Berserker b-1

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Good. Bad.” His hand reached to take hold of hers; he had removed his suit gauntlets. He swayed back and forth as if she attracted and repelled him at the same time. She wanted to scream and wail for him, to tear apart with her fingers the mindlessly proceeding metal that had made him what he was.

  “We’ve got them!” It was Hemphill, coming back from the stage, where the recorded tirade went on unrelentingly. He was exultant. “Don’t you see? He’s showing what must be a complete catalogue, of every star and rock they own. It’s a victory speech. But when we study those charts we can find them, we can track them down and reach them!”

  “Hemphill.” She wanted to calm him back to concentration on immediate problems.” How old are those images up there? What part of the galaxy were they made in? Or do they even come from some other galaxy? Will we ever be able to tell?”

  Hemphill lost some of his enthusiasm. “Anyway, it’s a chance to track them down; it’s information we’ve got to save.” He pointed at Goodlife. “He’s got to take me to what he calls the strategic housing; then we can sit and wait for the warships, or maybe get off this damned thing in a boat.”

  She stroked Goodlife’s hand, soothing a baby. “Yes, but he’s confused. How could he be anything else?”

  “Of course.” Hemphill paused to consider. “You can handle him much better than I.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Hemphill went on: “Now you’re a woman, and he appears to be a physically healthy young male. Calm him down if you like, but somehow you’ve got to persuade him to help me. Everything depends on it.” He had turned toward the stage again, unable to take more than half his mind from the star charts.” Go for a little walk and talk with him; don’t get far away.”

  And what else was there to do? She led Goodlife from the theater while the dead man on the stage clicked and shouted, cataloguing his thousand suns.

  Too much had happened, was still happening, and all at once he could no longer stand to be near the badlife. Goodlife found himself pulling away from the female, running, flying down the passages, toward the place where he had fled when he was small and strange fears had come from nowhere. It was the room where the machine always saw and heard him, and was ready to talk to him.

  He stood before the attention of the machine, in the chamber-that-has-shrunk. He thought of the place so, because he could remember it clearly as a larger room, where the scanners and speakers of the machine towered above his head. He knew the real change had been his own physical growth; still, this compartment was set apart in a special association with food and sleep and protective warmth.

  “I have listened to the badlife, and shown them things,” he confessed, fearing punishment.

  “I know that, Goodlife, for I have watched. These things have become a part of my experiment.”

  What joyous relief! The machine said nothing of punishment, though it must know that the words and actions of the badlife had shaken and confused his own ideas. He had even imagined himself showing the man Hemphill the strategic housing, and so putting an end to all punishment, for always.

  “They wanted me—they wanted me to—”

  “I have watched. I have listened. The man is tough and evil, powerfully motivated to fight against me. I must understand his kind, for they cause much damage. He must be tested to his limits, to destruction. He believes himself free inside me, and so he will not think as a prisoner. This is important.”

  Goodlife pulled off his irritating suit; the machine would not let the badlife in here. He sank down to the floor and wrapped his arms around the base of the scanner-speaker console. Once long ago the machine had given him a thing that was soft and warm when he held it . . . he closed his eyes.

  “What are my orders?” he asked sleepily. Here in this chamber all was steady and comforting, as always.

  “First, do not tell the badlife of these orders. Then, do what the man Hemphill tells you to do. No harm will come to me.”

  “He has a bomb.”

  “I watched his approach, and I disabled his bomb, even before he entered to attack me. His pistol can do me no serious harm. Do you think one badlife can conquer me?”

  “No.” Smiling, reassured, he curled into a more comfortable position.” Tell me about my parents.” He had heard the story a thousand times, but it was always good.

  “Your parents were good, they gave themselves to me. Then, during a great battle, the badlife killed them. The badlife hated them, as they hate you. When they say they like you, they lie, with the evil untruth of all badlife.

  “But your parents were good, and each gave me a part of their bodies, and from the parts I made you. Your parents were destroyed completely by the badlife, or I would have saved even their non-functioning bodies for you to see. That would have been good.”

  “Yes.”

  “The two badlife have searched for you. Now they are resting. Sleep, Goodlife.”

  He slept.

  Awakening, he remembered a dream in which two people had beckoned him to join them on the stage of the theater. He knew they were his mother and father, though they looked like the two badlife. The dream faded before his waking mind could grasp it firmly.

  He ate and drank, while the machine talked to him.

  “If the man Hemphill wants to be guided to the strategic housing, take him there. I will capture him there, and let him escape later to try again. When finally he can be provoked to fight no more, I will destroy him. But I mean to preserve the life of the female. You and she will produce more goodlife for me.”

  “Yes!” It was immediately clear what a good thing that would be. They would give parts of their bodies to the machine, so new goodlife bodies could be built, cell by cell. And the man Hemphill, who punished and damaged with his fast-swinging arm, would be utterly destroyed.

  When he rejoined the badlife, the man Hemphill barked questions and threatened punishment until Goodlife was confused and a little frightened. But Goodlife agreed to help, and was careful to reveal nothing of what the machine planned. Maria was more pleasant than ever. He touched her whenever he could.

  Hemphill demanded to be taken to the strategic housing. Goodlife agreed at once; he had been there many times. There was a high-speed elevator that made the fifty mile journey easy.

  Hemphill paused, before saying: “You’re too damn willing, all of a sudden.” Turning his face to Maria. “I don’t trust him.”

  This badlife thought he was being false! Goodlife was angered; the machine never lied, and no properly obedient goodlife could lie.

  Hemphill paced around, and finally demanded: “Is there any route that approaches this strategic housing in such a way that the machine cannot possibly watch us?”

  Goodlife thought. “I believe there is one such way. We will have to carry extra tanks of air, and travel many miles through vacuum.” The machine had said to help Hemphill, and help he would. He hoped he could watch when the male badlife was finally destroyed.

  There had been a battle, perhaps fought while men on Earth were hunting the mammoth with spears. The berserker had met some terrible opponent, and had taken a terrible lance-thrust of a wound. A cavity two miles wide at the widest, and fifty miles deep, had been driven in by a sequence of shaped atomic charges, through level after level of machinery, deck after deck of armor, and had been stopped only by the last inner defenses of the buried unliving heart. The berserker had survived, and crushed its enemy, and soon afterward its repair machines had sealed over the outer opening of the wound, using extra thicknesses of armor. It had meant to gradually rebuild the whole destruction; but there was so much life in the galaxy, and so much of it was stubborn and clever. Somehow battle damage accumulated faster than it could be repaired. The huge hole was used as a conveyor path, and never much worked on.

  When Hemphill saw the blasted cavity—what little of it his tiny suit lamp could show—he felt a shrinking fear that was greater than any in his memory. He stopped on the edge of the void, drifting the
re with his arm instinctively around Maria. She had put on a suit and accompanied him, without being asked, without protest or eagerness.

  They had already come an hour’s journey from the airlock, through weightless vacuum inside the great machine. Goodlife had led the way through section after section, with every show of cooperation. Hemphill had the pistol ready, and the bomb, and two hundred feet of cord tied around his left arm.

  But when Hemphill recognized the once-molten edge of the berserker’s great scar for what it was, his delicate new hope of survival left him. This, the damned thing had survived. This, perhaps, had hardly weakened it. Again, the bomb under his arm was only a pathetic toy.

  Goodlife drifted up to them. Hemphill had already taught him to touch helmets for speech in vacuum.

  “This great damage is the one path we can take to reach the strategic housing without passing scanners or service machines. I will teach you to ride the conveyor. It will carry us most of the way.”

  The conveyor was a thing of force fields and huge rushing containers, hundreds of yards out in the enormous wound and running lengthwise through it. When the conveyor’s force fields caught the people up, their weightlessness felt more than ever like falling, with occasional vast shapes, corpuscles of the berserker’s bloodstream, flickering past in the near-darkness to show their speed of movement.

  Hemphill flew beside Maria, holding her hand. Her face was hard to see, inside her helmet.

  This conveyor was yet another mad new world, a fairy tale of monsters and flying and falling. Hemphill fell past his fear into a new determination. I can do it, he thought. The thing is blind and helpless here. I will do it, and I will survive if I can.

  Goodlife led them from the slowing conveyor, to drift into a chamber hollowed in the inner armor by the final explosion at the end of the ancient lance-thrust. The chamber was an empty sphere a hundred feet across, from which cracks radiated out into the solid armor. On the surface nearest the center of the berserker, one fissure was as wide as a door, where the last energy of the enemy’s blow had driven ahead.

  Goodlife touched helmets with Hemphill, and said: “I have seen the other end of this crack, from inside, at the strategic housing. It is only a few yards from here.”

  Hemphill hesitated for only a moment, wondering whether to send Goodlife through the twisting passage first. But if this was some incredibly complex trap, the trigger of it might be anywhere.

  He touched his helmet to Maria’s. “Stay behind him. Follow him through and keep an eye on him.” Then Hemphill led the way.

  The fissure narrowed as he followed it, but at its end it was still wide enough for him to force himself through.

  He had reached another vast hollow sphere, the inner temple. In the center was a complexity the size of a small house, shock-mounted on a web of girders that ran from it in every direction. This could be nothing but the strategic housing. There was a glow from it like flickering moonlight; force field switches responding to the random atomic turmoil within, somehow choosing what human shipping lane or colony would be next attacked, and how.

  Hemphill felt a pressure rising in his mind and soul, toward a climax of triumphal hate. He drifted forward, cradling his bomb tenderly, starting to unwind the cord wrapped around his arm. He tied the free end delicately to the plunger of the bomb, as he approached the central complex.

  I mean to live, he thought, to watch the damned thing die. I will tape the bomb against the central block, that so-innocent looking slab in there, and I will brace myself around two hundred feet of these heavy metal corners, and pull the cord.

  Goodlife stood braced in the perfect place from which to see the heart of the machine, watching the man Hemphill string his cord. Goodlife felt a certain satisfaction that his prediction had been right, that the strategic housing was approachable by this one narrow path of the great damage. They would not have to go back that way. When the badlife had been captured, all of them could ride up in the air-filled elevator Goodlife used when he came here for maintenance practice.

  Hemphill had finished stringing his cord. Now he waved his arm at Goodlife and Maria, who clung to the same girder, watching. Now Hemphill pulled on the cord. Of course, nothing happened. The machine had said the bomb was disabled, and the machine would make very certain in such a matter.

  Maria pushed away from beside Goodlife, and drifted in toward Hemphill.

  Hemphill tugged again and again on his cord. Goodlife sighed impatiently, and moved. There was a great cold in the girders here; he could begin to feel it now through the fingers and toes of his suit.

  At last, when Hemphill started back to see what was wrong with his device, the service machines came from where they had been hiding, to seize him. He tried to draw his pistol, but their grippers moved far too quickly.

  It was hardly a struggle that Goodlife saw, but he watched with interest. Hemphill’s figure had gone rigid in the suit, obviously straining every muscle to the limit. Why should the badlife try to struggle against steel and atomic power? The machines bore the man effortlessly away, toward the elevator shaft. Goodlife felt an uneasiness.

  Maria was drifting, her face turned back toward Goodlife. He wanted to go to her and touch her again, but suddenly he was a little afraid, as before when he had run from her. One of the service machines came back from the elevator to grip her and carry her away. She kept her face turned toward Goodlife. He turned away from her, a feeling like punishment in the core of his being.

  In the great cold silence, the flickering light from the strategic housing bathed everything. In the center, a chaotic block of atoms. Elsewhere, engines, relays, sensing units. Where was it, really, the mighty machine that spoke to him? Everywhere, and nowhere. Would these new feelings, brought by the badlife, ever leave him? He tried to understand himself, and could not begin.

  Light flickered on a round shape a few yards away among the girders, a shape that offended Goodlife’s sense of the proper and necessary in machinery. Looking closer, he saw it was a space helmet.

  The motionless figure was wedged only lightly in an angle between frigid metal beams, but there was no force in here to move it.

  He could hear the suit creak, stiff with great cold, when he grabbed it and turned it. Unseeing blue eyes looked out at Goodlife through the faceplate. The man’s face wore a neat short beard.

  “Ahhh, yes,” sighed Goodlife inside his own helmet. A thousand times he had seen the image of this face.

  His father had been carrying something, heavy, strapped carefully to his ancient suit. His father had carried it this far, and here the old suit had wheezed and failed.

  His father, too, had followed the logical narrow path of the great damage, to reach the strategic housing without being seen. His father had choked and died and frozen here, carrying toward the strategic housing what could only be a bomb.

  Goodlife heard his own voice keening, without words, and he could not see plainly for the tears floating in his helmet. His fingers felt numbered with cold as he unstrapped the bomb and lifted it from his father . . .

  Hemphill was too exhausted to do more than gasp as the service machine carried him out of the elevator and along the air-filled corridor toward the prison room. When the machine went dead and dropped him, he had to lie still for long seconds before he could attack it again. It had hidden his pistol somewhere, so he began to beat on the robotlike thing with his armored fists, while it stood unresisting. Soon it toppled over. Hemphill sat on it and beat it some more, cursing it with sobbing breaths.

  It was nearly a minute later when the tremor of the explosion, racing from the compounded chaos of the berserker’s torn-out heart, racing through metal beams and decks, reached the corridor, where it was far too faint for anyone to feel.

  Maria, completely weary, sat where her metal captor had dropped her, watching Hemphill, loving him in a way, and pitying him.

  He stopped his pointless pounding of the machine under him, and said hoarsely: “It’s a trick, an
other damned trick.”

  The tremor had been too faint for anyone to feel, here, but Maria shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She saw that power still seemed to be on the elevator, and she watched the door of it.

  Hemphill went away to search among the now-purposeless machines for weapons and food. He came back, raging again. What was probably an automatic destructor charge had wrecked the theater and the star-charts . They might as well see about getting away in the boat.

  She ignored him, still watching an elevator door which never opened. Soon she began quietly to cry.

  The terror of the berserkers spread ahead of them across the galaxy. Even on worlds not touched by the physical fighting, there were people who felt themselves breathing darkness, and sickened inwardly. Few men on any world chose to look for long out into the nighttime sky. Some men on each world found themselves newly obsessed by the shadows of death.

  I touched a mind whose soul was dead . . .

  PATRON OF THE ARTS

  After some hours’ work, Herron found himself hungry and willing to pause for food. Looking over what he had just done, he could easily imagine one of the sycophantic critics praising it: A huge canvas, of discordant and brutal line! Aflame with a sense of engulfing menace! And for once, Herron thought, the critic might be praising something good.

  Turning away from his view of easel and blank bulkhead, Herron found that his captor had moved up silently to stand only an arm’s length behind him, for all the world like some human kibitzer.

  He had to chuckle. “I suppose you’ve some idiotic suggestion to make?”

  The roughly man-shaped machine said nothing, though it had what might be a speaker mounted on what might be a face. Herron shrugged and walked around it, going forward in search of the galley. This ship had been only a few hours out from Earth on C-plus drive when the berserker machine had run it down and captured it; and Piers Herron, the only passenger, had not yet had time to learn his way around.