Fred Saberhagen - Berserker - Sign Of The Wolf

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 84.97KB 7 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Fred Saberhagen - Berserker Short - Sign Of The Wolf

The dark shape, big as a man, came between the two smallest of the three watchfires, moving in silence

like that of sleep. Out of habit, Duncan had been watching that downwind direction, though his mind was

heavy with tiredness and with the thoughts of life that came with sixteen summers' age.

Duncan raised his spear and howled, and charged the wolf. For a moment the fire-eyes looked steadily

at him, appearing to be a full hand apart. Then the wolf turned away; it made one deep questioning

sound, and was gone into the darkness out beyond the fires.

Duncan stopped, drawing a gasping breath of relief. His charge had not been courage. The wolf would

probably have killed him if it had faced his charge, but it did not yet dare to face him in firelight.

The sheeps' eyes were on Duncan, a hundred glowing spots in the huddled mass of the flock. One or

two of the animals bleated softly.

He paced around the flock, sleepiness and introspection jarred from his mind. Legends said that men in

the old Earth-land had animals called dogs that guarded sheep. If that were true, some might think that

men were fools for ever leaving Earth-land.

But such thoughts were irreverent, and Duncan's situation called for prayer. Every night now the wolf

came, and all too often it killed a sheep.

Duncan raised his eyes to the night sky. "Send me a sign, star-gods," he prayed, routinely. But the

heavens were quiet. Only the stately fireflies of the dawn zone traced their steady random paths,

vanishing halfway up the eastern sky. The stars themselves agreed that three-fourths of the night was

gone. The legends said that Earth-land was among the stars, but the younger priests admitted such a

statement could only be taken symbolically.

The heavy thoughts came back, in spite of the nearby wolf. For two years now Duncan had prayed and

hoped for his mystical experience, the sign from a god that came to mark the future life of every youth.

From what other young men whispered now and then, he knew that many faked their signs. That was all

right for lowly herdsmen, or even for hunters. But how could a man without a genuine vision ever be

much more than a tender of animals? To be a priest, to study the things brought from old Earth-land and

saved--Duncan hungered for learning, for greatness, for things he could not name.

He looked up again, and gasped, for he saw a great sign in the sky, almost directly overhead. A point of

dazzling light, and then a bright little cloud remaining among the stars. Duncan gripped his spear,

watching, for a moment even forgetting the sheep. The tiny cloud swelled and faded very slowly.

For centuries now the berserker machines had warred on Earth-descended man. Automatons loosed in

some forgotten war, the machines moved as raidersthrough the galaxy, destroying whatever life they

could find and overcome.

One such machine slid out of the interstellar intervals toward Duncan's planet, drawn from afar by the

Sol-type light of Duncan's sun. To turn life into death was a berserker's function, and this sun and this

planet promised life.

The berserker machine was the size of a small planetoid, and its power was immense, but it knew well

that some planets were defended, and it bent and slowed its hurtling approach into a long cautious curve.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Fred Saberhagen - Berserker - Sign Of The Wolf.pdf

共7页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Fred Saberhagen - Berserker - Sign Of The Wolf

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: