Brother Assassin

by Fred Saberhagen

  It could, he supposed, be something that they swung when hard stone and mortar had to be demolished—but that was hardly a satisfactory explanation. And if it was only a plumb line, why so weighty? A few ounces of lead would serve that purpose just as well.

  Whatever they had intended or used it for, it was a pendulum. The restraining tether of cord, with its single knot, looked insubstantial. Vincento thrummed the taut little cord with his finger, and the long, lone cable gently whipped and swayed. The massive weight made little bobbing motions, dipping like a ship at anchor.

  The oscillations quickly died away; the stillness of the cathedral soon regained ascendancy. Once more cord and cable and bob were as steady as the stone columns in the still gray air. The pendulum-ship was dry-docked.

  Set sail, then! On impulse Vincento tugged once at the end of the restraining cord. And with startling ease the knot dissolved.

  Starting from rest, the weight for a moment seemed reluctant to move at all. And even after it had undeniably begun its first swing, still it moved so slowly that Vincento’s eye went involuntarily racing once more up into the shadows of the spire, to see how it was possible that mere length of cord should so delay things.

  A man might have counted four without haste before the weight for the first time reached the center, the low point, of its swing. Almost touching the floor, it passed that center in a smooth fast rush and immediately began to slow again, so that it needed four more counts to climb the gentle gradient of the far half of its arc. Then the weight paused for an unmeasurable instant, not quite touching the column at the opposite corner of the crossways, before it crept into its returning motion.

  Majestically the bob went back and forth, holding its cable taut, describing a perfect arc segment about ten yards in length. Vincento’s eye could find no diminution in the amplitude of the first half-dozen swings. He supposed that a weight so heavy and so freely suspended as this might continue to oscillate for many hours or even for days.

  Wait, though. Here was something. Vincento squinted at the pendulum through one swing. Then, leaning against the column it had been tethered to, and holding his head motionless, he watched the pendulum’s swing end-on for another half-dozen cycles.

  What was it he had come in here for? Oh, yes, someone was perhaps going to meet him.

  But this pendulum. He frowned at it, shook his head and watched some more. Then he started to look around him. He was going to have to make sure of something he thought he saw.

  Some workmen’s sawhorses were standing not far away. He dragged a pair of these to where he wanted them, so that the plank he now took up and set across them lay beneath the end of the pendulum’s arc and perpendicular to that arc’s direction. On the bottom of the swinging weight he had noticed a projection like a small spike: whatever it had been meant for, it would serve Vincento’s present purpose well. He laid a second plank atop the first, and slightly readjusted the position of his whole structure, in careful increments. Now on each swing the spike passed within an inch of the topmost board.

  He would make marks upon the board … but no, he could do better.. Somewhere in here he had seen sand. Yes, piled in a mixing trough, there by the entrance to the first side chapel. The sand was satisfactorily damp from the long spell of wet weather; he brought handfuls of it and dumped them on his upper board. Along several feet of the board’s length he patted and built the sand into a tiny wall, an inch or two high and just thick enough to stand. Then, in an interval between swings, he slid that upper board just slightly forward, taking his sand wall into the edge of the pendulum’s arc.

  A neatly designed experiment, he thought with satisfaction. On its first return, the moving spike notched his little sand fence delicately, tumbling a tiny clot of grains down the minute slope. Then the weight pulled its taut cable away again, taking another slow nibble of eternity.

  Vincento held his eyes from blinking as he watched the pendulum’s return. Holding his breath too, he could now hear for the first time the faint ghostly hissing of the swing.

  The spike as it moved back to the wall of sand made a new notch, though one contiguous with the first. Then the weight once more departed, in a movement huge and regular enough to be the cathedral’s stately pulse.

  And sixteen seconds later the third notch was new again, by the same margin and in the same direction as the second. In three vibrations the plane of the pendulum had shifted its extremity sideways by half a finger-width. His eyes had not deceived him earlier; that plane was slowly and regularly creeping clockwise.

  Might this effect be due to some slow untwisting of the cable? Then it should soon reverse itself, Vincento thought, or at least vary in amplitude. Again he stared up into the high shadows, oblivious of his aching neck.

  If he could, he would someday, somewhere, hang another pendulum like this one and study it at leisure. Yes, if he could. Even supposing that his health held out and that he was spared prison, it would be difficult. Enclosed towers of this height were anything but common. In another big temple or at some university, perhaps—but he had no intention of stooping to collaboration.

  … Suppose now that the puzzling sideways progression was not due to the cable’s unwinding. He thought he could feel that it was not, in somewhat the same way as, after study, he had come to feel certain of the stability of the sun. This clockwise creeping had something too elemental about it for him to be able to credit a trivial cause.

  Already the width of two fingers had been nibbled from the top of his little parapet of sand.

  He wondered how the cable was fastened at the top. Younger legs than his would be required to find that out, and Vincento departed to obtain them. Several times in his passage down the nave he turned, frowning back at the ceaseless pendulum as he might have stared at an unexpected star.

  Of it all, Derron had seen only an upper segment of the moving cable. He saw even that much with only one eye, for his face was being held with steady force against the rough planking of the high platform to which he had been carried, helpless as a kicking infant in the grip of the berserker. Inhumanly motionless, it crouched over him now, one chill hand gripping his neck and holding part of his coat gaglike in his mouth, the other hand twisting one of his arms just to the point of pain.

  Obviously the machine had no intention of killing or crippling him, not here. Still, his captivity seemed less like a period of time than a segment of eternity, measured out by the meaningless regularity of the swinging cable. Having him prisoner, the berserker was content to wait, which meant he had already failed. He had not had time even to communicate his situation to Operations: the berserker had at once known his pectoral wedge for what it was; it had ripped the wooden carving from his neck and cracked it like a thin-shelled nut, squeezing the meat of metal and components into trash between its fingers.

  Perhaps it thought that he could see nothing from the position in which it held him. That was almost true. From the tail of one eye he could just descry that metronomic cable, its arc narrow at this height, but its slow movement speaking of its enormous length.

  At last the cathedral door far below boomed shut for the second time since he had been captured. And only then did eternity begin to come to an end; the berserker let him go.

  Slowly and painfully he raised his half-numbed body from the wood. Rubbing the cheek that had been ground against the platform and the arm that had been twisted, he turned to face his enemy. Under the monk’s cowl he saw a pattern of seamed metal that looked as if it might be able to open and slide and reshape itself. He knew that he was facing what was probably the most complex and compact machine that the berserkers had ever built. Inside that steel skull, could there be plastic skin that could evert to become the convincing mask of a human face? There was no way to tell that much, let alone guess what identity it might be able to wear.

  “Colonel Odegard,” it said, in a voice machine-tailored to neutrality.

  Taken somewhat by surprise, he waited to hear more, whi
le the thing facing him on the high platform squatted on its heels, arms hanging limp. The hands were as ambiguous as the face; they were not human now, but there was no saying what they might be able to become. The rest of the body was hidden under the shapeless robe, which had probably once been Amling’s.

  “Colonel Odegard, do you fear the passage from life to not-life?”

  He didn’t know what he had expected to hear, but hardly that. “And if I do, what difference does it make?”

  “Yes,” said the berserker in its flat voice. “What is programmed goes on, regardless of any passage.”

  Before he could try to make any sense out of that, the machine jumped precisely forward and grabbed him again. He struggled, which of course made no difference. It tore strips from his coat, ripping the tough cloth with precise and even sounds. With the strips it gagged him again and tied him hand and foot—tightly, but not so tightly that he felt no hope of ever working free. It was not going to blunder into being responsible for a death here in the safety zone.

  After it had bound him, the machine paused for a moment, moving its cowled head like a listening man, searching the area with senses far beyond the human. And then it was gone down the ladder in utter silence, moving less like a man than like a giant cat or an ape.

  He could only strain desperately to get free, the gag choking back his curses.

  A second group of peasants, from some village higher in the hills, had come along the road to the cathedral. It was Brother Saile they met first; when they learned that he was not the saint and miracle worker of whom the whole countryside was talking, a brief glow of hope died from their faces, leaving only bitter anxiety.

  “Tell me, what is it you wish to see Brother Jovann about?” Saile inquired magisterially, clasping his hands with dignity across his belly.

  They clamored piteously, all at once, until he had to speak sharply to get them to talk one at a time and make sense. Then he heard that, for several days past, a great wolf had been terrorizing their little village. The monstrous beast had killed cattle and even—they swore it!—uprooted crops. The peasants were all talking at once again, and Saile was not sure if they said a child had been devoured, or if a herd boy had fallen and broken his arm, trying to get away from the wolf. In any case, the villagers were desperate. Men scarcely dared to work their fields. They were isolated, and very poor, with no powerful patron to give them aid of any kind, save only the Holy One Himself! And now the saintly Jovann, who must and would do something! They were utterly desperate!

  Brother Saile nodded. In his manner there showed sympathy mixed with reluctance. “And you say your village is several miles distant? In the hills, yes. Well—we shall see. I will do my best for you. Come with me and I will put your case before good Brother Jovann.”

  With a puzzled Will now walking beside him, Vincento entered the cathedral once more and made the best speed that he could down the nave. Back at the monastery, Rudd had chosen this time to bother him with warnings and complaints about the scarcity of food for the beasts. And when he had disentangled himself from that, his old legs had rebelled against climbing the hill a second time, even with Will’s help. Now as Vincento hurried, wheezing for breath, back to his still-swinging pendulum, more than an hour had passed since he had first set the bob in motion.

  For a few seconds he only stared in thoughtful silence at what had happened since his departure. The tiny battlement of sand had been demolished by continuous notches, up to the point where the pendulum’s turning plane had left it behind altogether. That plane had by now inched clockwise through ten or twelve degrees of arc.

  “Will, you’ve helped me in the workshop. Now this is another such case, where you must follow my orders precisely.”

  “Aye, master.”

  “First, keep in mind that you are not to stop the swinging of this cable here or disturb it in any way. Understood?”

  “Aye.”

  “Good. Now I want you to climb; there seem to be ladders and platforms enough for you to go up all the way. I want to discover how this swinging cable is mounted, what holds it at the top. Look at it until you can make me a sketch. You have a fair hand at drawing.”

  “Aye, I understand, sir.” Will craned his neck unhappily. “It’s a longish bit o’ climbin’, though.”

  “Yes, yes, a coin for you when you’re down. Another when you’ve given me a good sketch. Take your time now, and use your eyes. And remember, do not disturb the cable’s swing.”

  Derron had made only moderate progress toward getting the bonds loosened from his wrists when he heard clumsier feet than the berserker’s climbing toward him. Between the ladder’s uprights, Will’s honest face came into view, then predictably registered shock.

  “Bandit!” Derron spat, when his hands had been cut free and he could rid himself of the gag. “Must’ve been hiding in here somewhere … forced me up here and tied me up.”

  “Robbed ye, hey?” Will was awed. “Just one of’em?”

  “Yes, just one. Uh … I didn’t have any valuables with me, really. Took the wedge from around my neck.”

  “That’s fearsome. One o’ them lone rogues, hey?” Wondering and sympathetic, Will shook his head. “Likely he’d a’ slit your throat, sir, but didn’t want to do no real sacrilege. Think he might still be hereabout?”

  “No, no, I’m sure he was running away. Long gone by this time.”

  Will went on shaking his head. “Well. You’d better liven up your limbs, sir, before you starts to climb down. I’m going on up, bit of a job to do for master.”

  “Job?”

  “Aye.” Will was already climbing again, seemingly meaning to go right on up into the spire.

  Still on all fours, Derron peered down over the edge of the platform. Vincento’s ginger-colored hair marked a toy figure more than a hundred feet below. Down there the mysteriously moving cable ended in a dot, a ball of some kind that was tracing back and forth with sedate regularity. Derron had seen a pendulum of this size and shape before, somewhere. It had been used as a demonstration of…

  Derron’s muscles locked, after a moment in which he had been near falling over the platform’s edge. He had suddenly realized what Vincento was looking at, what Vincento doubtless had been studying for most of the time Derron had been held captive. On old Earth they had honored its earliest known inventor by naming it the Foucault pendulum.

  “Honorable Vincento!”

  Vincento looked around in surprise and annoyance to discover the young man, Alzay or Valzay or whatever his name was, hurrying toward him in obvious agitation, having evidently just descended from the tiny coiled stair where Will had just begun his climb.

  Valzay came hurrying up as if bringing the most vital news, though when he arrived all he had to relate was some imbecilic story about a bandit. Valzay’s eyes were looking sharply at the sawhorses and planks and the little wall of sand, even as he spouted pestiferous wordage that threatened to tangle Vincento’s thoughts.

  Vincento interrupted him. “Young man, I suggest you give your recital to the soldiers.” Then he turned his back on the intruder. Now. If it was not the cable untwisting, and if it proved to be not some trick of the mounting above—then what? Certainly the bones of the cathedral were not creeping counterclockwise. But yet … His mind strained forward, sounding unknown depths… .

  “I see, Messire Vincento, that you have already discovered my little surprise.” Derron saw very clearly how the game was certain to go, how it perhaps had gone already. But he also saw one desperate gamble that was still open to him and he seized the chance.

  “Your—little—surprise?” Vincento’s voice became very deliberate. His brows knit as if presaging thunder, while he turned slowly back to face Derron. “Then it was you who sent that rascally friar to me in the night?”

  The detail of the friar was confirmation, if any was needed, of what the berserker planned. “It was I who arranged this!” Derron gestured with proprietary pride at the pendulum. “I
must confess, sir, that I have really been here for several days; at first in the company of some friends, who aided me in this construction.”

  It was a big lie that Derron was improvising, and one that would not stand investigation. But if it had the initial impact that he hoped it would, Vincento would never want to investigate.

  As he told the silent, grim old man how he and his imaginary aides had installed the pendulum, Derron visualized the berserker here at work, catlike, monkey-like, devilish, arranging mounting and cable and weight in order that…

  “… you see before you, Messire Vincento, a firm proof of the rotation of the globe!”

  There was a startled gleam in the old eyes, but no real surprise. Beyond a doubt the desperate gamble had been justified. Now, to see if it could be won, Vincento had become a waiting statue, mouth twisted, eyes unblinking.

  Derron spoke on. “Of course, I have followed your example, distinguished sir, and that of several of our contemporaries, in protecting my rightful claim to this discovery while still keeping it secret for my own advantage in further research. To this end I have sent to several distinguished persons, in several parts of the world, anagram messages which encode a description of this experiment.

  “Thus to keep the secret yet awhile was, as I say, my plan. But when word reached me of your present—difficulties—I found I could not stand idly by.”

  Vincento had not yet moved. “A proof of our globe’s rotation, you say.” The tone was flat, suspended.

  “Ah, forgive me! I had not thought an explanation in detail would be—um. You see, the plane of the pendulum does not rotate, it is our globe that rotates beneath it.” Derron hesitated briefly—it was just occurring to Valzay that old Vincento had most likely become just a little slow, a trifle senile. Derron put on what he hoped looked like a faintly indulgent smile and spoke on, more slowly and distinctly. “At the poles of the world, such a device as this would trace daily a full circle of three hundred and sixty degrees. At the equator it would appear not to rotate at all.” Speeding up gradually, he poured in merciless detail his three and a half centuries’ advantage in accumulated knowledge. “Between these extremes, the rate of rotation is proportional to the latitude; here, it is about ten degrees per hour. And since we are in the northern hemisphere, the direction of apparent rotation is clockwise.”