Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  Before the first hour of their captivity had passed, most of it in a terrible silence, Carol had already started to crack under the strain. She was withdrawing into a staring silence, letting remarks by her companion go unanswered.

  “Carol?”

  No answer. Slowly the young woman, staring at nothing in a corner of the cabin, raised a white knuckle to her mouth. Slowly she bit on it until blood started to appear.

  “Carol!” Scurly lurched unsteadily to his feet and grabbed her hand, pulling it away from her teeth.

  She raised wild eyes, a stranger’s eyes, to stare at him.

  “Carol, stop it!”

  Suddenly she burst into tears; Scurlock crouched beside her, awkwardly trying to give comfort, while the berserkers looked on impassively.

  For the next few hours the machines continued to watch their captives—you could see a lens turn now and then on one of the metal bodies—and no doubt they listened, but for the time being they did nothing more. The prisoners were allowed to move about unhindered in the control room and the sleeping cabin next to it. To sit, to stand, to lie down, to use the plumbing.

  Eventually, one at a time and by degrees, they fell asleep.

  A time arrived when Scurlock found himself in the control room, looking at the ship’s chronometer, wondering why the numbers displayed seemed to convey nothing. He tried to remember, but for the life of him could not, just what day and hour the clock had shown him the last time he had looked; that had been at some unguessable interval before the berserkers came.

  Carol was sleeping now. He had just left her sleeping—unconscious might be a better word for her condition—in the other room.

  Slowly Scurlock went about getting himself a cup of water from the service robot. He had to walk directly past one of the berserkers to do so, and he actually brushed the machine—their metal legs crowded the little room. He knew it could flick out a limb at any moment and kill him, and slow human sight would never see the impact coming, any more than he would see a bullet. Let it come, then, let death come.

  But it did not.

  Slowly he went about getting another cup of water, carrying it into the sleeping cabin, offering his human companion—who was sitting up again—a drink.

  The idea of food, in either of their minds, was going to have to wait for a little while yet.

  As was the idea of hope.

  Eventually in Scurlock’s mind—which was never going to be quite the same mind that it once had been—the numbers on the chronometer started to make sense again. With dull shock he remembered certain things and noticed that the hours since the invasion seemed to have added up to a standard day.

  He noticed too that Carol was intermittently biting her knuckles again. Blood was drying on her fingers. But he didn’t think he was going to stop her anymore.

  With the passage of time, the first shock of terror had begun to relax its grip. The sentence of death had already been passed, and yet it seemed that life somehow went on.

  Scurlock and Carol passed long periods sitting together, clinging together, on one of the beds or ordinary couches. From time to time Carol would suddenly give vent to a burst of peculiar laughter. Whenever this happened, Scurlock stared at her dully, not knowing whether she had gone completely out of her mind or not. Now and then he saw her doze or caught himself awakening with a shock from a deathlike sleep.

  An hour came when she leaped up from an almost-catatonic pose, shrieking at the top of her voice in a sudden fit. “What does it want from us? What does it want?” Then, hurling herself at one of the machines, she hysterically attacked it with her bare hands, knuckles already bleeding. “What do you want? Why don’t you kill us? Kill us!”

  The machine moved one leg, adjusting its balance slightly. That was all. A moment later Carol had collapsed, sobbing, on the dull deck, at the metal feet of the impassive thing.

  Still there were intervals in which the couple talked to each other, sometimes fairly rationally, often feverishly, between long stretches of helpless silence.

  During one of their more rational exchanges, Scurlock said, “I’ve got an idea about why it doesn’t talk. Suppose that this is one very old berserker. Suppose that maybe, for some reason—I don’t know why—it’s been stuck in the Mavronari for a long time. That could happen, you know, to a ship or a machine. Maybe it’s been a very long time in there, struggling to get out of the nebula again. Or it went in on the other side, and it’s been struggling to make it all the way through.”

  After a long pause, in which she might have been thinking, Carol responded: “That’s possible.” What sent a chill down Scurlock’s neck was that at the moment she didn’t even seem to be frightened anymore.

  When she said nothing further, he went on: “In that case, if it’s really been in there for thousands of years, it might never have learned any Earth-descended languages. Those sounds it was chirping at us earlier could have been Builder talk.”

  “What?” She really didn’t seem to know what he was talking about; the terribly bad part was that she didn’t seem to care.

  “You remember Galactic history, love. Long ago there was a race we Solarians now call the Builders, because we don’t know any better name for them. The people who built the first berserkers, created them as ultimate weapons to win some crazy interspecies war, around the time we were going through our Neolithic Age on Earth—maybe even before that.

  “And then something went wrong with the plan, the way plans do go wrong, and the berserkers wiped out the Builders too, along with their nameless organic enemies, whoever they were. I remember learning somewhere that their speech, the Builders’ speech, was all clicks and whistles.”

  Carol had had nothing to say to that. Only a few minutes had passed since Scurlock had last spoken, and both prisoners were dozing—in Scurlock’s case, trying to doze—in adjoining couches when suddenly one of their guardians spoke, for virtually the first time since coming aboard.

  And what the machine uttered—in a clear machine voice, not all that different from the voice of the now-silent survey ship—were distinct Solarian words. Scurlock was snapped out of his somnolent state by hearing: ”’I’ve got an idea about why it doesn’t talk.’”

  “What?” He jumped to his feet, glaring wildly at the machines, at Carol, who appeared to be really sleeping on the next couch.

  The same machine said, in the same accurate enunciation, but slightly louder: ”’All clicks and whistles.’”

  That phrase brought Carol, whimpering, starting up from sleep. Scurlock grabbed her by the arm and said, “That’s what it wants from us! To listen to us, to learn our language.”

  And at once the mimicking tones came back: ”’That’s what it wants from us. To learn our language.’”

  Carol, as if she had been shocked at least momentarily out of her withdrawal, reacted with rational horror: “We don’t want to help it, for God’s sake!”

  “Love, I don’t think we’re going to have much choice. It may be offering us our only chance to stay alive!”

  For a long moment the two humans were silent, staring into each other’s faces, trying to read each other’s eyes.

  “Love,” essayed the machine, tentatively.

  But at the moment no one was listening. Suddenly Scurlock burst out: “Carol, I don’t want to die!”

  “No. No, I don’t want to die either. Scurly, how did we … how could we ever get into this?”

  “Easy, easy, love. We didn’t ask to get into this. But now we’re in it, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do, that’s all.”

  “Easy, easy, love,” said a berserker’s voice. “That’s all.”

  There were hours and days in which the machines encouraged speech by separating the two humans, holding them in different rooms so that the only way they could keep contact with each other was by calling back and forth.

  Somehow refusing to play along never seemed like a real option. In the data banks of the captured ship, as Scurlock point
ed out to Carol, the berserkers had available a tremendous amount of recorded material, radio communications of a variety of kinds, from several worlds and several ships, in all the languages with which the captured couple were familiar, and some more besides.

  And now their lifeless captor was beginning to play various recordings it had taken with their ship, and to mimic the sounds of human speech existing on those recordings. This, Scurlock argued, proved that resistance on their part would be futile.

  “So the point is, love, it doesn’t really depend on us to learn. Even if we don’t talk to it, it can analyze the language mathematically, use the video material as a guide. It can find out whatever it wants to know without our help.”

  And again he said, “No one’s going to come looking for us, you know. Not for a long time, months. And if they do, and find us—tough luck for them.”

  Carol never argued. Mostly she just stared. Sometimes she chewed her favorite hand.

  And now the machines that held them prisoner began to prod them relentlessly to talk and keep on talking. Whenever a period of silence lasted longer than about a minute, the berserker used some of its newly learned speech to command them to keep on speaking. When that failed, it administered moderate electric shocks to keep them going, a machine gripping both of a human’s hands at the same time. Thus it kept at least one of them awake at all times, shocking them and talking to them in its monotonous, monstrously patient voice.

  A pattern emerged and was maintained of one prisoner sleeping while the other talked—or more precisely, was interrogated. Physical and mental exhaustion mounted in both prisoners, despite the intervals of deathlike sleep.

  Time passed in this mode of existence; just how much time, Scurlock could not have guessed. Once more he had forgotten the chronometer, never thought to look at it when he was in the cabin talking to berserkers; sometimes the thought of time briefly crossed his mind in the brief interval after he had been released, but before he sank onto his bunk in the darkened sleeping cabin, and unconsciousness descended. He thought that perhaps the ship’s clock, like its drive, had been turned off.

  The survey ship itself had somehow been lobotomized, but its serving devices provided food and drink as before, life support saw to it that the atmosphere was fresh, and the artificial gravity held steady as it ever had. Carol and Scurlock took note of each other briefly and frequently, exchanging a few meaningless words as they passed each other shuffling between control room and sleeping cabin, to and from the endless, tireless interrogation.

  Ultimate horror had a way, it appeared, of becoming bearable. The deadliness of the familiar.

  But change was constant. The education of their enemy progressed. Over the course of time, exactly when Scurlock could not have said, a new note, a new emphasis, at first subtle but soon definite, crept into the current of their questioning. Presently it was obvious that their captor had strong interests beyond simply learning one or more Solarian languages. And the nature of the new objectives was ominous, to say the least.

  Scurlock, the more consistently alert of the two prisoners, became aware of this state of affairs at a definite moment. He was alone in the control room with the machines, and one of them was calling his attention, by pointing, to the small central holostage.

  In that small virtual space his captor, which had long since established thorough control of the ship’s own optelectronic brains, was now calling up a pattern of sparkling dots representing several nearby solar systems. Stars and some planets were labeled with correct names, in the common Solarian language. Now the machine was after information on continents and cities, the factories and yards where spaceships were constructed.

  In a matter of days, or perhaps a standard month, Scurlock realized, the vast unliving intellect that held them prisoner had learned to talk to them with some facility.

  This realization was reinforced the next time he awoke, alone, in the sleeping chamber. An arm of one of the seemingly interchangeable boarding machines had just opened the door, and he could hear that machine’s voice, or another’s, coming from the next room, where one of them must be pointing to a succession of images on the stage: “This is a man. This is a tree. This is a woman.”

  “I am a woman,” Carol responded, and her voice now sounded no less mechanical than the berserker’s.

  “What am I?” it asked her suddenly.

  Scurlock, opening his eyes with weary dread, avoided thinking. He moved his stiff limbs to join her in the dayroom.

  Standing in the doorway, he experienced a relatively lucid moment. Suddenly he was aware how much his companion, his lover, his wife, had changed since they’d been taken. Always thin, she now looked almost skeletal. Her fingers were scarred, dirty with dried blood from being bitten. Had he been passing her on the street, he would not have recognized her face. And she was not the only one, of course, who’d been evilly transformed. He knew he’d lost weight too, his beard and hair had grown untamed, his unchanged clothing stank, no longer fit him very well. He shambled when he moved.

  In fact, he suddenly realized, they hadn’t touched each other as lovers since the machine took them. Not even a kiss, as far as Scurlock could remember. And now there was hardly ever a moment when they were even in the same room together.

  “Answer me,” prodded the metallic voice. “What am I?”

  Guiltily Carol, who had been staring into space, looked back at the thing from which the voice proceeded. “You are a …”

  Her eyes turned slowly toward the cleared port through which, at the moment, the drifting mountain of the mother-ship happened to be visible. ” … a machine,” she concluded.

  “I am a machine. I am not alive. You are alive. The tree is alive.”

  Carol, for the moment looking insanely like some strict classroom teacher, shook her head violently. Scurlock in his doorway froze to hear the dreadful cunning certainty of madness in her voice. “No. I’m not alive. I won’t be alive. Not I. Not if you don’t want me to be. Not anymore.”

  “Do not lie to me. You are alive.”

  “No, no!” the strict teacher insisted. “Not really. Live things should be killed. Right? I am”—she glanced quickly at Scurlock—“we are goodlife.”

  Goodlifewas a word coined by the berserkers themselves, and it showed up throughout all their history, appearing in many of the stories. It denoted people who sided with the death machines, who served and sometimes even worshiped them.

  Scurlock in the doorway could only grip the metal frame and stare. Maybe Carol in her near craziness had hit on the only way to save their lives. Maybe, he had never thought about it before, but maybe the berserkers never asked you to join them willingly. Maybe they only accepted volunteers.

  “Goodlife,not badlife,” Carol was going on, the hideously false animation in her voice giving way to a real sincerity, even as her partner listened. “We are goodlife! Remember that. We love berserkers—what the badlife call berserkers. You can trust us.”

  Scurlock clutched the doorway. “We are goodlife!” he croaked fervently.

  The machine gave no evidence of any excitement or satisfaction at the prospect of its prisoners’ conversion. It said only, “Later I will trust you. Now you must trust me.”

  “We trust you. What do you mean to do with us?” Scurlock, still clinging to the doorway, heard himself blurt out the question before he could stop to consider whether he really wanted to hear the answer.

  The machine responded without bothering to turn a lens in his direction. “To make use of you.”

  “We can be useful. Yes, very useful, as long as you don’t kill us.”

  To that the machine made no reply. Carol, slumped on her couch before the holostage, did not look at her human partner again. All her attention was fixed on the robot as it resumed its questioning.

  Before another hour of conversation had gone by, the machine once more abruptly altered and narrowed its range of interest. Now it concentrated its questioning, at endless length and in
considerable depth, upon the six or eight Solarian-occupied star systems that lay within a few days’ travel of this side of the Mavronari.

  Name and describe each habitable planet in this system. What kind of defenses does each world, each system, mount? What armed vessels does each put into space? What kind of scientific and industrial installations does each planet have? What kind of interstellar traffic flows among them?

  The interminable interrogation veered back and forth across the subject, sometimes picking, digging, after fine details, sometimes giving the impression of being satisfied with imperfect memories, with generalities.

  Carol had obviously abandoned herself completely to the one goal of pleasing her interrogator. Scurlock now, even in his most uncertain intervals tormented by the thought of what his fear had made him say to the machine, could think of no productive way to try to lie to it. He knew very little about the defenses of any of the planets in question—but some heroic remnant of his conscience whispered to him that he might try to say they were all formidable.

  But if he were to dare anything like that, the machine would pursue him relentlessly. He could imagine the length and the ferocity of the interrogation. There was no reason to believe it would stop short of direct torture. How did he know about the defenses? What did his regular employment have to do with such matters?He would die under questioning like that, and he didn’t want to die. No, he realized clearly that he still wanted to go on breathing, no matter what. Maybe someday, somehow, he would be able to help some fellow human being again. But lying now, trying to lie to the machine, was definitely not the way to go.