Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The berserker did not disagree. “I offer the creator of Lancelot an even greater challenge.”

  It was time, and long past time, for Vivian to make an all-out effort to warn the base of the killer among them. Even with whatever protection her armor might afford, it was far from certain that she would succeed in such an effort. And Vivian had already prolonged this conversation enough to open herself to charges of goodlife activity.

  Even so, she heard her own voice ask, “And what is that task?”

  “To create an android indistinguishable from a human, one that can bear within it a berserker mind.”

  “Ahh.” Vivian felt thunderstruck, almost more astonished than when she had realized a berserker had trapped her right outside the door of her own home. One mysterious limitation under which the berserkers labored was that they had never managed to create an android that could pass as an human, or even a convincing animal. As far as any human knew, they had never even come close. Talk about a challenge . . .

  “Your new laboratory already awaits you. I promise you, it so far exceeds the facility you have here as your own genius surpasses the minds of the life-units who deny you your just recognition.”

  Despite herself, Vivian Travers felt a thrill the like of which she had not felt for many decades, certainly since the days when she had created Lancelot. What the enemy offered would truly be a challenge worthy of her skills—and think what she would learn about the berserkers themselves! In order for Vivian to bridge the gap between whatever device she might create and the berserkers’ mechanical natures, they would need to open themselves to her. She would learn their most intimate secrets, acquire the knowledge human generals had wished for since humanity’s first encounter with the killer machines.

  “Create an android berserker,” she murmured.

  “That is what I have said. I am equipped with devices to enable me to read with some degree of accuracy the level of a human’s emotional response. I can tell you are interested in this challenge.”

  A hot swell of anger rose in Vivian’s heart at the thought of how her “interest,” her curiosity, her intellect could be turned against her. Perhaps the berserker sensed the change in her emotions, but it moved too late. Berserkers were swifter than humans by as much as machines could out-speed living fingers and organic calculation. But Vivian’s battle armor was customized to respond to her slightest whim. She was sure she had a chance.

  The berserker had not finished speaking. “Your answer will be required in three da—”

  Her helm dropped into place faster than she could see it move, and from the center of her breastplate erupted a close-range shotgun-blast of force that would have torn to shreds almost any material object within a couple of body-lengths of where she stood.

  The shot of energy was sufficient to rip the berserker in two. Metal ran like water. Slag dripped onto the corridor floor.

  The berserker’s carbines fired in reaction—but inaccurately. They cut great gouges from the living rock of the corridor walls. The flying fragments bounced off Vivian’s armor, not even chipping the cobalt blue finish.

  Screaming in rage, Vivian grabbed the berserker’s upper torso in both gloved hands. Now she could call upon another component of her armor: using its computer-brain to sink her awareness into the enemy’s optelectronic system, searching for the self-destruct that was nearly always there. She located it and began fusing the paths that would carry the berserker’s command to destruct, reaching backward through the machine’s equivalent of a neural network, seeking to intercept the signal before it could reach the key point.

  She did not find such a signal. What she found was a whispered message that flowed into her awareness as static and seduction. It reinforced the last few words her ears had heard.

  “You are the one who created Lancelot. Our offer is good for three of your standard days. If at the end, you do not come forth to join us, we will continue on our mission to bring perfect order to the universe, beginning with this base.”

  Vivian felt the berserker’s memory begin to wipe. This was no self-destruct command that she could block, but an integral part of this particular program loop.

  Still convulsed with fury, Vivian squeezed, smashing the berserker’s limbs beneath her armored, cold-fusion powered gauntlets, magnifying her physical strength many times. The enemy machine dangled limply, its various appendages trailing to scrape the chipped and ravaged stone. Acids and molten metal flowed over her armor, but both it and the woman it protected remained immune, while the stone floor beneath was scoured in deep, smooth rivulets.

  That was how her neighbors found Vivian when, alerted by the sound of weapons firing, they left their cocktails and ran with more good will than good sense to her assistance. A team of first-response commandos in full battle armor arrived less than two minutes later. Brother Angel was in the lead. Some small part of Vivian’s mind thought this odd. He’d been briefing General Gosnick, hadn’t he? He didn’t even live on this hub.

  But she felt relieved that someone of his rank and reputation was there to assume responsibility for the mess.

  “It’s over,” she said, when she had regained some composure and convinced everyone she was unhurt.

  “Can someone get this hulk to my lab? I’ll be down to dissect it as soon as I’ve had a shower.”

  As she had known he would, Brother Angel stepped forward to take charge.

  “A berserker?” he said. “Here?”

  “I think the marks were made by your ‘mine,’ Brother,” Vivian said. “It seems we both were wrong about what left the marks on the fighter. Would you handle the initial report to General Gosnick? I need a drink.”

  Of course, even for someone of her rank and reputation, that was not the end of it, but Vivian would only allow her debriefing on the incident to continue while her hands were busy making sure the berserker assassin held no further surprises.

  A thorough inspection of the whole base was still in progress. So far there was no evidence that any other berserkers had slipped through the defenses.

  The general was pondering what the purpose of the single confirmed intruder might have been.

  “It would seem, then, to have been meant for you specifically,” General Gosnick said, as the debriefing was concluded. “How fortunate that you were still armored.”

  “Very,” Vivian agreed.

  The General departed, trailed by his entourage. Vivian continued working, aware that Brother Angel had remained.

  When he and Vivian were alone, Brother Angel asked, “How long did it stand confronting you?”

  Vivian had not wished to lie directly, but she didn’t feel she needed to lay herself open to charges of goodlife activity by answering accurately. Hadn’t her destruction of the berserker been proof enough of her loyalty?

  “As I said during the debriefing, I was so terrified that I lost all sense of time.”

  Brother Angel was the last person Vivian would have expected to ask the next question. “Why didn’t you accept its offer?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think perhaps you do,” Brother Angel insisted. “I was in the outer corridor when the berserker confronted you. I had seen you pass through the garden still wearing your battle armor. I was heading down to the labs and was going to offer to take your armor back with me. I know you keep another set in your quarters. You know how my senses are fragmented—I eavesdrop unwittingly on what is going on next door, while I may be blind and deaf to what is right in front of me.”

  “I know.”

  Brother Angel went on. “At first I wondered with whom you could be talking. Then when I heard what the berserker was saying to you, I understood. You did not refuse, and, as the berserker said, you sounded interested.”

  “Why then did you not alert the base?” Vivian asked.

  Brother Angel smiled thinly. “I might ask why you did not. It would seem that we were both shocked into temporary silence. Under a considerable strain. Unde
r the circumstances, I believe that we can both be pardoned.”

  He paused to draw a breath. “You in particular could be forgiven, I believe, even if you were to seriously consider accepting the berserker’s proposal.”

  It took Vivian a little while to find an answer. “How do you see that?”

  “You could perform a service of great value by accepting the berserkers’s offer. They would need to let you study their workings as no one has ever been able to before.” Brother Angel gestured toward the hulk on the lab table. “Dissecting that may contribute a little to our knowledge of this particular model’s electronic and mechanical workings, but it will tell us nothing about their brains. You yourself showed us how that was wiped by the berserker itself when it realized your attack would disable it. If you were to work closely with the berserkers, you would learn things about their brains, their programming, that could be of great value.”

  Vivian stood unmoving. Three days, said a traitorous voice in her mind. They gave you three days. She wondered if Brother Angel was aware of that detail. And you would be saving the base, perhaps learning what Life needs to defeat Death’s servants once and for all.

  “Become goodlife,” she said aloud. “That’s what you’re telling me, that I should become goodlife.”

  Brother Angel sharply drew in his breath. “May the Creator forbid it! I am suggesting that as a double agent, working for humanity, you would have a perfect opportunity to learn those things the berserkers have hidden from us. For you to be able to find what flaw it is in their programming that keeps them from successfully counterfeiting humans, they would need to open not only their bodies but their minds to you.”

  “And having learned such secrets as they chose to reveal,” Vivian said, her tone mocking, “how am I supposed to make any use of it when I would be the berserkers’ prisoner?”

  “You are the one who created Lancelot,” Brother Angel said. “I am sure you would find a way, even if it took you decades to do so. I am sure you would find a way.”

  He turned then and walked from the lab in a swirl of his brown monk’s robes. The door slid shut behind him with a marked thump. For a moment, Vivian contemplated calling General Gosnick and reporting what Brother Angel had said to her. Then she shrugged.

  If she did that, she would need to explain why she had not confessed having a relatively long conversation with the death machine. Of course it was quite possible that Brother Angel had already reported her, or was even now about to do so. Or . . .

  Lost in speculation, Vivian finished dissecting the serbot berserker, but even as her hands moved and her mouth dictated details to be recorded, her mind could not let go of what Brother Angel had said. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, she adopted the brother’s wild suggestion. Conservative General Gosnick would be as likely to grant permission as he would to turn into a butterfly, and more than three days were bound to pass before any new orders could arrive from anywhere outside the Lake system. She would need to keep her decision to play double-agent to herself, but she could find a way to counterfeit her death. There were those damaged fighters . . . She often test-piloted something she had repaired. More or less regular practice during most of her long life had made her as good a pilot as most who followed the profession.

  She could fly a fighter out toward the asteroid belt between Lake and the sixth planet. The berserkers must be out there somewhere, monitoring communications. She could send some tight-beam signal on ahead, let them know she was coming. She could go out far enough that one of the minor bodies would occlude the base’s clear view of her. Observers at Lake Moon would see an explosion, that’s all. Once she had faked her death and made some deal that would assure the base’s safety, she could enter into that fascinating research project. The berserkers should be aware that creative humans could not be tortured into creating. Lake Moon’s few hundred life-units, preserved only for as long as the berserkers needed Vivian, would not be too much for them to barter to assure her faithful service. Indeed, those lives on Lake Moon could be used as hostages against her good behavior. Couldn’t they? Yes. She could make it work.

  Then, when she had the answer as to why berserkers could not counterfeit humans, well, by then she surely would have gained insight as to how humanity might permanently defeat the berserkers. As Brother Angel had said, perhaps she could even find a way to escape, even if that escape was decades in the arranging.

  Another supreme challenge.

  “Decades,” the voice in her mind said, “during which more humans would die because you were not here on Lake Moon designing weapons and armor and spacecraft for them.”

  “Perhaps that would be best,” Vivian retorted. “The berserkers may be right in one thing. Perhaps more Life has died trying not to be sterilized than would have died if we had just rolled over and submitted at the start. How many colonies have been founded, only to be discovered by the berserkers and destroyed? How many babies born to become soldiers? In working to preserve, as I thought, Life, perhaps I have indeed been a servant of death.”

  Variations on this internal debate continued as Vivian’s three days of grace became two, became one. Her friends and neighbors did not trouble her. Her near brush with the berserker was reason enough for silence and a need for thought. If Brother Angel smiled a trace knowingly when their paths met in the refectory or one of the public gardens, Vivian ignored him.

  On her last day of grace, Vivian had an epiphany of sorts. She was in a private garden, alone but for Brother Angel, who had taken to being inconveniently present.

  “I wonder,” Vivian said, “if the Builders felt as I do now?”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “You heard the berserker call me a servant of death although all along I thought I was serving the purpose of life. What if the Builders felt the same way? We know little of why the Builders went to war with the Red Race, but whatever the reason, they clearly felt that the Red Race was not just something they needed to conquer, but something they needed to destroy. Why else than because the Builders felt that the Red Race was a threat to life—if not Life as we think of it, then at least of life as they valued and knew it.”

  “So they created the ultimate killing machines,” Brother Angel said, “to serve Life.”

  “Yes,” Vivian said. “And then perhaps they realized that they had gone too far, that they had become what they themselves feared. Most humans view the destruction of the Builders by the berserkers as a great irony—a sword turning in the warrior’s hand. What if it wasn’t that at all? What if the Builders themselves removed the restraining codes, turned their own weapons upon themselves as penance for what they had done?”

  Brother Angel seemed torn between horror and fascination. “It seems,” he murmured finally, “it seems, in a way, quite fitting.”

  “I thought that you would find it so.”

  “Eh?” He turned his wandering gaze more nearly in her direction.

  “Brother Angel, I find myself unable to believe that the berserkers’ emissary was able to accomplish its mission here—locating this secret base, acquiring access codes, even learning precisely what model of serbot is common on Lake Moon—without considerable help from some source already on the base.”

  Brother Angel watched and waited, not moving a muscle.

  Vivian went on. “The more I considered the matter, the more likely it seemed to me that this source was you.”

  Brother Angel protested. “More than a third of Lake Moon’s inhabitants would know those things. The access codes would be the only difficulty, and even those could be gotten with little effort.”

  “But you covered for me, Brother Angel. Would you have done so just to turn me double agent? I think not. I don’t think your wandering eyes and ears were what enabled you to eavesdrop. I think you were there all along, tracking your mechanical ally, making sure no one interfered before it had the opportunity to make its proposal.”

  “You know my war record,” Brother Angel pr
otested.

  “Remember,” Vivian said. “I know your history. I know how many of your closest friends were killed in the battle where you yourself were so gravely wounded. I wonder how much of your mind’s refusal to interface with the prosthetic enhancements we have built for you is related to your guilt that you survived when so many others died. I think your sympathies changed then. Why continue to fight Death, when Death is inevitable?”

  Vivian turned toward a viewport that showed the complex dance of the immediate solar system. Somewhere out there, undetected yet, but certainly there, the berserkers must be approaching.

  “I think that when the berserker hinted that I was dissatisfied with my place here at Lake Moon, with what I have achieved, it was speaking your thoughts, your unhappiness. I chose to come to this isolated place, to work in secret. You must feel yourself exiled by your injuries. Even so, you and I have much in common in the difficult choices we must make.”

  “So you are not planning to make accusations against me? You intend to accept the berserker’s offer?”

  Brother Angel said eagerly.

  “Yes. And I will do more than that. I will give you and your masters Lancelot.”

  Vivian, followed closely by Brother Angel, went to her lab. She entered and locked the door snugly behind them.

  The lab could be sealed, for her experiments were not to be lightly interrupted, and so she knew their privacy was secure.

  Vivian stripped to the skin.

  The attention of her visitor seemed to remain focused elsewhere.

  In a long life, she had reshaped her physical appearance so often that she no longer remembered what she had looked like at birth. Her hair had been every, and sometimes all, the colors of the rainbow. Her skin and eye colors had run through all those known to humanity, and some only imagined. She had been both full-figured and elfin slim. She had even managed find means to create the illusion of height or of relative shortness.