Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  But he was now in some sense beginning to envision the possibility, in fact the necessity, of one day possessing a home somewhere.

  Since meeting Jenny new ideas had begun to fill Nick’s mind in profusion, multiplying explosively. Until now the coordinates of his physical location in the universe had been practically meaningless to Nicholas, but if and when he acquired a body, such matters would certainly have meaning for him.

  And then there was, as always, the berserker.

  Nick might, should he choose to be aggressive, beam himself directly toward the dark-hulled enemy. On arrival, assuming there were antennas that would let him in, he could try to negotiate a deal, one program to another. But Hawksmoor saw little likelihood of any benefit from such a step. He had no reason to think that his beamed self would be well received aboard the ominously silent berserker, or free to roam about at will. Whatever remained of the original power in charge there would not be friendly. Though Nick fully recognized the awesome danger of berserkers to humanity, he tended to think of them less as machines than as programs more or less like himself.

  Most likely no version of himself would be allowed aboard the berserker at all. And if it was, it might well be caught there in some electronic trap, caught and safely confined for leisurely dissection by the foe. After a berserker had subjected Nick’s alter ego to an exhaustive examination, it would have a much better idea of how to deal with his progenitor, stay-at-home Nick, homebody Hawksmoor, aboard the Premier’s yacht.

  An alternate plan would be to transmit some ineffective, weakened version of himself. But then if that entity was not trapped, was allowed to act at will when it arrived, it might well make some devastating blunder. Unless Nick were to dispatch Inferior Nick under the strictest orders to do nothing but facilitate the following transmission, in safety, of Nick Prime … and if he could depend upon that attenuated version of himself to follow orders …

  Complications upon complications. It was all too much.

  Would a berserker consider Jenny, a recorded human being, to be still alive, her death a good to be accomplished? And would its attitude be any different toward him?

  Despite the great amounts of time and effort expended on the question, no Solarian knew exactly what standard berserkers used in judging between life and nonlife, in deciding which components of the universe were animated by vital force and therefore must be destroyed as abominations—and which were safely dead or inanimate, and therefore tolerable or even good.

  Anyway, Nick doubted that a berserker would perceive Jenny—or him or any optelectronic person—as alive. Once he told her his opinion, and was glad that she seemed marginally relieved. But privately he thought the question was probably academic. Most likely a berserker would regard both Jenny and him as, if not alive, still dangerous oddities. Subjects to be experimented upon for the knowledge to be gained, and then to be snuffed out as treacherous devices, likely to behave with sympathy to the cause of life.

  But, Nick realized, he could be wrong.

  He had mentioned the subject once to Frank, in their discussions, and Frank had expressed doubt that the enemy used any of what Marcus had called “fancy psychology” to distinguish between the living and the satisfactorily dead. Berserkers probably applied some simple test or series of tests for anything organic. Some other possible interpretations of what it meant to be alive, used by humans themselves, would broaden the category to encompass even the berserkers, self-replicating machines with purposeful behavior.

  Some indefinable oddity in Marcus’s farewell message raised in Nick’s mind the possibility that this berserker, which had already demonstrated a predilection for letting its victims live, had taken Frank as a (more or less) fleshly prisoner. If so, might it not have already learned from Frank of Nick’s existence and his nature? Would the berserker then be able to foresee what course of action Nicholas Hawksmoor the artiman was most likely to attempt?

  To Nick in his present situation, all pathways seemed to lead into shadowy danger, for the Lady and for himself. And at the moment not one of those pathways showed any real glimpse of sunlight at the end.

  It was time to consult once more with Freya2 and to check on the automated search that Nick had instituted for protocolonists whose genetic patterns met Jenny’s and his own demanding specifications.

  Freya2, having been designed as a biddable co-conspirator, was quite ready to help Hawksmoor in his plan.

  With the cargo inventory system still scrambled as it was, Nick felt once more compelled to awaken Jenny to discuss with her the great progress in and remaining hard facts of their situation, the continued difficulty, despite long effort, of implementing either of the two possible solutions to their problem of obtaining bodies.

  Today the lady was moody, unwilling to hold such a discussion unless Hawksmoor forced her to do so. And he was reluctant to do that.

  Finally, reluctantly, he once more put her, stealthily but forcibly, to sleep.

  There were intervals—brief, so far—when Nick envied his companion her privilege of safe electronic sleep, oblivion on demand, whenever she felt like it. At least, thanks to him, she was as safe when sleeping as she was when awake.

  As for himself, he sometimes tried to practice sleeping, lightly—for a time, trying to accustom himself to what a breathing life would be like. Then, worried, he would snap back to full tireless alertness.

  TWELVE

  Hawksmoor now experienced moments when the most ordinary call of duty seemed a maddening distraction from his secret work for Jenny and himself. Even the enigmatic berserker, and the danger it represented to Jenny, to himself, and to his fleshly creators, shrank into the background.

  But this attitude could never endure more than a moment, because his experiments, all his hopes for an eventual life of peace and freedom with Jenny, also depended upon the outcome of the various external struggles. If the berserker should win, the pair of them could hope for nothing better than enslavement and destruction.

  In any case, Nick hastened whenever he could to rejoin his beloved within the Abbey’s sanctuary. Usually he had to wake her when he arrived—because, seeing her bitterly unhappy, he had put her to sleep, without asking her consent, before his previous departure. Jenny never protested these intervals of enforced unconsciousness. And during her meetings with Nick she still steadfastly refused to be beguiled by the prospect of any kind of “dream world”—that was her word—he might concoct in an effort to distract her.

  Hawksmoor dutifully restrained himself, both in movement and in observation, from ever crossing the threshold of Jenny’s luxurious bedchamber. This was the lady’s room, in which he held her privacy inviolate, where she went when she chose to sleep—or when he knocked her out.

  During their talks he questioned her often about the world of the body, exactly where and how it differed from this virtual reality. Her catalogue of variation was voluminous.

  And fascinating. In fact it was her world, her memories and descriptions of existence in the flesh, a life he had never experienced, that were seducing Hawksmoor. Day by day, hour by hour, under her influence Nick found himself changing, reveling in new thoughts and feelings. The world of organic humanity acquired in his daydreams a greater immediacy, a sharper reality than he would ever have believed possible.

  Meanwhile his own mode of existence, the one whose merits he had tried to sell to Jenny, was coming to seem drab, inadequate. Is thislife? he demanded of himself urgently, considering himself as a part of the world in which he dwelt—had always dwelt. He found himself in growing sympathy with her dissatisfaction. Is this all it means to be alive?The lightning speed and certainty of electronic thought, electronic movement, were not enough to compensate.

  There were times now when even his beloved Abbey provoked in him this feeling of repugnance.

  When that happened, he roamed abroad, into the farther reaches of the station’s circuitry, seeking a way out.

  Meanwhile his secret work continued. Still
the search continued for the precisely correct zygotes, the genes that would give them, Jenny and himself, exactly the bodies that they craved, to please each other and themselves.

  Drifting through the conductors and composites of many materials that wove the research facility into a kind of unity, turning on video eyes, looking at the statglass shells holding the invisible zygotes, Hawksmoor speculated about what quality of experience the protocolonists might know, lying as they were, helplessly inert, changeless, almost immune to time within their statglass tiles. He supposed a dozen or so paralyzed cells would be incapable of experiencing anything at all. But how was it possible to know that with certainty?

  More than once he had invited Jenny to come exploring with him in the great world (by which he could only mean more wires, more circuits), to roam the universe of the station’s electronics at his side.

  Several times she had hesitated on the threshold, on the brink of losing the Abbey’s comforting illusions, and flowing into and through a circuit. But she found it unendurable, and rejected any further suggestions along that line with revulsion and dread. “I’ll go back to the real world as a human being when I go back at all!”

  The implication that he was not human stung Nick badly; but he told himself that Jenny should not be blamed for what she said when she was so upset.

  Virtual reality, in her view, was bad enough. The mere thought of entering the even more alien cosmos of optelectronic circuits threatened her deepest perception of herself as human.

  There were moments when, in spite of early setbacks and difficulties, he felt almost confident of success in either finding or creating bodies for them both. At other times, in growing horror, he was overcome by dread that his wooing of Jenny, though it might have begun promisingly, was doomed to failure.

  Trying his clumsy best to express to this woman what he was feeling, Nicholas said to her: “Someday—it is my fondest wish that someday we will be happy, living together.”

  They were in the Abbey’s grassy garth, where she had first glimpsed this world of his devising. It was one of the places that made her feel most human. “Oh Nick. Dear Nicholas. If only it could be so.”

  “But the first step is to guarantee that you will have your body back. I know. I’m doing what I can.”

  “I’m sure you are, Nick.” She stared past him, into a world of memory that he had never made his own, where he could not really follow. “But sometimes … I despair.”

  Before replying he paused to make, unseen, an adjustment somewhere in the realm of control, a place where Jenny could not see—or rather, one where she had steadfastly refused to look. Still, his old hope would not die entirely, that she might learn to be happy with him here. If the body project came to nothing, ultimately.

  Then Nick urged: “Give me your hand.”

  She did that willingly enough. Then she stared in surprise as the image of his extended fingers passed through that of hers.

  “Did you feel that?” he asked. “Of course you did not. Nor did I. That was the best that I could do in imitating your world, when you first came to live with me.”

  Jenny’s image shuddered. “Don’t do that again! It’s horrible. It makes me feel like a ghost.”

  “Very well. I just wanted to show you, remind you, how much progress we have made.”

  The lady said nothing.

  Pausing briefly, Nick restored the adjustment he had made. Then he brought their hands together again. This time hers was unwilling, and he held her wrist with his free hand, exerting gentle force.

  The contact came. “Better?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” Considered visually, their virtually real fingers appeared to be pressing, pushing against each other solidly, no more capable of interpenetration than two dumb stones might be. Skin paled with the pressure.

  “Push harder, if you like.”

  “Don’t hurt me!”

  Instantly Nick pulled back. “I can’t hurt you, my love. Beyond the fact that I could never wish to do so, you no longer possess the capacity for physical pain; I took care at the start to make sure of that. But that absence may be one reason why it’s been difficult to get the sense of touch adjusted within the range of high fidelity.”

  “Nick?” Suddenly the numbness of despair gave way once more to pleading.

  “Yes?”

  “Can’t you make just a little bit of me real? Come up with enough blood and bone somewhere to make only my little finger, maybe, real and solid? Even if that meant having to put up with pain again?”

  Nick, finding this attitude discouraging, fell silent for a time. After a pause he tried once more to explain: “The only real solid that has any chance of existing in this Abbey, the only physical substance that might be claimed to exist in this whole private world of ours, is the polyphase matter used to construct certain parts of VR chambers—any VR chambers. The facility that the Premier and his breathing shipmates would have to use, should they ever decide to walk through my Abbey. I suppose if you and I were in the program when they did that, we might meet them somewhere in it.”

  “You said there could be no real people here besides the two of us.”

  “I said I couldn’t provide any, and I can’t. Under certain conditions, the people you call real would have the power of entering my world, our world, this world. But that is something they have to do on their own initiative—do you see?”

  “I think so. Then it is possible that I might meet another real person here—inside your Abbey.”

  “Yes, if we should run the Abbey program in the VR chamber—but I thought you didn’t want to do that.”

  “I don’t—I don’t.”

  “Touch my hand again?”

  Reluctantly she tried. This time the sensation seemed more realistic than ever before.

  “Better, my love?”

  “A little.”

  “I’m sure you can remember, from your earlier phase of life, the touch of other human fingers on your own. But I can only imagine what that must be like subjectively. Still, now that I have the station’s medical information banks to draw on in addition to my other sources, I have been able to reprogram both of us to feel what I imagine. And it means a great deal to me when you tell me that my programming is getting closer and closer to fleshly psychological reality.”

  The Lady Genevieve was silent.

  He urged her: “You have known the touch of someone else’s hand on yours. Tell me again whether the experience I have provided is the same.”

  Grudgingly she admitted: “In a way it is the same—or almost. I thinkit is almost the same. Or perhaps I think that only because you have—!” Genevieve broke off suddenly.

  “Only because I have what?”

  “Because you have somehow reprogrammed me, so that I now accept whatever my programmer tells me as the truth! If you say that this is how a human touch must feel, then that’s it, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I have not done anything like that.” Nick made his voice convey outrage. Then he paused. Certainly he hadn’t meant to do that. But—once he had started making subtle adjustments—could he be positive about what had happened?

  For some time now it had been at least in the back of Nick’s mind that, whatever delights the fleshly world might hold for them in years to come, the time ought to be ripe here and now in this world of his own to move on from simple touching, to make a start on the enormous project of trying to calculate and estimate and program all the delights of sexual love.

  But now, with the lady still so uncertain and reluctant regarding the most elementary interactions, he saw that trying to go forward would be hopeless.

  From time to time, hoping to learn more about the processes involved, Nick conducted certain tests on his secret companion. When he assured Jenny that these were necessary to learn more about how to accomplish her eventual downloading back to flesh, she gave her enthusiastic consent.

  Part of the drill involved probing for the last event of the lady’s fles
hly life that her memory retained. And this—though she could not really recognize the experience for what it was—turned out to be the last thing that had happened before her physical organs perished. The process of being recorded, as her body had lain in the medirobot’s couch, in the last awful minutes before brain death. Even at the time she had not understood what was really happening to her. Probably no suspicion of the truth had then entered her failing mind.

  The last thing Genevieve could remember unambiguously was being rescued from the courier, carried from its shattered hull, by Nick. She had thought at the time that she was being rescued in the conventional sense. The spacesuited, armored figure had come in and held her protectively in its arms. And in her relief she had kissed her rescuer.

  She told Nick now that she still retained the disturbing memory of a strange, unsettling emptiness perceptible inside that figure’s helmet. The recalled image came and went, as if the following knockout of short-term memory had all but wiped that view away.

  Nick pondered whether the recording process, which had taken place in part after the main systems of her fleshly body had ceased to function, constituting as it did an electronic tracing of patterns, a draining, a pillaging of cells that had already begun to die in millions—whether that process in itself had tended to reinstate the short-term memory otherwise disabled.

  Still he was unable to persuade Genevieve to venture out, even for a moment, from her VR sanctuary into the world of more prosaic circuitry. She spent all her time, with Nick, or alone, within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. The place was so huge she could not avoid the feeling that years of subjective time would be required to explore it with all the attention its details deserved. There were a vast number of things within and around the building complex that she wanted to think about and examine—even more things in which she would have been interested had not her own condition come to obsess her almost to the exclusion of other thoughts.