Berserker b-1

by Fred Saberhagen

  It was more than a galley, he saw when he reached it—it was meant to be a place where arty colonial ladies could sit and twitter over tea when they grew weary of staring at pictures. The Frans Hals had been built as a traveling museum; then the war of life against berserker machines had grown hot around Sol, and BuCulture had wrongly decided that Earth’s art treasures would be safer if shipped away to Tau Epsilon. The Frans was ideally suited for such a mission, and for almost nothing else.

  Looking further forward from the entrance to the galley, Herron could see that the door to the crew compartment had been battered down, but he did not go to look inside. Not that it would bother him to look, he told himself; he was as indifferent to horror as he was to almost all other human things. The Frans’s crew of two were in there, or what was left of them after they had tried to fight off the berserker’s boarding machines. Doubtless they had preferred death to capture.

  Herron preferred nothing. Now he was probably the only living being—apart from a few bacteria—within half a light year; and he was pleased to discover that his situation did not terrify him; that his long-growing weariness of life was not just a pose to fool himself. His metal captor followed him into the galley, watching while he set the kitchen devices to work.

  “Still no suggestions?” Herron asked it. “Maybe you’re smarter than I thought.”

  “I am what men call a berserker,” the man-shaped thing squeaked at him suddenly, in an ineffectual-sounding voice. “I have captured your ship, and I will talk with you through this small machine you see. Do you grasp my meaning?”

  “I understand as well as I need to.” Herron had not yet seen the berserker itself, but he knew it was probably drifting a few miles away, or a few hundred or a thousand miles, from the ship it had captured. Captain Hanus had tried desperately to escape it, diving the Frans into a cloud of dark nebula where no ship or machine could move faster than light, and where the advantage in speed lay with the smaller hull.

  The chase had been at speeds up to a thousand miles a second. Forced to remain in normal space, the berserker could not steer its bulk among the meteoroids and gas-wisps as well as the Frans’s radar-computer system could maneuver the fleeing ship. But the berserker had sent an armed launch of its own to take up the chase, and the weaponless Frans had had no chance.

  Now, dishes of food, hot and cold, popped out on a galley table, and Herron bowed to the machine. “Will you join me?”

  “I need no organic food.”

  Herron sat down with a sigh. “In the end,” he told the machine, “you’ll find that lack of humor is as pointless as laughter. Wait and see if I’m not right.” He began to eat, and found himself not so hungry as he had thought. Evidently his body still feared death—this surprised him a little.

  “Do you normally function in the operation of this ship?” the machine asked.

  “No,” he said, making himself chew and swallow. “I’m not much good at pushing buttons.” A peculiar thing that had happened was nagging at Herron. When capture was only minutes away, Captain Hanus had come dashing aft from the control room, grabbing Herron and dragging him along in a tearing hurry, aft past all the stored art treasures.

  “Herron, listen—if we don’t make it, see here?” Tooling open a double hatch in the stern compartment, the captain had pointed into what looked like a short padded tunnel, the diameter of a large drainpipe. “The regular lifeboat won’t get away, but this might.”

  “Are you waiting for the Second Officer, Captain, or leaving us now?”

  “There’s room for only one, you fool, and I’m not the one who’s going.”

  “You mean to save me? Captain, I’m touched!” Herron laughed, easily and naturally. “But don’t put yourself out.”

  “You idiot. Can I trust you?” Hanus lunged into the boat, his hands flying over its controls. Then he backed out, glaring like a madman. “Listen. Look here. This button is the activator; now I’ve set things up so the boat should come out in the main shipping lanes and start sending a distress signal. Chances are she’ll be picked up safely then. Now the controls are set, only this activator button needs to be pushed down—”

  The berserker’s launch had attacked at that moment, with a roar like mountains falling on the hull of the ship. The lights and artificial gravity had failed and then come abruptly back. Piers Herron had been thrown on his side, his wind knocked out. He had watched while the captain, regaining his feet and moving like a man in a daze, had closed the hatch on the mysterious little boat again and staggered forward to his control room.

  “Why are you here?” the machine asked Herron.

  He dropped the forkful of food he had been staring at. He didn’t have to hesitate before answering the question. “Do you know what BuCulture is? They’re the fools in charge of art, on Earth. Some of them, like a lot of other fools, think I’m a great painter. They worship me. When I said I wanted to leave Earth on this ship, they made it possible.

  “I wanted to leave because almost everything that is worthwhile in any true sense is being removed from Earth. A good part of it is on this ship. What’s left behind on the planet is only a swarm of animals, breeding and dying, fighting—”

  “Why did you not try to fight or hide when my machines boarded this ship?”

  “Because it would have done no good.”

  When the berserker’s prize crew had forced their way in through an airlock, Herron had been setting up his easel in what was to have been a small exhibition hall, and he had paused to watch the uninvited visitors file past. One of the man-shaped metal things, the one through which he was being questioned now, had stayed to stare at him through its lenses while the others had moved on forward to the crew compartment.

  “Herron!” The intercom had shouted. “Try, Herron, please! You know what to do!” Clanging noises followed, and gunshots and curses.

  What to do, Captain? Why, yes. The shock of events and the promise of imminent death had stirred up some kind of life in Piers Herron. He looked with interest at the alien shapes and lines of his inanimate captor, the inhuman cold of deep space frosting over its metal here in the warm cabin. Then he turned away from it and began to paint the berserker, trying to catch not the outward shape he had never seen, but what he felt of its inwardness. He felt the emotionless deadliness of its watching lenses, boring into his back. The sensation was faintly pleasurable, like cold spring sunshine.

  “What is good?” the machine asked Herron, standing over him in the galley while he tried to eat.

  He snorted. “You tell me.”

  It took him literally. “To serve the cause of what men call death is good. To destroy life is good.”

  Herron pushed his nearly full plate into a disposal slot and stood up. “You’re almost right about life being worthless—but even if you were entirely right, why so enthusiastic? What is there praiseworthy about death?” Now his thoughts surprised him as his lack of appetite had.

  “I am entirely right,” said the machine.

  For long seconds Herron stood still, as if thinking, though his mind was almost completely blank. “No,” he said finally, and waited for a bolt to strike him.

  “In what do you think I am wrong?” it asked.

  “I’ll show you.” He led it out of the galley, his hands sweating and his mouth dry. Why wouldn’t the damned thing kill him and have done?

  The paintings were racked row on row and tier on tier; there was no room in the ship for more than a few to be displayed in a conventional way. Herron found the drawer he wanted and pulled it open so the portrait inside swung into full view, lights springing on around it to bring out the rich colors beneath the twentieth-century statglass coating.

  “This is where you’re wrong,” Herron said.

  The man-shaped thing’s scanner studied the portrait for perhaps fifteen seconds. “Explain what you are showing me,” it said.

  “I bow to you!” Herron did so. “You admit ignorance! You even ask an intelligible question,
if one that is somewhat too broad. First, tell me what you see here.”

  “I see the image of a life-unit, its third spatial dimension of negligible size as compared to the other two. The image is sealed inside a protective jacket transparent to the wavelengths used by the human eye. The life-unit imaged is, or was, an adult male apparently in good functional condition, garmented in a manner I have not seen before. What I take to be one garment is held before him—”

  “You see a man with a glove,” Herron cut in, wearying of his bitter game. “That is the title, Man with a Glove. Now what do you say about it?”

  There was a pause of twenty seconds. “Is it an attempt to praise life, to say that life is good?”

  Looking now at Titian’s thousand-year-old more-than-masterpiece, Herron hardly heard the machine’s answer; he was thinking helplessly and hopelessly of his own most recent work.

  “Now you will tell me what it means,” said the machine without emphasis.

  Herron walked away without answering, leaving the drawer open.

  The berserker’s mouthpiece walked at his side. “Tell me what it means or you will be punished.”

  “If you can pause to think, so can I.” But Herron’s stomach had knotted up at the threat of punishment, seeming to feel that pain mattered even more than death. Herron had great contempt for his stomach.

  His feet took him back to his easel. Looking at the discordant and brutal line that a few minutes ago had pleased him, he now found it as disgusting as everything else he had tried to do in the past year.

  The berserker asked: “What have you made here?”

  Herron picked up a brush he had forgotten to clean, and wiped at it irritably.” It is my attempt to get at your essence, to capture you with paint and canvas as you have seen those humans captured.” He waved at the storage racks. “My attempt has failed, as most do.”

  There was another pause, which Herron did not try to time.

  “An attempt to praise me?”

  Herron broke the spoiled brush and threw it down. “Call it what you like.”

  This time the pause was short, and at its end the machine did not speak, but turned away and walked in the direction of the airlock. Some of its fellows clanked past to join it. From the direction of the airlock there began to come sounds like those of heavy metal being worked and hammered. The interrogation seemed to be over for the time being.

  Herron’s thoughts wanted to be anywhere but on his work or on his fate, and they returned to what Hanus had shown him, or tried to show him. Not a regular lifeboat, but she might get away, the captain had said. All it needs now is to press the button.

  Herron started walking, smiling faintly as he realized that if the berserker was as careless as it seemed, he might possibly escape it.

  Escape to what? He couldn’t paint any more, if he ever could. All that really mattered to him now was here, and on other ships leaving Earth.

  Back at the storage rack, Herron swung the Man with a Glove out so its case came free from the rack and became a handy cart. He wheeled the portrait aft. There might be yet one worthwhile thing he could do with his life.

  The picture was massive in its statglass shielding, but he thought he could fit it into the boat.

  As an itch might nag a dying man, the question of what the captain had been intending with the boat nagged Herron. Hanus hadn’t seemed worried about Herron’s fate, but instead had spoken of trusting Herron . . .

  Nearing the stern, out of sight of the machines, Herron passed a strapped-down stack of crated statuary, and heard a noise, a rapid feeble pounding.

  It took several minutes to find and open the proper case. When he lifted the lid with its padded lining, a girl wearing a coverall sat up, her hair all wild as if standing in terror.

  “Are they gone?” She had bitten at her fingers and nails until they were bleeding. When he didn’t answer at once, she repeated her question again and again, in a rising whine.

  “The machines are still here,” he said at last.

  Literally shaking in her fear, she climbed out of the case. “Where’s Gus? Have they taken him?”

  “Gus?” But he thought he was beginning to understand.

  “Gus Hanus, the captain. He and I are—he was trying to save me, to get me away from Earth.”

  “I’m quite sure he’s dead,” said Herron. “He fought the machines.”

  Her bleeding fingers clutched at her lower face. “They’ll kill us, too! Or worse! What can we do?”

  “Don’t mourn your lover so deeply,” he said. But the girl seemed not to hear him; her wild eyes looked this way and that, expecting the machines. “Help me with this picture,” he told her calmly. “Hold the door there for me.”

  She obeyed as if half-hypnotized, not questioning what he was doing.

  “Gus said there’d be a boat,” she muttered to herself. “If he had to smuggle me down to Tau Epsilon he was going to use a special little boat—” She broke off, staring at Herron, afraid that he had heard her and was going to steal her boat. As indeed he was.

  When he had the painting in the stern compartment, he stopped. He looked long at the Man with a Glove, but in the end all he could seem to see was that the fingertips of the ungloved hand were not bitten bloody.

  Herron took the shivering girl by the arm and pushed her into the tiny boat. She huddled there in dazed terror; she was not good-looking. He wondered what Hanus had seen in her.

  “There’s room for only one,” he said, and she shrank and bared her teeth as if afraid he meant to drag her out again.” After I close the hatch, push that button there, the activator. Understand?

  That she understood at once. He dogged the double hatch shut and waited. Only about three seconds passed before there came a scraping sound that he supposed meant the boat had gone.

  Nearby was a tiny observation blister, and Herron put his head into it and watched the stars turn beyond the dark blizzard of the nebula. After a while he saw the through the blizzard, turning with the stars, black and rounded and bigger than any mountain. It gave no sign that it had detected the tiny boat slipping away. Its launch was very near the Frans but none of its commensal machines were in sight.

  Looking the Man with a Glove in the eye, Herron pushed him forward again, to a spot near his easel. The discordant lines of Herron’s own work were now worse than disgusting, but Herron made himself work on them.

  He hadn’t time to do much before the man-shaped machine came walking back to him; the uproar of metal working had ceased. Wiping his brush carefully, Herron put it down, and nodded at his berserker portrait. “When you destroy all the rest, save this painting. Carry it back to those who built you, they deserve it.”

  The machine-voice squeaked back at him: “Why do you think I will destroy paintings? Even if they are attempts to praise life, they are dead things in themselves, and so in themselves they are good.”

  Herron was suddenly too frightened and weary to speak. Looking dully into the machine’s lenses he saw there tiny flickerings, keeping time with his own pulse and breathing, like the indications of a lie detector.

  “Your mind is divided,” said the machine. “But with its much greater part you have praised me. I have repaired your ship, and set its course. I now release you, so other life-units can learn from you to praise what is good.”

  Herron could only stand there staring straight ahead of him, while a trampling of metal feet went past, and there was a final scraping on the hull.

  After some time he realized he was alive and free.

  At first he shrank from the dead men, but after once touching them he soon got them into a freezer. He had no particular reason to think either of them Believers, but he found a book and read Islamic, Ethical, Christian and Jewish burial services.

  Then he found an undamaged handgun on the deck, and went prowling the ship, taken suddenly with the wild notion that a machine might have stayed behind. Pausing only to tear down the abomination from his easel, he went on to
the very stern. There he had to stop, facing the direction in which he supposed the berserker now was.

  “Damn you, I can change!” he shouted at the stern bulkhead. His voice broke. “I can paint again. I’ll show you . . . I can change. I am alive.”

  Different men will find different ways of praising life, of calling it good.

  Even I, who by my nature cannot fight or destroy, can see intellectually this truth: In a war against death, it is by fighting and destroying the enemy that the value of life is affirmed.

  In such a war, no living fighter need concern himself with pity for his enemy; this one twisted pain, at least, no one need feel.

  But in any war the vital effect of pacifism is not on the foe, but on the pacifist.

  I touched a peace-loving mind, very hungry for life . . .

  THE PEACEMAKER

  Carr swallowed a pain pill and tried to find a less uncomfortable position in the combat chair. He keyed his radio transmitter, and spoke:

  “I come in peace. I have no weapons. I come to talk to you.”

  He waited. The cabin of his little one-man ship was silent. His radar screen showed the berserker machine still many light-seconds ahead of him. There was no reaction from it, but he knew that it had heard him.

  Behind Carr was the Sol-type star he called sun, and his home planet, colonized from Earth a century before. It was a lonely settlement, out near the rim of the galaxy; until now, the berserker war had been no more than a remote horror in news stories. The colony’s only real fighting ship had recently gone to join Karlsen’s fleet in the defense of Earth, when the berserkers were said to be massing there. But now the enemy was here. The people of Carr’s planet were readying two more warships as fast as they could—they were a small colony, and not wealthy in resources. Even if the two ships could be made ready in time, they would hardly be a match for a berserker.

  When Carr had taken his plan to the leaders of his planet, they had thought him mad. Go out and talk to it of peace and love. Argue with it? There might be some hope of converting the most depraved human to the cause of goodness and mercy, but what appeal could alter the built-in purpose of a machine?