Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “I must continue to pass as a slave,” the Hunterian had said. “No slave could carry such a device into the city without immediately being questioned. Besides, I am unfamiliar with its use; better each man to his own weapons.”

  “Each to his own,” Suomi had answered, reaching out for a farewell handshake. “Good luck with yours. I hope I meet you in the city above.”

  Now, at the foot of the mesa, he observed that a regular trail had already been worn, leading from the lower end of the climbing path off into the woods uphill in the direction of the city. He observed also that not a trace remained of the shattered robot; at first he could not even locate the place where it had lain. Then he realized that the massive tree, whose surface his rifle fire had splintered, had been removed. Here was the neatly sawn stump, with dirt rubbed on the cut surface so it would not look fresh. The tree itself had somehow been carried away. Great pains were being taken to eliminate all evidence that anything grotesque had happened here. But a number of men must have been involved in the cleanup and at least one of them must have talked, so the man in gray had rumors to build on. So much the better.

  When he got to the bottom of the climbing path, Suomi did shrug out of the rifle’s strap and let the weapon fall aside. Gratefully he saw that the climbing rope was still in place. Fighting down a foolish impulse to turn at the last moment and run away to cower in the woods once more, he gritted his teeth and gripped the rope and began to climb. Weakened and aching, he was now compelled to hang on with both hands even on the easy first part of the slope, where before he had been able to climb rapidly on legs alone.

  He had gotten only a little way up when a soldier came into view, looked down and saw Suomi, and began shouting. Suomi ignored the shouts and continued to struggle slowly upward. The shouting kept on. Suomi looked up and saw that the man had a spear raised as if ready to throw.

  “If you stick me with that thing,” Suomi yelled back at last, “you’ll have to carry me. Look at me. Am I so dangerous that I frighten you?”

  His belly muscles were tensing against the impact of the spear, but it did not come. The voice stopped shouting, moved away just a little, and began to talk. Other male voices answered. Suomi did not pay much attention to what they were saying, and did not look up again. Dizzy with hunger and fatigue, feverish from his infected wound, he struggled on the rocks for what seemed an endless time before he could pull himself out on the flat horizontal surface at the head of the path.

  The foam mattress lay almost under his feet when he stood up but there was no sign of Barbara. Half a dozen men, four soldiers and two priests in purple-trimmed robes, crowded around Suomi, barking threats and orders at him, almost nudging him off the mesa again with their drawn swords and a leveled spear. Finally one of the aristocrats raised his voice and there was order. The soldiers put down their weapons, rapidly stripped Suomi and searched him, then searched through his clothes and tossed them back to him.

  “What’ve you done with the girl who was here?” he asked while this was going on. No one bothered to answer.

  “Bring him inside the ship,” one of the aristocrats ordered the soldiers.

  “We’d better get on the communicator first and ask Andreas,” the other one advised. After a moment’s debate they compromised and had Suomi brought up the landing ramp as far as the open entrance lock. There they left him standing for the moment, with two soldiers gripping his arms. His guards were unusually large, strong men, and once the initial confusion of his capture was over they obeyed orders with precision and alertness.

  Suomi wished he could sit down, but was not quite certain that he would be able to get up again if he did. He could hear voices from the direction of the control room engaged in what sounded like a talk on the communicator between the ship and somewhere else. Andreas’s prize-crew perhaps had more technological savvy than Suomi had assumed. So much the worse.

  In a little while one of the aristocrats came back from the direction of the control room to stand in front of Suomi and regard him critically. “Andreas is busy with sacrifice. I think we’ll just bring this one on board, and confine him to his old stateroom. The place has been searched a dozen times, there are no weapons. Outworlder, you look in a bad way.”

  “If I could have some food . . .”

  “We won’t starve you to death, I don’t suppose. Though you may wish we had.” He signed to the soldiers to bring Suomi on into the ship.

  At the entrance to the control room the aristocrat turned. “Hold him tightly going through here.”

  They brought him into the control room, and they were quite right to make sure that he was held securely. Otherwise it might have been barely possible for him to lunge at the drive controls and, before he could be stopped, wreck the ship. But there was no hope of that, his arms were pinned in grips he could not have broken on his strongest days, of which this was not one.

  Seated in the large central pilot’s chair was another aristocratic priest.

  ON A screen before him were the faces of two men who seemed to be in some dimly lighted stone chamber. The one in the background was another priest. The one in front was Schoenberg.

  “Now,” the priest in the control chair was saying, addressing the screen, “You say that if the ship pitches more than ten degrees while under manual control, the autopilot will cut in automatically?”

  “Yes,” Schoenberg’s image said on the screen. “Provided the artificial gravity is off. Then ten degrees pitch and you’ll get the autopilot.”

  “Schoenberg!” Suomi cried out. “Don’t fly it for them, Schoenberg, it’s a berserker they’re working for. Don’t do anything they want!” Schoenberg’s face showed a reaction, though only a trivial one, and his eyes moved, probably following Suomi’s passage through the control room on a portable screen taken from the ship. The men transporting Suomi were making no particular effort to hush him up or hurry him along.

  “A berserker, Schoenberg!” Schoenberg’s eyes on the screen closed. His face looked deathly tired. His voice came wearily into the ship. “I know what I’m doing, Suomi. Just go along with them. Don’t make things more difficult than they are.”

  Suomi with his escort passed out of the control room and into the narrow passage leading to the staterooms, moving at a brisk pace. The doors of most of the rooms and compartments stood open, revealing scenes of disorder, but that of the room that had been Barbara’s was closed. A bored-looking soldier stood leaning against it from the outside.

  “Is the girl in there?” Suomi asked. Again no one would answer. He supposed that at this stage it made no difference whether she was or not.

  His captors knew somehow which room was his—perhaps they had found his name on something there, perhaps Schoenberg for whatever reason was telling them every small detail. When they thrust Suomi into the room he found it in the same state of disruption as the others he had seen, which was no more than might have been expected after several thorough searches. There was no sign that anything had been wantonly smashed. So much the better.

  They left him alone and closed the door behind him; no doubt there would be a soldier leaning against it on the outside. Since the room had not been designed as a prison cell, its door could be locked only from the inside. Unfortunately it had not been designed as a fortress either; though the door was thick and soundproof, it could probably be forced open quickly by a couple of armed and determined men. Nevertheless Suomi quietly activated the lock.

  He went then to stand beside his bunk, where an intercom control was set into the wall, and paused with his hand upraised. He could try to reach Barbara this way. But what could he say? Some of the enemy might well be in her room listening. To try to reassure her, to offer hope, might be much worse than useless. He turned the intercom to a position where it would receive but not transmit and left it there.

  The next thing he did was to get himself a long drink of cold water from the little sink. Then he opened the medicine chest, selected an antibiotic and a
painkiller. There also he found a medicated dressing to put on the worst of his minor wounds, the leg gash that somehow had become infected. After that, with a single glance of longing at the comfortable bunk, he walked to the little desk-workbench where he had kept his personal cameras and sound-recording gear. This material, like everything else, had been looked at and scattered. He opened drawers, looked in corners, searching. All was in disarray, but it seemed that nothing he needed had been removed or broken. He uttered a sigh of relief that broke off midway as he entered a new phase of tension.

  It was time to sit down and get to work.

  IN ITS buried shrine far below the Temple the berserker perceived the chanting far above of five familiar male voices. From the same location came the sounds of the shuffling of fourteen human feet, in a pattern consistent with that of one of the processions with which the humans habitually began their sacrificial rituals. Routine analysis of the sounds allowed the berserker to identify among the members of the procession not only five of its familiar servitors but two other human organisms, one male and one female, that were strangers to it.

  Compulsively but still routinely, the berserker concentrated all its senses upon the unknown male, who was now stumbling slightly on bare feet at the top of the long stone stair that must be unfamiliar to him, as the procession began its descent from Thorun’s temple. As it would have done with any strange male, the berserker was attempting an identification with another whose personal patterns were carried under highest priority in its data banks.

  Since its crippling and near-destruction in the battle 502.78 . . . standard years ago the berserker’s senses had been blurred and uncertain, hardly better than human sight and hearing. But the procession was bringing the unknown male nearer and nearer now, and the probability of his being identified with the prime target patterns was rapidly declining to a negligible level. The berserker was free to turn its attention to other matters.

  In the electronuclear mind of the berserker there was no wonder and no impatience, but there was definitely an awareness that some events were far more probable than others. In that sense therefore the berserker was surprised when it computed that today two human victims were to be offered to it instead of one, or an animal only, as often happened.

  In all the time since the battle in which it was damaged, since the human goodlife on this planet had rescued it from destruction and begun to offer it worship, the berserker had received such multiple offerings on only a few occasions. Searching back now through its memory banks and comparing data, it noted that these had invariably been times of intense emotion among its devotees.

  One such occasion had been the celebration of final victory over a particularly stubborn enemy tribe, a victory attained by following a battle plan computed by the berserker for its worshippers and handed down by it as a divine command. Then seventy-four human organisms, all members of the defeated tribe, had been sacrificed to it in one day. At another time of multiple sacrifice the emotions of those offering it had been much different. Then they were pleading for help, during a period of great food shortage. From that famine the berserker had led its followers and their tribe into a land ripe for plunder, by outlining for them a migration route, using its old battle-maps of the planet’s surface. And now it computed that the successful capture of the starship, and the impending completion of the long effort to find a way to sterilize the planet, must also produce intense emotion among this generation of its goodlife servants.

  The berserker did not understand emotion, and only when compelled by circumstances would it try to work with what it did not understand. The stimulus-response patterns called fear and lust, for example, seemed at first to be readily computable in humans as well as in less dangerously intelligent animals. But in more than five hundred years of attempting to master human psychology well enough to use these patterns to manipulate human organisms, the berserker had time and again run into depths and complexities of behavior that it could not understand. To accept worship meant trying to use patterns that were, if anything, even deeper and more complex, a tremendously uncertain means of working toward its goal. But no better means had been available, and with the capture of the starship it seemed that this was after all going to prove successful.

  Now the procession had completed its descent of the stair, and now it was entering the berserker’s chamber. The High Priest Andreas entered first, his vestments for this occasion of red and black, Thorun’s white and purple having been put secretly aside above, in Thorun’s temple. The robes in which the High Priest now appeared to worship his true god were heavily and ineradicably stained with the rust-brown of old blood.

  BEHIND Andreas came Gus De La Torre and Celeste Servetus, their wrists bound behind them, garbed in white and garlanded with live flowers that would soon be scattered on the floor to die. Four priests of the Inner Circle followed, their robes for this special occasion red and black like the High Priest’s, and stained like his as well.

  Andreas and the other four men conducting the sacrifice began performing the usual prostrations and chanting the usual litanies, while the victims, as usual, watched in uncertainty and mounting fear. The berserker had long ago noted that the words and actions used in these rituals tended to change but little over the standard centuries, the long Hunterian years, only gradually becoming somewhat more elaborate. For the moment it kept quiet. It had realized long ago that the less it said during a sacrificial ceremony, the better. Not only did it thus lessen the risk of confusing and disillusioning its worshippers by saying something out of tune with their incomprehensible psychology, but the rarer its pronouncements were, the more importance humans were wont to grant them.

  Two of the priests had now picked up instruments of music, and the rhythm of a drum and the wail of a horn now blended with the chanting. The music ordered and modified the beat of alpha brain waves, and the rhythms of other biological processes, in all the humans present.

  “Gus, help me! Help! Oh, God, no no nooo!” So screamed the female upon at last fully perceiving the stained altar just before her, and evidently realizing its purpose, just at the moment when the two priests who were not playing instruments came to tear away her garlands and clothes and chain her down upon the stones. The berserker watched steadily to see whether Gus or God (whatever entities these might be) might come to the female’s aid, although from its experience following 17,261 similar appeals the probability seemed vanishingly small.

  The female was secured to the altar and no help for her arrived. Her screams continued as Andreas took up a sharp implement and removed from her living body the organs most closely connected with the reproduction of life and the nourishment of the very young. These he threw before the berserker, demonstrating a symbolic and real triumph of Death over the very wellsprings of life. The ventral surface of her torso was then opened more deeply, and the central blood-pump of her body was excised, whereupon the female almost instantly ceased to function.

  It was now time for the second victim to be placed upon the altar.

  “No. Listen, my friends, I’m with you. No, no, not me. How can this be happening? Wait, let’s talk, you’re making a mistake. I’ll join you.” And then a wordless, hopeless cry, as his feet were tripped out from under him and he was thrown down naked upon the stones.

  Why should the male organism continue to struggle so violently when it must perceive that the chances of such struggle producing favorable results were now astronomically remote? Now at last the male had been chained down.

  “I’ll help you! I’ll do anything you want. Oh. Ah. No. Forgive me, everyone . . .” Another scream, as his organs of generation too were removed, and cast into the bloody puddle of female parts. And now his ventral tissues parted under the sharp knife in the High Priest’s hands, and now his heart, still pulsating, was held up in offering to the god of Death.

  “It is well, it is pleasing,” the berserker told the five gory, happy men who now stood quietly before it. Drum and horn and voice h
ad ceased. The chamber was still. The five who still bore the burden of life were subsiding now into states of emotional relaxation.

  “I am pleased,” the berserker reiterated. “Go now and prepare to bring the starship to me, that we may begin to attach my circuitry to its control systems. Only when that is done can we begin the alteration of its drive.”

  “Today or tomorrow, oh Death, we will bring you the starship,” said Andreas. “As soon as we are sure that Lachaise can fly it safely we will lower it into the pit. Tomorrow also we will bring you fresh human sacrifice.”

  “That will be good.” Meanwhile a possible problem had suggested itself to the berserker. “Are many of your people mystified by or curious about the ship? Is there any unrest because of its presence?”

  “There is some curiosity about it, oh Death, but I will handle that. This afternoon there will be a distraction that will leave the people able to think or talk of nothing else. Thorun is going to walk forth into the city and display his powers.” The berserker tried to compute the probable results of such an event, and found it could not grapple with the numerous abstract factors successfully. “In the past you have always been cautious about putting Thorun on display.”

  “Lord Death, the masses will not accept as divine any creature that they can see daily in the streets. But Thorun’s future will now be short in any case. At the most, a thirtieth-of-an-old-man’s-lifetime, and the masses of this world will no longer need a god—or any god save Thou.”

  The berserker decided to trust its goodlife servant in this matter. So far he had never failed his god. “So be it, loyal Andreas. Proceed in the service of Death as you think best.”

  Andreas bowed low, and then the humans began their rituals of departure, which included cleaning up the mess they had made.

  The berserker computed routinely that two deaths had been achieved today, which was a good, if modest, accomplishment. But, as always the waste of time and energy involved in formal sacrifice had been considerable, and that was not good.