The machine proceeded to explain. It seemed that in any battle against the common unliving foe, one important component of the value of Colonel Frank Marcus (ret.) or any other comparably equipped Solarian human, lay in the fact that this person in his box or boxes, into which no normal human adult body could fit, was able to imitate a small berserker machine in such a way that he might fool a real berserker-especially one not being particularly attentive.
Annie Zador said dazedly: “Of course the presumption among us has always been that Marcus was killed.”
Hoveler nodded agreement. “I didn’t suppose there was ever any question about his being killed, even if at first the berserker didn’t recognize his little pile of hardware as human. It would certainly recognize it as something dangerous.”
The machine scoffed. It laughed a human laugh. ” I’d be recognized, all right. Knowing me, I’d probably find some way to advertise the fact. ‘Here I am, what’re you going to do about it?’”
Then the colonel’s voice, issuing from what still looked like berserker hardware, told both bioworkers that his current job had brought him aboard the station to stand guard over the valuable cargo.
Zador and Hoveler, their minds reeling, agreed that the cargo of a billion protolives was very valuable.
The colonel-neither of his hearers any longer disputed his identity-said: “Right. No argument. But that’s not exactly the cargo my present employer is worried about.”
The station rocked with a nearby explosion. Hoveler demanded: “What’s all this fighting in space around us? Who’s attacking?”
“Berserkers, who else?” And with that the colonel left them, to take up his guard duties where he could best protect the deck of artificial wombs.
But just as he went out the door, he turned back a kind of metallic eyestalk and added: “If one of you, or both of you, want to come along, I’ll tell you where I’ve been for the past three hundred years.”
For some time after his recent awakening by the great machine, Frank, despite the startling things he’d glimpsed just before his capture, had clung fiercely to his first belief that he was the captive of a berserker; any other suggestion was nothing but sheer berserker trickery.
The machine, ignoring this attitude for the time being, told Frank in good Solarian speech that it had recalled him to duty because he was the finest tool available with which to fight real berserkers. No one else could do that quite as well.
And very quickly he had been forced to abandon his belief, because the machine could show him too much evidence, evidence that he must at last accept. Puzzling objects, of which Frank had caught only tantalizing glimpses before he had been overcome and captured and put to sleep, were now offered for his free inspection.
At last he had admitted: “All right then, you’re not a berserker-or at least you’re the damndest berserker I’ve ever… you know, the standard behavior pattern is very simple.
Berserker see life, berserker kill. Just like that.”
At that point Frank had stopped, and sighed, and capitulated; the sigh was a realistic sound, a good imitation of real organic lungs, an effect practiced for so long that Frank now used it unconsciously. “But you don’t operate that way. You never have.
You’ve killed, but you don’t live for killing. All right, I give up.
You look exactly like a berserker, but you’re not a berserker. You can’t be. But then just what in all the hells are you?”
It told him, and then it showed him. It had the evidence to prove these statements too.
Frank thought about it. “The artificial wombs,” he said. “That’s it, isn’t it? They’re what you’ve wanted all along.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Dirac, heavily armed and armored, was stalking the latest optelectronic version of his son through the ten-cube’s virtual version of Westminster Abbey.
And vice versa.
Devoutly the Premier wished that he could turn off at least some of these damned images. But at the moment the full complement of illusions was still firmly in Nick’s control, and Nick had the interactive quotient high.
He, Dirac, would have to prevail once more by managing reality.
Dirac told himself, not for the first time, that virtual people, programs, had their drawbacks just like those of flesh and blood.
One of the problems with the former, from his point of view, was that beings like Nick could not really be made to suffer.
Light falling through graphic images of stained glass painted the virtual stones of the original, antique Hawksmoor’s towers in muted pastels, and left deep shadows around and behind the roots of tombs and monuments and columns. Dirac as he advanced became aware, by means of subtle clues of sight and sound, of another presence in the Abbey besides his own and Nick’s. But one glimpse of this additional form in passing, wreathed in the virtual image of an angelic statue, indicated that it was only Jenny. The Premier decided that she, definitely a nonviolent woman, could be safely disregarded for the moment.
His stalking had carried him a considerable way in the virtual dimensions of the ten-cube, some distance east of the high altar and well into the royal chapels, before a more suspicious movement caught his eye, an unwonted stirring in the detailed mirage. The Premier pounced quickly, moving to grapple with his armored hands the lid of a great stone sarcophagus. The polyphase matter of the ten-cube’s deck and walls instantly reshaped itself to accommodate the signals from his own visual cortex, feedback forming a firm stone ledge for him to grab.
With a surge of violence Premier Dirac wrenched open the last resting place of the half sisters Elizabeth the First and Mary. But in this time and place it was neither of the ancient queens who lay inside. The form of a much more modern woman leaped up screaming.
Dirac shouted retribution at his wife, and drove her off, a screaming wraith among the monuments and tombs.
He prowled on, himself a solid ghost among the thousand imaged graves and statues.
Without warning gunfire chattered near him, missiles glancing from the Premier’s superb armor. The salvo bruised him, spun him round and sent him staggering, but that was all. It’d need a better angle, at shorter range, to bring him down.
Dirac gritted his teeth, delaying his return fire till he should have a clear target. He was wary of shooting this facility to pieces as he had the ten-cube on the yacht. He meant to do a lot of planning yet in this one, designing his new colony.
Once more Nick3, still successfully keeping himself concealed, was shouting threats and imprecations.
His father shouted condemnation back and then moved promptly in pursuit.
“I am damned,” Dirac was muttering now to himself, “damned if I am going to be killed, or beaten, by any recorded person-or, to state the thing conservatively, with legalistic prudence-by any computer program that behaves as if it believes itself to be a recorded person.”
And Dirac stalked on, gloriously aware of his own fleshly mortality. He was now entering the huge, magnificent chapel of Henry the Seventh, fan vaulting as delicate as forest leaves above his head. He had always disdained having any backup recording of himself. The Premier enjoyed being flesh, and intended to retain his body.
More than once over the years Dirac had considered having himself recorded, as insurance against accidents or assassinations.
There had been moments when the idea seemed tempting, but he had always rejected it. Because such a procedure could not fail to create a real potential rival.
The Premier had even imagined how it would be to undergo the experience, the splitting of his very self in half: he would put on the helmet and then later take it off, and nothing would have changed. At the same time, and just as validly, he would put the same helmet on, and then gradually become aware that he had said goodbye to his flesh forever. No. A deeply unsatisfactory invasion of the center of his being.
He had come out of Henry’s great chapel now, letting his instincts move him back toward the center, spirit
ual if not quite geometrical, of the whole Abbey. Just ahead of him Edward the Confessor’s chapel waited, cavernous and complex, a temple within a temple, centered on the shrine of green porphyry. There in the real Abbey’s early centuries, or so the stories said, miracles abounded.
The Premier entered.
Abruptly the empty helmet of Nick’s suit, transformed by illusion into a medieval casque, loomed up before his father. In the same instant Dirac’s carbine, alphatriggered, shot it clean off the armored suit, which crashed and fell into a corner of illusion.
Dirac kicked at it jubilantly. “Reprogramming again for you, young man! What is it about you that you can never learn? What is it-”
Dirac was never able to complete the thought. For that was the moment when Varvara Engadin, who had followed her former lover broodingly into the Abbey, came up close behind Dirac and shot him in the back.
And now the Premier was down, and knew that he was dying.
This time his superb armor had saved him from instantaneous death, but that was all.
Dimly he was aware that Freya had come from somewhere and was bending over him, long hair blowing in an invisible wind.
Dirac couldn’t grasp the details of what she was saying, but it seemed that, after all, he was going to be recorded.
Commodore Prinsep’s mind was whirling as he and his small band of followers advanced. It was maddening, it was impossible, that there should be such an altogether inordinate amount of breathing space on board any berserker. They had now been moving for long minutes inside that space, having entered it by means of the most startling discovery yet, an actual working airlock. The controls and markings of that lock were formed according to no Solarian system that the explorers had ever heard of, yet the functioning had been smooth and accurate.
“This thing is a bloody ship. It’s got to be.” The words were delivered in a harsh, fierce whisper by Nick, who understood that they bore incalculable implications.
The other intruders, being careful to keep their suits and helmets sealed, stared at the empty helmet that had just spoken.
One of them objected: “But it can’t be a ship!”
“Well, what is it then?”
“The damned machines didn’t build a whole ship just to accommodate goodlife! They couldn’t, they wouldn’t.”
“Maybe…”
“Never! Not a battlewagon like this one.”
Still the intruders had encountered no real opposition. Weapons ready, they continued to advance cautiously through one of the incredible, incongruous air-filled corridors that wound its way through the belly of the beast.
Here and there on the bulkheads, which in certain corridors had been worn smooth by the agelong passage of serving machines, were engraved signs obviously intended to be read by living eyes. These notices, mostly located near apertures or controls, were in the recognizable script or printing of the Builders. A few of the signs still glowed, while time and wear at last had entirely sapped the energy from others.
Following certain lines and conduits that appeared to be concerned with information input and control, making their way through twisted corridors and voluminous ducts, avoiding any moving machinery they saw, the survivors advanced, still seeking the berserker’s brain in order to destroy it.
But what the armed intruders came upon instead was something very different.
“Come look at this.”
“Damn it, keep radio silence-”
“No. No more radio silence. I tell you that doesn’t matter anymore. Come look.”
Those who had been summoned went to look. And found themselves entering a steel-vaulted chamber whose deck space was well nigh filled with screens and chairs and stages.
The stages and the screens were acrawl with information in alien and unreadable symbols.
At the center of the vaulted space, a dais supported three chairs or couches of peculiar shape, somewhat bigger and more elaborate than those in the lower levels of the room. The three central chairs were all closely surrounded by the most intricate machinery, and two of them had been swiveled to face away from the people who were now entering.
This chamber could be nothing but a bridge, a control room, whatever you might call it. The suggestion was overwhelming that this was an insulated, defended place from which the huge machine could be commanded.
The invaders gazed at one another in wonder. No Solarian had ever seen or heard of a berserker mounting any facility at all like this.
Besides the peculiar chairs or acceleration couches-a dozen of them in all, including those in the farther reaches of the room-there were visual displays, some utterly unearthly, some tantalizingly almost familiar.
Was it still within the range of possibility that this, all this, was only some virtual reality, berserker subterfuge, illusion? The hardware in the room felt every bit as solid as it looked. No virtual reality, no polyphase matter, here.
The Solarians, advancing slowly, were momentarily lost, distracted, in sheer wonder. Such substantial, comprehensive controls could never have been built for goodlife.
From somewhere outside the vast machine, dimly apprehended here, came the whine and scream and smash and vibration of heavy combat.
The controls and furniture in this chamber had been designed to accommodate creatures about the size and strength and dexterity of ED humans, but whose bodies must have differed from the Solarian standard in several important ways. The lighting, for one thing, designed for different vision. For another, the intended occupants of this room had obviously been somewhat taller and a great deal thinner than Solarians. The shape and positioning of the controls also implied considerable differences.
“No.” Dinant was denying, rejecting, what he saw.
Havot muttered, “A mockup, then. The damned thing has constructed a real-world simulation of some human ship.”
“Not a Solarian ship,” said Prinsep. “And I think not a simulation.”
“This room is full of air, good breathable air.” Lieutenant Tongres at least seemed on the verge of opening her helmet, declaring her acceptance of the miracle.
Havot was bewildered. “Some Carmpan vessel, then?”
That suggestion moved the commodore to something like amusement. “When did the Carmpan ever build a ship like this, or want one? No, not Carmpan either.”
And then all of the intruders fell silent.
Because the central chair on the dais, which had presented its high back to the intruders, was swiveling around. And that high seat was occupied.
Filled by a figure instantly recognizable, because it came out of ancient video recordings with which all the visitors were familiar.
But this was not video. The intruders were standing in the presence of a live Builder, perhaps clothed-it was hard to tell-though not visibly armored in any way. He (or just as likely, she) was sitting there regarding the intruders with a single eye centered just below the forehead, an eye whose bright pupil slid back and forth with a quivering speed that somehow suggested an insect. The being on the dais appeared, by Solarian standards, inhumanly thin.
Skin and flesh moved in the lower portion of the face, the face of a living body whose ancestors had never known the light of Sol. From between folds of loose saffron skin, a voice emerged, a muted torrent of clicks and whines. The sound was being amplified, translated for the visitors’ airmikes by an artificial speaker somewhere.
It was a Builder who confronted them. Beyond all argument, a living Builder. A fabled relic, incredibly alive, rising from his (or her) control chair, staring at the intruders with his/her liquidly mobile central eye of gray or blue.
“I am the acting captain of this vessel,” the being on the dais told them, “and I welcome you aboard my ship.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Builder who now stood towering over the gaping little audience of intruders was a slender, fine-boned being, taller than all but a very few Solarian men but topologically like a Solarian except for the single eye that
stretched across the upper face, with a bright bulging pupil that slid to and fro with the rapidity of thought.
After a stunned pause, Commodore Prinsep responded to the short speech of welcome, but the commodore was never able afterward to remember exactly what he had said. The thin orange-and-yellow figure looming above him on the dais listened as a machine swiftly translated Prinsep’s words into bursts of whistles and clicks.
From the first moment, the ship’s captain was a convincing presence. Neither Prinsep nor any of his companions had any doubt of the nature of the being now confronting them. All of them had seen, times beyond counting, images of the Builder race, pictures extracted from a precious handful of alien video records that were older than Solarian humanity. Copies of those videos reposed in every general encyclopedia, in every comprehensive data storage bank. Images of Builders were as widely recognizable as those of Solarians from the first century of photography.
In most of the ancient Builder graphics, no matter how elegantly enhanced, the berserkers’ creators showed as hardly more than stick drawings of orange glowing substance. Now for the first time in history it was plain to Solarian eyes that that orange color and brightness were the result of some kind of clothing, the exposed skin being a dullish yellow where it showed on the face, the four-fingered hands, and across part of the chest.
Before the commodore and his boarding party had fully absorbed one shock, another fell. A new flurry of excitement passed among them when one of their own species suddenly appeared on the dais within arm’s length of the captain. A biologically youthful man with sandy hair, dressed in modern ship’s issue clothing, arose from another of the central chairs, the tall back of which had concealed him.
Among the people who had come in with Prinsep, only Nick immediately recognized Sandy Kensing. Nick quickly informed the others of his identity.
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