Berserker Man

by Fred Saberhagen

  Iyenari promptly jumped to his feet, checking his suit's telltales. No doubt he thought they were all being subtly poisoned by hallucinogens.

  "I have them in sight," said Marcus's airspeakers. "Definitely people. Maybe twenty of 'em, walking in a rather compact group. Not suited. Looks like they're dressed in shipboard casuals."

  The bridge was calling Tupelov. "Sir, we've got a big scope on them. Earth-descended, no doubt about it. And we have a tentative computer match on at least two people as members of the Gonfalon's crew." That was one of the expedition ships whose fate the people with the Johann Karlsen had never learned.

  Whose idea it was that his people should advance to meet the onward-marching group halfway, Tupelov honestly couldn't remember afterwards. Maybe his own. At least he authorized more of his own crew to suit up and come out. And with the others he was walking away from the ship. The gray band flowed beneath their feet, the shifting of its effective gravity holding them always at the bottom of its curve.

  From the bridge again: "Sir, they don't look exactly happy to see you. Or exactly healthy, either. They look, well, like refugees of some kind. . . ."

  And again, a few moments later: "Sir, there's a machine of some kind in the middle of that group—"

  In Tupelov's suit, in all their suits at the same time, there sounded a brisk alarm. It signaled that radio code of a certain ominous type was in the air.

  "Back to the ship, quick!" Before he had finished giving the order he knew it was unnecessary; and he knew also that it was quite probably too late.

  * * *

  All force-currents led to the Taj, Michel had discovered. At least they did if the Taj was what you were looking for. Once that goal was chosen, there was no way to avoid finding it.

  Nor was there any way to simply approach it for a cautious look. You located the Taj, you decided to get a better look, and from that moment it had you enmeshed in its gray loops, embedded in its own peculiar space. Maybe a decision to flee, instead of coming closer, would have been honored. But as matters stood—

  On integrating the Co-ordinator's memory into his own, he had recognized in it a new view of something that he himself had seen long ago. It was something he had seen through Lance's eyes, the first time he had tried on Lancelot. Something that was then being clumsily and inadequately modeled, on one of the secret levels of Moonbase. He had seen, through Lance's eyes, a technician labeling that model with a name. So Earth had known a little about this, even then. Perhaps Tupelov had known, even as the berserkers knew, how the thing that humans called the Taj was connected with the origins of Michel Geulincx.

  * * *

  After the successful completion of his hunt in the vicinity of Alpine, he had flown straight inward from Blackwool toward the Core. Almost from the start this passage had been quite stormy, marked by heavy opposing currents. There were storms of radiation in his face. There were cloud-columns of matter in several forms, marching out fresh from the Core's creative furnaces, material moving on its way to sunbirth from the all but inexhaustible fountains known to exist at the roots of the galactic arms.

  He went on in, shifting from flightspace to so-called normal space and back again. He crossed through areas where travel in normal space actually was faster. Around him there was increasing evidence of an organization growing ever more complex and dense. Still he had come only a few hundred light years from Blackwool, a distance far short of what should have been necessary to bring him to the very center of the Core, when the Taj appeared ahead of him. He had reached his goal long before he had expected to.

  Seen from outside, the Taj reminded him of nothing so much as an enormous geodesic dome. Its size was hard to determine, but he knew it was immense, bigger than a star. And at once he knew that the great but subtle wrongness that he could feel pervading the whole Core was centered here.

  So there was the Taj ahead of him, and then without a single frame of transition there was the Taj around him on all sides. He was still free to move within it, but there was no apparent way out of the cage of its great gray loops and bands. Not a trace was visible of the geodesic structure that he had seen from outside.

  This was the center of infection of the wrongness of the Core.

  Mild, thick, planet-surface air filled the whole volume of space that now held Michel, extending as far as Lancelot could sense—but the air was not the wrongness; this space seemed to have been built for air. In the air were radio messages, some very old and decaying, intelligence in codes that were not human or berserker either, the same messages passing and repassing, endlessly traversing a finite but large and unbounded space. These messages were not the wrongness, either.

  And there was human speech, quite recent, in the air. And a scrambled berserker code, saying that fresh human prey had just become available. Even this was not the wrongness in the Taj.

  Michel took bearings. In a hurry, he turned and flew. In the improbable atmosphere, a shock wave grew before him like a wall of flame.

  He saw and recognized the Johann Karlsen, bound in its jeweler's setting like a pearl. Along one of the bands that circled the great ship, machines and suited humans skirmished. There must have been a sortie from the ship, and now the party was cut off.

  The enemy units were small in size, not much larger than the people, and the power they radiated was almost negligible. Halting above the conflict, Michel picked up berserker devices with one hand after the other, squeezing them dry, draining energy and information alike into Lance's reservoirs. Surviving units of the enemy, on the outskirts of the conflict, fled.

  Now there were only human radio voices nearby.

  " . . . what it can be I don't know . . ."

  " . . . unknown life form . . ."

  " . . . into the ship, negotiate from there . . ."

  These voices opened doors that had long been closed, doors to realms of memory never electronically ingested, memories of a time before there had been Lance. . . .

  Another voice, a woman's, receding rapidly, already faint: " . . . oh God, they've got me, help me someone, don't let them . . ."

  From hands of taloned flame he dropped the mangled metal of his enemies. The fragments fell toward infinity in all directions. His mother's voice . . . he spun into a meteoric passage of pursuit.

  * * *

  Ahead of him the berserker survivors bore their captive away in flight. He had no feeling for any outer boundary of the Taj, but there was certainly a center and their flight was in that direction. His pursuit gained. A handful of machines turned on him to fight a delaying action. He burst through their precisely calculated pattern, leaving spinning wreckage that had not delayed him very long.

  He could feel that the center of the Taj was somewhere close at hand, and indeed he knew as much from the last berserker memories he had just swallowed. At an intersection of three great curving Taj-bands, a vaster machine than any he had yet fought against was waiting for him. It looked less like a ship than like a space-going robot, and it was in the act of sealing something away inside its metal gut. With the sealing, the woman's radio voice that had never ceased to cry for help was muffled at last into a silence that even Lance's hearing could not penetrate. The support machines that had been in flight were gathered round the great one now; they formed their ranks around it, but ranks that left a peaceful pathway for Michel's approach.

  "You are Michel Geulincx," it said to him.

  "And you are one of the Directors." He saw now that, like the Co-ordinator, the machine before him must be only one of a number essentially equal in capability, sharing essentially the same programming and memory. The other Directors must be outside the Taj, though probably in at least occasional communication with this one. There was no one machine upon which the berserker cause depended, any more than the survival of life now depended completely upon any one protoplasmic organism.

  There was no need for the machine to answer his naming. It waited silently, for his attack or for his questioning, perhaps.
It was a tremendously armored braincase whose only purpose was the protection and support of the berserker computer gear that it contained. In a moment it might hurl its legions upon him—he could sense that more of them were gathering nearby, coming from more distant regions of the Taj.

  His attack would come when he was ready. And there was only one question that he still wanted answered.

  "Father," he said to it, and laughed. He knew that if he had heard that laugh from somewhere outside himself, he would have recognized it as mad and horrible.

  "Who has computed me your father?"

  "No one has told me the secret. I have drunk it in with the electronic blood of your machines." Michel spread his arms in a wide gesture, and in one of the support machines a sensor triggered and a weapon fired. Lance brushed the beam of it aside as Michel went on talking.

  "Two people's bodies came together, on all the levels of space. Cells from their two bodies joined, and a new cell, a third cell, a new person—but not quite—came from the joining. Not quite a person, because that was here in the Taj, and you were watching, and you interfered.

  "Instead of destroying the people, you took the chance to alter the new life that they were making. So it was no longer completely human. Maybe it was no longer really a life, with something of your death down in the middle of it, in the controlling atoms of its first cells . . . I don't know the human words for all the different kinds of energies that make a thing itself. You had a hand in the starting of that life, and then you—"

  The Director interrupted: "You are superior to all other life, Michel."

  "All life is evil to you, so does that mean I am more evil? No, I know what you mean—I am superior to all other goodlife. I was born out of an artificial womb, and your devices were somewhere in that, too, monitoring, changing me a little here and there. You designed me to be what you wanted from the start."

  "You are unique."

  "The Alpine goodlife must have helped you a lot. Did you save any of them when the end came there?"

  "All of them were saved from life."

  "Including Sixtus Geulincx?" It came out in a great, echoing shout.

  "The need for his service was at an end. The death he wanted was his reward."

  Michel uttered a spasmodic, prolonged sound. It was less human even than that previous mad cackle. Yet there was something of human laughter in it still. The vibration made his flame-shape dance cheerfully in the mirroring metal of the Director's formidable armor. It was the hysteria of a god, of a giant tickled beyond all endurance.

  The Director was waiting silently again. The interior of it held something warm and still alive, but resisted Lance's most subtle probing attempts to find out more, even as Lance was now deflecting the probes that the Director sent toward him. Never before had Michel/Lance faced a single antagonist as powerful as this. Michel could not tell what was passing in its electronic thoughts.

  When he had at last freed himself of that laugh-like sound, he addressed his enemy yet again. "Father? Do you understand what a machine-crime you have committed? I am no goodlife. I never will be. Do you know what a sin against your programming it was, to take a hand in my creation? What you must tell me now is why you did it."

  "Perhaps you are not goodlife; I have said you are unique. But even the creation of life is allowed me, if that helps me to destroy all life eventually. You were created to answer a question: Is the Taj living, or is it not? The answer must lie at its center. If it lives it must be destroyed. If it does not live, there may be some way to use it against life."

  The Taj was . . . beyond knowing. So Michel felt now, facing toward its center, which lay somewhere near. The berserker was right, whatever answers could be found about it would be found there. Michel could not feel that it was life, or non-life either. It was what it was. But still a steady wind of wrongness drifted outward from the direction of the center of the Taj.

  To the Director Michel said, "I think I was brought here for a purpose. But not by you."

  "I tried to bring you here when you were ready to be used. My machines and goodlife failed. But here you are. The severely odd things of the galaxy tend to arrive here. Things that do not fit the laws appear as if in court. For here the laws are made."

  "And do you want to make the laws, machine?"

  "I want to do only what I must do. Now you will try to destroy me." It was not an order, but a prophecy. "And you will try to save the female life-unit that I carry. Trying to do these things, you will follow me toward the center of the Taj."

  "I will not help you."

  "You will do what you must do. Through me the Directors that are outside the Taj will watch, and we will try to learn what we must know."

  Lance reached for the Director's electronic nerves. It launched no counterattack, but parried. Michel's hands closed on elusive, slippery hardness, on energies that froze themselves away out of his reach. In the timeless mode of combat he advanced, and saw the Director retreating, dodging, matching his own best speed. A lesser machine was caught between them and vanished, disintegrated in a great blast that rolled and spun its fellows away among the motionless, eternal gray roadways.

  The Director was retreating toward the center. Michel advanced.

  From out of the center of the Taj, chaos howled at him like a wind, and progress against this wind became difficult and slow. Michel saw now the bones of dead life-forms, failed attempts to go where he was going. And there were the husks of dead, age-old machines, sent on the same task. The grayness of the Taj itself had grown upon them; they might have been here, and ancient, before there was an Earth.

  And side by side with the wind of chaos, order and law and arrangement marched out like armies. They passed, vanishing endlessly down the galactic arms. Shapes still uncreated moved by him, flickers of potential being.

  Ahead, the Director still led him on. Farther ahead, the curving arm of the Taj that they were following turned into a broad and desolate plain. And ahead again, it was a spiral climbing to a tower.

  The altered shape of the Director still centimetered its way forward. Beyond it there lay the very center of the Taj. The Taj was at the center of the galaxy, and at the center of the Taj, Michel saw now, the entire galaxy was located.

  The Director had been destroyed eons ago. And still, somehow, the crystal-steel form of the Director led him on. It was barely recognizable, but still it could speak to him, by what channels he no longer knew. "Life-unit. Tell me what you see ahead of us. Michel. Tell me."

  But Michel could no longer bear to look ahead. Nor could he manage to turn his eyes in any other direction.

  It started to question him again. "Is this—?" it began, and then fell silent.

  "What?" Inside the awesome armor of his enemy, the life of his mother still survived.

  "Life-unit Michel. Is this the God of humanity that lies before us? Never before have I been able to come this far."

  Something was wrong, ahead. Something . . . and he saw the nature of the wrongness, now. It was only that the center of the Taj was—incomplete. "God must be something more than this," he said.

  "I compute," said the Director, "an imperfection there. It is not finished. Either you or I must . . ." It came to a complete stop. Then its physical forward motion began again.

  "Either you or I," said Michel. He moved forward, and was almost able to reach the Director now. He could still advance, but the advance was changing him. He was no longer what he had been. Everything had changed.

  "I no longer compute properly," said the Director. "I no longer," it said. Again it came to a complete stop. And that was all.

  Michel could reach inside it now with one hand, and carefully bring out the life it had been carrying. He shielded the woman completely in his closed hand as he brought her forth. His mother was frightened, terrified, still sane only because she could not see what lay outside the hand that held her safe. The center of the Taj was so small that Michel might have held it in his two human hands. And it
was a room, spacious enough to make a place for a great company to gather. And it dwarfed all the rest of the galaxy outside. It deafened and it blinded, so that even Lancelot could not look at it at all. And when Michel/Lancelot looked carefully into its great inner calm, he saw that every galaxy in the universe had its own Taj identical to this one, and he saw that the Taj of every galaxy in the universe was unique, flowing with subtly different laws. No galaxy was alive, and every galaxy carried in its heart the seeds and secrets of all created life. And each had an infinite purpose to complete.

  A door stood open, leading to the very center. Michel saw now that each Taj chose from the worlds of its galaxy a company of beings, no two from the same world-species. These it brought into itself, one by one, to forge one link in a great chain, to help lift the universe through its next purposive step.

  Here were a company of intelligent beings gathered, diverse live cells chosen to differentiate, in a gathering still incomplete.

  Michel turned for the last time, and without moving from where he was he reapproached the Johann Karlsen. Opening the metal shape harmlessly and gently, in a way that he now understood, he placed his mother inside it and withdrew his hands. The ship was whole. The bonds that had held it fixed in the Taj were of no purpose now, and they fell from it like dead leaves, like circlets of discarded skin.

  In freedom, Michel turned back to the center. Voices called him, of beings who were perfectly free and whose bonds could never now be broken. Beside a Carmpan whose shape Michel could dimly recognize from old adventure tales, one seat along their table-rim was vacant.

  Michel took another step, past the lifeless Director, and with that all life that had been born of Earth came home to the Taj-heart at last. Alone and of his own free will, Michel Geulincx moved forward to claim his place among the shining company.

  The Berserker Throne

  Chapter 1

  Around the green and lovely world called Salutai, the sky was clear of terror, as it had been now for many years. Today the planet's dayside sky was almost clear of clouds as well, and at midday the face of the land beneath it blazed with the thousand colors of midsummer flowers.