The Ultimate Enemy

by Fred Saberhagen

  Trying to think ahead, Sabel could feel his life knotting into a singularity at no great distance in the future. Impossible to try to predict what lay beyond. It was worse than uncertain; it was opaque.

  This time his laboratory computer made no fuss about accepting the video records. It began to process them at once.

  At his private information station Sabel called for a printout of any official news announcements made by the Guardians or the city fathers during the time he had been gone. He learned that the entertainer Greta Thamar had been released under the guardianship of her court-appointed lawyer, after memory extraction. She was now in satisfactory condition in the civilian wing of the hospital.

  There was nothing else in the news about good-life, or berserkers. And there had been no black-robed Guardians at Sabel’s door when he came in.

  DATING ANOMALY PRESENT was on the screen of Sabel’s laboratory computer the next time he looked at it.

  “Give details,” he commanded.

  RECORD GIVEN AS EPOCH 451st CENTURY IDENTIFIES WITH SPECTRUM OF RADIANT EPOCH 456th CENTURY, YEAR 23, DAY 152.

  “Let me see.”

  It was, as some part of Sabel’s mind already seemed to know, the segment that showed Helen on the inner surface of the Fortress, raising her arms ecstatically as in some strange rite. Or dance.

  The singularity in his future was hurtling toward him quickly now. “You say—you say that the spectrum in this record is identical with the one we recorded—what did you say? How long ago?”

  38 DAYS 11 HOURS, APPROXIMATELY 44

  MINUTES.

  As soon as he had the destructive materials he needed loaded aboard the flyer, he headed at top speed back to base camp. He did not wait to obtain a spare spacesuit.

  Inside the tent, things were disarranged, as if Helen perhaps had been searching restlessly for something. Under the loose coverall her breast rose and fell rapidly, as if she had recently been working hard, or were in the grip of some intense emotion.

  She held out her arms to him, and put on a glittering smile.

  Sabel stopped just inside the airlock. He pulled his helmet off and faced her grimly. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  She winced, and tilted her head, but would not speak. She still held out her arms, and the glassy smile was still in place.

  “Who are you, I said? That hologram was made just thirty-eight days ago.”

  Helen’s face altered. The practiced expression was still fixed on it, but now a different light played on her features. The light came from outside the shelter, and it was moving toward them.

  There were four people out there, some with hand weapons leveled in Sabel’s direction. Through the plastic he could not tell at once if their suited figures were those of men or women. Two of them immediately came in through the airlock, while the other two remained outside, looking at the cargo Sabel had brought out on the flyer.

  “God damn, it took you long enough.” Helen’s lovely lips had formed some words at last.

  The man who entered first, gun drawn, ignored Sabel for the moment and inspected her with a sour grin. “I see you came through five days in the cooler in good shape.”

  “Easier than one day here with him—God damn.” Helen’s smile at Sabel had turned into an equally practiced snarl.

  The second man to enter the shelter stopped just inside the airlock. He stood there with a hand on the gun bolstered at his belt, watching Sabel alertly.

  The first man now confidently bolstered his weapon too, and concentrated his attention on Sabel. He was tall and bitter-faced, but he was no policeman. “I’m going to want to take a look inside your lab, and maybe get some things out. So hand over the key, or tell me the combination.”

  Sabel moistened his lips. “Who are you?” The words were not frightened, they were imperious with rage. “And who is this woman here?”

  “I advise you to control yourself. She’s been entertaining you, keeping you out of our way while we got a little surprise ready for the city. We each of us serve the Master in our own way … even you have already served. You provided the Master with enough power to call on us for help, some days ago… yes, what?” Inside this helmet he turned his head to look outside the shelter. “Out completely? Under its own power now? Excellent!”

  He faced back toward Sabel. “And who am I? Someone who will get the key to your laboratory from you, one way or another, you may be sure. We’ve been working on you a long time already, many days. We saw to it that poor Greta got a new roommate, as soon as you took up with her. Poor Greta never knew … you see, we thought we might need your flyer and this final cargo of tools and chemicals to get the Master out. As it turned out, we didn’t.”

  Helen, the woman Sabel had known as Helen, walked into his field of vision, turned her face to him as if to deliver a final taunt.

  What it might have been, he never knew. Her dark eyes widened, in a parody of fainting fright. In the next moment she was slumping to the ground.

  Sabel had a glimpse of the other, suited figures tumbling. Then a great soundless, invisible, cushioned club smote at his whole body. The impact had no direction, but there was no way to stand against it. His muscles quit on him, his nerves dissolved. The rocky ground beneath the shelter came up to catch his awkward fall with bruising force.

  Once down, it was impossible to move a hand or foot. He had to concentrate on simply trying to breathe.

  Presently he heard the airlock’s cycling sigh. To lift his head and look was more than he could do; in his field of vision there were only suited bodies, and the ground.

  Black boots, Guardian boots, trod to a halt close before his eyes. A hand gripped Sabel’s shoulder and turned him part way up. Gunavarman’s jovial eyes looked down at him for a triumphal moment before the Chief Deputy moved on.

  Other black boots shuffled about. “Yes, this one’s Helen Nadrad, all right—that’s the name she used whoring at the Parisian Alley, anyway. I expect we can come up with another name or two for her if we look offworld. Ready to talk to us, Helen? Not yet? You’ll be all right. Stunner wears off in an hour or so.”

  “Chief, I wonder what they expected to do with suspended animation gear? Well, we’ll find out.”

  Gunavarman now began a radio conference with some distant personage. Sabel, in his agony of trying to breathe, to move, to speak, could hear only snatches of the talk:

  “Holding meetings out here for some time, evidently … mining for berserker parts, probably … equipment … yes, Sire, the berserker recording was found in his laboratory this time…

  a publicity hologram of Helen Nadrad included in it, for some reason… yes, very shocking. But no doubt … we followed him out here just now. Joro, that’s the goodlife organizer we’ve been watching, is here … yes, Sire. Thank you very much. I will pass on your remarks to my people here.”

  In a moment more the radio conversation had been concluded. Gunavarman, in glowing triumph, was bending over Sabel once again. “Prize catch,” the Guardian murmured. “Something you’d like to say to me?”

  Sabel was staring at the collapsed figure of Joro. Inside an imperfectly closed pocket of the man’s spacesuit he could see a small, blood-red cylinder, a stub of cut wire protruding from one end.

  “Anything important, Doctor?”

  He tried, as never before. Only a few words. “Dr-aw … your … weapons …”

  Gunavarman glanced round at his people swarming outside the tent. He looked confidently amused. “Why?”

  Now through the rock beneath the groundsheet of his shelter Sabel could hear a subtly syncopated, buzzing vibration, drawing near.

  “Draw … your …”

  Not that he really thought the little handguns were likely to do them any good.

  The instruments of science do not in themselves discover truth. And there are searchings that are not concluded by the coincidence of a pointer and a mark.

  Starsong

  Forcing the passage through the dark nebu
la Taynarus cost them three fighting ships, and after that they took the casualties of a three-day battle as their boarding parties fought their way into Hell. The Battle Commander of the task force feared from the beginning to the end of the action that the computer in command on the berserker side would destroy the place and the living invaders with it, in a last gotterdammerung of destructor charges. But he could hope that the damped-field projectors his men took with him into the fight would prevent any nuclear explosion. He sent living men to board because it was believed that Hell held living human prisoners. His hopes were justified; or at least, for whatever reason, no nuclear explosion came.

  The beliefs about prisoners were not easily confirmed. Ercul, the cybernetic psychologist who came to investigate when the fighting was over, certainly found humans there. In a way. In part. Odd organs that functioned in a sort-of way, interconnected with the non-human and the non-alive. The organs were most of them human brains, which had been grown in culture through use of the techniques that berserkers must have captured with some of our hospital ships.

  Our human laboratories grow the culture-brains from seedlings of human embryo-tissue, grow them to adult size and then dissect them as needed. A doctor slices off a prefrontal lobe, say, and puts it into the skull of a man whose own corresponding brain-part has been destroyed by some disease or violence. The culture-brain material serves as a matrix for regrowth, raw material on which the old personality can re-impress itself. The culture-brains, raised in glass jars, are not human except in potential. Even a layman can readily distinguish one of them from a normally developed brain by the visible absence of the finer surface convolutions. The culture-brains cannot be human in the sense of maintaining sentient human minds. Certain hormones and other subtle chemicals of the body-environment are necessary for the development of a brain with personality—not to mention the need for the stimuli of experience, the continual impact of the senses. Indeed some sensory input is needed if the culture-brain is to develop even to the stage of a template usable by the surgeon. For this input music is commonly employed.

  The berserkers had doubtless learned to culture livers and hearts and gonads as well as brains, but it was only man’s thinking ability that interested them deeply. The berserkers must have stood in their computer-analogue of awe as they regarded the memory-capacity and the decision-making power that nature in a few billion years of evolution had managed to pack into the few hundred cubic centimeters of the human nervous system.

  Off and on through their long war with men the berserkers had tried to incorporate human brains into their own circuitry. Never had they succeeded to their own satisfaction, but they kept trying.

  The berserkers themselves of course named nothing. But men were not far wrong in calling this center of their research Hell. This Hell lay hidden in the center of the dark Taynarus nebula, which in turn was roughly centered in a triangle formed by the Zitz and Toxx and Yaty systems. Men had known for years what Hell was, and approximately where it was, before they could muster armed strength enough in this part of their sector of the galaxy to go in and find it and root it out.

  “I certify that in this container there is no human life,” said the cybernetic psychologist, Ercul, under his breath, at the same time stamping the words on the glassite case before him. Ercul’s assistant gestured, and the able-bodied spaceman working with them pulled the power-connectors loose and let the thing in the tank begin to die. This one was not a culture-brain but had once been the nervous system of a living prisoner. It had been greatly damaged not only by removal of most of its human body but by being connected to a mass of electronic and micro-mechanical gear. Through some training program, probably a combination of punishment and reward, the berserker had then taught this brain to, perform certain computing operations at great speed and with low probability of error. It seemed that every time the computations had been finished the mechanism in the case with the brain had immediately reset all the counters to zero and once more presented the same inputs, whereupon the brain’s task had started over. The brain now seemed incapable of anything but going on with the job; and if that was really a kind of human life, which was not a possibility that Ercul was going to admit out loud, it was in his opinion a kind that was better terminated as soon as possible.

  “Next case?” he asked the spacemen. Then he realized he had just made a horrible pun upon his judge’s role. But none of his fellow harrowers of Hell seemed to have noticed it. But just give us a few more days on the job, he thought, and we will start finding things to laugh at.

  Anyway, he had to get on with his task of trying to distinguish rescued prisoners—two of these had been confirmed so far, and might some day again look human—from collection of bottled though more or less functioning organs.

  When they brought the next case before him, he had a bad moment, bad even for this day, recognizing some of his own work.

  The story of it had started more than a standard year before, on the not-far-off planet of Zitz, in a huge hall that had been decorated and thronged for one of the merriest of occasions.

  “Happy, honey?” Ordell Callison asked his bride, having a moment to take her hand and speak to her under the tumult of the wedding feast. It was not that he had any doubt of her happiness; it was just that the banal two-word question was the best utterance that he could find—unless, of course, he was to sing.

  “Ohhh, happy, yes!” At the moment Eury was no more articulate than he. But the truth of her words was in her voice and in her eyes, marvelous as some song that Ordell might have made and sung.

  Of course he was not going to be allowed to get away, even for his honeymoon, without singing one song at least.

  “Sing something, Ordell!” That was Hyman Bolf, calling from across the vast banquet table, where he stood filling his cup at the crystal punch-fountain. The famed multifaith revivalist had come from Yaty system to perform the wedding ceremony. On landing, his private ship had misbehaved oddly, the hydrogen power lamp flaring so that the smoke of burnt insulation had caused the reverend to emerge from his cabin weeping with irritated eyes; but after that bad omen, everything had gone well for the rest of the day.

  Other voices took it up at once. “Sing, Ordell!”

  “Yes, you’ve got to. Sing!”

  “But it’s m’own wedding, and I don’t feel quite right—“

  His objections were overwhelmingly shouted down.

  The man was music, and indeed his happiness today was such that he felt he might burst if he could not express it. He got to his feet, and one of his most trusted manservants, who had foreseen that Ordell would sing, was ready to bring him his self-invented instrument. Crammed into a small box that Ordell could hang from his neck like an accordion were a speaker system from woofer to tweet, plus a good bit of electronics and audionics; on the box’s plain surface there were ten spots for Ordell’s ten fingers to play upon. His music-box, he called it, having to call it something. Ordell’s imitators had had bigger and flashier and better music-boxes made for them; but surprisingly few people, even among girls between twelve and twenty, cared to listen to Ordell’s imitators.

  So Ordell Callison sang at his own wedding, and his audience was enthralled by him as people always were; as people had been by no other performer in all the ancient records of Man. The highbrowed music critics sat rapt in their places of honor at the head table; the cultured and not-so-cultured moneyed folk of Zitz and Toxx and Yaty, some of whom had come in their private racing ships, and the more ordinary guests, all were made happy by his song as no wine could have made them. And the adolescent girls, the Ordell fans who crowded and huddled inevitably outside the doors, they yielded themselves to his music to the point of fainting and beyond.

  A couple of weeks later Ordell and Eury and his new friends of the last fast years, the years of success and staggering wealth, were out in space in their sporty one-seater ships playing the game they called Tag. This time Ordell was playing the game in a sort of reversed wa
y, dodging about in one corner of the reserved volume of space, really trying to avoid the girl-ships that fluttered past instead of going after them.

  He had been keeping one eye out for Eury’s ship, and getting a little anxious about not being able to find it, when from out of nowhere there came shooting toward Ordell another boy-ship, the signals of emergency blazing from it across the spectrum. In another minute everyone had ceased to play. The screens of all the little ships imaged the face of Arty, the young man whose racer had just braked to a halt beside Ordell’s.

  Arty was babbling: “I tried, Ordell—I mean I didn’t try to—I didn’t mean her any harm—they’ll get her back—it wasn’t my fault she—“

  With what seemed great slowness, the truth of what had happened became clear. Arty had chased and overtaken Eury’s ship, as was the way of the game. He had clamped his ship to hers and boarded, and then thought to claim the usual prize. But Eury of course was married now, and being married meant much to her, as it did to Ordell who today had only played at catching girls. Somehow both of them had thought that everyone else must see how the world had changed since they were married, how the rules of the game of Tag would have to be amended for them from now on.

  Unable to convince Arty by argument of how things stood, Eury had had to struggle to make her point. She had somehow injured her foot, trying to evade him in the little cabin. He kept on stubbornly trying to claim his prize. It came out later that he had only agreed to go back to his own ship for a first aid kit (she swore that her ship’s kit was missing) after her seeming promise that he could have what he wanted when he returned.

  But when he had gone back to his ship, she broke her own racer free and fled. And he pursued. Drove her into a corner, against the boundary of the safety zone, which was guarded by automated warships against the possibility of berserker incursions.

  To get away from Arty she crossed that border in a great speeding curve, no doubt meaning to come back to safety within ten thousand miles or so.