Berserker Base

by Fred Saberhagen

  The others stared at Naxos, as if he had in fact been giving orders for their destruction. But now the tide of war receded for the moment. There remained only the ceaseless drone of the mining, and building operations, not yet silenced, and going on as if it could never be silenced.

  And now there was a new noise. Definitely something else, rather like one of the thrumming roars run in reverse, but more prolonged. "What's that?"

  They all listened to it. Lars said: "Something coming in for a quick landing… I think. A fighting unit arriving for emergency repairs."

  Still the controlling berserker of the base did not speak to its prisoners. It told them nothing, but the humans did not need to be told what they could experience for themselves: an assault, by something or someone, had begun against the base. The attacker must have come in the form of an armada of gigantic power. Or else, thought Lars, a fleet controlled by people gone insane with desperation.

  Or else… in his brain the thought of qwib-qwib burned..

  And there was something else… yet another secret. One of those two fragments hidden at the, beginning, when the Carmpan might have known already what all the visions were to be…

  No. Forget that, the other secret. That must be utterly forgotten.

  Subvocalizing words, he fell helplessly into a sing-song chant: You must not yet remember that, or into the fire will fall the fat…

  He thought that the Carmpan in their room were staring at him. He didn't dare to look their way. His mind wanted to chant verses, and he couldn't seem to stop it. If he was finally going mad, he supposed that the fact should come as no great surprise.

  But he didn't really believe that he was going mad. He believed that someone, somewhere, was trying to project a telepathic message to him, and it was for some reason coming in verse. In rhyme.

  Why?

  The 'Reen again? No. Something… someone else.

  A fragmentary answer trickled through… several reasons. Easier that way to prove how human I am. Easier to avoid the metal thoughts around you …

  To prove you're human… who are you?

  … Gage…

  It was a name, then, evidently. Suddenly, the panel-and-gage dream made a kind of sense, in dream-terms anyway. But now the fleeting direct contact had been broken.

  The berserker still did not demonstrate any intention of killing off its human prisoners. Not that any demonstration of intent could reasonably be expected before the fact. It would send in the guide-machines to mangle them, or simply fill their cave with fire, and all would be over in the winking of an eye. But so far, Lars assumed, the berserker computer was still trying to protect them from battle damage. Because some of the prisoners at least, himself for one, had already proven their value as telepathic communicators.

  Lars, unable at last to keep from looking round, saw that now the Carmpan had crowded forward into the doorway of their room, staring out at their ED fellow prisoners.

  Opava glared at them. "What are you doing? Damned animals, what is it?"

  "Sing," one of the Carmpan said.

  "Sing?" Naxos shouted his amazement at them. "Have you all gone crazy?"

  "Chant. Recite, it will help."

  "Help? How?"

  Behind Lars, the sounds of rock-mining mounted suddenly to an unprecedented level. Then they broke forth into an avalanche of sound, with an immediacy that spun him around. His ears registered a sharp drop in air pressure, compensated for in moments by the automatic life support machinery.

  A great hole gaped in one wall of the common room, where a moment earlier there had been nothing but smooth solid stone. Fragments enough to fill a barrel fanned out across the floor. The hole was a meter across, wide enough for a man to come through, even clad in the bulk of heavy combat armor, and in fact such a man was coming through it now. Looking almost as mechanical as the berserkers they had come to fight, human figures in semi-robotic armor spilled into the room one after another, their power tools and weapons at the ready. Lars could recognize the suits' insignia.

  The five suitless humans recoiled, instinctively cowering back.

  The airspeaker of the lead figure rasped at them: "Buzz Jameson, Adamant Navy. Keep out of the way. We sealed the other end of the tunnel behind us, your air's safe for the moment."

  A chaotic babble of outcries and questions rose up from the five prisoners.

  "We're an assault party, that's all. There's an attack on." Half a dozen of the invaders were now mobbing about in the common room, as if looking for the best way to get out of it again. The tunnel mouth from which they had emerged was ignored behind them, dark, narrow, and empty, Jameson inside his armor was redhaired and almost as big as Lars remembered from seeing him through Gemenca Bahazi's eyes. The big man looked round at the goggling prisoners. "We're going to get you out of here, but there's another job to do first. Which way to the bloody mind-jiggering machines? They're right here somewhere, aren't they?

  "How did you know about—?" But questions could wait. Naxos was already pointing out the proper door.

  Moments later, an assault on that barrier was readied. Plastic explosive was stack in place against it, and unarmored people dove for shelter.

  When the berserker had built that door it had not calculated on this kind of an assault; one small charge did the job. This time there was no pressure drop. The mind-probing chambers were evidently kept at atmospheric pressure constantly. Jammeson and his crew of five rushed through.

  Lars kept expecting the ant-shaped machines to burst in and murder the unprotected prisoners, wage war with the Adamant fighting crew. But no such invasion came. The guide machines must be busy, he thought, with something else, repairing damage or whatever.

  In a few seconds Jameson reappeared at the tunnel mouth. His airspeaker rasped at the gathered prisoners, asking if any of them knew the exact location of the central computer that ran the base. He explained that the central brain of the base was very probably quite near the rooms holding mind-probe devices, but he was suspicious of booby-traps. "We've been told the best way to get to it is through the prisoners' cave, and the machines where the prisoners are made to work."

  "Told by who? How'd you know where we were? And how do you know where the central computer is?''

  "We can put pieces of information together. And your chunky buddies over there haven't been idle." Jameson nodded toward the Carmpan. "They've been getting the word out, in great detail, about what's going on here."

  The Carmpan in their room were all staring out at Lars.

  Looking at them, he felt an impulse to chant mad verse. Something about how no castrato ever sang so pure—? He had no idea where that was coming from.

  Now Jameson had plunged back into the tunnel beyond the blasted door, rejoining his armored comrades. There was another heavy explosion from that direction, and less deafening sounds of fighting, of weapons that wasted little energy in sound.

  "God, how could they have landed here?" Dorothy shuddered, as if the thought of such human daring outraged her.

  "If it was a surprise attack—and they knew just where they were going—getting the brain could knock the whole base out."

  Jameson and his people had left a considerable package of blasting materials behind. Lars, while his fellow prisoners demonstrated various emotions around him, stared at that pack, and poised with his muscles tensed. Now, he thought, now one of us is going to… he was afraid to look at Pat.

  But it was not Pat who made the move, it was Opava. Drawing a concealded handgun from inside his coverall, the soft man took aim at the pack of explosives, meaning to detonate it, to bring down the tunnel roof on Jameson and his people and save the master.

  "A gun! He's goodlife! They let him keep a gun—"

  The first shot went wide, searing only rock, as Lars knocked down Opava's arm. They grappled and rolled over and over fighting, until someone clubbed Opava from behind. Naxos; he held one of the rock fragments from the tunnel's opening, and he swung it once more, h
ard.

  "Damned… goodlife!" There could be no worse obscenity.

  Lars looked at Pat. All he could think was that it had not been her.

  There was no time to do more than exchange a look. Back out of the tunnel again came Jameson, followed by one or two of his people, all of them with weapons in hand, armor battered and smoking.

  Jameson reported in rasping gasps that his effort to blow up the berserker's brain had been foiled. The berserker's fighting machines had counterattacked at the last moment, enough of them to hold the breach.

  Now one of his people fired into the tunnel, as one of the guide machines appeared there. Lars seized Pat by the hand. Together they scrambled for what shelter they might find in the cell-corridor,

  There, was nowhere, really, to go. The two of them were cowering in his cell when an inhuman shape moved into the open doorway. It looked to Lars like a guide machine, but one of a somewhat different model than he had previously encountered, it showed some signs of battle damage.

  Lars aimed at it the small sidearm he had taken from Opava—not that he had much hope that the berserkers would have given their goodlife pet a weapon with which they could be damaged.

  The machine said to him, in a surprisingly human voice: "Lars… the Remora program."

  His finger on the trigger quivered and relaxed. Still gripping Pat with one arm, Lars got to his feet. "What do we do?" He felt air pressure drop again; a leak somewhere, or the berserker brain at last getting around to cutting off their life support. Pat was silent, as if she were holding her breath.

  A twin of the strange machine appeared, carrying a couple of spacesuits, which it tossed at the feet of the two humans. "Hurry," it said to them.

  Lars, even as he struggled into his suit, went up and down the short corridor from cell to cell. He located Naxos and Dorothy Totonac, and told them tersely to obey the words and gestures of these new machines. Both of the other human prisoners obeyed dazedly, as spacesuits were tossed in front of them. Channith Defense Service, it said on the suits. Channith? Were was that? Lars had the feeling he ought to know…

  "Stand back!" It was Jameson, at the far end of the short corridor, raising a weapon at the machines that had brought the suits.

  "No!" Lars shouted. Stull only halfway into his own suit, he hopped forward awkwardly, trying to stop the Adamant commander. Lars found suddenly that he had help. From somewhere the Carmpan—half of them now in spacesuits also—came to surround Jameson, somehow compelling him to lower his weapon.

  Jameson and his one surviving follower, who was badly wounded, joined the group of ED and Carmpan prisoners when they were once more conducted outside their cave complex, under a sky now mad with the ongoing fireworks of the attack. The blue-white sunlight was partially obscured by battle debris clouding nearby space.

  The prisoners were led by their new guide machines to one of the largest of the occupied repair docks, and into the monstrously huge berserker that waited there, most of its hull in a cavernous pit below ground level. The enormous berserker had sustained damage, and repair machines were furiously at work upon it, patching holes and loading weapons.

  If took a painfully, frighteningly long time to get inside, out from under the sky that still flamed silently with not-very-distant war.

  Once inside the great machine, the humans heard a wheezy human voice, coming from around them and ahead of them, "Kanakuru, you're there. Good. This is Hilary Gage. Tell them who I am."

  That voice had to be coming through air. But Lars thought the mikes on his suit weren't working right. He got his helmet open, inhaled air stale but breathable.

  "Tell them who I am," the voice repeated. "And what I am," it added.

  "I… don't think I know."

  "You must know. The Carmpan tell me that it's been passed on to you, how I got into this. Unless…"

  Now the Carmpan, easing themselves out of their own suits and helmets, surrounded Lars as they had earlier ringed Jameson. Each of them stretched out an arm, a hand.

  He felt the touch. Multiplied. And not of Carmpan flesh alone, but minds.

  The episode that had been secret, the message that had been hidden, poured forth into his conscious mind…

  A TEARDROP FALLS

  Two miles up, the thick air of Harvest thinned to Earth-normal pressure. The sky was a peculiar blue, but blue. It was unbreathable still, but there was oxygen, ten percent and growing. One of the biological factories showed against white cloudscape to nice effect, in view of a floating camera. The camera showed a tremendous rippling balloon in the shape of an inverted teardrop, blowing green bubbles from its tip. Hilary Gage, watched the view with a sense of pride.

  Not that he would want to visit Harvest, ever. Multicolored slimes infected shallow tidal pools near the poles. Green sticky stuff floated in the primordial atmosphere. If it drifted too low it burned to ash. The planet was slimy. Changes were exceedingly slow. Mistakes took years to demonstrate themselves and decades to eradicate.

  Hilary Gage preferred the outer moon.

  One day this planet would be a world. Even then, Hilary Gage would not join the colonists. Hilary Gage was a computer program.

  Hilary Gage would never have volunteered for the Harvest Project unless the alternative was death.

  Death by old age.

  He was aware, rumor-fashion, that other worlds were leery of advanced computers. They were too much like the berserker machines. But the human worlds numbered in tens of thousands. Berserkers had been mere rumor in the Channith region since before Channith was settled. Nobody really doubted their existence, but…

  Yet for some purposes, computers were indecently convenient; and some projects required artificial intelligence.

  The computer wasn't really an escape. Hilary Gage must have died years ago. Perhaps his last thoughts had been of an immortal computer program.

  The computer was not a new one. Its programming had included two previous personalities… who had eventually changed their minds and asked that they be erased.

  Gage could understand that. Entertainments were in his files. When he reached for them they were there, beginning to end, like vivid memories. Chess games could survive that, and some poetry, but what of a detective novel? A football game? A livey?

  Gage made his own entertainment.

  He had not summoned up his poem for these past ten days. He was surprised and pleased at his self-control. Perhaps now he could study it with fresh eyes… ?

  Wrong. The entire work blinked into his mind in an instant. It was as if he had finished reading it a millisecond ago. What was normally an asset to Hilary—his flawless memory—was a hindrance now.

  Over the years it had grown to the size of a small novel, yet his computer-mind could apprehend its totality. This poem was his life's story, his only shot at immortality. It had unity and balance; the rhyme and meter, at least, were flawless; but did it have thrust? Reading it from start to finish was more difficult than he had ever expected. He had to forget the totality, which a normal reader would not immediately sense, and proceed in linear fashion. Judge the flow…

  "No castrate ever sung so pure—" Good, but not there. He exchanged it for a chunk of phrasing elsewhere. No word-processor program had ever been this easy! The altered emphasis caused him to fiddle further… and his description of the berserker-blasted world Harmony seemed to read with more impact now.

  Days and years of fear and rage. In his youth he had fought men. Channith needed to safeguard its sphere of influence. Aliens existed somewhere, and berserkers existed somewhere, but he knew them only as rumor, until the day he saw Harmony. The Free Gaea rebels had done well to flee to Harmony, to lead him to Harmony, to show him the work of the berserkers.

  It was so difficult to conquer a world, and so easy to destroy it. Afterward he could no longer fight men.

  His superiors could have retired him. Instead he was promoted and set to investigating the defense of Channith against the berserker machines.

/>   They must have thought of it as make work: an employment project. It was almost like being a tourist at government expense. In nearly forty years he never saw a live… an active berserker; but, traveling in realms where they were more than rumor, perhaps he had learned too much about them. They were all shapes, all sizes. Here they traveled in time. There they walked in human shape that sprouted suddenly into guns and knives. Machines could be destroyed, but they could never be made afraid.

  A day came when his own fear was everything. He couldn't make decisions… it was in the poem, here. Wasn't it? He couldn't feel it. A poet should have glands!

  He wasn't sure, and he was afraid to meddle further. Mechanically it worked. As poetry it might well be too… mechanical.

  Maybe he-could get someone to read it?

  His chance might come unexpectedly soon. In his peripheral awareness he sensed ripplings in the 2.7 microwave background of space: the bow shock of a spacecraft approaching in c-plus from the direction of Channith. An unexpected supervisor from the homeworld? Hilary filed the altered poem and turned his attention to the signal.

  Too slow? Too strong! Too far! Mass at 1012 grams, and a tremendous power source barely able to hold it in a c-plus-excited state, even in the near-flat space, between stars. It was lightyears distant, days away at its tormented crawl; but it occluded Channith's star, and Gage found that horrifying.

  Berserker.

  Its signal code might be expressed as a flash of binary bits, 100101101110; or as a moment of recognition, with a description embedded; but never as a sound, and never as a name.

  100101101110 had three identical brains, and a reflex that allowed it to act on a concensus of two. In battle it might lose one, or two, and never sense a change in personality. A century ago it had been a factory, an auxiliary warcraft, and a cluster of mining machines on a metal asteroid. Now the three were a unit. At the next repair station its three brains might be installed in three different ships, it might be reprogrammed, or damaged, or wired into other machinery, or disassembled as components for something else. Such a thing could not have an independent existence. To name itself would be inane.