Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Derron had seen a keyhole hit and closed before, and he understood perfectly what a victory he was seeing now. On the screens, the whole writhing build-up of change surrounding Ay now burst like a boil, began to straighten itself out like a piece of trickery with string. History flowed strong and safe back into the familiar riverbed. Only the one catalytic lifeline was newly broken; you had to look closely not to miss that little detail on the screens.

  The raw stump of that line left no room for doubt, but still Derron’s hand went out to punch his communicator for Stage Three. “Alf? Listen, will you let me know what shape he’s in, the moment—all right, thanks.”

  Holding the circuit open to Stage Three, he waited, tired eyes gazing blankly at the screens. Around him, the first waves of a celebration curled up around the edges of discipline.

  “Derron?” Alf’s voice was slow in coming, and slow-spoken when it came, to tell about the knife in the heart and speculate on how the man must have arranged to have it driven. And to confirm that Matt’s brain had been too long without oxygen for the medics to do anything useful for him.

  Derron flipped off the switch and sat there, tired and immobile. Some of the victorious hunters around him were breaking out cigars, and one was calling jovially for a ration of grog. A few minutes later Time Ops himself strolled by with a glass in his hand, but he was not shouting or even smiling as he paused at Derron’s position.

  “He was a good man, Odegard. The best, of course. Not many can accomplish a thousandth part of what he did. With their lives or their deaths.” Time Ops raised his glass in a solemn sipping toast to the bitten-off green line on the screen. Later of course there would be monuments and ceremonies to do the same thing more elaborately. But, for Odegard, none of it would have much practical value.

  “The thing is,” said Derron, “I don’t really care much what happens to the world. Only a person here and there.”

  Time Ops might not have heard, for the celebration was growing louder. “You did a necessary job, major, and did it well, from the start of the operation until today. We’re going to be expanding even more here in Time Operations, and we’ll need good men in key positions. Pm going to recommend you for another promotion . . .”

  Nomis stood with arms upraised, gray beard and black robes whipping in the wind, while he persisted in the evil endeavor that had kept him here on his secret rock for the past three days. Though Nomis could not escape the feeling that his labors against Ay had all been completely in vain . . .

  On the battlement, Alix shaded her fair eyes against the morning sun and strained them seaward to catch sight of sail or mast. She waited, trembling inwardly a little, for her first sight of her future lord . . .

  The cliffs of Queensland were dead ahead, Harl knew, though still a day’s rowing out of sight. He frowned to port across the sea’s gray face, though there was nothing to break the line of the horizon, but a distant line of squalls. Then his face cleared with the thought that young Ay, in his tent amidships, was doubtless planning for the fighting that was sure to come. END

  BROTHER BERSERKER

  He was sent back in time—to protect a famous heretic from destruction by a berserker!

  I

  The barefoot man in the gray friar’s habit topped a rise and paused to survey the country ahead. In that direction the paved road he was traveling continued to run almost straight under a leaden sky, humping over one scrubbily wooded hill after another. The stones of this road had been laid down in the days of expansion of the great Empire, and there was not much else in the world that had survived the centuries between then and now.

  The friar was of medium height and rather thin. His appearance seemed to have little to do with age; he was somewhere between twenty and forty. His scantily bearded face expressed his tiredness, and his gray robe was spotted with grayer mud. The fields up to the shoulders of the road were all ankle-deep in mud, and most of them showed no sign of having been plowed or planted this spring or last. The only sign of recent human presence visible from where the friar stood now was a heap of low ruined walls at roadside just ahead. Only the ruin was recent; the walls themselves had been old and might have been a caravanserai or legion post in the days of the Empire’s strength. But last month or last tenday, new war had passed this way, dissolving one more building into raw tumbled stones. Before grass could start to grow on the stones, it seemed likely that they might sink into the mud without a trace.

  When he reached the remnant of a wall, the friar sat down on it, resting from his long journey and looking with minor sadness at the minor destruction about him. He leaned over and picked up one fallen stone; his wiry hands showed strength. With something like a practiced mason’s look in his eye, he fitted the stone into a notch in the stump of wall and studied the effect.

  A distant hail made him raise his head and look back along the way he had come. Another lone figure, dressed in a habit much like his own, was hastening toward him, waving both arms for attention.

  The first friar forgot his little game with the stone, returned the wave and waited.

  The approaching figure soon resolved itself into a man of middle height, clean shaven and almost stout. “Glory to the Holy One, reverend brother!” puffed this newcomer, arriving at last within easy talking distance.

  The bearded friar had gotten to his feet, and now his thin face lighted gently. “Glory to His name.” The portly one asked anxiously:

  “Are you, as I think, Brother Jovann of Ernard?”

  “That is my name.”

  “Now may the Holy One be praised!” The heavier man made a wedge-sign with his hands and rolled eyes heavenward. “My name is Saile, brother. Now may the Holy One be praised, say I—”

  “So be it.”

  “—for He has led me in mysterious ways to reach your side! Brother Jovann, others will be flocking to your side, for the fame of your heroic virtue has spread afar in many lands. Even in the isolated villages of these remote hills, the peasants are aware now of your passage.”

  “I fear my many faults are known hereabouts, for I was born not far away.”

  “Ah, brother, you are overly modest. From numerous people in this land, as well as elsewhere, I have heard again and again of your exploits. How, two months ago, you dared to leave the encampment of the army of the Faithful, to cross no-man’s-land boldly into the very ranks of the Infidel, there to enter the tent of the Arch-Infidel himself and preach to him the truth of our Holy Mother Temple!”

  “And to fail to convert him.” Jovann nodded sadly. “You do well to remind me of my failure, for I am prone to the sin of pride.”

  “Ah.” Saile lost headway. But it was only for a moment. “My own most humble wish, Brother Jovann, is that I be allowed to be among the very first to join your order. Ah, you are even now on your way to Empire City? To petition our Vicar, the most holy Nabur the Eighth, for permission to found a new order of your own?”

  “Truly, God has called me to such a task, Brother Saile.” The thin friar’s eyes looked into the distance. “Once I labored at rebuilding temples with stones and bricks, but now I am called to rebuild with men.” His attention came back, smiling. “As for your becoming a member of the new order when it is formed, I can say nothing yet. But if you should choose to walk with me to Empire City, I will be happy for your company.”

  “I am most highly honored, Brother Jovann!”

  Saile prolonged his thanks to some length as they walked on together. He had also commented extensively on the chances of yet more rain falling and was discoursing on the question of where they might hope to obtain their next meal, when there came a distraction.

  A speedy coach that looked as if it might belong to some middle-ranking noble or prelate was overtaking them on the road. The friars’s ears gave them plenty of warning to step aside; four agile loadbeasts were making the wheels clatter over the leveled stones at a good speed.

  As the coach sped past, Brother Jovann found his eyes drawn to the face of
one occupant who rode facing forward, head and one arm extended slightly out a window. This was an old man, stocky of build—so far as could be judged—graybearded, but with the short-cut hair on his head still ginger colored. His thick mouth was twisted slightly as if ready to spit or to dispute.

  “I had hoped they might give us a lift,” Brother Saile muttered unhappily, watching the coach dwindle along the road ahead. “All the seats were not occupied, were they?” Brother Jovann shook his head; he had not noticed how many were in the coach. His attention had been drawn and held by the old man’s eyes. Fixed ahead, in the direction of the Holy City a hundred miles away, those eyes were clear and gray and powerful. And very much afraid.

  II

  When Derron Odegard walked out on the victory celebration in Time Operation, he found his feet taking him to Lisa, to face her with the news of Matt’s death and get it over with.

  She had only just moved out of the student nurses’s quarters at the hospital, to try some job and share a cubicle with another girl in a lowrank, uplevel corridor. Lisa’s roommate, in the midst of doing something to her hair, opened the door to Derron and then had to go back inside to pretend not to be listening.

  Lisa evidently saw Derron’s’ news in his face or guessed it. Her own face becoming calm as a mask, she stood just inside the half-open door, not asking him in from the corridor.

  He nodded. “It’s Matt—the battle’s won, the berserkers are stopped. But he’s dead, he sacrificed himself to do it.”

  She lifted her head proudly, showing no surprise. “Of course; what else could he do? That’s the job you gave him.”

  “Understand, Lisa, when I went to him with that salestalk I thought he was going to have a chance.” Her voice and her face began to break together. “I—knew you were going to kill him.”

  “My God, Lisa! I didn’t mean to do that.”

  Breaking up and melting, she leaned against the doorjamb. “And now there’s n-nothing to be done.”

  “The doctors tried—but no, nothing. We can’t go after his lifeline in the past again—it’d wreck the world to try to pull it out of that mess now.”

  “The world’s not worth it!”

  He was still trying to console her with some stupidities when the door closed in his face.

  A few days later he was sitting alone in his tiny private office on the Operations level, slumping in his chair, thinking that if Lisa were the woman he needed he would have stayed and kicked her door down; it was only a door, and behind it she was still alive.

  No, the woman he needed, whose image still ruled his secret thoughts, had been for a year and more behind the door of death; and no man had yet found a way of smashing through that. So in the matter of Lisa—as in everything else—Derron could no longer care very much.

  After he had sat in his silent office for a while, he noticed an official-looking envelope, sealed and addressed to him, on the desk. After another while he took the envelope and opened it.

  Inside was the formal notice of his new promotion, to the rank of colonel. “—in consideration of your recent outstanding service in Time Operations, and in the expectation that you will continue—” A set of appropriate collar insignia were enclosed.

  He sat there a while longer, looking across the room at what rested like a trophy atop his little bookcase—an ancient battle helmet, ornamented with wings. He was still doing this when the clangor of the alert signal vibrated throughout Operations, pulling him reflexively to his feet. In another moment he was on the way to the briefing room.

  Latecomers were still hurrying in when a general officer, Time Ops’ chief of staff, mounted the dais to get things started.

  “The third berserker assault has begun, gentlemen. Win or lose, this will be the last. It’ll give us the final bearing we need to locate their staging area, twenty-plus thousand years down.”

  There was an optimistic murmur heard.

  “Don’t cheer yet. This third attack gives every indication of being a hard one to beat.” The general went through the unveiling of hastely assembled maps and models. “Like the previous attack, this one is aimed at a single man. And again there’s no doubt about the target’s identity—this time the name is Vincent Vincento.”

  There was a murmur at that name. There would have been a reaction from almost any audience that could have been assembled on Sirgol. Even the half-educated of the planet had heard of Vincento, though the man was some three hundred and fifty years dead and he had never ruled a nation or raised an army.

  Derron’s attention became concentrated. In his pre-war historical studies he had specialized in Vincente’s time and place. And that locale was also oddly connected with his private grief.

  The briefing officer spoke on.

  “Vincento’s lifeline is among the very few we have been able to protect by sentry action along their entire effective lengths. Of course, this doesn’t mean a berserker can’t get near him; but if one tries to kill Vincento or even attacks someone else within a couple of miles of him, we’ll be onto its keyhole in a couple of seconds, present-time, and cancel it out. The same if it should try to kidnap or capture Vincento or take any direct physical action at all against him. The protection extends along Vincento’s lifeline from before his birth until the completion of his last important work at the age of seventy-eight. We can assume the enemy knows about it and is planning something more subtle than direct physical assault.”

  The general went into the technical evidence for this, then moved on to another point. “Chronologically, the enemy penetration is not more than a tenday before the start of Vincento’s famous trial before the Defenders of the Faith. There may well be a connection; suppose for example that a berserker could alter the outcome of the trial to get Vincento sentenced to death. It would be practically impossible for us to find a keyhole by tracing anything so indirect.

  “And an actual death sentence would not seem to be necessary for the enemy’s purpose. Vincento is seventy years old at the time of his trial. If it should result in his being put to torture or thrown into a dungeon, his life would be effectively ended.”

  Another general, seated in the front row, raised a hand. “Doesn’t some such treatment happen to him historically?”

  “No. Historically, Vincento never spends a day of his life in prison. After his recantation at the trial, he spends the remainder of his life in physically comfortable house arrest, where he has time to lay the foundation of the science of dynamics—and on that, of course, our science and our survival heavily depend.”

  The questioning general shifted once more in his front rank chair. “How in the world is an alien machine going to influence the outcome of a trial?”

  The briefing officer stared gloomily at his charts. “Frankly we’ve still a shortage of good ideas on that. We doubt that it’ll try to play a supernatural role, since the last such attempt failed.

  “Here’s something to keep in mind. Only one enemy device is engaged in this attack, and from all indications it’s physically small, only about the size of a man—which suggests the possibility that this one may be an android. Yes, I know, the berserkers have never, anywhere, been able to fabricate an android that would pass in human society as a normal person. Still, we hardly dare rule out the possibility that this time they’ve succeeded.”

  The discussion turned to countermeasures. A whole arsenal of devices were being kept in readiness for dropping into the past, but no one could say yet what might be needed.

  “The one really bright spot, of course, is that this attack’s within the time band where we can drop live agents, so we count on men on the spot as our main defense. People who’ll keep their eyes on Vincento from a little distance; people able to spot any significant deviation from history. They’ll need to know that particular period very well, besides having experience in Time Operations . . .”

  Listening, Derron looked down at the new insignia he was still carrying in his hand. And then he began at last to pin them
on.

  Brother Jovann and Brother Saile topped yet another hill, a few miles along from the spot where they had met, and found they were soon to catch up with the coach that had passed them so speedily, Its loadbeasts unharnessed and grazing, it stood empty beside the broken gate of a high-walled enclosure at the foot of the next hill ahead.

  On top of that hill there towered a great cathedral-temple, its stones too new for moss or weathering. Aloof against the lowering sky, it seemed to float above all human effort and concern.

  The ancient road, after passing the broken-gated monastery at the foot of the hill, swerved to meet a bridge—or the stub of a bridge, rather, for all of the spans were gone, with most of the piers that had supported them. The river that had burst its bridge was raging, ravaging the lowlands on either side, obviously swollen to several times its normal flow.

  On the other side of the river, beyond another stub of bridge, the town of Oibbog sat on secure high ground. A person or two could be seen moving in those distant streets. Coaches and loadbeasts were waiting there, too, interrupted in their journeys that were outbound from the Holy City.

  Leaden clouds still mounted ominously up the sky. From them the river fled, lashed and goaded by distant flails of lightning, a great swollen, terrified snake that had burst its bonds and carried them away.

  “Brother River will not let us cross tonight.”

  When he heard this personification, Saile’s head turned cautiously sideways, as if he wondered whether he might be expected to laugh. But before he decided, the rain broke again, like a waterfall. Tucking up robes, both friars ran to join the occupants of the coach in whatever shelter the abandoned-looking monastery might afford.

  III

  A hundred miles away, in the capital of the vanishing Empire and the Holy City of the embattled Temple, the same day was warm and sultry. Only the cold rage of Nabur the Eighth, eighty-first in the succession of Vicars of the Holy One, stirred like a storm-wind the air of his private apartments.