Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  Grateful at seeming to have got past the key point of the explanation without disaster, Hawksmoor went on, as delicately as possible, into the details. How he had reformed and reclothed the image of her body, plucking the vast quantities of necessary data out of the many video recordings of the lovely Lady Genevieve he happened to have on hand. Not just happened. His burgeoning worship of the lady had months ago caused him to begin to accumulate images of her—and the nearer the date of the wedding came, the more such images had been available.

  Nick might have related more details of the process by which he had created her image as it was today, a staggering number of details in fact. But already the lady had had enough. Briskly she interrupted his recital with an imperious demand that he at once start arranging for her return to an organic, fleshly body.

  “Nick, I understand, really I do, that your purpose in doing … what you have done was to save my life. And it worked, and I’m grateful, never think I’m not.”

  “My lady, it was the least that I—”

  “But I cannot go on living indefinitely like this, without a real body. How long is the restoration going to take?”

  Hawksmoor had been afraid of the moment when he had to face this question. “My lady, I am more sorry than I can say. But what you are asking can’t … Well, I just haven’t been able to discover any way in which it can be done.”

  As these words were spoken, the couple had rounded a columned corner and were, in terms of the virtual reality they shared, standing in the south transept of the Abbey, near the place Hawksmoor had learned ought to be called Poets’ Corner, because of the masters of the art who had been entombed or memorialized there. But the Lady Genevieve was not currently interested in poetry, or architecture either. She raised her eyes and looked around her, as if her imaged eyes could see through, beyond, the virtual world of stones and glass to whatever harsher, deeper fabric of realworld hardware was maintaining it.

  “Where are we, really?” she demanded.

  “In those terms, Jenny—if I may still call you that—we are now, as I have been trying to explain, aboard your husband’s yacht, the Eidolon—and no, he has not the faintest suspicion that you are here.”

  “He doesn’t even suspect?” Her tone was shocked, surprised, but—yes, he dared to think that her reaction was also one of hope. “I thought perhaps you were doing this at his orders.”

  That she might entertain such a suspicion had never occurred to Nick. He said: “I shall explain presently. But be assured that Premier Dirac has not the slightest inkling that you have survived in any form. He simply believes that you are dead, killed with the others who were aboard that courier when it exploded.”

  “So you haven’t told him.”

  To Nick’s immense relief, there had been more calculation than accusation in those words.

  He reassured her. “I have not told him or anyone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why have I not told your husband?” Suddenly he felt nervous and uncertain. “There are reasons. I am not going to apologize for my behavior, but you certainly deserve an explanation.”

  “Well?”

  “Yes. The first time we met, Jenny … I mean the first time you were able to look at me and respond to me … there in that great laboratory room aboard the bioresearch station—even before there was any hint of a berserker attack—I received the impression that you were deeply unhappy. Was I wrong?”

  She hesitated.

  “Was I wrong?”

  She was looking at some kind of marble monument encased in wooden cabinetry, with antique letters spelling CHAUCER carved into the stone. He could tell her the fascinating history of that memorial if she was interested. But right now she was just staring. At last she said: “No. No, Nick, I don’t suppose that you were wrong.”

  “I knew it! And now you have admitted that you fear your husband. I too have been living with him in a sense, you see, if only briefly. I know, as you know, that our Premier is not the easiest person in the Galaxy to get along with.”

  At that the lady smiled wanly.

  Hawksmoor went on: “The Premier and I, sometimes … well, all is not always well between us, my creator and me.

  “You see, Jenny, at first, when I was getting you out of the courier, transporting you to my medirobot, deciding that recording your mind was the only way to save it—all that time I had no idea of keeping your rescue a secret. No conscious plan. But then, I remember thinking, before telling the world that you were saved, I had better make sure that you had come through the recording process in good shape—which, let me hasten to assure you, you have done.”

  “And then?” the lady prompted.

  “Well, I determined that I was going to make sure you had the right to choose,” Nick burst out. “I mean, the right to choose whether you wanted to go back to him or not.”

  “Go back to him?” Jenny was stunned, uncomprehending. Then wild hope leaped up in her eyes. “You mean that after all you can restore me to my body?”

  “I—no, I thought I had explained, I cannot do that. No one can. Your body has been totally destroyed.”

  “But then how could I go back to him? What do you mean by such a question? How can I go back to anyone when I’m in this condition?”

  “I suppose the only real way in which you could go back to him,” said Nick in measured tones, “would be to visit him, to talk to him from a holostage. Perhaps to meet him in some virtual space, as we are meeting now.”

  “To meet him in some imaginary world, like this? Or to gaze at him from a holostage? What good is that to anyone?” The lady was starting to grow frantic once again. “What good is it to Dirac, especially? To a man who married me to start a dynasty? In his world of politics, being married to an electronic phantom will mean nothing, nothing at all. No, my husband must never know what has happened to me, at least not until you have brought me back to real life. He must never see me this way! He might—” She let the sentence die there, as if she were afraid to complete it.

  “There are alternatives, of course,” said Nick after a short interval. His own desperation was growing. “I think they are excellent alternatives. The fact is that you and I—that there are ways in which we might have a life together. Eventually, with others like ourselves—”

  “Like ourselves? You mean unreal? Only programs, images?”

  “It is a different form of life, I admit. But we—”

  “Life? Is this a life? I tell you, I must have a body.” The lady, interrupting, almost screaming, waved her imaged arms. “Skin and blood and bones and sex and muscles—can you give me those?”

  Hawksmoor exerted his best efforts to explain. But she wasn’t particularly interested in the technical details. She wanted him to cease his protests that getting her a body was impossible, and to get on with the task of doing it, somehow, at any cost.

  But at the same time—this was a new development, and it certainly gave Nick new hope—she didn’t want him to leave her alone. It was painfully lonely in the Abbey, Genevieve complained, when he was absent.

  Hawksmoor experienced great joy at the discovery that the lady missed him. Still, he was going to have to leave her sometime. “I could provide people,” he suggested.

  “Real people?”

  “Well, at the moment, no. Currently your companionship would be limited to somewhat distant figures, like the verger. Maybe a small crowd having a party in the next room or around the pool, the sounds, the distant images of people singing, dancing?”

  “And I could never join them. No thanks, Nick. Just come and see me when you have the time. And you must, you really must, try to bring me some good news.”

  “I’ll do that.” And he went away, projected his awareness elsewhere, fled down the pathway of an exit circuit, returning to duty fired with a new resolve, because she hadn’t wanted him to leave.

  Before he left, a small thing but about all that he could do, Nick had shown her how to put herself to sleep. />
  He was bitterly disappointed, though he told himself he had no right to be, at the savage reaction, absolutely unjustified as far as he could see, of the woman he loved. He had meant to offer her a joyous future.

  Also, he was really sure, down at the most fundamental level of his programming, that her demand to be restored to flesh was going to prove impossible to meet. Nowhere in his flawless, extensive memory was there any indication that the mass of data comprising an optelectroperson (authorities differed on the proper term to cover both kinds of programmed people), either organic or artificial in origin, had ever been successfully downloaded to an organic brain.

  At the pair’s next meeting, which came only minutes later in what fleshly folk would have counted as real time, Jenny, as she continued trying to come to terms with the harsh facts of her new existence, showed that she felt some repentance for her stridency and seeming lack of gratitude. She was, she now insisted repeatedly, really grateful to Nick for saving her in the only way he could. She agreed that surely, surely this shadowy existence among shadowy images was better than being dead.

  From the way she repeated this over and over, Nick got the impression that she might be endeavoring to convince herself.

  Hawksmoor was happy to be thanked, but he still felt deeply wounded that the woman he loved could so reject his world, his whole existence. He still worshiped this woman—more than ever, now that she was of his kind. If womanwas still the right word for what she had become—yes, it was, he would insist on that—and if worshiphad ever been the right word for what he felt.

  Love? The data banks to which he had access and the troubled presence, the enigmatic position, of that word in them assured him that it would admit of no easy definition.

  What he felt, he knew, some people would insist upon defining as one mass of programming hankering for another.

  In his timidity he had found the matter difficult to explain to the Lady Genevieve, but he had begun to have such feelings for her well before he had ever managed to get close enough for them to interact. It had all started when he had first seen her image, many months before her unlucky journey to Imatra.

  She had now been long enough in his world that it had become necessary for him to explain the degrees of difference, in his world, between perception and interaction. All that anyone, fleshly or optelectronic, ever sawof any other person was an image, was it not?

  On a succeeding visit to the Abbey he tried again. The lady did seem to be touched eventually by his pleas and arguments; she admitted that she liked Nick too, she really did. But she would not admit any lessening of her need to regain a body somehow, anyhow. On that point, she warned him, there was going to be no compromise. And she needed the cure, the restoration, as soon as possible: why wasn’t he working on the problem now?

  And when Hawksmoor made yet another effort, very tentative, to persuade her out of that demand, she quickly gave evidence of falling again into a fit of screaming panic.

  Under the circumstances Nick would have promised anything. Therefore he took the solemn oath she insisted that he take to work on the problem of obtaining for her what she called a real body, a mass of matter as fleshly as the one she had been born with, as healthy and attractive, as satisfactory in every way. And he swore also that his efforts would not fail.

  Having thus pacified his Jenny for the moment, Hawksmoor took polite leave and went away.

  He went away from her and from the Abbey, entering circuits that took him in effect a step closer to the universe of organic beings. He was thinking to himself as he undertook this shift of viewpoint that someone, sometime, on some ship or planet in the Solarian portion of the Galaxy, must have at least attempted such a downloading of human personality from hardware to organic brain.

  But when, in his next hurried intervals of free time, he tried to dig into the subject, Hawksmoor soon discovered that all of the data banks to which he could routinely gain access—which included all those he was aware of on the yacht—were silent on the subject of fitting electronic personalities into organic brains, and on certain closely related topics as well. Rather strangely silent, it seemed to Nick now. Could it be that the Boss, interested as he was in related matters, wanted to discourage others from experimenting in the field?

  It even crossed the optelectronic mind of Nicholas Hawksmoor to wonder: Was it possible that knowledge of such matters was being systematically kept from him? He couldn’t think of any reason why it should be so. Unless the Boss thought that for some reason he, Nick, was likely to tinker with himself in such a way. But there was no chance he’d want to do such a thing … or there hadn’t been, till now.

  He didn’t see how it could be possible to get anywhere at all in the effort to provide Jenny with a body using only the equipment currently available on the yacht. But it occurred to Nick that if his combative boss should catch up with the kidnapped bioresearch station, and should somehow, miraculously, against all odds, succeed in retrieving that facility from the berserker essentially undamaged—that facility just might make the feat possible.

  Then mentally Nick shook his head.

  Even supposing the mission should be such a highly improbable smashing success that the research station equipment indeed became available, there wouldn’t of course be time for Nick or anyone else to use it before the squadron and its prize returned to Imatra.

  Would there?

  Nick’s own information banks contained mention of some kind of quasi-religious cult on certain Solarian worlds, whose devotees promoted human recording as a try at spiritual immortality. He had the impression that this subject either was or had been one of Premier Dirac’s own private interests. The Premier was rumored to have had some connection with the cult.

  It was common knowledge that Frank Marcus had agreed to accept, for the duration of the emergency, the job of chief pilot of the Premier’s yacht. It was part of his agreement with the Premier that Frank, until combat seemed imminent, would be relieved of many or most routine pilot’s tasks, by one or more slightly lesser-rated mortals.

  It seemed evident from the size and segmented shape of Colonel Marcus’s metal body (his bodies, rather; Kensing had noticed that he changed modules from time to time) and from the small amount of organic nourishment he took (and the form in which he took it, a kind of gruel) that there couldn’t be a whole lot of his original, organic body left by now. Whispered guesses ranged down to as little as five kilograms, if the amount of organic nourishment he ingested was any clue. But however much he’d lost, Kensing would have staked his own life that the colonel was surely no recording; you had to be with him, talk with him, for only a short time to be sure of that.

  Frank generally took care of the mixing and pouring in of his organic food himself—sometimes a serving robot did it at his direction—and there were times, when Frank was off duty and ready to relax, when he included a few drops of some fine Peruvian (or other) brandy.

  And certain rumors were passed about: supposedly more than one of the female crew members were now able, and on occasion willing, to testify to the fact that the man who dwelt in the boxes still retained organic maleness.

  Other rumors circulated also, none of them seemingly more than half serious. Test one of them on Frank, as Kensing did, mention to him any suspicion going the rounds to the effect that Frank’s organic brain was long since dead, his mind had been recorded years ago, and he’d blast you with a raucous laugh. Sure, his brain functioned with computer assists sometimes, accepted optelectronic augmentation when he was at the helm of a ship, but any human pilot had to take advantage of those when things got rough. There was never any doubt, in Frank’s own mind at least, as to which component of himself, organic or electronic, was fully in charge. And Marcus had several times said vehemently, and was not shy about saying it again, that he was never going to allow himself to be recorded.

  Dirac, admiring, had said that if Frank himself had not been available, he would have tried to get someone like him, a man
or woman who lived in marcus boxes, as his number one pilot when combat against berserkers loomed as it did now. Over the last few decades, perhaps a century, the Marcus name had become eponymous for—or Frank the eponymous originator of—certain special equipment used by Solarian humans who suffered very severe physical disability. But people in marcus boxes were extremely rare. Almost everyone who had to deal with serious bodily impairment could benefit from, and much preferred, organic rebuilding. The whole body outside the brain could generally be repaired or replaced, and usually the new flesh was remarkable in its duplication of, perhaps even an improvement on, the shape of the original.

  Whether Frank himself had any compelling medical reason to live in his boxes now, instead of having his fleshly frame regrown, perhaps only the medical officer aboard the Eidoloncould have said—and ethics of course prevented any casual testing of rumors there.

  Nor did it seem that anyone present—except of course the Premier himself, who seemed to have no interest in the question—would have the nerve to ask the colonel directly.

  Someone speculated that while Colonel Marcus must have originally—some centuries ago—been housed in his present form for compelling medical and technical reasons, he probably now preferred to retain the massive hardware for reasons of his own.

  Only Nick among the other available pilots could meld as thoroughly as Frank with a diversity of modern machines. And in fact Nick was among those who now took regular shifts at the helm of the Eidolon.When he was taking his turn, the pilot’s acceleration couch stood empty.

  Early on in the chase, Dirac, after consultation with his advisers, both human and systemic, ordered an advance at superluminal velocity, despite the considerable risk involved in taking even small c-plus jumps in this cluttered region of space. Going faster than light was the only way they could be sure of catching the berserker.

  Superb piloting could cut the risk to some degree. Hawksmoor was among the first to admit that Frank, like a few other organic Solarian humans, possessed a fine touch in the control of, the melding with, machinery that even Nick could not duplicate. The marvels of a still-organic brain, which were as yet imperfectly understood, provided Frank’s mind, both conscious and unconscious, with the little extra, the fine edge over pure machine control that enabled the best human pilots sometimes, under favorable conditions, to seize a slight advantage over even the best of pure machine opponents.