Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 04 - Berserker Man

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BERSERKER MAN
BERSERKER SERIES
By
Fred Saberhagen
NO ESCAPE!
He was driving them in evasive maneuvers now, while the hull crashed like a gong, and
flashes of enemy force were plain in the simultaneous overload of instruments. Flash and
crash again, blinding stroke from the enemy and blending sigh of their own weapons lashing
back, more in defiance than in any true hope of damaging Goliath. The berserker which had
caught them by surprise was too big to fight, too fast to get away from, here in relatively open
space. Nothing to do but dodge—
Yet again the berserker struck…
Tor books by Fred Saberhagen
THE BERSERKER SERIES
The Berserker Wars
Berserker Base (with Poul Anderson, Ed Bryant, Stephen Donaldson, Larry Niven, Connie
Willis, and Roger Zelazny)
Berserker: Blue Death
The Berserker Throne
Berserker's Planet
THE DRACULA SERIES
The Dracula Tapes
The Holmes-Dracula Files
An Old Friend of the Family
Thorn
Dominion
A Matter of Taste
THE SWORDS SERIES
The First Book of Swords
The Second Book of Swords
The Third Book of Swords
The First Book of Lost Swords: Woundhealer's Story
The Second Book of Lost Swords: Sightblinder's Story
The Third Book of Lost Swords: Stonecutter's Story T
he Fourth Book of Lost Swords: Farslayer's Story
The Fifth Book of Lost Swords: Coinspinner's Story
The Sixth Book of Lost Swords: Mindsword's Story
OTHER BOOKS
A Century of Progress
Coils (with Roger Zelazny)
Earth Descended
The Mask of the Sun
A Question of Time
Specimens
The Veils of Azlaroc
The Water of Thought
FRED SABERHAGEN
BERSERKER MAN
TOR
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK
NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is
stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the
author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and
any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
BERSERKER MAN
Copyright © 1979 by Fred Saberhagen
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
49 West 24th Street
New York, N.Y. 10010
TOR® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
Cover art by Tony Roberts
ISBN:0-812-50564-6
First Tor printing: April 1992
Printed in the United States of America
PROLOGUE
WELL, ELLY TEMESVAR THOUGHT GRAYLY, WE'VE GIVEN it a good fight, done better
than anyone might have expected, considering how little ship we have to fight it with.
Out perpendicularly from the surface of a peculiar star there jutted what looked like a
transfixing spear of plasma, bright as the star itself, as thick as a major planet, and so long
that it looked needle-thin. On the jet's brilliant, almost insubstantial surface the little duoship
that Elly and her partner rode in clung like a microbe on a glowing treetrunk, in an effort to
find concealment where there was really none. And somewhere on the other side of the
shining plasma fountain, a hundred thousand kilometers or more away, the mad berserker
stalked them. Berserkers were pure machine, of course, but still in Elly's most heartsure
mental images of them they were all mad—she smelled on them the suicidal madness of their
ancient and unknown builders.
The odd star that drained itself into the plasma jet was close enough to have been blinding
were not the ports all sealed opaque for combat. And despite the nearness of the Galactic
Core, few other stars were visible. Bright nebular material filled cubic parsec after cubic
parsec in this region, hiding everything else and evoking old legends of lightspace in which
the stars were only points of darkness.
"Pull in the scanning nodes just a touch on your side, Elly." Frank's voice, as usual sounding
almost imperturbable, came into her earphones. He was on the other side of the thick steel
bulkhead that completely bisected crew quarters when its hatches were closed for combat. In
theory one compartment might be breached, while the human in the other one survived to
fight on. In practice, this time, the whole craft was just about to be crunched like a pretzel,
and Elly in moments of free mental time wished that she might have, at the end, at least as
much human contact as open connecting hatches could provide.
She did not voice her wish. "Nodes in," she acknowledged instead, in trained reaction that
seemed to function independent of her will. Her fingers had meanwhile remained poised but
motionless upon the ten keys of her auxiliary controls. Through her helmet the electrical
waves of her brain directly drove the equipment for which she was responsible, in a control
system that worked a large fraction of a second faster than any dependent upon arm-length
nerves.
"It's going to come again—" The rest of Frank's warning was lost, even with earphones, as
the berserker came, wolf springing from behind a plasma tree. Basic control of the ship
depended upon the signals from her partner's brain, and the stroke and counterstroke of the
next passage at arms were over before Elly had fully grasped that it was about to start. One
reason Frank Marcus sat as commander in the left seat was that he was faster than Elly by
far; but then he was faster than anyone. Frank the Legendary. Even two minutes ago, Elly
had still nursed conscious hopes that he might be able to get them out of this alive.
He was driving them in evasive maneuvers now, while the hull crashed like a gong, and
flashes of enemy force were plain in the simultaneous overload of instruments. Flash and
crash again, blinding stroke from the enemy and blending sigh of their own weapons lashing
back, more in defiance than in any true hope of damaging Goliath. The berserker which had
caught them by surprise was too big to fight, too fast to get away from, here in relatively open
space. Nothing to do but dodge—
Yet again the berserker struck, and yet again they emerged whole from the barrage. They
were characters in some fantasy cartoon, staggering along a tightrope and parrying a rain of
meteoric irons with the flimsy stalk of a broken umbrella.
"—little ship—"
Between great blasts of static, that was the voice of the berserker reaching them. It was trying
to talk, only to distract them perhaps, or perhaps to offer life of a sort. There were sometimes
living, willing servitors. And sometimes there were specimens that the unliving enemy found
interesting enough to be kept breathing for a long time under study. Distraction, with the
game effectively over, might seem a pointless waste of tactical finesse, but the enemy's
tactics were varied by randomizing devices and tended to be unpredictable.
"—tie ship, new weapons will not save you—"
The voice was quavering, neither male nor female, neither old nor young. It was assembled
from the recorded words of prisoners, of goodlife (the willing servitors), of defiant human
enemies who had cursed the thing before they died and whose very curses were put to its
use.
"New weapons? What the hell does that mean?" Like many who fought berserkers, Frank
Marcus seemed to believe in Hell, at least enough to swear by it.
"That's what it said."
"—helpless… badlife…" A great static roar. "You are too small…" The message or distraction
from the enemy dissolved utterly in noise. No carrier wave could any longer bring it through
the furious radiation from the plasma jet.
Mumbling something to himself, Frank danced the duoship around the jet. He dropped his
craft from normal space into that condition called flight-space, where physical existence
outside the guarded hull became little more than mathematics, and outracing light became
not only possible but unavoidable. He brought them bursting back again into normal space, a
fearful risk this near the great mass of a star. He had a way, had luck, had something no one
could bottle or even measure, that in addition to his speed made for success against
berserkers. Elly had heard the claim that, given a thousand human pilots with this potency,
humanity might have won the long war centuries ago. Cloning of his cells had been tried, to
produce a race of Franks, but the results had been disappointing.
Just behind them—so Elly read the flickerings that raced across her panels—the jet-star's
solar wind exploded like the surface of a wavy pond attacked by a sharp-skipping pebble. A
chain of blasts expanded into spheres of force and gas. Behind them too, delayed but not
avoided, the pursuing monster came, its prey once more in view. The berserker made a dark,
irregular blot against giant swirls of bright nebula that were far too distant to provide a hiding
place, the stuff of the galaxy in an agelong expulsion from the galactic heart. The enemy was
a tiny blot a hundred kilometers across.
Frank would never quit. In a hundred and forty milliseconds he skipped his ship through a
distance equal to the diameter of Earth's orbit, whipping it once more out of normal space and
once more back, intact, a blind man safely juggling razors.
This time, space around them was different when they came back. White noise on Elly's
view-screen. Peculiar readings everywhere—but at the same time silence, and stability.
"Frank?"
"Yeah. We're inside the jet, Elly. As I figured, it turned out to be a hollow tube. We're riding it
out away from the star at a couple hundred kilometers per second. The boogie's still outside."
"You… it… how can you tell?"
Something resembling amusement shaded Frank's business voice. "If it was in here with us,
it'd still be trying to chew us up, right?"
"Oh." She hadn't heard such meekness in her own shipboard voice for years. That word had
come out in a novice trainee's timid chirp; she had heard the like from a good many of them
during her tour as instructor at Space Combat School.
Frank was talking. "So, it's going to know we're here in the tube—because there's nowhere
else we can be. It'll try to get a fix on just where we are inside—probably won't be able to.
Then it'll come in after us. It'll come fairly slowly. It must compute it has us cold, and it has no
reason to take the kind of chance we just did. As soon as it does come in, we go."
"Where?"
"Yeah, that's the question." Again in Frank's voice a shade of humor, this time laced with
bitterness. Then, a new note of urgent thought: "Elly.
Take a look at that cloud down at the end of this pipe. Ever see anything like that before?"
She adjusted her instruments, and learned to begin with that the inner surface of the great jet
bearing them along was about five thousand kilometers away, as they rode near its center.
Directly behind them was the sun that fueled and projected the enormous jet, and hurled
down its hollow center a torrent of particle radiation from which the duoship's hull had so far
shielded its occupants. While directly ahead…
There their strange jet fed a nebula perhaps even stranger, one which at their present speed
they should reach in less than an hour. Elly scanned it as best she could, and made very little
sense of what her instruments reported. The nebula seemed to be emitting fiercely at many
wavelengths while absorbing greedily at others… for a moment she thought there was a
grand pattern to be detected, but the indications for order were fleeting and in another
moment chaos had intervened. Go into that in flightspace? she thought. It's far too dense.
We'll hit it like a solid wall…
"Hey, Elly?" The voice in her earphones was suddenly much changed, with a difference she
did not at first comprehend.
She answered numbly: "What?"
"Come over, will you? We've got a solid quarter hour before there's anything we need to do."
She might have said that there was nothing they could do, now or in fifteen minutes. But she
unfastened herself from the clasp of her acceleration couch and drifted free of it, a blonde
young woman, large and strong. The artificial gravity was now set in combat mode, operating
only as needed to counter otherwise unbearable accelerations.
As Elly moved to open one of the hatches communicating with the other half of the ship's
living space, some thoughts about a last goodbye were skipping through her mind. And
something about suicide, which she would prefer to being captured live by a berserker.
Most of the space in the commander's small cabin was occupied by Frank's acceleration
couch and by his body. It was not easy to see just where the one ended and the other began.
Photographs Elly had seen of Frank, made before that brush with a berserker nine years
back had almost cost him his life, showed a trim-waisted, young-looking man, so intense that
even his image seemed to thrum with extra energy. Now, what the berserker and the
surgeons had left of that vital body was permanently cushioned in fluids and encased in
armor.
The three cable-connected units in which Frank lived struck Elly sometimes as a lazy
costumer's concept of an insect body. There were head, thorax, and abdomen, but no face to
turn to Elly as she entered. She knew, though, that Frank would be watching her with a part
of his instrument-perceptions, while he remained wired directly to the sensors of the ship, and
adequately alert. One plastic-and-metal arm rose from the central box to acknowledge her
presence with a small wave.
Elly's eyes and ears and mind still rang with battle; she felt half-stunned into stupidity.
"What?" she asked again, into the silence.
"Just wanted to enjoy your company." Frank's voice, sounding completely human and natural,
issued now from a speaker near her head. The arm, too thin and too lacking in fingers to be
human, meanwhile extended itself a little farther and stroked her shoulder. Its hand slid along
to her waist. The familiar feel of it was not unpleasant; its movement was gentle and its
texture smooth, like warm skin. Something about it, maybe the hardness of the underlying
structure, always gave Elly the sensation of encountering powerful masculinity.
Now the arm began to tug her drifting figure toward the body-boxes on their segmented
couch, and now she understood at last. "You're crazy!" The words broke from her almost in a
laugh, but still with something like conviction.
"Why crazy? I told you, we've got fifteen minutes." Frank wouldn't be, couldn't be, wrong
about a thing like that. When Frank went off duty, it was safe to go. "Sorry if you're not in the
mood. Imagine a great big kiss, right about here." His voice performed a cheerful sound-
effect. Another hand, this one partly of flesh (and feeling no more and no less strong and sure
and male because of that) came from somewhere and went to work with an infinitely sure
touch upon the clasps of the single garment that Elly routinely wore inside her couch.
She closed her eyes, despaired of being able to think of anything important like suicide and
goodbye, and ceased to try. The inner surfaces of the artifact-abdomen, evolving to embrace
her as she let herself be drawn against them, were not cold or metallic. As usual at this point,
she had a moment of feeling rather ridiculous, being reminded of a leathery vaulting horse
that she had straddled in some gym class long ago. And now, once more, the touch of human
flesh…
Frank had said fifteen minutes. In less than twelve, Elly was safely and snugly back in her
own combat couch, tuned in on all her instruments and ready for business. Trust Commander
Frank to see to it that nothing interfered with that. All hatches were once more closed solidly
again, as per regulations. Combat was now imminent, whereas twelve minutes back it had
not been.
Years ago Elly had realized that Elly Temesvar, shunned by some men as too overpowering
in several ways, couldn't begin to sustain any close personal relationship with this sometime
shipmate of hers. She never felt so much used, abused, liked, disliked, or loved by him as
she felt simply befuddled. Her thoughts and feelings about him … it was as if she never was
given a change to develop any. Perhaps any she did start to develop, good or bad, were
blown and swept away as soon as they began to sprout, by some contrary aspect of the man.
He simply did too much and knew too much and was too much. Off duty she tended to avoid
Frank Marcus, and tended not to talk about him, even when the curious pressed for
information.
Thirteen minutes of the fifteen gone, and now Frank began to explain his developing plan, if
that was the right word, for their next tactic. If it was suicidal, she thought, at least it was
grander and dicier than swallowing any little pills.
Meanwhile the odd nebula at the approaching end of the great glowing tunnel continued to fly
closer. And now the last of Frank's quarter-hour passed, marked by no event more vital than
an increasing flickering and tattering of the tunnel's plasma wall, which here began to churn
almost like a mass of falling water. The jet was now starting to disperse, the speed of its
material increasing rapidly, evidently because distance was freeing it from the enormous
gravity of the star from which it issued.
"Here we go," her earphones said. "It's coming any moment."
The small ship bounced with the turbulence of the unraveling of the distant plasma walls that
had for a little while concealed it. Elly manned her post, though what she could do for the ship
just now was trivial. Through a tattering wall of the stuff that hurtled outward from the star, the
great berserker came.
ONE
THE CARVING, ACCORDING TO ITS LABEL, WAS OF LESHY wood, described as native to
the planet Alpine and difficult to work as well as enduring and beautiful. Angelo Lombok, a
stranger to this stuff and to this world as well, turned it over in his fingers, pondering. It was
certified as an original handwork, and the artist did not appear to have been bothered by the
reputed difficulty. The basic style was the same as that of the Geulincx carvings Lombok had
been shown before leaving Earth, but the subject matter was more disturbing. It showed a
man and a woman, fugitives, for their bodies leaned forward on long-striding legs even as
their anxious faces turned to look behind them. The swirls of wooden clothing were somewhat
over-dramatic, but what could you expect from an artist ten years old?
Sometimes Lombok wished that he had in one way or another gone in more seriously for art.
Well, one only had a single lifetime to spend, four or five hundred years at the outside; and he
had now invested too much of his in work along another line to consider starting over.
With a faint sigh, he stretched up on his toes to set the carving back upon the giftshop shelf—
which, no doubt, silently recorded the replacement, and forebore to sound an alarm when he
turned away. The one bag he had brought with him was small and light, and he needed no
help to carry it through the modest bustle of the passenger terminal and outside to where a
string of compact aircraft waited to be hired.
Looking something like a tiny brown woodcarving himself, Lombok settled into a comfortable
seat aboard the next conveyance to glide up to the dock, and issued orders.
"I wish to visit the family Geulincx." It came out Jew-links, which he had been informed was
the locally correct pronunciation. He suspected that, like many other famous and semi-
famous people, the Geulincx clan had programmed obstacles into their local transport control
system to forestall unknown visitors; and these obstacles he now endeavored to bypass. "I
am not expected, but they will want to see me; I represent the Academy, on Earth, and I am
here to offer their son Michel a scholarship."
He had the co-ordinates of the place ready to supply if necessary, but the machine evidently
did not need them. It seemed his ploy had worked, for in a moment he was on his way, the
rim of the spaceport dropping away smoothly beneath the climbing vehicle and a forested
mountain leaning closer. Some of the flora here, he had been informed, was Earth-
descended, as were of course the colonists. Upon a crag that slid past now he recognized
bristlecone pines, close-molded to the rock by centuries of wind.
His flight among the mountains, here only thinly inhabited, took him into the advancing night.
As soon as the cloudless sky began to darken there appeared overhead part of the planet's
network of defensive satellites, celestial clockwork in a slowly shifting pattern. There were no
real stars, but also to be seen in the jeweled velvet of this almost-private space were the faint,
untwinkling sparks of three natural planets and two small moons, all now surrounded and
enfolded by what looked like an infinity of never-ending night. That engulfing blackness was
all dark nebula, called Blackwool by the natives. It was thick enough to blot out, even here,
the Core itself, and the realization of that fact made Lombok uncomfortable—whereas, of
course, he would have been unaffected by the familiar and infinitely vaster looming of the
stars.
The military situation in the Alpine system had not yet deteriorated to the point where
blackouts were in order, and the Geulincx chalet, halfway up another mountainside, was
almost gaily lighted. It was a consciously pretty building, in a half-timbered style evidently
copied from something in Earth's long past—he had seen its picture used in the family
advertisements in the art journals. When he was sure that he had almost reached his goal,
Lombok opened his small valise and riffled once more through the papers carried on top. All
in order. All perfectly convincing, or had better be.
A road, devoid of traffic save for what appeared to be one heavy hauler, whose headlights
revealed the narrow pavement, came winding upward from the valley floor. Other dwellings
must be even rarer here than near the spaceport, if one could judge by the lack of other
lights. The landing deck at the chalet, though, was well illuminated, with one empty aircraft
parked and waiting at one side of it. Lombok landed gently under soft floodlights, just as a
man and a woman, no doubt alerted by some detection system, came out of the main
building a few meters away to stand and watch. His cashcard in a slot conferred payment on
the machine. A moment later Lombok was standing on the deck, valise in hand, while his
transportation whirred away behind him.
The man, tall and gray, watched it go as if he might have liked to keep it waiting for a visitor,
or impostor, whose stay would probably be brief. The woman came forward, though, hand
outstretched and ready to be eager. "Mr. Lombok? Did I hear your recording in the flyer
correctly, something about the Academy, and a scholarship—?"
"I trust you did." Her hand enveloped his; she was broadly built and muscular, and Lombok's
briefing on earth had informed him that she had been a successful athlete in her first youth.
"I'm Carmen Geulincx, of course, and this is Sixtus. Let us take that bag for you." Lombok's
briefing had informed him also that on Alpine a woman generally took her husband's family
name. Sixtus, taller, grayer, older than his wife, now came forward, cordial in a quiet way now
that it seemed that there was nothing else for him to be. For a few moments they all stood
there in the fine evening—it occurred to the visitor that daytime in the lower altitudes must be
quite hot—exchanging pleasantries, about Lombok's journey as if he were an invited guest,
and about the beauty of the spot, which he was sure he would appreciate come dawn.
"And now—what is this, Mr. Lombok, about a scholarship?"
He twinkled at them reassuringly, and put a small hand through each of their arms. "Perhaps
we should go in, where you can sit down and brace yourselves for a pleasant shock. We
would like Michel—how is he, by the way?"
"Oh, fine," the woman murmured impatiently, with a quick glance toward the house.
"What—?"
"We would like to pay his way—and that of at least one adult parent or guardian—to come to
Earth and study with us at the Academy. For four years."
The woman literally swayed.
Five minutes later they were in the house, but no one had really sat down as yet. Carmen
was moving this way and that in excitement, piling up false starts toward sitting beside her
guest (who kept jumping up from the sofa out of politeness, and being urged to sit again) and
organizing some kind of meal or snack by way of beginning a celebration.
Meanwhile Sixtus stood leaning in a timbered doorway, with the look of a man thinking and
thinking. He had, very early in the discussion, hinted that he would like to see Lombok's
credentials, which had been immediately produced, and were impeccable.
"The thing is…" murmured Lombok, as soon as a sort of temporary calm had established
itself.
Sixtus shot a glance that said: I knew there was a catch. His wife did not receive it, being
suddenly fixated, with a stricken look, upon her visitor.
"What?" she breathed.
"The thing is, that there is very little time in which this particular opening can be filled. You
understand some of our most generous grants and bequests impose conditions upon us that
we do not like, but still must honor. This opening, as I say, must be filled quickly. It will be
necessary for Michel to come at once. Within two days he must start for Earth."
"But there's no ship … is there?"
"Fortunately, the convoy I arrived with is laying over for a day or two. The decision to offer
Michel the scholarship was reached only about six months ago, on Earth, and I was
immediately dispatched. Luckily there was a convoy scheduled. There was no time to send
you any preliminary announcement, or ask if you would accept."
"Oh, we quite understand that. And naturally anyone involved in Art"—the capitalization was
audible—"would just… of course there's no real hesitance about accepting. But only two
days?"
"That is when the convoy leaves. And who knows when the next ship will be available? Earth
as you know is months away."
"Oh, we know." Somewhere in the reaches of the house below, a muted rumble: logs,
perhaps, being dumped from that heavy hauler.
"I understand that this is very short notice to give you. But at the same time it is a very rare
opportunity. All of us at the Academy have been much impressed by the examples of Michel's
work that have reached us."
"The agent said his stuff was beginning to sell on Earth. But I never… oh. Only two days.
Sixtus, what—?"
Sixtus nodded, smiled, shook his head a little in various directions. Below, more noise, a
power saw ripping with good appetite at wood, no doubt producing a texture more modern
cutting devices could not duplicate. There were, Lombok had been told, a small army of
workers here: cabinet makers, carvers, apprentices.
He remarked into the tense silence, "I noticed one of Michel's carvings on sale at the
spaceport gift shop. I've really been looking forward to meeting him. Is he—?"
"Oh, of course. He'll be very anxious to meet you. I think he's probably working now." Carmen
cast vague, anxious eyes upward.
They led Lombok up some stairs, then along a hall. Sixtus, who had acquired Lombak's bag,
dropped it en passant into the open doorway of a dim, pine-scented bedroom. The house's
interior was as luxurious and calculatedly rustic as its outside.
Of several rugged doors near the end of the hallway, one was ajar. Carmen pushed it gently
open, peering in ahead of the two men. "Michel? We have a surprise guest, and he'd like to
see you."
The room was large, even for a bedchamber-workshop combined, and as well lighted as a
jeweler's showplace. There was a rumpled bed at the far end, piled with oversized pillows,
against a row of windows now darkened by the night outside. Their draperies hung open as if
forgotten.
Against the wall beside the door, a long elaborate workbench stood piled with woodworking
equipment and stocks of material. Midway along the bench, the boy perched on a stool. A
ten-year-old with long, faded hair, he looked back at Lombok solemnly as the small man
entered.
"Hello, Michel."
"Hello." The boy's voice was thin and ordinary. His coloring was not blond so much as dusty-
colorless. A narrow face and large, washed-out looking eyes made him appear frail, but he
took Lombok's hand firmly enough and looked him boldly in the eye. He was barefoot and
wearing what looked like pajamas, ingrained with wood dust and fine shavings, as if he had
spent the day in them.
"Oh, Michel," Carmen said, "why didn't you change? Mr. Lombok will think you're ill, too ill for
a… how would you like to go on a long trip, Sweetie?"
Michel slid off his stool and stood scratching the back of one knee with the opposite foot.
"Where?"
"Earth," said Lombok, speaking as to an adult. "I'm authorized to offer you a scholarship to
the Academy."
Michel's eyebrows went up just a notch—and then his face was normalized by a very natural
ten-year-old smile.
Ten minutes after that, the adults had adjourned to a terrace, where a gentle aura of infrared
from some concealed source kept off what must be the night's increasing chill, and warm
drinks were brought by an efficient robot rolling on almost silent wheels.
"You must be very proud of him," Lombok remarked, taking his first sip, watching the others
carefully.
"Couldn't be more if we were his bioparents," Sixtus put in. "We're both of us carvers, too, of
course—they certainly did a superb job of genetic matching at the adoption center."
Lornbok sipped his drink once more, carefully, and put it down. "I didn't realize he was
adopted," he lied, in tones of mild interest.
"Oh yes. He knows, of course."
"It occurs to me—may I ask a somewhat personal question?"
"Please do."
"Well. I was wondering if you had ever made any effort to find out who his bioparents were, or
are?"
His hosts both shook their heads, amused. Sixtus assured him, "The Premier of Alpine
himself couldn't get information out of that place. They keep the medical profiles of the
bioparents available, for health reasons. But that's all they ever give out—nothing else, once
the bioparents say they want it sealed."
"I see." Lombok pondered. "Even so, I think I shall have to try, tomorrow. The assistant
director has a pet project, you see, correlating bioparents' behavior and lifestyle with the
children's artistic achievement. Is this adoption center on Alpine?"
"In Glacier City. But I'm sure going there won't do you any good."
"I suppose not, but I'll have to report that I made the effort. In the morning, I'll fly over there.
And then—am I to take it that our offer is accepted?"
Before he got an answer, Michel himself, now fully if casually dressed, came with quick
eagerness out onto the terrace and dropped into a chair. "My, such energy," his mother
teased.
The boy was looking keenly at the visitor. "Have you ever seen a berserker?" he demanded
directly, evidently following some train of his own thoughts with youthful single-mindedness.
Sixtus chuckled, and Lombok tried to make a little joke of it. "No, I'm still healthy." That of
course was no answer at all, and he saw that Michel expected one. "No, I haven't. I've never
been on a planet under direct attack. I don't travel in space a great deal. My trip out here was,
as I mentioned, uneventful in the way of military action. Thanks to a strong convoy, and/or
good fortune."
"No alarms at the Bottleneck?" This from Sixtus. "You must have come through that way." A
painful truism, for there was no other way to reach the Alpine system, surrounded as it was
by parsec after parsec of dust and gas, too thick for any practical astrogation.
"No trouble," Lombok reiterated. He studied the adults' faces. "I know, some folks would feel
alarmed at the prospect of a long space voyage just now. But let's face it, the way things are
going, Alpine itself is not going to be the safest spot in the inhabited galaxy. If and when the
Bottleneck does close completely, either as a result of nebular drift or through berserker
action—well, everyone on Alpine is going to be in a state of siege at best."
He was not telling the Geulincx clan anything they did not already know. But he was
discussing the very chancy essentials of their future, and all three were watching him and
listening with the utmost concentration. He went on: "Speaking for myself, I feel more
comfortable making the trip back now than I would staying."
Sixtus was looking up at the nebular night, like some farmer judging when a wild
thunderstorm was likely to assault his tender crops. "I have to stay here for the sake of the
business," he announced. "There are other members of the family depending on it. I have a
sister—she has children. And there are workers, dealers—I can't just pack up and leave on
two days' notice."
"The business is important," Carmen agreed. She and her husband were looking at each
other as if they had independently arrived at the whole solution, to the surprise of neither.
"But then, Michel's future is, also." Her marveling lips formed the next words in silence: The
Academy!
"The convoy leaves in two days," Lombok prodded. "Two days at the outside. They've
promised me a few hours' notice." In fact the fleet would move when he told the admiral he
was ready; but no one on Alpine, Lombok hoped, dreamed as much.
"He must go," said Carmen, and stroked her son's long hair. His eyes were shining with
anticipation. "And he's simply too young to go alone. Sixtus, how long do you think it will take
you to get things in order here, and join us?"
Lombok drew on the smoker he had just lighted, meanwhile watching the others reflectively.
The lady was more excited than her son; she must see an old dream come to life, herself at
the Academy where she would move among the famous people of the world of high-priced
art; with her energy and cleverness and her son's talent that world would lie open before
them… The man at Moonbase who had sent Lombok had calculated well.
Lombok in his mind's eye saw her at Moonbase, stunned, perhaps outraged when she
learned the truth. The truth-telling would have to be handled carefully, when the time came.
TWO
THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM ON ALPINE WAS QUITE FLEXIBLE, and he hadn't spent
much time in formal schooling. Also the isolation of the family establishment had tended to
diminish contacts with other children. The result was that he had only a few friends near his
own age, a lack that had never notably concerned him.
Of those few, he could think of none that he was really going to miss. But when, in the
morning, after Mr. Lombok had departed on what everyone had agreed must be a futile
mission to the adoption center, Michel's mother suggested that he call one or two of the
children at least to say goodbye, he complied. Of the three he called, two were bored by his
great news—or tried to sound that way. The third, awed and openly envious, wondered aloud
how Michel felt about going through the Bottleneck, where there was almost certain to be
fighting.
Michel, who was somewhat keen on space war— at least as it was fought in the juvenile
adventure books—and considered himself a well-informed layperson on the subject,
estimated the risks as somewhat lower. After all, the ship captains and the other folk in
charge would not decide to risk the passage if they thought it prohibitively dangerous.
Mr. Lombok was back in a couple of hours, announcing that he had been unable to learn
anything, but not looking disappointed. Were Carmen and Michel ready? He was going to call
the spaceport, on the chance that it had been decided to move up departure time and they
had not got around to notifying him…
"Good thing I did," he announced, a couple of minutes later, turning away from the privacy of
the communicator console. "Good thing you're ready, too! The last shuttle lifts off three hours
from now."
It took the four of them something over an hour in a family aircraft to reach the port. Michel
had visited it twice before, once on a tour with his school class, and again to see off a visiting
uncle from Esteel. This time he said goodbye to his father on the ramp, feeling a moment of
sharp sadness as they embraced. Then the three travelers were hurried into a shuttle, a
larger craft than that which had borne away the uncle, and with its hull bearing a hash of
letters and numbers, some military designation.
His first shuttle flight did not feel all that different from a straight climb in an aircraft, at first. He
and his mother and Mr. Lombok were the only passengers; as the sky outside the cleared
ports purpled and darkened, a young woman wearing the insignia of an ensign in the
personnel services came to sit with them and chat. No one but Michel seemed to notice when
the artificial gravity came on in the cabin. He did, though, subtle as the difference was; and
felt immediately afterward how the great thrustors underneath began to multiply their force.
And as the blue of atmospheric daylight faded, he began to be able to see some of the
convoy escorting them; Mr. Lombok had spoken reassuringly but vaguely of its strength.
There were six good-sized ships hanging in formation, small crescent sun-glints against the
starless black. But wait—there rode six more, in another flight higher up. And wait again, six
more beyond…
When he had counted six flights of warships waiting, and understood that there might be
more beyond his range of vision, he began to wonder what was going on. More avidly than
his parents realized, he followed the news of the war in space, and not all the books he read
on the subject were juvenile novels. A collection of ships this strong ought to be called a task
force or a battle fleet. Mr. Lombok had implied that this force had come more or less straight
out to Alpine from Earth, and that it was now going straight back. For what?
His mother dutifully noted the various flights of warships as he pointed them out to her, smiled
at his keenness, and went on rehearsing for Mr. Lombok the speeches she meant to use on
important people when they got to the Academy. Mr. Lombok, now looking totally relaxed,
gave her his smiling attention, only now and then directing a sort of proprietary glance toward
Michel.
Only when the starship in which they were to ride at last loomed overhead, like a continent of
metal dimly lighted from below by Alpine's blue-glowing dayside, did Carmen at last take a
real look.
"I'll certainly feel safe on that," she commented, peering upward, and then looked round to
make sure that their meager baggage had not somehow crept away and lost itself.
Michel observed the docking as best he could; and before the shuttle was swallowed inside
the block-thick hull of the leviathan, he had the chance to glimpse her name, running in
comparatively modest letters across her skin of battle gray: she was the Johann Karlsen.
He sat there looking out the port at nearly featureless dark metal, about a meter from his
nose. Then the convoy, or fleet, was not only sizable, but contained at least one vessel of the
dreadnought class: the very one aboard which he and his mother were about to have the fun
of a voyage lasting maybe for some four standard months.
Except that with each passing moment, Michel felt less certain about the fun. He pondered,
and decided it was too late now to do anything but go along.
Departure followed docking within minutes. Michel and his mother were shortly settled into
modest but comfortable adjoining cabins, and the friendly young woman officer, who was
evidently their assigned friend, came to take them on a tour of the parts of the ship accessible
to passengers. She was full of explanations and always reassuring. That evening they all
dined with the captain. The captain was a tall, gray woman with a harsh, angular face that
softened briefly but remarkably when she smiled, who asked in an abstracted way if there
was anything they wanted.
Ship's time had been adjusted to match local Alpine time at the longitude of the Geulincx
establishment. Coincidence or not, the peculiarity of this adjustment was not lost on Michel,
and did nothing to ease his growing sense of something stranger than a long space voyage
getting under way.
… his father, his biofather whom he had never seen and did not know, was locked up in a
filing cabinet somewhere aboard the Johann Karlsen, screaming for his son to let him out. It
was up to Michel to make his way through a complexity of locks and barriers to find the
trapped man, but before he could get the machinery well in hand, he realized that he had just
been dreaming and was now awake. He sat up in the unfamiliar bed in the totally dark cabin,
listening very intently.
Thrum.
He had never before felt the interior tug, perceived as a shadowy twisting in the bones and
guts, that was a side effect of the energies released when a c-plus cannon fired close at
hand. But in his spacewar books he had read descriptions enough of the effect.
Thrum. Thrum.
When he had attended, fully awake, for a half a minute, he was no longer in any doubt. He
counted hours back to departure. Probably they had reached the Bottleneck already, or were
very near it. They wouldn't be firing for practice here. Thrum-thrum. Thrum. And he thought
that they would never practice-fire so steadily; it would be too hard on the vital equipment, the
force manifolds in particular.
Leaving the room dark—he remembered just where his clothes lay on the floor—he slid out of
bed and started to get dressed. He was three-quarters clad when his door was lightly
opened, to admit from the lighted passageway the young woman officer, Ensign Schneider.
She looked surprised to see him on his feet and moving.
"What's wrong, Michel?" There was a straining lightness in her voice.
"Don't you know?" he asked, mechanically, feeling sure she did. "We're under attack." He
paused, one arm sleeved in his shirt, one not, sensing.
"I don't hear any—"
"Or we were. The firing stopped just now."
She was smiling at him uncertainly when Lombok stepped in from the hall behind her,
wearing a robe that made him look like a little brown bird. He appeared almost elated to see
that the boy was up and getting dressed. "Something wake you, Michel?"
Why were these people acting like idiots? "I want to see, Mr. Lombok. Do you suppose I
could just look in on the bridge? I promise I won't disturb anything."
Lombok studied him a moment, then turned to the young woman. "Ensign, why don't you just
see if Mrs. Geulincx is restless too?" Then he turned away, indicating with a motion of his
head that Michel should follow.
In the corridors the gravity had been reduced, just as was always done on big ships in the
stories, when combat alert sounded. The soft handgrips built into the walls and overhead had
摘要：

BERSERKERMANBERSERKERSERIESByFredSaberhagenNOESCAPE!Hewasdrivingtheminevasivemaneuversnow,whilethehullcrashedlikeagong,andflashesofenemyforcewereplaininthesimultaneousoverloadofinstruments.Flashandcrashagain,blindingstrokefromtheenemyandblendingsighoftheirownweaponslashingback,moreindefiancethaninan...

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