Berserker Man

by Fred Saberhagen

  The watching winner, drifting a meter above the ground, poised still at the place where the fight had ended. Though he could not yet understand the ending of the fight, he could still feel it, in the thin muscles of his right shoulder.

  Wondering, he began to drift a little higher. He did not fly to Frank; he could tell from the alpha waves of a stunned but living brain that Frank was still alive, inside that small, crumpled complex of force and metal upon which machines and human beings were now converging from all directions of the plain. But there would be little or nothing that he, Michel, could do in the way of giving help.

  In the distance circled the sun-touched hills, looking more golden now than silver. Michel rose just a little higher still.

  "Michel." There was a new strain in Tupelov's radio voice, and also a new fear starting. "Michel, come down."

  He didn't much like Tupelov, despite the man's good manners; right from the start he hadn't liked him. There was no need to answer him right away. Frank was probably going to be all right, but now there would be no more testing for a while—maybe three days, Michel guessed. And before he took off the suit there was a thing or two he was impatient to get a look at.

  Kid, you all right? This was Frank, half-conscious now, sub-vocalizing. Kid, this is a tougher thing than any of us realized.

  "I understand, Frank." He didn't bother, this time, to turn his radio off before he spoke. "Anyway I'm starting to."

  "Michel, come down."

  Come at me harder this time . . . I won't hurt you . . . The mumbled words cut off abruptly. Some of the medics and their robots had reached Frank already, assessed his condition, opened his dented ovoid, were administering medication that knocked him out completely.

  Michel rose higher. Beyond the hills where sunlight had a grip would lie the rim of the full Earth.

  "Michel!" Tupelov was in a swift agony of alarm. "Get down here! The defenses will pick you up; you're entering the danger zone . . ."

  He knew all that. Without difficulty he could feel the vast electronic nerve-nets just beyond the near horizon, on all sides. The defense machines could not locate him yet, not really, but they were twitching with his presence. Ignorant gods, idiotic genius genii of metal and force.

  He had to give them words to say to him: Are you fast, little one in the gauze suit? Are you powerful? Will you play against berserkers, as we do? We dare you to a trial. Dare dare dare dare—

  Not ready for that, not yet, Michel turned away from the Earth, sank ten centimeters lower. As he turned his back on Earth the forcefields shielding his eyes went gold-opaque. In a moment his mind had cleared them enough to let him see Earth's risen god. There were great slow undulations of corona, and on the disc itself the flares and ulcerous sunspots. The solar wind came sleeting in his face, infinitesimally faint but he could see it if he tried.

  Great things out there, that someone—like me—can somehow, sometime, begin to know. On even terms, maybe? Or do I only think that because of still-enormous ignorance?

  "Michel?" The voice was still afraid, but now it was starting to be calculating as well.

  No need to make Tupelov sweat so dangerously. Michel did not have to hurry, to do what must be done. More learning, first. More exploration of what was possible. And then?

  "I'm coming," said Michel. In quiet obedience he coasted down to land.

  FIVE

  Lombok found Elly Temesvar in an enormous and ancient city of old Earth, where the air was rich, untamed, with live-Earth smells, very different from those of all the other worlds Lombok had visited, very fitting, he thought, to the human senses. Temesvar's address was in a part of the city so old that it seemed half monument and maybe one-fourth archaeological site. The remainder in private hands included the great structure identified to Lombok as the Temple of the Final Savior. Its walls were granite block, aged steel reinforcements here and there showing through their fabric. Their style was some branch of Gothic. Just inside the doorway by which Lombok entered, a bright electroplaque informed the visitor of the different theories regarding the time and the purpose of the original construction—the place had been a temple of some kind, it seemed certain, from the very start.

  An old-looking man with empty eyes, garbed in a gray sack, approached after Lombok had stood for an uncertain minute inside the arched dimness of the entry. When Lombok gave him the name of the woman he was looking for, he shuffled away again; Lombok continued waiting, looking mostly at the electroplaque.

  A couple of minutes later, a blonde young woman of sturdy frame, veiled from the eyes down in well-fitting gray, emerged from behind a dull shimmer of modern field-drapes.

  "You have a question for me?" Her voice was businesslike. It didn't seem to surprise her at all that a stranger should have a question.

  "If you are Elly Temesvar, I have a question or two. About you, actually."

  Above the veil, gray eyes appraised him levelly. "No reason why I shouldn't answer questions. Come along, we can talk in here."

  He followed her past great columns, framing far interior spaces lost in dimness. Light from the gray Earth day outside entered through clerestory windows far above. Somewhere around a corner, a mixed chorus chanted drearily in a language Lombok did not recognize. He had been able to find out very little about this place as yet, and hadn't wanted to delay his visit until he could learn more. It was not on the secret Security list of possible goodlife front organizations—which of course proved nothing either way.

  Elly led him across an enormous nave, whose immensity dwarfed small groups of gray-robes standing here and there in what looked like contemplation. At the far end of the nave rose what appeared to be a huge altar badly in need of repair. What with more pillars, and the pervading dimness, Lombok got no very clear look in that direction. Presently he was led into an out-of-the-way corner surrounded by still more columns, containing ancient stonework decorations and the first chairs Lombok had seen since entering the Temple. All the chairs looked old; some of them had once been real furniture, and some were cheap.

  As his guide sat down, she simultaneously unveiled her face, saving her visitor the trouble of trying to frame a polite request along that line. Her appearance matched the photos Lombok had studied. "So, what are your questions, Mr.—?"

  "Lombok. I'm from the Defense Department."

  He had credentials ready, but Temesvar waved them away. "I believe you. Anyway, it doesn't matter."

  Oh? Lombok wondered silently. Even if I were to ask you something about highly classified material? Of course whatever secrets the woman had known when on active duty would now be greatly out of date. Or most of them would.

  Aloud he said, "I'm doing a psychological study on certain retired veterans. You filled out a census form last year, remember? We're just spot-checking some randomly chosen respondents."

  "Randomly." For some reason, that amused her, or almost did. "If anything happens at random, it'll fall on me."

  He almost looked up at her sharply, hearing that. Randomness related to certain official secrets she did know, secrets still kept in hiding on the Moon.

  He was consulting a convincing-looking list. "Your resignation, let me see, was perfectly voluntary, wasn't it? No pressure put on you of any kind, for any reason?"

  "There was a little pressure to change my mind, stay with the service, as I recall. I was really pretty good."

  "Yes. You were." He paused. "Looking back at it now, what would you say was the real reason you resigned?"

  "The same reason I gave then. I had begun to understand that what I was doing in the service did not matter."

  Lombok gave her a chance to elaborate on that. When nothing came, he started making notes, painstakingly: "Did . . . not . . . matter."

  "Aren't you recording this? Most people do."

  Most people? How many interviewers had she had, and who were they? "If you don't mind—"

  "Not in the least."

  Lombok pretended to turn on a tiny recorder that
had been running all along. "Now. Could you amplify that a little, about your career in the Space Force not mattering?"

  "It just didn't. Military things don't, nor does exploring space. After my last mission I began to understand that. Not all at once, but gradually."

  "The defense of the life of the galaxy against berserkers doesn't matter?"

  "I knew you were going to put it that way. In the long run—no, it doesn't. Oh, we're not goodlife here in the Temple. If there were berserkers attacking Earth at this moment, I'd fight them, I suppose. Yes, I'm sure I would, a human reaction to protect the people that I'd see around me, and, I suppose, myself. Even though I knew that ultimately it wouldn't matter."

  Lombok was trying to understand. "You just couldn't see that any more reconnaissance missions were worthwhile."

  She was pleased, a little, that he was making an effort to grasp what she meant. "Something like that," she said.

  "Want to tell me about that last mission of yours?"

  She shifted position, crossing her legs athletically under the gray robing. "If you have the time to listen."

  "All the time in the world." Lombok gestured genially. "Where you went, what you saw and did. How you got on with Colonel Marcus."

  "Colonel, now, is he? Somehow I pictured him as having more rank than that by this time. Or being dead." It was said quite remotely, but without malice.

  Lombok said, "I'm sure you've told the story of that last mission of yours before now."

  "Yes, it's been recorded before, too. You could have looked it up. Probably you did. I admit I'm a little curious. Why do you come and ask me to tell it again, eleven years later?"

  He didn't know whether or not to try and keep up the fiction of the random survey. "It was a unique experience. Wasn't it? I'd just like to hear it from you live, if you don't mind."

  "Mind? No." But intelligent Elly was re-evaluating him. She dug out smokers, offered one which Lombok refused, puffed her own into life. "Who do you work for, at Defense?"

  "Tupelov."

  She digested that for a moment, then gestured that it did not matter. "All right. Well, the big thing about that last mission of course was that we ran into something near the Core that we had never heard of, seen, or imagined before. It had been sighted at least once before, and photographed. But there are so many weird filings in CORESEC they didn't even try to brief us on them all. Anyway. When we got back to CORESEC headquarters with—what we brought—people started calling the thing that we had found the Taj, after the Taj Mahal here on Earth. Something large and grand, with an aura of mystery about it. That became its official code name. What you call it now I don't know."

  "What did you think of the Taj? At first sight?"

  Her eyes, which had begun to drift away from him, came back.

  "At first of course it was just a place to go. A hope. You have to realize that our ship had been under attack almost continuously for almost twenty standard hours, by a berserker much more powerful than we were. No one but Frank Marcus could have . . . anyway, by the time the Taj came into sight I was on the verge of a mental breakdown. I realize that now. They did hospitalize me briefly as soon as we got back to CORESEC headquarters, as you must know."

  He knew. He signaled sympathetic, full attention.

  Elly looked at her smoker and put it out. "What I said a minute ago, about random things falling on me. Do you know that on that mission everything peculiar seemed to happen?"

  "Such as what?"

  "I'm not sure I can even recall the whole list of oddities now. Before the berserker jumped us, we found amino acids in free space, varieties that no one had ever observed outside of atmosphere before. All kinds of organics, in enormous profusion."

  "Excuse me, but I have never heard what the basic purpose of that mission was."

  "General intelligence-gathering. Not looking for berserkers, certainly, not with two people in one small ship." The young woman fell silent, perhaps with some private memory.

  "You were telling me about all the organic materials."

  "Right. We were surprised. There are very few planets, you know, in that sector near the Core."

  "CORESEC. I know a little bit about it. But tell me."

  "High average star-density, better than thirty per cubic parsec. Nebular material very heavy, very complex. A maze of tunnels and bottlenecks; it's easy for a ship to get trapped. A number of them have. That's why they sent Frank."

  "And you."

  "Yes, I suppose. I was good. We saw gluts of petroleum. Would you believe dense enough in places for real gas-fires? Where there was free oxygen too, in regions sheltered from heavy starlight, you could get a line of real flame a billion kilometers long, along a zone of compression in the medium."

  Another pause. Lombok got the feeling that when she had started to talk she had intended to lead up to something, but now she kept drifting away from it again. No doubt because nothing mattered. He prompted: "On that trip you became pregnant."

  "Yes. I didn't realize you knew about that. I was on contraceptives, naturally. If I had wanted a pregnancy that wouldn't have been the ideal time or place to start it."

  "Naturally."

  "But for some reason there was a contraceptive failure. On that trip, all the long shots came home first."

  It seemed that going on with the conversation was among the things that did not matter. Not wanting to concentrate too obviously on the pregnancy, he asked, "Tell me how you got away from the berserker."

  Now Elly was looking past Lombok, as if at a viewscreen somewhere, and as she began to speak again tension gradually developed. Her strong hands started pulling and fingering at her robe. "It was after us—I mean right after us, a few kilometers, no more. I think that by then it had decided it could take us easily, and it wanted us alive. As we entered the Taj, there was some kind of—shock, sudden change, don't ask me exactly what. Frank was knocked out. I remained conscious the whole time—at least when they hypnotized me back at CORESEC, they couldn't find any gaps in my consciousness."

  "And what did you see, feel, experience, while you were in there?" There was no immediate answer, and Lombok added, "How long did this—immersion last?"

  The brief glance Elly gave him was almost pitying. "How long did it last? Well, the ship's clock in Frank's compartment ran through about four hours during the immersion, as you call it. The clock on my side meanwhile recorded something over eleven years."

  Lombok had seen those figures before. He cleared his throat. "Obviously not any relativistic effect."

  "Obviously." She smiled briefly. "Or I would have come out of the Taj with a half-grown child."

  "So, some kind of strange field or whatever fouled up the timers. They were the regular cesium-133 clocks?"

  "Yes. Therefore atoms of cesium-133 were changing energy states in our two compartments in quite different ways. If you were a scientist you'd look more puzzled than you do."

  "Oh, I'm puzzled. But that's nothing new for me. Was your pregnancy affected by whatever had happened? Was the later fetal development normal?"

  "I really don't know. There were other people willing to worry about that. And able to do a better job of taking care of it than I could, I'm sure. I had all I could handle, for a while, inside my own head. I had the conceptus removed on Alpine, the first place we stopped. You know, this is the first time I've really talked about it since. It was a nice-looking adoption agency, as I recall, well-equipped . . . I suppose there's an eleven-year-old running around Alpine now with a stranger origin than he or she can well imagine." Elly's expression softened, without quite reaching anything that could be called a smile.

  Lombok sat back in his chair, raised his arms in a luxurious stretch. He looked up and around, at the dim groining of the ancient arches. "Who is the Final Savior, if you don't mind my asking?"

  "I don't mind. We will know It when It comes."

  "It?"

  "When we say that, people tend to think we are berserker-worshippers.
Completely untrue. The Savior is, will be, beyond the classifications of life and non-life."

  "Identified with omnipotence? With a Creator?"

  "I don't see any meaning in those questions."

  Lombok cheerfully let them pass. "You were going to tell me more about your experience inside the Taj."

  "Yes." Elly saw her hands plucking at the gray robe, and made them stop. "Descriptions won't do much good, I'm afraid. I tried to make recordings, take pictures. They didn't show very much when we got home."

  "I know. If it hadn't been for the two things you brought back, it's possible no one would have believed your story at all."

  There was a flash of humor in her eyes. "I didn't want to bring up the subject of those artifacts. Security, you know."

  "I thought security wouldn't matter to you."

  "It must matter to you, though. Now I'm sure you are really from Defense. Tell me, have more people been sent to the Taj? Oh, they must have been, by this time. I'd like to know what they've found out."

  So would I, Lombok thought drily. Neither of the two expeditions had returned as yet. Which was not necessarily a sign of anything really wrong, not yet, but certainly in another standard year it would begin to be. He said, "I'm not really in the exploration end of the business."

  Elly was once more looking over his shoulder. "You want to hear what it was like. All right. At one point, for example, it was as if—as if the ship had been turned inside out, and shrunken to the size of a giant beach-ball. Spherical still, but hardly bigger than a human body. I sat there somehow, on this intricate thing, riding—like a sort of side-saddle. My own body—I couldn't tell if my body was inside out too, or not. I'm sure I wasn't dreaming. My head was giant-sized and stuck out unprotected."

  "Didn't you have your suit on?"

  "Yes. When the experience started. But then I seemed to be outside of it."

  "Colonel Marcus was unconscious all this time?"

  "Yes. Commander Marcus, then. I couldn't raise him on the intercom, which had changed into the weirdest little squiggle of wire. I looked around the—the beach-ball, but I couldn't identify anything belonging to the ship."