By this time the great man had transferred his anger from his former associate, and was cussing out the high politicians who had allowed the defenses of this base, and of the home-worlds in general, to deteriorate to such a state.
Someone, very likely one of the civilian bartenders grown weary of shouted arguments, had evidently called up entertainment, for now a kind of stirring, primitive-sounding music began to drown out the dispute. To Jory it sounded like an instrumental recording of some Templar battle chant.
Nash, as Jory quickly became convinced in the course of their first talk, was unlike anyone she had met before, part dramatist, part journalist, part other things that were harder to define. Now that she could get a closer look at his artificial eye, she thought that the design probably incorporated a camera function. Certainly it included a small light, which ought to be useful for close-up photography.
As she sat opposite her new boss in the bar he turned the light on from time to time, ostensibly to see her better. More likely, she thought, the real reason was to call attention to the device.
He had a glass before him at his table, but the contents appeared to be nothing stronger than beer.
He was red haired, middle-aged by contemporary standards for an Earthman, somewhere over the century mark but under one hundred and fifty. Hale and active, and somewhat above average height, a shade under two meters tall. Half out of uniform, wearing a civilian hat. Tunic and trousers rumpled. He was the most unmilitary-seeming man, Jory decided, that she could recall ever meeting in uniform.
The man worked hard at his job, Jory had heard, but he considered that a large part of his job was self-promotion. His current assignment, which he had lobbied hard to get, was the making of a kind of holographic documentary of the berserker attack, now considered inevitable, on the atoll.
Nash had a lieutenant commander's rank, and the appropriate insignia pinned on his collar or lapels, but as far as Jory could tell he currently had no duties or responsibilities other than those of an observer.
When she had finished introducing herself, and had accepted the chair that he stood to offer her with elaborate politeness (he was even a little taller than she had thought) she waited a decent interval, then asked, "I'm not quite clear, sir— are you here as a military officer, or a civilian?" She felt reasonably confident of the answer, but wanted to hear how he was going to put it.
"I'm in uniform," he growled at her. "I've got the right to wear it."
In fact everyone said that Colonel Shanga, who was commanding ground troops and machines on the atoll, was more than willing to have Nash performing the job of live observer when the attack came. The skills that had won the great director interstellar awards for holographic drama, famed for the live recording of complicated, sprawling scenes, ought to serve him well in live reporting of a battle.
She looked around, but there was no sign of Colonel Shanga in the bar. Or of any other officer with a rank as high as Nash's.
As Jory recalled, at least half of Nash's many fictional dramas took place on one frontier planet or another. They were not her favorite form of entertainment, but she had seen one or two on holostage and had mildly enjoyed them.
Nash stared at her, his face gradually brightening, as if he approved of what he saw. He gave the impression that he had forgotten about hiring this particular person, but now was glad to be reminded. More likely he pretended that was the situation. For a moment it seemed to Jory that he was on the verge of telling her to go home—or somewhere else.
But he needed her, or someone like her, for this job, or thought he did. She had been trained on, and was experienced in using, all the right equipment.
Her credentials, or resume, which she had sent to Nash, and which he perhaps dug out of a pocket and looked at now, showed that she could handle the equipment, the multiple linked recorders, about as well as anyone. Better than anyone else available.
He looked up. "Combat experience?"
"None." The answer came automatically, but as soon as she thought about it, she realized that it was technically incorrect. "Oh, well, unless you count being shot at on a transport." She named a distant sector of the settled corner of the Galaxy. "Some kind of astrogational error, and we found ourselves in the wrong place. At least one berserker took a couple of shots at us, and our captain didn't wait around to make sure how many there were."
Nash glowered at her for a moment without comment. Then he said, "Looks like the crew might be a little shorthanded when the great day comes." It was evident, from scraps of earlier conversation she'd overheard, that one or two of the people the great man had brought with him from Earth, as civilian employees, were getting cold feet at the prospect of a berserker attack, and had decided to take ship for home. He was scornful of such an attitude, which he considered unprofessional when such a marvelous opportunity beckoned.
"Good riddance to 'em, I say." Looking Jory up and down, he brightened somewhat. "Sure and it's glad I am to have your sweet self with me on this day." His artificial left eye extended its central lens slightly in her direction. The thing appeared to be just slightly loose in its fleshy socket, giving him a thoroughly repulsive appearance.
"And I'm glad to be here."
"You going to stick with me when the shooting starts?" The question came in a half-belligerent growl. Somehow he got the impression that he felt guilty about subjecting a woman to the perils of combat. Not that he had yet experienced them himself.
Jory needed no time at all to think that one over. "When the shooting starts I'm going to be here on Fifty Fifty, since that's what the job calls for." She sipped her drink. "As for being with you, I don't know what personal plans you've made for that occasion."
Someone down the bar, or at one of the adjoining tables, smothered a laugh.
Nash let go Jory's hand, turned his head and glared, then grumbled something. But when he turned back to Jory he did not seem seriously displeased.
Toward the end of the interview, he seized Jory's right hand in both of his, and pressed it fervently, as if sealing a bargain. His right eye was twinkling, his left behaving itself.
Presently she left the bar, and moved on to try to talk to Colonel Shanga. She found him a professional military man of middle age, like the majority of his troops a specialist in ground combat, and at the moment hard at work in his dug-in headquarters, too busy to give her more than a few words.
ELEVEN
The return of Spacer Gift and Flower to the planet Uhao was separated by only a moderate interval of spacetime from the moment when Field Marshal Yamanim, way out on distant Fifty Fifty, began to brief the garrison's officers on the details of the oncoming berserker attack that they would be required to meet. The luxury liner carrying the young man and woman touched down on the planet's surface at a point that lay about as far as it was possible to get from the sprawling Port Diamond base.
While en route from Earth, Gift and Flower had made tentative plans as to what they were going to do once they arrived back on Uhao. Nifty's main goal was to go on a tour of the pyramids, along the river called the Nile. The only real suggestion Flower made was that the couple should sooner or later drop in on certain friends of hers, who were currently occupying a house on the other side of the world, back in the vicinity of the base. That was okay with Nifty; he was going to have to head back that way in a few days.
The weather on Uhao was gorgeous, as usual. And in contrast to the ships and bases where Gift had recently been spending his time, neither the field nor the adjoining town were very busy.
Once off the ship, he took a deep breath, stretched, and wondered what the hell might be going to happen next. It seemed he had barely had time to get used to the pleasures of travel in such style when the trip was over. Not that any of the luxuries aboard had really mattered to him, of course—except for Flower herself.
He wondered whether the pair of them might possibly be met on debarkation by her angry lover, the man whose name was on the spaceship ticket, a
nd who would be wondering what kind of a guy Flower had taken up with now—and, more to the point, could be trying to get back the money he'd put out for tickets. But no one met them when they got off the ship. In fact, no one paid any attention to them at all. Nifty's career as a celebrity, it seemed, was over. Now that he was in civvies again, he was once more just as invisible as everyone else.
Looking around with satisfaction before he left the terminal, he noted that there weren't even any space police in sight. His brief taste of celebrity had been more than he wanted, and he could hope it would fade as fast as it had blossomed into being.
And Gift was silently grateful for his new companion's evident determination to stick with him, which seemed unaffected by the fact that he was no longer in the news. He kept telling himself that she was different from any other girlfriend he'd ever had—and some of the differences were hard to define.
The pair of them started out from the small spaceport carrying their bags in the beautiful weather, walking a curving walkway of crumbled seashells that led toward the town, looking for a hotel.
"Nifty?"
"Huh?"
"Are you sorry you didn't go home?"
"Not a damn bit sorry." And that was true. All the same, he kept darting back now and then, in memory and imagination, to his home. Or at least to the only small spot anywhere in the Galaxy that he could still think of as his home.
"Glad you came with me?" Flower persisted in her habit of holding him by one arm, as if she feared he might be going to run away.
"Hell, yes."
"Won't your people at home be looking for you?"
"Actually they'd probably be surprised if I showed up." If that wasn't exactly true, well, it was close enough. And he began, haltingly, to try to describe to Flower his childhood home, or at least some of the good things about it.
She listened, and seemed to believe everything he told her. Maybe in comparison to what her home had been, his, with all its difficulties, sounded happy.
All right, so he was enhancing the good points, the virtues, a little. He was probably confabulating his childhood home with other places he'd only visited.
And then, for no apparent reason, as they were walking along, he had one of his bad moments, the kind that had pestered him since the incident in space. The bad moments came for him, often seemingly out of nowhere, when he was impaled by pangs of guilt for those two screaming, distant bodies in deep space. Such moments had come to him during his hellish ride in the courier, now and then in the hospital, again on the satellite and on the shuttle—with his return to Earth, those pangs were coming more frequently. He wondered if he was going to need professional help to deal with them.
For this, to keep myself alive so I could come back to this, I did what I did?
Beginning to relax, to be able to get some enjoyment out of being on Uhao again: He and Flower had decided they were going to gratify his long-held wish to tour the pyramids.
Flower's plan, insofar as she had one, seemed to be to let her new lover decide how they would occupy their time. Whatever he decided, she seemed willing to go along.
Shortly after they checked into the hotel on Uhao, Flower had absented herself for a few minutes, to make a phone call. "The friends I told you about, Nifty. I want to find out when's a good time for us to drop in on them."
"You could have phoned them from the room."
"Sure, I guess I could have. I didn't think."
Except then, he thought, he would probably have heard the conversation. "Okay. Whatever."
The hell with it. He wasn't going to worry about it.
Shortly after the couple had checked into their hotel on Uhao, Nifty was on the phone, trying to arrange a boat tour on the Uhaon Nile, with a stop at the pyramids.
Gift was eager to seek distraction from the war, and from his past. He had his life, he was young, and he was going to enjoy it. Flower seemed to have a good bit of money available, and for a few days at least he wasn't going to mind staying in a posh hotel—or in a succession of them.
Flower sympathized with Nifty's reluctance to face his folks at home—yes, of course she could understand that.
In size, Uhao fit right into the appropriate envelope for habitable planets—almost a twin of Earth in its dimensions and mass. And much less heavily populated than Earth, once you got away from Port Diamond and a few other centers.
On this world too, as on all the homeworlds now, there were frequent practice alerts. But the farther you got from the few population centers, the less difference they seemed to make. A sky like Earth's, discolored with force fields bending space and churning air, seemed to be pressing down, suffocating him.
Standing on Uhao's surface and looking up, during one of the scheduled practice alerts, one saw, in what should have been broad daylight, much the same scene as one would have seen on Earth: A sky dun-colored and dimmed with defensive barriers.
Space was available on the boat tour, and soon Nifty and his new girlfriend were traveling to parts of PD he hadn't seen before, passing now and then through others he hadn't glimpsed for a long time. Sights he had wanted to see, but had never managed to reach before. Regions practically antipodal to the base, as remote as it was possible to imagine from the headquarters of Hypo, and from all the rest of the war.
Flower was vague about whether these parts were familiar to her. Partly she was guiding him, and partly he was guiding her.
And then the pyramids were looking up ahead of them, out of a distant haze of atmospheric warmth.
According to the guidebooks, Solarian archaeologists had long struggled with the question of just what kind of intelligent beings had lived here, and why they had accomplished this gigantic construction. From the evidence of the four known pyramids that they had built, the biggest just a little bigger than anything in Egypt, those native Uhaons, like the Carmpan and a few other offshoots of Galactic life, qualified as humans of some description, even though their evolution had been quite independent of that which had taken place on the planets of distant Sol.
Other than their pyramids, which seemed to have endured at least as long as those that stood beside Earth's Nile, those ancient natives of Uhao had left very little in the way of records. There endured on the planet none of their bones or mummies or recognizable works of art, so exactly what they had looked like was still a matter of conjecture. Whatever had cost these pyramid builders their lives had not been berserkers, for the rest of the native biomass had not been extinguished with them.
Unobtrusive interior lighting had been fixed up to display the faint, all-but-invisible markings, undoubtedly ancient inscriptions, applied with paint or other medium long since decayed, which had recently been discovered on one of the interior walls.
Flower became more interested the more she learned about the famous monuments.
Several times Gift lingered behind, almost lost in thought, when the tour group moved on. Dawdling, looking at the marked stones and trying to understand. Some of the smooth-cut faces of the ashlars bore inscriptions, which no Solarian had ever been able to interpret. There were, of course, rival theories.
On the tour, other people, as much interested in these ancient things as Gift, and much more knowledgeable about them, talked to Gift and Flower. One of the couples they met in this way were superficially much like themselves. This young pair said they were on their honeymoon.
At some point the honeymooners looked at Gift as if expecting him to confirm that he and Flower were there in the same capacity. Maybe he did so. "Us, too."
A faint breeze of dry air, artificially cooled, came flowing through.
"The gods of Uhao alone—if anyone—know how many thousands of years old this structure is."
Their Solarian guide was explaining how the rocky surfaces of the enormous building blocks had been treated for some now-forgotten symbolic or religious purpose, bathed in radiation by some Solarian cultists at some comparatively late point in the pyramids' history—only a few hun
dred years ago. Therefore those ancient stones now gave different readings, erratically emitted radiation, in different areas. Even the very age of the structures was still in serious dispute.
Nifty'd bought more new clothes since they'd landed, using his own money this time. Since his girlfriend was so generous, he allowed himself to feel that he had a little cash to spare.
When Nifty and Flower were alone again, and the matter of the pyramids came up, she said, "I bet I know what really built them."
"What? They're not just natural forms, like crystals, you know. Sorneone with a purpose in mind…"
She was shaking her head, calmly, certainly.
"All right, tell me what you think."
"Machines. I don't mean robots that work for people."
Gift thought that was nonsense. He told her: "Some of the machines that are out to kill us are far older than this structure. All that time they've been getting ready to do the job. Practicing. Waiting for their chance."
While he listened, his mouth gradually falling open, Flower gently but firmly expressed her doubt that those machines really wanted to kill anybody. "We project our own violent motives upon them."
"Absolutely I could never buy that. Have you ever seen one?"
"You know I haven't." She shook her head, and went on to tell him how he'd been brainwashed by his officers in the Space Force, and he simply didn't understand.
He let it pass. But something in the argument started Spacer Gift thinking of his latest series of troubling dreams.
His deathdream again. He couldn't seem to escape from the damned thing. In his real dream, he was on the verge of thinking the fatal thought… gasping, he awoke from a nightmare of suffocation in the emptiness of space.
Now and then in their hotel, or on the tour boat, they listened to and watched the news. The official bulletins, mostly from over on the far side of the Gulf, continued to be a grim catalog of losses—of lives, of planets, of ships and territory, all in staggering amounts. During the last few days the widespread rumors of a great impending berserker attack had coalesced into official warnings: The coming storm would perhaps be aimed at Uhao, or perhaps at Earth itself, and all the other homeworlds.
Berserker Fury Page 13