The answer came right back. “Again, no computer that we create makes such judgments. But a machine can easily be programmed to say anything the programmer wants. It could mimic fear or hate or anger. If a machine were somehow capable of determining what life is, then the same machine could be programmed, just as for any other task, to seek out life and destroy it.”
The Lady Constance, eldest of the diplomats, spread frail hands in a helpless gesture. “What do we do, my colleagues? It is true that the Huvean first spacer here is in practical control of the human response”
Homasubi raised a hand. “I did not and do not seek to establish control over any of your party, madam, who have evidently come here in a laudable attempt to make peace. But I am captain of this ship, and first spacer of this fleet, which I do control while awaiting fresh orders from my government.”
“I understand your position, First Spacer, and I am sure that all of us sympathize. I thank you for your patience.”
The first spacer gave a slight bow, remaining seated. “Let us hope and pray that events allow us all the luxury of being patient.”
Not until all the Earth-descended humans had their turns did the Carmpan suddenly speak up. Heads turned in surprise. Ninety-first Diplomat’s voice, coming from a small metallic device attached to the thick body, had a surprisingly ordinary, Earth-descended sound.
“I think we have learned several things about this entity confronting us. First, that not even indirectly can it represent any power descended from Earthly life.
“The second thing we have learned regarding the intruder, is that it is terrible. I can find no better word in the ED languages, but I mean something deeper, more profound, than the simple fact that it has destroyed a planet and several billion intelligent lives.
“Third, it is not accidental.”
One of the Huvean officers put in: “That’s all very well, but as a practical matter what we really want to know is, where did it come from?”
The Carmpan did not answer that. With little animals from her home world strung across her body, along with exotic bits of hardware quite strange to the Earth-descended eye, it gave its cousins from another human family the second chapter of its Prophecy of Probability.
The seer was looking into a bigger picture, where many other worlds were going to suffer as Prairie had, and Timber was.
The Carmpan knew what the berserker wanted, and the Carmpan was, in her own way, terrified.
Turning to face Gregor across the virtual conference table, she asked him to bring out his list of hostages that he had practically forgotten, but she somehow knew he had, and waited until he had dug into an inner pocket and come up with the crumpled paper. The Carmpan pointed out that this was evidence, immediately available to show the Huveans, that he had had some contact with the hostages, and had taken some interest in them.
Then the Carmpan said that the list should be longer, by a hundred billion ED names “For all of you, on all your worlds, are become hostages for life’s survival.”
Slowly, giving her movement the air of solemn ritual, Ninety-first Diplomat was changing her position. In physical reality it might very well have been impossible for her to climb up on an ED table, but in the virtual presentation there was no difficulty. She ascended to the tabletop, and briefly knelt there on her stubby legs, performing a genuflection in the direction of Admiral Radigast, while all around her the Earth-descended looked on in wonderment.
She repeated the gesture in several directions, on the last occasion coming back to squarely face the image of the admiral again.
Then she said: “I kneel not to you as individuals, but to all of Earth-descended humanity. It is for this great struggle that you were created.”
At several times during the discussion, Admiral Radigast, having convinced himself that he felt somewhat rested, had been on the point of saying that he had important duties to perform and must withdraw. But he grew fascinated, almost against his will, and stayed. When Ninety-first Diplomat knelt before him he was stunned. It seemed that he could not have uttered a word to save his life, while a thousand ideas, hopes, and fears raced through his head.
When he had recovered sufficiently to mentally rejoin the conference, the Carmpan was saying something about the terrible length of the war that had today begun.
“I see it stretching on into the future, spreading deeper and deeper into the Galaxy, even to the Core itself. It goes beyond the limits of my vision….”
Gregor for one was chilled when he heard that. Radigast had begun to chew a pod, impassively, after taking steps to assure that his virtual image would not be so impolite.
But, the Carmpan went on, Earth-descended humans should not regret that the war that was to be their terrible burden had started at this time. Human technology had developed to the point where they at least had a fighting chance, even if they had to face the enemy virtually alone. And given the presence of both human life and at least one berserker in the Galaxy, there was no way, no way, it could have been permanently avoided.
The various military leaders exchanged looks. None of them had heard anything in this speech that they thought would be immediately useful.
“But how are we to fight it?” one asked.
There was no reply. When it seemed obvious that the Carmpan had done speaking, there was a lengthy silence.
Gregor was perhaps the first to notice, and he gestured silently, with an outstretched hand. Some of the little animals hanging on the Carmpan’s harness, alive and squirming minutes earlier, were hanging limp and dead. It took him a little longer to realize that the Carmpan herself was no longer breathing.
People jumped to the assistance of Ninety-first Diplomat. A medirobot aboard the civilian ship was summoned, one that had been thoughtfully pre-programmed for the treatment of non-ED life.
Soon the machine delivered its unemotional report. Ninety-first Diplomat’s life had not departed, but she had sunk into a kind of coma.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Sometimes Luon doubted that she was long going to survive, in the streets of a city that seemed to have gone mad with terror, war, and rioting. But Reggie was at her side continually (or, as she usually thought of it, she was at his), and that was all that mattered. They were hardly out of reach of each other for more than ten minutes a day. She was frightened, hungry, bruised, her body and her clothing dirty, but she could think of nowhere in the Galaxy where she would rather be.
Last night the pair of them, along with the other surviving former hostages, had been able to catch a few hours’ sleep in a kind of dormitory shelter, improvised by some local people in the subterranean station of a subway that was no longer running. Some kind soul had handed out blankets and pillows, and a few hours later someone else had got around to handing out food. Even the emergency ration bars looked and tasted good. When they emerged from the shelter in the morning, Porphyry was standing against a building, waiting, it said, for Luon. The robot explained that it was continually trying to communicate, using its built-in systems, with the central system buried beneath the Citadel, and with Admiral Radigast’s flagship. But so far, Porphyry reported in its usual cheery tones, it had had little success.
No one had tried to steal it while it waited through the night. A robot was immune to bribery and coercion, and if forcibly removed from its assigned master tended to turn quickly into a useless if somewhat decorative statue. Reprogramming, without the master’s agreement, was as a rule fiendishly difficult.
Douras viewed Porphyry’s arrival with considerable suspicion, but then he tended to view everything that way. He and some of the other Huveans would have preferred to do without Luon’s company altogether, Douras had more than once warned Reggie that she was probably a spy, but she had a knowledge of the layout of the city, of local customs and procedures, that served them well.
At one point Douras and Reggie came close to exchanging blows, in a dispute over whether Luon ought to be trusted or not.
Douras
insisted that when the rescue attempt was made, it would come near the Citadel, so they must not get more than a kilometer or so from the city’s center. So far the former hostages were all hanging out in the same area, staying in frequent contact with each other while at the same time trying not to give the appearance of a group. Above all they were trying to suppress their Huvean accents and speech patterns.
The members of the band sometimes argued fiercely among themselves, but still they had pretty thoroughly bonded, which was to be expected in the circumstances. From the people around them they heard a lot of bloodcurdling threats against everyone and everything associated with their home world.
Parts of the public communication grid were working, at least intermittently, and parts were not. Here near city center the general news services were still functioning, more or less, and they considered themselves very lucky in that the only official word about hostages had been an early announcement that the new president wanted them to go free. After that, the subject had been dropped, in favor of news about the latest fighting on the ground, nothing good there, plans for rationing, and confused schemes of mass evacuation for the city. It was as if whoever was in charge of deciding what people ought to think about had suddenly ceased to care.
Naturally everyone on the planet, those dug in underground as well as the people staying by choice or necessity on the surface, wanted to know what was going to happen next. But despite sporadic recorded announcements from different branches of local government, urging calm and patience, it was obvious that authority had all but totally collapsed.
From the new, self-proclaimed president, there had been no further word for several days.
The fighting machines landed by the mysterious attacker were keeping methodically busy, as if what they had undertaken was some kind of construction project. They advanced aggressively, for what seemed some predetermined time, mowing down buildings and any living thing that happened to be in them, cutting a swath of death and destruction through the sprawling city. Then they would grind to a halt, come together again and wait, as if to see what kind of response they had provoked.
Most times the response was not slow in coming, in the form of some military counterattack, by remote-controlled machines and armored infantry. The counterattacks were generally ineffective, with heavy casualties among the infantry, but the planet’s military reserves were huge, and people kept trying. No human commander on the ground had yet resorted to nuclear weapons, not in the middle of a capital city where mass evacuation had become a practical impossibility.
Early on the military had ordered evacuations, but no one was making any real effort to enforce them. Tanks and other machines of war were continually being brought in from remote areas of the planet, but so far had had little success. Announcements kept reassuring the people that more help was on the way.
Enemy couriers could be seen and heard, coming and going, seemingly with impunity, lifting off and landing from sites on the surface under control of the monstrous landers. The enemy also deployed auxiliary machines of various sizes and shapes and capabilities, which seemed to serve as infantry; Luon had heard of several of these being destroyed by human weapons, but none of the big machines being cleanly defeated.
Eventually word had filtered down to the people in the streets of the arrival of the Huvean fleet in the Twin Worlds system. The young Huveans were electrified, and the most patriotic among them was elated. “They’ll get us out of here!”
Standing in the darkened street at night, they scanned the sky in an effort to catch a glimpse of ships, hoping they would be coming close enough to be seen. Porphyry had somewhat better vision than most people, for most purposes, but was not equipped to do much better in this case.
Reggie had a gritty and more realistic view than Douras on the prospects of their being rescued. “Maybe they can get us out, but don’t hold your breath. To begin with, they don’t know where we are, and I don’t see how we’re going to tell them. At least not without telling everyone around us.” Short of finding some communications hub that really worked, and seizing control of it, there seemed no way of doing that.
But Douras was not discouraged by dangers and delays. The aggressive Huvean youth was happier than Luon had ever seen him. His eyes glittered, and he worked his right hand, making a fist and opening it. “You’ll see! They can do it. Wait till our marines hit these mobs. You’ll see.”
First Spacer Homasubi could feel himself being forced to a decision he did not want to make. If he decided to send Huvean marines to try to rescue the hostages, the Huveans would face both organized and unorganized opposition. The Twin Worlds military on the ground might not be able to cope with the alien landers, but they would be at no such disadvantage when dealing with a few hundred Huvean troops.
Gregor, still riding with the Twin Worlds fleet, could give the first spacer no assurance of cooperation on the ground, but rather warned against making the attempt. If Gregor tried to order cooperation with Huvea, he would lose what little authority he might possess with the groundbound, and be denounced as a traitor.
The first spacer, unwilling to delay a decision any longer, at last decided to send a recon party down in secret.
Gregor and Radigast gave their blessing.
Admiral Radigast was somewhat surprised when First Spacer Homasubi, sending a message couched in terms of formal courtesy, invited him over to the Mukunda for a face-to-face, person-to-person talk, on the subject of sending more marines down to Timber’s surface.
Charlie put on a long face and advised: “Wouldn’t trust him, sir.” God, but Charlie looked half dead.
The advice got a laugh from the admiral. It was his first effort along that line in a long time.
The two of them were standing in the transport bay, or what was left of it, with the admiral about to board the scoutship that was going to do shuttle service.
“What’s he going to do, Charlie, kidnap me? Hold me for motherless ransom? If he tries that, I’d advise you not to pay. Not that you’ve got anything to pay with anyway.”
“I don’t know. Admiral”
“I do. His motherless fleet’s in great shape. About all that’s left of mine is scouts and lifeboats and a cloud of thin gas, studded with a few hulks like this one we’re standing in. He can blow us out of space any time he wants to take the motherless trouble. No. It won’t be the Twin Worlds fleet that Mister First Spacer wants to talk about today.”
“But their political officer”
Radigast said what Delegate Zarnesti was. “Homasubi has to put up with that little bastard, I suppose. But I know a little bit about the first spacer too. I’d bet my bloody retirement pay that he’s the one in command over there, and intends to stay that way. And everyone on his ships knows it.”
“So what do you think he wants to talk about? Strategy and tactics to be used against the berserker? If he does, it’s a hopeful sign.”
“A motherless hopeful sign indeed. Though I don’t know if he’ll believe a motherless thing I tell him. Probably listen carefully to my advice, then do the bloody opposite.”
The admiral, seeing a gleam of hope for the survival of the remaining Twin Worlds population, briefly talked over the prospective conference with Acting President Gregor.
“Mister President? There’s a motherless high-level diplomatic task I think you ought to undertake while I’m away.”
“I might be able to guess what you have in mind.”
A joint task force of twenty Huvean marines, and about the same number of picked Twin Worlds people, all in civilian clothes and equipped with functional communicators, was landed secretly at night on the outskirts of Capital City. Promptly its members began working their way, in small groups, toward the city center.
The leaders were soon able to send back to their respective flagships confirmation that the former hostages were no longer in the Citadel. Exactly where they were was still to be discovered.
Luon, Reggie, and the remaining ha
ndful of former hostages, so far unrecognized as such by those around them, had got to a place where there seemed to be less fighting, At the moment they were listening to official reports stating where the latest berserker landings had taken place.
Reggie reached out a hand and stroked her fair curls. “I expect there’s going to be more fighting. My poor little girl.” He had a way of talking that sometimes made people think him slightly pompous; of course Luon knew that he really wasn’t like that at all.
She wasn’t even going to object to being called a little girl. She closed her eyes. “At least it won’t be my people fighting against yours.”
“I hope not. I hope by all the gods that we’re all done with that.”
“Of course it won’t! Both our fleets and armies will be firmly on the same side, if all goes well.”
Douras, who was close enough to overhear, savagely disputed that.
Luon, having watched at close range while one human fleet was ground up, wasn’t sure how much help the Huvean fleet was going to be. Whatever force the Huveans had brought couldn’t be much different from the Twin Worlds force that was already beaten, could it?
Reggie, having caught glimpses of helpless civilians being butchered by the alien machines, was feeling the urge to get into the battle himself. One difficulty was that he lacked any kind of military training.
Delegate Zarnesti suspiciously turned down Acting President Gregor’s bland invitation to visit the Morholt. The civilian talk was going to be a virtual meeting only.
Political Officer Zarnesti, preparing for his own conference with Gregor, was firmly against the first spacer having any discussion with the enemy, unless it was purely for the purpose of accepting the admiral’s surrender.
The PO also wondered aloud if Radigast might be coming aboard as a suicide bomber.
But he was overruled by Homasubi, before the admiral and whoever he was bringing with him (probably no one) arrived.
“He will have to be searched carefully on arrival, your security people can be trusted to see to that?”
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