Berserker's Planet

by Fred Saberhagen

  Schoenberg only shrugged. Suomi said: "I suppose there might be three or four. Not many can afford private space travel, and also have the inclination to hunt."

  De La Torre: "Since we all seem to have the inclination to hunt, it's lucky for us that we found Oscar."

  Oscar had no comment. Suomi asked De La Torre: "Do you work for him, by the way? You've never told me."

  "I have independent means, as they say. We met through business, about a year ago."

  Schoenberg had gone a little higher to ease the strain on the drive. At this altitude the world called Hunters' almost seemed to have let go of the ship again. On several of the wall screens the terminator, boundary line between night and day, could be seen slanting across cloud cover athwart the invisible equator far to the south. The south pole, well out of sight around the curvature of the world, was more than halfway through its approximately seven standard years of uninterrupted sunlight. There the sun was a standard year past its closest approach to the zenith, and was now spiralling lower and ever lower in the sky, one turn with every Hunterian day, or one about every twenty standard hours.

  A couple of standard years in the future the sun would set for its long night at the south pole and simultaneously rise above the horizon at the north pole. Right now the Hunterian arctic, locked in the last half of its long night, must look as lifeless as the surface of Pluto, buried under a vast freeze-out of a substantial portion of the planet's water. Up there the equinoctial dawn would bring the hunting season to its end; right now the season was at its height in the middle latitudes of the north, where the sun was just coming over the horizon, each day sweeping from east to west a little higher in the southern sky, bringing in the thaw. That region must be Schoenberg's destination.

  They came down into a world of icy twilight, amid slopes of bare enduring rock and eroding, fantastic glaciers, all towering above valleys filled with rushing water and greenly exploding life.

  Schoenberg found a walkable part of the landscape in which to set Orion down and some solid level rock to bear her weight. This time, before opening the hatch, he took a rifle from the small rack set just inside, and held it ready in his hands. The opening of the hatch admitted a steady polyphonic roar of rushing waters. Schoenberg drew a deep breath and stood in the opening, looking out. As on the earlier landing the others were behind him. Celeste and Barbara, not dressed for near-freezing weather, moved shivering to the rear. The air smelled of wetness and cold, of thawing time and alien life. The landscape stretched before them, too big and complex to be quickly taken in. The shadows of southern mountains reached up high on the mountains to the north.

  They were going out right away; there were several standard hours of daylight remaining here. Schoenberg began a routine check-out of arms and other equipment, and called for volunteers.

  Athena announced at once that she was ready. De La Torre said that he would like to have a go. Suomi, too-not that he really intended to kill anything that did not attack him. He felt a genuine need to get out of the ship for a while. Though all the tricks of environmental psychology had been used in the interior design of the Orion to ameliorate the reality of confinement, the trip had still cooped up six people in a small space for many weeks. Being aware of all the designer's tricks, Suomi was perhaps helped less than others by them. Barbara and Celeste elected not to try hunting today after Schoenberg had indicated he preferred it that way. He promised them a more peaceful picnic outing in the morning.

  "We'll go in pairs, then," Schoenberg announced when everything was ready. "Gus, you've hunted before, but not on this planet. If I may suggest, you and Athena take a stroll down the valley there." It spread before them as they looked out from the hatch, beginning thirty or forty meters from the rocky level where the ship rested, plunging after about a kilometer and a half of gentle, green-clad slope into an ice-clogged canyon down whose center a new torrent had begun to carve its way. "Down there at the lower end, where it slopes off into the canyon, the vegetation may well be head-high. There should be twelve or thirteen species of large herbivores."

  "In that little space?" De La Torre interrupted.

  "In that little space." Now that he was going hunting, Schoenberg sounded more relaxed and happy than at any time on the trip before. "Life doesn't just thaw out here in the spring-it explodes. There'll be large predators in that valley too, or I miss my guess. You don't want to run into one an arm's length away, so better skirt the taller growth. Carlos and I are going to take the upper path." This climbed a rocky slope on the other side of the ship. Suomi, during their descent, had glimpsed higher meadows in that direction. "We may find something really hungry up there, just out of a high cave and on its way down into the valleys for its first meal in a year or two."

  Boots, warm clothing, weapons, communicators, a few emergency items-all in order. Suomi was the last to get down the ramp and crunch his new boots on Hunterian soil. Almost before his feet were off the ramp it began to fold up and retract. If the playgirls stayed inside with the hatch closed they would be perfectly safe until the men returned.

  Athena and Gus waved and set off on the lower way, tendrils of grass-like groundcover whipping about their boots. "Lead on up the path," said Schoenberg, with an uphill gesture to Suomi. "I'm sure your nerves are okay-just a matter of principle that I don't like a novice hunter with a loaded firearm walking behind me, when something to shoot at may jump out ahead." The voice was charming if the words were not, and they were said with a happy and friendly look. All was right with Schoenberg at the moment, obviously; he was eager to get going.

  There was not really a path to follow, of course, but Suomi moved on up the spine of hill that formed the natural route Schoenberg must have meant to indicate.

  Suomi as he climbed was soon lost in admiration of the country around him. Wherever the melting away of the winter's ice had left a few square centimeters of soil exposed, rank vegetation had sprung up. There were no tree-sized plants in evidence, nothing that seemed to have begun to grow more than a few days or weeks ago. In most places the grass- and vine-like things were no more than waist high, but frequently they grew so thickly that no glimpse of soil could be seen between the stems. The plants were striving madly, ruthlessly, for water and warmth and sunlight, leaping into growth, making what they could of the wet season before the long searing drought of summer began.

  He paused, coming in sight of a meadow where man-sized creatures like giant slugs were moving, voraciously feeding on the plants, the wrinkles visibly stretching out of their grayish, hairless bodies.

  "Rime-worms," said Schoenberg, who came up close behind him and disregarded the creatures after the first glance. "Look sharp now, there may be something after them."

  "Do any of the larger forms freeze solidly through the night?"

  "Biologists I've talked to say it's not possible.

  But I don't think anyone knows for sure." Now that they had stopped, Schoenberg was studying the country with binoculars. They had put a little rocky bulge of hill between themselves and the spaceship, and were now out of sight and sound of anything manmade save what they carried with them. The tracks they had left behind them in occasional patches of slush or muddy turf were the only signs of past human activity. The world around them had been made virgin by death and resurrection.

  Suomi was studying the country too, but not with binoculars and not for game. The yellowed sun was skimming a low point in the mountainous horizon, and seemed on the point of setting; actually there must still be an hour or so of daylight left. On the other side of a wide valley a glacier groaned, shed a few tons of cornice, broke out with a clear new waterfall. The organ-notes of older cataracts held steady in the distance. Gradually, as Suomi began to comprehend the scene fully, as he got beyond the stage of simple elation at getting outdoors again, he realized that he had never before beheld a scene of nature so beautiful and awesome, nothing that even came close. Not even the wonders and terrors of space, which, when they could be p
erceived at all, were beyond the scale and grasp of human appreciation. This thundering world of mountains and valleys, with its exploding life, was not beyond the human scale, not quite.

  Schoenberg was less content with what he saw. Of predators he had evidently discovered no sign. "Let's move on a little," he said tersely, putting his binoculars away. Suomi led on again. When they had gone a few hundred meters more, Schoenberg called another halt, this time at the foot of a steep slope.

  After another short session with the binoculars, Schoenberg pointed up the hill and said: "I'm going up there and have a look around. Let me do this alone, I want to be quiet and inconspicuous about it. Stay here, don't move around, keep your eyes open. There may be something on our trail, stalking us, and you may get a good shot just by waiting."

  With a faint thrill of danger, small enough to be enjoyable, Suomi looked back along the way they had come. Nothing moved but the distant, harmless rime-worms. "All right."

  He sat down and watched Schoenberg up the slope and out of sight over the top of it. He then swiveled around on his rocky seat, enjoying the absence of people in every direction. It was delightful to be alone, for the first time in-it seemed like the first time in his life. Isolation could be accomplished in the ship, of course, but the others' bodies and minds were always there, one was always aware of them only a few meters away. Suomi touched the communicator on his belt. The channels among hunters and between the hunters and the ship were alive but so far totally unused. Everyone was enjoying the physical and psychic separation.

  Time passed. Schoenberg was gone longer than Suomi had expected. A thin shadow came over the nearby scenery as the sun declined behind a distant rim of ice: Without preamble a magnificent glacier-beast appeared before Suomi's eyes, perhaps two hundred fifty meters off, across a gentle slope of detritus fallen from an extension of the slope at the foot of which Suomi waited. It was not the direction from which Schoenberg had thought a predator was likely to come, nor was the creature looking toward Suomi. It was facing downhill, turning its head back and forth. Suomi raised his binoculars, and recalled his reading. An excellent specimen, male, probably second-cycle, just awakened from the second hibernation of its life into its full prime of strength and ferocity. The hollowness of loins and ribs was visible despite the thickness of orange-yellow fur. It was rather larger than an Earthly tiger.

  Suomi, without getting to his feet, raised his rifle in perfectly steady hands and aimed. He was only playing. He lowered the weapon again.

  "Long shot for a beginner," said Schoenberg's voice from close behind him, a little way up the slope. The cataract-roar must swallow the voice before the beast could hear it, even as it had kept Suomi from hearing Schoenberg's approach among the rocks. "But a clean one. If you don't want to try it I'll have a crack."

  Suomi knew without turning that Schoenberg would already be raising his rifle to take aim. Still without looking around, Suomi lifted his own weapon once more and fired (pop, a little louder than in the shooting gallery, and now at full power there was a perceptible kick), deliberately aiming ahead of the animal to frighten it away, blasting up a spray of ice. Catlike, the creature crouched, then turned toward the earthmen its alienly unreadable face. The men who lived on Hunters' were men of Earth in their ancestry and distant history; it was easy to forget how alien all the other life-forms here must be.

  Now the glacier-beast was running, crossing the slope in great graceful catlike bounds. But it was not fleeing from the men as it should, as Suomi had unthinkingly assumed it must. In pure innocence of the powers it faced it was coming now to kill and eat him. Insane hunger drove it on. Its sprinting taloned feet hurled up rocks from the talus slope, mixed with a powdering of snow.

  Shoot. Whether Schoenberg was calling out the word, or he himself, or whether it only hung thought-projected in the freezing, timeless air, Suomi did not know. He knew only that death was coming for him, visible, and incarnate, and his hands were good for nothing but dealing out symbols, manipulating writing instruments, paintbrushes, electronic styluses, making an impression on the world at second or third remove, and his muscles were paralyzed now and he was going to die. He could not move against the mindless certainty he saw in the animal's eyes, the certainty that he was meat.

  Schoenberg's rifle sounded, a repetitive, seemingly ineffectual popping not far from Suomi's right ear. Invisible fists of god-like power slammed at the charging animal, met the beautiful energy of its charge with a greater, more brutal force. The force-blows tore out gobs of orange-yellow fur, and distorted the shapes of muscle and bone beneath. The huge body shed its grace and its momentum. Still it seemed to be trying to reach the men. Now its body broke open along a line of penetration wounds, spilling out insides like some red-stuffed toy. Clear in Suomi's vision was an open paw with knife-long claws, arching high on the end of a forelimb and then striking down into a puddle of slush not ten meters from his boots.

  When the beast was still, Schoenberg put another shot carefully into the back of its head for good measure, then slung his rifle and got out his hologram camera. Then, after looking at the gory, broken body from several angles, he shook his head and put the camera away again. He spoke reassuringly to Suomi, seeming not in the least surprised or upset by Suomi's behavior. He was offhandedly gracious when Suomi at last managed to stammer out a kind of thanks. And that in its way was the most contemptuous attitude that Schoenberg could have taken.

  IV

  Early on the morning of the Tournament's second day, Leros, the priest in charge, led the surviving thirty-two contestants on an easy march of some five kilometers, up from the flat land by the river where the first round had been fought to a much higher meadow resting in Godsmountain's lap. At this new site an advance party of priests and workers were already at work, preparing a new fighting ring of cleared, hard-trodden earth, and a new field altar for the image of Thorun that was brought up on a cart just in front of Leros and the warriors. The slave-laborers were sweating, earning their rations today, for their numbers had been greatly reduced, many being sent to other projects. Only half the original number of warriors now required service, of course, and as always there was plenty of other labor to be performed in the citadel-city above and the tributary lands below.

  The plan of the Tournament, handed down to Leros by the High Priest Andreas and" his Inner Circle of councillors, required that each successive round of fighting take place closer to the top of the mountain than the one before. The purpose, as Andreas had explained it, was symbolic. But Leros observed now that the plan had practical advantages as well. The offal of each camp would be promptly left behind, the latrine, the leavings of the cook-tents, the remnants of the funeral pyre.

  The work of readying the new site was completed shortly after the fighting men arrived, and an acolyte handed over the day's new vellum-written lists to Leros. He called the men into assembly, and, when some formalities had been gotten out of the way, read the lists out:

  Arthur of Chesspa

  Bram the Beardless of Consiglor

  Brunn of Bourzoe

  Charles the Upright

  Col Renba

  Efim Samdeviatoff

  Farley of Eikosk

  Geoff Symbolor of Symbolorville

  Giles the Treacherous of Endross Swamp

  Gladwin Vanucci

  Hal Coppersmith

  Homer Garamond of Running Water

  Jud Isaksson of Ardstoy Hill

  Kanret Jon of Jonsplace

  LeNos of the Highlands

  M'Gamba Mim

  Mesthles of the Windy Vale

  Octans Bukk of Pachuka

  Omir Kelsumba

  Otis Kitamura

  Pernsol Muledriver of Weff's Plain

  Polydorus the Foul

  Rafael Sandoval

  Rahim Sosias

  Rudolph Thadbury

  Shang Ti the Awesome

  Siniuju of the Evergreen Slope

  Thomas the Grabber

 
Travers Sandakan of Thieves' Road

  Vann the Nomad

  Vladerlin Bain of Sanfa Town

  Wull Narvaez

  Before giving the signal for the start of the second round's first fight, Leros took a moment to look around him at his world. There was much in it to make him feel content. From the high meadow where he stood the prospect was one of long reaches of cultivated land below, kilometer after kilometer of field and pasture, with here and there an orchard, a cluster of houses, a patch of raw forest or a string of trees along a watercourse. It was a peaceful and malleable world, one of peasants and crops and artisans, obediently serving the master of violence wh6 dwelt on the heights above. There was, of course, the Brotherhood to flaw it. After yesterday's posted insult nothing further had been heard from them… there was also, more naggingly, the fact that the Inner Circle seemed to be closed to Leros, and the office of High Priest, therefore, forever unattainable. Why should a priest like Lachaise, for example, who was far more an artisan than a fighting man, be a member of the Inner Circle, when Leros and others more deserving were kept out?

  At any rate the Tournament was going well. That was what mattered most. Perhaps if it was a great success he would at last be promoted-and there was no reason why it should not smoothly run its course. At the end of it the great gate of the city would open for the winner as the maidens strewed flowers before him and he was conducted in triumph through the streets to the Temple; and that would stand open for him also; and then the inner curtains of chain-mail would part-as they never had for Leros-and the secret doors, and the winner would be let in where Leros himself had never been to the place where gods walked with the fallen heroes who once were mortal men, where only the High Priest and the Inner Circle came to mediate between them and the world of men.