Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Odegard!” The blast in his helmet made him wince. It sounded like Colonel Borss. “Don’t let those people get away, try to protect them!” Derron sighed, sub-subvocally. Understood. How about getting me a linguist?”

  “We’re trying to get you one. You’re in a vital area there. Try to protect those people until we can get you some help.”

  “Understood.”

  “Anyone that size is bound to eat a lot of food,” one of the older men was complaining to Matt.

  “With dead legs I don’t suppose he’ll live long enough to eat very much,” Matt answered. He was trying to talk someone into giving him a hand in pulling the stone-man up out of the pit. Stone-Man sat watching calmly, as if he felt confident of getting some help.

  The man debating against Matt cheerfully switched arguments. “If he won’t live long, there’s no use trying to help him. Anyway he’s not one of The People.”

  “No, he’s not. But still . . . .” Matt searched for words, for ways of thought, to clarify his own feelings. This stone-man who had tried to help Dart was part of some larger order, to which The People also belonged. Part of something opposing all the wild beasts and demons that killed men by day or night.

  “There may be others of his band around here,” put in another man. “They would be strong friends to have.”

  “This one wants to be our friend,” the boy Dart piped up.

  The oldest woman scoffed: “So would anyone who was crippled and needed help.”

  VI

  A girl linguist’s voice joined the muted hive buzzing in Derron’s helmet and gave him a rather halting translation of part of the debate. But after only a couple of minutes she was ordered away to work with another operator, who had managed to terrify the band he was supposed to be protecting.

  “Tell him to pretend he’s crippled,” Derron advised. “All right, I’ll do without a linguist. But how about dropping some of those self-defense weapons for these people of mine? If we wait until that berserker comes back it’ll be too late. And make it grenades, not arrows. There’s only one man in the bunch who has a bow.”

  “The weapons are being prepared. It’s dangerous to hand them out until they’re absolutely needed. Suppose they use ’em on each other, or on the slave?”

  “You can at least drop them into the slave now.” Inside the slaveunit’s big torso was a hollow receptacle into which small items could be dropped from the future as required.

  “They’re being prepared.”

  Derron didn’t know if he could believe that or not, the way things were going today.

  The people seemed to be still discussing the slaveunit, while he kept it sitting in what he hoped was a patient and trustworthy attitude. According to the brief translation Derron had heard, the tall young man with the bow slung over his shoulder was arguing in favor of helping the “stone-man.”

  At last this man with the bow, who seemed to be the nearest thing to a chief that these people had, talked one of the other men into helping him. Together they approached one of the saplings splintered in the fight, and twisted it loose from its stump, hacking through the tough bark strings with a handaxe. Then the two bold men came right up to the edge of the poisondigger’s trap, holding the sapling by its branches so its splintered end was extended, rather shakily, down to where the slave could grasp it.

  The two men pulled, then grunted with surprise at the weight they felt. Two more men were now willing to come and lend a hand.

  “Odegard, this is Colonel Borss,” said a helmet-voice, in urgent tones. “We can see now what the berserkers’ target is. The first written language developed on the planet originates very near your present location. Possibly with the people you’re with right now. We can’t be sure of that and neither can the enemy, but certainly your band is in the target group.”

  Derron was hanging on with both hands as the slaveunit was dragged up the side of the pit. “Thanks for the word, Colonel. Now how about those grenades I asked for?”

  “We’re rushing two more slaves toward you, but we’re having technical problems. Grenades?” There was a brief pause. “They tell me some grenades are coming up.” The colonel’s voice clicked off.

  When the slave came sliding up over the rim of the pit, The People all retreated a few steps, falling silent and watching the machine carefully. Derron repeated his peaceful gestures.

  As soon as his audience was slightly reassured about the slave, they went back to worrying about something else. The setting sun made them nervous, and they kept looking over their shoulders at it as they talked to one another.

  In another minute they had gathered up their few belongings and were on the march, with the air of folk resuming a practiced activity. Stone-Man, it seemed, was to be allowed to choose his own course of action.

  Derron trailed along at the end of the file. He soon found that on level ground he could keep the slaveunit moving pretty well, walking on the knuckles of its hands like a brokenbacked ape. The People cast frequent backward glances at this pathetic monstrosity, showing mixed emotions. But even more frequently they looked farther back, fearful about something that might be on their trail.

  Quite possibly, Derron thought, these people had already seen the berserker, or found the bodies of their friends who had met it. Sooner or later it would pick up their trail, in any case. The slaveunit’s leg-dragging track would make the berserker use a bit more caution, but certainly it would still come on.

  Colonel Borss came back to talk. “You’re right, Odegard, your berserker’s still in your area. It’s the only one we haven’t bagged yet, but it’s in the most vital spot. What I think we’ll do is this—the two slaves being sent as reinforcements will be in place in a few minutes now. They’ll follow your line of march one on each side and a short distance ahead. Then when your people stop somewhere for the night we’ll set up the two new slaves for an ambush.”

  Falling dusk washed the scene in a kind of dark beauty. The People hiked with the swampy, half-wooded valley on their right and low rocky hills close by on their left. The man with the bow, whose name seemed to be something like Matt, kept scanning these hills as he walked.

  “What about those grenades? Operations? Anybody there?”

  “We’re setting up this ambush now, Odegard. We don’t want your people pitching grenades at our devices.”

  There was some sense to that, Derron supposed. But he had no faith.

  The leader, Matt, turned and went trotting up a hillside, the other people following briskly. Derron saw that they were headed for a narrow cave entrance, which was set into a steep low cliff like a door in the wall of a house. A little way from the cave everyone halted. Matt unslung his bow and nocked an arrow before pitching a rock into the darkness of the cave. Just inside the entrance was an L-bend that made it practically impossible to see any further.

  Derron was reporting these latest developments to Operations, when out of the cave there reverberated a growl that made The People scatter like the survival experts they were.

  When the cave-bear came to answer the door, it found Derron’s proxy waiting alone on the porch.

  The slave in its present condition had no balance to speak of, so the bear’s first slap bowled it over. From a supine position Derron slapped back, clobbering the bear’s nose and provoking a blood-freezing roar.

  Made of tougher stuff than poisondiggers, the bear strained its fangs on the slaveunit’s face. Still flat on his back, Derron lifted the bear with his steel arms and pitched it downhill. Go away!

  The first roar had been only a tune-up for this second one. Derron didn’t want to break even an animal’s lifeline here if he could help it, but time was passing. He threw the bear a little further this time; it bounced once, landed on its feet, and without slowing down kept right on going into the swamp. Its howls trailed in the air for half a minute.

  The People slowly gathered round again, for once forgetting to look over then shoulders. Derron had the feeling they were all
about to fall down and worship him; before anything like this could happen, he dragged his proxy into the cave and made sure that it was now unoccupied. Matt had made a good discovery here; there was plenty of room inside the high narrow cavern to shelter the whole band.

  When he came out he found The People gathering dead branches from under the trees at the edge of the swamp, getting ready to build a good-sized fire at the mouth of the cave. Far across the swampy valley a small spark of orange marked the encampment of some other band, in the thickening purplish haze of falling night.

  “Operations, bow’s that ambush coming?”

  “The other two units are taking up ambush positions now. They have you in sight at the cave-mouth.”

  “Good.”

  Let The People build their fire, then, and draw the berserker. They would be safe in a guarded cave while it walked into a trap.

  From a pouch made of what looked like tough lizard-skin one of the old women produced a bundle of bark, which she unwrapped to reveal a smoldering center. With incantations and a judicious use of wood chips, she soon had the watchfire blazing. Its first tongues gave more light than did the fast-dimming sky.

  The slaveunit moved last into the cave, right after Matt. Derron sat it leaning against the wall just inside the L-bend and sighed. He could use a rest—

  Without warning the night outside erupted with the crackle of lasers and the clang of armored battle. Inside the cave the people jumped to their feet.

  In the lasers’ reflected glare Derron saw Matt with his bow ready, the other men grabbing up stones—and Dart, high up on a rock in the rear of the cave. There was a small window in the wall of rock back there, and the boy was looking out, the laser-glare bright on his awed face.

  The flashing and crashing outside came to a sudden halt. The world sank into a deathlike silence. Long seconds passed.

  “Operations? Operations? What’s going on? What happened outside?”

  “Oh, Holy One . . .” The voice was shaken. “Scratch two slaveunits. Looks like the damn’ thing’s reflexes are just too good. Odegard, do the best you can . . .”

  The watchfire came exploding suddenly into the cave, kicked probably by a clawed steel foot, so that a hail of sparks and brands bounced from the curving wall of stone just opposite the narrow entrance. The berserker would walk right in. Its cold brain had learned contempt for all the Modems were able to do against it.

  But there came a heavy grating sound; evidently the cave mouth was just a bit too narrow for it.

  “Odegard, a dozen of the arrows are ready to drop through to you now. Shaped charges in the points, set to fire on sharp contact.”

  “Arrows? I wanted grenades, I told you we’ve only one bow, and there’s no room . . .” But the window in the rear of the cave might serve as an archery port. “Send arrows, then. Send something!”

  “Dropping arrows now. Odegard, we have a relief operator standing by in another master-unit, so we can switch . . . .”

  “Never mind that. I’m used to operating this broken-backed thing now, and he isn’t.”

  The berserker was scraping and hammering at the bulge of rock that kept it from its prey, raising a hellish racket. With the slaveunit’s hands Derron undid the catches and opened the door in its metal torso. While a bank of faces surrounded him, staring solemnly through the gloom, he took out the arrows and offered them to Matt.

  VII

  With reverence the hunter accepted the weapons. Since the firelight had vanished the slave’s eyes had shifted into the infrared; Derron could see well enough to tell that the arrows looked to be well constructed, their straight wooden shafts fletched with plastic feathers, their heads a good imitation of handchipped flint. Now if they only worked . . . .

  Matt needed no instructions on what to do with the arrows, not after their magical manner of appearance. Dart getting under his feet, he dashed to the rear of the cave; there he put the youngster behind him and scrambled up the rocks to the natural window. It would have given him a fine safe spot to shoot from, if there had been no such thing as laser beams.

  Since lasers did exist, it would be the slaveunit’s task to take the first beam itself and keep the berserker’s attention on it as much as possible. Derron inched his crippled metal body toward the bend of the L. When he saw Matt nock an arrow to his bow, he lunged out, with his ridiculous hand-walking movement, around the corner.

  The berserker had just backed away to take a fresh run at the entrance. It of course was quicker than Derron with its beam. But the slave’s armor held for the moment, and Derron scrambled forward, firing back at point-blank range. If the berserker saw Matt, it ignored him, thinking arrows meant nothing.

  But now the first one struck. Derron saw the shaft spin softly away, while the head vanished in a momentary fireball that left a fist-sized hole in the berserker’s armor at the shoulder of one foreleg.

  The machine lurched off balance even as its laser flicked toward Matt. Derron kept scrambling after it on steel hands, keeping his own beam on it like a spotlight. The bushes atop the little cliff had been set afire, but Matt popped up bravely and shot his second arrow, as accurately as the first. The shaped charge hit the berserker in the side, and staggered it on its three legs. And then it could fire its laser no more, for Derron was close enough to swing a heavy metal fist and crack the thick glass of the projector-eye.

  And then the wrestling-match was on again. The strength of the slave’s two arms matched that of the berserker’s one functional foreleg. But the enemy reflexes were still more than human. Derron hung on as best he could, but the world was soon spinning round him again, and again he was thrown.

  Derron gripped one of the trampling legs and hung on somehow, trying to immobilize the berserker as a target. Where were the arrows now? Derron’s laser was smashed. The berserker was still too big, too heavy, too quick. While Derron gripped one of its functional legs the other two still stomped and tore—there went one of the slaveunit’s useless feet, ripped clean off. The metal man was going to be pulled to pieces. For some reason no more arrows were being shot—

  Derron caught just a glimpse of a hurtling body as Matt leaped directly into the fight, raising in each hand a cluster of magic-arrows. Yelling, seeming to fly like a god, he stabbed his thunderbolts down against the enemy’s back.

  The blasts were absorbed in full by the berserker’s interior. And then something inside the monster let go in an explosion that bounced both machines. And with that, die fight was over.

  Derron crawled from the overheated wreck of the slaveunit, out from under the mass of glowing, twisting, spitting metal that had been the enemy. Then he had to pause for a few seconds in exhaustion. He saw Dart come running from the cave, tears streaking his face, in his hand Matt’s bow, with its broken string dangling.

  Most of the rest of The People were gathering around something on the ground nearby. Matt lay where the enemy’s last convulsion had thrown him. He was dead, his belly torn open, hands charred, face smashed out of shape—then the eyes opened in that ruined face. Matt drew a shaky breath and shuddered and went on breathing.

  Derron no longer felt his own exhaustion. The People made way as he crawled his battered metal proxy to Matt’s side and gently lifted him. Two of the younger women were wailing. Matt was too far gone to wince at the touch of hot metal.

  “Good work, Odegard!” Colonel Borss’s voice had regained strength. “That wraps up the operation. We can lift your unit back to presenttime now; better put that fellow down.”

  Derron held onto Matt. “His lifeline is breaking off here no matter what we do. Bring him up with the machine.”

  “It’s not authorized to bring anyone . . . .” The voice faded in hesitation.

  “He won the fight for us, and now his guts are hanging out. He’s finished in this part of history. Sir.”

  “All right, we’ll bring him up. Stand by while we re-adjust.”

  The People meanwhile had formed a ring of awe around the
slaveunit and its dying burden. Somehow the scene would probably be assimilated into one of the extant myths; myths were tough bottles, Derron thought, stretching to hold many kinds of wine.

  Up at the mouth of the cave, the old woman was having trouble with her tinder as she tried to get the watch-fire started again. A young girl with her hesitated, then ran down to the glowing berserker-shell and on its heat kindled a dry branch into flame. Waving the branch to keep it bright, she went back up the hill in a sort of dance.

  And then Derron was sitting in a fading circle of light on the dark floor of Operations Stage Three. The circle vanished, and two men with a stretcher ran toward him. He opened his metal arms to let the medics take Matt, then inside his helmet his teeth found the power switch and he turned off the master-unit.

  He let the end-of-mission checklist go hang. In a few seconds he had extricated himself from the master, and in his sweat-soaked leotard was skipping down the stairs from the catwalk. The other slaves were being brought back to, and the Stage was busy. He pushed his way through a confusion of technicians and miscellaneous folk and reached Matt’s side just as the medics were picking up the stretcher with him on it. Wet cloths had already been draped over the wounded man’s bulging intestines, and some kind of an intravenous had been started.

  Matt’s eyes were open, though of course they were stupid with shock. To him Derron could be no more than another strange shape among many; but Derron’s shape walked along beside him, gripping his forearms above his burned hand, until consciousness faded away.

  The word was spreading, as if by public announcement, that a man had been brought up alive from the deep past. When they carried Matt into the nearest hospital it was only natural that Lisa, like everyone else who had the chance, should come hurrying to see him.

  “He’s lost,” she murmured, looking down at the swollen face, in which the eyelids now and then flicked open. “Oh, so lost. Alone.” She turned anxiously to a doctor. “He’ll live, now, won’t he?”