Fred Saberhagen - Berserker Throne

VIP免费
2024-12-13 0 0 319.31KB 88 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt
THE BERSERKER THRONE
Berserker Series
by
Fred Saberhanen
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and
any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
THE BERSERKER THRONE
Copyright © 1985 by Fred Saberhagen
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
First Tor printing: December 1986
A TOR Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
49 West 24 Street
New York, N.Y. 10010
Cover art by Vincent DiFate
ISBN: 0-812-55318-7
CAN. ED.: 0-812-55319-5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number. 85-2021
Printed in the United States of America
THE
BERSERKER
THRONE
Chapter 1
Around the green and lovely world called Salutai, the sky was clear of terror, as it had been now
for many years. Today the planet's day side sky was almost clear of clouds as well, and at midday
the face of the land beneath it blazed with the thousand colors of midsummer flowers.
It was the Holiday of Life today on Salutai, the planet's greatest yearly festival, and at the
meridian of noon the central procession of the festival was passing through small town streets
strewn with fresh-cut blooms.
Through this particular small town ran many canals. They were clean, open waterways, and almost as
numerous as the streets. And today in the canals as in the streets of Salutai the masses of summer
blooms were prodigally distributed, those on the water floating and drifting in the controlled
current. The streets and canal banks and buildings of the town under the noonday sun echoed with
celebration, with ten kinds of music all being played and sung at the same time. The buildings,
streets, canals, as well as the people in them and on them and the living plants that made
archways above, were all mad with decorations.
At the center of the slow-moving ceremonial procession crept the broad, low, bubble-domed
groundcar in which the Empress of the Eight Worlds was riding. The parade extending ahead of her
car and behind it was not really very long, but it took its time, so that everyone in the town who
wanted to see the procession and the Empress at close range had a good chance to do so. And there
were many, in this town and across the planet, who did want to see. The crowds, here on Salutai
composed exclusively of Earth-descended humans, cried the name of their Empress in several
languages, and some of the people in the crowd waved petitions and raised banners and placards,
promoting one cause or another, as her clear-topped groundcar crept past.
Though the procession was not moving with much speed, neither was the town large. The sun of
Salutai was still very nearly directly overhead when the central groundcar and its escort of
marchers and other vehicles emerged from the confinement of the old town's narrow streets, and
entered abruptly into a countryside that was approximately half in well-managed cultivation, half
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred...0Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt (1 of 88) [11/1/2004 12:23:06 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt
still in what looked like virgin wilderness.
As the short parade left the last of the hard-paved streets behind, the crowds surrounding it grew
no less, but rather greater. Here, amid a vast, parklike expanse that provided more room in which
to assemble, a larger throng was waiting. This crowd was made up partly of government workers and
dependents drafted into action and tubed out from the nearby capital city; still, most of the
people had come here freely, to cheer a monarch popular enough to draw spontaneous affection from
many of her people.
Here a substantial minority of the crowd had in mind other things besides the offer of uncritical
affection. Live news coverage of the procession was notably absent, but still there were
occasional protests. Whenever these protestors and placard-bearers grew too numerous or noisy,
security people in uniform and out appeared in sudden concentration, moving to break up the
gatherings as gently and as quietly as possible. There were no injuries. The people of Salutai
knew a long tradition of courtesy, and they were almost universally unused to the organization of
violence, at least against their fellow humans and fellow citizens.
Now, still surrounded by flowers, and by a slow wave of noise that was still predominantly happy,
the procession paused on the bank of a broad, open canal. Amid a suddenly increased presence of
uniformed security forces, the Empress, still tall and regal despite her advanced age, stood up
out of her low car, and amid much ceremonious escort walked down a few steps to a dock. There she
stepped aboard a heavily decorated pleasure-barge that waited to receive her, rising and falling
gently amid the floating drifts of flowers.
She had to delay briefly then, looking back toward shore, to give her attention to a delegation of
school-children who were about to present her with a special bouquet.
To a young man who was watching from the top of a small hill a hundred meters distant, amid the
scalloped outer fringes of the crowd, the whole scene, of applauding throngs, welcoming children,
and the endless visual bombardment of blossoms, made a very pretty picture indeed.
The young man's name was Chen Shizuoka, and with his curly dark hair surrounding an almost angelic
face he looked very earnest and nervous at the moment, more so than those around him. He said to
his companion: "Listen to them. They still love her."
The two of them, Chen and the young woman who was standing with him, had been waiting for several
hours on the hilltop, along with a handful of other people who had with foresight chosen this
place for the clear view that it was certain to provide of the Empress and the parade. For the
last few minutes Chen and his companion, whose name was Hana Calderon, had been watching intently
the stately and joyful approach of the procession. Chen loved the Empress, as did so many of her
people, and he would have liked to be able to get closer to her now, near enough to cry out some
heartfelt personal greeting, and perhaps even to meet her eyes. But today he had a duty that
precluded the gratification of any such personal wish.
Hana Calderon was not really so young as Chen; at the moment she looked quieter, less nervous, and
somehow more effective. She raised a hand and brushed back straight black hair from dark oriental
eyes, narrowed now in calculation.
"I think," she said, her tone suggesting that she was mildly chiding the young man but being
careful how she went about it, "that what most of them are really cheering is the Holiday of
Life."
As if by reflex Chen glanced up at the clear terrorless sky, from which it was always possible-and
this year perhaps more probable than last-that terror might come again.
"I suppose," he said to his companion, avoiding argument as usual, "that feelings are strong again
this year. With the news."
Hana Calderon nodded, moving her chiseled classical profile up and down without turning the gaze
of her dark eyes away from the Empress's barge. The presentation of the special bouquet had just
been completed, and the vessel was now almost ready to carry the Empress out on the next,
waterborne leg of her progress.
The young woman said in an abstracted voice: "I suppose they are." Then, still not looking away
from the barge, she reached out a hand to touch Chen. In a suddenly crisp tone, she added: "Are
you ready?"
Chen Shizuoka's right hand had been for a long time ready in his inner pocket, gripping a small
plastic object. It seemed to him that his fingers had been clutching that object for an eternity.
"Ready."
"Then let it go. Now!" The words were an order, given sharply and decisively, though Hana's voice
was too low for anyone else standing nearby to hear her through the noise of the surrounding
crowd.
A hundred meters downhill from where they stood, the barge was just getting into motion. Chen
Shizuoka withdrew the tiny device he had been gripping, and with a different pressure of his
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred...0Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt (2 of 88) [11/1/2004 12:23:06 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt
fingers activated it. A signal even subtler than most electronic emanations was sent forth.
From among the tight-packed crowd below, there rose up sudden screams.
Don't be afraid! Chen wanted to reassure them. He knew how harmless the large inflatable devices
were that now came popping up out of the canal, in front of and around the barge that bore the
Empress. The great rough shapes, surfacing like huge gray hippopotami of old Earth, were blocking
the decorated barge completely. The devices, inflating themselves at Chen's signal, were all
moored to the bottom of the canal so as not to be easily pushed out of the way. As large as
hippos, they were of various shapes, all intended to represent particular models of berserkers,
but in no more than a clumsy cartoon fashion. Chen himself had insisted on that point, so that not
even a single startled child in the crowd should be able to mistake them for the terrible reality.
What the planners of the demonstration hoped to create in their audience was thought, not terror.
A considerable amount of work had gone into fabricating the inflatable devices, and the effort and
strain of planting them secretly in the canal had been, Chen thought when he looked back on it,
more than he ever wanted to go through again. Not that he would have refused to do it all again,
and more, if he thought that doing so would get the Prince recalled to power, and some of those
who currently served the Empress in high places exiled in his stead.
Up out of the water the odd shapes came, shiny-wet and dark and in the cartoon crudity of their
forms unmistakable as to what they were supposed to represent. One after another in rapid
succession broke the surface, the swift bobbing lunges of their rising pushing aside the drowning
masses of flowers.
The crowds near the canal were in great turmoil.
"It's working," Chen crooned softly, happily to the young woman at his side, not turning his head
to look at her. "It's going to do the job."
Suddenly there were sharp thrumming sounds from below, and more yells, and an even greater turmoil
among the crowd, the start of real panic. Some of the more trigger-happy security people had
pulled out handguns and were actually opening fire, with devastating effect upon harmless inflated
plastic. Chen, with sudden helpless concern, as if he had seen a distant child toying with a
dangerous weapon, recalled how there had been hurt feelings among the populace, injured protests
at the mere announcement that this time when the Empress traveled among her people she was going
to be accompanied by a strong security contingent.
And the many citizens who had protested the security arrangements had been right, Chen thought,
there were the supposed protectors now, blasting away with guns and endangering lives. It was not
as if they could really believe that they were confronted with a plot to hurt the Empress. No one
was going to do that; not to the Empress; certainly not here on her home world of Salutai.
The brief outburst of gunfire ceased, evidently on some order, as abruptly as it had started. But
the uproar and panic in the surrounding crowd continued at an alarming pitch. Looking downhill,
Chen observed that some of the clumsy-looking waterborne devices had been destroyed. But enough of
them remained in place to at least impede the forward movement of the barge. A dozen in all of the
inflatable things had been put into position-Chen could still remember the feel of the bottom mud,
the taste it gave the water when it was stirred up, the thrill of terror recurring each time there
was some alarm and he and the others thought that they had been discovered at their task.
Some of the placards borne by the ugly gray shapes had not yet been blasted into illegibility. One
of them read: THE ENEMY IS NOT DESTROYED. And another: RECALL PRINCE HARIVARMAN.
"Let's get going," said Hana Calderon suddenly, speaking quietly into Chen's ear. He nodded once,
and with that they separated, with nothing more in the way of farewell than one last glance of
triumph exchanged. Except for the unexpected outbreak of gunfire, and the resulting panic-maybe
someone really had been hurt; Chen certainly hoped not-everything was going smoothly, according to
the carefully rehearsed plan. No one in that crowd below would be able to ignore their message.
Everyone would carry it home and talk about it. Approvingly or disapprovingly, they would be
forced to think about it. And eventually, inevitably, it would be accepted. Because it was the
truth.
Chen turned away from Hana and from the scene below. Without either delay or haste he started
walking his own planned path down the side of the hill away from the canal and the confusion
around the barge. He didn't look for Hana, but he knew she would be making a similar withdrawal,
moving on a diverging course. He would meet her later, in the city. No one appeared to take any
particular notice of him as he retreated. He dropped his plastic control device into a trash
disposal in passing. He felt certain already that their getaway was going to be as successful as
all the other previously successful steps in the elaborate plan.
Even now, out of direct sight of the demonstration that his hands had triggered, Chen could hear
in the crowd's roar behind him the kind of impact their show had achieved. At least as great as
anything he had dared to hope for. Now from the same direction sounded sharp reports, what must be
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred...0Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt (3 of 88) [11/1/2004 12:23:06 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt
the sound of more inflated dummies being shot to fragments. And the roar of the crowd went up
again.
His imitation berserkers would shortly be destroyed, but no one of the thousands who had been here
today would be able to ignore or forget the messages that they had carried.
Chen listened carefully as he retreated, savoring the crowd noise behind him. It was fading
gradually as he moved away, and now for some reason it held more anger and fear than he had
imagined there would be-because of the actions of the security people, he supposed, and who could
blame the crowd for that?
Some fifty meters down the hill, moving amid a slowly growing crowd of other people who had
prudently or timidly decided to be somewhere else, Chen came to an inconspicuously parked
groundcycle. When he straddled the machine it started quietly, and within moments it was bearing
him at a greatly increased speed away from the tumult and the crowds.
He had less than a kilometer to travel on the cycle, traversing a network of smooth pathways that
laced the lovely countryside, before he reached a subway station whose entrance was almost hidden,
set into the side of a flowered embankment. He abandoned the cycle outside the station, confident
that a confederate would take it away later so it would not be traced to him. Once underground,
Chen was able almost at once to board a swift tubetrain that brought him in a few minutes
underneath the capital city.
Disembarking from the train, riding a stair to ground level, into the usual swarm of people at one
of the central metropolitan stations, Chen felt a wave of bleak reaction as he melded himself into
the population of the streets. It was almost a sense of disappointment at the ease of his and his
friends'" success. It seemed in a way unfair, as if the security people had never had a chance of
stopping the demonstration, or of catching up with him or Hana afterward; now all was, would be,
anticlimax.
Of course, most of the other members of Chen's protest group had kept telling him all along that
the demonstration would be a great success. Hana had certainly been confident, and he himself had
really expected nothing less than success…
The plan now called for him to go home, that is to return to the student's room where he lived
alone, and there await developments. But there was no particular hurry about his getting to his
room. Chen delayed, watching a public newscast that was evidently running somewhat behind events,
for it showed nothing about a demonstration interrupting the progress of the Empress. He moved on
to a favorite bookstore, dallied there a little longer, then walked on unhurriedly. If he ever
should be questioned, for any reason, about his whereabouts today, he'd have an answer: Why yes,
he had been out there, watching the parade. When things started to get noisy and rowdy, and he
heard actual shots, he had simply decided that it was time to leave.
Chen passed another public newscast, and dawdled before the elevated holostage long enough to be
sure that the news still contained no mention of the demonstration; by now, he felt sure, that
omission must be deliberate. On Salutai such blatantly direct government control was unheard of,
even in these times; the situation made him uneasy.
When Chen reached the street where he lodged, and approached the block on which his room was
located, his uneasiness led him to look about him with unwonted caution. He saw with a sinking
sensation, but somehow no real surprise, that there were security people here, cruising in their
cars, two or three cars of them at least, observing. He had learned to recognize the type of
unmarked groundcar that they favored. They appeared to be trying to make themselves inconspicuous,
but there they were.
Something had gone wrong after all. He could not help believing that they were here waiting for
him to show up. The sinking feeling was becoming a steady sickness in his gut.
Chen stepped around a corner into a cross street. He paused in the doorway of an apartment
building, and stood pondering what to do next.
He leaned out of the doorway to look back along the way that he had come, and the sound numbed him
for an instant with its sudden shock, a frightening impact against the wall immediately beside his
head, as if an invisible rock from some invisible catapult had struck there. There was another
component to the sound too, a sharp thrum, a louder echo of the police weapons at the
demonstration, much louder and closer than he had heard them from the hill. This came from a
rooftop or an upper window across the street. Someone over there was shooting at him, shooting to
kill.
In sudden cold terror Chen dodged out of the doorway, heading down the street in a fast zigzag
walk, the movement blending him at once into the flow of other hurrying pedestrians. Still his
whole back felt tensed and swollen, one enormous muscle tightening uselessly against the killing
blow that was to come any second. The sky that had been free of terror an hour ago had turned now
to blue ice closing him in.
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred...0Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt (4 of 88) [11/1/2004 12:23:06 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt
Now he thought that one of the unmarked cars of the security people was keeping pace with him
along the street. He dodged quickly into a smaller side passage for pedestrians, leaving the
vehicle behind.
He fled through the complex and crowded heart of the city, heading instinctively for areas where
the congestion would be greater. Once, then twice, he dared to hope that he had shaken his
pursuers off. But each time, even before hope could really establish itself, he saw that such was
not the case. They had perhaps lost sight of him for the moment, but he knew they must be
everywhere, in vehicles and afoot, in uniform and in civilian clothes. Anyone who glanced at him
might be Security… and Chen had to assume that they were all after him.
Organize a simple demonstration, just a demonstration, and they hunted you like this. Tried to
kill you on sight, out of hand… it was a bad dream, and he was caught up in it, and there was no
use hoping to be saved by any rules of sanity and logic.
What did they want to kill him for, what had he done that even they should think was terrible to
that degree? If a free citizen could no longer even protest openly without being hunted like a
dangerous animal, then things on the world of Salutai were already even worse than he and his
friends had been telling one another. Far worse.
Exhaustion overtook Chen quickly. It was as if he had been running steadily for hours, enduring
steady fear and tension more tiring than mere physical exertion. In one of the tougher
neighborhoods of the city, a couple of kilometers now from his own apartment, Chen entered a
crowded square of shops and other buildings, some of them little more than hovels. A few derelicts
were camped, amid litter, on the grassy plaza at the center.
Chen had taken his last turning seeking a complication of pathways, but realized as soon as he had
entered the square that the move might well have been a blunder. There were only three or four
ways out of it again. Should he turn back right away… ?
It was already too late for that. One of the slow-cruising groundcars had just stopped, a little
way behind him. They must be losing him and picking him up again, trying to close in. Quickly he
slid around a knot of people, getting them between him and the car, and moved on with them. If the
crowds of pedestrians ever thinned out, he was lost. He was better dressed than most of the people
in this neighborhood, on the verge at least of being conspicuous because of that.
Walking, waiting in exhaustion for a blasting death, he scanned the storefronts rapidly for a
place to hide. If his pursuers were willing to shoot him dead, they were certainly not going to be
put off by the necessity of searching for him inside a store, or anywhere else that he could think
of. Nothing that he could do to throw them off was going to give them too much trouble.
Except, perhaps…
On one of the storefronts ahead there loomed a large sign, of a type familiar all across the Earth-
colonized portion of the Galaxy. It was seen on most worlds, as here, more often in the poorer
neighborhoods than in the well-to-do:
THE FIGHT FOR LIFE HAS NOT BEEN WON.
THE TEMPLARS NEED YOU.
Just beneath the sign, a poster with its lifelike picture animated by electronics showed an
appealing child in the act of cringing away from a grasping metal menace. The berserker android on
the poster was a far more barbed and angled and poisonous-looking portrayal of the ancient enemy
than any of Chen's balloons had been.
And as if this poster were indeed another menace from which he needed desperately to be saved,
Chen stopped in his tracks, recoiled slightly, and glanced hastily, hopelessly, around the square.
His situation here looked indeed hopeless. Already he thought that he could see a checkpoint being
established, or one already functioning unobtrusively, at each possible exit.
And suppose he did manage, somehow, to find another way out of the square. The search for him, a
manhunt of this intensity, was obviously not going to be broken off simply because he managed to
dodge it one more time. The hunt was going to go on. And he could think of no place in this city,
on this planet, where it could not reach him; no place to hide. Chen certainly had no intention of
leading these murderous monsters to any of his friends.
This kind of a hunt, Chen saw, could end only when they had caught him. And he had seen and felt
evidence that being caught would not simply be a matter of being arrested-matters had gone beyond
that already. Incomprehensibly, the security people had shot at him. He kept coming back to that
fact, being brought up short by it, stumbling over it. But there was no way around the fact. For
some reason that could make sense only to their mad arrogance, they were really trying to kill
him.
He was walking forward again, moving in a daze, a condition which on these poor streets made him
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred...0Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt (5 of 88) [11/1/2004 12:23:06 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt
less rather than more conspicuous. The door to the Templars' recruiting office was again
immediately in front of him. To Chen that open doorway had a look of unreality, but now everything
about him did; everything except the fact that someone was now trying to accomplish his death.
That had a reality of a transcendent kind.
"What can we do for you, sir?" A bland-looking sergeant behind a counter, no different in
appearance or manner except for the uniform than any other salesman in any other shop, raised his
head and spoke as Chen entered. A couple of other young men, with some kind of fancy paper
readouts in their hands, were just turning away from the counter, about to leave the office.
Chen moved up close to the waist-high surface of the counter, and rested his hands upon it. There
came and went in his mind a last fleeting thought that perhaps it would be enough for him to spend
a little time in this office, off the street; perhaps if he did that the killers out there would
get tired of looking for him and go away…
… that hope was not worth even a fleeting thought. He had to get on with what he perceived as his
only remaining choice.
Chen cleared his throat. "I-if I were to enlist right now, how soon could I get off planet?"
"Soon as you want." Experienced eyes sized Chen up with calculation. The sergeant was carefully
unsurprised.
Chen pressed him: "Today, maybe?"
The sergeant checked the timepiece on the wall. Now he looked more than ever to Chen like a
salesman, one accustomed to not show surprise at a customer's strange request. Certainly it seemed
that the question was not entirely new to him.
"Why not today?" The sergeant's voice was matter-of-fact, perhaps carefully so. "If you're in
something of a hurry to get elsewhere, that's all right with us. Soon as you sign the enlistment
form, and take the oath, then you're officially a Templar. We'd drive you to the spaceport enclave
today anyway. That's Templar diplomatic territory. If, maybe, just for an example, there were
angry relatives looking for you here, or maybe creditors, they wouldn't have a chance. We've even
had people come in who were in trouble with the law, with the cops hardly a jump behind them. The
cops have no chance either, not of arresting someone who's officially a Templar. Not for something
the man did before he enlisted." The recruiter looked at Chen steadily; it sounded like a speech
that had been well thought out, one that had been given before.
Chen cleared his throat again. "That's about what I thought; I…"
Something in Chen, ever since he was a child, was always stirred by stories of adventure, had
always looked forward in daydreams to this moment: to becoming a Templar, entering a world of
physical adventure, risking all in a most worthy cause. In real life, other considerations had
always until now prevailed: a distaste for what he foresaw the military life would be like; a wish
to be a student; a strong desire to be free to act in Eight Worlds politics.
And in the daydreams, Chen had never thought that it would be the desperate need for escape that
would drive him to this step, as it had driven so many characters in adventure stories. But there
was no arguing with reality, which evidently after all had no prejudice against trite melodrama.
Those guns in the hands of the men outside were real.
Chen signed the document placed before him by the recruiter, not bothering to read it, either
before or after. "Now what? Can I wait here?"
The sergeant, still as calm as before, came around from behind his official barricade. "Yeah. But
first, to make it official, you take the oath. I need another live witness for that." He went into
the back room and came back with a young woman, who wore on the shoulder of her Templar uniform an
insignia that Chen thought meant she was a clerk.
The oath, like the paper he had just signed, went by him without its words really registering in
his consciousness; he could only hope that it would serve as a magic curtain, an incantation, to
render him invisible to scanning gunsights.
Now he was led into the back room and told to wait. It might have been the back room of any
office, holding information transmission and storage equipment, with miscellaneous bins and
closets. There were also a few chairs and two desks, at one of which the young clerk went back to
her paperwork.
A couple of hours passed-for Chen, as in some endless dream-as he sat numbly watching the clerk go
about her duties. Her work was largely electronic, and did not appear to be all that arduous. Once
or twice he tried to make conversation, and got in return short answers, and looks that had in
them the faintly amused tolerance of the veteran.
Before the first hour of Chen's wait was over, there came from the front office a sound of new
voices, too low to be fully distinguishable, as if several men had entered at once and were in
conference with the sergeant. The voices might have represented no more than some group of friends
coming in together on a routine recruiting inquiry, but Chen thought that they meant something
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred...0Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt (6 of 88) [11/1/2004 12:23:06 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt
else. He waited fatalistically, but nothing happened, except that the voices ceased presently and
the men went out again. And shortly after that unusual conversation in the front, the sergeant
came briefly into the back again, for no other reason than to give Chen a long and unreadable
look.
After the second hour of Chen's wait, two young men, not the same two who had been in the office
when Chen entered, arrived and were ushered into the back to join him in his waiting. These two,
he thought, were certainly real recruits. They exchanged nods with Chen, and had no more success
than he had had in making nervous banter with the clerk.
Shortly after their arrival, ground transportation arrived to take all three recruits to the
Templar facility at the spaceport. They were led by the sergeant out a back door of the office
into an alley, and at once urged into the vehicle, a high-built van.
The windows of the groundvan were set for high one-way opacity; it would be very hard for anyone
outside to look in. During the drive to the spaceport Chen observed a security car or two, or what
he thought were such; it was hard to tell if their occupants might be taking any particular
interest in the Templar vehicle.
Inside the van, the ride to the spaceport was mostly silent; it was beginning to sink in on the
other recruits, perhaps, what sort of a major change in lifestyle they had embarked upon.
Listening to the few words that his two companions exchanged between them, Chen gathered that
basic training for all Templar recruits from the Eight Worlds now took place on the planet
Niteroi, only about two days' travel from Salutai at c-plus speeds. Chen hadn't bothered to ask
where he was going, having, as the sergeant evidently realized, quite enough in the way of other
matters to engage his thoughts.
Now in the back of Chen's mind the faint hope-he wasn't sure it really amounted to a hope-had
arisen that he might, now that he was officially a Templar, get a chance someday to see the
Templar Radiant, and perhaps even the opportunity to meet or at least set eyes on the man who was
the chief object of all his political action, the exiled Prince Harivarman. The Prince had been
held at the Radiant in Templar custody for the past four standard years. Well, maybe some day that
chance would come. Right now Chen was willing to settle for exile himself, or imprisonment or just
about any terms on which he would be allowed to live.
The recruiting sergeant, who had come along in the van to deliver his shipment, eyed Chen closely
again when they were getting out of the vehicle at the spaceport, already behind the closed gates
and gray walls of the small Templar enclave there.
"I hear you were out there demonstrating for the Prince." The sergeant's face was still
unreadable. His voice no longer sounded exactly polite-Chen was no longer a civilian who had just
walked into his office as a prospect-but the tone did not seem to express disapproval either.
"That's right," Chen said proudly.
The sergeant did not respond in any way that Chen could see, but turned away and went on about his
business.
Other recruits, gathered from elsewhere on the planet, were waiting within the walls of the
spaceport Templar enclave, already being kept separate from civilians. More than a dozen freshly
enlisted young men and women were aboard the shuttle when it finally rose from Salutai.
Chapter 2
For hundreds of years Earth-descended humanity had observed and tried to explain the class of
astrophysical objects called gravitational radiants, but still no wholly satisfactory scientific
theory existed to account for them. Only nine of the objects, including the Templar Radiant, were
known to exist in the entire Galaxy. Each of the nine was a fiery paradox: a mild source of
comparatively harmless radiation, and, what made them unique, each a center and source of inverse
gravity. Centuries ago human effort had rendered the Templar Radiant unique even in its class by
enclosing it completely within a vast spherical fortress of stone and metal and fabricated forms
of matter.
Commander Anne Blenheim was enjoying what was almost her first look around the vast interior of
the ancient Templar Fortress that enclosed the Radiant itself, and of which she had very recently
assumed command. Looking up, she saw the Radiant as a sunlike object, not much bigger than a point
in its apparent size, though only about four kilometers directly above her head. The reversed
gravitational influence of the Radiant naturally prevailed here, and the sunlike point would be in
the same directly overhead position for anyone standing anywhere on the inner surface of the
Fortress, whose basic shape was that of an enormous hollow sphere.
The reasons why that form of construction had been used-or indeed the reasons for the Fortress
having been built at all-were lost, along with much else in the early history of its creators, the
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred...0Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt (7 of 88) [11/1/2004 12:23:06 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt
Dardanians. They had disappeared from Galactic society centuries ago, and to historians of the
present day they formed one of the most enigmatic branches of Earth-descended humanity.
Still, the thought behind one aspect of the construction was obvious; the inner surface of the
Fortress had been fixed at a distance of approximately four kilometers from the Radiant itself,
because at that distance the reverse gravity of the Radiant, pushing the inhabitants of the
Fortress against the faintly concave surface, was equal to Earth-standard normal.
Commander Blenheim stood, neatly uniformed, just outside the main gate of the Templar base; around
her the little, self-contained world rose up in all directions. One square kilometer after another
mapped itself out conveniently for inspection on the interior of the surrounding and supporting
globe of rock and metal. The inner surface was lined with streets, dotted with houses, with
buildings of all sorts except that none were very tall. The commander knew that many of the
buildings, possibly even a majority of them, were now unused.
There were also great blank spaces on the map, kilometers of raw rock that might once have been
occupied, but had been scraped clean of surface detail in some remodeling project of centuries
ago, and were now abandoned. Now again remodeling activity was in progress, especially in and
around the Templar base itself. There was a lot of greenery in sight too, plants from Earth and
other worlds genetically redesigned to thrive in this mild steady light. This massive effort at
planting was a development that Anne Blenheim understood was fairly new, and of which she heartily
approved both esthetically and as an affirmation of life. Orchards and single trees and even
miniature forests were visible everywhere across the inner sphere that made itself a sky.
Close by the small parklike space where the commander was now standing, the main gate of the
Templar compound was busy with pedestrian and vehicular traffic, either military people or those
on business with the military. A great many of the people passing through glanced at Commander
Blenheim as they went by; she had been on board the Fortress for only one standard day, and her
arrival as the new commanding officer was, she was sure, the biggest topic of conversation among
the few thousand people who made up the whole civilian and military population here.
Because she was now standing just outside the gate and not inside it, salutes from the passing
military were not forthcoming, and the commander was spared the distraction of having to return
them. But the quick glances at her continued. Military and civilian passersby alike were all
doubtless wondering just why the new base commander might be standing here in apparent idleness-
taking a traffic count, perhaps? Waiting for someone?-but in the twenty-four hours she had been on
the Radiant, no one had become a close enough acquaintance to pause and try to find out.
In her imagination she framed an answer anyway: "Waiting to make a diplomatic contact of sorts.
With a certain-gentleman." Then she smiled at the strange gaze that answer evoked from her
imaginary questioner. A diplomatic contact, here? The Templars were of course as active in that
field as anyone else, if not more so-they had to be, with no home land or planet of their own. But
the place for diplomacy would seem to be out in the mainstream of human civilization, out where
the other power brokers moved.
Or perhaps her hypothetical questioner would understand at once. After all, the Prince had been
here on the Fortress for four standard years.
If instead of talking about diplomatic contacts she were to say that she was waiting for her
prisoner to show up-well, that would have been at least as accurate, but the reaction perhaps less
fun to watch.
And this, she decided, must be the eminent gentleman himself approaching now. The groundcar easing
its way toward Commander Blenheim through moderate traffic was of a type unremarkable on the
streets of the Fortress, though it would have been conspicuous almost anywhere else. It was a
special model that could maneuver as a slow and very short-range spacecraft as well as an
atmospheric flyer. Two such vehicles had been assigned for the Prince's use, and both of them had
been modified to radiate certain identifying signals continuously, tracer transmissions that
allowed Templar spy devices to follow their movements. But the cars-or flyers-bore no special
markings visible to the casual eye.
Commander Blenheim had met the exiled Prince Harivarman for the first time yesterday, but only in
a brief formal introduction on the day of her arrival. She had promptly accepted the Prince's
offer to give her a tour today of Georgicus Sabel's old workroom; she had chosen to wait for him
outside the gate, arriving a little early so she could keep an eye on the progress of some of the
remodeling work nearby while she was waiting.
The Prince-no, she reminded herself, she must now cease to call him the Prince, even in her own
thoughts, even if everyone on the Eight Worlds still called him that; the regulations that were
part of the Compact of Exile said that he was now to be addressed as General Harivarman-the
general, then, the exile, had been a quasi-prisoner here in the Fortress for the past four years.
The commander's intelligence reports informed her that he was becoming something of an enthusiast
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred...0Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt (8 of 88) [11/1/2004 12:23:06 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt
about the local history. Well, for such a small place, there was certainly plenty of history
available here; more than some whole planets had to boast about, Commander Blenheim had often
thought while doing her homework on it as part of her preparation for her new job. And from her
new point of view as the general's chief jailer it was of course much better for him to be
absorbed in history than taking too strong an interest in current events.
Everyone in the Eight Worlds knew the Prince's story. And a good many had heard it beyond the
Eight, out on those hundreds of worlds composing what its members considered to be the human
mainstream of Galactic civilization. Since the news had spread of her assignment as commander
here, it had sometimes seemed to Anne Blenheim that everyone in the inhabited Galaxy had an
opinion on the Prince-the general-and each was ready to give her their version of good advice on
how to deal with the great man who was now in her charge. Some said quietly that, though of course
it was not in her power to do so, he really should be released. Some said he should be executed,
that the Council of the Eight Thrones would never be safe until he was dead. And there were plenty
of intermediate opinions. The Council should restore him to power as Prime Minister under the
Empress. Or they should send him as ambassador plenipotentiary to Earth. Or confine him in a
solitary cell for life.
As she kept telling other people firmly, her new job really gave her nothing to say, even in an
advisory capacity, as to which of those courses should be adopted. The Compact of Exile, a
complicated agreement by which the Templars had accepted responsibility for Harivarman's
confinement and welfare, left her as base commander little room for altering the terms of the
general's existence. And jailer was not really the right word, not the correct job description for
the relationship of the base commander on the Fortress with the eminent expatriate.
Of course, what exactly the right word was for that aspect of her job was something she had not
yet worked out to her own satisfaction. The Compact of Exile, like many another important
document, had been deliberately left somewhat vague. And Colonel Phocion, her predecessor here,
had evidently taken too different an approach than hers for his ideas to be very helpful.
The approaching groundcar was rolling to a stop within a few meters of where Anne Blenheim was
standing, just at the entrance to the small park. She could see now that there were two men in it.
In front, a driver-more a ceremonial position than anything else, for naturally the car really
drove itself-and a passenger in back. Commander Blenheim, who had naturally done some homework on
the history and present condition of the exile, was sure that the human driver could be no one but
a man named Lescar, who was the Prince's-there she went again-who was the general's faithful
servant and longtime companion.
Four years ago, at the beginning of his exile, General Harivarman had arrived at the Templar
Radiant with an attractive wife and an extensive staff of aides and servants, more than twenty
people in all. The wife had made brave, self-effacing statements about loyalty. Now he was down to
one devoted companion, the remainder-wife included-having for one reason or another opted to
depart.
The man who now stood up out of the car, to greet the commander somehow less impressively than she
had expected, was informally dressed, dark, angular, and muscular of build. His face, not
particularly handsome, was of course immediately recognizable. It was somehow surprising that,
except for his hands and perhaps his feet, he was not really physically large. General Harivarman
was obviously past his first immaturity of youth, and it was equally obvious that he was not yet
greatly burdened with years; it would have been difficult for any casual observer to pin his age
down much more closely than that. But Commander Blenheim knew that he was notably young for one of
his achievements, in fact just thirty-seven standard years, only slightly older than herself.
Lucky the leader, she thought, who had that kind of ageless look; her own appearance, peach-
complected and a little plump, made people sometimes assume her to be even younger than she was-
especially before they got to know her.
In a moment, routine and rather formal greetings having been exchanged between commander and
exile, she and the man she kept reminding herself to call the general were settled in the back of
the car and under way, the back of the driver's graying head fixed in place before them.
Ever since yesterday's brief introduction, she had been wondering what this second and more
leisurely encounter with the general would produce, in terms of mutual understanding. Well, the
first moments of it were already something of a disappointment, though Commander Blenheim was not
sure why.
As the car began to move the man beside her had been gazing off into the distance. Now he turned
his head and was looking at her closely, in an almost proprietary way. No way to win points with
her, but then he probably didn't care.
He said now in his deep voice: "No doubt you've done your homework, Commander, about Georgicus
Sabel? I don't want to inflict a tiresome rehashing of a history that you already know."
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred...0Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt (9 of 88) [11/1/2004 12:23:06 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt
"I've had to do a fair amount of homework recently on other topics. I know what everyone knows, of
course, about Sabel… but go ahead, you tell me."
Her seat companion looked thoughtful. He seemed to be taking the assignment seriously. "Well. Two
hundred and five years ago, right here-that is, right in the workshop that we're going to visit,
and right under the noses of the Guardians-Georgicus Sabel encountered a functioning berserker, a
remnant of their attacking force of several hundred years before that. He tried to bargain with
it. He proposed giving it something it wanted, for something, scientific information, that he
thought he could get from it in return…
"To deal with a berserker, to play the role of goodlife, wasn't what he had started out to do, of
course. He began by seeking Truth, you see. That's Truth with a great big scientific capital T."
"But since he dealt with a berserker, he was goodlife. Wasn't he?" Commander Blenheim knew the
story very well, from the relatively inaccessible official Templar records as well as from the
public histories. She knew what Sabel had been. He had been goodlife without a doubt. Guilty of
that which in the Templar universe of thought was still the one great and unforgivable sin, the
act that negated any possible good intentions-the provision of service and aid to a berserker, one
of those murderous robots that went about its age-old programmed task of eliminating from the
universe the blight of life. To Templars-to any human being except the perverted goodlife, but to
Templars in particular-berserkers were malignance personified in metal.
So much Anne Blenheim knew, beyond a doubt, about Sabel. But she wanted to learn at first hand
what the Prin-what the general thought on such a topic; and she also wanted to know how the
general talked, to watch him and listen to him, to get a taste of his famous persuasive magnetism.
The man riding beside her remained thoughtful. "Technically, yes, Sabel was goodlife. Legally,
yes. He would have been convicted, there's no doubt, if he had been brought to a Templar trial."
"Or to a trial in any other impartial human court."
"I suppose. Under the existing law. But if you mean did he really want to see berserkers wipe the
universe clean of life, or did he want them to kill even a single human being, or did he in any
sense worship the death machines-as real goodlife always do, in some sense-then the answer must be
no."
It was a heavy answer to a heavy question. Sabel had been dead and gone for centuries, and
Commander Blenheim had no wish to get into a heavy argument about him.
She and her companion rode on in silence for a while, through clean, almost unpopulated streets,
past experimental buildings and plantings, past refurbished houses and new-grown groves. In
Sabel's day, she remembered from her reading, the interior cavity of the Fortress had been allowed
to remain in vacuum, people living and building their houses all around the interior surface with
their breathing air held tightly under clear bubbles; only in the last few decades had the
necessary engineering been completed to maintain a film of atmosphere over the whole interior
surface.
She asked: "And how did you happen to become an expert on the history of the Sabel case, General?
I gather that you really are."
"Oh." There was a faint tone of disappointment, as if she might have chosen to raise a more
interesting point of the many available. "In the beginning, you see, when I first took up
residence here, the subject of Sabel didn't interest me particularly." The general spread large,
capable hands in an engaging gesture. "But gradually, over those first months… well, if one wishes
to remain intellectually active here on the Fortress, what can one study? The choices are somewhat
limited. There's physics, of course, like old Sabel himself, trying to wrest some new truth from
nature. But if real physicists have been staring at the Radiant for centuries and haven't got very
far with it-well, there's not much hope for an amateur."
He said it with such conscientious diffidence that the commander felt compelled to comment. "I
wasn't warned that you'd be modest."
The general grinned, showing the first flash of something extraordinary that she had seen in him.
"Modest, perhaps. Self-effacing, never." Then, looking out of the car, he pointed ahead. And, of
course, up at an angle.
Only half a kilometer ahead of them now was an angled shape that had to be Sabel's laboratory, or
the roof of it anyway. The commander had noticed that most of the buildings here in this now airy
but still virtually weatherless space, even the most recently constructed ones, still had roofs,
many of them sloped and angled as if to shed nonexistent rain or snow. The conspicuous roof ahead
of them was a series of angled and curved surfaces, studded with the small protrusions of old-
looking instruments, and marked with holes where other instruments had evidently been taken out
long ago.
Of course the laboratory, like everything else on the concave dwelling surface, had been basically
within view of the groundcar's occupants all along. Now the building vanished briefly as they drew
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fre...Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txt (10 of 88) [11/1/2004 12:23:06 AM]
摘要：

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20The%20Berserker%20Throne.txtTHEBERSERKERTHRONEBerserkerSeriesbyFredSaberhanenThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.THEBERSERKERTHRO...

展开>> 收起<<
Fred Saberhagen - Berserker Throne.pdf

共88页,预览18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！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：88 页 大小：319.31KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-13

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 88
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注