Fred Saberhagen - Berserker Base

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BERSERKER BASE

FRED SABERHAGEN

In the beginning, in his first minutes of being held captive by the damned machine, Lars Kanakuru

had cursed its metallic guts for keeping him alive. The damned berserker machine ignored his

curses, though he was sure it heard them, even as it had seemed to ignore the missile he had

launched at it from his small oneseater spacecraft. Lars never saw what happened to the missile.

But he had seen on his instruments how the damned berserker had extended forcefield arms, reaching

out many kilometers for his little ship, and he saw and felt how it pulled him into the embrace of

death.

A COLLABORATION BY

POUL ANDERSON, EDWARD BRYANT,

STEPHEN R. DONALDSON,

LARRY NIVEN, FRED SABERHAGEN

CONNIE WILLIS, ROGER ZELAZNY

BERSERKER

BASE

TOR

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

This is a work of fiction, All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fiction, and

any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

"Prisoner's Base," "Friends Together," "'The Founts of Sorrow," "The Great Secret," "Dangerous

permission of the author and his agent, Howard Morhaim.

First printing: March 1985

First mass market printing: June 1987

A TOR Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. 49 West 24 Street New York, N.Y. 10010

Cover art by Boris Vallejo

ISBN: 0-812-55327-6 CAN. ED.: 0-812-55328-4

Printed in the United States of America

PRISONER'S BASE

In the beginning, in his first minutes of being held captive by the damned machine, Lars Kanakuru

had cursed its metallic guts for keeping him alive. The damned berserker machine ignored his

curses, though he was sure it heard them, even as it had seemed to ignore the missile he had

launched at it from his small oneseater spacecraft. Lars never saw what happened to the missile.

But he had seen on his instruments how the damned berserker had extended forcefield arms, reaching

out many kilometers for his little ship, and he saw and felt how it pulled him into the embrace of

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death.

Not to quick death. He was not going to be that lucky. Suicide attacks by fanatical humans were

perhaps not unknown in this berserker machine's experience, but they must be at least sufficiently

rare for it to find their perpetrators interesting. It had evidently decided that he ought to be

studied.

Lars had no sidearm with him in the tiny cabin of his oneseater, nothing that he could use to

quickly kill himself. And before he could use the materials on hand to improvise a way to do the

job, some kind of gas was being injected into the cabin of his fighter, hissing into his breathing

air, and he lost consciousness…

When his senses returned to him he was no longer inside his fighter ship. Now, with his head

aching, he was stretched out on a hard, unfamiliar deck, enclosed in a small, windowless, and

apparently doorless cell. Light, faint and reddish, came from somewhere above, and warmed air

hissed faintly around him.

He sat up. Gravity, doubtless artificial, held him with standard, Earth-normal strength. There

wouldn't be quite room in the cell to stand erect. Nor room to walk, or crawl, more than a couple

of meters in any direction.

Lars did not rejoice to find himself still alive. It was certain now that he was not going to be

killed quickly. He was going to be studied.

At the same time, he found that the idea of suicide no longer attracted him. It had been a

basically alien thought for him anyway.

So, he had been captured by a berserker machine. Others had survived the experience and had

returned to human worlds to tell about it—a few others, benefiting from rare miracles of one kind

or another. A very few others, a very few miracles, in all the millions of cubic light years, in

all the centuries, across which the human race had had to fight its war against berserkers.

As a veteran space traveler, Lars could tell almost from the moment of his awakening that he was

now in flightspace. There were certain subtle indications of motion, alterations in gravity,

inward twinges to go with them. The machine that held him captive was outpacing light through

realms of mathematical reality, bearing him across some section of the Galaxy, in what direction

he had no way of guessing.

The human body was never really totally at home in the inhuman world of flightspace. But it had

long been a familiar world to Lars Kanakuru, and to find himself in it now was, oddly, almost

reassuring. There had been no prospect of help for him in. the particular sector of normal space

in which he had been captured. That little fragment of the Galaxy, Lars was certain, belonged to

the berserkers now, along with the few planets that it held. One of which had been his home…

His immediate physical surroundings were such as to allow him to stay alive, no more. He took

stock again, more carefully. His spacesuit had been removed, along with all the contents of his

pockets. He was still dressed in the coverall and light boots he had been wearing under the

spacesuit, standard combat gear of the service to which he belonged.

Lars was surrounded by dim reddish light, bound in by cramping metal or ceramic—he was not sure

which—walls and floor and ceiling. There was air, of course, of breathable content and pressure,

through which from time to time there passed a wave of some exotic, inorganic stench. There was,

he soon discovered, a supply of water. Almost icy cold, it gushed on demand from a wall nozzle

over a small hole in the deck that served as plumbing.

He thought back over the space battle, the combat mission, that had landed him in this cell. Next

time he would do better. He found that he was telling himself that over and over. He couldn't seem

to make himself realize that there would be no next time, not for him.

Then he thought ahead, or tried to. As a rule, berserkers killed quickly; human suffering had no

intrinsic value for machines. What berserker machines were programmed to want was human

nonexistence. But in his case the time for quick killing had already passed.

Then Lars tried not to think ahead, because none of the things that were known to happen to

berserker prisoners were better than being quickly killed, in fact all of the other things—except,

of course, the occasional miraculous rescue—were, in his opinion, considerably worse.

Think about the present, then. Lars Kanakuru decided that it was quite likely that he was the only

living thing within many light years. But then it almost immediately occurred to him thai that

could not be exactly true. There would be a horde of microorganisms within his body, as in that of

every other living human. He carried a population of a sort along. The idea gave him an odd kind

of comfort.

His mental state, he supposed, was already becoming rather odd.

There was no way for him in his cruel simple cell to keep track of time. But in time—it might have

been hours, or it might have been a day—he slept again, and dreamed.

In his dream Lars saw a ship's control panel before him, covered with electronic gages, and in the

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way of dreams he understood that this was the control panel of some new kind of fighter craft. He

was happy to see this, because it meant he had escaped from the berserker. But his troubles were

not over. One of the gages on the panel was a very strange one, for it seemed to be displaying

pairs of rhyming words, and it was very important that Lars understand what this meant, and he

could not.

The dream was not really frightening, but still it was incredibly vivid and forceful, and Lars

awoke from it sweating, his hands scraping the warm smooth deck. A very odd dream.

He lay there feeling groggy and apathetic. He drank water, and would have eaten, had any food been

provided. Well, he wasn't starving yet. The berserker would feed him when necessary. If it had

wanted him dead, he'd be that way already. He dozed again, and awakened.

And then there came the realization that the machine that bore him was in flightspace no longer.

Presently, faintly perceptible though the masses of metal that surrounded him, came sounds and

vibrations that suggested a heavy docking. He decided that the berserker that had captured him had

reached its base. And that meant that soon he should know exactly what was going to happen to him.

Shortly after he felt the docking, one wall of Lars's cell opened, and a machine came in to get

him. The metallic-ceramic body of the mobile unit was shaped rather like the body of an ant, and

it was half as large as Lars himself. It said nothing to him, and he offered it no resistance. It

brought with it a spacesuit, not his own, but one that would fit him and looked to be of human

make. Doubtless the suit had been captured too, sometime, somewhere, and doubtless the man or

woman who had worn it was now dead, it bore some faded-looking insignia, but in the faint red

light the symbols were hard to read.

The berserker tossed the suit at his feet. Obviously it wanted him to wear the suit, not puzzle

out its provenance. He could have played dumb, tried to give his captor a hard time, but he

discovered that he was no longer at all anxious to find death. He put on the suit and sealed

himself into it. Its air supply was full, and sweet-smelling.

Then the machine conducted him away, into airless regions outside his cell. It was not a very long

journey, only a few hundred meters, but one of many twists and turnings, along pathways not

designed for human travel. Most of this journey took place in reduced gravity, and Lars felt this

gravity was natural. There were subtleties you could sense when you had enough experience.

At about the halfway point, his guide brought him out of the great space-going berserker that had

captured him, to stand under an airless sky of stars, upon a rocky surface streaked with long

shadows from a blue-white sun, and Lars saw that his feeling about the gravity had been right. He

was now standing on the surface of a planet. It was all cracked rock, as far as he could see out

to the near horizon, and populated by marching ghost-forms of dust, shapes raised by drifting

electrical charges and not wind. Lars had seen shapes similar to those once before, on another

dead world. This world was evidently a small one, to judge by the near horizon, the gravity only a

fraction of Earth-standard normal, and the lack of atmosphere. The place was certainly lifeless

now, and had probably been utterly devoid of life even before berserkers had arrived on it.

It looked like they had come here to stay. There was a lot of berserker construction about, towers

and mineheads and nameless shapes, extending across most of what Lars could see of the lifeless

landscape.

The fabrication wasn't hard to identify as to its origin, or its purpose either. What did

berserkers ever build? Titanic shipyard facilities, in which to construct more of their own kind,

and repair docks for the units that had suffered in battle. Lars got a good look—when he thought

about it later, it seemed to him that matters were arranged deliberately by the machine so that he

would be able to catch a very good look—at the power and infernal majesty surrounding him.

And then he was conducted underground, into a narrow tunnel, the faceplate of his suit freed of

that blue-white solar glare.

A door closed behind him, and then another door, sealing him into a small chamber of half-smoothed

rock. Air hissed around him, and then another door ahead of him slid open. Air and sound, and a

moment of realization. He was no longer alone. There were other prisoners here, his fellow humans.

At the moment of realization Lars was intensely surprised, though later he was not sure why.

Human voices reached him from just ahead. Human figures, all dressed in space coveralls as he was,

looked up. Gathered in a small group were four Earth-descended humans, two women and two men.

The chamber where they gathered was perhaps ten meters square, and high enough to stand in, not

much more. It was barren of furnishings, and the four people were sitting on the stone floor.

Three other doors, each in a different wall, led out of it. Two of the other doors were open, one

was closed.

Three of the people got to their feet as Lars approached. One of the women remained sitting on the

floor, in an attitude that suggested she was indifferent to anything that happened.

Lars introduced himself: "Flight Officer Lars Kanakuru, Eight Worlds Combined Forces."

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"Captain Absalom Naxos, New Hebrides Strategic Defense Corps." The captain spoke quickly, as if he

might be conveying urgently needed information. He was a hungry-looking, intense man, with jet

black eyebrows looking almost artificial on a pallid face, and a thin black stubble of beard that

appeared to be struggling to establish itself with only moderate success.

Lars said: "Glad to meet you. Wish it could be under different conditions…"

"Don't we all. There's no goodlife here."

The woman who had got to her feet, younger and better-looking than the other, moved a half step

forward. "Pat Sandomierz. I'm just a civilian."

"Hello." Lars took the hand that she extended. In the background, coming always through the rock,

was a noise of machinery, sometimes louder, sometimes faint. Lars assumed that it was corning from

the berserkers' mining and manufacturing operations somewhere nearby.

Pat had truly beautiful gray-blue eyes. She said she had been taken off a passenger liner by an

attacking berserker. She was sure that the crew and all the other passengers were dead.

"I'm Nicholas Opava." The second man in the group gave an immediate overall impression of

softness. A naturally dark skin kept him from showing a prison pallor. He radiated hopelessness,

Lars thought. Opava said he had been the sole human manning a lonely scientific outpost, from

which a berserker had picked him up.

The remaining woman, Dorothy Totonac, was somewhat older than the other people, and looked

withdrawn. It was Pat who gave Lars Dorothy's name; Dorothy had finally gotten to her feet, but

seemed disinclined to do more than nod.

Lars asked how long, the others had beers here. The answer seemed to be no more than a matter of

days, for any of them. A mild argument over timekeeping methods had just started, when Lars was

distracted by a glance through one of the open doorways. In the adjoining room, about the same

size as the one where Lars was standing, there were other living beings gathered, eight or ten of

them. But they were not Earth-descended humans.

Lars reached to take Nicholas Opava by the arm. Lowering his voice automatically, he asked:

"Aren't those Carmpan?" For all his spacefaring Lars had never seen the like before. But still he

recognized those squarish, leathery Carmpan bodies at first glance; almost any educated human, of

any world, would do so. Pictures of the Carmpan were somewhat rare, but everyone had seen them.

Opava only nodded wearily.

"We've gotten on quite well with them," Captain Naxos put in, in his businesslike way. "Conditions

being what they are, all of us locked up together, they're disposed to be comparatively sociable."

Lars stood staring at the Carmpan. He saw that something he had heard about them was correct: the

shape of their bulky, angular bodies did suggest machinery. But he had never heard the Carmpan

mind described as in the least mechanical.

Besides mental skills that were bizarre by Earthly standards, and sometimes awesome, the Carmpan

were famed also for a general tendency to avoid contact with Earth-descended humans. But now one

of the Carmpan was coming out of their room, proceeding toward them. The Carmpan's pace was a

slow, rolling but not awkward walk.

"Coming to greet the newcomer, I'll bet," said Pat Sandornierz.

She was right. The thick-bodied being (two arms, two legs, and was the outer surface all scaly

modified skin, or in part tight clothing? Lars couldn't tell) was heading straight for Lars. The

other two men, and the two women, retreated minimally.

"It is not possible to welcome here." The voice, to Lars, sounded surprisingly clear and Earthly,

though the mouth and throat that produced it were obviously from somewhere else. "But it is

possible to wish you well, and that I and my fellow Carmpan do."

"Thank you. The same to you." What to say to an alien? "How were you captured?"

An armlike appendage gestured. The wide unearthly mouth shaped Earthly words with uncanny

precision. "Unhappily, my friend. Unhappily." With that the Carmpan turned its back on them

slowly, and got wilder way again, retreating to rejoin its fellows. Male or female? Lars couldn't

tell. He had heard that the Carmpan themselves rarely became interested in the distinction.

"I thought they newer talked to us that freely," Lars mattered, watching the retreating back.

Pat repeated in effect what Captain Naxos had already said: that the Carmpan, constrained by

necessity, could be and were being good companions. And yet even the berserker had known enough to

provide two rooms, realizing the necessity for a psychological separation between its two kinds of

biological specimens.

Lars was ravenously hungry, and there was food of a sort available, the pink-and-green cakes that

some of the rare survivors of berserker imprisonment had described. He could see the Carmpan in

their room munching cakes of other colors. After Lars had eaten, his fellow prisoners pointed out

to him an individual cell that he could use for sleeping, or for such privacy as was attainable.

It much resembled his cell on the berserker craft, except that this one was dug out of rock, and

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its open doorway had no door. Each prisoner had a similar retreat, with one spare cell still

remaining unoccupied. The individual cells used by the Earth-descended prisoners were all located

down a little side hall from their common room.

Utterly tired, stretching out alone on the provided blanket, letting his eyes close, he felt

locked somehow to the other people he had just met. It was as if he could still feel them around

him even as he slept.

He dreamt again. And again encountered the mysterious control panel, and the gage, displaying

rhyming words, whose meaning he could not decipher.

At the moment he awoke, Lars turned his head to one side on impulse. His line of vision passed out

the open doorway of his cell and down the short hallway at an angle, into the common room. There

was another doorway beyond that, the door to the Carmpan room, through which one of the Carmpan

was looking at him. After a moment of eye contact, the being turned away.

Well, one of the things known about the Carmpan was their mental powers; there were the Prophets

of Probability among them. There was also the demonstrated fact of extremely long-distance (though

largely useless, it seemed) telepathic ability possessed by at least some Carmpan individuals,

such as the Third Historian, who had also been famed for his communications with Earth. Lars would

not have been astonished to learn that his vivid dream had been caused by some exercise of Carmpan

mental powers. But he could think of no reason why the Carmpan should care what he dreamed, or if

he dreamed at all.

Had it been some attempt to convey a message, through telepathic contact? Of course the gage-dream

had first come to Lars days ago, before he arrived at this base, and before he had known that the

Carmpan here existed. But that might not be an argument against true telepathy, as Lars understood

what little was known by Earth-descended humans of the subject. Time, he thought, might not always

be an effective barrier.

So, the dream might be a way to convey a secret message of some kind, a communication beyond the

berserkers' power to intercept. On that chance, Lars decided that he would not mention the dream

aloud.

The four other ED humans were all awake when Lars rejoined them in the common room. One was

eating; two talking, one—Opava, this time—lounging about lethargically. Dorothy Totonac still

looked sad, but this time she said hello. Lars ate some more pink-and-green cake, meanwhile

exchanging a few words with his fellow prisoners.

No one else said anything to him about odd dreams. No one remarked that the berserker brain that

ran this base was sure to be listening somehow to everything that they were saying, watching

everything they did, but Lars was sure that everyone understood that fact, it gave him some

minimal of power, to be able to withhold even so little as a dream from the enemy.

The conversation had not proceeded far when the same door opened through which Lars had been

brought into the prisoners' complex. Several of the ant-shaped escort machines entered. None of

them were carrying spacesuits. The conversation among the humans broke off, and as if at a signal

all stood and faced the enemy.

There was a moment of silence. Then the door in the third wall, the door that since Lars's arrival

had remained closed, slid open, revealing a red-lit passageway beyond.

Captain Naxos stirred uneasily. "Something new. They've never opened that door since I've been

here." The captain was, by some hours, at least, the senior prisoner.

The half-dozen ant-shaped machines were pointing, gesturing the prisoners toward the newly opened

door.

"Looks like we march," Pat Sandomierz muttered.

Lars could think of no way to argue for even a momentary delay, and no real reason to try. With

his fellow prisoners he moved, under the guidance of the small machines, through an air-filled

passage, with atmosphere and gravity held at Earth-standard normal all along the way.

Dorothy, brightening as if perhaps the novelty of the new passage pleased her, commented: "The

Carmpan tolerate our native conditions well. It doesn't work that well in the reverse, or so I've

been told."

No one else felt like making conversation. The passage was no more than thirty meters long. At its

far end it branched into a complex of several more chambers cut from rock, each much larger than

the sleeping cells, but smaller than the common room. Each chamber was largely filled with exotic-

looking machinery. The humans looked at each other blankly; whatever the gear was, none of them

could recognize it.

Lars heard a sound and looked back. Five of the Carmpan were also being brought along through the

passage by the small berserker guides, into this complex of chambers full of sophisticated

machines.

Live bodies and mechanical ones milled around. Now each ED human prisoner was paired off—whether

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at random or not, Lars could not tell—with one of the Carmpan. Lars and his new partner were taken

into one of the chambers containing machinery. There were two couches visible. First Lars had to

watch as the Carmpan was put on one couch, and there connected into the complex of equipment, by

means of wires and other things more subtle. Then Lars himself was taken to the other couch and

made to lie down. The small ant-shaped berserkers attached restraints to his limbs, and things to

his head.

At once strange thoughts moved through his mind, as if projected from outside. Visual pictures

came, outlandish and indecipherable, though clear.

Presumably, adjustments were made. Coherence soon evolved. At last there were some clear, plain

words:

I am Carmpan. Do not be more frightened than you can help. I do not believe the berserker intends

at this moment to do us permanent harm,

The message came through clearly, but whether it was coming somehow directly from the Carmpan's

mind, or from that mind through the medium of the machinery, Lars could not tell. He opened his

eyes, but the relative positioning of the two coaches kept him from looking at his Carmpan

partner. The rock chamber that held his body seemed, if anything, less real than the new world of

strange communication within his skull.

It seeks to use our minds, yours and mine, together. We are so different in our modes of thought,

yet with this subtle machinery our thoughts can be made in a sense compatible. Together, doing

much more than either could do alone. It seeks to use our thoughts to probe the far places where—

Something in the subtle machinery operated silently, and the contact was broken off. Still, it had

provided Lars with understanding of a sort, or at least a theory. It would make sense, or it

might, that the huge berserker computer that dominated and ran this whole base was using their two

diverse biological minds to try to do what neither mind alone, nor the berserkers machinery alone,

could do: to probe whatever section of space had been targeted by the latest sortie of its

attacking units.

That first session was all probing and testing, and it went on for long, exhausting hours. Lars

experienced glimpses of life and activity on several worlds, and on ships in space. He had little

comprehension of what he was seeing and experiencing, and not the choice about it. He supposed

that the Carmpan had no choice either. The berserker was using them, like so much animated radio

equipment…

No radio signal could carry information faster than light through space. The signals of the

mind—if that was the right word for those ethereal transactions—were evidently another matter.

Knowledge of another kind trickled into Lars's awareness, brought perhaps by the cold probe of the

berserker itself, coming to drain the man's consciousness of knowledge, being forced by some law

to leave something in exchange. Lars understood that ten or more huge berserker craft had been

launched from this base some time ago, and the object of the current exercise was to see how well

those machines were doing, at a distance impossible or impractical for other types of

communication.

The telepathic session was interrupted. The Carmpan who had been hooked up in tandem with Lars was

disconnected and taken out by the guide machines, and another Carmpan brought in. Lars understood

that different pairings of live minds were being tried, always one ED and one Carmpan, hooked

somehow in… series? Parallel? Did it make sense to look for an electronic equivalent? The Carmpan

and ED minds, Lars realized, must complement each other in some way that the berserkers expected

to be able to turn to their advantage.

When the subtle machinery was turned on, Lars got the impression that the enforced contact was

much more unpleasant for the Carmpan than it was for him.

At last he was unwired, and released from his couch. He had no idea how long the session had

lasted. As exhausted as if he had been running or fighting for hours, he was allowed to return to

the cell complex, the other prisoners straggling wearily with him.

They were allowed a brief interlude for rest and food.

Then they were marched back through the passage, where the testing and probing began again. This

time some of the ED prisoners showed mental confusion afterward. Exhaustion became the normal

state. But so far the side effects were bearable.

Repeated sessions went on for what must certainly have been several days. All these sessions at

the machines were devoted, as Lars thought, to testing and in some sense training. At last, when

the most, compatible partners had been determined, they were put to work together.

Only then did the first of the real working telepathic sessions take place.

Lars, hooked up again with one of the Carmpan (he still had no certain way of telling them apart)

experienced blasts of mental noise, confusion, gibberish… the touch of the living Carmpan mind

alternated with the cold mental probing from the berserker's circuits.

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Time warped away. Future and past were blurred in the realm where dwelt the speeding Carmpan mind,

and the hurtling thought of Lars Kanakuru. Now again clear images began to come through, from

other minds. They were fragmentary, practically unintelligible. They came and went through the

Carmpan mind before Lars could do more than glimpse them.

A fragment was seized, then tossed aside. Not by Lars.. Toward him.

Hide this, my Earth-descended ally, partner. This must be hidden at all costs. Do not let the

berserker perceive this…

Lars tried to answer the Carmpan, though at the moment he hardly felt capable of generating a

coherent independent thought.

And yet again, another speeding fragment: Hide this.

And then the mental landscape was lighted, seared, frozen, all in one instant, as if by lightning.

And immediately after that, just as suddenly, the world went dark.

Presently Lars, drifting in some dreamland, realized that the Carmpan now sharing the machine with

him was dead. Lars thought that perhaps he knew the fact even before the berserker did, or just as

soon.

Sudden death in harness, presumably accomplished by the berserker. As Lars read the situation, the

berserker considered that the guilty, unreliable badlife had done something treacherous, some

telepathic trick. But it did not know exactly what the badlife had done, or that anything of value

had been kept from it by being passed on to Lars. Otherwise it would already be trying to turn the

mind of Lars Kanakuru inside out…

… two fragments, that the Carmpan had said must be concealed.

The Remora program. That was one of them. A mere name. That of a computer program? Or perhaps a

program of rearmament, somewhere, the effort of some world getting ready to defend itself against

berserkers? As to what the Remora program really was, where it was, or why it had to be kept

secret, Lars had no clue.

He thought the other fragment was, if anything, even more meaningless: qwib-qwib. Not even a real

word, at least not in any language that Lars had ever known or heard.

His general impression from the telepathic visions he had experienced so far was that at least

three of the ten or more dispatched berserkers were proceeding about their business

satisfactorily. In other cases the berserkers were having… certain difficulties. Life in its many

modes could be amazingly tough and stubborn.

Another brief rest was allowed the telepathic life-units. Then another session began. And now,

through the alien filter of a new (and perhaps more malleable?) Carmpan mind, Lars began to

perceive another segment of the lives of incredibly distant humans.

And this information, this vision, he had no choice but to pass on…

WHAT MAKES US HUMAN

Aster's Hope stood more than a hundred meters tall—a perfect sphere bristling with vanes,

antennae, and scanners, punctuated with laser ports, viewscreens, and receptors. She left her

orbit around her homeworld like a steel ball out of a slingshot, her sides bright in the pure

sunlight of the solar system. Accelerating toward her traveling speed of .85c, she moved past the

outer planets—first Philomel with its gigantic streaks of raw, cold hydrogen, then lonely

Periwinkle glimmering at the edge of the spectrum—on her way into the black and luminous beyond.

She was the best her people had ever made, the best they knew how to make. She had to be: she

wasn't coming back for centuries.

There were exactly three hundred ninety-two people aboard.

They, too, were the best Aster had to offer. Diplomats and meditechs, linguists, theoretical

biologists, physicists, scholars, even librarians for the vast banks of knowledge Aster's Hope

carried: all of them had been trained to the teeth especially for this mission. And they included

the absolute cream of Aster's young Service, the so-called "puters" and "nicians" who knew how to

make Aster's Hope sail the fine-grained winds of the galaxy. Three hundred ninety-two people in

all, culled and tested and prepared from the whole population of the planet to share in the

culmination of Aster's history.

Three hundred ninety of them, were asleep.

The other two were supposed to be taking care of the ship. But they weren't. They were running

naked down a mid-shell corridor between the clean, impersonal chambers where the cryogenic

capsules hugged their occupants. Temple was giggling because she knew Gracias was never going to

catch her unless she let him. He still had some of the ice cream she'd spilled on him trickling

through the hair on his chest, but if she didn't slow down he wasn't going to be able to do

anything about it. Maybe she wasn't smarter or stronger than he was, better-trained or higher-

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ranking—but she was certainly faster.

This was their duty shift, the week they would spend out of their capsules every half year until

they died. Aster's Hope carried twenty-five shifts from the Service, and they were the suicide

personnel of this mission: aging at the rate of one week twice every year, none of them were

expected to live long enough to see the ship's return home. Everyone else could be spared until

Aster's Hope reached its destination; asleep the whole trip, they would arrive only a bit more

mature than they were when they left. But the Service had to maintain the ship. And so the

planners of the mission had been forced to a difficult decision: either fill Aster's Hope entirely

with puters and nicians and pray that they would be able to do the work of diplomats, theoretical

physicists and linguists; or sacrifice a certain number of Service personnel to make room for

people who could be explicitly trained for the mission. The planners decided that the ability to

take Aster's Hope apart chip by chip and seal after seal and then put her all back together again

was enough experience to ask of any individual man or woman. Therefore the mission itself would

have to be entrusted to other experts.

And therefore Aster's Hope would be unable to carry enough puters and nicians to bring the mission

home again.

Faced with this dilemma, the Service personnel were naturally expected to spend a significant

period of each duty shift trying to reproduce. If they had children, they could pass on their

knowledge and skill. And if the children were born soon enough, they would be old enough to take

Aster's Hope home when she needed them.

Temple and Gracias weren't particularly interested in having children. But they took every other

aspect of reproduction very seriously.

She slowed down for a few seconds, just to tantalize him. Then she put on a burst of speed. He

tended to be just a bit dull in his love-making—and even in his conversation—unless she made a

special effort to get his heart pounding. On some days, a slow, comfortable, and just-a-bit-dull

lover was exactly what she wanted. But not today. Today she was full of energy from the tips of

her toes to the ends of her hair, and she wanted Gracias at his best.

But when she tossed a laughing look back over her shoulder to see how he was doing, he wasn't

behind her anymore.

Where—? Well, good. He was trying to take control of the race. Win by tricking her because he

couldn't do it with speed. Temple laughed out loud while she paused to catch her breath and think.

Obviously, he had ducked into one of the rooms or passages off this corridor, looking for a way to

shortcut ahead of her—or maybe to lure her into ambush. And she hadn't heard the automatic door

open and close because she'd been running and breathing too hard. Very good! This was the Graces

she wanted.

But where had be wired off? Not the auxiliary compcom: that room didn't have any other exit. How

about the nearest capsule chamber? From there, he'd have to shaft down to inner-shell and come

back up. That could be dicey: he'd have to guess how far and fast, and in what direction, she was

moving. Which gave her a chance to turn the tables on him.

With a grin, she went for the door to the next capsule chamber. Sensing her approach, it opened

with a nearly silent whoosh, then closed behind her. Familiar with the look of the cryogenic

capsules huddled in the grasp of their triple-redundant support machinery, each one independently

supplied and run so that no system-wide future could wipe out the mission, she hardly glanced

around her as she headed toward the shaft.

Its indicators showed that it wasn't in use. So Gracias wasn't on his way up here. Perfect. She'd

take the shaft up to outer-shell and elude him there, just to whet his appetite. Turn his own

gambit against him. Pleased with herself, she approached the door of the shaft.

But when she impinged on the shaft's sensor, it didn't react to her. None of the lights came on:

the elevator stayed where it was. Surprised, she put her whole body in front of the sensor.

Nothing. She jumped up and down, waved her arms. Still nothing.

That was strange. When Gracias ran his diagnostics this morning, the only malfunction anywhere was

in an obscure circuit of foodsup's beer synthesizer. And she'd already helped him fix it. Why

wasn't the shaft operating?

Thinking she ought to go to the next room and try another shaft, find out how serious the problem

was, Temple trotted back to the capsule chamber door.

This time, it didn't open for her.

That was so unexpected that she ran into the door—which startled more than hurt her. In her nearly

thirty years, she had never seen an automatic door fail. All doors opened except locked doors; and

locked doors had an exterior status light no one could miss. Yet the indicators for this door

showed open and normal.

She tried again.

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The door didn't open.

That wasn't just strange. It was serious. A severe malfunction. Which didn't show up on

diagnostics? Or had it just now happened? Either way, it was time to stop playing. Aster's Hope

needed help. Frowning, Temple looked for the nearest speaker so she could call Gracias and tell

him what was going on.

It was opposite her, on the wall beside the shaft. She started toward it.

Before she got there, the door to the chamber slid open.

A nonchalant look on his dark face, a tuneless whistle puckering his mouth, Gracias came into the

room. He was carrying a light sleeping pallet over one shoulder. The door closed behind him

normally.

"Going somewhere?" he asked in a tone of casual curiosity.

Temple knew that look, that tone. In spite of herself, she gave him a wide grin. "Damn you all to

pieces," she remarked. "How did you do that?"

He shrugged, trying to hide the sparkle in his eyes. "Nothing to it. Auxcompcom's right over

there." He nodded in the direction of the comp command room she had passed. "Ship motion sensors

knew where you were. Saw you come in here. Did a temporary repro. Told the comp not to react to

any body mass smaller than mine. You're stuck in here for another hour."

"You ought to be ashamed." She couldn't stop grinning. His ploy delighted her. "That's the most

irresponsible thing I've ever heard. If the ether puters spend their time doing repros, the comp

won't be good for alphabet soup by the time we get where we're going."

He didn't quite meet her happy gaze. "Too late now. Still pretending he was nonchalant—in spite of

some obvious evidence to the contrary—he put the pallet on the floor by front of him. "Stack here

for another hour." Then he did look at her, his black eyes smoldering. "Don't want to waste it."

She made an effort to sound exasperated. "Idiot." But she practically jumped into his arms when he

gave her the chance.

They were still doing their duty when the ship's, brapper sounded, and the comp snapped Aster's

Hope onto emergency alert.

Temple and Gracias were, respectively, the nician and puter of their duty shift. The Service had

trained them for their jobs almost from birth. They had access, both by education and through the

comp, to the best knowledge Aster had evolved, the best resources her planners and builders had

been able to cram into Aster's Hope. In some ways, they were the pinnacle of Aster's long climb

toward the future: they represented, more surely than any of the diplomats or librarians, what the

Asterins had been striving toward for three thousand years.

But the terms themselves, "nician" and "puter," were atavisms, pieces of words left over from

before the Crash— sounds which had become at once magic and nonsense during the period of

inevitable barbarism that had followed the Crash. Surviving legends spoke of the puters and

nicians who had piloted the great colonization ship Aster across the galactic void from Earth,

lightyears measured in hundreds or thousands from the homeworld of the human race. In Aster, as in

all the great ships which Earth had sent out to preserve humankind from some now-forgotten crisis,

most of the people had slept through the centuries of space-normal travel while the nicians and

puters had spent their lives and died, generation after generation, to keep the ship safe and

alive as the comp and its scanners hunted the heavens for some world where Aster's sleepers could

live.

It was a long and heroic task, that measureless vigil of the men and women who ran the ship. In

one sense, they succeeded; for when Aster came to her last resting place it was on the surface of

a planet rich in compatible atmosphere and vegetation but almost devoid of competitive fauna. The

planet's sun was only a few degrees hotter than Sol: its gravity, only a fraction heavier. The

people who found their way out of sleep onto the soil and hope of the new world had reason to

count themselves fortunate.

But in another sense the nicians and puters failed. While most of her occupants slept, Aster had

been working for hundreds or thousands of years—and entropy was immutable. Parts of the ship broke

down. The puters and nicians made repairs. Other parts broke down and were fixed. And then Aster

began to run low on supplies and equipment. The parts that broke down were fixed at the expense of

other parts. The nicians and puters kept their ship alive by nothing more in the end than sheer

ingenuity and courage. But they couldn't keep her from crashing.

The Crash upset everything the people of Earth had planned for the people of Aster. The comp was

wrecked, its memory banks irretrievable, useless. Fires destroyed what physical books the ship

carried. The pieces of equipment which survived tended to be ones which couldn't be kept running

without access to an ion generator and couldn't be repaired without the ability to manufacture

microchips. Aster's engines had flared out under the strain of bringing her bulk down through the

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atmosphere and were cold forever.

Nearly nine hundred men and women survived the Crash, but they had nothing to keep themselves

alive with except the knowledge and determination they carried in their own heads.

That the descendants of those pioneers survived to name their planet Aster—to make it yield up

first a life and then a future… to dream of the stars and space flight and Earth-—was a tribute

more to their determination than to their knowledge. A significant portion of what they knew was

of no conceivable value. The descendants of the original puters and nicians knew how to run Aster;

but the theoretical questions involved in how she had run were scantly understood. And none of

those personnel had been trained to live in what was essentially a jungle. As for the sleepers:

according to legend, a full ten percent of them had been politicians. And another twenty percent

had been people the politicians deemed essential— secretaries, press officers, security guards,

even cosmeticians. That left barely six hundred individuals who were accustomed to living in some

sort of contact with reality.

And yet they found a way to live.

First they survived by experimentation (some of it fatal), they learned to distinguish edible from

inedible vegetation; they remembered enough about the importance of fire to procure some from

Aster's remains before the wreckage burned itself out; they organized themselves enough to assign

responsibilities.

Later they persisted: they found rocks and chipped them sharp in order to work with the

vegetation; they made clothing out of leaves and the skins of small animals; they taught

themselves how to weave shelter; they kept their population going.

Next they struggled. After all, what good did it do them to have a world if they couldn't fight

over it?

And eventually they began to reinvent the knowledge they had lost.

The inhabitants of Aster considered all this a slow process. From their point of view, it seemed

to take an exceptionally long time. But judged by the way planetary civilizations usually evolved,

Asterin history moved with considerable celerity. A thousand years after the Crash, Aster's people

had remembered the wheel. (Some theorists argued that the wheel had never actually been forgotten.

But to be useful it needed someplace to roll—and Aster was a jungle. For several centuries, no

wheel could compare in value with a good axe. Old memories of the wheel failed to take hold until

after the Asterins had cleared enough ground to make its value apparent.) A thousand years after

the wheel, the printing press came back into existence. (One of the major problems the Asterins

had throughout their history to this point was what to do with all the dead lumber they created by

making enough open space for their towns, fields, and roads. The reappearance of paper offered

only a trivial solution until the printing press came along.) And a thousand years after the

printing press, Aster's Hope was ready for her mission. Although they didn't know it, the people

of Aster had beaten Earth's time for the same development by several thousand years.

Determination had a lot to do with it. People who came so far from Earth in order to procure the

endurance of the human race didn't look kindly on anything that was less than what they wanted.

But determination required an object: people had to know what they wanted. The alternative was a

history full of wars, since determined people who didn't know what they wanted tended to be

unnecessarily aggressive.

That object—the dream which shaped Asterin life and civilization from the earliest generations,

the inborn sense of common purpose and yearning which kept the wars short, caused people to share

what they knew, and inspired progress—was provided by the legends of Earth and Aster.

Within two generations after the Crash, no one knew even vaguely where Earth was: the knowledge as

well as the tools of astrogation had been lost. Two generations after that, it was no longer clear

what Earth had been like. And after two more generations, the reality of space flight had begun to

pass out of the collective Asterin imagination.

But the ideas endured.

Earth.

Aster.

Nicians and puters.

Sleep.

On Aster perhaps more than anywhere else in the Galaxy, dreams provided the staff of purpose. On

Aster evolved a civilization driven by legends. Communally and individually, the images and

passions which fared the mind daring physical sleep became the goals which shaped the mind while

it was awake.

To rediscover Earth.

And go back.

For centuries, of course, this looked like nonsense. If it had been a conscious choice rather than

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