Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  Hell, a mass of fortified metal miles in diameter, received him and his racer through its main entrance. He got out of his ship and found himself able to breathe and walk and see where he was going; the physical environment in Hell was for the most part mild and pleasant, because prisoners did not as a rule survive very long, and the computer-brains of the berserker did not want to impose unnecessary stresses upon them.

  The berserker devices having immediate control over the routine operations in Hell were themselves in large part organic, containing culture-brains grown for the purpose and some reeducated captured brains as well. These were all examples of the berserker’s highest achievements in its attempts at reverse cybernation.

  Before Ordell had taken a dozen steps away from his ship, he was stopped and questioned by one of these monsters. Half steel and circuitry, half culture-flesh, it carried in three crystal globes its three potentially-human brains, their too-smooth surfaces bathed in nutrient and woven with hair-fine wires.

  “Why have you come here?” the monster asked him, speaking through a diaphragm in its midsection.

  Only now did Ordell begin at all to make a conscious plan. At the core of his thought was the knowledge that in the human laboratories music was used to tune and tone the culture-brains, and that his own music was as superior for that purpose as it was by all other standards.

  To the three-headed monster he sang very simply that he had come here only to seek his young wife, pure accident had brought her, ahead of time, to the end of her life. In one of the old formal languages in which he sang so well of deep things, he implored the power in charge of this domain of terror, this kingdom of silence and unborn creatures, to tie fast again the thread of Eury’s life. If you deny me this, he sang, I cannot return to the world of the living alone, and you here will have us both.

  The music, which had conveyed nothing but its mathematical elements to the cold computer-brains outside, melted the trained purpose of the inner, half-fleshly guardians. The three-brained monster passed him on to others, and each in turn found its set aim yielding to the hitherto unknown touch of beauty, found harmony and melody calling up the buried human things that transcended logic.

  He walked steadily deeper into Hell, and they could not resist. His music was leaked into a hundred experiments through audio-inputs, vibrated faintly through the mountings of glassite cases, was sensed by tortured nerve-cells through the changes in inductance and capacitance that emanated rhythmically from Ordell’s music-box. Brains that had known nothing but to be forced to the limit of their powers in useless calculation—brains that had been hammered into madness with the leakage of a millimicrovolt from an inserted probe—these heard his music, felt it, sensed it, each with its own unique perception, and reacted.

  A hundred experiments were interrupted, became unreliable, were totally ruined. The overseers, half flesh themselves, failed and fumbled in their programmed purposes, coming to the decision that the asked-for prisoner must be brought forth and released.

  The ultimate-controlling pure berserker computer, pure metallic cold, totally immune to this strange jamming that was wreaking havoc in its laboratory, descended at last from its concentration on high strategic planning to investigate. And then it turned its full energy at once to regaining control over what was going on within the heart of Hell. But it tried in vain, for the moment at least. It had given too much power to its half-alive creations; it had trusted too much to fickle protoplasm to be true to its conditioning.

  Ordell was standing before the two linked potentially-human brains which were, under the berserker itself, the lords and superintendents of Hell. These two like all their lesser kind had been melted and deflected by Ordell’s music; and now they were fighting back with all the electric speed at their command against their cold master’s attempt to reaffirm its rule. They held magnetic relays like fortresses against the berserker, they maintained their grip on the outposts that were ferrite cores, they fought to hold a frontier that wavered through the territory of control.

  “Then take her away,” said the voice of these rebellious overseers to Ordell Callison. “But do not stop singing, do not pause for breath for more than a second, until you are in your ship and away, clear of Hell’s outermost gate.”

  Ordell sang on, sang of his new joy at the wonderful hope that they were giving him.

  A door hissed open behind him, and he turned to see Eury coming through it. She was limping on her injured foot, which had never been taken care of, but he could see that she was really all right. The machines had not started to open her head.

  “Do not pause!” barked the voder at him. “Go!”

  Eury moaned at the sight of her husband, and stretched out her arms to him, but he dared do no more than motion with his head for her to follow him, even as his song swelled to a paean of triumphant joy. He walked out along the narrow passage through which he had come, moving now in a direction that no one else had ever traveled. The way was so narrow that he had to keep on going ahead while Eury followed. He had to keep from even turning his head to look at her, to concentrate the power of his music on each new guardian that rose before him, half-alive and questioning; once more each one in turn opened a door. Always he could hear behind him the sobbing of his wife, and the dragging stepping of her wounded foot.

  “Ordell? Ordell, honey, is it really you? I can’t believe ‘tis.”

  Ahead, the last danger, the three-brained sentry of the outer gate, rose to block their way, under orders to prevent escape. Ordell sang of the freedom of living in a human body, of running over unfenced grass through sunlit air. The gatekeeper bowed aside again, to let them pass.

  “Honey? Turn an’ look at me, tell me this is not some other trick they’re playin’. Honey, if y’love me, turn?”

  Turning, he saw her clearly for the first time since he had entered Hell. To Ordell her beauty was such that it stopped time, stopped even the song in his throat and his fingers on the keys of music. A movement free of the strange influence that had perverted all its creatures was all the time that the berserker needed to re-establish something close to complete control. The three-headed shape seized Eury, and bore her away from her husband, carried her back through doorway after doorway of darkness, so fast that her last scream of farewell could scarcely reach the ears of her man. “Goodbye … love …”

  He cried out and ran after her, beating uselessly on a massive door that slammed in his face. He hung there on the door for a long time, screaming and pleading for one more chance to get his wife away. He sang again, but the berserker had reestablished its icy control too firmly—it had not entirely regained power, however, for though the half-living overseers no longer obeyed Ordell, neither did they molest him. They left the way open for him to depart.

  He lingered for about seven days there at the gate, in his small ship and out of it, without food or sleep, singing uselessly until no voice was left him. Then he collapsed inside his ship. Then he, or more likely his autopilot, drove the racer away from the berserker and back toward freedom.

  The berserker defenses did not, any more than the human, question a small ship coming out. Probably they assumed it to be one of their own scouts or raiders. There were never any escapes from Hell.

  Back on the planet Zitz his managers greeted him as one risen from the dead. In a few days’ time he was to give a live concert, which had long been scheduled and sold out. In another day the managers and promoters would have had to begin returning money.

  He did not really cooperate with the doctors who worked to restore his strength, but neither did he oppose them. As soon as his voice came back he began to sing again; he sang most of the time, except when they drugged him to sleep. And it did not matter to him whether they sent him onto a stage to do his singing again.

  The live performance was billed as one of his pop concerts, which in practice meant a hall overflowing with ten thousand adolescent girls, who were elevated even beyond their usual level of excitement by the
miracles of Ordell’s bereavement, resurrection, and ghastly appearance—which last, his managers had made sure, was not too much relieved by cosmetics.

  During the first song or two the girls were awed and relatively silent, quiet enough so that Ordell’s voice could be heard. Then—well, one girl in ten thousand would scream it out aloud: “You’re ours again!” There was a sense in which his marriage had been resented.

  Casually and indifferently looking out over them all, he smiled out of habit, and began to sing how much he hated them and scorned them, seeing in them nothing but hopeless ugliness. How he could send them all to Hell in an instant, to gain for that instant just one more look at his wife’s face. How all the girls who were before him now would become easier to look at in Hell, with their repulsive bodies stripped away.

  For a few moments the currents of emotion in the great hall balanced against one another to produce the illusion of calm. Ordell’s deadly voice was clear. But then the storm of reaction broke, and he could no longer be heard. The powers of hate and lust, rage and demand, bore all before them. The ushers who always labored to form a barricade at a Callison concert were swept away at once by ten thousand girls turned Maenad.

  The riot was over in a minute, ended by the police firing a powerful tranquilizer gas into the crowd. One of the ushers had been killed and others badly hurt.

  Ordell himself was nearly dead. Medical help arrived only just in time to save the life in the tissues of his brain, which a thoroughly broken neck and other damage had all but isolated from the rest of his body.

  Next day the leading cybernetic-psychologist on Zitz was called in by Ordell Callison’s doctors. They were saving what remained of Ordell’s life, but they had not yet been able to open any bridge of communication with him. They wanted to tell him now that they were doing all they could, and they would have to tell him sometime that he could probably never be restored to anything like physical normality.

  Ercul and psychologist sank probes directly into Ordell’s brain, so that this information could be given him. Next he connected the speech centers to a voder device loaded with recordings of Ordell’s own voice, so that the tones that issued were the same as had once come from his throat. And—in response to the crippled man’s first request—to the motor-centers that had controlled Ordell’s fingers went probes connected to a music-box.

  After that he at once began to sing. He was not limited now by any need to pause for breath. He sang orders to those about him, telling them what he wanted done, and they obeyed. While he sang, not one of them was assailed by any doubt.

  They took him to the spaceport. With his life-support system of tubes and nourishment and electricity they put him aboard his racer. And with the autopilot programmed as he commanded, they sent him out, fired along the course that he had chosen.

  Ercul knew Ordell and Eury when he found them, together in the same experimental case. Recognizing his own work on Ordell, he felt certain even before the electroencephalogram patterns matched with his old records.

  There was little left of either of them; if Ordell was still capable of singing, he would never again be able to communicate a song.

  “Dols only two point five above normal bias level,” chanted the psychologist’s assistant, taking routine readings, not guessing whose pain it was he was attempting to judge. “Neither one of them seems to be hurting. At the moment, anyway.”

  In a heavy hand, Ercul lifted his stamp and marked the case. I certify that in this container there is no human life.

  The assistant looked up in mild surprise at this quick decision. “There is some mutual awareness here, I would say, between the two subjects.” He spoke in a businesslike, almost cheerful voice. He had been enough hours on the job now to start getting used to it.

  But Ercul never would.

  SOME EVENTS AT THE

  TEMPLAR RADIANT

  And the search for truth may be the life-work of a human mind. Praise be to those who have such a purpose—truly—in their hearts!

  All his years of past work, his entire future too, hung balanced on this moment.

  A chair forgotten somewhere behind him, Sabel stood tall in the blue habit that often served him as laboratory coat. His hands gripped opposite corners of the high, pulpit-like control console. His head was thrown back, eyes closed, sweat-dampened dark hair hanging in something more than his usual disarray over his high, pale forehead.

  He was alone, as far as any other human presence was concerned. The large, stone-walled chamber in which he stood was for the moment quiet.

  All his years of work … and although during the past few days he had mentally rehearsed this moment to the point of exhaustion, he was still uncertain of how to start. Should he begin with a series of cautious, testing questions, or ought he leap toward his real goal at once?

  Hesitancy could not be long endured, not now. But caution, as it usually had during his mental rehearsals, prevailed.

  Eyes open, Sabel faced the workbenches filled with equipment that were arranged before him. Quietly he said: “You are what human beings call a berserker. Confirm or deny.”

  “Confirm.” The voice was familiar, because his hookup gave it the same human-sounding tones in which his own laboratory computer ordinarily spoke to him. It was a familiarity that he must not allow to become in the least degree reassuring.

  So far, at least, success. “You understand,” Sabel pronounced, “that I have restored you from a state of nearly complete destruction. I—”

  “Destruction,” echoed the cheerful workbench voice.

  “Yes. You understand that you no longer have the power to destroy, to take life. That you are now constrained to answer all my—”

  “To take life.”

  “Yes. Stop interrupting me.” He raised a hand to wipe a trickle of fresh sweat from an eye. He saw how his hand was quivering with the strain of its unconscious grip upon the console. “Now,” he said, and had to pause, trying to remember where he was in his plan of questioning.

  Into the pause, the voice from his laboratory speakers said: “In you there is life.”

  “There is.” Sabel managed to reassert himself, to pull himself together. “Human life.” Dark eyes glaring steadily across the lab, he peered at the long, cabled benches whereon his captive enemy lay stretched, bound down, vitals exposed like those of some hapless human on a torture rack. Not that he could torture what had no nerves and did not live. Nor was there anything like a human shape in sight. All that he had here of the berserker was fragmented. One box here, another there, between them a chemical construct in a tank, that whole complex wired to an adjoining bench that bore rows of semi-material crystals.

  Again his familiar laboratory speaker uttered alien words: “Life is to be destroyed.”

  This did not surprise Sabel; it was only a restatement of the basic programmed command that all berserkers bore. That the statement was made so boldly now roused in Sabel nothing but hope; it seemed that at least the thing was not going to begin by trying to lie to him.

  It seemed also that he had established a firm physical control. Scanning the indicators just before him on the console, he saw no sign of danger … he knew that, given the slightest chance, his prisoner was going to try to implement its basic programming. He had of course separated it from anything obviously useful as a weapon. But he was not absolutely certain of the functions of all the berserker components that he had brought into his laboratory and hooked up. And the lab of course was full of potential weapons. There were fields, electric and otherwise, quite powerful enough to extinguish human life. There were objects that could be turned into deadly projectiles by only a very moderate application of force. To ward off any such improvisations Sabel had set defensive rings of force to dancing round the benches upon which his foe lay bound. And, just for insurance, another curtain of fields hung round him and the console. The fields were almost invisible, but the ancient stonework of the lab’s far wall kept acquiring and losing new flavori
ngs of light at the spots where the spinning field-components brushed it and eased free again.

  Not that it seemed likely that the berserker-brain in its present disabled and almost disembodied state could establish control over weaponry enough to kill a mouse. Nor did Sabel ordinarily go overboard on the side of caution. But, as he told himself, he understood very well just what he was dealing with.

  He had paused again, seeking reassurance from the indicators ranked before him. All appeared to be going well, and he went on: “I seek information from you. It is not military information, so whatever inhibitions have been programmed into you against answering human questions do not apply.” Not that he felt at all confident that a berserker would meekly take direction from him. But there was nothing to be lost by the attempt.

  The reply from the machine was delayed longer than he had expected, so that he began to hope his attempt had been successful. But then the answer came.

  “I may trade certain classes of information to you, in return for lives to be destroyed.”

  The possibility of some such proposition had crossed Sabel’s mind some time ago. In the next room a cage of small laboratory animals was waiting.

  “I am a cosmophysicist,” he said. “In particular I strive to understand the Radiant. In the records of past observations of the Radiant there is a long gap that I would like to fill. This gap corresponds to the period of several hundred standard years during which berserkers occupied this fortress. That period ended with the battle in which you were severely damaged. Therefore I believe that your memory probably contains some observations that will be very useful to me. It is not necessary that they be formal observations of the Radiant. Any scene recorded in light from the Radiant may be helpful. Do you understand?”

  “In return for my giving you such records, what lives am I offered to destroy?”