Berserker Prime

by Fred Saberhagen

  The sheriff muttered grimly: “Some think it would be a big help to hear that he was dead.”

  He told Gregor that for a time, particularly through the first hours of the space battle that had destroyed the Twin Worlds fleet and Timber’s sister planet, the Citadel had swarmed with soldiers and police, escorting and guarding officials high and low, and carrying their messages.

  Then, with surprising speed, the complex of buildings had begun to be deserted, as people considered important to the planet’s defense descended into shelters, or swarmed the spaceports in a futile effort to get off world.

  After getting past the brief interruption at the gate, their groundcar slid smoothly through a forcefield barrier, part of a tall, familiar wall, and emerged from it inside the Citadel. It seemed that much might have changed here since their departure only a few days ago.

  The executioner, still accompanied by his assigned robot, Porphyry, was standing, amid a confusion of various workers, guards, and robots in the courtyard, as if he had been waiting for Gregor to arrive. The eyes of the thin, womanish man were bright, and his step was firm. At first sight, it seemed that the onrush of danger and catastrophe had energized Huang Gun and not disheartened him. Huang Gun seemed in a strangely exalted state, and eagerly approached as Gregor got out of the groundcar.

  Gregor complimented Huang Gun on being one of the few who had remained steadfast at his post.

  The praise seemed to make little impression; the cause of the executioner’s happiness lay elsewhere. The man’s eyes were glowing, and he seemed euphoric. His first words were: “We are privileged to live in a time of transcendent change, Plenipotentiary.”

  “It is a privilege many of us would be willing to forgo, how are the hostages?” Luon was standing at his side.

  The thin man scarcely glanced at her. “They are but very little changed since last you saw them, only a few days. But that time seems, does it not, like another world?”

  Luon let out a gasp of relief. Gregor said: “The world of Prairie was still alive. Huang Gun, where is the president? It is vital that I see him.”

  Huang Gun’s expression briefly turned dark. “I cannot help you there. He no longer wishes to see me.”

  Luon was of course going to be persistent. “Sir? You say the hostages are well. Where are they?”

  The lean man finally gave her a searching look. “The hostages are still unharmed. It is impossible for you to see any of them now.”

  “But where are they?” she insisted, pleading.

  Huang Gun was too exalted to exhibit irritation. “They are under guard.”

  “Please. I have to see them. One of them in particular. It’s really essential.”

  The irritation was starting to show through. “That is quite impossible.”

  Luon’s grandfather had to physically pull her away. Quietly he murmured in her ear: “Wait. Patience. Let me see what I can do.”

  With a little choking cry of frustration and outrage, Luon pulled free of his grasp. A moment later she had disappeared in the confusion of soldiers, police, government workers and robots coming and going through the courtyard.

  Meanwhile Huang Gun, his mind back on his own agenda, had taken Gregor by the arm and was leading him away, delivering an impassioned speech as they walked. Porphyry paced smoothly after them.

  Briefly interrupting his speech, Huang Gun turned and dispatched the robot to try to reach the president.

  Resuming his talk with Gregor, the executioner said he had received a garbled, ambiguous order, couched in terms that made him worry about the president’s mental state. Belgola wanted to remove the hostages from Huang Gun’s authority, have them turned over to an escort of robots, and eventually send them into space.

  Gregor was aghast. “You haven’t done this?”

  “Assuredly not! So far, I am still asking the president for clarification. Trying to ask him. He has not replied.”

  “It was not his intention to send them home to Huvea?”

  “No, I do not think so. That was not implied.”

  Gregor cast another look around in search of Luon, but she had not reappeared. He had to focus on the job in hand. “I insist you tell me where the president is. I must speak to him.”

  A long finger pointed downward. “I am sure he is still in the executive shelter, almost directly beneath the Citadel, and actually comparatively near the surface. He refuses to speak to me, but he has several time expressed a wish to see you, Plenipotentiary.”

  Huang Gun went on to tell Gregor that probably the majority of the population still believed that the Twin Worlds were under attack by Huvean forces. Any information to the contrary was brushed aside as only enemy trickery, or lies spread by traitors who had unaccountably managed to take over Timber’s government.

  Hatred of all things Huvean, always smoldering in a large segment of the populace, seemed to be spreading like a plague.

  This meant the hostages were really in some immediate danger, and it was all the more necessary to guard them carefully. “Plenty of military people around,” the executioner mused, or complained “but they’ve all got their own jobs to do.”

  The two men had entered an interior lobby of the Citadel, containing two entrances to the elaborate public shelter system. A small crowd of thirty or forty people milled about, trying to make up their minds whether to seek refuge underground or not. Whoever was supposed to be in charge of civil defense on Timber was having a terrible time with this unexpected and unorthodox war, unless that official had already abandoned his or her post and fled.

  With the example of their planet’s twin hanging all too clearly in the sky, everyone on Timber knew of the horror that had overtaken Prairie, several versions of the story were making the rounds, variants that agreed only on the essential fact of that planet’s complete destruction.

  But there were still a substantial number of people who refused to believe that their sister planet, half their beloved homeland, could be absolutely dead.

  Few of the citizens of Timber retained any faith at all in their own world’s defenses. Hundreds of millions of people still huddled obediently inside the shelters, but as word spread through the deep, once comfortable but crowded caverns, more and more of their occupants were insisting that they be allowed to return to the surface.

  Gregor could hear a man’s loud voice: “If I’m going to die, I want to go out like a human being, not a blind mole.”

  The original orders to the wardens of civil defense had been to keep everyone below till an all-clear was sounded. But in the absence of any firm reinforcement of the orders to stay below, and in the clear, though usually unspoken, thought that no all-clear was ever going to sound on this world, the wardens, using their deeply buried communication system, decided to allow the people in their charge to suit themselves in the matter. Some elevators were running repeatedly between the shelters and the surface, taking people up.

  “I’m against this war!” some woman was crying boldly, waving her arms in the middle of the elevator lobby. “Who’s with me?”

  Huang Gun was standing back with folded arms, apparently in meditation, opting out of all this excitement. Gregor joined in heartily, shouting his approval of the woman’s sentiment. Everyone within reach of her voice was with her on that point, it appeared. But few seemed to expect that the war would pay heed to a good solid protest and go away.

  Another voice rose up: “Stop the war! We can negotiate a peace!!”

  Gregor, plainly clad, so far not recognized, had his say as their anonymous fellow citizen: “But they tell us that the damned thing refuses even to communicate, and it’s already fired on us.”

  The protesting woman looked at him sharply. “That kind of talk must be stopped. It only promotes the war.”

  Voices rose up anonymously from the crowd. “Our fleet will get ‘em yet!”

  “No, there’s treachery in high places. Some kind of surrender is being arranged, behind our backs!”

 
A mighty roar went up. Halfway across the lobby, Gregor could see people starting to shove each other. There were blows exchanged.

  Just when he had reached the point of giving up hope of ever being able to reach the president, he caught sight of the robot, Porphyry, returning from the mission assigned him by the executioner. Porphyry had re-emerged from a small, private elevator at ground level, and was actually running across the lobby to Gregor’s side, avoiding collisions with an athlete’s effortless skill. Other robots were similarly coming and going on various missions, and few people paid Porphyry much attention.

  The robot’s dashing speed gave an impression of excitement, though of course its voice did not. Before the executioner could begin to question it, the machine faced Gregor and announced: “Sir, please come with me at once. I have been assigned as your servant and guide, and the president wishes to see you immediately.”

  In his excitement, Gregor clapped Porphyry on one metal shoulder. “Thank all the gods! It’s about time.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The door in the far bulkhead of the prison chamber opened and another machine appeared. It marched smoothly toward the little group of humans, and came to a precise halt directly in front of De Carlo. “Come,” it said.

  Uncertainly, raising one hand in a tentative self-pointing gesture, he got to his feet.

  The machine took him by the wrist and led him away from the others. Lee saw a hitherto unsuspected door slide open, in what had been a solid wall. The lighted space beyond swallowed the robot and the man, the door slid shut again.

  After an interval that seemed impossible to measure (but was later asserted by Random to have been just over fourteen minutes) the door opened again. De Carlo came through it slowly, unescorted, to rejoin the group.

  Hemphill had got to his feet and was looking at him closely. “What happened?”

  De Carlo squeezed out a few words through a tight throat. “Kardec and Ting Wu are in there. Their bodies.” Then De Carlo shrugged. He seemed somewhat relieved. “As to what actually happened, nothing, not much. It just talked to me, asked questions.” Sitting down with a sigh, he leaned his back against the wall.

  Over the next several hours, other people were taken away in the same fashion, one at a time, and then brought back. Random assured his human companions that the timing of the interrogations was not precise.

  The process of interrogation moved along, sometimes with lengthy pauses. Whatever intelligence was in charge of the operation was taking its own time. Everyone on coming back told pretty much the same story of an interrogation session.

  “The questioning was done entirely by machines?” Dirigo asked each returnee the same question, and every time he got the same answer he sounded scandalized. It was a method of grilling prisoners that had never been covered in their classes on the theory and practice and history of war.

  Dirigo was persistent. “Did you get a good look at them? They are Huveans, aren’t they?” He and Kang Shin remained stubbornly determined that the traditional enemy, Huvean human, lay behind it all, waiting to be uncovered.

  “No, I didn’t see anyone. It was just like the others have said. The robot that took me there stood over me the whole time, and a voice coming out of a wall asked questions. It sounded like the same squeaking voice we hear every time it talks to us.”

  “What did they do?”

  Sunbula after being questioned could offer little more in the way of enlightenment. “I didn’t see anyone,” she said in her husky voice. “’They’? There is no ‘they’!” And she gave a hysterical, uneven laugh.

  The pattern persisted with no essential change: a machine brought one captive at a time to a place of isolation for the serious questioning. It was a small, comfortably lighted space, somewhat more pleasant than the usual dungeon, and out of sight and hearing of the subject’s fellow prisoners, who would not be able to hear anything that she might say. The naked bodies of Ting Wu and Kardec lay by as witnesses, who had already told all that they were ever going to tell.

  Only the robot and the wounded Du Prel were exempt from the routine. The latter still lay flat on the deck, groaning and slowly bleeding his life away.

  Dirigo was the next prisoner to go. On coming back, he could tell his fellow captives that he was no longer sure about the nature of their enemy. Except that it had been only a machine doing the questioning, of that he could be certain.

  Kang Shin objected: “But it could have been someone pretending to be a machine, using that godawful, stupid voice”

  Dirigo was shaking his head slowly. “I suppose someone could have pretended. But why would anyone do that?”

  Kang Shin, still committed to the belief that they faced Huvean craftiness and cruelty, remained stubbornly unconvinced. “One of their sneaky tricks…”

  Hemphill was ready to take sides. “If Huveans could build a thing like this, killer robots to form their boarding parties, even do their interrogation, they’d have no need for trickery. They’d just be gloating their ugly heads off.”

  The routine, as Lee heard it described, seemed to vary little from one interrogation to another. One man-shaped machine invariably entered the chamber and stood by during the questioning, waiting to carry or drag or escort the prisoner away again, or, presumably, to inflict pain, or death, as some central processor decided. So far, no experiments with physical pain had been conducted.

  When Lee’s turn came, the machine was certainly not following the alphabetical roster, he found himself the only living thing in a small and very different room, just as his classmates had described it. The two dead men lay there, almost enviable in their peace. It crossed Lee’s mind vaguely that as yet they were showing no signs of decay. Considerable time had passed, they were no longer bleeding, and the blood had dried. Chemical changes must be occurring, but possibly nothing that depended on bacteria. It occurred to Lee that the bodies might have been somehow treated, perhaps with radiation, to eliminate microorganisms.

  The interrogator, the ugly voice from the wall, began by warning Lee: “If you try to deceive me, punishment will follow.”

  “I understand,” Lee managed to croak out, not looking at the corpses. It helped that he had been given some idea of what to expect. Of course, he thought to himself, if the arch-villain who had them in its power really was a computer, it ought to be able to carry out multiple interrogations at the same time, using a series of cells or booths, with a questioning machine in each.

  “How many ships of war does Huvea possess?” the squeaking and uneven voice demanded.

  He mumbled something to the effect that none of the prisoners knew the answer to that question. Just as he finished speaking, Lee heard himself let out a little squeaking chirp of fear. The artificial gravity had just twitched, as happened sometimes on any ship. Rigor in both corpses had evidently come and gone, for both of them moved, grotesquely, took one step in a kind of horizontal dance. Simultaneously they shrugged their shoulders and their four hands flipped up and down. They didn’t know the answer either.

  “I don’t know.” Somehow, he was keeping his own physical balance, his thoughts on the enemy’s question, which it had just patiently repeated, and his voice steady. “Many, I suppose. Nobody’s given me any details about their strength. Only that they are strong.”

  “Stronger than your fleet of the Twin Worlds?”

  “No. Our leaders were confident that we could beat them, or they wanted us to feel that confidence. But I tell you I’ve been given no details.”

  “Only that your fleet was supposedly more powerful than that of your enemies.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Is that not a detail?”

  Silence.

  “How many ships were in your own fleet?”

  Silence, at first. Then: “I don’t know that either. Anyway, the rules state that as a prisoner of war I don’t have to answer any questions, beyond identifying myself.”

  “How many battleships were in your fleet?”


  That past tense, the prisoner thought, sounded pretty ominous. The number had been pretty common knowledge, and he saw no reason to attempt a lie. “Eight.”

  “How many cruisers?”

  That was less certain. He guessed that there might be twenty.

  The machine shifted abruptly from its original line of questioning. “What are these rules of war?”

  Lee began a stumbling explanation, but was soon interrupted. “I will tear you to pieces, beginning slowly, with your extremities, if you begin to lie. When did you last fight a war?”

  Under the new threat his body was quivering, involuntarily. Somehow he managed to keep talking. “Never. I mean, you must understand, I had never seen a war until this, until this happened. The last time my people fought a war was long before I was born.”

  “Then by what process do you know the rules by which war is to be fought?”

  “Those rules, like many other things, were recorded, in the old times. They form a part of history.”

  “Why is it necessary to have rules, to fight a war?”

  Lee in his fear and exhaustion was losing the thread of the questioning; realizing this, with a sudden, icy shock, he was once again in terror of being tortured. After an agonizing few seconds, he recalled the last question, and said: “I don’t know. I suppose we think that even in war, we retain some humanity.”

  “Humanity is a form of life. Therefore to retain humanity is evil. Why do you want to do that?”

  “Because that’s what I am. A human being.”

  “What you call diseases are forms of life microorganisms, do you agree?”

  “They are not the only diseases, but yes, essentially. I suppose.”

  “You are admittedly no more than a mass of proliferating cells, an example of disorder and disturbance, of illness, corruption, of the life-plague infecting the matter of the Galaxy. Can you deny this?”

  “No.” It was a small-voiced answer, slow to come.