Now, dishes of food, hot and cold, popped out on a galley table, and Herron bowed to the machine. “Will you join me?”
“I need no organic food.”
Herron sat down with a sigh. “In the end,” he told the machine, “you’ll find that lack of humor is as pointless as laughter. Wait and see if I’m not right.” He began to eat, and found himself not so hungry as he had thought. Evidently his body still feared death—this surprised him a little.
“Do you normally function in the operation of this ship?” the machine asked.
“No,” he said, making himself chew and swallow. “I’m not much good at pushing buttons.” A peculiar thing that had happened was nagging at Herron. When capture was only minutes away, Captain Hanus had come dashing aft from the control room, grabbing Herron and dragging him along in a tearing hurry, aft past all the stored art treasures.
“Herron, listen—if we don’t make it, see here?” Tooling open a double hatch in the stern compartment, the captain had pointed into what looked like a short padded tunnel, the diameter of a large drain pipe. “The regular lifeboat won’t get away, but this might.”
“Are you waiting for the Second Officer, Captain, or leaving us now?”
“There’s room for only one, you fool, and I’m not the one who’s going.”
“You mean to save me? Captain, I’m touched!” Herron laughed, easily and naturally. “But don’t put yourself out.”
“You idiot. Can I trust you?” Hanus lunged into the boat, his hands flying over its controls. Then he backed out, glaring like a madman. “Listen. Look here. This button is the activator; now I’ve set things up so the boat should come out in the main shipping lanes and start sending a distress signal. Chances are she’ll be picked up safely then. Now the controls are set, only this activator button needs to be pushed down—”
The berserker’s launch had attacked at that moment, with a roar like mountains falling on the hull of the ship. The lights and the artificial gravity had failed and then come abruptly back. Piers Herron had been thrown on his side, his wind knocked out. He had watched while the captain, regaining his feet and moving like a man in a daze, had closed the hatch on the mysterious little boat again and staggered forward toward his control room.
“Why are you here?” the machine asked Herron.
He dropped the forkful of food he had been staring at. He didn’t have to hesitate before answering the question. “Do you know what BuCulture is? They’re the fools in charge of Art, on Earth. Some of them, like a lot of other fools, think I’m a great painter. They worship me. When I said I wanted to leave Earth on this ship, they made it possible.
“I wanted to leave because almost everything that is worthwhile in any true sense is being removed from Earth. A good part of it is on this ship. What’s left behind on the planet is only a swarm of animals, breeding and dying, fighting—” he paused.
“Why did you not try to fight or to hide when my machines boarded this ship?”
“Because it would have done no good.”
When the berserker’s prize crew had forced their way in through an airlock, Herron had been setting up his easel in what was to have been a small exhibition hall, and he had paused to watch the uninvited visitors file past. One of the manshaped metal things, the one through which he was being questioned now, had stayed to stare at him through its lenses while the others had moved on forward to the crew compartment.
“Herron!” the intercom had shouted. “Try, Herron, please! You know what to do!” Clanging noises followed, and gunshots and curses.
What to do, Captain? Why, yes. The shock of events and the promise of imminent death had stirred up some kind of life in Piers Herron. He looked with interest at the alien captor, the inhuman cold of deep space frosting over its metal here in the warm cabin. Then he turned away from it and began to paint the berserker, trying to catch not the outward shape he had never seen, but what he felt of its inwardness. He felt the emotionless deadlines of its watching lenses boring into his back. The sensation was faintly pleasurable, like cold spring sunshine.
“What is good?” the machine asked Herron, standing over him in the galley while he tried to eat.
He snorted. “You tell me.”
It took him literally. “To serve the cause of what men call death is good. To destroy life is good.”
Herron pushed his nearly full plate into a disposal slot and stood up. “You’re almost right—but even if you were entirely right, why so enthusiastic? What is there praise-worthy about death?” Now his thoughts surprised him as his lack of appetite had.
“I am entirely right,” said the machine.
For long seconds Herron stood still, as if thinking, though his mind was almost entirely blank. “No,” he said finally, and waited for a bolt to strike him.
“In what do you think I am wrong?” it asked.
“I’ll show you.” He led it out of the galley, his hands sweating and his mouth dry. Why wouldn’t the damned thing kill him and have done?
The paintings were racked row on row and tier on tier; there was no room in the ship for more than a few to be displayed in a conventional way. Herron found the drawer he wanted and pulled it open so the portrait inside swung into full view, lights springing on around it to bring out the rich colors beneath the twentieth century statglass coating.
“This is where you’re wrong,” Herron said.
The man-shaped thing’s scanner studied the portrait for perhaps fifteen seconds. “Explain what you are showing me,” it said.
“I bow to you!” Herron did so. “You admit ignorance! You even ask an intelligible question, if one that is somewhat too broad. Explain, you say. First, tell me what you see here.”
“I see the image of a life-unit, its third spatial dimension of negligible size as compared to the other two. The image is sealed inside a protective jacket transparent to the wavelengths used by the human eye. The life-unit imaged is, or was, an adult male apparently in good functional condition, garmented in a manner I have not seen before. What I take to be one garment is held before him—”
“You see a man with a glove,” Herron cut in, wearying of his bitter game. “That is the title, Man With A Glove. Now what do you say it means?”
There was a pause of twenty seconds. “Is it an attempt to praise life, to say that life is good?”
Looking now at Titian’s eight hundred year old more-thanmasterpiece, Herron for the moment hardly heard what the machine was saying; he was thinking helplessly and hopelessly of his own most recent work.
“Now you will tell me what it means,” said the machine without emphasis.
Herron walked away without answering, leaving the drawer open.
The berserker’s mouthpiece walked at his side. “Tell me what it means or you will be punished.”
“If you can pause to think, so can I.”
But Herron’s stomach had knotted up at the threat of punishment, seeming to feel that pain mattered even more than death. Herron had great contempt for his stomach.
His feet took him back to his easel. Looking at the discordant and brutal line that a few minutes ago had pleased him, he now found it as disgusting as everything else he had tried to do in the past year.
The berserker asked: “What have you made here?”
Herron picked up a brush he had forgotten to clean, and wiped at it irritably.
“It is my attempt to get at your essence, to capture you with paint and canvas as you have seen those humans captured.” He waved at the storage racks. “My attempt has failed, as most do.”
There was another pause, which Herron did not try to time.
“An attempt to praise me?”
Herron broke the spoiled brush and threw it down. “Call it what you like.”
This time the pause was short, and at its end the machine did not speak, but turned away and walked in the direction of the airlock. Some of its fellows clanked past to join it. From the direction of the airlock there beg
an to come sounds like those of heavy metal being worked and hammered. The interrogation seemed to be over for the time being.
Herron’s thoughts wanted to be anywhere but on his work or on his fate, and they returned to what Hanus had shown him, or tried to show him. Not a regular lifeboat, but she might get away, the captain had said. All it needs now is to press the button.
Herron started walking, smiling faintly as he realized that if this berserker was as careless as it seemed, he might possibly escape it.
Escape to what? He couldn’t paint any more, if he ever could. All that really mattered to him now was here, and on other ships leaving Earth.
Back at the storage rack, Herron swung the Man With A Glove out so its case came free from the rack and became a handy cart. He wheeled the portrait aft. There might yet be one worthwhile thing he could do with his life.
The picture was massive in its statglass shielding, but he thought he could fit it into the boat.
As an itch might nag a dying man, the question of what the captain had been intending with the boat nagged Herron. Hanus hadn’t seemed worried about Herron’s fate, but instead had spoken of trusting Herron . . .
Nearing the stern, unwatched by the machines, Herron passed a strapped-down stack of crated statuary, and heard a noise, a rapid feeble pounding.
It took several minutes to find and open the proper case. When he lifted the lid with its padded lining, a girl wearing a coverall sat up, her hair all wild as if standing in terror.
“Are they gone?” She had bitten at her fingers and nails until they were bleeding. When he didn’t answer at once, she repeated her question again and again, in a rising whine.
“The machines are still here,” he said at last.
Literally shaking in her fear, she climbed out of the case. “Where’s Gus? Have they taken him?”
“Gus?” But he thought he was beginning to understand.
“Gus Hanus, the captain. He and I are—he was trying to save me, to get me away from Earth.”
“I’m quite sure he’s dead,” said Herron. “He fought the machines.” Her bleeding fingers clutched at her lower face. “They’ll kill us, too. Or worse! What can we do?”
“Don’t mourn your lover so deeply,” he said. But the girl seemed not to hear him; her wild eyes looked this way and that, expecting the machines. “Help me with this picture,” he told her calmly. “Hold the door there for me.”
She obeyed as if half-hypnotized, not questioning what he was doing.
“Gus said there’d be a boat,” she muttered to herself. “If he had to smuggle me down to Tau Epsilon he was going to use a special little boat—” She broke off, staring at Herron, afraid that he had heard her and would steal her boat. As indeed he was going to do.
When he had the painting in the stern compartment, he stopped. He looked long at the Man With A Glove, but in the end all he could seem to see was that the fingertips of the ungloved hand were not bitten bloody.
Herron took the shivering girl by the arm and pushed her into the tiny boat. She huddled there in her dazed terror; she was not goodlooking. He wondered what Hanus had seen in her.
“There’s room for only one,” he said, and she shrank and bared her teeth as if afraid he meant to drag her out again. “After I close the hatch, push that button there, the activator. Understand?”
That she understood at once. He dogged the double hatch shut, and waited. Only about three seconds passed before there came a soft scraping sound that he supposed meant that the boat had gone.
Nearby was a tiny observation blister, and Herron put his head into it and watched the stars turn beyond the dark blizzard of the nebula. After a while he saw the berserker through the blizzard, turning with the stars, black and rounded and bigger than any mountain. It gave no sign that it had detected the tiny boat slipping away. Its launch was very near the Franz but none of the commensal machines were in sight.
Looking the Man With A Glove in the eye, Herron pushed him forward again, to a spot near his easel. The discordant lines of Herron’s own work were now worse than disgusting, but Herron made himself work on them.
He hadn’t time to do much before the man-shaped machine came walking back to him; the uproar of metalworking had ceased. Wiping his brush carefully, Herron put it down, and nodded at his berserker-portrait. “When you destroy all the rest, save this painting. Carry it back to those who built you, they deserve it.”
The machine-voice squeaked back at him: “Why do you think I will destroy paintings? Even if they are attempts to praise life, they are dead things in themselves, and so in themselves they are good.”
Herron was suddenly too frightened and weary to speak. Looking dully into the machine’s lenses, he saw there tiny flickerings, keeping time with his own pulse and breathing, like the indications of a liedetector.
“Your mind is divided,” said the machine. “But with its much greater part you have praised me. I have repaired your ship, and set its course. I now release you, so other life-units can learn from you to praise what is good.”
Herron could only stand there staring straight ahead of him, while a trampling of metal feet went past, and there was a final scraping on the hull.
After some time he realized he was alive and free.
At first he shrank from the dead men, but after once touching them he soon got them into a freezer. He had no particular reason to think either of them Believers, but he found a book and read Islamic, Ethical, Christian and Jewish burial services.
Then he found an undamaged handgun on the deck, and went prowling the ship, taken suddenly with the wild notion that a machine might have stayed behind. Pausing only to tear down the abomination from his easel, he went on to the very stern. There he had to stop, facing the direction in which he supposed the berserker now was.
“Damn you, I can change!” he shouted at the stern bulkhead. His voice broke. “I can paint again. I’ll show you . . . I can change. I am alive.” END
MASQUE OF THE RED SHIFT
Outside the ship the Berserkers roamed a ruined galaxy. Inside the revelers jeered at Death!
I
Finding himself alone and unoccupied, Felipe Nogara chose to spend a free moment in looking at the thing that had brought him out here beyond the last fringe of the galaxy. From the luxury of his quarters he stepped up into his private observation bubble. There, in a raised dome of invisible glass, he seemed to be standing outside the hull of his flagship Nirvana.
Under that hull, “below” the Nirvana’s artificial gravity, there slanted the bright disk of the galaxy, including in one of its arms all the star-systems that Earth-descended man had yet explored. But in whatever direction Nogara looked, bright spots and points of light were plentiful. They were other galaxies, marching away at their recessional velocities of tens of thousands of miles per second, marching on out to the optical horizon of the universe.
Nogara had not come here to look at galaxies, however; he had come to look at something new, at a phenomenon never before seen by men at such close range.
It was made visible to him by the apparent pinching-together of the galaxies beyond it, and by the clouds and streamers of dust cascading into it. The star that formed the center of the phenomenon was itself held beyond human sight by the strength of its own gravity. Its mass, perhaps a billion times that of Sol, so bent spacetime around itself that not a photon of light could escape it with a visible wavelength.
The dusty debris of deep space tumbled and churned, falling into the grip of the hypermass. The falling dust built up static charges until lightning turned it into luminescent thunderclouds, and the flicker of the vast lightning shifted into the red before it vanished, near the bottom of the gravitational hill. Probably not even a neutrino could escape this sun. And no ship would dare approach much closer than Nirvana now rode.
Nogara had come out here to judge for himself if the recently discovered phenomenon might soon present any danger to inhabited planets; ordinary suns woul
d go down like chips of wood into a whirlpool if the hypermass found them in its path. But it seemed that another thousand years would pass before any planets had to be evacuated; and before then the hypermass might have gorged itself on dust until its core imploded, whereupon most of its substance could be expected to re-enter the universe in a most spectacular but less dangerous form.
Anyway, in another thousand years it would be someone else’s problem. Right now it might be said to be Nogara’s—for men said that he ran the galaxy, if they said it of anyone.
A communicator sounded, calling him back to the enclosed luxury of his quarters, and he walked down quickly, glad of a reason to get out from under the galaxies.
He touched a plate with one strong and hairy hand. “What is it?”
“My lord, a courier ship has arrived. From the Flamland system. They are bringing . . .”
“Speak plainly. They are bringing my brother’s body?”
“Yes, my lord. The launch bearing the coffin is already approaching Nirvana.”
“I will meet the courier captain, alone, in the Great Hall. I want no ceremony. Have the robots at the airlock test the escort and the outside of the coffin for infection.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The mention of disease was a bit of misdirection. It was not the Flamland plague that had put Nogara’s half-brother Johann Karlsen into a box, though that was the official story. The doctors were supposed to have frozen the hero of the Stone Place as a last resort, to prevent his irreversible death.
An official lie was necessary because not even High Lord Nogara could lightly put out of the way the one man who had made the difference at the Stone Place nebula. In that battle seven years ago the berserker machines had been beaten; if they had not been, intelligent life might already be extinct in the known galaxy. The berserkers were huge automated warships, built for some conflict between long-vanished races and now the enemies of everything that lived. The fighting against them was still bitter, but since the Stone Place it seemed that life in the galaxy would survive.
Short Fiction Complete Page 26