Berserker Man

by Fred Saberhagen

  . . . the badlife have grasped at least the fact that he is unusual, and they mean to use him as part of a weapons system. Have you ever heard the code name Lancelot?

  With the strange gauze now fastened more or less firmly to its torso and its head, the robot began to move about a little. Gently, with a certain skeletal engineering grace, it stepped and postured. To Elly's mind there came the image of a Dance of Death that she had seen somewhere.

  Michel's small gasp, a couple of meters to her left, broke in upon her fascinated concentration. The boy was staring at the robot with an expression Elly could not read. She looked back at the grotesquely draped machine herself, and watched it several seconds longer before it was borne in upon her that something about the test was going badly.

  The robot's good hand had moved to one of the fasteners on its chest, as if it might be going to tear itself free of what it had put on, but could not quite make up its electronic mind to do so. The damaged arm meanwhile rose in an astonishingly human gesture, flapping a useless hand and forearm across its own head as if in madness or dismay. Then, stiffly as a toppled statue, the machine fell to the deck in an abrupt swirl of gauze.

  Two others of its kind were at its sides at once. With hands moving faster than human eyes could follow, they manipulated fastenings, stripping away the slow-billowing robes from the inert body, which remained inert even when they were done.

  The Co-ordinator itself gave no evidence of having been affected in the least. "One human volunteer," it presently called out.

  Four human hands were raised. Stal's hand, Elly noticed, came up just a little less promptly than the others.

  "Life-unit Mabuchi," uttered the machine. The stocky deacon stepped forward, and reached to take up the strange garment from where it had been replaced upon the chair. His eyes were rounded with an emotion that Elly read as a blend of ecstasy and fear.

  Then he snatched his hand back as if it had been burned, when the berserker startled him by speaking again: "You will put on Lancelot. Having done so, you will then not move or act in any way except at my direct command."

  "Yes, lord and master." The deacon's answer was so low that Elly lip-read rather than heard it. Quite psychotic, she thought, looking at the man's rapt face. Why didn't I ever see that in him in the Temple?

  Mabuchi hesitated about his gray smock, then eventually decided to leave the garment on as the robots began to help him fit the shimmering stage-wrappings over it. At first Elly thought that his head remained uncovered, but then she caught a glimpse of haze that clung round his dark-haired cranium like a ghostly helmet.

  The machines, finished with their task, stepped back, but no more than one small step each. Mabuchi's eyes were closed now, and like a newly blind man he put out his hands with fingers groping. He seemed to be listening intently to something that Elly could not hear.

  Then his eyes opened, his lips moved. "Am I dying?" he asked of the company in general, in a voice that now sounded like that of a man trying to be cunning rather than submissive.

  "I detect no evidence of—"

  The rest of the Co-ordinator's reply was lost, as Mabuchi suddenly lunged toward the central console where it perched. The machines on his right and left immediately seized both his arms, and behind him another robot materialized from somewhere, holding in both hands a glowing net. But—Elly could not see how—the deacon's right arm was suddenly free again. Growling strange noises, he struck with it at the robot on his left. His fingers, like the paw of a clawing animal draped in suddenly glowing gauze, struck the machine across the front of its head. The area that in a human would have been the face was wiped away, turned into a molten smear as if it had been soft putty.

  The glowing net had enveloped Mabuchi now, and the two robots still standing fought him to a standstill while he screamed. One at last undid the fastening of Lancelot at the deacon's throat, and the gauze helm was peeled back from his head. A crackling echo filled the small room, marking the passage of something moving at shockwave speeds; Elly saw a black hole the diameter of a pencil leap into existence in the center of the deacon's forehead. His fleshy body sagged in the metal arms of the machines he fought. He twitched a few times and was still.

  A small hatch closed softly in the middle of the Co-ordinator's casing. Elly turned her eyes toward the boy who was supposed to be her son. Michel was watching her again; there was fright in his face now, but a busy intelligence was there also. Did he have any idea of who she was?

  Before she could decide whether or not to try to speak to him, a machine had come and was pulling her away. As she was tugged out of the control room into the passage again, she turned her head for a last look at her son.

  * * *

  Augmentation gravity in the operations building was almost gone, along with a lot of other things. But the life support systems were still functioning in an emergency mode. And a number of people were still around to breathe the air the systems fed them.

  Tupelov was talking, to the surviving human operator at the surviving Moonbase ticker: "Tell the admiral to bypass us completely here for now. The attack here is definitely over. We have functioning life-systems and some functioning ships. Tell him get everything into pursuit and interception."

  "Sir, if you would—"

  "I'm busy. I've told them once. You tell them." He didn't want to get into planning discussions now, he didn't want to get into a lengthy conversation with the President; once that happened he would be given orders and he would be stuck. What Tupelov had to decide first concerned an option that he hadn't mentioned to anyone else as yet—whether it might be best to gather what ships he had at the proving grounds and join in the pursuit personally.

  He walked across the great room, an odd-looking place in the emergency lighting mode, swaying up high on his toes in the low g. As always when he found himself in a prolonged low-g situation, he was going to have to struggle against spacesickness. Coming to his present goal, another emergency communications station, Tupelov gripped a railing in search of visceral support.

  "Is Colonel Marcus back yet? What'd he get?" Marcus, you had to give him that, was really very good at most of the parts of his job that really mattered. After getting the crippled scout and the people in it back to base somehow, the Colonel had rolled his boxes right into another craft and had immediately headed out from Miranda in a dangerous series of c-plus microjumps, planning to reach a distance from which the raid of two hours earlier could be photographed as it took place.

  "He's back, sir. Want to talk to him?"

  "No. Just run me whatever he got." And Tupelov gratefully threw himself into a chair, which helped the low-g queasies somewhat. On a small stage before him, three-dimensional pictures almost immediately began to run.

  "They came from Oberon. God damn." Tupelov watched as, in jumpy, computer-enhanced magnification, the six berserker craft came hurtling in, one of them destroyed en route by a backlash from tortured space itself. They had known exactly where they were going, all right, and had risked all to get there before they could be stopped.

  Someone was standing beside his chair, and he knew without looking back that it was Carmen. Neither of them said anything as they watched the recorded light flare out and back across the Mirandan surface.

  Now came the part where the robotic photointerpreters had to strain to their limits, trying to show what had happened to one small figure in an orange suit. A dot, surrounded in the pictures by pursuing machines. The machines closed in, and then the dot was out from among them somehow. What a weapon.

  "Is my boy still alive? Can you tell me that much at least?"

  It took a few seconds for her words to seep through his intense concentration upon the ongoing struggle. No sooner had the finally-captured dot been hauled aboard the goodlife ship than it and its friends had blasted off. "No, I can't," said Tupelov, brutally.

  Carmen surprised him then, moving around in front of him so that her body cut off his line of sight to the stage. "Are you h
urt?" Tupelov demanded abruptly; she was dragging around in the low-g like some semighostly victim of internal bleeding.

  "I want to know," she demanded, "what you're going to do to find my son. They took him, didn't they? Took him alive."

  "Get out of my way."

  "You tell me."

  "Get her out of here!" Tupelov ordered loudly. But then, before the people who came to pull at Carmen had hauled her more than a few meters, he turned his head and called, "Carmen, I'm betting he's still alive. I'm going to do everything I can to get him back. Everything. I mean it."

  Carmen must have heard him, but did not answer. More collapsed than not, she let herself be taken off.

  Before Tupelov could start to rerun the pictures, a young woman aide came up to his side in a bounding ballet run. "Sir? The President is on the ticker. Insists on a personal report from you. And Mr. Lombok has finally been located. Drugged. He's in a hospital on Earth."

  Tupelov said out loud what ought to be done to and with the President. On his way back across the big room, bouncing helplessly on his toes, as if in some kind of insane elation, the Secretary passed an improvised alcove where Colonel Marcus had his space suit boxes drawn up, and was talking to debriefers: " . . . he was calling me right there at the end, before they took him off. You know, that gets me somehow."

  TEN

  Even deprived of Lancelot, Michel could feel that the speed of the small goodlife ship was very high as it fled from Miranda. And as soon as the flight was fairly under way he noticed that, as on Johann Karlsen, the artificial gravity of this ship had been set at precisely surface normal for Alpine.

  When the robot put on Lancelot in the control room, Michel felt certain ahead of time that the machine was not going to be able to survive, and he nursed hopes that the destruction would prove contagious, wiping out the Co-ordinator also. But that device had disconnected itself from its slave before the trial, and Michel's hopes were dashed.

  He had not expected the goodlife man to succeed either, of course, and the violent death came as no great surprise to Michel. Though he had in a sense felt death before, he had never seen it, but at the moment it meant almost nothing to him. Only that one more enemy had been removed, and that the Co-ordinator had sustained a small defeat.

  Since he himself was not yet dead, the berserkers obviously hoped for something more than death from him, and he was waiting to discover what. After the stocky goodlife man was shot down, the blond woman the machines did not trust was led out of the control room. She reminded Michel somewhat of his mother, and the thought of his mother dead back on Miranda kept him for a little while from thinking about anything else.

  Shortly a few words from the Co-ordinator sent the three surviving goodlife on their way, apparently unguarded. The dead man was stripped carefully out of Lancelot by the surviving machines, and was then dumped like so much garbage into a disposal unit. There was not room for his legs until his upper body had been silently digested, somewhere down inside.

  Now Lancelot lay draped across the captain's chair again. The three robots still in the room, their tasks completed for the moment, ceased to move, becoming almost inert machinery. Now Michel was alone at last with the Co-ordinator.

  He had been standing through it all, and now he moved to a chair—not the captain's, of course—and sat down, facing the thing that squatted like a great spider on the console.

  Having sat down, he waited. The other waited, too. In the great new quiet that seemed to be thickening in the control room, Michel listened for any sound that might be coming from his chief enemy, but could hear nothing. It was so quiet that he thought that with some effort he might now manage to hear his own heart beat, even without the help of Lancelot.

  How long he waited thus he did not know. Fear came at him in waves, and he fought it back, trying to defend his sanity. Eventually he felt that he was going to succeed in this at least.

  No sooner was he sure of this than the berserker spoke. Had it been monitoring his heartbeat also?

  It said: "I offer you an end of fear."

  "You mean kill me."

  "No. I compute that you already know that I mean something else." After allowing him time for an answer he did not make, it went on: "The badlife who have been using you would kill you at this moment if they could. Is it not true?"

  "Probably." The thought hadn't struck him till this moment, but it struck hard now.

  "But they cannot reach you. I will protect you from them."

  "What'll you do with me?"

  "I will take you to a place of safety, where you will have a long and happy life."

  He doubted that. "Why?"

  "You are to be studied because of your unique qualities. But the study will be non-destructive. Kind and gentle and considerate. Your uniqueness must not be damaged and it may be fragile."

  "What happened to the other people?" Michel burst out suddenly. "I mean those back on Miranda."

  "It is probable that many still survive. To kill them was not my prime objective."

  "What about those in the scoutship? The one that was flying near me when I . . . I . . ."

  "It was damaged but not destroyed. Why does that concern you? Those life-units are all your enemies now."

  "My—my mother was on that ship." And as Michel spoke he could feel a small though abrupt change in the inertial space his body occupied; c-plus flight had now begun in earnest. Pursuit by human forces would be a much more difficult problem now, though not yet impossible. Not if the adventure books were right.

  The berserker had paused, as if it needed time to compute its next choice of words. "Your mother," it told him now, "is the female life-unit inside whose body your body was formed. That life-unit is aboard this ship. You have seen her in this room."

  Michel could feel no impact from mere words just now, whatever they might say. Turning the berserker's last statement over in his mind, he could find no proof that it was untrue. He had long known that he was adopted, and he had heard somewhere that on Alpine at least an effort was generally made to match adoptive to biological parents, even in physical appearance. And there was no doubt that the woman he had just seen looked like his mother. But, supposing the berserker had told the truth, what did it matter now?

  It was not going to try to convince him, at least not now. Instead it asked: "When did you first try on the device called Lancelot?"

  Sometime, maybe, after he had had a chance to think things out, he would try to lie to it. Right now he saw no need to do so. "Only a few days ago," he answered.

  "Where?"

  "At Moonbase."

  "What were the effects of that first test on you?"

  "On me? Not much of anything." Michel's hands were gripping the chair arms hard, but not as hard as he had gripped them on first sitting down a few minutes ago. He could feel muscles in his back shuddering, trying to start to relax.

  "And what were the effects upon you of the astragalus and the ring?"

  "The what?" Yet in his memory the faintest trace lay, almost buried. Something overhead: The astragalus is . . .

  The berserker was not going to insist on anything just now. It asked: "And where were you before you went to Moonbase?"

  "On Alpine. That's a planet way in near the—"

  "Why were you chosen to wear Lancelot?"

  "I guess because other people tended to go crazy. You saw. They tried a lot of people." Now Michel could feel microjumps, and multiplying in length as well as frequency. If only he had a cleared port or a screen . . . but what good would that do him?

  "Explain the meaning of the designation Lancelot."

  He tried to recall just what he had been told on that subject, by some people at Moonbase. "It's the name of a man in some old stories, a famous fighter. Back in the days when men fought with big knives and rode around on animals. Only one other man could ever beat him. His son."

  "Do you wish to see your mother now?"

  For just an instant Michel's nerves gave a gr
eat leap. Then he remembered who the machine meant. "You mean the woman . . . who was here."

  "I have told you she is your mother."

  "I—yes, I'd like to talk to her."

  The robots went into smooth motion once again. A door opened, and again Michel's heart leaped, though only momentarily, at the sight of the tall blonde woman standing in the corridor beyond.

  * * *

  Aboard a larger ship, also thrumming subliminally with its increasing speed of flight, Tupelov occupied a combat chair in a prominent position on the bridge. Carmen sat in a chair beside his. With the seats' protective devices at the moment folded away, she could almost but not quite lean her head on his shoulder. Her posture was half that of a supplicant, half tired lover.

  She said, "I heard you give that order for the fleet not to pursue directly any longer, to try for an interception."

  "Well, I did. We should have a better chance that way. Another force is going to take up the pursuit, you see, following what they can pick up of the trail as long as they can. A ship jumping does leave a trail of sorts, you know."

  "But how can we intercept them if we don't know where they're taking him?"

  Across the center of the bridge, surrounded by officers' chairs, a complex display of the whole known galaxy was etched in light, a model of a volume tens of thousands of light years in diameter. Tupelov had spent most of the time since his task force departed the proving grounds in looking at this display, and he was looking at it now. "I'm making my best guess, that's all." He glanced at her briefly. "You look very tired."