Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The flywheel-powered electric motors of the tractor worked in the next thing to perfect silence and freedom from vibration, so all that woke them both from edgy sleep, coming through rock and suit to flesh and bone, was the gentle crunching of its rollers on the ground.

  And, only a second or two later, Selina’s voice on radio: “The particle readings have dropped, all across the board. I’m off to get the ship.”

  Both men, wide awake at once, scrambled into the main room of the cave, the captain only a step ahead. The chamber was big and empty without the vehicle. Selina had left the radiation meter behind, sitting on the ledge where Medellin had left his note. At the moment, the readings on the meter’s face were in fact very low.

  Du Bos hastily checked his chronometer—first contact on the optical eclipse, according to his calculations, was not due for another hour. Then he quickly followed Amdo out of the cave, onto the glaring surface, and at once looked up to check the position of the moon in the black sky. As expected, its wide silvery crescent was still on the same side of, though now much closer to, the immobile, dazzling sun.

  Amdo had taken half a dozen quick strides and then stopped, staring in frustration after the receding vehicle. Glowing orange out here in the sun’s glare, it was already much too far away for a man chasing it on foot to have any chance of catching up and grabbing on. And it was dwindling quickly, evidently moving at speed as Selina steered it on a sinuous course, keeping to the safest ground as she went the long way round to get the ship.

  The captain’s voice on radio was cairn, “Selina. If—when you get the ship lifted and moved over here, set her down on the white rock about -a hundred meters in front of the cave. That looks about the solidest.”

  “Understand, captain,” the girl’s voice came back. “That does look like the best place. I’m sorry to do it this way, but I just couldn’t take the time to argue any more. If totality lasts only about twelve minutes for the particle eclipse too, there’s not a second to waste. At best I’m going to get a good dose of radiation at the other end, before I reach the ship and get inside.”

  Du Bos had Amdo by the arm and was tugging him back toward the cave, and at the same time he was motioning for a switch to the alternate radio channel.

  The captain went along; and they ducked back in together, looking up then simultaneously to see that the indicated radiation level was still quite low. On the channel that should give them privacy, Du Bos said: “I—I must leave it up to you as to whether to order that girl to come back at once; but understand that whatever has caused this apparent lull in the storm—some magnetic effect, perhaps—may change again at any moment.”

  “In the first place, I don’t think she’d come back, if I gave the order.”

  Du Bos was still gripping him. “Another possibility is that the counter’s pickup unit”—he nodded toward the outside—”may have failed under overload. You’d better get her back.”

  “And in the second place, Doctor Du Bos, I do know something about our hardware. These counters are very unlikely to be knocked out by a particle bombardment. In the third place, Medellin didn’t have any temporary magnetic lulls in his storm; I’m sure he would have taken advantage of one if it had come.” As if reluctantly, the captain added: “He did say that the particle eclipse should come first. He had no authority with him and he had to think the thing out for himself.”

  The old man stiffened. “It can’t work that way, I tell you.”

  “Doctor Du Bos, eclipses are not quite the same thing as astrophysics, are they?”

  Du Bos glared at him but did not answer.

  “Have you made any particular study of eclipses?”

  “No, have you? Are you qualified to even begin . . .?” The scientist choked down still angrier words.

  The captain grimaced. “I never did really try to figure out the truth about when this particle eclipse should start, not even when Selina was arguing with me . . . so I’m not going to try now, not with only ten minutes or so left before . . . one way or the other. But two very bright people have really studied this thing, knowing their lives depended on it, and have come to the opposite conclusion from your offhand opinion. If you were Joe Doakes—”

  “Which they are, in this case.”

  “—all right, if you were Joe Doakes too, the question would still have been very much open. But just because you were the eminent astronomer I bowed my head to you and never tried to think it out. And that I do regret. This trip so far hasn’t been exactly my finest effort in space.”

  He glanced up abruptly at the counter, then switched to the radio channel that Selina presumably still was using. “How’s it going, Jabal?”

  “Good enough, captain.”

  “Radiation is still very low here, quite tolerable. I’ll let you know at once of any change.”

  “Understand, captain. Thank you. Fifteen more minutes and I should be in the ship.”

  About two more minutes of silence passed, before Du Bos walked out into the middle of the empty-looking cave, and squatted down to sketch with a gloved finger on the crumbly floor his own version of Selina’s now-vanished eclipse diagram. Amdo, watching, saw the arc of planetary orbit appear, and then the epicyclic circle of the satellite’s path; crude arrow-markers seemed to show that each body was moving counterclockwise in its track, as if seen from a hypothetical observers’ post somewhere high above the north pole of the planet.

  After staring for a full minute at what he had drawn, Du Bos stood up and got out his calculator; Amdo got the impression that the machine was only being used this time to put into rigorous, acceptable form something already done, like typing a document after the last handwritten draft is done, the fateful content known . . .

  The glowing digits on the counter’s face were suddenly jumping again, and the captain got on the radio at once. “Selina, a sharp rise in particle radiation has just started here. Not back to previous levels yet, but if it keeps on going up like this it soon will be.”

  “I understand, captain. Five more minutes and I should be in the ship.” She started to say more, but a torrent of radiation-produced noise was cutting communication off.

  Du Bos was holstering his calculator again. He cleared his throat; it was a startling, uncharacteristic, nervous-old-uncle sound, that almost made Amdo jump.

  Du Bos said: “The particles do take much longer than the light to get here, as I said before. But then it doesn’t follow at all that the particle eclipse will lag the optical eclipse by the same amount of time. You see, the particles that will strike the planet during the optical eclipse must have passed within the satellite’s orbit some minutes earlier.” He scuffed with a boot at the cave floor as he might have waved his hand at a classroom display. “See? The satellite in effect plows a clear space through the sea of particles flowing outward from the sun. This wake, cleared of particles, drifts back, lagging the satellite—”

  “The way the clear space under an umbrella lags behind when you run in the rain.”

  “Well, yes. And although the satellite, from our point of view, looks as if it’s moving backwards, from west to east,” Du Bos said, gesturing overhead, “Slag is carrying us and the satellite along in its orbit faster than the satellite is looping back, so the net movement is still forward, both still clockwise with respect to the sun, and we do enter the wake—the particle eclipse—first.”

  “You’re saying that you were wrong.”

  Du Bos came over to stand beside him, watching the counter. The radiation outside was hellish. A silence began to stretch. It was an almost timeless stillness, reaching for eternity. But then the silence was riddled, dissolved, made—almost—irrelevant, by the glorious loud crunching of an egg-shaped hull bottom grinding down on rock and pumice a few tens of meters from the cave . . .

  Slag was a million kilometers below, and sinking fast now beneath the push of interstellar engines. The corpuscular storm that still filled this solar system raged harmlessly beyond the layer of fo
rces shielding the ovoid hull.

  Selina lay in sickbay and Du Bos had been ministering to her. The tall, gray man was at her bedside helping her to a drink when Amdo came in, clutching a small wad of printout. “The medical boxes say you may be a sick lady for a while, Selina,” Amdo announced, waving the prognosis he had just gotten on the bridge. “But nothing worse than that.”

  She smiled. And then Du Bos, who seemed to have been waiting for the proper in-person witness, smiled down at her as well, and Amdo for the first time heard from the old man something that he could construe as evidence of greatness.

  “I’m sorry,” said the galaxy’s first astrophysicist. “I was most terribly wrong.”

  THE SMILE

  The berserker attack upon the world called St. Gervase had ended some four standard months before the large and luxurious private yacht of the Tyrant Yoritomo appeared amid the ashclouds and rainclouds that still monotonized the planet’s newly lifeless sky. From the yacht a silent pair of waspish-looking launches soon began a swift descent, to land on the denuded surface where the planet’s capital city had once stood.

  The crews disembarking from the launches were armored against hot ash and hot mud and residual radiation. They knew what they were looking for, and in less than a standard hour they had located the vaulted tunnel leading down, from what had been a sub-basement of the famed St. Gervase Museum. The tunnel was partially collapsed in places, but still passable, and they followed its steps downward, stumbling here and there on debris fallen from the surface. The battle had not been completely one-sided in its early stages, and scattered amid the wreckage of the once-great city were fragments of berserker troop-landers and of their robotic shock-troops. The unliving metal killers had had to force a landing, to neutralize the defensive field generators, before the bombardment could begin in earnest.

  The tunnel terminated in a large vault a hundred meters down. The lights, on an independent power supply, were still working, and the air conditioning was still trying to keep out dust. There were five great statues in the vault, including one in the attached workshop where some conservator or restorer had evidently been treating it. Each one was a priceless masterwork. And scattered in an almost casual litter throughout the shelter were paintings, pottery, small works in bronze and gold and silver, the least a treasure to be envied.

  At once the visitors radioed news of their discovery to one who waited eagerly in the yacht hovering above. Their report concluded with the observation that someone had evidently been living down here since the attack. Beside the workshop, with its power lamp to keep things going, there was a small room that had served as a repository of the Museum’s records. A cot stood in it now, there had been food supplies laid in, and there were other signs of human habitation. Well, it was not too strange that there should have been a few survivors, out of a population of many millions.

  The man who had been living alone in the shelter for four months came back to find the landing party going busily about their work.

  “Looters,” he remarked, in a voice that seemed to have lost the strength for rage, or even fear. Not armored against radiation or anything else, he leaned against the terminal doorway of the battered tunnel, a long-haired, unshaven, once-fat man whose frame was now swallowed up in clothes that looked as if they might not have been changed since the attack.

  The member of the landing party standing nearest looked back at him silently, and drummed fingers on the butt of a bolstered handgun, considering. The man who had just arrived threw down the pieces of metallic junk he had brought with him, conveying in the gesture his contempt.

  The handgun was out of its holster, but before it was leveled, an intervention from the leader of the landing party came in the form of a sharp gesture. Without taking his eyes off the man in the doorway, the leader at once reopened communication with the large ship waiting above.

  “Your Mightiness, we have a survivor here,” he informed the round face that soon appeared upon the small portable wallscreen. “I believe it is the sculptor Antonio Nobrega.”

  “Let me see him at once. Bring him before the screen.” The voice of His Mightiness was inimitable and terrible, and no less terrible, somehow, because he always sounded short of breath. “Yes, you are right, although he is much changed. Nobrega, how fortunate for us both! This is indeed another important find.”

  “I knew you would be coming to St. Gervase now,” Nobrega told the screen, in his empty voice. “Like a disease germ settling in a mangled body. Like some great fat cancer virus. Did you bring along your woman, to take charge of our Culture?”

  One of the men beside the sculptor knocked him down. A breathless little snarl came from the screen at this, and Nobrega was quickly helped back to his feet, then put into a chair.

  “He is an artist, my faithful ones,” the screen-voice chided. “We must not expect him to have any sense of the fitness of things outside his art. No. We must get the maestro here some radiation treatment, and then bring him along with us to the Palace, and he will live and work there as happily, or unhappily, as elsewhere.”

  “Oh no,” said the artist from his chair, more faintly than before. “My work is done.”

  “Pish-posh. You’ll see.”

  “I knew you were coming . . .”

  “Oh?” The small voice from the screen was humoring him. “And how did you know that?”

  “I heard . . . when our fleet was still defending the approaches to the system, my daughter was out there with it. Through her, before she died, I heard how you brought your own fleet in-system, to watch what was going to happen, to judge our strength, our chance of resisting the berserkers. I heard how your force vanished when they came. I said then that you’d be back, to loot the things you could never get at in any other way.”

  Nobrega was quiet for a moment, then lunged from his chair—or made the best attempt at lunging that he could. He grabbed up a long metal sculptor’s tool and drew it back to swing at Winged Truth Rising, a marble Poniatowski eleven centuries old. “Before I’ll see you take this—”

  Before he could knock a chip of marble loose, he was overpowered, and put into restraint.

  When they approached him again an hour later, to take him up to the yacht for medical examination and treatment, they found him already dead. Autopsy on the spot discovered several kinds of slow and gentle poison. Nobrega might have taken some deliberately. Or he might have been finished by something the berserkers had left behind, to ensure that there would be no survivors, as they moved on to carry out their programmed task of eradicating all life from the Galaxy.

  On his voyage home from St. Gervase, and for several months thereafter, Yoritimo was prevented by pressing business from really inspecting his new treasures. By then the five great statues had been installed, to good esthetic advantage, in the deepest, largest, and best-protected gallery of the Palace. Lesser collections had been evicted to make room and visual space for Winged Truth Rising; Lazamon’s Laughing (or Raging] Bacchus; The Last Provocation, by Sarapion; Lazienki’s Twisting Room; and Remembrance of Past Wrongs, by Prajapati.

  It chanced that at this time the Lady Yoritomo was at the Palace too. Her duties, as Cultural Leader of the People, and High Overseer of Education for the four tributary planets, kept her on the move, and it often happened that she and her Lord did not see each other for a month or longer at a time. The two of them trusted each other more than they trusted anyone else. Today they sat alone in the great gallery and sipped tea, and spoke of business.

  The Lady was trying to promote her latest theory, which was that love for the ruling pair might be implanted genetically in the next generation of people on the tributary worlds. Several experimental projects had already begun. So far these had achieved little but severe mental retardation in the subjects, but there were plenty of new subjects and she was not discouraged.

  The Lord spoke mainly of his own plan, which was to form a more explicit working arrangement with the berserkers. In this scheme t
he Yoritomos would furnish the killer machines with human lives they did not need, and planets hard to defend, in exchange for choice works of art and, of course, immunity from personal attack. The plan had many attractive features, but the Lord had to admit that the difficulty of opening negotiations with berserkers, let alone establishing any degree of mutual trust, made it somewhat impractical.

  When a pause came in the conversation, Yoritomo had the banal thought that he and his wife had little to talk about anymore, outside of business. With a word to her, he rose from the alcove where they had been sitting, and walked to the far end of the gallery of statues to replenish the tea pot. For esthetic reasons he refused to allow robots in here; nor did he want human servitors around while this private discussion was in progress. Also, he thought, as he retraced his steps, the Lady could not help but be flattered, and won toward his own position in a certain matter where they disagreed, when she was served personally by the hands of one so mighty . . .

  He rounded the great metal flank of The Last Provocation and came to a dumb halt, in shocked surprise so great that for a moment his facial expression did not even alter. Half a minute ago he had left her vivacious and thoughtful and full of graceful energy. She was still in the same place, on the settee, but slumped over sideways now, one arm extended with its slender, jeweled finger twitching upon the rich brown carpet. The Lady’s hair was wildly disarranged; and small wonder, he thought madly, for her head had been twisted almost completely around, so her dead eyes now looked over one bare shoulder almost straight at Yoritomo. Upon her shoulder and her cheek were bruised discolorations . . .

  He spun around at last, dropping the fragile masterpiece that held his tea. His concealed weapon was half-drawn before it was smashed out of his grip. He had one look at death, serenely towering above him. He had not quite time enough to shriek, before the next blow fell.