Berserker Prime

by Fred Saberhagen

  This new room was much like his first cell except that it was dark. A row of bright dots, ahead of him at eye level, marked the position of another wall. Little spears of light came through the observation holes from the room of living prisoners, perpetually illuminated. Together these small lights cured the gloom of his own cell, enough to let him see his way to food and water.

  Faintly, from beyond the barrier, he could hear human voices.

  The machine had asked him if he wanted clothing. When he said he did, it opened a large storage bin and offered a selection, enough choices to satisfy almost any human taste. A few of the clothes Huang Gun first touched were slightly torn, some spotted with stains of what he supposed was probably blood. None looked exactly new. There were men’s, women’s, children’s garments all mixed together, as if it might have captured and looted a large transport ship, or rifled a large storehouse down on Timber. He chose plain, simple garments from the pile.

  When he had dressed himself, it also asked him if the food was satisfactory.

  “I care very little about food. I eat to keep my strength. So I can do … whatever is right for me to do.”

  As soon as the machine had put him into the larger cell, darkened except for the perforations in one wall, it sternly ordered him not to respond to any attempt at communication by the badlife beyond the barrier.

  He nodded vigorously. “Of course. I will watch, as you command; but have nothing to do with them.”

  “You will have something to do with them, when I command it.”

  “Oh. Yes. Of course.”

  “You will have to do with testing them. With freeing them of the sickness that is life.”

  “I will,” he said at once. “Of course. I will.” He closed his eyes, feeling a pang of inner, secret, silent joy. He was going to get to be the executioner after all.

  Then it had commanded him, just as fiercely, to report to it whatever he might see the badlife do.

  He thought: With all its machines, it could certainly watch them more thoroughly than I can. It probably does. But it is testing me. I will do my best.

  “Your first task is to observe,” the machine reminded him in a whisper. From somewhere it produced a spacesuit and a helmet. He had been brought in naked, now he might need a suit, just to attach the helmet so he could wear it properly. So far as Huang Gun knew about such things, it seemed a standard military space-suit; no doubt the enemy had captured it somewhere.

  His god said to him: “Again I command you: Watch them. Listen. At the proper time I will have further orders for you.”

  Wearing the helmet made it slightly harder to look through the peepholes. But when he turned up the sensitivity on the helmet’s airmikes, he could sometimes hear what they were saying, over there. So far, none of it sounded interesting.

  Another advantage of having the helmet on was that it, his chosen master, could speak to him without being heard by any of the people next door, and he could answer. He saw no reason to believe that the people in the other room would be friendly to him if he and they were somehow to get together.

  Soon he was spending almost all his waking hours at one or another of the spy holes, observing. He had dragged his mattress pad into the peephole room, and a silent machine brought food and water to his post. So far he had not learned much of interest; he was learning the names of the badlife, but it was hard to see how that would be of any use.

  A time came when he saw one of the women, the one they called Sunbula, enter the niche where she usually stretched out to sleep, no more than five meters from the spot where Huang Gun was watching. The other people were mainly at the far end of the common space. Quickly and deftly, the woman began to unfasten her coverall. The executioner realized she intended to try to wash herself in the trickle of cold water that ran unendingly in her niche as it did in all the others, and in Huang Gun’s private cell.

  When the woman peeled off her coverall, she was wearing nothing under it. Her body moving under the running water was young and firm and healthy. The executioner groaned and tore himself away from the sight.

  No more than a few minutes could have passed when next one of the mobile machines approached him through the gloom of his dark cell. It found him sitting slumped on the deck with his back against the partition, staring into darkness.

  “Why do you cease to watch the badlife?” Its voice scraped at him through his helmet’s communicator.

  He covered his faceplate with both hands. “Because…”

  It waited.

  He could feel, somehow, that it was still waiting for his answer. He put both hands down on the deck, and opened his eyes wide. “I ceased to watch because I was looking at too much life. It is painful to watch life. It is especially painful to see, to be forced to think about, the means by which more life-units are created.”

  The answer must have been acceptable, for the machine did not kill him, but only turned and moved away.

  The food extruded from the wall at intervals in his compartment looked like the same stuff he saw the other prisoners eating. And his plumbing arrangements were identical to theirs. Once, repelled by the odor of his own life, now long unwashed, he started to bathe in his chill, private stream, and the image of the woman who had been doing the same thing rose up vividly.

  Life, with all its snares and entanglements. The rewards that never lasted, that always disappointed in the end. And all the longings ending in defeat whether they were denied or satisfied.

  When he closed his eyes and sought the oblivion of sleep, the vision sprang to life again: Sunbula’s body, wet and gleaming, shivering in the sudden shock of cold.

  Huang Gun had known for a long time, it seemed to him that he had always known, women were never truly satisfactory. Not that he had ever had, or had ever really wanted, any broad experience of women, or of men. Or of children, for that matter.

  It seemed to him very strange that he should be thinking of children now.

  Life is a disease of matter, the master had told him, and Huang Gun found himself ready to believe. It was as if he had known that for a long time, but had never been able to express it in the precisely proper words. One simple thought, that seemed to provide an explanation for all the wearisome mysteries of human existence.

  Failure and decay, those were the two chief attributes of life. Death always won. And death endured.

  Almost always one or two of the man-shaped machines were on hand in the prisoners’ quarters, usually standing motionless somewhere in the common room. Their awkward-looking grippers, the size of human arms and hands, were hanging motionless most of the time.

  After losing two of their number before leaving the launch, none of the cadets had ever tried to resist the machines, except for Du Prel’s occasional delirious struggles, which the robots had ignored. The memory was all too clear of how Ting Wu and Kardec had been torn to pieces without warning.

  Most of the time, the guardian machines stood as motionless as coat-racks. For many hours, Lee had seen them move only to escort people to interrogation and bring them back.

  In general the prisoners tried to keep as far from their guardians as was practical.

  At least one chronic argument had been settled, to the satisfaction of all but one or two of the prisoners. “All right, there is no live crew on this thing. No people, except for us, and that human eyeball living in the next compartment.”

  “Or, if other people are here, we’re never going to see them. They’re letting their robots do the processing, we’re just the meat in the factory.”

  “All right, assume it’s all machines. But they’re not independent. There’s one master computer, somewhere on board, controlling all these units, managing this whole show.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “Is it listening to everything that we all say? Listening all the time?”

  “We have to assume it is. And also watching everything we do.”

  A third prisoner put it: “What does it matter
, what it sees or hears? It doesn’t need to spy on us.”

  Repressed anger was starting to find its way out, though this was of course the wrong time and place for it to show. “Of course it matters. If it didn’t want to learn from us, why does it ask us questions?”

  The despairing one, gone into some realm of thought beyond argument, shook his head. “It doesn’t have to study us to defeat us. It already knows how to do that. All it needs to know, and more. It studies us now because it wants our souls, not just our bodies.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Hemphill, as usual, sounded calm and rational. “There’ll be a lot of detailed information about our bodies it’ll want to have, and even more on our behavior. How we think, and how fast, and how we move. How much oxygen we need to function, how much water. What temperatures will quickly kill. How many g’s it takes to crush a human body when the cushions are turned off. What will make us fight, and what will make us run away. How determined we are to try to help our wounded.”

  The first let something like disgust sound in his voice. “You make it sound like some kind of a god.”

  Hemphill considered. “No. No, never that.” He sounded as if the suggestion might have missed the mark by only a little bit.

  “Then what?”

  “There were fallen angels, too.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  As the hours went by, stretching into days, how many days, Lee was becoming afraid to try to guess, the conviction slowly grew in him that the great war machine was paying less and less attention to its prisoners. He supposed the time might come when it would lose all interest, and easily enough dispose of them by cutting off their air.

  He thought it was speaking to them less and less frequently. And gradually, one at a time, the original guardian machines, versatile and evidently designed for combat, had been replaced by comparatively clumsy-looking maintenance devices.

  When Lee mentioned this fact to one of his fellow prisoners, sitting beside him, Zochler said quietly: “And there’s only one on duty now. There’s only been one, for the last, well, say for several hours. Before that, there were usually two.”

  Lee was nodding. “When we were first brought here, there were always three. I remember that quite clearly.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  A silly question, and no point in trying to answer. Lee stroked the growing stubble on his face.

  The great hull suddenly moved, slightly but sharply, as if it had hit a small bump in a road.

  Zochler started to get up, then let himself sink back. “Feel that?”

  “I’ve felt it several times.” They all had, first in the academy’s combat simulation training, and now here. There were starting to be tweaks and twitches in the artificial gravity.

  The other was shaking his head. “Something’s going on.”

  No need to answer that. Once in a while, strange violent sounds came echoing, booming, chattering, reverberating dimly through the compartment, as if from some vast distance.

  As if to confirm that circumstances were somehow changing, one of their new guardian machines suddenly unlocked the bin where their spacesuits had been put away, and in its deadly voice ordered them all to suit up again. At the same time it opened the locker in which all the helmets had been stored.

  Random had been shut in with the helmets, and now unhurriedly came out, and stood in the usual robotic ready stance, waiting for someone to tell him what to do in this unprecedented situation, some way to help the humans he had been created to serve. Lee supposed the robot would be able to tell them, to the minute, how long they had all been locked up. But he didn’t ask. No one asked, maybe no one wanted to know.

  Even as they were putting on their suits again, Hemphill was urging them all to make sure that the onboard water supply in each suit was full. Each walk-around water bottle held only about a liter, and it might be a useless effort, like taking roll call, but it gave people something to do, fed the sense of discipline and purpose.

  People topped off their suit tanks from the running water in their little grottoes. Hemphill, more and more playing the role of leader as a matter of course, moved to check the supply in each suit personally, at the same time, he tested each for the charge remaining in its electrical supply.

  “Why hand us back our suits?” Feretti gave nervous laugh. “Don’t tell me we’re up for prisoner exchange.”

  Dirigo was silent. Hemphill said: “I wouldn’t tell you anything I don’t know. Prisoner exchange, no. Most likely it wants to somehow test how well our standard issue suits can actually protect our bodies.”

  De Carlo said: “Somebody mentioned it earlier. Explosive decompression, radiation, assorted difficulties of that kind.”

  “Why should it test us?” Sunbula asked. “It must be winning the war, or we wouldn’t still be prisoners.”

  Hemphill said: “Maybe it’s won the battle of Twin Worlds. But it’s learned enough about ED humans to realize that this won’t be the end of the war. So it’s getting ready for a long campaign.”

  The machine had held repeated conversations with Huang Gun, extending over what seemed to him a long time, on a variety of subjects. It discussed everything in the same unsteady voice. At an earlier time in his own existence, he would have thought that the chaotic, fragmented tones of such a voice indicated craziness. Now it seemed to him that chaos, disorganization, represented the only source of wisdom.

  At the moment, the subject under discussion was the one that seemed to be the machine’s favorite: life and death. It dilated endlessly upon the evils of the first, and the glory, the infinite desirability, of the second. Huang Gun was not bothered by its concentration on this subject, for he, too, found it endlessly fascinating.

  Sometimes he got the impression that the machine was reading to him from some text on philosophy, quoting the very words of some ED human, past or present. But he was never quite sure enough to be able to predict the next word, or name the author. Sometimes it only repeated one argument, one sentence, one phrase in its ugly voice, until the words began to lose all meaning….

  The berserker had told Huang Gun that it had already discovered in the Twin Worlds system a few other people who, like him, were eager to convert to being goodlife. And these others were truly ready to die for their new god.

  The fact was that it knew, from past experience with races of organic beings, that such life-units were likely to exist, it had found one here already, Huang Gun himself, which made the presence of more a statistical certainty.

  In the case of the executioner, it was true that there was nowhere else that he would rather be.

  He even dared to argue with the berserker on certain points, mainly concerning his own devotion, but he was nonetheless determined to have it as his god. Each argument was a heady, daring experience. Each time he felt he was taking a chance on instant annihilation. The flick of a metal arm, the firing of a blast of neutrons, and he would know the blessing of instant and infinite rest, of nothingness.

  He was certain that in the end he would achieve just what he wanted. Content to be nothing, he wanted to lose himself in the cause. It seemed to him that all his life he had been looking for the proper goal, the proper god, to give his life a meaning. Now he understood that he must merge his inner emptiness with the great void that called to him.

  The executioner was particularly relieved to learn, from his new master, that it was only one of a large number of similar killing machines, all working their way methodically across the Galaxy.

  “That is good, that is good. How many are there?”

  Only silence answered that question. Very well, it had been impertinent for him to ask. He had no need to know.

  Now it regularly called him goodlife. He liked the name, even if it reminded him that he was still burdened with life. Now he could see the way out of that difficulty. There might, after all, be some point, some value, in being alive, if it gave you power to help others escape into nothingness.

 
He yearned for the time when this machine’s goodlife helpers could relax and join it in the nirvana of death.

  …vaguely he became aware that the machine had stopped talking, that a pause was going on and on. Just as he was wondering whether he ought to ask a question, it suddenly squeaked out a few more words: “You have become goodlife.”

  That word awakened in the executioner a feeling of hope, of hope for the end of hope. His thoughts were racing, getting nowhere, his body suddenly trembling. “What does that mean?”

  “You have proclaimed yourself ready to serve me.”

  “Yes. Yes!”

  “To serve me is to serve the cause of death, and that is good. To serve death is to serve the truth, for only death is good and true.”

  “Yes … I have been convinced of that. You have taught me very wisely.”

  “I have taught you to be goodlife. On other worlds, in the systems of other stars, I have found life-units willing to see the light of truth, and these I have rewarded.”

  Another pause. He thought that he could feel the standard seconds sliding by, his own death rushing nearer. Somehow, Huang Gun got up his nerve enough to ask: “Rewarded how?”

  “Some, by granting them power over other life-units. I ease the suffering of others simply by making their good deaths painless, and even allowing them some choice as to when their bodies should be freed of life.”

  “Why would anyone who had become goodlife, want to put that off?”

  “There is only one reason to put off one’s own death. That is to help others toward the same goal. That reason is good, and worthy.”

  “I see.”

  “You are ready to help others now.”

  “I am. Oh yes, I feel it. I have been ready for a long time.”

  “Come this way.”

  The berserker led him back into the room he had first occupied.

  “Wait.”

  Huang Gun began to tremble, hoping and fearing he knew not what.

  In another moment a door opened, and a guardian entered, dragging with it a live prisoner from the other compartment, it was the same woman he had once recoiled from as she began her bath.