Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The stable burning with the black smoke

  The treason of the murdering in the bed

  The open war, with all the wounds that bled . . .”

  “Who are you, really?” Mitch demanded. He wanted it out in the opep. And he wanted to gain time, for Katsulos wore a pistol at his belt. “What is this to you? Some kind of religion?”

  “Not some religion!” Katsulos shook his head, while his eyes glowed steadily at Mitch. “Not a mythology of distant gods, nor a system of pale ethics for dusty philosophers. No!” He took a step closer. “Spain, there is no time now for me to proselytize with craft and subtlety. I say only this—the temple of Mars stands open to you! The new god of all creation will accept your sacrifice and your love.”

  “You pray to that bronze statue?” Mitch tensed, getting ready.

  “No, the Mars of the ancients is not our god!” The fanatic’s words poured out faster and louder, “The myth with helmet and sword is our symbol and no more. Our god is new, and real, and worthy. He wields death-beam and missile, and his glory is as the nova sun. He is the descendant of Life and feeds on Life as is his right. And we who give ourselves to any of his units become immortal in him though our flesh perishes at his touch.”

  “I’ve heard there were men who prayed to berserkers,” said Mitch. “Somehow I never expected to meet one.” Faintly in the distance he heard a man shouting, and feet pounding down a corridor. Suddenly he wondered if he or Katsulos was more likely to receive reinforcement.

  “Soon we will be everywhere,” said Katsulos loudly. “We are here now, and we are seizing this ship. We will take it out to save the unit of our god orbiting the hypermass. And there we will give the badlife Karlsen to Mars, and we will give ourselves, and this great ship. And through Mars we will live forever!”

  He looked into Mitch’s face and started to draw his gun, just as Mitch hurled himself forward.

  Katsulos tried to spin away as Mitch reached him. Mitch failed to get a solid grip, and both men fell sprawling, a few feet apart. Mitch saw the gun muzzle swing round on him, and dived desperately for shelter behind a row of seats. Splinters flew around him as the gun blasted. In an instant he was moving again, in a crouching run that carried him into the temple of Venus by one door and out by another. Before Katsulos could sight at him for another shot Mitch had leaped down an exit stairway.

  As he emerged into a corridor, he heard gunfire from the direction of the crew’s quarters. He went the other way, heading for Hemphill’s cabin. At a turn in the passage a black uniform stepped out to bar his way, aiming a pistol, Mitch charged without hesitation, taking the policeman by surprise. The gun fired even as he knocked it aside, and then his rush bowled the black uniform over. Mitch sat on him and clobbered him with fists and elbows until he was quiet.

  Then, captured gun in hand, Mitch hurried on to Hemphill’s door. It slid open before he could pound on it, and closed again as soon as he jumped inside.

  A dead black-uniform sat leaning against the wall, unseeing eyes aimed at Mitch, bullet-holes patterned across his chest.

  “Welcome,” said Hemphill drily. He stood with his left hand on an elaborate control console that had been raised from a place of concealment inside the huge desk. In his right hand a machine pistol hung casually. “It seems we face greater difficulties than we expected.”

  IV

  Lucinda sat in the darkened cabin that was Jor’s hiding place, watching him eat. Immediately after his escape she had started roaming the ship’s passages, looking for him, whispering his name, until at last he had seen her and had answered.

  Since then she had been smuggling food and drink to him.

  He was no mere boy, as she had thought at first glance. He was a man of about her own age, with tiny lines at the corners of his suspicious eyes. Paradoxically, the more she helped him, the more suspicious his eyes became.

  Now he paused in his eating to ask: “What do you plan to do when we reach Nogara, and a hundred of his men come aboard to search for me? They’ll soon find me then.” She wanted to tell him about Hemphill’s plan for rescuing Karlsen. Once Johann Karlsen was aboard, no one on this ship would have to fear Nogara. Or so she felt. But just because Jor still seemed suspicious of her, she hesitated to trust him with a secret.

  “You knew you’d be caught eventually,” she countered. “So why did you run away?”

  “You don’t know what it’s like, being their prisoner.”

  “I do know.”

  He ignored her contradiction. “They trained me with the others, to fight in the arena. And then they singled me out, and began to train me for something even worse. Now they flick a switch somewhere, and I start to kill, like a berserker.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He closed his eyes, his food forgotten. “I think there’s a man they want me to assassinate. Every day or so they put me in the temple of Mars and drive me mad, and then the image of this man is always sent to me. Always it’s the same face and uniform. And I must destroy the image, with a sword or a gun or with my hands. I have no choice when they flip that switch, no control over myself. They’ve hollowed me out and then filled me up again with their own madness. They’re madmen. I think they go into the temple themselves and turn the foul madness on, and wallow in it before their idol.”

  He had never said so much to her in one speech before. She was not sure how much of it was true, but she felt he believed it all, and she reached for his hand.

  “Jor, I do know something about them. That’s why I’ve helped you. And I’ve seen other men who were really brainwashed. They haven’t really destroyed you, you’ll be all right again some day.”

  “They want me to look normal.” He opened his eyes, which were still suspicious. “Why are you on this ship, anyway?”

  “Because.” She looked into the past. “Two years ago I met a man called Johann Karlsen. Yes, the one everyone knows of. I spent about ten minutes with him, before he—disappeared.” She sighed. “If he’s still alive, he’s certainly forgotten about me. But I fell in love with him.”

  “In love!” Jor snorted, and began to pick his teeth.

  Or I thought I fell in love with him, she said to herself. Watching Jor now, understanding and forgiving his sullen mistrust, she realized that she was no longer able to visualize Karlsen’s face clearly.

  Something triggered Jor’s taut nerves, and he jumped up to peek out of the cabin into the passage. “What’s that noise? Hear? It sounds like fighting.”

  “So.” Hemphill’s voice was grimly more than usual. The surviving crewmen are barricaded in their quarters, surrounded and under attack. The damned berserker-lovers hold the bridge, and the engine room. In fact they hold the ship, except for this.” He patted the console that he had raised from its concealment inside Nogara’s innocent-looking desk. “I know Felipe Nogara, and I thought he’d have a master control in his cabin, and I thought we might possibly need it. That’s why I had myself quartered in here.”

  “What all does it control?” Mitch asked, wiping his hands. He had just dragged the dead man into a closet. Katsulos should have known better than to send only one against the High Admiral.

  “I believe it will override any control on the bridge or in the engine room. With it I can open or close most of the doors and hatches on the ship. And there seem to be scanners hidden in a hundred places, connected to this little viewscreen.

  The berserker-lovers aren’t going anywhere with this ship until they’ve done a lot of rewiring, or gotten us out of this cabin.”

  “I don’t suppose we’re going anywhere either,” said Mitch. “Have you any idea what’s happened to Lucy?”

  “No. She and that man Jor may be free. And they may do us some good, but we can’t count on it. Spain, look here.” Hemphill pointed to the little screen. “This is a view inside the guardroom and prison, under the arena’s seats. If all those individual cells are occupied, there must be about forty men in there.”

  “Tha
t’s an idea. They may be trained fighters, and they’ll certainly have no love for the black uniforms.”

  “I could talk to them from here,” Hemphill mused. “But how can we free them and arm them? I can’t control their individual cell doors, though I can keep the enemy locked out of that area, at least for a while. Tell me, how did the fighting start? What set it off?”

  Mitch told Hemphill what he knew. “It’s almost funny. The cultists have the same idea you have, of taking the ship out to the hypermass and going after Karlsen. Only of course they want to give him to the berserker machine.” He shook his head. “I suppose Katsulos handpicked cultists from among the police for this mission. There must be more of them around than any of us thought.”

  Hemphill only shrugged. Maybe he understood fairly well those fanatics out there whose polarity happened to be opposite from his own.

  Lucinda would not leave Jor now, nor let him leave her. Like hunted animals they made their way through the corridors, which she knew well from her days of restless walking. She guided him around the sounds of fighting, to where he wanted to go.

  He peered around the last corner, and brought his head back to whisper: “There’s no one at the guardroom door.”

  “But how will you get in? And some of the vultures may be inside, and you’re not armed.”

  He laughed soundlessly. “What have I to lose? My life?” He moved on around the corner.

  Mitch’s fingers suddenly dug into Hemphill’s arm. “Look! Jor’s there, with the same idea you had. Open the door for him, quick!”

  In the temple of Mars, most of the painted panels had been removed from the interior walls. Two black-uniformed men were at work on the mechanism thus revealed, while Katsulos sat in the center, watching Jor’s progress through his own secret scanners. When he saw Jor and Lucinda being let into the guardroom, Katsulos pounced.

  “Quick, turn on the beam and focus on him! Boil his brains with it. He’ll kill everyone in there, and then we can take our time with the others.”

  His two assistants hurried to obey. They arranged cables and a directional antenna. One asked: “He’s the one you were training to assassinate Hemphill?”

  “Yes, his brain rhythms are on the chart. Focus on him quickly!”

  “Set them free and arm them!” Hemphill’s image shouted, from a guardroom viewscreen. “You men there! Fight with us and I promise to take you to freedom when the ship is ours. And I promise to take Johann Karlsen with us, if he’s alive.”

  There was a roar from the cells at the offer of freedom, and another roar at Karlsen’s name. “With him, we’d go on to Esteel itself!” one prisoner shouted.

  When the beam from the temple of Mars struck downward, it went unfelt by everyone but Jor. The others in the guardroom had not been conditioned by repeated treatments, and the heat of their emotions was already high.

  But the beam hit Jor’s sensitized brain with overwhelming force, just as he picked up the key that would open the cells. In a paroxysm of rage he dropped the keys, and grabbed an automatic weapon from the arms rack. The first burst he fired shattered Hemphill’s image from the viewscreen. With the fragment of his mind that was still his own, he felt despair like that of a drowning man. He knew he was not going to be able to resist what was coming next.

  When Jor fired at the viewscreen, Lucinda understood what was being done to him.

  “Jor, no!” She fell to her knees before him. The face of Mars looked down at her, frightening beyond anything she had ever seen. “Jor, stop it! I love you!”

  Mars laughed at her love, or tried to laugh. But Mars could not quite manage to point the weapon at her, for Jor was trying to come back into his own face again, now coming back halfway, struggling terribly.

  “And you love me, Jor, I can see it. Even if they force you to kill me, remember that I know that.”

  Jor felt a healing power, opposing the power of Mars. To his mind came the pictures he had once glimpsed in the temple of Venus. Of course, there must be a countering projector built in up there, and someone had managed to turn it on.

  He came above his red rage like a swimmer surfacing, lungs bursting, from a drowning sea. He looked down at the gun in his hands. With a great effort of will he forced his fingers to begin opening. Mars still shouted at him, louder and louder, but Venus’ power grew stronger still. His hands opened and the weapon clattered on the floor.

  Once the gladiators had been freed and armed, the fight was soon over, though not one of the cultists tried to surrender. Katsulos and the two with him fought to the last from inside the temple of Mars, with the hate projector turned up to maximum power, and the recorder, chanting voices roaring out their song. Perhaps Katsulos still hoped to force his enemies into acts of self-destructive rage. Or perhaps he had the projector on as an act of worship.

  Whatever his reasons, the three inside the temple absorbed the full effect themselves. Mitch had seen bad things before, but when he at last broke open the temple door, he had to turn away for a moment.

  Hemphill showed only satisfaction at seeing how the worship of Mars had culminated aboard Nirvana 11. “Let’s see to the bridge and engine room first. Then we can get this mess cleaned up and be on our way.” Mitch was glad to follow, but he was detained for a moment by Jor.

  “Was it you who managed to turn on the counter-projector? If it was, I owe you much more than my life.” Mitch stared at him blankly. “Counter-projector? What’re you talking about?”

  “But there must have been . . .” When the others had hurried away, Jor remained in the arena for a few moments, looking in awe at the thin walls of the temple of Venus, where no mindbeam projector could be hidden. Then a girl’s voice called, and Jor too hurried out.

  There was silence in the arena.

  “Emergency condition concluded,” said the voice of the intercom station, to the rows of empty seats. “Ship’s Records returning to normal operation. Last question asked was about basis of temple designs. Chaucer’s verse relevant to temple of Venus follows, in original language:

  “I recche nat if it may bettre be

  To have victorie of them, or they of me

  So that I have myne lady in myne armes.

  For though so be that Mars is god of Armes,

  Your vertu is so great in hevene above

  That, if yow list, I shall wel have my love . . .”

  Venus smiled, half-risen from her glittering waves. END

  THE FACE OF THE DEEP

  The star was enormous and deadly. He was its captive—and could never escape!

  After five minutes had gone by with no apparent change in his situation, Karlsen realized that he might be going to live for a while yet. And as soon as this happened, as soon as his mind dared open its eyes again, so to speak, he began to see the depths of space around him and what they held.

  Not that there was much else for him to see, riding as he was in a crystalline bubble of a launch about twelve feet in diameter. The fortunes of war had dropped him here, halfway down the steepest gravitational hill in the known universe.

  At the unseeable bottom of this hill lay a sun so massive that not a quantum of light could escape it with a visible wavelength. In less than a minute he and his raindrop of a boat had fallen here, some unmeasurable distance out of normal space, trying to escape an enemy which had remained in close pursuit. Karlsen was a religious man, and he had spent that falling minute in prayer, achieving something like calm, considering himself already dead.

  But after that minute, he was suddenly no longer falling. He seemed to have entered an orbit, an orbit that no man had ever traveled before, amid sights no eyes had ever seen.

  He rode above a thunderstorm at war with a sunset—a ceaseless, soundless turmoil of fantastic clouds that filled half the sky as a nearby planet would. But this mass was immeasurably bigger than any planet, bigger in fact than most giant stars. Its core and its cause, held forever beyond human sight by its own power, was a hypermassive sun a billion time
s the weight of Sol.

  The clouds were interstellar dust, swept up by the pull of the hypermass, drawn to fall tumbling and churning into it. The clouds as they fell built up electrical static which was discharged in almost continuous lightning. Karlsen saw as blue-white the nearer flashes and those ahead of him as he rode. But most of the flashes, like most of the clouds, were far below him, and so most of his light was sullen-red, wearied by climbing just a section of this gravitycliff. Karlsen’s little bubbleship had artificial gravity of its own and kept turning itself so its deck was down, so Karlsen saw the red light below him through the translucent deck, flaring up between his space-booted feet. He sat in the one massive chair which was fixed in the center of the bubble and which contained the boat’s controls and life-support machinery. Below the deck were one or two other opaque objects, one of these a small but powerful spacewarping engine. All else around Karlsen was clear glass, holding in air, holding out radiation, but leaving his eyes and soul naked to the deeps of space around him.

  He took a full breath now and tried his engine, tried to lift himself up out of here. As he had expected, nothing happened at full drive. He might as well have been working bicycle pedals.

  Even a slight change in his orbit would have been immediately visible to him, for his bubble was somehow locked in position within a narrow belt of rocks and dust that stretched like a threat to girdle the vastness below him. Before the thread could bend perceptibly on its great circle it lost its identity in distance, merging with other threads into a thicker strand. This in turn was braided with other strands into a heavier belt, and so on, order above order of size, until at last (a hundred thousand miles ahead? A million?) the first bending of the great ring-pattern was perceptible; and then the arc, rainbowcolored at that point by lightning, deepened swiftly, plunging out of sight below the terrible horizon of the hypermass’s shroud of dust. The fantastic cloud-shapes of that horizon, which Karlsen knew must be millions of miles from him, grew closer while he looked at them. Such was the speed of his orbit.