Berserker Kill

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Child?”

  “I was… pregnant.”

  “You know the answer to that. You donated your… protochild, I believe is the proper term, to the colony program. Or do you mean what might have happened afterward?”

  The couple stood regarding each other, no longer touching. A silence stretched between them.

  At last the lady broke it. “Nick, tell me the truth. What’s happened?”

  “To you? You are here with me, and you are safe. Perhaps that ought to be enough for now. But whenever you decide you really want to probe more deeply…”

  For a moment Lady Genevieve could not speak. The sensation reminded her of her earlier problem in obtaining enough air with which to form and utter words, but this difficulty was somehow even more fundamental.

  “No!” she cried out suddenly. “Don’t tell me anything-anything frightening-just now. Can’t we get out of this old building? What are all these monuments around us, graves?”

  Her escort remained calm. “Many of them are. Tombs built into the walls and floor. But tombs so old I didn’t think that they would mean anything to you, frighten you-”

  “Isn’t there anywhere else we can go?”

  “There are a great many places.” He took the lady’s hand and stroked it soothingly. In her perception there was still something peculiar about the contact. “Let’s try this way for a start.”

  With Nick gallantly providing an arm upon which the lady was willing to lean for comfort and guidance, the couple progressed from the western end of the nave into a stone-walled room that Nick murmured was St. George’s chapel, then out of that grim place along a narrow passage penetrating a wall of tremendous thickness, to reach what were obviously the living quarters.

  On their arrival in these very different rooms, Hawksmoor looked somewhat anxiously at the lady and asked her what she thought. Before he considered this space ready to use for entertaining, he had several times redesigned and refilled it with several successive sets of furnishings, according to the changing dictates of his taste.

  After all, he was still very young.

  Parts of his version of the Abbey, including the structural shell and much of the pleasing detail in the stonework and glass, had existed for many months before he met or even heard of the Lady Genevieve. It was Nick’s private hobby as well as a component of his work in which he was deeply interested. But all this flurry of recent hasty revision had of course the single object of pleasing Jenny.

  Actually, as he confessed later to his beloved, he had been able to discover very little about how these inner, semiprivate rooms had actually looked in the original down through the centuries-and in truth he did not really care. It was the grand design, the stonework and its decoration, that he had found most fascinating-at least until very recently.

  Presently she was sitting in a comfortable modern chair. The room’s stone walls were hung with abstract tapestries. The windows were too high for their clear glass to let in any real view of the outside. “It is a strange temple, Nick.”

  “It is a very old temple.”

  “And you live here?”

  He had remained on his feet, restless, still watching her reactions closely, his boots resounding upon the bare stone between two thickly woven modern-looking rugs. “I suppose I spend as much time here as I do anywhere.”

  “And what god or goddess was it meant to serve?”

  “A single god. The God of the Christians-are you any sort of a Believer, my lady?”

  She shook her coppery curls. “Not really. When I was a child, my parents disagreed sharply on the subject of religion. My father is Monotheist, my mother was… it’s hard to say just what she was. She died five years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Then I am to understand that this whole magnificent temple now belongs to you?”

  “Yes, I think I can claim that.” Hawksmoor leaned back in his oversized chair and gestured theatrically. “Everything you see around you. Which means that it is all at your service, absolutely.”

  Running her fingers over the fabric of her own chair, she frowned at the sensation-something about her sense of touch was still not truly right.

  Hawksmoor was gripping the carven arms of his seat, staring at her in what seemed to her an oddly helpless way. “My feelings for you, my lady, are-more than I can readily describe. I realize that from your point of view we have scarcely met, but… it might be accurate to say I worship you.”

  The lady, in the process of trying to grapple with this statement, trying to find some way to respond, raised her eyes and was momentarily distracted when she glimpsed, as if by accident, through a partly open door in a far wall, a thoroughly modern indoor swimming pool. Completely out of place. The water’s surface as still as a mirror, yet she could tell that it was water. Sunken in blue-green tile, surrounded by utterly modern metal walls, lighted with soft modern clarity.

  “I see you’ve noticed the pool. It’s a kind of experiment of mine. A little touch that I thought you might one day-”

  “Nick,” she broke in, and then came to a stop. She had no idea of what she ought to say, or wanted to say, next. Only that she wanted to slow things down somehow.

  “Yes, Lady Genevieve. Jenny. May I call you that?”

  “Of course. Why not? You’ve saved my life.”

  “Jenny. I should not have started burdening you with my feelings. Today was not the time. Later we can speak of them.”

  “Feelings are important,” she replied at last.

  “Yes. Oh, yes.” He nodded solemnly.

  “Are we really on Earth, Nick?”

  “I am not very sure what ‘really’ means-but in answer to your question, no, most people would say that just now you and I are not on Earth.”

  “I see. Thank you. Nick, have you ever really been to Earth?”

  “No. But then, perhaps yes.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “In a way I do. But I must keep coming back to my own question; like feelings, it’s important: What does ‘really’ mean?”

  Terror, which Lady Genevieve could easily visualize in the form of little mice and rats, had for some time been nibbling at the outside of the protective obscurity of thought that Nick had somehow so kindly provided for her, and that she had so welcomed.

  Without any clear statement on the matter having been made, she had become convinced that this man was going to be her sole companion for some indefinite time to come. Part of her yearned to press him for real answers. What was this place really, this Abbey? But at the same time, fear held her back from the sheer finality of any answer he might give.

  Nick was aware of her disquiet. “Don’t you like it? I think this is certainly one of the most beautiful places I know; But if you don’t like it, we could easily move elsewhere.”

  “Your Abbey’s lovely, Nick. In its own way. It feels solid and safe, protected somehow.”

  “I hoped it would feel like that. To you.”

  “But-”

  “But something is bothering you. I will answer any questions that I can.”

  The lady stared into her companion’s eyes. “Let me tell you some of what I do remember. And this part is very clear. We, you and I, were on a little spaceship, a courier vessel, and there had already been a-tragedy. We were surrounded by death and-and-do you deny any of this?”

  “No, my lady. I can’t deny it.” Hawksmoor shook his head solemnly.

  “I cannot stand this anymore! Tell me, I beg of you, tell me in plain words what has happened. How we got from that place to this.”

  “My lady-” His voice beseeched her. “What I did when I found you on that little ship was the only thing I could have done. I took the only possible course open to me to save you from death.

  Believe me, I did it all for you.”

  “My thanks again, dear Nick, for saving me. Now tell me how.”

  He came visibly to a decision and pressed on, showing a curious mixture of eagerness and reluc
tance. “You will remember how I entered the courier’s cabin, wearing space armor?”

  “I remember that, of course. And how I welcomed you. It seems to me that I remember your arms going round me-” And that, she suddenly realized, had been the last time that the touch of anything had felt precisely right.

  Her companion was nodding. “My arms did indeed enfold you.

  The limbs of that suit are mine-in the sense that I am usually able to make use of them when I wish. What I must explain to you now is that those or others I might borrow are the only arms I have.”

  She was listening intently, frowning.

  He said tenderly, worriedly, “You mustn’t be afraid.”

  She was staring at Nick’s own upper limbs, which seemed large and obvious, fairly ordinary in appearance as he stood before her, hands on his hips. She whispered, “I don’t understand.”

  “These?” He extended his arms, wiggling his fingers, pulled them back to hug himself, then held them out again. “Of course these are mine too, but they could not have helped you on that ship. They have other purposes-and they are making progress, evidently. Now you can feel my touch. Is what you feel when you touch me still strange? Much different than-the contact of your husband’s hand, for example?”

  “Yes! There is still something… odd about the way things feel here. Not only your hand, but everything. All the objects that I touch. And as I think about it, there’s a peculiarity in the way things look. The colors are so fine, so vivid. And the smell of everything is a little different, and… but I don’t…”

  “My lady, when you and I stood together, the two of us together on that wrecked, dying ship, I promised you solemnly that I could get you safely away, across the airless gap to my ship, even though you had no suit. Because I knew that your poor, hurt body could be fitted neatly inside my suit; and that is exactly how I did it.”

  “Two people in one suit? I didn’t think-”

  “Two people, Lady Genevieve, yes, but only one body. Yours.

  You see, even then I had no body of my own. No solid arms with which to rescue you, or anyone.” His waving hands seemed to deny their own existence. “No anything of flesh and bone.” His voice was low, underplaying the string of disclaimers like a man who admits that he is at the moment inconveniently missing a leg, lost in some accident and not yet medically regrown.

  “You seem to be telling me that you have no body. No-”

  “No fleshly body. Nor have I ever had one. To achieve useful solidity I need a spacesuit, or some other hardware subject to my control. What you see before you here and now is an image.

  Mere information. I am, you see, I have always been, an optelectronic artifact. Fundamentally, no more than a computer program.” Once again Nicholas Hawksmoor made an expansive gesture with his imaged arms.

  The lady stared at him for a long time-somewhere time was jerking ahead in subtle electronic increments-and hardly a line of her face moved by so much as a millimeter, for however long she stared.

  Finally she said, “You were telling me about my-rescue. Go ahead. I want to hear the details. Everything.”

  “Of course. The moment I came aboard the courier where you were trapped, and looked around, I could see that few of your fellow passengers would benefit from any help that I might give… but no, that’s wrong. Let me be truthful with you, always very truthful. The truth was that I cared very little about those people. I didn’t worry about them. It was you I had come to save.

  “You-welcomed me aboard. And-just at that point, another blast engulfed us.”

  “Yes. Yes, there was another explosion. I remember that.”

  In a strained voice Nick whispered: “I am afraid that you were injured rather severely then.”

  “Ah.” Both her hands were taken, engulfed, in both of his. She could close her eyes, and did, but nothing she could do would make the strangeness of his touching go away.

  “Yes. I had to work very quickly. Your body fit neatly inside my suit, which, as I have tried to explain, is in a way also my body-”

  The lady gasped.

  “-and which, therefore, in terms of mass and physics, was very nearly empty. And I, dwelling for the time being in the suit’s electronics, working the servos that drive the arms and fingers of the suit, sealed you into the body cavity with my own metal hands, and I, being in effect the spacesuit, acting through the spacesuit, fed you air, made you breathe, though by that time your lungs were scarcely working.

  “Then I carried you back safely across the gap of cold and emptiness and death, safely into my own little ship which was standing by. Then out of the suit with you, and right into the medirobot. And now… now here you are.”

  The lady was staring at him. She did not appear to be breathing.

  Now that she thought about it, she seemed to have no need to breathe.

  Into the silence, as if he found her silence frightening, her rescuer said: “I don’t suppose you remember my little ship at all.

  You haven’t really had a chance to see her. I call her the Wren, that’s a sort of pun, she’s named for my namesake’s mentor, Christopher Wren, he was yet another architect. I don’t know if he was any kind of a pilot, in the sailing ships they had those days. I don’t suppose he was-”

  She broke in with a reaction of shattered horror. ” You are only an image?”

  “In a sense, yes. An image appearing in a mode of virtual reality. Technically I am an optelectronic artifact, basically a computer program…”

  ” Then what in all the hells have I become? What have you done to me?”

  Nick, who had been dreading this moment more and more, did his best to explain. His voice was kindly and muted and logical.

  But before he had said ten more words, the lady began to scream.

  He tried to talk above the breathless screaming, but that was useless, so for the sake of her own sanity, and his, he exercised a certain control function and turned her off. Only temporarily, of course.

  CHAPTER SIX

  One of the yacht’s junior officers, who was perhaps really trying to be helpful, said to Kensing, who was standing in one of the yacht’s corridors looking thoughtful: “You really don’t get it about Nick yet, do you?”

  Kensing stared at him. “I’ve had other things to think about. So what the hell is it about Nick that I don’t get, assuming his problem has any relevance?”

  The man looked defensive. “I didn’t exactly say he had a problem.”

  “What, then?”

  “Hawksmoor’s a computer program.”

  “Oh.” Suddenly several things that had been puzzling Kensing made sense. He had heard of the thing being done before, the optelectronic creation of a close analogue of a human personality. It wasn’t done often, though technically such procedures had been feasible for a long time. In a society that had developed and was still developing while locked in an age-long struggle against machines, the anthropomorphizing of hardware or software was definitely unpopular and uncommon.

  Such constructions were also illegal on many worlds, among folk who, with the hideous example of the berserkers always before them, lived in dread of their own computer artifacts somehow getting out of hand.

  Kensing asked: “You don’t mean a recorded person?”

  “Nope. Mean just what I said. The fact doesn’t get much publicity, but the boss has developed a definite interest in electronic personalities over the last few years.”

  Kensing nodded. Anthropomorphic programs designed from scratch, as opposed to those recorded from organic human brains, were deeply interesting to many students of psychology, politics, and control. But the few examples extant were generally kept hidden.

  There existed a closely related class of programs, actual recorded people, which were sometimes very useful tools but tended to be subject to even more widespread restrictions.

  Kensing had once met one of them, the program Hilary Gage, which-or who-had played a key role in one particularly famous fight agai
nst berserkers. Kensing, meeting the Gage program long after that battle, had enjoyed a lengthy conversation with him-or with it. Even after the long talk, Kensing wasn’t sure which pronoun best applied.

  Today, only minutes after discovering the truth about Hawksmoor, Kensing happened to bring up the subject with Frank Marcus. He learned that Frank had met Gage, too; and Frank, like many other people, remained perfectly sure that in meeting a recorded person he had encountered nothing but a program.

  At the moment Kensing and Marcus were inspecting the latest VR mockup of the kidnapped station, put up by Eidolon’s computers. All the members of the crew were taking turns in visiting the ten-cube to see this display when they had the chance; they all wanted to know in detail the nature of the prize they were pursuing, and what sort of military operations might be feasible if and when they got close enough to think of attempting a recovery.

  But Kensing, inspecting the model’s beautifully realistic image, was suddenly sure the whole enterprise was doomed to futility.

  Berserkers killed. That was the function for which they had been designed and built, and that was what they did.

  The possibility that Annie might be still alive was really small, in fact infinitesimal…

  There was an interruption on holostage. Nick Hawksmoor was suddenly present. He appeared standing to one side and slightly behind the modeled cylinder of the station, resting one forearm on the flat disk of the upper end. The weightless image perfectly supported his weightless body.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I really couldn’t help overhearing.

  I’m touching up some of the life support in these compartments at the moment, and on occasion conversations just come through.”

  “Quite all right,” said Kensing, feeling odd.