Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The stage became a window into a vast hall. One person stood forward at an imaged lectern; he was a slender, fine-boned being, topologically like a man except for the single eye that stretched across his face, with a bright bulging pupil that slid to and fro like mercury.

  The speaker’s voice was a highpitched torrent of clicks and whines. Most of those in the ranks behind him wore a kind of uniform. When he paused, they whined in unison.

  “What does he say?” Maria whispered.

  Goodlife looked at her. “The machine has told me that it has lost the meaning of the sounds.”

  “Then may we see the images of your parents, Goodlife?”

  Hemphill, watching the stage, started to object; but the girl was right. The sight of this fellow’s parents might be more immediately helpful.

  Goodlife found a control somewhere.

  Hemphill was surprised momentarily that the parents appeared only in flat projected pictures. First the man was there, against a plain background, blue eyes and neat short beard, nodding his head with a pleasant expression on his face. He wore the lining coverall of a spacesuit.

  Then the woman, holding some kind of cloth before her for covering, and looking straight into the camera. She had a broad face and red braided hair. There was hardly time to see anything more before the alien orator was back, whining faster than ever.

  Hemphill turned to ask: “Is that all? All you know of your parents?”

  “Yes. Now they are images, they no longer think they exist. The badlife killed them.”

  The creature in the projection was assuming, Maria thought, a more didactic tone. Three-dimensional charts of stars and planets appeared near him, one after another, and he gestured at them as he spoke. He had vast numbers of stars and planets on his charts to boast about; she could tell somehow that he was boasting.

  Hemphill was moving toward the stage a step at a time, more and more absorbed. Maria did not like the way the light of the images reflected on his face.

  Goodlife, too, watched the stage pageant which perhaps he had seen a thousand times before. Maria could not tell what thoughts might be behind his meaningless face which had never had another human face to imitate. On impulse she took his arm again.

  “Goodlife, Hemphill and I are alive, like you. Will you help us now? Then we will always help you.” She had a sudden mental picture of Goodlife rescued, taken to a planet, cowering among the staring badlife.

  “Good. Bad.” His hand reached to take hold of hers; he had removed his suit gauntlets. He swayed back and forth as if she attracted and repelled him at the same time. God, she wanted to scream and wail for him, to tear apart with her fingers the mindlessly proceeding metal that had made him what he was.

  “We’ve got them!” It was Hemphill, coming back from the stage, where the recorded tirade went on unrelentingly. He was exultant. “Don’t you see? He’s showing what must be a complete catalogue, of every star and rock they own. It’s a victory speech. But when we study those charts we can find them, we can track them down and reach them!”

  “Hemphill.” She wanted to calm him back to concentration on immediate problems. “How old are those—pictures, up there? What part of the galaxy do they show? Or were they even made in another galaxy? Will we ever be able to tell?”

  Hemphill lost some enthusiasm. “Anyway, it’s a chance to track them down; we’ve got to save this information.” He pointed at Goodlife. “He’s got to take me to what he calls the strategic housing; then we Can sit and wait for the warships, or maybe get off this damned thing in a boat.”

  She stroked Goodlife’s hand, soothing a baby. “Yes, but he’s confused. How could he be anything else?”

  “Of course.” Hemphill paused to consider. “You can handle him much better than I.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Hemphill went on: “Now you’re a woman, and he appears to be a physically healthy young male. Calm him down if you like, but somehow you’ve got to persuade him to help me. Everything depends on it.” He had turned toward the stage again, unable to keep half his mind from the star charts. “Take him out somewhere, for a little walk and talk; don’t get far away.”

  And what else was there to do? She led Goodlife from the theater while the dead man on the stage clicked and shouted, cataloguing his thousand suns.

  IV

  Too much had happened, was still happening, and all at once he could no longer stand to be near the badlife. Goodlife found himself pulling away from the female, running, flying down the passages, toward the place where he had fled when he was small and strange fears had come from nowhere. It was the room where the machine always saw and heard him, and was ready to talk to him.

  He stood before the attention of the machine, in the chamber-thathas shrunk. He thought of the place so, because he could remember it clearly as a larger room, where the scanners and speakers of the machine towered above his head. He knew the real change had been his own physical growth; still, this compartment was set apart in a special association with food and sleep and protective warmth.

  “I have listened to the badlife, and shown them things,” he said, fearing punishment.

  “I know that, Goodlife, for I have watched. These things have become a part of my experiment.”

  What joyous relief! It said nothing of punishment, though it must know that the words of the badlife had shaken and confused him. He had even imagined himself showing the man Hemphill the strategic housing, and so putting an end to all punishment, for always.

  “They wanted me—they wanted me to—”

  “I have watched. I have listened. The man is tough and evil, powerfully motivated to fight against me. I must understand his kind, for they cause much damage. He must be tested to his limits, to destruction. He thinks himself free inside me, and so he will not think as a prisoner. This is important.”

  Goodlife pulled off his irritating suit; the machine would not let the badlife in here. He sank down to the floor and wrapped his arms around the base of a scanner-speaker console. Once long ago the machine had given him a thing that was soft and warm when he held it . . . he closed his eyes.

  “What are my orders?” he asked, sleepily. Here in this chamber all was steady and comforting, as always.

  “First, do not tell the badlife of these orders. Then, do what the man Hemphill tells you to do. No harm will come to me.”

  “He has a bomb.”

  “I watched his approach, and I disabled his bomb, even before he entered to attack me. His pistol can do me no serious harm. Do you think one badlife can conquer me?”

  “No. Smiling, reassured, he curled into a more comfortable position. “Tell me about my parents.” He had heard the story a thousand times, but it was always good.

  “Your parents were good, they gave themselves to me. Then, during a great battle, the badlife killed them. The badlife hated them, as they hate you. When they say they like you, they lie, with the evil untruth of all badlife.

  “But your parents had each given me a part of their bodies, and from them I made you. Your parents were destroyed completely by the badlife, or I would have saved even their non-functioning bodies for you to see. That would have been good.”

  “Yes.”

  “The two badlives have searched for you; now they are resting. Sleep, Goodlife.”

  He slept.

  Awakening, he remembered a dream in which two people had beckoned him to join them on the stage of the theater. He knew they were his mother and father, though they looked like the two badlife. The dream faded before his waking mind could grasp it firmly.

  He ate and drank, while the machine talked to him.

  “If the man Hemphill wants to be guided to the strategic housing, take him there. I will capture him there, and let him escape later to try again. When finally he can be provoked to fight no more, I will destroy him. But I mean to preserve the life of the female; you and she will produce more goodlife for me.”

  “Yes!” It was immediately cle
ar what a good thing that would be. They would give parts of their bodies to the machine, so new goodlife bodies could be built, cell by cell. And the man Hemphill, who punished and damaged with his fastswinging arm, would be utterly destroyed.

  When he rejoined the badlife, the man Hemphill barked questions and threatened punishment until Goodlife was confused and a little frightened. But Goodlife agreed to help, and was careful to reveal nothing of what the machine planned. Maria was more pleasant than every. He touched her whenever he could.

  Hemphill demanded to be taken to the strategic housing. Goodlife agreed at once; he had been there many times. There was a high-speed elevator that made the fifty-mile journey easy.

  Hemphill paused, before saying: “You’re too damn willing, all of a sudden.” Turning his face to Maria. “I don’t trust him.”

  This badlife thought he was being false! Goodlife was angered; the machine never lied, and no properly obedient goodlife could lie.

  Hemphill paced around, and finally demanded: “Is there any route that approaches this strategic housing in such a way that the machine cannot possibly watch us?”

  Goodlife thought. “I believe there is one such way. We will have to carry extra tanks of air, and travel many miles through vacuum.” The machine had said to help Hemphill, and help he would. He hoped he could watch when the male badlife was finally destroyed.

  There had been a battle, in some time that could hardly be related meaningfully to any Earthly calendar. The berserker had fought some terrible opponent, and had taken a terrible lance-thrust of a wound. A cavity two miles wide at the widest, and fifty miles deep, had been driven in by a sequence of shaped atomic charges, through level after level of machinery, deck after deck of armor, and had been stopped only by the last inner defenses of the buried unliving heart. The berserker had survived, and crushed its enemy, and soon afterward its repair machines had sealed over the outer opening of the wound, using extra thicknesses of armor. It had meant to gradually rebuild the whole destruction; but there was so much life in the galaxy, and so much of it was stubborn and clever. Somehow battle damage accumulated faster than it could be repaired. The great hole was used as a conveyor path, and never much worked on.

  When Hemphill saw the blasted cavity—what little of it his tiny suit-lamp could show—he felt a shrinking fear that was greater than any in his memory. He stopped on the edge of the void, drifting there with his arm instinctively around Maria. She had put on a suit and accompanied him, without protest or eagerness, without being asked.

  It had already been an hour’s journey from the airlock, through weightless vacuum inside the great machine. Goodlife had led the way through section after section, with every show of cooperation. Hemphill had the pistol ready, and the bomb, and two hundred feet of cord tied around his left arm.

  But when Hemphill recognized the once-molten edge of the berserker’s great scar for what it was, his delicate new hope of survival left him. This, the damned thing had survived. This, perhaps, had hardly weakened it. Again, the bomb under his arm was only a pathetic toy.

  Goodlife drifted up to them. Hemphill had already taught him to touch helmets for speech in vacuum.

  “This great damage is the one path we can take to reach the strategic housing without passing scanners or service machines. I will teach you to ride the conveyor. It will carry us most of the way.”

  The conveyor was a thing of forcefields and great rushing containers, hundreds of yards out in the Great Damage and running lengthwise through it. When the conveyor’s forcefields caught the people up, their weightlessness was more than ever like falling, with occasional vast shapes, corpuscles of the beserker’s bloodstream, flickering past in the near darkness to show movement.

  Hemphill flew beside Maria, holding her hand. Her face was hard to see inside the helmet, but she did not seem to be looking at him. There was no need.

  This conveyor was another mad new world, a fairy tale of monsters and flying and falling. Hemphill fell past past great fear, into a calm determination.

  I can do it, he thought. The thing is blind and helpless here. I will do it, and I will survive if I can.

  Goodlife led them from the slowing conveyor, to drift into a chamber hollowed in the inner armor by the final explosion at the end of the ancient lance-thrust. The chamber was an empty sphere a hundred feet across, from which cracks radiated out into the solid armor. On the surface nearest the center of the berserker, one fissure was as wide as a door, where the last energy of the enemy’s blow had driven ahead.

  Goodlife touched helmets. “I have seen the other end of this crack, from inside, at the strategic housing. It is only a few yards from here.” Hemphill hesitated for only a moment, wondering whether to send Goodlife through the twisting passage first. But if this was some incredibly complex trap, the trigger of it might be anywhere.

  He touched his helmet to Maria’s. “Stay behind him. Follow him through, and keep an eye on him.” The fissure narrowed as Hemphill followed it, but at the end it was still wide enough for him to force himself through.

  This was the inner temple, another great hollow sphere. In the center was a complexity the size of a small house, shock-mounted on a web of girders that ran in every direction. This could be nothing but the strategic housing. There was a glow from it like flickering moonlight; forcefield switches responding to the random atomic turmoil within, somehow choosing what human shipping lane or colony would be next attacked, and how.

  Hemphill felt a pressure rising in his mind and soul, toward a climax of triumphal hate. He drifted forward, cradling his bomb tenderly, starting to unwind the cord wrapped around his arm. He tied the free end delicately to the plunger of the bomb, as he approached the central complex.

  I mean to live, he thought, to watch the damned thing die. I will tape the bomb against the central block, that so-innocent looking slab in there, and I will brace myself around two hundred feet of these heavy metal corners, and pull.

  Goodlife stood braced in the perfect place from which to watch the heart of the machine, watching the man Hemphill string his cord. Goodlife felt a certain satisfaction that his prediction had been right, and that the strategic housing was approachable by this one narrow path of the great damage. They would not have to go back that way. When the badlife had been captured, all of them could ride up in the airfilled elevator Goodlife used when he came here for maintenance practice.

  Hemphill had finished stringing his cord. Now he waved his arm at Goodlife and Maria, who clung to the same girder, watching. Now Hemphill pulled on the cord. Of course, nothing happened. The machine had said the bomb was disabled, and the machine would make very certain in such a matter.

  Maria pushed away from beside Goodlife, and drifted in toward Hemphill.

  Hemphill tugged again and again on his cord. Goodlife sighed impatiently, and moved. There was a great cold in the girders here; he could begin to feel it now through the fingers and toes of his suit.

  At last, when Hemphill started back to see what was wrong with his device, the service machines came from where they had been hiding, to seize him. He tried to draw his pistol, but their grippers moved far too quickly.

  It was hardly a struggle that Goodlife saw, but he watched with interest. Hemphill’s figure had gone rigid in the suit, obviously straining every muscle to the limit. Why should the badlife try to struggle against steel and atomic power? The machines bore the man effortlessly away, toward the elevator shaft. Goodlife felt an uneasiness.

  Maria was drifting, her face turned back toward Goodlife. He wanted to go to her and touch her again, but suddenly he was a little afraid, as before when he had run from her. One of the service machines came back from the elevator to grip her and carry her away. She kept her face turned toward Goodlife. He turned away from her, a feeling like punishment in the core of his being.

  In the great cold silence, the flickering light from the strategic housing bathed everything. In the center, a chaotic block of atoms. Elsewher
e, engines, relays, sensing cells. Where was it, really, the great machine that spoke to him? Everywhere, and nowhere. Would these new feelings, brought by the badlife, ever leave him? He tried to understand himself, and could not begin.

  Light flickered on a round shape among the girders and a few yards away, a shape that offended Goodlife’s sense of the proper and necessary in machinery. Looking closer, he saw that it was a space helmet.

  The motionless figure was wedged only lightly in an angle between frigid beams, but there was no force in here to move it.

  He could hear the suit creak, stiff with great cold, when he grabbed it and turned it. Unseeing blue eyes looked out at Goodlife through the faceplate. The man’s face wore a neat short beard.

  “Ahhh, yes,” sighed Goodlife inside his own helmet. A thousand times he had seen this face.

  His father had been carrying something, heavy, strapped carefully to his ancient suit. His father had carried it this far, until the old suit had wheezed and failed.

  His father, too, had followed the logical narrow path of the great damage, to reach the strategic housing without being seen. His father had choked and died and frozen here, carrying toward strategic housing what could only be a bomb.

  Goodlife heard his own voice keening, without words, and he could not see plainly for the tears floating in his helmet. His fingers felt numbed with cold as he unstrapped the bomb and lifted it from his father . . .

  V

  Hemphill was too exhausted to do more than gasp as the service machine carried him out of the elevator and along the air-filled corridor toward the prison room. When the machine went dead and dropped him, he had to lie still for long seconds before he could attack it again. It had hidden his pistol somewhere, so he began to beat on the robotlike thing with his armored fists, while it stood unresisting. Soon it toppled over. Hemphill sat on it and beat it some more, sobbing.