Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  A slender girl of eighteen or twenty, clad in the remnants of a simple paper dress, came into the park and leaned against a tree as if she could walk no further. The way her dress was torn . . . .

  Derron turned away, squeezing his eyes shut and shaking his head in a spasm of self-disgust. He stood up here like some ancient tyrant, remotely entertained and critically lustful.

  He would have to decide, one of these days, whether he was really still on the side of the human race or not. He hurried down some nearby stairs and came out on the ground level of the park. The badly burned man was bathing his raw arm in the cool running water. No one seemed to have stopped breathing, or to be bleeding to death. The girl looked as if she might fall away from her supporting tree at any moment.

  Derron went to her, pulling off his jacket. He wrapped her in the garment and eased her away from the tree.

  “Where are you hurt?”

  She shook her head and refused to sit down, so they did a little offbalance dance while he held her up.

  She was tall and slim and ordinarily she would be lovely . . . no, not really lovely, or at least not standardpretty. But good to look at. Her dark hair was cut in the short simple style most favored by Planetary Command, as most women’s was these days. No jewelry or make-up. Plainly she was in some kind of shock.

  She came out of it somewhat to look in bewilderment at the jacket that had been wrapped around her; her eyes focused on the collar insignia. She said: “You’re an officer.” Her voice was low and blurry.

  “In a small way. Hadn’t you better lie down somewhere?”

  “No. First tell me what’s going on . . . I’ve been trying to get home . . . or somewhere. Can’t you tell me where I am? What’s going on?” Her voice was rising.

  “Easy, take it easy. There was a missile strike. Here, now, this insignia of mine is supposed to be a help with the girls. So behave! Won’t you sit down?”

  “No! First I must find out . . . I don’t know who I am, or where, or why.”

  “I don’t know those things about myself.” That was the most honest communication he had made to anyone in a long time.

  He was afraid that when the girl came out of her dazed condition it would be into panic. More people, passers-by and medics, were running into the park now, aiding the wounded and creating a scene of confusion. The girl looked wildly around her and clung to Derron’s arm. He supposed the best thing was to walk her to a hospital. Where? Of course—there was the one adjoining Time Operations, just a short way from here.

  “Come along,” he said. The girl walked willingly beside him, clinging to his encircling arm. “What’s your name?” he asked, as they boarded the elevator. The other people stared at her in his jacket.

  “I . . . don’t know.” Now she looked more frightened than ever. Her hand went to her throat, but there was no dog-tag chain around her neck. Many people didn’t like to wear them. “Where are you taking me?”

  “To a hospital. You need some looking-after.” He would have liked to give some wilder answer for the onlookers’ benefit, but he didn’t want to terrify the girl.

  She had little to say after that. He led her off the elevator and another short walk brought them to the hospital’s emergency door. Other casualties from the explosion, stretcher cases, were arriving now.

  Inside the emergency room an old nurse started to peel Derron’s jacket off the girl and what was left of her dress came with it. “You just come back for your jacket tomorrow, young man,” the woman ordered sharply, rewrapping.

  “Gladly.” Then he could only wave good-by to the girl as a horde of stretcher-bearers and other busy people swept him with them back out into the corridor. He found himself laughing to himself about the nurse and the jacket. It was a while since he had laughed about anything.

  He had a spare jacket in his locker in the sentry officers’ ready room in Time Ops, and he went there to pick it up. There was nothing new on the bulletin board. He would like to get off sentry duty and into something where you didn’t just sit still under strain for six hours a day.

  He went to the nearest officers’ gym and talked to acquaintances and played two rounds of handball, winning an ersatz soft-drink that he preferred not to collect. The others were talking about the missile strike; Derron mentioned that he had seen some of the wounded, but he said nothing about the girl.

  From the gym he went with a couple of the others to a bar, where he had one drink, his usual limit, and listened without real interest to their talk of some new girls at a local uplevel dive called the Red Garter. Private enterprise still flourished in certain areas.

  He ate a meal in the local officers’ mess, with a better appetite than usual. Then he took the elevator back up to housing level and at last reached his bachelor’s cubicle. He stretched out on his cot and for once went sound asleep before he could even consider taking a pill.

  III

  He was awake earlier than usual, feeling well rested. The little clock on his cubicle wall had just jumped to oh-six-thirty hours, Planetary Emergency Time.

  This morning none of Time’s aspects worried him particularly. He had enough time to stop by the hospital and see what had happened to her, before he went on duty.

  He was carrying yesterday’s jacket over his arm when, following a nurse’s directions, he found the girl seated in a patients’ lounge. The TV was on, tuned to Channel Gung-Ho, the one devoted to the war effort and associated government propaganda, and she was frowning at it with a look of naivete. Today she was wearing a plain dress that did not exactly fit. Her sandaled feet were curled beside her on her chair. At this time of the morning she had the lounge pretty much to herself.

  At the sound of Derron’s step she turned her head quickly, then got to her feet, smiling. “Oh, it’s you! It’s a good feeling to recognize someone.”

  “It’s a good feeling for me, to have someone recognize me.”

  She thanked him for yesterday’s help. He introduced himself.

  She wished she could tell him her name, but the amnesia was persisting. “Outside of that, I feel fine.”

  “That’s good, anyway,” he said as they sat down in adjacent chairs.

  “Actually I do have a name, of sorts. For the sake of their computer records the people here at the hospital have tagged me Lisa Gray, next off some list they keep handy. Evidently a fair number of people go blank in the upper story these days.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “They tell me that when the missile hit yesterday I was with a number of people from an upper-level refugee camp that’s being closed down. A lot of the records were destroyed in the blast. They can’t find me, or they haven’t yet.” She laughed nervously.

  Derron tried a remark or two meant to be reassuring, but they didn’t sound very helpful in his own ears. He got off the subject. “Have you had your breakfast?”

  “Yes. There’s a little automat right here if you want something. Maybe I could use some more fruit juice.”

  In a couple of minutes Derron was back with two glasses of the orange-colored liquid called fruit juice and a couple of standard sweetrolls. Lisa was again studying the war on die TV screen; the commentator’s stentorian voice was turned mercifully low.

  Derron set the repast on a low table, pulled his own chair closer, and asked: “Do you remember what we’re fighting against?”

  On screen at the moment was a deep-space scene in which it was hard to make anything out. Lisa hesitated, then shook her head. “Not really.”

  “Does the word ‘berserker’ mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they’re machines. Some of them are bigger than any spaceships we Earth-descended men have ever built. Others come in many shapes and sizes, but all of them are deadly. The first berserkers were built ages ago, to fight in some war we’ve never heard of, between races we’ve never met.

  “Sometimes men have beaten the berserkers in battle, but some of them always survived, to hide out
somewhere and build more of their kind, with improvements. They’re programmed to destroy life anywhere they can find it, and they’ve come halfway across the galaxy doing a pretty good job. They go on and on like death itself.”

  “No,” said Lisa, not liking the plot.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to start raving. We on Sirgol were alive, and so the berserkers had to get rid of us. They boiled away our oceans, and burned our air and our land and nine tenths of our people. But since they’re only machines, it’s all an accident, a sort of cosmic joke. An act of the Holy One, as people used to say. We have no one to take revenge on.” His voice choked slightly in his tight throat; he sipped at his orange-colored water and then pushed it away.

  “Won’t men come from other planets to help us?”

  “Some of them are fighting berserkers near their own systems, too. And a really big relief fleet will have to be put together to do us any good. And polities must be played between the stars as usual. I suppose some help will come eventually, maybe in another year.”

  The TV announcer began to drone aggressively about victories on the moon, while an appropriate videotape was shown. The chief satellite of Sirgol was said to much resemble the moon of Earth. Its round face had been pocked by impact craters into an awed expression long before men or berserkers existed. During the last year a rash of new craters had wiped away the face of Sirgol’s moon, together with all human bases there.

  “I think that help will come to us in time,” said Usa.

  In time for what? Derron wondered. “I suppose so,” he said and felt it was a he.

  Lisa was looking anxiously at the TV. “It seems to me I can remember . . . . Yes! I can remember seeing the old moon, the funny face in it! It did look like a face, didn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I remember it!” she cried in a burst of joy. Like a child she jumped up from her chair and kissed Derron on the cheek.

  While she sat down again, looking at him happily, a line of ancient poetry sang through his mind. He swallowed.

  Now on the TV they were showing the dayside surface of Sirgol. Cracked dry mudflats stretched away to a horizon near which there danced whirlwinds of yellow dust—there was a little atmosphere left—under a sky of savage blue. Rising gleaming from the dried mud in the middle distance were the bright steel bones of some invading berserker device, smashed and twisted last tenday or last month by some awesome energy of defense. Another victory for the droning voice to try to magnify—

  Derron cleared his throat. “Do you remember about our planet here being unique?”

  “No . . . I doubt that I ever understood science.” But she looked interested. “Go on, tell me about it.”

  “Well.” Derron put on his littleused teacher’s voice. “If you catch a glimpse of our sun on the screen there, you’ll see it looks much like any other star that has an Earthtype planet. But looks axe deceiving. Oh, our daily lives are the same as they would be elsewhere. And interstellar ships can enter and leave our system—if they take precautions. But our local spacetime is tricky.

  “We were colonized through a weird accident. About a hundred years ago an exploring ship from Earth fell into our peculiar spacetime unawares. It dropped back through about twenty thousand years of time, which must have wiped clean the memories of everyone aboard.” He smiled at Lisa. “Our planet is unique in that time travel into the past is possible here, under certain conditions. First, anyone who travels back more than about five hundred years suffers enough mental devolution to have their memories wiped out. They go blank in the upper story, as you put it. Our First Men must have crawled around like babies after their ship landed itself.”

  “The First Men . . . that’s familiar.”

  “There were First Women, too, of course. Somehow the survivors kept on surviving, and multiplied, and over the generations started building up civilizations. When the second exploring ship arrived, about ten years Earth-time after the first, we’d built up a thriving planet-wide civilization and were getting started on space travel ourselves. In fact it was signals from our early interplanetary probes that drew the second Earthship here. It approached more carefully than the first one had and landed successfully.

  “Pretty soon the men from Earth figured out what had happened to our first ship. They also brought us warning of the berserkers. Took some of our people to other systems and showed them what galactic war was like. The people of other worlds were tickled to have four hundred million new allies, and they deluged us with advice on weapons and fortifications, and we spent the next eighty years getting ready to defend ourselves. Then about a year ago the berserker fleet came . . . .” Derron’s voice trailed off.

  Lisa drank some of her “juice” as if she liked it. She prompted: “What do you do now, Derron?”

  “Oh, various odd jobs in Time Operations. See, if the berserkers can delay our historical progress at some vital point—the invention of the wheel, say—everything following would be slowed down. When galactic civilization contacted us, we might be still in the Middle Ages, or further back, without any technological base on which to build defenses for ourselves. And in the new real-time, the present would see us entirely wiped out.”

  Derron looked at the version of Time he wore on his wrist. “Looks like I’d better go right now and start my day’s heroic fighting.”

  The officer in charge of that morning’s briefing was Colonel Borss. He took his job very seriously in all its details, with the somber expectancy of a prophet.

  “As we all know, yesterday’s defensive action was tactically successful.”

  In the semi-darkness of the briefing room the colonel’s pointer skipped luminously across the glowing symbols on his big display screen. “But, strategically speaking, we must admit that the situation has deteriorated somewhat.”

  The colonel went on to explain that this gloomy view was due to the existence of the enemy’s beachhead, his staging area some twentyplus-thousand years down, from whence more berserker devices would undoubtedly be propelled up into historical real-time. For technical reasons, these devices moving presentward would be almost impossible to stop until they had finally emerged.

  All was not entirely lost, however. “After the enemy has broken three more times into our history, we should be able to get a fix on his beachhead and smash it with a few missiles.

  “That’ll pretty well put an end to his whole Time Operations program.

  “Of course we have first to face the little detail of repelling the next three attacks.”

  As his dutiful audience of junior officers made faint laughing sounds, the colonel produced on his screen a type of graph of human history on Sirgol, a glowing treelike shape. He tapped with his pointer far down on the slender trunk. “We rather suspect that the first attack will fall somewhere near here, near the First Men, where our history is still a tender shoot.”

  IV

  Matt, sometime also called LionHunter, felt the afternoon sun hot on his bare shoulders as he turned away from the last familiar landmarks of his country, the territory in which he had lived all his twentyfive years.

  Matt had climbed up on a rock to get a better view of the unknown land ahead, into which he and the rest of The People were fleeing. Ahead he could see swamps, and barren hills, and nothing very inviting. Everywhere the land wavered with the spirits of heat.

  The little band of The People, as many in number as a man’s fingers and toes, were shuffling along in a thin file beside the rock which Matt had mounted. No one was hanging back, or even trying to argue the others out of making the journey. For though there might be strange dangers in the new land ahead, everyone agreed that nothing there was likely to be as terrible as what they were fleeing—the new beasts, the lions with flesh of stone who could not be hurt by stones or arrows, who could kill with only a glance from their fiery eyes.

  In the past two days, ten of The People had been caught and killed. The others had been able to do nothing but hide, hardl
y daring to look for a puddle to drink from or to pull up a root to eat.

  Matt gripped with one hand the bow slung over his shoulder, the only bow now left to the survivors of The People; the others had been burned, with the men who had tried to use them against a stone-lion. Tomorrow, Matt thought, he would try hunting for meat in the new country. No one was carrying any food now. Some of the young were wailing in hunger until the women pinched their mouths and noses shut to quiet them.

  The file of the surviving People had passed Matt now. He ran his eye along it, then hopped down from his rock, frowning.

  A few strides brought him up to those in the rear of the march. “Where is Dart?” he asked, frowning.

  Dart was an orphan, and no one was overly concerned. “He kept telling us how hungry he was,” a woman said. “And then he ran on toward those swampy woods ahead. I suppose he went to look for something to eat.”

  Matt grunted. He had no idea of trying to keep any firm control over the actions of any of The People. Someone who wanted to run ahead just did so.

  Derron was just buying Lisa some lunch—from the hospital automat, since she was still being kept under observation—when the public address speakers began to broadcast a list of names of Time Operation people who were to report for duty at once. Derron’s name was included.

  He scooped up a sandwich and ate it as he went. This was something more than another practice alert. When Derron reached the briefing room, Colonel Borss was already on the dais and speaking, pausing to glare at each new arrival.

  “Gentlemen, the first assault has fallen just about as predicted, within a few hundred years of the First Men.” To Derron’s slight surprise, the colonel paused momentarily to bow his head at the mention of those beings sacred to Orthodoxy. These days there were few religionists traditional enough to make such gestures.