Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Zalazar stalked right and left, seeking a way around the flames or through them. The figure inside them did not seem to be burned or tormented by the terrible heat, only bound. Zalazar, as he approached the tongues of fire, had to raise first one hand, and then his shield, to try to protect himself from radiance and glare. The only way to reach the bound god seemed to be to leap directly into the flames, or through them.

  Zalazar tried. Unbearable pain seared at him, and the tongues of flame seized him like hands and threw him back. The instant he was clear of the flames, then-burning stopped; he was unharmed.

  Je shrieked words of compulsion in his ear. Zalazar wrapped himself in his silvery cloak, raised his shield, brandished his sword, and tried again. And was thrown back. And yet again, but all to no avail. And still Je made him try. She stood near now in her full imaged presence.

  Yet again the tongues of fire gripped Zalazar, and hurled him flying, sprawling. When Zalazar saw that the metal of his shield was running now in molten drops, he cried aloud his agony: “Spare me, great Je! what will you have from me? Only so much can you make of me—so much and no more.”

  “I will make whatever I wish of you, mortal. We are so near, so very near to victory!” Her gaze turned to Bormanus, and she went on: “There is a way in which we can augment our power, as I foresaw. Murder will feed great magic.”

  Zalazar came crawling along the floor, toward the goddess’s feet. He made his hand let go the sword. Only now he realized that no scabbard for it had ever been given him. “Goddess, do not demand of me that I kill my own flesh and blood. It will not bring you victory. I was never a great wizard, even in my youth. No Alhazred, no Vulcan the Shaper. Though even before I met you I had convinced myself of that. A warrior? Conqueror? No, I am not Trillion Mu either, though I have killed; your demon’s power and yours could sustain me in combat for a time even against Thor Redbeard himself. But I cannot do more. Even murder will not give me power enough. And if it could, I will not—”

  In fishwife rage, Je lost her self-control. “What are you, thing of clay, to argue with me?” She grabbed Bormanus and forced him forward, bent down so that his neck was exposed for a swordstroke. “Earth is mine to deal with as I will, and you are no more than a clod of earth. Kill him!”

  “Destroy me if you will, goddess. If you can. I will not kill him.”

  Je’s eyes glowed, orange fire from a volcano. “I see that I have maddened you with my assistance, until you think you are a demigod at least. You are not worth destruction. If I only withdraw my sustaining power, you will both fall back to earth and be no more than bird-dung when you land. Where will you turn for help if I abandon you?”

  Zalazar, on his feet again, turned, physically, looking for help. The half-melted shield now felt impossibly heavy, weighing his left arm down. The brocade of his god-garments hung on him now like lead. The last time the flames had thrown him, some of their pain had remained in his bones. At a thought from Je, the cloud-floor of the palace would open beneath his feet. He would have a long fall in which to think things over.

  The Throne of the World was empty, waiting. No help there. But still he was not going to murder.

  Je’s voice surprised him in its altered tone. It was less threatening now. “Zalazar, I see that I must tell you the truth. It need not be Helios that you place on the Throne when you have gained the power. It could be me.”

  “You?”

  “The truth is that it could even be yourself.”

  “I?” Zalazar turned slowly. Looked at the throne again, and thought, and shook his head. “I am only a poor man, I tell you, goddess. Alone and almost lost. If it is true that I can choose the Ruler of the World, well, it must be some cruel joke, such as you say that even gods are subject to. But if the choice is truly mine to make, I will not give it you. As for taking it myself, I should not. I have no fitness, or powers, or wealth, or even family.”

  Silence fell in Cloudholm. It was an abrupt change; a stillness that was something more than silence had descended. Zalazar waited, eyes downcast, holding his breath, trying to understand.

  Then he began to understand, for the last three words that he himself had spoken seemed to be echoing and re-echoing in the air. All his life he had been a poor nomad, with no family at all.

  Even the flames of Helios’s prison seemed to have cooled somewhat, though Zalazar did not immediately raise his head to look at them. When it seemed to him that the silence might have gone on for half an hour, he did at last look up.

  He who had walked with Zalazar as his companion had at last taken the lyre from his belt, and the others were allowed to recognize him now.

  Je had recoiled, cringing, herself for once down on one knee, with averted gaze. But Zalazar, for now, could look.

  White teeth, inhumanly beautiful and even, smiled at him. “Old man, you have decided well. One comes to claim the throne in time, and Thanatos will be overcome, and your many-times-great-grandsons will have to choose again; but that is not your problem now. I send you back to Earth. Retain the youth that Je has given you—it is fitting, for a new age of the world has been ordained, though not by me. And memories, if you can—retain them too. Magic must sleep.”

  Bright, half-melted shield and silver garments fell softly to the floor of cloud, beside the sword. Zalazar was gone.

  The bright eyes under the dark curls swept around. The god belted his lyre and unslung his bow. There was a great recessional howling as Je’s demon-servant fled, and fell, and fled and fell again.

  Je raised her eyes, in a last moment of defiance. The winged head of Hypnos, already hovering beside her ear, silently awaited a command.

  “Sleep now, sister Je. As our father Zeus and our brothers and sisters sleep. I join you presently,” Apollo said.

  INTRODUCTION (The Berserker Wars)

  The History Of The Galaxy

  MESSAGE BEGINS

  REPORT ON THE PRIVATE ARCHIVE OF THE THIRD HISTORIAN

  A File Which Presents the History of the Galaxy in Twenty Pages

  Transmission Mode: Triplicate Message Torpedoes

  Code: Trapdoor XIII

  TX Date: 7645.11.0

  From: Archivist Ingli, Expedition Co-ordinator

  To: Chief Co-ordinator, Earth Archives

  cc: Defense Co-ordination Central

  Hal: We’re here, surrounded by friendly Carmpan of whom we rarely see more than one or two at a time, and then usually only with some partial or symbolic physical barrier between us. Everything is going pretty much as expected, we have experienced nothing really contrary to the experience of a thousand years’ occasional and arm’s-length contact with the race. By the way, it’s beginning to look, to me at least, less and less coincidental that our first meeting with the Carmpan coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the Berserker War. I’ll have more to say on this point presently.

  Let me first describe what I consider to be our main achievement so far on this mission. To begin with, the structure in which we are living and working is best described as a large, comfortable library, and we have been given free access to great masses of information in several kinds of storage systems. (I hope, by the way, that the exchange team of Carmpan researchers on Earth are being treated as well as we are here.) Much of this mass of stored data is, as we expected, still unintelligible to us and so far useless. But quite early in the game our hosts pointed out to us, for our special attention, an alcove containing what we’ve come to call the private archive of the Third Historian. Having looked at the files therein, my colleagues and I agree unanimously that they were very probably compiled and largely written by the same Carmpan individual who used that name (or title) as signature to the messages he composed and sent to our ancestors some generations ago, when the Berserker peril was even greater than it is today.

  Since a copy of this report is going directly to the military, Hal, bear with me when I pause now and then to insert a paragraph or two of history. We can’t reasonably expect that
all the readers over there are going to know as much of it offhand as we do.

  Up until now, almost all of the information that we have ever had directly from the Carmpan on any subject—Berserkers, the Builders, the Carmpan themselves, the Elder Races, almost everything—a very great proportion of this information, I say, has come to our Solarian worlds through long-distance communications signed by this one individual, for whom we still have no other name than Third Historian. He—or she, the Carmpan language does not readily distinguish sexes, and they usually appear to care not much more about sex than we do about blood types—was active centuries ago, and to my knowledge no new Third Historian message has been received on the Solarian world for centuries.

  So we still know next to nothing about the Third Historian or indeed about any Carmpan individual as a person, and it appears to me unlikely that this present Expedition is going to find out much about him. We do of course ask questions, particularly since being shown the private archive that is marked in several places with his signature. Our questions are answered in the usual obscure ways, about which more below. Even the significance of the number in his name or title is still unknown to us. It does seem certain that more than three individuals must have occupied the post of Chief Historian—assuming there is such an official post among the Carmpan—during such a very long history as their race boasts. Or would boast if they were at all given to boasting.

  When I asked directly, I was told that the Third Historian is still alive. This surprised me somewhat, though the life-span required, considerably less than a thousand standard years, would not be utterly out of the question even for one of our own comparatively perishable species. However, when I asked urgently to see him, or at least to be told where he is, I was informed just as unequivocally that the Third Historian is now dead. One of the enclosures with this message is our own recording of this particular question-and-answer session.

  Let me digress just a little more from the important contents of the TH’s private files, to remark that in the short time we’ve been here we’ve had more face-to-face (if that’s the right way to put it; you know what I mean) contact with the Carmpan than have any other group of Solarian humans in history. As you are well aware, we were very eager for this chance. On the long voyage out here we managed to convince ourselves that with goodwill on both sides (a requirement that I certainly feel has been met) we were going to do a lot better at communicating with the Carmpan than any other of our race has ever done. We were going to dig a lot of Galactic history out of them, complete with hard facts, dates, numbers, the kind of thing we like to call history. We would dig up information that must be available to them even if they consider it valueless, and bring it home with us. Not only that, we would at last meet a Carmpan or two who really wanted to learn about us through our own conscious attempts at communication; and, boy, were we ever going to communicate with them.

  Need I add, that so far it hasn’t worked out quite that way? That so far our formal conference sessions are dominated, whatever we Solarians try to do, by the Carmpan spiritual (?) and sociological abstractions? (Military readers, see my monograph on Drifts and Tones in Carmpan Communications; someone at the Archives will be glad to furnish you with copies.) That’s just the way in which our gracious hosts here insist on looking at the Universe. I find I must set down the cliche once again, and then I swear that I will ban it from all later messages: The Carmpan mind is very, very different from our own.

  Of course the communications we have been directing to the Carmpan while in general conference form, to our way of thinking, a clear and concise outline of the history of our Solarian variant of the human race, from our origins on Earth through our later phases of expansion and development to the present, when we are the dominant life form on more than a thousand major planets in more than seven hundred systems, not to mention all the natural and artificial extra-systemic habitats, enjoying a blessed variety of political and economic organizations while managing to co-operate quite well, most of us, most of the time, in the thousand-year Berserker War.

  I frankly don’t know what our hosts think of this presentation we make about ourselves. There are moments when I believe they knew it all already, knew more than we have told them, down to the last detailed production statistic, through their own far-ranging mental activities. And, again, there are times when I believe they just don’t care, don’t know and aren’t interested, are going through the motions of listening to us only out of politeness. They do express thanks when we pause after shoving information at them, as they express thanks for so much else that our race has done. But there is no substantive comment on what we tell them. There are no questions that sound eager.

  That’s how things stand now. We are here, and being very well treated, and we like our hosts. And they like us and are glad to have us here, even if it would be strictly inaccurate to say that they enjoy our company. And it is somehow implied that they have done, are doing, will do, something important for us. That’s how things stand, how they stood the moment we arrived. Actually we could just have sent them an electronic greeting card and accomplished just as much.

  Except of course for one thing. Our presentation of our own history evidently had at least one good effect, that of showing our hosts what we think a history ought to be. It may have decided them to show us quickly the one file in the library that comes closest to our ideal. It was approximately one standard day after our own history presentation, which came about one standard day after our arrival, that we were led to the personal file of the Third Historian. I think I have mentioned that the alcove containing the Third Historian’s file and carrel occupies only a very small portion of this library. It’s quite a comfortable, self-sufficient artificial world, by the way, that seems to have been built with Solarian comfort and convenience in mind. The gravity, atmosphere, lighting, furnishings, color schemes, and so on, are very pleasant by our standards. Green plants are abundant. And the Carmpan information-handling systems, let me interject here, work better than ours do, once we know precisely what we want to ask of them. Details on request, when we get home. The idea so commonly held among Solarians that we are technologically superior to the Carmpan seems to me to be justifiable only on a very selective basis.

  Back to my main subject. While the private writings of the Third Historian we have discovered here are more obscure and difficult to translate than we would like, certainly more so than his famous public transmissions to our ancestors centuries ago, yet they are vastly more accessible to Solarian understanding than any other Carmpan literary-historical work that I have ever encountered in a lifetime of study; I exclude of course documents on the level of mere maps and catalogues, which in their rare appearances have often had practical if limited application.

  If we had come here completely unacquainted with the Third Historian, it would still have been obvious to us from his private archive that he was—or is—intensely interested in two things. The first of these, for whatever reason, is our own race. As in his earlier public messages, he repeatedly expresses Carmpan gratitude for our leadership, our victories, and our losses in the long and terrible war against what he so often calls “the unliving enemy.” To me the impression is inescapable that much of the material in this private archive consists of drafts of messages intended for us but never sent; that these reiterations of thanks must be for our benefit.

  The second great interest of the Third Historian, as evidenced in his old public messages as well as in the newly discovered material, is the Berserkers. Briefly, our most important find within his private archive is an electronic document (I am of course enclosing a recording of it herewith) that purports to be a digest, a capsule, or perhaps an outline, for nothing less than a history of the whole inhabited portion of the Galaxy for as far back as the Carmpan have been able to keep records and their history, we should recall, has been shown to extend into the tens of millions of years at least. Everything we have learned here tends to support the accepted be
lief that the Carmpan mental probing can span more than half the Galactic diameter; and that this mind-probing is as accurate for the purposes to which the Carmpan put it as it appears to be useless for any of the military, commercial, or hard (in our terms) research functions to which we have always yearned to be able to apply it.

  * * *

  I had hoped when I began to compose this message to be able to include with it a full if tentative translation of the History Document (hereafter abbreviated HD) found in the Third Historian’s private archive. Without the episodic appendix (see below) it could be printed out in twenty pages; it’s really that short. But unfortunately the longer I study HD with an eye to making a translation, the more I realize how obscure it is somewhat in the sense of poetry, I mean, and you, Hal, know what trying to translate poetry can be like. Layer upon layer of suggested meaning, that to me is at best barely perceptible, is packed beneath a surface narrative that in itself could be translated in a number of possible ways. Here we have Drifts grafted upon Tones, and vice versa. Information is packed not only in layer upon layer, but in the interference patterns, or in something analogous to such patterns, that are formed by the relationships between the layers, between each layer and all the other ones. I fear I am not making myself clear. In future messages I mean to go into much more detail about this hologram-like though non-physical system.

  Here let me digress to mention one fact definitely confirmed by the surface narrative in HD. This is that the Builders were a warlike race for a long time before they created the Berserkers. There is convincing evidence that before the fateful experiment the Builders had fought at least four long, desperate interstellar wars, resulting in the complete extermination of at least four other races. These four early victim-races are unfortunately identified in HD only in the Tones-Drifts system of sociological-spiritual (religious?) notation. Whether any translation at all of this passage into a Solarian tongue is possible without assigning the races completely arbitrary names and identities (e.g., One, Two, Three, Four) is still in doubt, though I have spent two days working on that simple-seeming question with our own ship’s computer.