Berserker Kill

by Fred Saberhagen

  But none of that really helped at all. Genevieve’s existence was made endurable only by the power she had been given to put herself to sleep whenever she wished, by simply willing the event. She availed herself of that refuge times beyond counting, often to find herself awake again, with little or no subjective sense of having rested, or of any duration whatsoever having passed. Her best hope to achieve the sensation of rest was to prolong the process of temporary extinction by simply entering her bedroom, an act that tended to bring on slowly increasing drowsiness.

  Hawksmoor, alone with his thoughts while Jenny enjoyed one of her frequent periods of sleep-at least Nicholas hoped they were enjoyable-willed his own human image naked, and in that condition stood looking at himself in a virtual, multidimensional electronic mirror of his own devising. It was a mirror that could have existed in no ordinary space, and it showed the front and sides and top and back and bottom, all at once.

  Nick’s knowledge of human anatomy, and of the shapes and sizes and arrangements and textures of flesh that were ordinarily considered desirable, came not only from the databank references but from direct observation of human behavior, on this voyage and on others-including the behavior of a number of humans confident they were unobserved.

  There had been a time, before the mobilization of the demonic Loki, when Nick’s secret observations had extended even to the behavior of the Premier himself, especially on certain occasions when Varvara Engadin was sharing Dirac’s room and bed.

  But in Loki, Dirac possessed a handy means of keeping Nick at a distance when he didn’t want him, as well as of summoning him when he did.

  Nick told himself, almost convinced himself, that his knowledge of human love was already considerably more than merely theoretical. Ever since his creation-his own first memories were of being aboard the yacht, with control of most of a ship’s circuitry at his electronic fingertips, his to do with as he pleased-he had been able to watch the most intimate biological activities of a succession of human shipmates, including people he knew as well as strangers. Obviously programs duplicating organic sexual excitement, love and pleasure, would have to be of enormous complexity-but Hawksmoor prided himself that programming acceptable variations of those things would not be beyond his powers.

  But at the same time Nick felt-he considered it probably accurate to use the word “instinctively” to describe this feeling-that Jenny’s yearning for a body was fundamentally right.

  Something, perhaps many things, had always been missing from his world, from the only universe of experience that he had ever known or, in his present form, could ever know. The events called joy and love and satisfaction had to be of greater potential than what he or any being could program into himself. To know such things in their full meaning there had to be a giving from outside. Jenny represented that-but what could Jenny, as miserable as she was now, give him?

  “Until we have flesh of our own, we are doomed to be no more than ghosts.” At some point she had spoken those words to him.

  And in the universe they shared what was once said could never be forgotten.

  Eventually a standard year had passed since Dirac’s daring boarding of the station and the loss of Frank Marcus, among others, in savage combat.

  Still Nick had failed to convince Jenny to be satisfied with any of the zygote images he had presented for her approval. The project to grow bodies for Jenny and himself had been on hold for months.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Loki, the Premier’s optelectronic bodyguard, was wont to be irascible. He frequently reminded anyone, organic or not, who addressed him as if he were human that he was not a human being at all, but rather belonged to the category of events or objects more properly denoted personal systems.

  But it seemed to Nick that Loki acted like a person in many ways.

  Loki expressed no opinion, because he was not required to have one, on the humanity or lack thereof of Hawksmoor or any other entity save Loki himself-itself, if you please.

  One important way in which the bodyguard-and-personal-servant system called Loki served the Premier was as a surefire means of summoning or dismissing his pilot, architect, and sometime bodyguard called Hawksmoor.

  Fully self-aware or not, Loki was an effective, specialized AI being, capable of ordering Hawksmoor about when necessary.

  When Nick thought about this situation, he supposed that he ought to have realized from the hour of his creation that Dirac would prudently have arranged some such way to maintain power over him. But actually the facts of Loki’s existence and nature were a very recent and very disquieting discovery.

  Fortunately for Nick’s hopes of independence, for his secret projects, Loki was seldom fully mobilized, and when he was, he paid relatively little attention to Nick. But eventually Hawksmoor complained to his boss. Nick protested that Loki was harassing him. If Dirac wanted Nick to do the best possible job on all his multitude of assigned tasks, he would have to modify the system.

  Dirac agreed to make some modifications, restricting Loki to a more purely defensive use.

  Nick thanked the Boss and industriously returned to work.

  Part of his self-assigned clandestine project was now to oversee a team of simple robots in the creation of a nursery. This was a small volume of space to be walled off from the rest of the station by new construction, a secret facility in which his and Jenny’s new bodies, emerging fresh from the artificial wombs, could be safely brought to maturity, or near maturity, without being allowed to develop minds or personalities of their own. This nursery, as Nick called it in his own thoughts, would of course be located near the secretly operated wombs, in a part of the station where people rarely went.

  Still Jenny hesitated, withholding her final approval from any of the zygotes Nick’s searching robot managed to turn up.

  Millions more tiles had now been tested by the robot, but the surface of the cargo’s possibilities had barely been scratched.

  Nick himself reviewed the most likely candidates before bringing the very cream of the crop to Jenny for her consideration. Then he set aside those she rejected-the rate was one hundred percent so far-keeping them on file for possible use if and when the lady should weary of her insistence on perfection.

  Meanwhile, a slow parade of mindless images, of possible Jennys, were sent along by the searching robot to model for Hawksmoor alone. For a time the show of naked women amused and excited him, and added to his enjoyment by making the images behave in the manner of fleshly women he had secretly observed.

  But presently this enjoyment wearied. And afterward Nick felt dirty, guilty. As if he had stood by, allowing the woman he loved to be defiled by someone else. Out of respect for his lady and for himself he turned the prancing parade into a slow, dutiful march.

  For of course the job of reviewing possible bodies still had to be done. He inspected succeeding candidates in the manner of one saddled with a weighty responsibility.

  Nick’s own yearnings to inhabit flesh were not entirely a result of his wish to be with Jenny. To some extent they certainly predated his rescue of the lady. But before he encountered her, such cravings might have been largely subconscious, and he might have thought them mere aberrations. In that epoch he had never questioned that he himself was perfectly at home, self-sufficient, in the current mode of his existence.

  But now he could feel absolutely certain of almost nothing about himself.

  “Or-I think I have feelings. I can see myself acting as if I do-how can I know myself any better than that?”

  Yes, he thought that his own wish to have a body of his own had developed into a fixed idea, a compulsion, only when Genevieve, unequal to the task of trying to make do with images, swore that she had to have her body back-a beautiful, female, healthy, satisfactory body, of course-or go mad.

  Nick was frightened to hear her say that. He feared madness, for himself as well as Jenny, and he felt it a distinct possibility, though he wasn’t at all sure what it would mean for an
electronic person to go mad.

  In the back of Nick’s mind another fear lurked, though he tried to convince himself that the worry was irrational: Would Genevieve, once reestablished in the flesh, be tempted to rejoin her husband? She said she now loved Nick and feared Dirac, but Dirac was, after all, the father of her child.

  And yet another worry: What would happen if progress with the artificial wombs was made in such a way that Jenny was somehow to be granted her body before he, Nick, got his-what then?

  She who had been Lady Genevieve was still haunted by recurrent fears over what might have become, and what was going to become, of her protochild. Hers and Dirac’s.

  Part of the feeling was resentment, a fear that the child would somehow become her rival, her replacement.

  More and more now, Genevieve insisted to Nick that she was really terrified of Dirac. She would be happy never to see her tyrannical husband again.

  Nick for the most part believed these protestations- because they made him so gloriously happy. Even in his moments of doubt he clung fervently to the hope that they were true.

  Nicholas, ready to deal with the difficulties of obtaining two bodies rather than just one, ready to abandon the only world he knew to take on the mysterious burdens and glories of flesh-emphasized to Jenny his determination that, whatever else might happen, they should remain together.

  What good would a body be to him if she had none?

  But the corollary of that was, how could he bear to have her regain her flesh if she left him behind in the process?

  “You really do want me to come with you when you go back to that world, don’t you?”

  “Of course, Nick.”

  “You have to understand that, one way or another, if I’m in that world, Dirac won’t be. And vice versa. You must understand that.

  He’d never tolerate-what I have done. What you and I will be doing.”

  “Then we must make sure he’s not around to bother us.” She was quite calm and deadly about that.

  Nick of course had never had genes before. Programmers who brought nonorganic people into existence did not approach their jobs by such a roundabout route. On first deciding to assume flesh, he had been ready to accept almost any presentable form.

  But now he had to face the fact that it was not only possible but necessary, with expert help and a lot of hard work, to choose what physical attributes he’d like to have, and then make up a suitable set, or find the closest possible approximation, from the existing Solarian supplies.

  On assuming flesh he would of course be giving up a great deal of mental speed and sureness, and he could not help but regret in advance the losses he was going to suffer. Naturally there would be gains in other areas, compensations deriving from his new organic brain. But the compensations were subtler than the losses, harder for him in his current mode to define or even imagine.

  Outweighing any such problems, of course, was the fact that in the fleshly mode he would have Jenny… have her, solid to solid, flesh to flesh. And this was a thing of awe, a profound mystery that he could not begin to fathom.

  Nick needed to be reassured. He pleaded with his lady: “You’d want to be the one to show me how to live in a body? You must realize, the idea, the concept, of having real flesh is very strange to me. It’ll take me a while, with my new organic brain, to learn to use muscles instead of thoughts. I’ll forget where I am, I’ll be terribly slow and clumsy. I’ll fall down and bruise myself, and-and I don’t know what.”

  He earned a laugh with that line. It was in fact the first real laugh that Nick had ever heard from her. But it was over in a moment.

  Having been thus offered a kind of sympathy, Nick kept on. “I realize that kind of an existence is very natural for human beings, of course.” Just as being in the womb or in the cradle, is natural, but I don’t want to do that. “But still. I could wind up needing extensive medical therapy, surgery, just to keep my body alive. I could spend my first month or so of real life in a medirobot.” In fact Freya2 had warned him that such might be the case.

  Jenny soothed him, offered comfort. “I’ll show you how to live in your big clumsy body. I’ll show you everything. And I’ll take care of you if you need help. Oh, Nick… By the way, have you found a new model for yourself that you like better?”

  Nick had, and now paraded the latest version of his potential self for her approval.

  Genevieve frowned with interest at the walking, posing image.

  “That’s rather a different look, Nick-”

  “Don’t you like it?” Suddenly he was anxious.

  “Yes, I find it quite acceptable. And yet…”

  “And yet what?”

  “And yet, the face reminds me of something. Someone I’ve seen, somewhere before. But, I thought my memory was now completely digitized?”

  “It is.”

  “If so, shouldn’t that mean that I must either remember something or not remember it, not experience this-this-?”

  It was also somewhat odd that she would find familiar the image of an unborn face. But chance, and quantum effects, could play strange tricks in any mind.

  Nick was vaguely perturbed, but he tried to be soothing. “In most cases the process will work that way. For everything important, I hope. But-I don’t wish to alarm you, but possibly there was some slight damage to your brain before I could start the recording. That could produce such an ambiguity. Also the recording process itself is rarely perfect. It’s not surprising that there should be a few lacunae.”

  And Lady Genevieve continued to fret vaguely over her impression that she had seen this new face of Nick’s somewhere before.

  Mick, as he thought to himself and several times tried to explain to Jenny, suffered moral qualms at the thought of simply taking over some human’s developed body-he at least doubted whether he was morally capable of doing that. His basic programming forbade him to kill humans or cause them harm-except possibly in a situation where anything he did would have some such effect.

  Jenny appeared to be devoid of any such scruples. She proclaimed herself too desperate to afford them. There was a suggestion that she had been quite capable of hard and ruthless behavior in her fleshly past, when the situation seemed to call for it.

  “Why do you think the Premier chose me for his bride? It wasn’t entirely because of my family connections. Nor, I assure you, for my beauty-I had nothing spectacular in that department.

  No, he wanted a capable ally.”

  This revelation clashed violently with the ideal image of Genevieve that Nick had been developing. Resolutely he refused to give it thought.

  Other seeming inconsistencies nagged at him. Nick was impressed and somewhat puzzled-alarmed and at the same time gratified-by his own progressively improving capability to disobey what had seemed the fundamentals of his programming.

  He pondered the proposition: When complexity reaches a certain level, true life is born. And at a higher level yet, true freedom, true humanity?

  And still Jenny hesitated over her choice of body.

  So far, he thought bitterly, the great plan to achieve flesh, and carnal love, like almost everything else in the life of Nicholas Hawksmoor, remained entirely in his imagination, while the obstacles to its achievement unfortunately did not. The difficulties he faced were not susceptible of being solved by any rearrangement of symbols or reshuffling of information. He had observed that whenever the world of hardware and flesh came into contact with that of thought and pattern, the former tended to dominate.

  But he was still fiercely determined to prevail. All the more important, then, that his calculations and patterns be as precise and as far-reaching as he could make them. He had to try to foresee everything.

  Was it foolish to hope that the bodies could be grown under the noses of the fleshly humans who remained in control of the biostation, that the necessary years would be available to bring his and Jenny’s new selves to maturity? Perhaps that was an unreasonable hope, but at least he wou
ld learn from the experience. And next time, next time, somehow, he would succeed.

  And even suppose his plan succeeded, and at last he was somehow able, with the aid of the vast bioresearch computers, the artificial wombs, the available genetic samples, the help of Freya2, to reconstruct the Lady Genevieve, and also embody himself in flesh.

  The pair of them wouldn’t be able to hide out indefinitely in bodies. Wasn’t there bound to come a time, sooner or later, when he would be forced to explain, to attempt to justify, to the Premier or at least to other people what he had done? The time was bound to come. And when it came…

  In his fancy Nicholas now brainstormed a series of elaborately mad scenarios, each one crazier than the last, he might be able to deceive and at the same time placate Dirac: On that day when the Premier’s beloved showed up in the rosy flesh, somehow alive after all, quite recognizable though not precisely identical to her earlier self. And not a day older-probably younger, if anything.

  For a time Hawksmoor toyed with the daring ploy of telling the truth, making a full confession. Was there any conceivable way to convince the Premier that Nick now wanted to have, really ought to be allowed to have, and one way or another was going to have, a body?

  On the face of it, that scenario was the craziest of all. He was totally convinced that Dirac would never assent. For good old Nick to acquire bone and blood and muscle would forever abolish his unique usefulness.

  And those difficulties, heroic as they might seem, would be only the start. Next would be the additional problem of explaining, how, why, the Lady Genevieve had been kept in hiding ever since her rescue. Explain that to me, Nick.