Now this particular berserker, a computer or program evidently in command of the task force that was about to complete the devastation of the Solarian Gulf Fleet, wanted to know what a trumpet was, and how feet could possibly be jubilant.
And the berserker, as before, wanted an explanation of the Templar song, and what it meant to the life units who seemed to draw strength from what they perceived as the presence and leadership of this mysterious God.
"Where," it inquired of the prisoner, "do you believe that this entity called God is to be found?"
An answer came immediately from the human head that seemed to rest bodiless atop the force-field cube: "Everywhere."
"I do not perceive him," the berserker answered.
"You are not fit to do that."
Gavrilov jumped up and made motions at the barrier, trying to get at and punish the prisoner; then subsided in frustration when he was unable to reach him.
And presumably the berserker continued to watch it all, dispassionately. At least the Teacher made no further comment upon the behavior of life units good or bad.
Or perhaps, Gift thought, the Teacher had been distracted by something the humans could not perceive, and was no longer bothering to watch.
Gift could only marvel that the captive Templar had been able to maintain his defiant attitude under these conditions. It must be a kind of madness. But probably there were drugs that would have that effect. From time to time the helpless captive again broke into song, the same song that Gift remembered Traskeluk singing:
I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps
I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel…
Once more the song succeeded in arousing the berserker's curiosity. The machine broke in, turning up the volume of its squeaky voice, wanting to know what certain of the words meant.
"You will tell me now, or later, under interrogation."
But the Templar only sang some more.
Laval had now turned his attention more fully to questioning Flower. His voice was smooth and quiet, but his manner had turned sadistic, talking to her about the horrible things that usually happened to prisoners, and assuring her that her safe status as a goodlife unit had not yet been confirmed.
Gift thought of shouting at the man, but that wasn't going to make Flower's life any easier.
Laval also managed to imply that Gavrilov had not entirely established his goodlife credentials.
Gavrilov naturally contested this, and both men tried to get some confirmation of their status from the machine.
It was possible to believe that the fate of prisoners in general was not necessarily the worst imaginable. After they had given the machine what seemed all their useful information, they were quickly killed. After all, death, net pain, was what a berserker was programmed to achieve. Pain was a part of life.
The crushing of organic bodies—like every other activity involving them—was always messy, and always entailed extra effort on the killers' part to make sure that all the microorganisms that were inevitably associated with Solarian bodies were expunged from existence too. Microbes were after all also alive, and therefore required to be killed. Viruses too seemed to fall into the banned category, as the berserkers computed it.
Among supposed experts on the subject who had never been caught by one, it was widely supposed that, in return for cooperation, the machines were willing to grant prisoners the boon of a quick termination, by being popped naked out into space. Or cast into some equivalent of a roaring furnace, where the matter in their bodies will furnish fuel for the berserker engines, and where there would be no possibility of even the microorganisms in badlife bodies surviving for any substantial period of time.
Laval had let Flower go—for the moment. From the way he looked at her, Gift could deduce a certain sadistic refinement. She wasn't going anywhere.
Given the chance, as the men resumed their dispute, she drew apart from the others again, while the nameless woman crawled back into the kennel. Once again Flower's wanderings carried her out of their sight, brought her back to see what had happened to Gift.
Nifty felt sorry for Flower, and said as much when she came wandering back to him again, but there was nothing he could do for her. Having come as far as he had come, he knew that he was already dead.
He could look at that fact and think about it now. The worst had happened, and here he was.
Gift experienced a curious relief.
Now in his exhaustion, his strange and newfound peace, he actually dozed; it was only for a few minutes, and he dreamed of Traskeluk and Terrin.
He awakened to see Flower looking in at him through the force door of his cell. When she saw he was awake, she whispered: "I was afraid you were dead."
"I am," he told her after a while.
She looked at him, not understanding. It was funny, damned funny, but Gift understood that she was now more frightened than he was.
Gift said: "Actually, I've been dead now for about a standard month. One of your machines killed me over on the other side of the Gulf… no, I take that back. Out there I killed myself."
"I don't understand."
He reached out and tried to hold her hand, but the glassy, repellent force of the door, almost invisible, prevented contact. "Nevermind."
Presently Flower drifted away once more. Climbing slowly to his feet in the awkward suit, going back to his observation post, Gift saw how the goodlife, including Laval, were still pining away for lack of a kind word from their supposed Teacher—well, at least Gift himself had not yet been physically mishandled by the machines. Considering only physical comfort, he'd undergone treatment almost as bad aboard regular coach-class transport, in his limited experience of civilian travel.
Drifty Gift, he thought. And a terrible, detached clarity seemed to be growing in his thoughts. It was as if he had been drugged, ever since the spy-ship skirmish, but he was coming out of it now. Not by chemicals, no, by something else.
Hell itself would hold no terrors for a man in his condition. Hell itself…
When Laval grew curious about current events, he liked to climb up a couple of steps, to a slightly elevated spot giving a slightly better view of the flight deck of the berserker carrier, that the Templar said was code-named Pestilence.
Roy Laval often preferred to watch from the elevated spot, as if this gave him some claim to prominence. Or enabled him to understand what was going on, when he was given no explanation. When he talked to the berserker now, as often as not it did not answer him.
It seemed to Laval that his great Teacher had now completely given up talking to him, or to anyone—as if it had forgotten there were any life units at all on board. But Laval kept trying to read some great philosophical purpose into the neglect.
From time to time the berserker launched a small machine into space from the flight deck, what looked to Gift like a fighter or hardlauncher popping straight up like a round cork from a bottle. No mass launching yet, though from the look of the preparations, something like that certainly impended. Or some fighter or scout came in, straggling back to its mothership at last, and docked. Sometimes when this happened Laval caught himself unconsciously waiting for a human figure in armor to climb out and walk across the deck.
Everything that Gift could see out on the flight deck confirmed that the berserker carrier was preparing for battle, getting ready to launch a swarm of smaller killer machines, analogs of Solarian fighters, hardlaunchers, and undersluggers.
Laval had gone into a kindly goodlife phase, had stopped being overtly sadistic, and was now trying to recruit Flower— it seemed a minimal achievement to sign up at least one more person to join the goodlife cadre he imagined he was forming.
The more Gift studied the construction and the life support th
at was keeping everyone alive, the flimsier it looked. Obviously, the berserker wanted to protect a lot of other things more than it wanted to protect even the most devout goodlife.
The modest space reserved for the housing of life units looked out into a much vaster domain. This was covered by a glassy overhead of crystalline matter or maybe purely of force, curved like a visual sky.
On the berserker carrier, the doomed Templar and the one or two goodlife—observed and overheard by Spacer Gift, who was present largely as a result of human cross-purposes, and berserker miscalculations—were standing or sitting half exposed to the raging sky.
It tended to get very cold here, standing on the face of Death, whose jaws were open if not quite visible. Very cold, with occasional waves of almost searing heat, sufficient to keep all the slime units from actually freezing. What air there was tended to move about in gusty drafts, and there were abrupt pressure changes. The concept of physical comfort did not seem to enter into berserker calculations.
"There's some very effective artificial gravity in effect here. It's making a considerable effort to keep us alive—or some of us."
"It has to do that, if it's going to bother with having us here at all. We are objects of study."
Gift, suddenly feeling starved, bit into the food cake when a machine brought it around. Ordinarily it would have seemed little better than just edible, but right now his hunger made it intensely satisfying. His body was eager to nourish itself. Right now life—what little he had left of it—Deemed infinitely precious. He thought that he was not going to try to kill himself again, the way he had during his first encounter with the shape of Death.
Flower kept on telling Nifty that she was sorry she had got him into this.
He murmured something inane, to the effect that it didn't matter. The two of them were still separated by the door of Nifty's cell.
Suddenly she asked, innocently: "Why's it got you locked up in there, by yourself?"
"I guess maybe it's saving me."
"For what?" After thinking over her own question for a few seconds, she suddenly cried out: "Oh, Nifty. I'm sorry!" She looked over her shoulder, toward the sound of human voices. "I didn't mean to do this to you. I didn't know… I haven't told any of the others that you're here…"
"Never mind, not your fault." The situation had a curious feeling of inevitability about it. He put his hands to his head.
"I'm so sorry… I wanted to go back on the ship, but now there's a gate and it wouldn't let me."
And the small Solarian ship that had brought three people out here remained beached on the flight deck, tantalizingly almost within reach. It had not been moved from where it had come down. Gift was able to reach a position, on the opposite side of his cell from where he watched his fellow captives, from which it became visible. Gift hadn't been able to get a good look at it when he went aboard on Uhao, because most of the hull had been under water. Now he could see, through the transparent wall of the life pen, a smooth hull, house-sized, unremarkable as small civilian spacecraft went. Near at hand, but it might as well have been a million klicks away.
The yacht, as far as he could tell by looking from this angle, was just resting lightly secured out on the open deck— no fancy landing docks here—and looked as if it would be perfectly easy to drift away in if one got the chance. Fat chance. It would be scheduled for decontamination in the berserker sense; all the live microorganisms it might contain to be incinerated.
The Solarians, goodlife and bad, gasping and shivering alike in the violent changes of temperature, argued tersely with one another, over everything, as it seemed to the listening Gift, and nothing. Now and then Laval or Gavrilov or the Templar snarled their mutual hatred, while machines recorded everything for later evaluation.
Roy Laval, droning on in his endless argument with Gavrilov, remained deeply immersed in his plans to be the quisling ruler of Earth. He plans to be the viceroy set on a throne, or the equivalent, by what he imagined would be a berserker hegemony over life units that would be allowed in some sense to live.
Before the others arrived, and the time for battle drew near, the berserker had been letting Laval play with visual displays, planning what he imagined his palace on conquered Earth was going to be like. But now the machine seemed to have no energy or interest left for such games, and the display was dead and dark.
The lighting in the area of confinement was uncomfortable for human eyes, some areas in shadow and some in harsh glare, and the noise of nearby mechanism was occasionally deafening. The air was first hot and then icy cold, and stank sharply of some chemicals, so that someone imagined it might be a berserker's breath. That would be a good idea for Flower to have.
Now and then a machine came by, rolling or treading through the fringes of the area on some unexplained errand, sometimes moving faster than a man could run, and the people had to stay out of its way—at least the most experienced goodlife took good care to stay out of the way. And they always answered obsequiously on the rare occasions when a machine had anything to say to them.
Flower, when she came back to see him again, had some kind of extra fabric wrapped around her now in an effort to keep warm, but Gift could see that she was still shivering. Under this extra wrapping, he noticed, she was wearing the dress she'd had on when they first met.
She was hungry too, but still she brought Gift a share of the miserable food one of the man-sized machines had given her; a pink-and-green cake from some rudimentary robotic life-support kitchen.
She was relieved to discover that the machines had already fed him, on stuff that looked and tasted better than her rations; evidently they considered him more important than her, and he wound up sharing his nicer meal with her.
"That does look better." She sniffed. "Smells better too." They threw hers away.
This time, when Flower went back to join the others, Laval renewed his interest. He grabbed her, and after he had enjoyed twisting her arm for a while, confined her, chaining her to a thick pipe of unknown purpose, that came up out of the deck and curved away to vanish in shadows far overhead. He used the chain he had been wearing as a belt, and secured it with the same padlock.
Goodlife and machines alike stood by and watched without interfering.
And Gift, watching unseen, could taste blood, where he had bitten his lower lip. He knew that any protest on his part would only make things worse for her.
TWENTY-EIGHT
A typical preflight briefing, on any Solarian carrier, began in the ready room, where two dozen men and women, already in partial armor, crowded in, filling the specially wide chairs built to accommodate armored bottoms.
A human officer stood live before them, telling them the most recent plots on the enemy's supposed location and strength. The plan of attack, and the point in spacetime where the carriers were to be found after the strike. Small ships in combat expended their power prodigally; miss rendezvous and you were likely to become a drifting speck a light-year from the nearest friend.
Then standing and sitting around, killing time, waiting on a knife edge.
Once more, for what seemed the hundredth time, the order came: "Crews to your ships!"
And feet pounded in a running scramble. The ground crew of humans and machines had everything ready.
Spaceborne again, and again the Voids came on, always the Voids. Accelerating faster than any Solarian small ship could, and turning faster. Intensive coordination between organic brain and Solarian machine was necessary to win a dogfight with one of them. The lifeless optelectronic brains of the berserkers never blundered, but sometimes they were forced to make decisions based on inadequate information. And again, sometimes they randomized their tactics, making moves that though unpredictable turned out to be as bad as blunders.
Wondering, grumbling to himself, Jay Nash came driving up to his rented house in a suburb of Port Diamond. It was months—he'd lost track of exactly how long—since he'd been here. At first he'd thought his house sitter wa
s reliable. But lately, things had been happening that made him wonder.
Nash's shoulder, deeply punctured by berserker shrapnel on Fifty Fifty, still felt numb, and spasms of pain now and then marched up and down his arm. He'd had to spend a couple of days in the hospital. Not as young as he once was, and he'd been wounded.
Remembering that he'd now been through a real battle made him smile yet once more with satisfaction.
It was also in the back of Nash's mind that before leaving Uhao he probably would stop in once more to see his current girlfriend in Port Diamond. But he wasn't completely sure about that; it always bothered him when he failed to be faithful to his wife. He considered his family, who were back on Earth, vitally important components of his life; it was just that he didn't choose to spend much time with them.
Wondering, all through his drive out here to the house, what the hell had happened to Yokosuka. He really needed the stuff he'd sent her to get or he wouldn't have bothered sending for it. And again, when he'd tried to phone the house, he'd got signals that indicated something was wrong with the equipment. For all he knew, the damned house had burned to the ground, and no one had bothered to let him know.
If you really wanted something done right, there was no substitute for doing it yourself.
Maybe the gal had tried fooling around with some of his special recording gear, and had popped the circuit breakers somewhere. Thinking about it, he grumbled to himself.
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