gas inside went out in a faint puff of sudden mist.

  The watery world that someone with little imagination had named Aqua, sixteen thousand kilometers away, filled the opening. A quarter of it was dayside, blue mottled white with patterned clouds; nightside was eerie with subtle atmospheric glows.

  "Stand by one, Alpha," came over the radio. "A little trouble clearing Delta."

  "Understand," said Sam Gates. "Hey Boris, I like those tridi stories at home. The chap just drives his ship up to a new planet and lands. The faithful crew stands around scratching their heads.

  'Well, what'll we do now?' says one. Then they wait for the hero to speak up."

  " 'Let's get out and look around,' " said Brazil, grinning. " 'O.K., but let's all be careful. Maybe we better close the door of the ship behind us.' "

  Sam gave a rare smile. "And then one character takes his helmet off to eat a coconut. Only it turns out to be a chieftain's daughter."

  "And they're all in the soup. They never seem to learn."

  "Stand by, Alpha," said Operations over the radio, unnecessarily. Gates pointed to the slim volume wedged under an arm of Brazil's chair, secured, like everything else aboard, against some possible failure of the artificial gravity. "What's the book this time?"

  "Thoreau. I thought I might need a dose of philosophy if you get us stuck in the mud down there."

  "Always meant to read the old nature-lover through some day." Gates nodded at the screens showing the waiting planet. "Wonder what he would have thought of all this."

  Brazil looked at the image of the planet with the dawnline creeping imperceptibly across upper atmosphere as a rainbow of varying ionization and light pressure. He smiled at a sudden recollection, and quoted: "Walden Pond—let's see—'A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above . . . I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.' "

  "He wrote that in the middle of the nineteenth century?" asked Gates, astonished. "Let me see that book when you're done with it."

  "You're clear for takeoff, Alpha. Good luck," said the radio. Scoutship Alpha outraced the dawnline by an hour to the island and eased down on schedule, without hurry, into thicker and thicker air, until it entered predawn darkness and fog. Gates used his radar for the first time, to work his way down toward the water a few hundred meters off the rocky coastline.

  Aqua was Brazil's ninth new planet. But I won't forget this one, he thought in some corner of his brain not used for watching instruments.

  And he was right.

  The plan called for an offshore landing unseen by the natives, the concealment of the scoutship under water but near land, and the going ashore of Gates and Brazil in protective suits to make contact with the local intelligent life. Tight-beam communication was to be maintained at all times with the Yuan Chwang. A small video eye rode above each planeteer's left ear; whatever the eye saw was transmitted to the mother ship.

  The versatile and roughly humanoid robot that accompanied every scoutship (and followed men onto new planets, but rarely preceded them) would be left in the submerged scout, and would bring it to the human crew if they summoned it by radio.

  The Yuan Chwang was not orbiting Aqua, but hovering and trying to keep its great bulk invisible, fifteen or sixteen thousand kilometers above the island. The other scouts were cruising in upper atmosphere in the general area of the target island, observing what they could.

  Aboard Alpha, detection screens picked out what looked to Brazil like the infrared pattern of smoldering fires and fainter body heat of a small village where the recon photos had shown a village to be. Gates worked the scout by radar to an offshore point about a kilometer from the village, which lay on the shore of a small cove. He dipped the scout low enough to put a sonar probe under water and get a picture of the bottom.

  "Nothing strange down there," said Gates. "We'll go ahead."

  Cutting in automatic stabilizers, he lowered the scout into and through choppy water and made slowly toward shore, while Brazil studied the ocean and bottom, trying to read half a dozen presentations at once.

  Near the rocky upthrust of land, Gates let the little ship settle gently onto sandy bottom. He summoned the robot and told it to use enough drive to prevent the ship's sinking into the bottom. The robot got into the pilot's seat as the humans checklisted themselves into helmets, out of the control room, and into the lock. They stood with legs spread and arms raised while gas and UV sterilized their suits and the chamber. Gates nodded and Brazil opened a valve to let alien sea into the lock; in a few seconds they stepped out of the world of checklists and into dark water. Brazil lingered to feel that the lock door was secured behind them, let gas into his flotation bubbles, and followed Gates up through the darkness. Once something like a luminous smoke ring curled greenly past them through the water.

  "Can you bliphate the distance phlooh that?" asked a voice from the Yuan Chwang, half strangled by transmission through space, air, and water.

  "Hard to say; I'd guess only a few meters," Gates answered, waiting until his head had broken surface and he had taken a look around. Brazil was right behind him; he could barely see Gates' helmet above the water three meters away. The rough rock face of the coastline was only a deeper darkness at one side. They paddled toward it; waves sloshed them against it; they gripped it and began to climb.

  Earthmen emerged onto the land of a new world, looking more like primeval lungfish than lords of creation. They climbed rock uncertainly and slowly and halted at the top of a small cliff. The suits were engineered for easy movement and reasonable comfort for twenty-four continuous sealed-in hours in almost any environment. Old Planeteers sometimes said soberly that they needed a suit on to feel comfortable; but they usually preferred to take the suit off before sitting down to discuss how comfortably they wore it.

  "Let's wait for a little more light," said Gates' radio voice. Brazil sat down beside a large rock and tried to see what was on the inland slope away from the cliff.

  The sun was not far b
elow the hilly horizon now and a gray predawn light made the scene gradually intelligible. A faint excuse for a road wandered along a few yards away, roughly paralleling the shoreline; it might be a cattle path that led toward the village. Beyond the road were fields with a a semicultivated look, holding orderly rows of squat bushes above a mat of low-growing vines that seemed to cover most of the ground in sight. Green hills rose beyond the fields.

  The dawn brightened slowly. To Brazil, sunrises always brought awe, whether he saw them on an outworld, or on crowded Earth, or across the rusty deserts of the world to which his parents had emigrated and where he had been born. Sitting on this alien rock with sea water dripping from his armor, he thought: First Landing; it's like a First Morning. Let there be light.

  "Light enough," said Gates. "Let's get started."

  They walked on crunching vines to the road, heads swiveling constantly and air microphones tuned to high sensitivity. Brazil caught himself listening for the ape-howling that had accompanied each new morning on his last new planet. It wasn't good to carry such mental baggage on the job; he would have to unload it. They paced along the faint road toward the village. The hardpacked brownish soil of the road held no informative prints of hooves or feet or wheels.

  "Smoke ahead," said Gates suddenly. It was a barely visible vertical tracery in the sky, rising not far away.

  The road curved around a craggy little hill; when they had rounded this, the village was before them. Large rowboats were beached on the sand of a small sheltered cove. Forty or fifty meters back from the water stood about twenty huts, built mainly from what looked like mats of the groundvine. A small stream trickled through the village, flowing from the direction of a structure like a low fortress, that stood beyond the huts and was much larger than any of them. Its dark walls of dried mud or clay were surrounded by a considerable space cleared of all vegetation.

  Brazil turned his head to one side and saw his first native. His stomach went cold and he said to Gates: "On the rock up there. Look."

  The native was undoubtedly humanoid and had apparently been dead a long time. He was bound somehow with vines to the crag that almost overhung the road, four or five meters above the Earthmen, and around his neck hung a placard that looked like cardboard, bearing a short inscription in bold characters resembling Arabic. He had been a tall man in life, by Earthly standards, and long strands of pale hair were still in evidence.

  "Get this?" asked Gates of the observers in the sky.

  "Affirmative. You're going on?"

  "Don't see why not."

  "We never mind these 'No Trespassing' signs," said Brazil, with an attempt at flippancy he didn't feel. Dead men were nothing new to him, but this one had a considerable resemblance to himself and had, so to speak, sneaked up on him.

  There were no living people yet in sight, but there were shrill cries from the village, and a small flock of hawklike birds with oversized wings sprang up from among the huts. The birds were green and vivid orange against the misty sky and flew circling over the village.

  "Let's go," said Gates.

  They went down the sloping road toward the huts, trying to look confident but not frightening.

  At an open gateway in the wall of the fortified structure a figure appeared, a red-haired man dressed in dark jerkin and leggings and boots, with breastplate of silvery metal that matched the round helmet he carried in one hand. In the other was a spear. He stretched himself and yawned, and appeared to be trying to scratch his ribs with the helmet. He was still a good distance away and gave no sign that he had spotted two aliens in strange suits walking into his town.

  The birds were more alert. The cries of the circling flock changed suddenly in tone, and in a moment it had become a living arrow launched at Gates and Brazil. The flock broke off just before contact, to circle the intruders in a blurred uproar of wings and claws, but several birds scraped the helmets, which were almost invisible in mild light, and came back to tear head-on at Brazil's apparently unprotected face.

  The thud of impact was impressive; when Brazil's eyes opened from the reflex blink, the bird was flopping on the ground with something badly broken. He picked it up, intending to impress the natives with his friendliness by treating kindly their pet that had attacked him, and also to suggest to them that it was futile to attack; but it struggled and fought his armored hands so that he thought he was doing it more harm than good.

  He set it gently down again as the first natives came blinking and shivering out of their huts to see what all the noise was about, some of them still pulling on scanty rags of clothing. They were all of a type with the body on the rock, blond, tall humanoids with deep chests and slender limbs; in the living people were visible a dozen small distinctions of facial and bodily proportion that added up to an obvious but not at first definable difference from any Earthman.

  The red-haired man of the fortress had ducked inside the gateway, which was still open. A domestic-looking animal with plumes on its head looked out at the strangers with interest.

  The blond natives stood together in front of their huts, as if waiting for a group picture to be taken, gaping at their visitors in silence. The watchbird flock still screamed and flew, now in widening circles, having given up assault at least temporarily.

  Gates kept moving forward until he stood near the center of the cleared space between beach and huts. Brazil stopped beside him there and they stood almost motionless, smiling, arms spread with hands open, in the approved position for approaching Apparent Primitives who seem timid. The sun stood over the horizon now, dissipating the morning fog.

  Brazil became aware that the whole crowd was watching him. Only now and then did one shoot a quick glance at Gates, as if puzzled about something.

  Gates spoke via throat mike and radio, scarcely moving his smiling lips. "You look like 'em, boy. I think you better play leader. They may never have seen anyone dark as me before."

  Brazil made the practiced throat-muscle movement that switched on his airspeaker and opened his mouth to begin the greeting of his public with soothing sounds. He was interrupted by Sam's voice in his ear again. "Coming from the fort."

  Six Apparent Primitives who looked anything but timid were marching in sloppy formation down the slope from the walled structure, straight toward the Earthmen, bearing spears and facial expressions that Brazil could not interpret as meaning anything good. They were all red-haired and armored, muscular, well-fed, and bulbous-nosed, evidently of a different tribe or race than the blond hut-dwellers.

  Brazil's barefoot audience watched the warriors' approach nervously and began to fade back into their huts. But one of the older men, who had been staring Brazil in the eye with an expression of intense and mounting emotion—the planeteer grew edgy at not being able to decide what emotion—now sprang forward to grab Brazil by the arm and harangue him with the first native speech he had heard, meanwhile looking at him with the gaze of a pleading worshiper.

  The six red-haired warriors were very near and didn't look happy at all. They also seemed to be concentrating on Brazil.

  With a cry as of great despair the old man tore himself away from Brazil and fled at top speed toward the huts. One of the approaching warriors threw his spear with a whipping, expert motion; it caught the old man in the back and sent him dying on his face in the sand.

  "Well, I'll be—" Boris Brazil roared out the first Earth words into the air of Aqua.

  The red-haired warriors stood before him, eyeing him with what he interpreted as incredulous contempt. One of them barked something that he thought he could almost translate: "What are you doing, you blond peasant clod, dressed up in that outlandish armor?" He probably looked more like a blond native in the suit, with his physical proportions somewhat concealed, than he would without it.

  The one who had speared the old man started walking toward his victim, maybe to retrieve his weapon. Brazil started that way too, with no clear idea of what he was going to do, but with the feeling that the old man
had appealed to him in vain for help.

  As Brazil started to move, the five other spears were suddenly leveled at him. A hysterical blond boy ran out of a hut to kneel beside the old man and scream something that sounded nasty at the approaching warrior. Gates was standing motionless a few meters away. A spear thrust fast and hard against Brazil's chest with plain intent to kill, setting him back on his heels; a lordly voice from the Yuan Chwang said in his ear, "This is not our affair." Brazil grabbed the thrusting spear in his left hand, jerked its owner forward off balance, and delivered with his armored right fist what seemed the appropriate greeting to an Apparent Primitive Attempting Murder of Earthman.

  The blow knocked the man out from under his helmet and dropped him to the sand. Spears rocked Boris from all sides, clashed and slid around his helmet. He caught a glimpse of the sixth warrior kicking the boy, knocking him over, and pulling a short axe from his belt for a finishing blow.

  The arm swinging back the axe suddenly released it; the weapon spun through the air to land some meters away and the warrior sat down suddenly and nervelessly. Sam Gates had decided it was time for stun pistols.

  Before Brazil had reached the same conclusion, the four remaining spearmen had given up trying to stick him through his suit and were grabbing at his arms to hold him. Gates potted two more of them, in the legs, with silent and invisible force. The remaining two abandoned the fight and backed away toward their stronghold with spears leveled, shouting what was no doubt a call for reinforcements. The man that Brazil had felled got up and tottered dazedly after them.

  "Let's get out of here," said Gates.

  Brazil's eye swept around. The old man was dead, the spear still in him. The young boy who had been kicked was lying unconscious right in front of a warrior who was going to be considerably annoyed as soon as he felt a little better. Brazil scooped the child up and got him over his shoulders in a fireman's carry and looked at Gates, who gave a sort of facial shrug.