Berserker Throne

by Fred Saberhagen

  But the Prince was frowning, even as his assistant took his tools energetically in hand. To Harivarman himself, the necessity of explaining some of the technical details of the escape project to a helper, putting the whole idea into plain words, had been enough to make it begin to seem impossible.

  And the more fiercely Harivarman tried now to reconvince himself, the more unlikely the whole scheme of using the drive unit began to appear in his thoughts. It was an interstellar drive they were concerned with here, and not the motor of a groundcar. It was even a drive of a largely unfamiliar type.

  For a few moments the Prince hovered on the brink of changing his mind suddenly, of telling Lescar to abandon the project and go back to the house and forget what he had seen. But the Prince did not do so. Instinct forbade that too. The trouble was, thought Harivarman, that they had no choice. The more time he had in which to consider the political situation, the more firmly he became convinced that now, with the Empress gone, his enemies were soon going to attempt to finish him off, one way or another.

  A day of intensive effort passed, and then another, with the two men working busily—most of the time not really side by side, but just out of each other's sight. Lescar's job in its present stage could rarely benefit from two pairs of hands, and the Prince was still keeping his own work secret even from Lescar. Harivarman labored in the adjoining room, now tracing the paths of control signals through the body and the main brain of the berserker, seeking additional memory banks, looking for more confirmation of his find. The indications that he found were intriguing, but still somewhat ambiguous. A large part of the thing's brain was evidently inaccessible, inside an inner seal of armor impervious to any of the tools he had on hand. In there, if anywhere, he thought, would also be a destructor device, a booby-trap.

  The Prince had contrived to keep the berserker covered most of the time with a sheet of opaque plastic, material he sometimes used as a background or light-reflector when making photographs. Lescar, on the couple of occasions when he happened to glance into the room where the Prince was working, saw nothing that startled him particularly. Harivarman had implied that he was trying to get the astrogation system of a Dardanian lifeboat working.

  Throughout these days of hard work the Prince actually grew increasingly skeptical regarding his world-shaking discovery. Or perhaps he was not so much skeptical of the discovery itself as of its immediate value to him. To announce a revelation of such magnitude now—especially if it were quickly challenged, as any such claim would be—would lay him open to charges of making up wild lies in an effort to save himself. And there was no way his claim could be quickly proven.

  But, if he had not discovered what he thought he had—then what had he found?

  He badly needed to talk to someone, and he could not talk to anyone. Not yet. Not even to Lescar.

  And doubt still whispered to him that something was not right. A kernel of unease still nagged at him. Perhaps it was only because he had to bear his knowledge all alone.

  Harivarman found himself continually being struck by the fact that his discovered control code, if such it truly was, appeared to be so easy to use. There was even a fairly wide choice of frequency and modulation of the signal. The signal itself, suitably compressed, could be transmitted in a fraction of a second, complex though the code-sequence was and virtually impossible to arrive at by accident or through trial and error.

  Of course, ease of use, if you thought about it, was really logical enough. If you had a control code for berserkers at all, you'd certainly want it to be easily and quickly usable.

  All very logical, but yet something about it nagged.

  By the second day after Lescar had been added to the work force, something like a routine had been established, and the two men put in several hours of effort without anything out of the way happening. By this time Harivarman was ready for a break, and he had left his own job for the moment, as he did periodically, to confer with Lescar. The Prince was standing, almost drifting, in the room where his assistant labored, though he had not joined Lescar inside the inflated shelter. With the transparent wall of the shelter between them, the two men were discussing, in the private code of gestures they had worked out, the length of time a flyer might have to be immobilized to fit it for escape.

  Suddenly through the stone around them there came a faint vibration, frightening because it was unexpected and at first inexplicable. Harivarman could feel it through the one hand with which he was gripping the wall, holding himself in position.

  Simultaneously Harivarman observed an odd change, as of a moving shadow, in the light that shone through the imperfectly closed doorway from the next room. That shadow would move in his nightmares for the remainder of his life.

  In the next moment, before Harivarman could speak or move, the connecting door between the rooms burst fully open. That intrusion was accompanied in vacuum-silence by some destruction of the adjacent wall, as a large object that was too wide for the doorway came through it anyway on six long mechanical legs, stone bursting and erupting around it. The berserker's half-gutted belly still hung open, a cable or two trailing from the site of Harivarman's surgery. The legs were all unfolded now and at least four of them working, performing at least well enough to propel the huge berserker at the speed of a walking man.

  If Lescar cried out, the sound was not broadcast on radio and Harivarman did not hear it. Harivarman did not spare a moment to look at his helper, but instead took one look at what was coming through the doorway and sprang for the doorway leading out to the corridor. It was an instinctive effort to reach . . . no, not the flyer. Nothing in the flyer would be useful to him now. It was a prisoners' vehicle, weaponless.

  Even as the Prince sprang to escape, he saw from the corner of his eye how the thing turned after him; it might still be powerful enough to brush stone walls aside, but this first real sight of it in unimpeded motion suggested that it was crippled, and terribly slow for a berserker. Now Lescar in his shelter might be given time to get his helmet on, before the plastic was ripped away from around him.

  The Prince scrambled through the door and leaped from its outer sill. He flew across the corridor, caromed off the far wall, and in another practiced low-g dive spun back again directly for the doorway of the berserker's original room. He had left his recording of the supposed control signal in there.

  Meanwhile the berserker, perhaps only belatedly recognizing the presence of another life-unit, had turned back after Lescar. Reaching out one of its limbs it tore the shelter down, the ruptured plastic exploding in a puff of briefly visible atmospheric fog. Harivarman, reentering the room at top speed, holding what he hoped was a control device in hand, was just in time to catch the faint wavefront of that puffy blast, and to see that Lescar had indeed managed to somehow close up his helmet.

  In both hands the Prince raised like a gun the small recorder-transmitter that held what he had deduced was the control code. He transmitted the signal.

  The machine, just on the point of seizing Lescar, halted. It had actually caught him by one arm before the signal reached it, but the movement of the berserker's arm that would have crushed the man if it had been followed through was instead aborted. The slowed effort of the metal arm only launched Lescar gently into a harmless hurtling flight, a flight that ended when his master caught him in midspace as he went by.

  That last aborted movement of the berserker had left its own body spinning gently. It brought itself to a neat and almost gentle halt, a giant spider hanging against the big room's opposite wall. It clung there, obviously still in control of itself, no doubt still alert, but making no further demonstration of hostility.

  The Prince clutched his servant in his powerful arms, damping the desperate struggles that the smaller man was making in his blind panic. Eventually, talking on radio, wrestling, soothing, Harivarman got Lescar under control, held back from crazy flight.

  According to Harivarman's elementary understanding of how the code should wor
k, the berserker might now be susceptible to spoken orders transmitted on the same frequency as the first disabling code had been.

  Lescar had frozen in terror and shock. Still gripping him cautiously with one hand, the Prince managed to turn on his own helmet microphone to that frequency. Then, pointing with his free arm at the machine, Harivarman said: "Remain there. Do not move until I order you to move." It scarcely occurred to him as a possibility that the machine might not be able to understand his speech. His language was, he knew, not greatly changed from one of the human tongues that had been in common use on a number of worlds in the days of Dardanian greatness; berserkers, like humans, made an effort to learn the languages of the enemy.

  The machine remained.

  The Prince still held on to Lescar, who was still in pitiable shape though not seriously injured physically. The man was cowering, and his face seen through the helmet glass looked stunned; Harivarman could feel the tremors in the other's body even through their two suits and his own gloves. "You're safe now, Lescar. It's not going to move."

  Harivarman was not yet trembling himself. He thought that he might, later, when he could afford the luxury. Now, dragging his servant with him, not taking his eyes from the inert berserker, Harivarman backed from the room out into the corridor. Lescar did not resist, or try to help.

  His master had him inside the flyer, both their helmets off in breathable air, before the servant spoke. "Your Honor, I will go and get weapons. Somehow. Then we must destroy it."

  "Later, my old friend. Later. For now, this moment, do nothing. Just wait here and rest. Will you promise me?"

  It took the Prince a few more minutes of talking, persuading, calming, before he was sure that Lescar was going to follow orders strictly.

  Then Harivarman resealed his own helmet, and went back to face the thing that he had found, and the thing that he had done.

  Chapter 9

  In the process of soothing and coaxing Lescar out of his near-catatonic state the Prince had gained time himself to recover from the ghastly initial shock. He saw Lescar settled safely into the flyer. Then, feeling himself more intensely alive than he had felt for years, he returned to the room where he had left the berserker, to again confront the deadly thing that he had evidently been able to bring under his control.

  Looking through the doorway from the corridor, he saw that the machine was exactly where he had left it a few minutes earlier, clinging like a spider against the opposite wall of the big room.

  The Prince stood in the doorway. He keyed in his suit radio's transmitter on absolute minimum power, carefully choosing the same frequency at which he had sent the immobilizing code. It was not a frequency in common use within the Fortress, and with the low power he was using it was unlikely that Lescar in the flyer, or any other living listener, was going to pick up this transmission.

  Speaking softly, again raising one arm to point at the machine, he demanded of it: "Do you understand me?"

  The answer in his helmet was low, but clearly, slowly spoken. "I do." The tones of that voice were strange, fragmented and uneven. The Prince had heard the like often enough in his years of warfare. That voice had been put together as the berserkers in the old days had fashioned human voices for themselves, electronically melding words and syllables together from the recorded speech, the preserved emotions, of some of their multitudes of human prisoners.

  Harivarman felt a faint shudder go through him. It was as if something in the space around him had sucked heat out of his suit. He said: "Use the minimum effective power in your transmissions, please." Then, marveling at that last word he had just used, he added: "That is an order."

  "Order acknowledged," the berserker answered. Then it paused for two seconds before it asked him bluntly: "Are you goodlife?"

  Somehow that shook the Prince, and turned his fear to anger. He felt a wild impulse to deny the accusation, to clear up any misunderstanding that the berserker might have on that point. But he was only talking to a machine.

  Before he could speak to the damned thing at all he had to clear his throat. It had been a long time, he thought, a decade or two at least, since he, Prince Harivarman, had been so affected by nervousness.

  When his throat was clear he demanded of the berserker: "Are you ready to receive further orders now?"

  "I am standing by for orders." It was not going to press him, then, to respond to the question about his goodlife status. Harivarman felt relieved, and at the same time somehow guilty for the feeling.

  He said: "I order that from now on you do nothing harmful to me or any other human." His throat felt dry again, and again he had to pause before he added: "Unless or until I specifically order otherwise."

  "Order acknowledged." The broken-sounding syllables came out eerily, possibly the words of human prisoners that it had killed a thousand years ago. Its voice-tones chimed and changed, as if in mockery.

  "And it will be obeyed? You will obey that order?"

  "That was my meaning. I will obey. I must. I am constrained to do so."

  Harivarman relaxed slightly, clinging with both gauntleted hands to the stone frame of his doorway. Now his suit was too hot, and he could feel himself sweating inside it.

  So, what was he going to do now? He felt exhausted. And Lescar needed to be taken back to the house, to have a chance to pull himself together. And it was necessary to find out what was happening in the City, to know if those who would be coming to arrange his death had yet arrived. . . .

  And now, the berserker. It appeared that Harivarman was simply going to have to go away and leave it here, as it was, still essentially functional.

  "I order you," he said, "to remain in this room until I return. I order you also to transmit no signals of any kind till I come back."

  "Orders acknowledged."

  "And harm no one. No unit of human life."

  "Order acknowledged."

  "Good," he said, and closed the door on the damned thing, and wished that there were gravity enough for him to lean and sag against the door.

  Anyway, he reassured himself, the chance of anyone else stumbling on it out here was astronomically remote. If no one had found it here in two hundred years . . . He reminded himself to emphasize that point to Lescar.

  Still, Harivarman found himself almost unable to simply leave. He was tempted to weld shut both doors of the room. Only the vivid memory of the death machine breaking its way through the stone-walled doorway between rooms kept him from wasting time on that.

  Leaving the doors of both rooms closed, all traces of his investigation, as far as possible, removed from the corridor, Harivarman rejoined his servant in the flyer. When he climbed into the vehicle's cabin, Lescar looked at him in silence. On the little man's face was a haunted expression the Prince had never seen there before.

  The Prince sighed to himself. Managing Lescar in the immediate future was not going to be easy. Still, at the moment, Harivarman felt oddly confident and happy. It was his usual response when there was a real and immediate challenge to be faced.

  He raised a hand to the control panel, to start the flyer, then let his hand fall without touching the controls. "Well, Lescar? Speak, tell me all of your objections."

  Lescar only shook his head, a slow, slight movement.

  The Prince, making his voice urgent, full of soft energy, said: "You see, don't you, what a monumental discovery I have made? I found a way to stop the thing in its tracks—to make it obey my orders."

  Lescar's lips moved; the words were so low that Harivarman could not make them out. His eyes still stared at the Prince hopelessly.

  Harivarman, gripping him by the arm, giving him a little shake, persisted. "Do you see what this could mean?"

  The servant's eyes turned away, and he was silent. And now Harivarman was distracted from his task of management. There was a faint new illumination growing in the corridor around their flyer. It signaled the imminent arrival of another flyer, or at least a vehicle of some kind.

&n
bsp; The two men looked at each other. Lescar with a slight head motion indicated mutely: I'll be all right. Harivarman left him at once, closed his helmet and cycled himself out through the flyer's small airlock. In a long, gently curving dive he projected himself to where the approaching Templar staff car had just drifted to a stop. He wanted to meet its occupants, whoever they were, before they got out and started nosing around, noticing nearby doors and rooms and other things. Only one vehicle had arrived. If they were coming to arrest me, thought Harivarman hurriedly, there'd be more of them . . . but he wasn't really sure of that. He supposed it might depend on whether the new arrest warrant from Salutai or the Council message addressed him as Prince or only General. All a matter of status.

  Commander Blenheim, wearing a spacesuit marked with the insignia of her authority, her helmet open, was seated in the rear of the newly arrived staff car. He could see her watching his approach. When Harivarman appeared just outside her window, she motioned for him to use the airlock and join her. Already sitting beside her in the back seat was a young man, unknown to Harivarman, and also wearing a spacesuit, though without insignia of rank. Like the commander he was wearing his helmet open. Up front in the driver's position, separated from the rear by a glass panel, sat a driver-bodyguard with sergeant's stripes on the shoulders of his suit, looking dutifully straight ahead.

  The Prince cycled himself in through the airlock. This staff car was a somewhat larger vehicle than his own flyer, and notably more luxurious as well, with a touch of artificial gravity laid on in the interior. Down, as Harivarman entered, was suddenly toward the tiny cabin's deck.

  "I've been rather curious about what you do out here," was Commander Anne Blenheim's greeting.

  "I'll gladly include some of these sites in the next tour," the Prince replied almost absently, easing himself into a seat facing her. He realized that he must sound and look happier than the last time this woman had seen him, and he wondered what she, who probably had a good grasp of the political situation, might make of that.