Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  Polly’s homeworld was also considerably closer to Base Four Twenty-Five than were most of the other colonies. Therefore it was less susceptible—both in theory and historically—to berserker attack. Still the Yirrkalans, not content to rely on the Space Force, had never skimped on their ground defenses; and now even these already formidable installations were being hastily improved to counter the improvement recently evident in the berserkers’ weaponry.

  All in all, the place offered relative security, as much security as human existence in the Milkpail ever had, which was at best considerable. Domingo, disembarking on a robotic stretcher from the newly landed ship with Polly walking at his side, could see, beyond the glass walls of the port, a near horizon of pleasant hills, under a whitish sky mottled with many colors, predominantly blue. The captain’s battered body was swathed in blankets as he came rolling off the ship, but the air he could feel on his face was almost comfortably warm. The distant white giant sun of this system was hidden in nebular clouds, but its light came filtering through the sky to make an indirect judgment upon this little world, touching all its surfaces with ghostly frost.

  Vineyards and floral gardens covered most of the land that the newly arrived patient was able to see on his first look around outside the surface spaceport. In the direction where the horizon looked most distant there were ranks of the familiar screens and diffraction filters used as life-collection machinery, the same kinds of harvesting equipment that were common to most Milkpail worlds.

  “Here come my people now,” said Polly cheerfully.

  Domingo looked down past his foot. Two figures that had to be Polly’s sister and brother-in-law, Irina and Casper, were on hand, wrapped in coats of synthetic fur, to meet the travelers just outside the port. Irina resembled her husband more than she did Polly, being somewhat plump and with a placid air about her. She and Casper had with them Polly’s two children, who immediately claimed most of their mother’s attention.

  The children were a boy and a girl, Ferdy and Agnes, about six and eight years old respectively, if Domingo remembered how to judge. He thought that neither of the kids looked much like their mother. Judging from the violence of the greeting they gave her, there was no doubt that they remembered who she was. Both children stared at Domingo with grave eyes, then looked away again, appearing to be impressed with their first sight of him on his robotic stretcher; he supposed they had heard some story of heroics. Their aunt and uncle were polite enough on being introduced, but not so much impressed.

  He smiled at all of them as best he could and said hello, wanting to prepare for himself the smoothest possible environment in which to get on with the business of his recovery. The stretcher’s wheels hissed faintly on the ramp bringing him down and away from the spaceport. Casper and Irina walking near him made friendly conversation, but still they seemed somewhat ill at ease.

  They all rode in a private groundvan—a rented vehicle that could hold the stretcher—through streets lined with genengineered trees that made the scene look like pictures from old Earth. This was a bigger world than Shubra, but still most of humanity would have thought it very small. Polly’s small house was out on the far edge of the settlement, but driving to it at moderate speed took much less than an hour. Most of the way they traveled through flower gardens and banks of life-collecting machines. The machines held up fine grids and nets to draw in the microscopic and near-microscopic organisms that came down out of the nebula, out of the sky.

  The little two-story house, set in its own hectare of grounds, was somehow different from what Domingo had anticipated, though he could not have said just what he had been expecting. The little dwelling had been unoccupied for some time, they said, but Casper and Irina had been busy getting it ready for Polly’s arrival and of course Domingo’s, too.

  Polly and her patient moved into the house at once, along with Polly’s children. The appearance, Domingo realized, was that he had acquired an instant family. But there weren’t any neighbors close enough to be misled by appearances.

  His stretcher was guided into a small bedroom on the ground floor, next to Polly’s room, as she explained. The kids’ rooms were upstairs—Agnes and Ferd were evidently not used to a two-story house, and the mere idea of being upstairs was enough to enchant them.

  Domingo rested on his stretcher in his new room and thought about berserkers, while other people took care of the moving in. Not that there was very much to be done.

  On the day of his arrival on Yirrkala he was capable of dragging himself from stretcher to bed and back again, and of using his best hand to feed himself with only a minimum of human or robotic help, but that was about the extent of what he could manage. He had his room to himself at night—except for occasional look-in visits from Polly the nurse who slept next door—and from the start he often took his meals alone.

  The first days of his stay passed uneventfully. The kids banged around in rooms nearby, upstairs and downstairs, or outside in their fur coats and caps, rollicking in the ever-ghostly light. Sometimes the young ones yelled, in anger at each other or just in celebration of life. They were on some kind of school holiday, Domingo gathered, and so around the house most of the time. Every once in a while their mother murmured them into temporary quietness, and when murmuring didn’t work she took stronger measures to see that the patient wasn’t disturbed unduly. But the patient assured her that the noises of life really didn’t bother him.

  He even understood why they didn’t bother him. It was because life, as life, no longer meant anything to him, one way or the other. Domingo didn’t bother to bring that insight to Polly’s attention, but perhaps she sensed it anyway.

  His appetite was no problem, not from the time that he was strong enough to chew. His teeth were still in good shape. He didn’t much care what he ate, food was food, strengthening the body for its remaining purpose. On Yirrkala his devoted nurse saw to it that he got good food, and on Yirrkala he ate well from the start and grew in strength.

  Faithfully the captain performed his prescribed exercises, some of them with the special robot that had been shipped to him for the purpose. The thing had arms and grips sticking out all over it, so it looked like an athlete melded with his own equipment. Some of the exercises he did with Polly, who took the opportunity to try to psychologize him and to find out how determined he still was to go after Leviathan. He was still determined. She was obviously much concerned about his welfare, his mental and emotional health. Too bad for her, Domingo thought in silence.

  Casper and Irina lived at some little distance, or said they did, and so they came to visit only occasionally. On their visits they smiled at Domingo and chatted with him, but he could tell that in general they disapproved of his presence in Polly’s house, and especially in Polly’s life.

  That was all right with him. He didn’t say so, but he meant to be gone from both as soon as he possibly could.

  Still, there were moments when Domingo was almost tempted to dream about what life might be like if it were possible for him to stay here with Polly and her family. Almost tempted, but not quite. To be nursed indefinitely. Something like that … the stillborn dream was pointless, it had no conclusion, and seemed unlikely ever to develop one. And even this faint inclination to dream of the impossible, such as it was, faded as his strength and mobility returned.

  A standard month after Domingo’s arrival on Yirrkala, his weight was already approaching normal again, allowing for the subtracted limb. The robotic stretcher had already been abandoned in favor of a semirobotic wheelchair, in which he could get around pretty much by himself. Both of his arms were working adequately now, but he was still a one-legged man—the prosthesis was going to be installed later, back at the base hospital.

  The children, in free moments between sessions of play and the occasional jobs their mother thought up for them, had shown a continuing interest in various stages of his progress. He was still popular with Ferd and Agnes, and he wasn’t sure just why. Neither of them s
pent that much time actually in his presence. Maybe that was the explanation.

  Little Agnes once asked the captain if he had any kids of his own at home. He told her no, not any more he didn’t, and at that point had provided some distraction and she had let it go at that.

  Able to stand up at last, lurching and crutching his way across the room on one foot to get his first really good close look at himself in the mirror since his injury, Domingo was struck by how different his face appeared from the last time he could remember seeing it. He stared into the optical glass, wondering at himself. Not so much at the gross physical scars and alterations, though those were certainly great enough. The most noticeable of them in the mirror now, aside from the missing leg, was a twisty scar, not yet fully obliterated by the surgeon’s art, that wound down one side of his jaw and neck and into his collar. The scar ended a little below that, fading indeterminately into his shoulder.

  But he thought his face showed greater transformations than that, though the skin and flesh of it were pretty much back where they were supposed to be. Alterations deeper than that, greater even than the missing leg, had taken place, molding him into someone he did not understand.

  He was still pondering when, beside his own face in the mirror, he caught a glimpse of Polly passing the open doorway of his room. The house was always kept quite warm, for his benefit, he supposed, and she was wearing almost nothing today as she moved about overseeing the machinery that did the housework. She looked just as she had when Domingo had first met her: compactly built, agile and shapely; an attractive young woman. Domingo was aware of her attractiveness, but only in an abstract way. She had no regular man, as far as he could tell, at least she never spoke of one. And she was drawn to Domingo. He knew that too, he could remember it as from an earlier life, and he could feel it now.

  Sometimes it bothered him that he was making use of her and her feelings, that her investment in him was going to repay her nothing. Or at least he felt it ought to bother him.

  But the feeling of vague guilt never lasted for long. Nor did he spend much time considering his failure to understand himself, to relate himself as he was now to the man he used to be. Actually he had little time to worry about those things, because they were basically unessential. Because there was something else that demanded almost all his thought and energy, something that he had to do.

  Still—Polly and her children. They gave his mind a place to rest from planning, the only place it had. They provided something of a ready-made family, or the appearance of one, at least. But the sight of the little girl, especially, reminded Domingo painfully of his own daughters.

  As for Polly herself … Domingo had not really thought at all about women, as women, since well before the berserker mangled his body. Not since what had happened on Shubra, in fact. His body was functional now, his physical strength was gradually returning, but he still had no urge to think of Polly, or anyone else, in that way.

  Still looking into the mirror, Domingo found himself keeping a wary eye on the robot exercise machine that was waiting behind him. It was, or ought to be, a comical-looking device, with the gymnastic tools protruding from it everywhere. Polly made jokes about it sometimes, and he smiled to be sociable. But it had never struck him as amusing. It would be a while yet, he supposed, before he could feel at ease in the presence of any smart machine. That was one of the things he was going to have to train himself to do before he got back into his ship. His ship was a machine too, and he was going to have to use it.

  Yes, in the mirror his face looked different.

  The captain began to get out of the house on milder days, when real frost and dew were dissipated by the energy of the white glowing sky. Then one day the four of them, he and Polly and the two kids, took off on the Yirrkalan version of a summer outing. They went as far as getting into a boat, going for a cruise on one of the small outdoor bodies of open water. Domingo’s wheelchair wore a flotation collar, just in case.

  From the boat, cruising through the fantastic rock grottoes that edged the convoluted pond, they looked at a profusion of marvelous floating flowers. They stared at fighting flowers, plants that grappled with one another in slow motion and tried to drown one another’s floating pads. They talked about what life was and speculated, half playfully, on what gods there really were. At least Polly speculated, and tried to get Domingo to do so, too. The children had a couple of ideas to contribute, but mainly they were obsessed with tossing pebbles.

  Neither did the captain have much to say to advance the discussion. All Domingo could see when he looked for gods was a jagged wall of metal, trimmed here and there with blue flames. That and dirty fragments of a white dress.

  There were genengineered fish, too, in this Yirrkalan pond, the biggest of them strange silvery harmless monsters, long as a man’s arm, that went gliding about in the cold, almost murky depths. If you could really call these depths, two or three meters at the most.

  The kids had somehow developed a scary legend of the deepest part of the pond, and they took turns relating it and elaborating on it. A big fish lived down there under a gloomy shelf of rock, a fish bigger than any of the others …

  “And, and, you know what his name is, Uncle Niles?” Child-eyes growing wide with excitement. With fear, was more like it.

  “I know. I know that, yes.”

  The answer didn’t have a chance, because again there was a timely distraction from a sibling. No one in this world or any other wanted to hear any of his newly discovered final answers.

  A little later, feeling sorry for his nurse and wanting to be reassuring, he said banally: “This is a nice world, Polly.”

  Impulsively though still quietly, she burst out: “Stay here. Stay with us.” Then she looked as if she were afraid her words might scare him off.

  All he could say was something noncommittal; then those words of his own sounded so bad he wished he could have them back, too. But they were gone.

  An hour or so later, having regained the ability to chat inconsequentially—the children practically enforced that—they came back to the house. Berserkers were for the moment as close to being forgotten as they could be.

  An unfamiliar groundcar was parked in front of the house, and a man was waiting in it. A bulky figure got out of the groundcar as Polly’s vehicle pulled up. Gujar Sidoruk had come to Yirrkala for a visit and was waiting to see them—to see Domingo in particular.

  At first Gujar didn’t seem changed at all. “You’re looking good, Niles. Real good.”

  “Considering.”

  “No, I mean it. Real good. Well, yeah, of course, considering everything.”

  Presently the two men were sitting in the house and talking; Polly’s children demanded her immediate attention.

  Gujar began telling the captain about the state of his, Gujar’s, feelings. He was still grieving for Maymyo and for everyone else the machines had slaughtered. He still wanted to cry whenever he thought of her, and there were times when he did cry; and up until now he hadn’t been able even to make an effort to resume some kind of normal life.

  The bulky man looked half collapsed as he tried to talk about it. “I still think of her all the time.”

  Domingo said: “I do, too.” He reflected that he himself didn’t look collapsed at all, though a couple of months ago he had been half dead. Anyway, he’d just been told that he looked good, and he believed it. He added: “Is that what you came to tell me?”

  Gujar said: “No. At first I didn’t want to go back to Shubra. Because it would remind me too much of—everything. But now I think I am going back. I’ve been visiting there again, and … I think she’d want me to. I figured you’d be going on with your hunting, but I wanted to tell you that I can’t.”

  “I was counting on your help, Gujar. The thing that killed her is still out there. Killing more.”

  Gujar got up from his chair and shuffled around, as if embarrassed. “The Space Force’ll do a better job of hunting it than I can. I don’t
want to spend my life …”

  Polly had got caught up on her mothering for the time being. She had come back into the room, and was listening sympathetically to this line of argument, or complaint, or whatever it was. But so far she was not saying anything. She’d never tried to argue Domingo out of his purpose, or even insisted on a long discussion of the subject with him. For which he was grateful.

  Gujar went on: “There are plans for reconstruction on Shubra, Niles.”

  “I suppose there are.” That harsh voice of his was back at full strength now, sounding just as it had before he had been almost destroyed. Listening to it, Polly realized for the first time that these days Domingo sometimes sounded like a berserker himself. Not that she had ever heard one of them speak, but in stories when they spoke they usually sounded a lot like that.

  “Heavier ground defenses of course, to start with.” Gujar had overcome sorrow and was beginning to sound almost enthusiastic. “That goes without saying. I want to look over some of the new installations on this rock while I’m here.”

  Domingo didn’t say anything to that. He sat in the robotic wheelchair scowling, thinking with silent contempt of ground defenses and people who let such things occupy their minds.

  His visitor kept trying to make him enthusiastic, too. “There’s no shortage of people. I mean, new people ready to come in and settle …”

  “I saw some of them once, back at the base.”

  “Oh?”

  “In fact, I gave them a little speech.”

  “Oh?” Gujar didn’t understand at all. He wouldn’t have made an acceptable second-in-command … but he was going on talking anyway: “Sector says they have more than enough applicants. And Sector’s willing to capitalize a new colony again. They have a big stake out here in the Milkpail now.”