Other rumors, not verified on any of the official newscasts, included one that goodlife were now extremely well organized, and working secretly to accomplish a revolution, or massive simultaneous acts of sabotage.
Meanwhile there were others, the fellow travelers of berserkers as it were (who tried to dissociate themselves from goodlife, but sometimes were arrested anyway)—those others were pushing openly for an evacuation of the homeworlds. To accommodate the entire population of a planet somehow on spacecraft would be a mind-boggling endeavor, and most people considered it a crackpot idea.
Of course, undertaking any such evacuation would make a shambles of any effort at armed defense.
Gift and Flower in their tourist travels also heard one whispered rumor to the effect that some actual berserker machines, imported along devious trade routes from who knows where, by unknown means, had been and were still being brought into close contact with Solarian society. Not only by people who were goodlife in the traditional sense, but by some well-meaning people who considered such machines ambassadors for peace.
These infiltrating berserkers were said to be disguised as, and for the most part functioned perfectly well as, ordinary service or maintenance robots of the kind used widely on all ED worlds.
There seemed to be no way to prove conclusively that these rumors were without substance.
Nifty snorted. "Most ridiculous thing I ever heard."
For once Flower was in agreement. "Isn't it, though?" Then she wondered aloud whether there was, or could be, any quick, reliable test that could be made to determine whether some complicated serving machine was really a berserker.
Gift's thought was that whoever applied such a test to a berserker stood in deadly danger.
"Maybe that is the test—you pretend you have some means of detecting berserker programming—and then when you walk up to the machine, it figures that the game is up anyway, and it knocks your head off. If it's caught, it's going to take with it as many badlives as it can. What's the matter?"
The matter was that Flower didn't look pleased. She said she had heard such stories before. She told Nifty that one such machine, disguised as some kind of communications station, was rumored to have argued, or transmitted, in the few seconds before it was destroyed: "We are two kinds of life, organic, and nonorganic—there is no reason why we cannot coexist."
And it had added: "We have computed a new truth at last; we, whom you call berserkers and death machines, are as alive as you are."
Gift was too disgusted to comment.
But Flower insisted, without being able to say how she knew, that the story was perfectly true.
She brought up one point that he really couldn't argue with: The other side of the coin of human involvement with berserkers was that some people regarded the death machines with a hatred so intense as to close their eyes and ears to argument or demonstration of any kind. The Templars, the kind of people who would join the Templars, were an obvious example.
"There are people like that," said Flower. The tone of her voice suggested that she might be speaking of the damned.
Gift volunteered suddenly: "I once knew a man like that. His name was Traskeluk. He told me his father had served in the Templars."
"Who was he?"
Nifty, who had been suddenly caught up in a vision of deep space and bloodstained armor, came to himself with a start. Then he shrugged. "Man I used to know," he repeated.
"One of your shipmates, I bet."
"Flo, you were just talking about people who won't listen to arguments. Let me tell you, there are certain other humans, who while not necessarily hardcore goodlife, who really nurse a hatred of their own race—why I don't know—and they are willing to transfer their loyalty to anything they can think of as a promising alternative. Cats and dogs and even bugs, in some cases."
Flower didn't have anything to say to that.
TWELVE
Nifty Gift felt heartily weary of the war, and more than ready to get away from it. Of course getting away wasn't going to be easy, especially not for him, the way his luck had now begun to turn. Maybe in some other galaxy (if anyone ever figured out how to drive a ship across the void between) escape to a peaceful paradise could be possible. But if there were habitable planets in that other place, then there would be people, and most likely berserkers too. Gift had no scientific basis for this conclusion, but given the nastiness of the universe in general, he had no doubt that it was so.
At least, much thanks to any gods who might exist, thanks to his own fine combat record and the kindness of Mother R, he wasn't going to have to go out in space and confront berserkers any more.
To one like Nifty Gift, who had spent most of the last couple of standard years in quarters on Uhao, the changes that had taken place on this world over the last few months were obvious. Now Gift and Flower, traveling, strolling, boating, and loafing their way around some of the remoter portions of this paradise planet, saw that the facts of life and death, had been brought home to everyone: Berserkers were no longer only a remote terror, directly affecting only distant sectors. The danger, the terror, had moved closer with a leap of sobering dimensions, closer than ever before.
Not that there was panic. But wherever there were people, there was a certain tension, at an energizing level, in the air. Also there was a tendency to blame anything that went wrong upon the war. Shelters were being constructed, dug out of planetary rock on a massive scale, and some existing underground works, deep mines and such, were being adapted as emergency shelters. Now on Uhao, holographic posters, bearing patriotic urgings, were everywhere in the cities, and at a few spots in the countryside. There were several versions of the posters; in the most popular, what was supposed to be a berserker machine, portrayed as all angles and shadows, reached out with wicked-looking prongs to impale a screaming mother and her helpless infant. Well, maybe some of the bad machines did actually look like that. And any lady who met one would have plenty to scream about.
Flower looked scornfully at these posters every time she saw one. She didn't talk about them, but sometimes she bit her lip as if in an effort to restrain some withering comment.
Some tension and posters, yes, but still, as Gift took note, there was no visible panic among the natives. Solarians seemed to be basically confident beings, and things were not that bad yet. The effects of the big raid, a couple of months ago, had been felt almost entirely over on the other side of the planet.
A person who wanted to find something to worry about, beyond the bald fact that the berserkers were out to kill everyone, would say that the greater danger was still complacency. Popular sports and other entertainment were flourishing along their usual course without a pause; our people fighting at the front, in their ships and in the colonies, wanted it that way. Or so the claim was made, and no one argued. The great majority seemed to be going about their business very much as before. The truth, as it was now revealed, was that they genuinely had confidence in their government, despite all their earlier willingness to complain about it, and believed in their military leaders as well. Since he'd last walked the surface of this planet a few months back, in a change that seemed to Spacer Gift paradoxical, those complaints had almost vanished.
Gradually, as the days of their journeying together passed, the realization crept up on Nifty Gift that Flower was to some degree sympathetic to the berserker cause. Or at least she had some idea that it was clever to sound like it. In fact, he supposed, she just didn't know what the hell she was talking about.
He warned her a couple of times that she could get in trouble that way, but she didn't seem to care.
Well, to hell with it. He didn't want to think about her problems. He had more than enough of his own. And mostly the two of them got on well enough, and were able to find plenty of pleasant things to talk about.
They were lying in bed, talking. "Sometimes I think, Nifty—"
"That's a mistake."
"What?" Looking at him blankly, she didn't g
et it. There were a lot of things she didn't get.
"Never mind."
His companion frowned, making her moist, red lower lip protrude in a way that had impressed him, from the first time he beheld it, as utterly delightful. "Well, sometimes I think that maybe the machines have it right after all."
He paused before answering. "What machines? You talking about the bad machines?"
"Call them that if you like." She added quickly: "You can turn me in for saying what I just said, I don't care."
"Don't be silly, I'm not going to turn you in for anything," he hastily assured her. If security was coming after anyone, it would be him. If they ever found out… but of course there was no way they were ever going to find out.
He stroked her body, then her cheek and hair. "I'm glad you're not a machine," he added. When she didn't respond to that, he asked, in an effort to get it straight: "You say the machines—the berserkers—have something right? I don't get it. You mean they're right about wanting to kill us all?"
Flower's lips firmed in, making a thin determined line. Her voice took on a similar quality. "How do you know that's what they want?"
Nifty could only squint in puzzlement. Then he asked slowly: "How do we know… ?"
"We're really the ones who are trying to kill them, aren't we? Because our race thinks we're so… so… we're like, the whole universe belongs to us." She was staring into the air with a fierce determination. Obviously she was angry at humanity.
"Well, better us than them."
"How do you know that?"
She had a way of coming up with these things, now and then, that just stopped conversation. Gift lay thinking, trying to figure out if any part of what she was telling him made sense. Why was he here with her, anyway? By now he could have made some excuse, and gone his own way again, and maybe taken up with somebody else. But then he would have to start explaining all over again who he was and what he was doing.
Flower added: "They didn't kill you, did they, when they had the chance? Probably they just wanted to frighten you away."
"Frighten me——" He shook his head, groping for words.
He had thought that maybe this woman was on the verge of understanding him. But the truth, as Nifty now had to admit to himself, the truth was that the more he and Flower tried to talk about anything serious, the more he realized that she didn't understand anything at all. "Let's not talk about it."
"All right, Nifty. Anything you say." And she snuggled up close to him again. After a while she said: "You make love like a machine."
It took him a while to understand that she had meant it as a compliment.
"Shall I turn on the news?"
"Why not?"
And a minute later he had heard the words, seen the images, that left him frozen there in a sitting position in the bed, staring at the stage as if he had never seen one before.
"What's the matter?" Flower asked him in a hushed voice.
"That was my ship. My old…" He had almost said spy ship. "The one they're talking about."
She hadn't really been listening to the program, but now she did, after tapping in a command that the last couple of minutes be played over again. Well, there was no help for that. Everyone was going to hear it over and over.
When Flower had satisfied her craving for the news, she gazed at Nifty with wide eyes. "So that man they're talking about, the one they just found alive, is one of your crew? Is he the one you were trying to escape with at the end?"
"That's right. Traskeluk." He was still staring at the stage, where more stories were being played out. But he had not the faintest idea what any of them were about.
"They said he's in good condition and expected to recover." When Gift didn't answer, Flower looked at him closely, then came over and sat down close beside him and began to pet him, as if she thought he needed consolation. Well, he needed something, and it must have shown. He muttered a few words.
"What did you say, Nifty?"
"I said, "This changes everything.' "
"How?"
He didn't bother to answer. He called up the news item yet again, and scrutinized every detail. Not that there were many details given. Not much to see, little more than a muffled form being slid out of an ambulance, against a background that looked like the Port Diamond base hospital. His own name was mentioned in passing, and Trask's of course, but no one else's. No, there was no suggestion that Ensign Terrin might have survived also. Only Traskeluk. Only…
"Was he your good friend, Nifty?"
He wished she would just keep quiet for a minute, and let him think.
It didn't take Gift long to realize that thinking wasn't doing him a whole lot of good. It was hard to imagine how it could. He could think all he wanted, and it wouldn't undo anything. That night he lay awake for a long time, staring into darkness. He kept expecting a knock on the door in the middle of the night, security and space police. What the hell was he going to do now?
But the knock didn't come. Not yet.
By now, Traskeluk must have told at least half a dozen debriefers his version of events out in deep space. That would be bad… but then gradually Gift, thinking back, remembering what the man was like, came to the sickening realization that Traskeluk probably wasn't going to tell his debriefers the whole real story at all. What he was going to do was likely to be a whole lot worse.
And Trask was sure to get convalescent leave, as soon as he was out of the hospital, which might be any time now, for all Gift knew.
It wasn't going to be security that came to his door in the middle of the night.
And Nifty still couldn't think of a single damned thing to do about it.
Not a day went by without Flower repeating at least a couple of times, usually in a low, sincere voice, that there were some friends of hers, staying on Port Diamond, that she wanted Nifty to meet.
"Yes, I know. You keep telling me about your goddamned friends."
"They might be able to help."
"Help? You don't even begin to know what kind of help I need, and they don't either."
She made little conciliatory noises.
He sighed, and counted up how many days of leave he had left. He couldn't seem to remember the number of the days, or the dates either, from one day to the next, and had to keep counting them over and over again, unfolding the single sheet of his orders and looking at the already thumb-worn paper. Usually time spent off duty went fast, but this time there were more hours than he knew what to do with.
No further word on the news about Traskeluk's condition, or when he might be discharged from the hospital. Certainly he'd talked with his debriefers by now, but still there was no sign that anyone was looking for Nifty Gift. They might be thinking that they should let him enjoy his leave in peace, but they would certainly have some more questions to ask him when he got back to the base.
Gift toyed with the idea of putting in a call to the hospital, over on the other side of the world, trying to talk to Trask, trying to explain, but just thinking about it made him shudder. Whatever else happened, he wasn't going to do that.
In the middle of breakfast he looked up and across the table at Flower. "All right. Sure, why the hell not? Let's go pay a visit to your friends."
She was obviously pleased. "You'll like them, Nifty. We'll have to do some more traveling."
"We do a lot of that anyway."
That night, he found himself lying awake in bed, trying to keep from worrying about Flower's attitude toward the bad machines, which at least was a distraction from his worries about Traskeluk. This woman really seemed to think berserkers were not so bad. He tried on that attitude in his own mind, like a shoe on a foot, and could tell right away that it didn't fit at all. She was an attractive woman who said she could sympathize with his feelings of not wanting to be idolized for what everyone thought he had done against the berserkers. But damn it, if she really believed what she was saying, she was crazy. And thinking and talking like that could get her into real t
rouble.
All along there had been something brittle about her. What had at first seemed an intriguing individuality was now coming to look like something seriously wrong. He'd gone out of his way trying not to see that fact, but now he couldn't deny that it was there.
As near as Nifty could pin it down, Flower seemed to believe that berserkers were a force of nature, like gravity or starlight, and that nature was some kind of god that should be worshiped.
Maybe, if he ever told this woman what he had really done, she'd take it as a point in his favor that he had left murderous Solarians to be killed, because they deserved to die for carrying on their war against the innocent machines.
And later in the day Gift, who was now avidly watching the news for any clues, caught sight of Traskeluk, off his stretcher now, looking almost healthy, and being interviewed on one of those news-talk shows. No, now Gift could see that Trask was actually holding a press conference, on a very familiar looking hospital terrace.
Gift stared with a sick fascination at the show, not sure whether it was running live or on a delayed display. Obviously the man wasn't dying, and hadn't come out of his experience brain damaged. So he must have spent a lot of time talking to the debriefers already. So what had he been telling them? What had he—?
Gift didn't have to wonder very long. Again his own name came up briefly, mentioned in passing by one of the questioners. And a moment later Traskeluk was looking straight out of the stage, right at the camera, talking to him, to his old shipmate Nifty.
"I look forward to seeing you, Nifty. We'll have a lot of stuff to talk about."
And the hostess, or whatever they called the one in charge of trying to control the assembled reporters, gushed once more at the hero, and that was that.
Berserker Fury Page 14