Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  While riding the tubeliner to Boston to attend a class reunion he finished other tasks in time to put the calendar microtape into a projector and begin work on the problem. Scanning back over the printout—chronologically from the scheduled vacation—setting his mind in as ruthless a frame as possible, he mentally pruned out an underbrush of minor appointments, celebrations and entertainments planned from a sense of social duty. With his finger gliding on the projected image of the microtape he drew the surcease of eternity closer and ever closer to the hurtling moment of the present in which he dwelt.

  “Would you care for a cocktail, sir?”

  “No, thank you.” He could have used one, but, nagged by the urgency of finishing before they got to Boston or probably not at all in the immediate future, he stuck with his work. Four months nearer to his present, moving anti-clockward from next year’s vacation, his finger stopped, having run into the notable barrier of the annual banquet of the Old Marrieds’ Club, for which he and Iris had standing reservations., Yes. That would set a time. Attend the banquet, dropping to a few old friends broad hints that he would not be back next year, delay a decent month and then bow out.

  He straightened in his seat, turned off the projector and slid it back into its travel case. Settled, and they were just pulling into Boston. Once in a while things worked out just right.

  ON THE day he got home from the reunion he began trying to get in touch with his physician. It was a few days before the doctor, repeatedly trying to return his call, did so at a moment when Pandareus was available. Communication established, Pandareus promptly asked for and was given the name of another doctor, who had done terminations for several other people.

  “There aren’t any real specialists,” his own doctor assured Pandareus. “Not in the field you want. Not enough people are having it done. How about a round of golf on Wednesday?”

  “Can’t,” said Pandareus automatically and then consulted his calendar to make sure of why. “My father’s coming into town that day. Maybe next week?”

  The doctor looked off screen, evidently checking his own calendar, and frowned. “I’ll try to call you back on it. You’ll like Dr. James. One of the best men in the city.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Right.”

  Pandareus broke the connection and punched for Dr. James. A busy-signal. Well, he would try calling in the afternoon, before the time came to leave for the matinee.

  Eventually he got through. “Dr. James’s office,” a receptionist of timeless prettiness told him.

  “How do you do. I’d like to make an appointment to talk to the doctor, or talk to him right now if that’s feasible. It’s regarding my contemplated termination.”

  “I see, sir.” Even before taking his name she asked, “And when is your preferred date for termination?”

  He told her.

  The receptionist was gently, exquisitely concerned. “I’m sorry, sir, but Dr. James will be on vacation that month.”

  BUT he persevered. Iris helped a lot. Seated with her in an aircab on his way at last to Dr. James’s office to be terminated, he looked back on the months since his first firm decision to die and found the time, as viewed from his present angle, to be almost disconcertingly short.

  Iris, riding beside him, was tired. She held an envelope containing some of the necessary papers, which they had only just managed to have signed in time, this very morning. “Oh, God, I’m dead,” she murmured without thinking, and then looked over at him with alarm. “That was thoughtless of me, wasn’t it?”

  “Not at all, my dear. I won’t be easily upset today. I feel happy. Completed. Fulfilled. A successful race run, a well-earned rest ahead, as it were. I want you to share my joy.”

  “I do, Matthew.” But a little movement about the lips and throat, a tiny lift of the head, counterbalanced all the happy intonations she was putting into her voice. She was trying her best to act as if nothing were wrong, but after a little more than a hundred years he could infallibly tell when something out of the ordinary was bothering her.

  “Iris, what are your plans for the immediate future? I really haven’t had time to discuss it with you.”

  “I’d like to get away for a while, Matthew. But I don’t see how I can. My desensitivity training group begins to meet next week. And there will be any number of loose ends to tidy up regarding your departure.”

  “Something more is bothering you. I can tell. Are you going to miss me too much, after all?”

  “No, dear. If your absence affects me unduly I will just think of you as being on a long trip somewhere. And keep busy.”

  He pressed her hand. “But there is something. I insist on hearing what it is. It is most unfair to conceal things from me at this juncture.”

  “Matthew, I am not going to interfere with your happy departure. You have put so much time and effort into arranging it. Into making an achievement of your whole life. To—to close it properly, like a good poem.”

  “Something is definitely wrong and you are going to tell me what it is. Or I will stop the cab until you do.”

  Iris put down the bulky envelope and looked for a tissue. “You have nothing to regret. You have certainly been a good husband to me. You have kept almost every promise you ever made.”

  Aha. “What promise or promises have I failed to keep?”

  “I have really nothing to complain of, Matthew.”

  The airborne cab glided to a soft waiting halt on the roof of the building housing Dr. James’s office, but neither of the passengers got out at once. Pandareus had to spar through another verbal round or two with his wife before the reason for her unhappiness was clear.

  “It was more than ninety years ago. Matthew, and I am sure you have forgotten it. But early in our marriage you did promise me that one day we would have a child.”

  HE CLOSED his eyes for a moment. Recollection of the promise had been coming back hazily, subconsciously, for some indeterminate time. Perhaps she had been dropping hints, trying to remind him. Anyway, there was no real surprise in hearing about the promise now and he could not honestly deny that it had been made. An obligation was an obligation and he had several times already put off dying for lesser ones than this. This was rather more important than a five-great grandson’s confirmation, he supposed.

  “Iris, do you really think we have the right to bring a new life into the world?”

  “Oh, Matthew, the world can certainly support one more, with hydrogen-fusion power and reclamation and all the rest. An equilibrium has been reached. It’s not as if everyone were reproducing; I was reading just the other day how remarkable it is that so few exercise their legal rights to do so. The author was wondering why. And even if you did father a child once before—I’ve never had one. I don’t think people are going to comment.”

  “I suppose not.” He gave his wife the ghost of a smile, let his hand hang in the air for a moment and then signaled decisively for the cab to open its door. “Just let me step into James’s office and let them know there’s been a change of plan.”

  “Oh, Matthew! How loving of you to do this for me.” She gripped his fingers and looked into his eyes intently. “You must understand, having a child will mean that your presence as a father is required for an indefinite period. The child will need you psychologically. It will mean years added to your life.”

  “I’ve been through it all before, remember?” He kissed her on the cheek. “The decision is made. I’ll be right back.”

  But he was gone quite a long time, and she began to worry. Suppose he had—but no, there he was, looking a little happier than when he left, reaching briskly for the cab’s door.

  “James was pretty good about it all,” Pandareus said, getting in. “But my change of mind meant there were more forms to be filled out and we’ll have to check back with city hall, the crematorium and the lawyers and—” He broke off to snap his fingers with irritation. “I meant to ask James if he could put us in touch with a good—what d’you call
’em?—obstetrician. Doctor who oversees gestation. And also one of those hospitals where they have an artificial womb. Those’re supposed to be much improved these days.”

  Iris was relaxed now, content and comfortable. “Oh, no, Matthew. It was on television just the other day that artificial wombs are being discontinued once again. Even the new models had too many drawbacks.”

  Pandareus gave the cab its new orders and leaned back beside his wife as it took off and promptly became stuck in a traffic jam at the five-hundred-meter aerial level. “Then you’ll just have to go through the whole nine months of inconvenience and the big disabling trauma at the end. I went through it all with Janet.” He shook his head and smiled a little. “It’s going to take some planning. Well, if it will make you happy, dear. When do you want to have the baby? Get it started, I mean?”

  “Let’s see.” Then Iris’s forehead almost creased with a pretty frown of light vexation. “Oh, dear. If we got baby started right now he’d be born just when our vacation trip is on. Let’s see—”

  WINGS OUT OF SHADOW

  ‘Random’ is not quite the same as ‘unpredictable’ !

  IN MALORI’S first and only combat mission the berserker came to him in the image of a priest of the sect into which Malori had been born on the planet Yaty. In a dreamlike vision that was the analogue of a very real combat he saw the robed figure standing tall in a deformed pulpit, eyes flaming with malevolence, lowering arms winglike with the robes they stretched. With their lowering, the lights of the universe were dimming outside the windows of stained glass and Malori was being damned.

  Even with his heart pounding under damnation’s terror Malori retained sufficient consciousness to remember the real nature of himself and of his adversary and that he was not powerless against him. His dream-feet walked him timelessly toward the pulpit and its demon-priest while all around him the stained glass windows burst, showering him with fragments of sick fear. He walked a crooked path, avoiding the places in the smooth floor where, with quick gestures, the priest created snarling, snapping stone mouths full of teeth. Malori seemed to have unlimited time to decide where to put his feet. Weapon, he thought, a surgeon instructing some invisible aide. Here—in my right hand.

  From those who had survived similar battles he had heard how the inhuman enemy appeared to each in different form, how each human must live the combat through in terms of a unique nightmare. To some a berserker came as a ravening beast, to others as devil or god or man. To still others it was some essence of terror that could never be faced or even seen. The combat was a nightmare experienced while the subconscious ruled, while the waking mind was suppressed by careful electrical pressures on the brain. Eyes and ears were padded shut so that the conscious mind might be more easily suppressed, the mouth plugged to save the tongue from being bitten, the nude body held immobile by the defensive fields that kept it whole against the thousands of gravities that came with each movement of the one-man ship while in combat mode. It was a nightmare from which mere terror could never wake one; waking came only when the fight was over, came only with death or victory or disengagement.

  Into Malori’s dream-hand there now came a meat cleaver keen as a razor, massive as a guillotine-blade. So huge it was that had it been what it seemed it would have been far too cumbersome to even lift. His uncle’s butcher shop on Yaty was gone, with all other human works of that planet. But the cleaver came back to him now, magnified, perfected to suit his need.

  He gripped it hard in both hands and advanced. As he drew near the pulpit towered higher. The carved dragon on its front, which should have been an angel, came alive, blasting him with rosy fire. With a shield that came from nowhere he parried the, splashing flames.

  Outside the remnants of the stained glass windows the lights of the universe were almost dead now. Standing at the base of the pulpit, Malori drew back his cleaver as if to strike overhand at the priest who towered above his reach. Then, without any forethought at all, he switched his aim at the top of his backswing and laid the blow crashing against the pulpit’s stem. It shook, but resisted stoutly. Damnation came.

  Before the devils reached him, though, the energy was draining from the dream. In less than a second of real time it was no more than a fading visual image, a few seconds after that a dying memory. Malori, coming back to consciousness with eyes and ears still sealed, floated in a soothing limbo. Before post-combat fatigue and sensory deprivation could combine to send him into psychosis, attachments on his scalp began to feed his brain with bursts of pins-and-needles noise. It was the safest signal to administer to a brain that might be on the verge of any of a dozen different kinds of madness. The noise made a whitish roaring scattering of light and sound that seemed to fill his head and at the same time somehow outlined for him the positions of his limbs.

  His first fully conscious thought: he had just fought a berserker and survived. He had won—or had at least achieved a stand-off—or he would not be here. It was no mean achievement.

  BERSERKERS were like no other foe that Earth-descended human beings had ever faced. They had cunning and intelligence and yet were not alive. Relics of some interstellar war over long ages since, automated machines, warships for the most part, they carried as their basic programming the command to destroy all life whereever it could be found. Yaty was only the latest of many Earth-colonized planets to suffer a berserker attack, and it was among the luckiest; nearly all its people had been successfully evacuated. Malori and others now fought in deep space to protect the Hope, one of the enormous evacuation ships. The Hope was a sphere several kilometers in diameters, large enough to contain a good proportion of the planet’s population stored tier on tier in defense-field stasis. A trickle-relaxation of the fields allowed them to breathe and live with slowed metabolism.

  The voyage to a safe sector of the galaxy was going to take several months because most of it, in terms of time spent, was going to be occupied in traversing an outlying arm of the great Taynarus nebula. Here gas and dust were much too thick to let a ship duck out of normal space and travel faster than light. Here even the speeds attainable in normal space were greatly restricted. At thousands of kilometers per second, manned ship or berserker machine could alike be smashed flat against a wisp of gas far more tenuous than human breath.

  Taynarus was a wilderness of uncharted plumes and tendrils of dispersed matter, laced through by corridors of relatively empty space. Much of the wilderness was completely shaded by interstellar dust from the light of all the suns outside. Through dark shoals and swamps and tides of nebula the Hope and her escort Judith fled, and a berserker pack pursued. Some berserkers were even larger than the Hope, but those that had taken up this chase were much smaller. In regions of space so thick with matter, a race went to the small as well as to the swift; as the impact cross-section of a ship increased, its maximum practical speed went inexorably down.

  The Hope, ill-adapted for this chase (in the rush to evacuate, there had been no better choice available) could not expect to outrun the smaller and more maneuverable enemy. Hence the escort carrier Judith, trying always to keep herself between Hope and the pursuing pack. Judith mothered the little fighting ships, spawning them out whenever the enemy came too near, welcoming survivors back when the threat had once again been beaten off. There had been fifteen of the one-man ships when the chase began. Now there were nine.

  The noise injections from Malori’s life support equipment slowed down, then stopped. His conscious mind once more sat steady on its throne. The gradual relaxation of his defense fields he knew to be a certain sign that he would soon rejoin the world of waking men.

  As soon as his fighter, Number Four, had docked itself inside the Judith Malori hastened to disconnect himself from the tiny ship’s systems. He pulled on a loose coverall and let himself out of the cramped space. A thin man with knobby joints and an awkward step, he hurried along a catwalk through the echoing hangar-like chamber, noting that three or four fighters besides his had already r
eturned and were resting in their cradles. The artificial gravity was quite steady, but Malori stumbled and almost fell in his haste to get down the short ladder to the operations deck.

  Petrovich, commander of the Judith, a bulky, iron-faced man of middle height, was on the deck apparently waiting for him.

  “Did—did I make my kill?” Malori stuttered eagerly as he came hurrying up. The forms of military address were little observed aboard the Judith, as a rule, and Malori was really a civilian anyway. That he had been allowed to take out a fighter at all was a mark of the commander’s desperation.

  Scowling, Petrovich answered bluntly. “Malori, you’re a disaster in one of these ships. Haven’t the mind for it at all.”

  The world turned a little gray in front of Malori. He hadn’t understood until this moment just how important to him certain dreams of glory were. He could find only weak and awkward words. “But . . . I thought I did all right.” He tried to recall his combat-nightmare. Something about a church.

  “Two people had to divert their ships from their original combat objectives to rescue you. I’ve already seen their gun-camera tapes. You had Number Four just sparring around with that berserker as if you had no intention doing it any damage at all.” Petrovich looked at him more closely, shrugged, and softened his voice somewhat. “I’m not trying to chew you out, you weren’t even aware of what was happening, of course. I’m just stating facts. Thank probability the Hope is twenty AU deep in a formaldehyde cloud up ahead. If she’d been in an exposed position just now they would have got her.”

  “But—” Malori tried to begin an argument but the commander simply walked away. More fighters were coming in. Locks sighed and cradles clanged, and Petrovich had plenty of more important things to do than stand here arguing with him. Malori stood there alone for a few moments, feeling deflated and defeated and diminished. Involuntarily he cast a yearning glance back at Number Four. It was a short, windowless cylinder, not much more than a man’s height in diameter, resting in its metal cradle while technicians worked about it. The stubby main laser nozzle, still hot from firing, was sending up a wisp of smoke now that it was back in atmosphere. There was his twohanded cleaver.