Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “I guess that was it I suppose just putting a simple bomb in the statue wouldn’t have been sure enough, or selective enough.”

  “Also it might have had to pass some machines that sniff out explosives, before it got into the inner . . . Ritwan! When that thing attacked, just now, what recording were they listening to in the cargo bay?”

  Ritwan stopped in the middle of opening another box. “Oshogbo called it out to us as we were leaving. You’re right, one with both the Yoritomos on it. Nobrega must have set his creation to be triggered by their voices, heard together.”

  “How it’s supposed to be turned off, is what I’d like to know.”

  “It did turn off, for some reason, didn’t it? And lay there for two centuries. Probably Nobrega didn’t foresee that the statue might survive long enough for the cycle to be able to repeat. Maybe if we can just hold out a little longer, it’ll turn itself off again.”

  Patient and regular as a clock, the muffled battering sounded on.

  “Can’t depend on that, I’m afraid.” Chinan kicked away the last crate to be searched. “Well, this seems to be the extent of the hardware we have for putting together weapons. It looks like whatever we use is going to have to be electrical. I think we can rig up something to electrocute—if that’s the right word—or fry, or melt, the enemy. We’ve got to know first, though, just which of those statues is the one we’re fighting. There are only two possible mobile ones, which narrows it down. But still.”

  “Laughing Bacchus,” Iselin supplied. “And Remembrance of Past Wrongs.”

  “The first is basically steel. We can set up an induction field strong enough to melt it down, I think. A hundred kilos or so of molten iron in the middle of the deck may be hard to deal with, but not as hard as what we’ve got now. But the other statue, or anyway its outer structure, is some kind of very hard and tough ceramic. That one will need something like a lightning bolt to knock it out.” A horrible thought seemed to strike Chinan all at once. “You don’t suppose there could be two—?”

  Ritwan gestured reassurance. “I think Nobrega would have put all his time and effort into perfecting one.”

  “So,” said Jselin, “it all comes down to knowing which one he forged, and which is really genuine. The one he worked on must be forged; even if he’d started with a real masterpiece to build his killing device, by the time he got everything implanted the surface would have to be almost totally reconstructed.”

  “So I’m going up to the lounge,” the art historian replied. “And see those holograms. If we’re lucky I’ll be able to spot it.”

  Iselin came with him, muttering: “All you have to do, friend, is detect a forgery that got past Yoritomo and his experts . . . maybe we’d better think of something else.”

  In the lounge the holograms of the two statues were soon displayed full size, side by side and slowly rotating. Both were tall, roughly humanoid figures, and both in their own ways were smiling.

  A minute and a half had passed when Ritwan said, decisively: “This one’s the forgery. Build your lightning device.”

  Before the emergency door at last gave way under that mindless, punch-press pounding, the electrical equipment had been assembled and moved into place. On either side of the doorway Chinan and Iselin crouched, manning their switches. Ritwan (counted the most expendable in combat) stood in plain view opposite the crumpling door, garbed in a heat-insulating spacesuit and clutching the heavy autohammer to his chest.

  The final failure of the door was sudden. One moment it remained in place, masking what lay beyond; next moment, it had been torn away. For a long second of the new silence, the last work of Antonio Nobrega stood clearly visible, bone-white in the glare of lamps on every side, against the blackened ruin of what had been the cargo bay.

  Ritwan raised the hammer, which suddenly felt no heavier than a microprobe. For a moment he knew what people felt, who face the true berserker foe in combat.

  The tall thing took a step toward him, serenely smiling. And the blue-white blast came at it from the side, faster than any mere matter could be made to dodge.

  A couple of hours later the most urgent damage-control measures had been taken, two dead bodies had been packed for preservation— with real reverence if without gestures—and the pieces of Nobrega’s work, torn asunder by the current that the ceramic would not peacefully admit, had cooled enough to handle.

  Ritwan had promised to show the others how he had known the forgery; and now he came up with the fragment he was looking for. “This,” he said.

  “The mouth?”

  “The smile. If you’ve looked at as much Federation era art as I have, the incongruity is obvious. The smile’s all wrong for Prajapati’s period. It’s evil, cunning—when the face was intact you could see it plainly. Gloating. Calm and malevolent at the same time.”

  Iselin asked: “But Nobrega himself didn’t see that? Or Yoritomo?”

  “For the period they lived in, the smile’s just fine, artistically speaking. They couldn’t step, forward or backward two hundred years, and get a better perspective. I suppose revenge is normal in any century, but tastes in art are changeable.”

  Chinan said: “I thought perhaps the subject or the title gave you some clue.”

  “Remembrance of Past Wrongs— no, Prajapati did actually do something very similar in subject, as I recall. As I say, I suppose revenge knows no cultural or temporal boundaries.”

  Normal in any century. Oshogbo, watching via intercom from the numbing burn-treatment bath, shivered and closed her eyes. No boundaries.

  The universe has given life its own arsenal of weapons, and I am no longer surprised that even tenderness may sometimes be counted among them. Even the most gentle and humble t)f living things may demonstrate surprising strength . . .

  1978

  SMASHER

  Here is some suspenseful sf about a berserker force which descends on a planet named Waterfall. The berserkers were unliving and unmanned war machines programmed to destroy anything that lived. And life on Waterfall consisted of some odd marine life and four defenseless humans . . .

  Claus Slovensko was coming to the conclusion that the battle in nearby space was going to be invisible to anyone on the planet Waterfall—assuming that there was really going to be a battle at all.

  Claus stood alone atop a forty-meter dune, studying a night sky that flamed with the stars of the alien Busog cluster—mostly blue-white giants, which were ordinarily a sight worth watching in themselves. Against that background, the greatest energies released by interstellar warships could, he supposed, be missed as a barely visible twinkling. Unless, of course, the fighting should come very close indeed.

  In the direction he was feeing, an ocean made invisible by night stretched from near the foot of the barren dune to a horizon marked only by the cessation of the stars. Claus turned now to scan once more the sky in the other direction. That way, toward planetary north, the starry profusion went on and on. In the northeast a silvery half-moon, some antique stage designer’s concept of what Earth’s own moon should be, hung low behind thin clouds. Below those clouds extended an entire continent of lifeless sand and rock. The land masses of Waterfall were bound in a silence that Earth ears found uncanny—stillness marred only by the wind, by murmurings of sterile streams, and by occasional deep rumblings in the rock itself.

  Claus continued turning slowly, till he faced south again. Below him the night sea lapped with lulling false familiarity. He sniffed the air, shrugged, gave up squinting at the stars, and began to feel his way, one cautious foot after another, down the shifting slope of the dune’s flank. A small complex of buildings—labs and living quarters bunched as if for companionship, the only human habitation on the world of Waterfall—lay a hundred meters before him and below. Tonight, as usual, the windows were all cheerfully alight. Ino Vacroux had decided, and none of the other three people on the planet had seen any reason to dispute him, that any attempt at blackout would be pointless. If a bers
erker force was going to descend on Waterfall, the chance of four defenseless humans avoiding discovery by the unliving killers would be nil.

  Just beyond the foot of the dune, Claus passed through a gate in the high fence of fused rock designed to keep out drifting sand. With no vegetation of any kind to hold the dunes in place, they tended sometimes to get pushy.

  A few steps past the fence, he opened the lockless door of the main entrance of the comfortable living quarters. The large common room just inside was cluttered with casual furniture, books, amateur art, and small- and middle-sized aquariums. The three other people who completed the population of the planet were all in this room at the moment, and all looked up to see if Claus brought news.

  Jenny Surya, his wife, was seated at the small computer terminal in the far corner, wearing shorts and sweater, dark hair tied up somewhat carelessly, long elegant legs crossed. She was frowning as she looked up, but abstractedly, as if the worst news Claus might be bringing them would be of some potential distraction from their work.

  Closer to Claus, in a big chair pulled up to the big communicator cabinet, slouched Ino Vacroux, senior scientist of the base. Claus surmised that Ino had been a magnificent physical specimen a few decades ago, before being nearly killed in a berserker attack upon another planet. The medics had restored function but not fineness to his body. The gnarled, hairy thighs below his shorts were not much thicker than a child’s; his ravaged torso was draped now in a flamboyant shirt. In a chair near his sat Glenna Reyes, his wife, in her usual work garb of clean white coveralls. She was just a little younger than Vacroux, but wore the years with considerably more ease.

  “Nothing to see,” Claus informed them all, with a loose wave meant to describe the lack of visible action in the sky.

  “Or to hear, either,” Vacroux grated. His face was grim as he nodded toward the communicator. The screens of the device sparkled, and its speakers hissed a little, with noise that wandered in from the stars and things stranger than stars that nature had set in this corner of the galaxy.

  Only a few hours earlier, in the middle of Waterfall’s short autumn afternoon, there had been plenty to hear indeed. Driven by a priority code coming in advance of a vitally important message, the communicator had boomed to life, then roared the message through the house and across the entire base, in a voice that the four people heard plainly even four hundred meters distant, where they were gathered to watch dolphins.

  “Sea Mother, this is Brass Trumpet. Predators here, and we’re going to try to turn them. Hold your place. Repeating . . .”

  One repetition of the substance came through as the four were hurrying back to the house. As soon as they got in they played back the automatically recorded signal. And then, when Glenna had at last located the code book somewhere, and they could verify the worst, they had played it back once more.

  Sea Mother was the code name for any humans who might happen to be on Waterfall. It had been assigned by the military years ago, as part of its precautionary routine, and had probably never been used before today. Brass Trumpet, according to the book, conveyed a warning of deadly peril, and was to be used only by a human battle force when there were thought to be berserkers already in the Waterfall system or on their way to it. And “predators here” could hardly mean anything but berserkers—unliving and unmanned war machines, programmed to destroy whatever life they found. The first of them had been built in ages past, during the madness of some interstellar war between races now long-since vanished. Between berserkers and starfaring Earthhumans, war had now been chronic for a thousand standard years.

  That Brass Trumpet’s warning should be so brief and vague was understandable. The enemy would doubtless pick it up as soon as its intended hearers, and might well be able to decode it. But for all the message content revealed, Sea Mother might be another powerful human force, toward which Brass Trumpet sought to turn them. It would also have been conceivable for such a message to be sent to no one—a planned deception to make the enemy waste computer capacity and detection instruments. And even if the berserkers’ deadly electronic brains should somehow compute correctly that Sea Mother was a small and helpless target, it was still possible to hope that the berserkers would be too intent on fatter targets elsewhere, too hard-pressed by human forces, or both, to turn aside and snap up such a minor morsel.

  During the hours since that first warning, nothing but noise had come from the communicator. Glenna sighed, and reached out to pat her man on the arm below the sleeve of his loud shirt. “Busy day with the crustaceans tomorrow,” she reminded him.

  “So we’d better get some rest. I know.” Ino looked and sounded worn. He was the only one of the four who had ever seen berserkers before, at anything like close range. It was not exactly reassuring to see how grimly and intensely he reacted to the warning of their possible approach.

  “You can connect the small alarm,” Glenna went on, “so it’ll be sure to wake us if another priority message comes in.”

  That, thought Glaus, would be easier on the nerves than being blasted out of sleep by that God-voice shouting again, this time only a few meters from the head of their bed.

  “Yes, I’ll do that.” Ino thought, then slapped his chair-arms. He made his voice a little brighter. “You’re right about tomorrow. And over in Twenty-three we’re going to have to start feeding the mantis shrimp.” He glanced around at the wall near his chair, where a long chart showed ponds, bays, lagoons, and tidal pools, all strung out in a kilometers-long array, most of it natural, along this part of the coast. This array was a chief reason why the Sea Mother base had been located where it was.

  From its sun and moon to its gravity and atmosphere, Waterfall was remarkably Earthlike in almost every measurable attribute save one—this world was congenitally lifeless. About forty standard years past, during a lull in the seemingly interminable berserker war, it had appeared that the peaceful advancement of interstellar humanization might get in an inning or two, and work had begun toward altering this lifelessness. Great ships had settled upon Waterfall with massive inoculations of Earthly life, in a program very carefully orchestrated to produce, eventually, a twin-Earth circling one of the few Sol-type suns in this part of the galaxy.

  The enormously complex task had been interrupted when war flared again. The first recrudescence of fighting was far away, but it drew off people and resources. A man-wife team of scientists was selected to stay alone on Waterfall for the duration of the emergency. They were to keep the program going along planned lines, even though at a slow pace. Ino and Glenna had been here for two years now. A supply ship from Atlantis called at intervals of a few standard months. The last to call, eight local days ago, had brought along another husband-and-wife team for a visit. Glaus and Jenny were both psychologists, interested in the study of couples living in isolation; they were to stay at least until the next supply ship came.

  So far the young guests had been welcome. Glenna, her own children long grown and independent on other worlds, approached motherliness sometimes in her attitude. Ino, more of a born competitor, swam races with Claus and gambled—lightly—with him. With Jenny he alternated between half-serious gallantry and teasing.

  “I almost forgot,” he said now, getting up from his chair before the communicator, and racking his arms and shoulders with an intense stretch. “I’ve got a little present for you, Jen.”

  “Oh?” She was bright, interested, imperturbable. It was her usual working attitude, which he persisted in trying to break through.

  Ino went out briefly, and came back to join the others in the kitchen. A small snack before retiring had become a daily ritual for the group.

  “For you,” he said, presenting Jen with a small bag of clear plastic. There was water inside, and something else.

  “Oh, my goodness.” It was still her usual nurselike business tone, which evidently struck Ino as a challenge. “What do I do with it?”

  “Keep him in that last aquarium in the parlor,” Ino ad
vised. “It’s untenanted right now.”

  Claus, looking at the bag from halfway across the kitchen, made out in it one of those nonhuman, nonmammalian shapes that are apt to give Earth people the impression of the intensely alien, even when the organism sighted comes from their own planet. It was no bigger than an adult human finger, but replete with waving appendages. There came to mind something written by Lafcadio Hearn about a centipede: The blur of its moving legs . . . toward which one would no more advance one’s hand . . . than toward the spinning blade of a power saw . . .

  Or some words close to those. Jen, Claus knew, cared for the shapes of nonmammalian life even less than he did. But she would grit her teeth and struggle not to let the teasing old man see it.

  “Just slit the bag and let it drain into the tank,” Ino was advising, for once sounding pretty serious. “They don’t like handling . . . okay? He’s a bit groggy right now, but tomorrow, if he’s not satisfied with you as his new owner, he may try to get away.”

  Glenna, in the background, was rolling her eyes in the general direction of Brass Trumpet, miming: What is the old fool up to now? When is he going to grow up?

  “Get away?” Jen inquired sweetly. “You told me the other day that even a snail couldn’t climb that glass—”

  The house was filled with the insistent droning of the alarm that Ino had just connected. He’s running some kind of test, Claus thought at once. Then he saw the other man’s face and knew that Ino wasn’t.

  Already the new priority message was coming in: “Sea Mother, the fight’s over here. Predators departing Waterfall System. Repeating . . .”

  Claus started to obey an impulse to run out and look at the sky again, then realized that there would certainly be nothing to be seen of the battle now. Radio waves, no faster than light, had just announced that it was over. Instead, he joined the others in voicing their mutual relief. They had a minute or so of totally unselfconscious cheering.