Berserker - Earth Descended Part 18

School went on, Bart arguing with his teachers that they should show him more about the structure of the s.h.i.+p than about things of old Earth that didn't seem to him to have any bearing on his present situation.

Galina still pushed biology, but Bart could see that you'd have to study that for years to really get anywhere. He didn't know how much time he had to study any-thing.

A couple of small riding carts had been built, powered by electric motors, and Bart had some fun riding them about. His elders got angry and yelled at him when he drove too wildly.

The most popular physical game consisted of sliding plastic discs over a pattern of numbered squares on the floor.

Sixty.

When he woke up in his room a machine was standing beside him, waiting to give him his monthly physical. His gains in weight and height were both greater than at any time during the previous month. He counted a few more pubic hairs. This morning the creamy drink was dropped from his solitary breakfast.

The birthday party had more and fancier decorations than before, but little else was different, except that most of the people were content to just sit around and eat and drink and talk. Fuad didn't eat or drink much-he'd lost a lot of weight. But Chao, as the others said, was having a good day, and joined in merrily.

All in all, the old people had a good time. They fussed over Bart quite a bit, but he felt pretty much out of it. Not sad, really, but detached. School had been recessed for the day, though he would have liked to learn more about the s.h.i.+p.

Sixty-one.

Ranjan had suffered a stroke, and was lying paralyzed in the hospital, unable to move anything on his right side. Everyone seemed angry at the s.h.i.+p, for what they described as cutting back more on its medical programs just as their needs were rising. Part of the s.p.a.ce it had formerly used to give them such n.i.g.g.ardly medical treatments as it provided had now been walled off. Something else was going on in there, they said, and nodded angrily, though they didn't know what was going on.

They questioned Bart, something like envy now mixed on their faces with the tenderness they usually accorded him these days. But he had not a sc.r.a.p of information to provide.

At the moment the office of president was empty, and the question of reorganizing the government was being somewhat crankily debated.

Sixty-two.

Vivian, who had been getting fat, was wasting and suffering internal pains. Ranjan was still unable to help himself at all. Bart was told these ills and a catalogue of lesser ones as if he should be just bursting with eagerness to hear them.

He was more interested in ping-pong, which was now a favorite game.

The burning social question was whether there should be an attempt at tinkering with the basic food machines to try to get a more easily chewable output from them.

Kichiro, Solon, and Armin, the only really healthy men, were undertaking an ambitious program to get themselves in shape. Edris, Galina, Sharon, Helsa, and Lotis were laughing a lot at the men and pondering a reducing program for them-selves. Trac was thin already, maybe because she had trouble eating.

Sixty-three.

He learned that Vivian was dead, to n.o.body's surprise.

His school today was conducted by Lotis, who about seven weeks ago had started to seduce him in the swimming pool. Meeting the eyes of the old gray-haired woman now, Bart thought she didn't remember that at all, which was only right; that hadn't been her in the pool at all, only someone with whom she shared a name. Today she taught him gardening.

The garden was being expanded again. A lot of the rejuvenation plants were still there, taking up s.p.a.ce, and not so much living room was needed for people any more, Bart supposed. There were fourteen of them alive now instead of twenty-four, and the survivors didn't move around as much as they used to.

"Remember when I took this picture of you, Bart?"

"Yes, I do, but you don't." And he went rudely on his way, leaving Armin standing still behind him. It wasn't really Armin that bothered Bart, it was the whole situation. The future wasn't coming for these old people, but it was sure enough coming for him.

Sixty-four.

Fuad had just died, of another heart attack, and Bart was solemnly conducted to see the still body being stored in a refrigeration room before they said words over it and gave it back to the s.h.i.+p through a disposal chute.

"Death is a part of life, Bart," Basil explained. They hadn't given him that reasonable an explanation a couple of months ago when they murdered Fritz before his eyes. Never mind, he told himself.

The more energetic people were playing squash today, and Bart joined in for a little while. He was fussed over as usual, and after school people pressed cake and cookies on him.

Sixty-five.

He had noticed for some time that his sessions in the school room (not far from the hospital, from which came now and then a querulous groaning) tended to fall into two types. In the first type a teacher tried very earnestly to cram knowledge into his head; in a lesson of the second type (some-times conducted by the same man or woman) there were long pauses, and an air of futility hung over the proceedings.

Today's session, starting right after lunch, was of the second type. After about an hour Sharon, his instructor, left him alone with a teaching machine, from which he abstracted information on the layout of the s.h.i.+p, until that got boring. He played with the machine trivially then until they came to get him for dinner.

Sixty-six He asked to be allowed to study on his own again, and when the request was granted he day-dreamed and played with the machine for a while. The vision of young Lotis in the pool came to him, and he got up and went to see if the pool was still there.

Gray-haired Lotis, his teacher again today, discovered his unexplained desertion and came after him angrily. They quarreled, and she tried to take him by the hair and drag him back to school.

She was still a st.u.r.dy old girl, but in getting free he pushed her hard enough to knock her down. Alarmed by the way she yelled, he ran away.

Soon Kichiro came limping after him. Bart might have run some more and evaded capture, or sought the safety of his room, but he thrust out his lip and stood his ground. Kichiro slapped him and over-awed him and made him come back to school, the hardest grip that Bart could remember clamped on his arm.

Sixty-seven.

He heard that Ranjan had died, to everyone's relief, after six years of paralysis.

Bart went sullenly into school, under Kichiro's watchful eye.

The regular lesson hadn't gone far before Kichiro interrupted it to make a small impulsive speech. "Bart, you're about all that we old people have to live for. You and the hope that you represent, that one day there will be more people on the s.h.i.+p, people who will get out from under the yoke of the machines, something we've never been able to manage. 'We have done those things we ought not to have done, and left undone those things we should have done.' "

Bart didn't know what to say.

"But all our lives make too much of a burden to be put on you, don't they?" Kichiro added with a sigh.

He seemed to be pleading.

"No, it's all right with me if you feel that way."

And his teacher was happy and gave him a manly hug. But Kichiro had missed the point. Bart no longer cared how any of them felt about any-thing.

Sixty-eight.

The first person he met was Armin, who told him that Chao and Basil had both died, separately and rather suddenly, in the past year.

Bart went to school and found that they had a test programmed into the teaching machine, ready for him to take. Left alone to work, he answered a couple of the questions, and then, feeling that he had something more important to do on this day, he got up and left the school. He looked back once and then walked on. Kichiro looked older and less vigorous than he had two years before, and Bart didn't think any of the others would try to get rough with him. Not any more.

He went to the commissary and punched orders for a small birthday cake into the machine, as he had done for some of those early parties, so long ago. It seemed long to him, now.

Soon he had his cake, and the fourteen small candles he had ordered, and a lighter too. He carried the cake to a refectory table and sat down alone to eat some of it himself. He made a little ceremony of lighting the candles, but would have felt too silly singing himself any songs.

He had ordered the sweet fizzy drink he usually had at parties but soon got up and went to where the wine was already kept and poured himself a cup of that.

Kichiro came in and stared at him a few moments before speaking. "You're supposed to be in school."

The old man's voice was half startled and half angry. "What do you think you're doing?"

"It's my fourteenth birthday today. I'm having my cake."

Kichiro stared a little longer through his puffy, old man's eyes. "Well-I'm sorry if we forgot about your birthday, but that doesn't excuse your running out in the middle of a test." He had left a door open somewhere behind him and all the time he was talking, fretful moaning complaints kept drifting from the direction of the hospital.

Armin and Helsa came into the room. "What's the matter?"

Kichiro told them, and they started arguing, Helsa for taking a different approach with the boy, as she put it, and Armin in favor of declaring another holiday. This last suggestion angered Kichiro. They were still arguing with one another when Bart finished the little piece of cake on his plate and got up and left, practically unnoticed. This time he located the pool but found it had long been dry and empty.

Sixty-nine.

Bart woke up and left his room as usual, and was surprised when the first set of heavy doors that interrupted his private corridor remained closed when he approached. Then he saw that a new doorway, leading to a new, or newly revealed, pa.s.sageway had been made in the wall at right angles to the doors.

After a moment, Bart took the new way.

"The prime directives under which I operate are very clear," the s.h.i.+p said in his ear. "At least one human parent is necessary for children to mature to their full potential.

"We will arrive in less than twenty standard years within a system of planets probably suitable for colonization. From now on you will be awakened increasingly often. You will serve the first generation of colonists as parent. Like them, you have first-rate genetic potential, and perhaps you will remain in some position of leaders.h.i.+p when they mature. Today begins your apprentice-s.h.i.+p in this role; your elementary preparation for it, a course in the basics of human psychology, was completed yesterday."

With gradual comprehension Bart walked on, guided toward the new nursery by the polyphonic squalling from its full cribs.

RECESSIONAL.

From the window of his high hotel room, sixty dollars a day at convention rates, he could look between other buildings to see a small piece of the ocean. Within the mirror where he looked when shaving there was another window with another square of sea, and an hourly newscast came on that morning just as he was starting to shave. Razor in hand he listened while the voice of the woman announcer went through a few details of what she called the grisly discovery. The thing somehow got to him, enough to keep him from concentrating properly either on shaving or on what he ought to say when he appeared on the panel in a couple of hours. Not only that, it stayed with him after he finished getting ready and left the room.

The radio really hadn't given many facts. The body of a woman of indeterminate age had been washed up on a beach somewhere down in the Keys, which put it, he supposed, almost a hundred miles to the southwest of Miami Beach. An unnamed authority was quoted to the effect that the body might have been in the water as long as several years. He thought at first that the news-caster had probably got that garbled somehow, but then mention was made of pockets of cold, un-circulating water to be found in certain depths, in which unusual preservation action could be expected.

One reason for the grisly discovery remaining with him all morning, he supposed, was that his panel topic was "Science in Science Fiction," and he hoped to be able to work that "unusual pre-servation action"

into what he had to say. He felt a little uncomfortable about this panel, as he really was no scientist, though he read the professional journals fairly often and popularizations a lot, and his stories tended to be thick with scientific jargon. He thought some of the readers liked the jargon better than the stories, and he loved it himself, really, which was why long ago he had begun to use so much of it. For him it had always made a kind of poetry.

Some of the other people on the panel were not only real scientists, but were writers as well. They talked quantum mechanics. They talked epistemo-logy. He wasn't sure at first that he remembered what that meant. He wondered for a little while if he was going to have to sit there like a dummy for long minutes at a time. So as soon as the chance came, he got in a few words that s.h.i.+fted the subject to alternate universes. Anybody could talk about that.

Suppose, he thought to himself, looking out over the heads of the audience in the far last row while some argument between two other panelists droned on, just suppose that body could have been five years in the sea. How far could a body drift in five years? Well, certainly not through the Panama Ca.n.a.l. When, in the early afternoon, he got back to his room, he looked out at what little he could see of the one great ocean that went all the way around the world, and thought about that body again. They hadn't said what, if anything, the woman had been wearing. He couldn't quite shake the subject, it seemed to have set up a resonance of some kind inside his head. Time pa.s.sed, what seemed like a lot of time as he sat waiting in his room, but the phone call from another hotel room that he was expecting failed to come.

So he left the convention earlier than he had planned, left it that very afternoon, driving north through summer Florida. Going to the convention, he told himself, had been more trouble than it was worth. In the old days, the cons ran three days, no more, and were relaxed and friendly. Now each one he went to seemed like some d.a.m.ned big business in itself. Just getting away on his own was something of a relief.

A day and a half later, waking up early in his motel room in Atlanta, he put in a call to his agent in New York. The agent would be back in the office in half an hour, the girl thought, and would call him back then. Waiting for the agent to call back, he took a shower, and when he came out of the shower, dripping, turned on the radio.

Listening, he experienced an inward chill.