Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The tip of the central spire held its symbolic wedge two hundred and sixty feet above the flattened hilltop. The stones of tower and wall, of arch and flying buttress were rich clear gray, almost shining in the morning light. Inside, the stained glass would be living flame along the eastern wall. There was only one sight in all the world like this, and he had seen it only once before, with his beloved at his side. If air and grass were now alive again, surely she too must be alive and somewhere near where he might reach her. The resurrected reality before him was at the moment more convincing than any thought or. logic. At any moment now he might hear her voice, might be able to reach out and touch . . .

  There was a splash nearby. The stout friar was wearing a caricature expression of anger, disappointment and surprise, while the thinner one stood with a hand stretched out over the water. As Derron watched, a big fish jumped and splashed again; one of the slippery catch had evidently escaped.

  . . . touch her warm and living skin. The way her hair moved in the wind came back to him now, with the clarity of something seen only a minute ago.

  His feet took him away from the bridge, back along the road. He saw without really thinking that Vincento still sat alone in the sun.

  The hill raised its cathedral before Derron, and his feet began a steady climb.

  Jovann was looking sadly at the peasants, while he addressed the splasher in the water. “Brother Fish, I have given you liberty not because we do not need food, but so you may be able to praise God, who sends all blessings—the fish to the angler, or freedom to the fish. We men so often forget to be thankful!”

  The fish splashed and leaped and splashed again. As if the pain of the hook or the time spent gilling air—or something else—had driven it quite mad.

  Jovann looked down at this watery uproar in distress. “Be still now, Brother Fish. Enough! Live in the water, not the painful air. Give praise and thanks as a fish may naturally do!”

  The splashing stopped. The last ripples and foam were swept away downstream.

  Every peasant’s hands were raised in the wedge-sign, and they darted their eyes at one another as if they would have liked to run but dared not. Brother Saile’s face gaped as blankly as had the fish’s, as his eyes swung from Jovann to the river and back again.

  Jovann beckoned Saile away and said to him: “I am going apart for an hour, to pray the Holy One to cleanse me of anger and pride. And for these poor men’s crops. Do you likewise.” And Jovann walked away alone, following the riverbank in the opposite direction from the peasants.

  As Derron climbed the steps that switchbacked up the face of the cathedral hill, it crossed his mind that at this moment in time the genes of the girl he loved were scattered in the chromosomes of some two thousand ancestors. Only in such a tenuous sense was she alive today.

  He had never forgiven her for dying, for being helplessly killed with all the other millions, for emptying his world. So, he told himself, forgive her now, today. Get it all over with, out of your system once and for all, so you can be some good to yourself.

  Now the roof of the monastery was bedew the level of his climbing feet. And now his eyes rose above the level of the paved space before the cathedral door.

  Here all seemed to him just as he remembered it. He stood upon the very stones where her feet and his would one day stand, facing the same hedges and statues along the cathedral’s front. Holiday and love might still be true, war and grief no more than bad dreams.

  But it was she who was the dream now, who would never again be anything more. For a moment the knowledge was almost too much, still—he thought he might be going to kneel down or fall down or cry aloud—but then it could be accepted, at last, at long long last.

  He was not going to collapse or even cry out. They had looked out over the valley from here and talked about building their home on some nearby spot, the home for the kids they were going to have. Now he was just going to stand here and go on living.

  The crisis building up in him since he had known he might see Oibbog again slowly faded. Peace and stillness reigned.

  He had still to go into the building, where he had spent a morning helping her photograph stained glass. He wished he could be lucky enough to find the supposed author of the universe inside; Derron would have a few pointed questions to ask.

  The main door was just as solidly hung as he remembered it; he wondered briefly if a wooden door might last three hundred years. No matter.

  He tugged it open and heard the booming reverberation of the broken closure come back from the cavernous interior. And only then did he recall that his staff with all its weaponry was resting back in his monastery cell. No matter; immediate violence from the berserker was not a danger.

  He went in and paced down the center of the enormous nave. There was nothing to be seen of God or berserker, nor for that matter of deserter or pregnant waif whose lifeline might be showing up to confuse operations.

  There would seem to be room in here for all of them to hide. The arched nave was about three hundred feet long and a hundred feet high for most of that length. Construction had not been quite completed when the workmen had been ordered or frightened off the job; much scaffolding still surrounded columns and clung to walls, and a few abandoned tools were very slowly gathering dust where they had been set down.

  Whether because of the combatants’s reverence or superstitious awe, or only by chance, war had not trampled here. Even the stained glass was all intact, splintered only by the sun coming in to fire the gloom with richness. This main body of the temple was now no more than a few decades old. The paving stones of the nave, the wide steps leading to side chapels, all were flat and unworn; three centuries and more of random footsteps would be needed to shape them into standard distribution curves. Here and there the workmen’s cables and ropes hung from the scaffolding, as steady in the motionless air as if carved from stone themselves.

  As Derron approached the intersection of transepts and nave, a movement caught the corner of his eye. One of the friars, hood worn over his head, here in God’s house, was approaching him.

  Derron cleared his throat. “Reverend Brother.” And then it struck him as odd, that one of the two men he had left at the bridge should have hurried here ahead of him. Peering closely, he saw that the face beneath the cowl was not quite a face. The hands reaching to grab him as the figure shot forward were dummy flesh, split open now to show the steel claws.

  A little mob of peasants was coming up the road from the bridgehead, babbling loudly of miracles and fish. The noise was distracting, and in truth Vincento was only too ready to let himself be distracted from his humiliating task. He summoned Will, gave him the escritoire and papers to take in charge and then turned his own steps restlessly upward in the fine sunlight.

  He had decided that the meeting supposedly arranged in the cathedral was probably some Defenders’s snare. Let them try! he would see through it before they had gotten very far. No more than the oafs who called themselves scholars were clerics Vincento’s equals in cleverness. It was only the Defenders’s power he respected and feared, never their brains.

  He was patient with his old legs, and so they served him well enough on the climb. After a pause at the top to breathe, he entered at the cathedral’s main door, tugging it firmly closed behind him. He devoutly hoped that no one was going to meet him to offer sympathy. A sympathizer always had at least some implied claim to be the equal—or even the superior!—of the one he tried to console. Pah!

  Vincento strolled through the nave, a stone-sealed space too vast to give the least sense of confinement. To his right and left, columns towered in their parallel rows. With distance the apparent gap between each column and the next diminished, until at fifty paces each row became opaque as a wall. No matter where a man stood inside this unpartitioned space, half of it would always be blocked from his view—more than half, if one counted the areas of the transept-arms and the chapels.

  When he reached the appointed meeting pl
ace, the crossways of nave and transepts, Vincento could look directly up nearly two hundred feet, into the shadowed interior of the mighty spire. There were workmen’s platforms there too, reached by ladders mounting from the clerestory level, where must be the upper end of some stair that coiled up within the wall from floor level.

  In this temple there were no chandeliers and no breezes to swing them if they had existed. If in Vincento’s youth this had been his parish house of worship, he could hardly have begun, during a drowsy Sabbath sermon, to discover the laws of pendulums.

  A single cable of great length descended thinly from the uttermost dark interior of the spire. Vincento’s eye followed it down, to find that after all there was a pendulum here, at least in potential. For a bob, there hung on the end of the long cable a ball of metal that would be heavy as a man. This weight was caught and held by the merest loop of cord to one of the huge columns at a corner of the nave-transept intersection.

  Looking up and down, up and down again tended to make an old man dizzy. Vincento rubbed his neck. But what use could the builders have had for such a patriarch of pendulums? It could, Vincento supposed, be something they swung when hard stone and mortar had to be demolished. Or was it only a plumb-line made gigantic?

  Whatever they had intended it for, it was a pendulum. The restraining tether of cord, with its single knot, looked insubstantial. Vincento thrummed the taut little cord with his finger, and gently the long long cable whipped and swayed. The massive weight made tiny bobbing motions, dipping like a ship at anchor.

  Quickly the oscillations died away; the cathedral stillness regained ascendancy. Cord and weight and cable were once more as steady as the stone columns in the still gray air. The pendulum-ship was drydocked.

  Set sail, then! On impulse Vincento tugged once at the end of the knotted restraining cord. And with startling ease the knot dissolved.

  Starting from rest, the weight for a moment seemed reluctant to move. Even after it had undeniably begun its first swing, it still moved so slowly that Vincento’s eye raced involuntarily once more up into the shadows of the spire, to see how it was possible that mere length of cord should so delay things.

  A man might have counted four without haste before the weight for the first time reached the center, the low-point, of its swing. Almost touching the floor, it passed that center in a smooth fast rush and immediately began to slow again, so that it needed four more counts to climb the gentle gradient of the far half of its arc. Then an unmeasurable instant’s pause, not quite touching a column on the other side of the crossways, before the weight edged into its returning motion.

  Back and forth it went, in a perfectly straight track about ten yards in length. Vincento’s eye could find no diminution in the amplitude of the first half-dozen swings. He supposed that a heavy weight swinging so freely might continue to oscillate for many hours or even for days.

  But wait. Vincento squinted at the pendulum. Holding his head motionless he watched it closely through another half dozen swings.

  What was it he had come in here for? Oh yes, someone was perhaps going to meet him.

  But this pendulum. He frowned at it and shook his head. He was going to have to make sure of something that he thought he saw.

  Workmen’s sawhorses stood not far away. He dragged a pair of these to where he wanted them, then spanned them with a plank, which lay beneath the end of the pendulum’s arc and perpendicular to its direction. On the bottom of the swinging weight he had noticed a projection like a small spike—whatever it had been designed for, it would serve Vincento’s present purpose well. He laid a second board atop the first and readjusted his whole structure slightly. Now on each swing the spike passed within an inch of the topmost board.

  Somewhere in here he had seen sand . . . yes, piled there in a mixing-trough, by the entrance to the first side-chapel. The sand was damp with the long spell of wet weather; he brought handfuls and dumped them on the upper board, where he patted and built the sand into a small wall, an inch or two high, along the board’s length. Then in an interval between swings he slid his upper board slightly forward, taking his sand-wall into the edge of the pendulum’s arc.

  A neatly designed experiment, he thought. On its first return the moving spike notched his little sand wall delicately, tumbling a tiny clot of grains down die minute slope. Then the weight pulled its taut cable away again, taking another nibble of eternity.

  Vincento held his breath, held his eyes from blinking as he watched the pendulum’s return. Now he heard for the first time the faint ghostly hissing of its passage.

  The spike coming back to the wall of sand made a new notch, though one contiguous to the first. Then in movement huge and regular enough to be the cathedral’s stately pulse, the weight once more departed.

  And the third notch was new again, by the same margin and in the same direction as the second. In three vibrations the plane of the pendulum had shifted its extremity sideways by half a finger width. His eyes had not deceived him earlier; it was creeping regularly clockwise.

  Perhaps some slow untwisting of the cable? Then it should soon reverse itself, Vincento thought, or at least vary in amplitude. Again he stared up into the high shadows.

  He would have to hang another pendulur. like this somewhere, someday, and study it at leisure. If he could. Even supposing that his health held out and he was spared prison, it would be difficult. Enclosed towers of this height were anything but common. In another temple or at some university, perhaps . . . but he had no intention of stooping to collaboration.

  . . . suppose now that the sideways progression was not due to the cable unwinding. He thought he could feel that it was not—in somewhat the same way as, after study, he had come to feel the stability of the sun. This clockwise creeping had something too elemental about it for him to be able to credit a trivial cause.

  Already the width of two fingers had been nibbled from the top of his little parapet of sand.

  He wondered how the cable was fastened at the top. Younger legs than his would be required to find that out, and Vincento departed to get them. Several times in his passage down the nave he turned, frowning back at the pendulum as he might have stared at an unexpected star.

  VII

  Of it all, Derron had seen only an upper segment of the moving cable. He saw even that much with only one eye, for his face was being held with steady force against the rough planking of the high platform to which the berserker had carried him, helpless as a kicking infant. Inhumanly motionless, it crouched over him now, one chill hand gripping his neck and holding part of his garment gaglike in his mouth, the other hand twisting one of his arms just to the point of pain.

  Obviously it had no intention of killing or crippling him. Still his captivity felt more like eternity than time, though measured by the meaningless regularity of the swinging cable. Having his prisoner, the berserker was content to wait, which meant that he had failed. It had at once known his communicator for what it was, had ripped the wooden carving from his neck and cracked it like a thin-shelled nut, squeezing the meat of metal and components into trash between its fingers.

  Only when the cathedral door far below had boomed shut once more did eternity begin to come to an end. The berserker then let him go.

  Slowly and painfully he raised his numbed body from the wood. Rubbing the arm that had been twisted, he turned to face his enemy. Under the cowl he saw a pattern of seamed metal that looked as if it might be able to open and slide and reshape itself. Was there plastic somewhere inside that could evert to become the mask of a human face? There was no way to tell that much, let alone guess what identity it might be able to wear.

  “Colonel Odegard,” it said, in a voice machine-tailored to neutrality.

  He waited for more, while the thing facing him on the high platform squatted on its heels, arms hanging limp. Like the face, the hands were ambiguous; they were not human now, but there was no saying what they might be able to become. The rest of the thing was h
idden under the shapeless robe, which had probably once been Amling’s.

  “Colonel Odegard, do you fear the passage from life to not-life?”

  He didn’t know what he had expected to hear, but hardly that. “And if I do, what difference does it make?”

  “Yes,” said the berserker. “What is programmed goes on regardless of any passage.”

  Before he could try to make any sense out of that, the machine jumped precisely forward and grabbed him again. He struggled again, which of course made no difference. It tore strips from his coat, ripping the tough cloth with precise and even sounds. With the strips it gagged him again and tied him hand and foot tightly, but still not so that he felt hopeless of ever working free. It would not blunder into causing his death, here where it must be careful not to kill. When it had bound him, the machine paused for a moment, moving its cowled head like a listening man, searching the area with senses far beyond the human. And then it was gone, down the ladder in utter silence, like a giant cat or ape.

  He strained desperately to get loose, choking curses on his gag.

  From some village in the hills a second group of peasants had come along the road to the cathedral. It was Brother Saile they met first; their anxious faces fell even further when they learned he was not the saint and miracle-worker of whom the whole countryside was talking.

  “Tell me, what is it you wish to see Brother Jovann about?” Saile inquired, his hands clasped with dignity across his belly.

  They clamored piteously. For the past several days a great wolf had terrorized their little village, killing cattle and even a child and even—they swore it!—uprooting crops. They were isolated and very poor, with no powerful patron to give them aid of any kind, save only the Holy One himself! And now the saintly Jovann, who must and would do something. They were utterly desperate.

  Brother Saile nodded, his face showing sympathy mixed with reluctance. “And your village is several miles distant? In the hills. Well—we shall see. Come with me, and I will put your case before good Brother Jovann.”