Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 02 - Brother Assassin

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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 1993 Brother Assassin
PART ONE
LIEUTENANT DERRON ODEGARD LEANED BACK IN HIS contour chair for just long enough to
wipe his somewhat sweaty palms on the legs of his easy-fitting duty uniform, and to shift minutely the
position of the padded headset on his skull. He performed these nervous actions without taking his eyes
from the tangled green pattern on the wide, slightly curved viewscreen before him; then he leaned
forward again and resumed his hunt for the enemy.
After only half an hour on watch he was already bone-tired, feeling the weight of every one of his
planet's forty million surviving inhabitants resting crushingly on the back of his neck. He didn't want to
bear the burden of responsibility for any of those lives, but at the moment there was nowhere to set it
down. Being an officer and a sentry gained a man a bit of material comfort and allowed him a bit less
regimentation when he went off duty-but let a sentry make one gross mistake on the job, and the entire
surviving population of the planet Sirgol could be tumbled into nothingness, knocked out of real-time and
killed, ended so completely that they would never have existed at all.
Derron's hands rested easily and lightly on the molded controls of his console; there was a good deal of
skill, though nothing like love, in his touch. Before him on the screen, the green, tangled cathode traces
shifted at his will, like tall grasses pushed aside by the hands of a cautious hunter. This symbolic grass
through which he searched represented the interwoven lifelines of all the animals and plants that
nourished, or had flourished, upon a certain few square miles of Sirgol's land surface, during a few
decades of time, some twenty thousand years deep in the prehistoric past.
Surrounding Derron Odegard's chair and console were those of other sentries, a thousand units all
aligned in long, subtly curving rows. Their arrangement pleased and rested the momentarily lifted eye,
then led the gaze back to the viewscreen where it belonged. Concentration was further encouraged by
the gentle modulations that sometimes passed like drifting clouds across the artificial light, which flowed
from the strongly vaulted ceiling of this buried chamber, and by the insistent psych-music that came
murmuring in and out of headsets, airy melodies now and then supported on an elemental, heavy beat. In
this chamber buried below many miles of rock, the air was fresh with drifting breezes, scented
convincingly with the tang of the sea or the smell of green fields, with various reminiscences of the living
soil and water that the berserkers' bombardment had wiped away, months ago, from Sirgol's surface.
Again, the traces representing interconnected life rippled on Derron's viewscreen as he touched the
controls. In the remote past, the infraelectronic spy devices connected to his screen were moving at his
command. They did not stir the branches nor startle the fauna in the ancient forests they surveyed.
Instead they hovered just outside reality, not interfering, avoiding most of the nets of paradox spread by
reality for man or machine that traveled in time. The spy devices lurked just around the local curves of
probability from real-time, able to sense even from that position the lines of powerful organization of
matter that were life.
Derron knew that his assigned sector, nearly twenty thousand years back, was somewhere near the time
of the First Men's coming to Sirgol, but he had not yet seen the trace, unmistakably powerful, of a human
lifeline there. He was not looking for humans especially. What mattered was that neither he nor any other
sentry had yet observed the splash of disruptive change that would mean a berserker attack; the gigantic
machines besieging the planet in present-time had perhaps not yet discovered that it was possible here to
invade the past.
Like a good sentry in any army, Derron avoided letting his own moves become predictable as he walked
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his post. From his seat in remote physical comfort and relative physical safety, he monitored the signals of
one spy device after another, ranging now a decade farther into the past, then five miles north; next two
years uptime, then a dozen miles southwest. Still no alien predator's passage showed in the lush symbolic
grass that grew on Derron's screen. The enemy he sought had no lifeline of its own, and would be visible
only by the death and disruption that it broadcast.
"Nothing yet," said Derron curtly, without turning, when he felt his supervisor's presence at his elbow.
The supervisor, a captain, remained looking on for a moment and then without comment walked quietly
on down the narrow aisle. Still without lifting his eyes from his screen, Derron frowned. It irritated him to
realize that he had forgotten the captain's name. Well, this was only the captain's second day on the job,
and the captain, or Derron, or both of them, might be transferred to some other duty tomorrow. The
Time Operations Section of Sirgol's Planetary Defense Forces was organizationally fluid, to put it mildly.
Only a few months ago had the defenders realized that the siege might be extended into time warfare.
This sentry room, and the rest of Time Operations, had been really functional for only about a month, and
it had yet to handle a real fight. Luckily, the techniques of time warfare were almost certainly entirely new
to the enemy also; nowhere else but around the planet Sirgol was time travel known to be possible.
Before Derron Odegard had managed to recall his captain's name, the first battle fought by Time
Operations had begun. For Derron it began very simply and undramatically, with the calm feminine voice
of one of the communicators flowing into his earphones to announce that the berserker space fleet had
launched toward the planet several devices that did not behave like ordinary missiles. As these weapons
fell toward the planet's surface they vanished from direct observation; the sentry screens soon discovered
them in probability-space, falling into the planet's past.
There were five or six objects-the number was soon confirmed as six-dropping eight thousand years
down, ten thousand, twelve. The sentries watching over the affected sectors were alerted one after
another. But the enemy seemed to understand that his passage was being closely followed. Only when
the six devices had passed the twenty-one-thousand-year level, when their depth in the abyss of time had
made observation from the present practically impossible, did they stop. Somewhere.
"Attention, all sentries," said a familiar, drawling male voice in Derron's headset. "This is the Time
Operations commander, to let you all know as much as I do about what's going on. Looks like they're
setting up a staging area for themselves down there, about minus twenty-one thousand. They can shoot
stuff uptime at us from there, and we probably won't be able to spot it until it breaks into real-time on us,
and maybe not until it starts killing."
The psych-music came back. A few minutes passed before the calm voice of a communications girl
spoke to Derron individually, relaying orders for him to shift his pattern of search, telling him in which
dimensions and by how much to change his sector. The sentries would be shifting all along the line, which
meant that an enemy penetration into real-time was suspected. Observers would be concentrating near
the area of the invasion while still maintaining a certain amount of coverage everywhere else. The first
enemy attack might be only a diversion.
These days, when an enemy missile dug near the shelters, Derron rarely bothered to take cover, never
felt anything worse than the remotest and vaguest sort of fear; it was the same for him now, knowing that
battle was joined, or about to be. His eye and hand remained as steady as if he knew this was only one
more routine training exercise. There were advantages in not caring very much whether death came now
or later.
Still, he could not escape the hateful weight of responsibility, and the minutes of the watch dragged more
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slowly now than ever. Twice more the imperturbable female voice changed Derron's search sector. Then
the Time Ops commander came back on to confirm officially that an attack was launched.
"Now keep your eyes open, boys," said the drawling voice to all the sentries, "and find me that keyhole."
At some time deeper than twenty thousand years in the past, at some place as yet undetermined, the
keyhole must exist-an opening from probability-space into real-time, created by the invasion of the six
berserker devices.
Had men's eyes been able to watch their arrival directly, they would have seen the killing machines,
looking like six stub-winged aircraft, materialize apparently from nowhere in a spot high in Sirgol's
atmosphere. Like precision fliers, the machines exploded at once out of the compact formation in which
they had appeared to scatter in six separate directions at multisonic speed.
And, as they separated, the six immediately began seeding the helpless world below them with poison.
Radioactives, antibiotic chemicals... it was hard to tell from a distance of twenty thousand years just what
they were using. Like the other sentries, Derron Odegard saw the attack only by its effects. He perceived
it as a diminution in the probability of existence of all the life in his sector, a rising tide of moribundity
beginning in one corner of that sector and washing slowly over the rest.
The six machines were poisoning the whole planet. If the First Men were on the surface at the time of
this attack, it would of course kill them; if they landed later they would wander baby-helpless to their
deaths in a foodless, sterile world. And, if that happened, the descendants in present-time of the First
Men, the entire surviving population, would cease to exist. The planet and the system would be the
berserkers' for the taking.
The rising odds on world death spread up through prehistory and history. In each living cell on the planet
the dark tide of nonexistence rose, a malignant change visible on every sentry screen.
The many observed vectors of that change were plotted by men and computers working together in
Time Operations' nerve center. They had a wealth of data to work with; perhaps no more than twenty
minutes of present-time had passed from the start of the attack until the computers announced that the
keyhole of the six enemy flying machines had been pinpointed.
In the deeper catacomb called Operations Stage Two, the defensive missiles waited in stacks, their blunt
simple shapes surrounded by complexities of control and launching mechanism. At the command of
Operations' computers and their human overseers, steel arms extended a missile sideways from its rack,
while on the dark stone floor beneath it there appeared a silvery circle, shimmering like a pool of troubled
liquid.
The arms released the missile, and in the first instant of falling it disappeared. While one set of forces
propelled it into the past, another sent it as a probability-wave up through the miles of rock, to the
surface of the planet and beyond, into the stratosphere, straight for the keyhole through which the six
devices of the enemy had entered real-time.
Derron saw the ominous changes that had been creeping across his screen begin suddenly to reverse
themselves. It looked like a trick, like a film run backward, like some stunt without relevance to the real
world.
"Right in the keyhole!" yelped the Time Ops commander's voice, drawling no longer. The six berserker
devices now shared their point of entry into real-time with an atomic explosion, neatly tailored to fit.
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As every screen showed the waves of death receding, jubilation spread in murmurous waves of its own,
up and down the long curved ranks of sentry posts. But caution and discipline combined to keep the
rejoicing muted. The remainder of the six-hour shift passed in the manner of a training exercise, in which
all the i's were properly dotted and the f s crossed, the tactical success made certain by observations and
tests. But beneath the discipline and caution the jubilation quietly persisted. Men who were relieved on
schedule for their breaks passed one another smiling and winking. Derron smiled like everyone else when
someone met his eye. To go along, to show the expected reaction, was socially the easiest course. And
he did feel a certain pride in having done a good job.
When the shift ended without any further sign of enemy action, it was certain that the berserkers' first
venture into time warfare had been beaten back into nonexistence.
But the damned machines would come back, as they always did, thought Derron. Stiff and sweaty and
mentally tired, not bothering to smile this time, he rose from his chair with a sigh of relief to make room
for the sentry on the next shift.
"I guess you people did all right today," said the replacement, a touch of envy in his voice.
Derron managed one more smile. "You can have the next chance for glory." He pressed his thumbprint
into the appropriate place on the console's scanner, as the other man did the same. Then, officially
relieved, he walked at a dragging pace out of the sentry room, joining the stream of other members of his
shift. Here and there another face appeared as grim and tired as he knew his own must look. But once
they had passed through the doors that marked the area of enforced quiet, most of the men formed
excited groups and started to whoop it up a little.
Derron stood in line to turn in his recording cartridge with its record of his shift activity. Then he stood in
another line, to make a short oral report to one of the debriefing officers. And after that he was free. As
if, he thought, freedom had any meaning these days for a citizen of Sirgol.
A huge passenger elevator, one of a string that worked like buckets on an endless belt, lifted him amid a
crowd of others out of the deeper caves of Operations to the housing level of the buried world-city. At
this depth there were still miles of rock overhead.
The ideal physical environment of the sentry room was not to be found on Housing Level or at any other
place where maximum human efficiency was not considered essential at all times. Throughout most of
Housing Level the air tended to be stale at best, and at worst it was burdened with unpleasant odors. The
lighting along most of the gray street-corridors was no better than it had to be. In most public places
decoration was limited to the ubiquitous signs and posters, which, in the name of the government,
exhorted the people to greater efforts for victory or promised them that improvements in living conditions
were on the way..Here and there, such improvements were slowly being made. From month to month,
the air became a little fresher, the food a little more varied and tastier. Given the practically limitless
power of hydrogen fusion to labor for them upon the mineral wealth of the surrounding rock, it seemed
that the besieged planet garrison might sustain itself indefinitely, in gradually increasing comfort.
The corridor in which Derron now walked was one of the main thoroughfares of the buried world-city.
His bachelor officer's cubicle was one of the housing units that, along with shops and offices, lined its
sides. The corridor was two stories high and as wide as an ordinary main street in some ordinary minor
city of the late lamented surface world. Down its center were laid moving belts, ridden in either direction
by people who had to go farther than they could conveniently walk. Derron could see pairs of
white-uniformed police rushing past on the belts now, checking the dog tags of travelers. Planetary
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Command was evidently cracking down on work evaders.
As usual, the broad statwalks on either side of the moving strips were moderately crowded with an
assortment of people. Men and women in work uniforms monotonously alike were going to their jobs or
leaving them, at a pace neither hurried nor slow. Only a group of children just set free from some
schoolroom were displaying any excess of energy. A very few adults and young people, off duty, strolled
the walks or stood in line before the stores and places of amusement. Those businesses still under some
semblance of private management seemed on the average to do a brisker trade than those wholly
operated by the government.
One of the shorter queues of customers was the one before the local branch of the Homestead Office.
Like the other small offices and shops, it was an area partitioned off by wire and glass to one side of the
wide corridor. Standing in front of the Homestead Office on the statwalk, Derron looked in at the
lethargic clerks, at the display of curling posters and somehow shabby models. The displays depicted, in
colors meant to glow impressively, a number of plans for the postwar rehabilitation of the planet's
surface.
APPLY NOW FOR THE LAND YOU WANT!
Of land there was no shortage. Substances breathable and drinkable, however, might be hard to find.
But the Homestead assumption was that someday-after victory, of course-there would be a good new
life for all on the surface, a life nourished and protected by the new oceans of air and water that were to
be somehow squeezed from the planet's deep rock or, if need be, brought in from the giant outer planets
of the Sirgol system.
To judge by their uniform insignia, the people standing in the short line before the Homestead office were
of all classifications and ranks. But at the moment they were all displaying what an earlier age might have
called a peasant patience. With eyes that hoped and wanted to believe, they fed their gaze on the models
and the posters. Derron had stopped on the statwalk mainly to look at these people standing in line. All
of them had somehow managed to forget, if indeed they had ever allowed themselves to grasp the fact,
that the world was dead. The real world, the one that mattered, had been killed and cremated, along with
nine out of the ten of the people who had made it live.
Not that the nine out of ten, the statistics, really mattered to Derron. Or, he thought, to anyone else. It
was always only the individual who mattered....
A familiar face, a beloved face, came into Derron's thoughts, and he pushed it wearily away and turned
from the believers who were waiting in line for a chance to strengthen their belief.
He began to walk toward his cubicle once more; but when he came to a place where the corridor
branched, he turned on impulse to follow the narrow side passage. It was like an alley, dark and with few
doors or windows; but a hundred paces ahead it ended in an arch that framed the living green of real
treetops. At this time of day there would not be many people in the park.
He had not taken many steps down the side corridor before he felt the tremor of an explosion come
racing through the living rock surrounding him. Ahead, he saw two small red birds streak in alarm across
the green of the trees. He kept on walking without hesitating or breaking stride, and had taken three more
paces before the sound came, dull and muffled but heavy. It must have been a small missile penetration,
fairly close by. From the besieging fleet in space the enemy threw down probability-waves that
sometimes got through the defenses and the miles of shielding rock and then turned into missiles and so
into explosions in the vicinity of the buried shelters.
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Unhurriedly, Derron continued walking to the end of the passage. There he halted, leaning with both
hands on a protective railing of natural logs while he looked out over the dozen acres of park from a little
balcony two levels above the grass. From the dome of "sky" six levels higher yet, an artificial sun shone
down almost convincingly on grass and trees and shrubbery and on the varicolored birds in their invisible
cage of curtain-jets of air. Across the park there tumbled a narrow stream of free fresh water; today its
level had fallen so that the concrete sides of its bed were revealed halfway down.
A year ago-a lifetime ago-when the real world had been still alive, Derron Odegard had not been one to
spend much time in the appreciation of nature. Oh, a hike now and then in the fresh air.
But he had been concentrating on finishing his schooling and in settling down to the labors of the
professional historian. He had centered his life in texte and films and tapes and in the usual academic
schemes for academic advancement. Even his hikes and holidays had taken him to places of historic
significance.... With an effort that had become reflex, he forced the image of the woman he had loved
once more from his thoughts.
A year ago, a historian's career had been a prospect filled with excitement, made electric by the first
hints from the physicists that the quirks of Sirgol's unique space-time might prove susceptive to
manipulation, that humanity on Sirgol might be granted a firsthand look at much of its own past. Only a
year ago, the berserker war had seemed remote; a terrible thing, of course, but afflicting only other
worlds, light-years away. Decades had passed since the Earthmen had brought warning, and Sirgol's
planetary defenses had been decades in the building, a routine part of life's background for a young man
finishing his schooling.
It occurred to Derron now, as a trivial truism, that in the past year he had learned more about history
than he had in all the years of study that had gone before. Not that it was doing him any good. He thought
now that when the last moment of history came on Sirgol, if he could know that it was the last, he would
try to get away to one of these little parks with a small bottle of wine he had been saving. He would finish
history by drinking whatever number of toasts history allowed, to whatever dead and dying things
seemed to him most worthy of mourning.
The tension of the day's watch was just beginning to drain from his fingers into the hand-worn bark of
the railing, and he had actually forgotten the recent explosion, when the first of the wounded came
stumbling into the park below.
The man came out of a narrow, grass-level entrance, his uniform jacket gone and the rest of his clothing
torn and blackened. One of his bared arms was burnt and raw and swollen. He walked quickly, half
blindly, among the trees, and then like an actor in some wilderness drama fell full length at the edge of the
artificial brook and drank from it ravenously.
Next from the same entrance came another man, older, more sedentary in appearance. Probably some
kind of clerk or administrator, though at the distance Derron could not make out his insignia. This man
was not visibly wounded, but he moved into the park as if he were lost. Now and then he raised his
hands to his ears; he might be deaf, or just wondering if his head was still there.
A pudgy woman entered, moaning in bewilderment, using first one hand and then the other to hold the
flap of her torn scalp in place. After her another woman. A steady trickle of the suffering and maimed
was flowing from the little entrance at grass level, spilling into the false peace of the park and defiling it
with the swelling chorus of their querulous voices.
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From somewhere down the passages were heard authoritarian yells, and then the whine and rumble of
heavy machinery. Damage Control was on the job promptly, for rescue and emergency repair. The
walking wounded were obviously being sent to the park to get them out from underfoot while more
urgent matters were handled. By now there were a couple of dozen sufferers wandering over the grass or
lying on it, their groans demanding of the trees why the missile had gotten through today, why it had had
to come to them.
Among the wounded there walked a slender young woman of eighteen or twenty, clad in the remnants of
a simple paper uniform dress. She stopped, leaning against a tree as if she could walk no farther. The
way her dress was torn...
Derron turned away from the railing, squeezing his eyes shut in a spasm of self-disgust. He had suddenly
seen himself, standing here like some ancient tyrant remotely entertained by others' pain, condescending
to lust with a critical eye. One of these days, and soon, he would have to decide whether he was really
still on the side of the human race or not.
There was a stairway handy, and he hurried down to the ground level of the park. The badly burned
man was bathing his raw arm in the cool running water, and others were drinking. No one seemed to
have stopped breathing or to be bleeding to death. The girl looked as if she might fall away from her
supporting tree at any moment.
Pulling off his jacket as he went to her, Derron wrapped her in the garment and eased her away from the
tree. "Where are you hurt?"
She shook her head and said something incoherent. Her face was pale enough for her to be in shock; he
tried to get her to sit down. She would not, and so the two of them did a little off-balance dance while he
held her up. She was a tall, slim girl, and under normal conditions she would be lovely... no, not lovely, or
anyway not pretty in the ordinary way. But good to look at, certainly. Her hair, like most women's these
days, was cut in the short simple style promoted by the government. She was wearing no jewelry or
makeup at all, which was a bit unusual.
She soon came out of her daze enough to look down with bewilderment at the jacket that had been
wrapped around her. "You're an officer," she said in a low blurry voice, her eyes focusing on the collar
insignia.
"In a very small way. Now, hadn't you better lie down somewhere?"
"No.... I've been trying to get home... or somewhere. Can't you tell me where I am? What's going on?"
Her voice was rising.
"I believe there was a missile strike. Here now, this insignia of mine is supposed to be a help with the
girls, so sit down at least, won't you?"
She resisted, and they danced a few more steps. "No. First I have to find out... I don't know who I
am-or where, or why!"
"I don't know those things about myself." That was the most honest communication he had spoken to
anyone in a considerable time. More people, passersby and medics, were running into the park now,
adding to the general confusion as they tried to help the wounded. Becoming gradually more aware of her
surroundings, the woman looked wildly around at all this activity and clung to Derron's arm.
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"All right, young lady, since you seem determined to walk, I'm going to take you to the hospital. There's
one not far from here, just down the elevator. Come along."
The woman was willing enough to walk beside him, holding his arm. "What's your name?" he asked her
as they boarded the elevator. The other people aboard stared at the dazed woman wearing his jacket.
"I... don't know!" Finding her name gone, she became really frightened. Her hand went to her throat, but
no dog tag depended there. Many people didn't like to wear them and disregarded the regulation
requiring it. "Where are you taking me?"
"I told you, to a hospital. You need some looking after." He would have liked to give a wilder answer,
for their staring fellow passengers' benefit.
Down at Operations Level, he led the woman off the elevator. A few more steps brought them to an
emergency entrance to the hospital complex. Other casualties from the explosion, stretcher cases, were
arriving now, and the emergency room was crowded. An elderly nurse started to take Derron's jacket off
the young woman and what was left of her own clothing peeled away with it. She squealed faintly, and
the nurse rewrapped her with a brisk motion. "You just come back for this jacket tomorrow, young
man."
"Gladly." And then the pressure of stretcher bearers and other busy people around him was so great that
he could' do no more than wave good-bye to the woman as he was forced slowly out into the corridor.
He disentangled himself from the crowd and walked away smiling, almost laughing to himself about the
nurse and the jacket, as if it had been a great joke. It was a while since he had had a thought that seemed
worth smiling at.
He was still smiling faintly as he ducked into the Time Operations complex to pick up the spare jacket
that he kept in his locker in the sentries' ready room. There was nothing new on the bulletin board. He
thought, not for the first time, of applying for a transfer, to some job that didn't require sitting still for six
hours of deadly strain a day. But it seemed that those who didn't apply were just about as likely to be
transferred as those who did.
Naturally, the woman's husband or lover would probably show up before tomorrow to claim her. Of
course-a woman like that. Well, he would hope someone showed up for her-a sister or a brother,
perhaps.
He went into the nearby officers' gym and got into a handball game with his old classmate Chan Amling,
who was now a captain in the Historical Research Section. Amling was not one to play without betting,
and Derron won an ersatz soft drink, which he preferred not to collect. The talk in the gym was mostly
about Time Operations' first victory; when someone brought up the subject of the missile strike, Derron
said no more than that he had seen some of the wounded.
After showering, Derron and Amling and a couple of others went to a bar on Housing Level that Amling
favored. Major Lukas, the chief historical psychologist in Time Operations, was established there in a
booth, holding forth on the psychic and other attributes of some new girls at a local uplevel dive called the
Red Garter. There were some areas in which private enterprise still flourished with a minimum of
governmental interference.
Amling bet with the others on darts, on dice, and on something having to do with the Red Garter girls.
Derron wasn't listening too closely, though for a change he was smiling and joking a little. He had one
drink, his usual maximum, and relaxed for a while amid the social noise.
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In the local officers' mess he ate his dinner with a better appetite than usual. When at last he reached his
cubicle, he kicked off his shoes and stretched out on his cot and for once was sound asleep before he
could even consider taking a pill.
After coming stiffly awake in the middle of the night, then getting undressed and going properly to bed,
he still awoke somewhat ahead of schedule and feeling well rested. The little clock on his cubicle wall
read oh-six-thirty hours, Planetwide Emergency Time. This morning none of the aspects of Time weighed
on him very heavily. Certainly, he thought, he had enough of that mysterious dimension at his disposal to
let him stop at the hospital for a while before going on duty.
Carrying yesterday's jacket over his arm, he followed a nurse's directions and found the woman seated
in a patients' lounge, which at this time of the morning she had pretty much to herself. She was planted
directly in front of the television, frowning with naive-looking concentration at Channel Gung-Ho, as the
government's exhortation channel was popularly termed. Today the woman was wearing a plain new
paper dress and hospital slippers.
At the sound of Derron's step she turned her head quickly, then smiled and got to her feet. "Oh, it's you!
It's a good feeling to recognize someone."
Derron took the hand she was holding out. "It's a good feeling to be recognized. You're looking much
better."
She thanked Derron for his help, and he protested that it had been nothing. She turned off the television
sound and they sat down to talk. He introduced himself.
Her smile vanished. "I wish I could tell you my name."
"I know, I talked with the nurse-----They say your amnesia is persisting, but outside of that you're doing
fine."
"Yes, I feel fine except for that one little detail. I guess I wasn't physically hurt at all. And I have a new
name, of sorts. Lisa Gray. For the sake of their hospital records they had to tag me with something, next
off some list they keep handy. Evidently a fair number of people go blank in the upper story these days
and have to be renamed. And they say so many records, fingerprints and things, were lost when the
surface was evacuated."
"Lisa's a nice name. I think it suits you."
"Thank you, sir." She managed to sound almost carefree for a moment.
Derron considered. "You know, I've heard that being in the path of a missile, being run over by the
probability-wave before it materializes, can cause amnesia. It's a little like being dropped into the deep
past. Sort of wipes the slate clean."
The girl nodded. "Yes, the doctors think that's what happened to me yesterday. They tell me that when
the missile hit I was with a group of people being brought down from an upper level that's being
evacuated. I suppose if I had any next of kin with me, they were blown to pieces along with our records.
Nobody's come looking for me."
It was a story common enough on Sirgol to be boring, but this time Derron could feel the pain in it. In
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sympathy he changed the subject. "Have you had your breakfast yet?"
"Yes. There's a little automat right here if you want something. Maybe I could use some more fruit juice."
In a minute Derron was back, carrying one paper cup of the orange-colored liquid called fruit juice, one
cup of tea, and a couple of the standard sweet rolls. Lisa was again studying the television version of the
war; the commentator's stentorian voice was still tuned mercifully low.
Derron laid out his cargo on a low table and pulled his own chair closer. Glancing at Lisa's puzzled
expression, he asked, "Do you remember much about the war?"
"Almost nothing.... I guess that part of my memory really was wiped clean. What are these berserkers? I
know they're something terrible, but..."
"Well, they're machines." Derron sipped his tea. "Some of them are bigger than any spaceships that we
or any other Earth-descended men have ever built. Others come in different shapes and sizes, but all of
them are deadly. The first of them were constructed ages ago, by some race we've never met, to fight in
some war we've never heard of.
"They were programmed to destroy life anywhere they could find it, and they've come only the Holy
One knows how far, doing just that." Derron had begun in a conversational tone, and his voice was still
quiet, but now the words seemed to be welling up from an inexhaustible spring of bitterness. "Sometimes
men have beaten them in battle, but some of them have always survived. The survivors hide out on
unexplored rocks, around some dark star, and they build more of their kind, with improvements. And
then they come back. They just go on and on, like death itself...."
"No," said Lisa, unwilling to have it so.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to start raving. Not so early in the morning, anyway." He smiled faintly. He
supposed he had no reasonable excuse for unloading the weight of his soul onto this woman. But once
things started pouring out... "We on Sirgol were alive, and so the berserkers had to kill us. But since
they're only machines, why, it's all only an accident, sort of a cosmic joke. An act of the Holy One, as
people used to put it. We have no one to take revenge on." His throat felt tight; he swallowed the rest of
his tea and pushed the cup away.
Lisa asked. "Won't men come from other planets to help us?"
He sighed. "Some of them are fighting berserkers near their own systems. A really big relief fleet would
have to be put together to do us any good- while, of course, politics must still be played among the stars
as usual. Oh, I suppose help will be sent eventually."
The television commentator was droning on aggressively about men's brilliant defensive victories on the
moon, while an appropriate videotape was being shown. The chief satellite of Sirgol was said to much
resemble the moon on Earth; long before either men or berserkers had existed, its round face had been
pocked by impact craters into an awed expression. But during the last year, the face of Sirgol's moon
had vanished under a rash of new impacts, along with practically all of the human defenders there.
"I think help will come to us in time," said Lisa.
In time for what? Derron wondered. "I suppose so," he said, and felt that he was lying.
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摘要：

FredSaberhagen-Berserker1993BrotherAssassinPARTONELIEUTENANTDERRONODEGARDLEANEDBACKINHIScontourchairforjustlongenoughtowipehissomewhatsweatypalmsonthelegsofhiseasy-fittingdutyuniform,andtoshiftminutelythepositionofthepaddedheadsetonhisskull.Heperformedthesenervousactionswithouttakinghiseyesfromtheta...

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