Berserker - Berserker's Planet Part 1

BERSERKER'S PLANET.

THE BERSERKER SERIES.

By Fred Saberhagen.

I.

The dead man's voice was coming live and clear over s.h.i.+p's radio into theOrion's lounge, and the six people gathered there, the only people alive within several hundred light years, were listening attentively for the moment, some of them only because Oscar Schoenberg, who ownedOrion and was driving her on this trip, had indicated thathe wanted to listen. Carlos Suomi, who was ready to stand up to Schoenberg and expected to have a serious argument with him one of these days, was in this instance in perfect agreement with him. Athena Poulson, the independent one of the three women, had made no objection; Celeste Servetus, perhaps the least independent, had made a few but they meant nothing.

Gustavus De La Torre and Barbara Hurtado had never, in Suomi's experience, objected to any decision made by Schoenberg.

The dead man's voice to which they listened was. not recorded, only mummified by the approximately five hundred years of s.p.a.cetime that stretched between Hunters' system, where the radio signal had been generated, andOrion's present position in intragalactic s.p.a.ce about eleven hundred light years (or five and a half weeks by s.h.i.+p) from Earth. It was the voice of Johann Karlsen, who about five hundred standard years ago had led a battle fleet to Hunters' system to skirmish there with a berserker fleet and drive them off. That was some time after he had smashed the main berserker power and permanently crippled their offensive capabilities at the dark nebula called the Stone Place.

Most of the bulkhead s.p.a.ce in the lounge was occupied by viewscreens, and then, as now, they were adjusted for the purpose, the screens brought in the stars with awesome realism. Suomi was looking in the proper direction on the screen, but from this distance of five hundred light years it was barely possible without using telescopic magnification to pick out Hunters' sun, let alone to see the comparatively minor flares of the s.p.a.ce battle Karlsen had been fighting when he spoke the words now coming into the s.p.a.ce yacht's lounge for Schoenberg to brood over and Suomi to record. Briefly the two men looked somewhat alike, though Suomi was smaller, probably much younger, and had a rather boyish face.

"How can you be sure that's Karlsen's voice?" Gus De La Torre, a lean and dark and somehow dangerous-looking man, asked now. He and Schoenberg were sitting in soft ma.s.sive chairs facing each other across the small diameters of the lounge. The other four had positioned their similar chairs so that the group made an approximate circle.

"I've heard it before. This same sequence." Schoenberg's voice was rather soft for such a big, tough-looking man, but it was as decisive as usual. His gaze, like Suomi's, was on the viewscreen, probing out among the stars as he listened intently to Karlsen. "On my last trip to Hunters'," Schoenberg went on softly, "about fifteen standard years ago, I stopped in this region-fifteen lights closer-in, of course-and managed to find this same signal. I listened to these same words and recorded some of them, just as Carlos is doing now." He nodded in Suomi's direction, Karlsen broke a crackling radio silence to say: "Check the lands on that hatch if it won't seal-should I have to tell you that?" The voice was biting, and there was something unforgettable about it even when the words it uttered were only peevish sc.r.a.ps of jargon indistinguishable from those spoken by the commander of any other difficult and dangerous operation.

"Listen to him," Schoenberg said. "If that's not Karlsen, who could it be? Anyway, when I got back to Earth after the last trip I checked what I had recorded against historians' records made on his flags.h.i.+p, and confirmed it was the same sequence."

De La Torre made a playful tut-tutting sound. "Oscar, did n.o.body ask you how you came by your recording? You weren't supposed to be out in this region of s.p.a.ce then, were you, any more than we are now?"

"Pah. n.o.body pays that much attention. Interstellar Authority certainly doesn't."

Suomi had the impression that Schoenberg and De La Torre had not known each other very long or very well, but had met in some business connection and had fallen in together because of a common interest in hunting, something that few people now shared. Few people on Earth, at least, which was the home planet of everyone aboard the s.h.i.+p.

Karlsen said: "This is the High Commander speaking. Ring three uncover. Boarding parties, start your action sequence."

"Signal hasn't decayed much since I heard it last," Schoenberg mused. "The next fifteen lights toward Hunters' must be clean." Without moving from his chair he dialed a three-dimensional holographic astrogation chart into existence and with his lightwriter deftly added a symbol to it. The degree of clean emptiness of the s.p.a.ce between them and their destination was of importance because, although a stars.h.i.+p's faster-than-light translation took place outside of normal s.p.a.ce, conditions in adjacent realms of normal s.p.a.ce had their inescapable effects.

"There'll be a good gravitational hill to get up," said Karlsen on the radio. "Let's stay alert."

"Frankly, all this bores me," said Celeste Servetus (full figure, Oriental and black and some strain of Nordic in her ancestry, incredibly smooth taut skin beneath her silver body paint, wig of what looked like silver mist). Here lately it was Celeste's way to display flashes of insolence toward Schoenberg, to go through periods of playing what in an earlier age would have been described as hard-to-get. Schoenberg did not bother to look at her now. She had already been got.

"We wouldn't be here now, probably, if it weren't for that gentleman who's talking on the radio." This was Barbara Hurtado. Barbara and Celeste were much alike, both playgirls brought along on this expedition as items for male consumption, like the beer and the cigars; and they were much different, too.

Barbara, a Caucasian-looking brunette, was as usual opaquely clothed from knees to shoulders, and there was nothing ethereal about her. If you saw her inert, asleep, face immobile, and did not hear her voice or her laugh, or behold the grace with which she moved, you might well think her nothing beyond the ordinary in s.e.xual attractiveness.

Alive and in motion, she was as eye-catching as Celeste. They were about on a par intellectually, too, Suomi had decided. Barbara's remark implying that present-day interstellar human civilization owed its existence to Karlsen and his victories over the berserkers was a truism, not susceptible to debate or even worthy of reply.

The berserkers, automated wars.h.i.+ps of terrible power and effectiveness, had been loosed on the galaxy during some unknown war fought by races long vanished before human history began. The basic program built into all berserkers was to seek out and destroy life, whenever and wherever they found it. In the dark centuries of their first a.s.saults on Earth-descended man, they had come near overwhelming his modest dominion among the stars. Though Karlsen and others had turned them back, forced them away from the center of human-dominated s.p.a.ce, there were still berserkers in existence and men still fought and died against them on the frontiers of man's little corner of the galaxy. Not around here, though. Not for five hundred years.

"I admit his voice does something to me," Celeste said, s.h.i.+fting her position in her chair, stretching, and then curling her long naked silver legs.

"He loses his temper in a minute here," said Schoenberg.

"And why shouldn't he? I think men of genius have that right." This was Athena Poulson in her fine contralto. Despite her name, her face showed mainly Oriental ancestry. She was better looking than nine out of ten young women, carrying to the first decimal place what Celeste brought to the third. Athena was now wearing a simple one-piece suit, not much different from what she usually wore in the office. She was one of Schoenberg's most private and trusted secretaries.

Suomi, wanting to make sure he caught Karlsen's temper-losing on his recording, checked the little crystal cube resting on the flat arm of his chair. He had adjusted it to screen out conversation in the lounge and pick up only what came in by radio. He reminded himself to label the cube as soon as he got it back to his stateroom; generally he forgot.

"How they must have hated him," said Barbara Hurtado, her voice now dreamy and far away.

Athena looked over. "Who? The people he lost his temper at?"

"No, those hideous machines he fought against. Oscar, you've studied it all. Tell us something about it."

Schoenberg shrugged. He seemed reluctant to talk very much on the subject although it obviously interested him. "I'd say Karlsen was a real man, and I wish I could have known him. Carlos here has perhaps studied the period more thoroughly than I have."

"Tell us, Carl," Athena said. She was sitting two chairs away. Suomi's field was the psychology of environmental design. He had been called in, some months ago, to consult with Schoenberg and a.s.sociates on the plans for a difficult new office, and there he had met Athena... so now he was here, on a big-game hunting expedition, of all things.

"Yes, now's your chance," De La Torre put in. Things did not generally go quite smoothly between him and Suomi, though the abrasion had not yet been bad enough to open up an acknowledged quarrel.

"Well," said Suomi thoughtfully, "in a way, you know, those machines did hate him."

"Oh no," said Athena positively, shaking her head. "Not machines."

Sometimes he felt like hitting her.

He went on: "Karlsen is supposed to have had some knack of choosing strategy they couldn't cope with, some quality of leaders.h.i.+p... whatever he had, the berserkers couldn't seem to oppose him successfully.

They're said to have placed a higher value on his destruction than on that of some entire planets."

"The berserkers made special a.s.sa.s.sin machines," Schoenberg offered unexpectedly. "Just to get Karlsen."

"Are you sure of that?" Suomi asked, interested. "I've run into hints of something like that, but couldn't find it definitely stated anywhere. "

"Oh, yes." Schoenberg smiled faintly. "If you're trying to study the matter you can't just ask Infocenter on Earth for a printout; you have to get out and dig a little more than that."

"Why?" Infocenter, as a rule, could promptly reproduce anything that was available as reference material anywhere on Earth.

"There are still some old government censor-blocks in their data banks holding information on berserkers."

Suomi shook his head. "Why in the world?"

"Just official inertia, I suppose. n.o.body wants to take the time and trouble to dig them out. If you mean why were the censor-blocks inserted in the first place, well, it was because at one time there were some people who wors.h.i.+pped the d.a.m.ned things; berserkers, I mean."

"That's hard to believe," Celeste objected. She tried to say more but was interrupted by Karlsen shouting in anger, chewing out his men about something unintelligibly technological.

"That's about the end," said Schoenberg, reaching for a control beside his chair. The frying crackle of radio static died away. "There're several hours of radio silence following." Schoenberg's eyes went s.h.i.+fting restlessly now to his astrogational chart. "So there was some dimwitted bureaucratic policy of restricting information about berserkers... the whole thing is fascinating, ladies and gents, but what say we move on toward our hunting?"

Without pretense of waiting for agreement he began to set his astrogational and drive computers to take them on toward Hunters'. It would be another seventeen or eighteen standard days beforeOrion arrived in-system there. Exact timing was not possible in interstellar travel. It was something like piloting a sailing s.h.i.+p in a sea full of variable currents, depending upon winds that were undependable from day to day even though they held to a fairly consistent pattern. Variable stars, pulsars, spinars and quasars within the galaxy and out of it had each their effects upon the subfoundation of s.p.a.ce through which the stars.h.i.+p moved. Black holes of various sizes committed their wrenching gravitational enormities upon the fabric of the Universe. The explosions of supernovae far and near sent semi-eternal shock waves lapping at the hull. The interstellar s.h.i.+p that effectively outpaces light does not, cannot, carry aboard itself all the power needed to make it move as it does move. Only tapping the gravitational-inertial resources of the universe can provide such power, as the winds were tapped to drive the sailing s.h.i.+ps of old.

Though the artificial gravity maintained its calm dominion in the lounge a change in lighting of the holographic chart signalled thatOrion was underway. Schoenberg stood up, and stretched expansively, seeming to grow even bigger than he was. "On to Hunters'!" he announced. "Who'll join me in a drink?

To the success of the hunt, and the enjoyment of any other amus.e.m.e.nts we may run into."

They all would have a drink. But Athena took only a sip before dropping her gla.s.s away into the recycling station. "Shall we get our chess tournament moving again, Oscar?"

"I think not." Schoenberg stood with one hand behind his back under the short tails of his lounging jacket, almost posing, savoring his own drink. "I'm going below. Time we got the firing range set up and got in a little practice. We're not going after pheasant, exactly... we'll have enough of tournaments after we land, perhaps." His intelligent eyes, lighted now by some private amus.e.m.e.nt, skipped around at all of them, seemed to linger longest, by a fraction of a second, on Suomi. Then Schoenberg turned and with a little wave went out of the lounge.

The party broke up. After taking his recorder back to his stateroom, Suomi started out again to see what the firing range was going to be like, and ran into De La Torre in the pa.s.sageway.

Suomi asked: "What was that all about, 'enough of tournaments after we land'?"

"He's told you nothing about the tournament he wants to watch?"

"No. What kind?"

De La Torre smiled, and would not or could not give him a straight answer.

II.

In the camp by the placid river, under G.o.dsmountain's wooded flanks, there were sixty-four warriors when all were a.s.sembled at last, on this warm morning in the eastern-sunrise season. Out of the sixty-four there were not more than four or five who had ever seen each other before because they had come each from his own district, town, fiefdom, nomadic band or island, from every corner of the inhabitable world.

Some had journeyed here from the sh.o.r.es of the boundless eastern ocean. Others had come from the edge of permanently inhabited territory to the north, where spring, already a sixtieth-of-an-old-man's-lifetime old, was melting free the glacier-beast and rime-worm. From the north came the mightiest hunters of this world named for hunting. Others of these warriors had come from the uncrossable shattered desert that lay to the west of the lands of men, and others still from the tangle of rivers and swamps in the south that blended finally into ocean again and blocked all travel in that direction.

The warriors who had gathered on this day for the beginning of Thorun's Tournament were variously tall or short, lean or heavy, but only a few were very young men, and none at all were very old. All were notably violent men even on this world of violence, but during the days of a.s.sembly they had camped here together in peace, each on his arrival accepting without argument whatever little plot of campground was a.s.signed him by Leros or one of the subordinate priests of Thorun. In the center of the camp an image of the G.o.d, dark-bearded and gold-diademed, brooding with hand on sword-hilt, had been erected on a field-altar, a small wooden platform, and no warrior failed to place some offering before it.

Some of the offerings were rich, for some of the men who had come to fight in the Tournament were wealthy.

However wealthy or powerful an entrant might be, he came alone, unattended by any servants or well-wishers and carrying little more than a heavy robe for shelter in addition to the weapons of his preference. It was going to be a holy tournament, regarded by the priests of Thorun as so sacred that outside spectators were barred-though there was scarcely a freeman on the planet who did not yearn to watch. Nor were outside servants needed. The a.s.sembled warriors and priests were to be served-luxuriously, it appeared-by an almost equal number of gray-clad male slaves whose dress marked them as property of G.o.dsmountain, of Thorun and his servitors. No women were to be allowed within the camp.

On this morning when the last warrior arrived, some slaves were making ready the flat fighting arena of pounded earth, some ten paces in diameter. Other slaves prepared a midday meal and set aside offerings of fruit and meat for those who would wish to lay them on Thorun's altar. The smoke of the cooking fires rose into a sky that was quite clear and had something of the blueness of Earth's sky, and yet also something of yellowness and bitterness and bra.s.s.

From beyond the plumes of smoke the mountain looked down, an unfamiliar sight to almost all of those who had come here to fight. But it had been known since childhood in all their hearts and minds. On its top the priests of Thorun dwelt, and their G.o.d and his power with them, within the white walls of his sacred city. Women and animals and other prosaic necessities were up there too; slaves were taken up from time to time as needed to serve the dwellers but seldom or never did the slaves come down again; those at work this morning in the riparian meadow had all been imported for the occasion from tributary lands. G.o.dsmountain's sizable armies never, except for select detachments, marched any nearer their own capital than the mountain's base. To most ordinary folk the summit and its citadel-city were unattainable.

Thorun himself dwelt there, and the demiG.o.d Mjollnir, his most faithful paladin. Other divinities visited from time to time: the G.o.ds of healing, justice, soil and weather, and growth and fecundity; and numerous demiG.o.ds with ancillary responsibilities. But it was primarily Thorun's mountain, Thorun's religion, Thorun's world-except to those, generally restricted to the rim of the world these days, who did not like Thorun, or did not like the power wielded in his name by G.o.dsmountain's priests. Hunters' was a planet of hunters and warriors, and Thorun was G.o.d of war and of the hunt.

A priest called Leros, of middle age, having seen three previous northern springs, and scarred by the violence of his youth, had been appointed by the High Priest Andreas to direct the Tournament. Leros was high in rank among the priests of Thorun, though not a member of the most secret Inner Circle. In his youth he had gained an almost legendary reputation as a fighter, and many of the best of these young heroes regarded him with awe. Leros came down to the riverbank himself to, greet the last-arriving warrior, one Chapmut of Rillijax. He gave Chapmut a hand out of his canoe, bade him welcome to the Sacred Tournament of Thorun, and then with a small flourish placed the last checkmark on the tally sheet containing all the expected warriors' names.

Shortly after, a solemn drum called all of them to an a.s.sembly. Leros, standing in a new robe of spotless white in the center of the clean new arena, waited while they gathered around its edge. They were not long in falling silent to give him their full attention. In some parts of the circle the warriors were crowded, yet there was no jostling or edging for position among them, or anything but the greatest courtesy.

"Rejoice, ye chosen of the G.o.ds!" Leros cried out at last in his still-strong voice. He swept his gaze fully around the ring of fighting men, standing himself as tall and strong as most of them, though no longer as quick or sure. It was many days, about a sixtieth-part-of-an-old-man's-life, since the formal announcement of this Tournament had been carried down from G.o.dsmountain and spread across the world. For much longer, since the time of the last northern spring, it had been common knowledge that this Tournament was coming. Scrawny little boys of that time were now men in their prime; and G.o.dsmountain and all its doings had waxed greatly in importance since then.

Many of the waiting entrants were half naked in the mild weather, their bodies all muscles and scars and hair. The clothes of some were very rough, and those of others soft and rich. A few wore sc.r.a.ps of body armor, or carried s.h.i.+elds of hardened sloth-leather or bright iron. Full armor was unknown on Hunters', where a man stood on his feet to fight and never rode. These fighters were chiefs' sons and peasants'

sons and sons of unknown fathers. Nothing but merit, merit with sword and spear and battle-axe, had won them their places here. Around him now Leros saw blue eyes and dark eyes, eyes with epicanthic folds and eyes without, deep eyes here, mad eyes there, and a pair or two of eyes that seemed as innocent as babes'. The original colonists from Earth, some six standard centuries in the past, had been eclectically selected from a world already well mixed in race and culture. Around Leros the faces were brown or white or black, with hair of black or brown or yellow or red-there was one iron-gray, two shaven bald. Here was a heavily tattooed face, with stripes across from ear to ear, and over there a smile showed teeth all filed to points. More numerous than the oddities were other men who looked as prosaic as herdsmen, save for the weapons at their belts. Besides their human maleness, only one thing was common to them all: uncommon skill at killing other men in single combat.

"Rejoice, ye chosen!" Leros called again, more softly. "Before the sun goes down upon this day, half of you will stand within our G.o.d's great hall-" he pointed toward G.o.dsmountain's top, out of sight behind the wooded bulges of its lower slopes-"and face to face with Thorun himself." Leros prepared himself to retell, and his listeners made ready to hear yet again, the promises that had been carried down from G.o.dsmountain a standard year earlier by Leros and his aides.

Thorun, warrior-chieftain of the G.o.ds (so the message went) had been pleased by the spirit shown by the race of men in the recent series of wars extending G.o.dsmountain's power across most of the habitable world. The G.o.d was pleased to grant to humankind the privilege of fighting for a seat at his right hand, the compet.i.tion being open to the sixty-four finest heroes of the age. To accomplish this purpose the inhabited world had been arbitrarily divided into sixty-four districts, and the local rulers of every district were invited to send-the details of the selection process being left largely to them-their mightiest warrior.

All but one of the contestants was expected to die in the Tournament of Thorun, and that one, the winner, would be granted the status of a demiG.o.d and would take his seat at Thorun's right hand. (Out in the country somewhere, some irreverent logician would be sure to ask the priest who brought the message: How about Mjollnir: Will he have to move down a peg? Not at all, my nephew. No doubt he and the Tournament winner will share the honor of being next to Thorun. No doubt they will fight for the day's turn whenever it pleases them.) By all reports it pleased them to fight a lot in Thorun's hall atop the mountain. There the great G.o.d and the more or less deified men, slaughtered heroes of wars and combats past, re-slaughtered one another daily for the joy of it and were miraculously healed of their wounds each evening in time to enjoy the perfect meat and drink of Thorun's table, the tale-telling of immortal eloquence shared by the company of the G.o.ds, the endless supply of maidens eternally made virgin for their pleasure. (Out in the country, the questioner relaxes with a sigh; there is more here than a simple warrior knows how to argue about. Even if he is not so simple, the questioner sees that he is not going to beat this talking priest at his own game of words.) Leros on this bright morning was formally spelling out once more what his listeners already knew: "Those of you who fall in the first round of fighting will be the first to feast with Thorun-but eternally around the lowest portion of his table. The next sixteen who perish, in the second round of fighting, will be granted places higher up. In the fighting of the third round eight will die and will be seated higher still-and each of these will have eternally with him four lovely maids of a beauty surpa.s.sing any in this world, two of ivory white and two of ebon black, to satisfy his every wish even before it can be spoken aloud.

"After the fourth round has been fought there will be only four warriors left alive, the strongest of the strong. The four who die in the fourth round of fighting will be granted s.h.i.+elds and arms l.u.s.trous as silver, yet harder and keener than the finest steel, and wine goblets to match, and each will have eight virgin maidens of still greater beauty perpetually in his service. They will be seated very near to Thorun.

"In the fifth round of duels, two more men must fall, and these two will be seated in tall chairs of oak and gold, higher up the table still, and they will be granted gold winecups and s.h.i.+elds and arms, and each will be served by sixteen maids of beauty indescribable, and all things will be theirs in fuller measure than any lower men may have. On that day but two of you will remain alive outside the hall where the G.o.ds feast.

"The single duel of the sixth round of fighting will be the last and greatest. Who loses it will still be honored beyond any of those that I have mentioned yet. And when it is over, the Tournament will be over, and one man will have won. That man alone shall walk, in the flesh, into the holy place of the G.o.d Thorun, and his place for all time to come shall be at Thorun's right hand; and from his high place that man will overtop all of the other sixty-three by as great a measure as they stand above the race of puny, mortal men that crawl about here below."

Leros concluded with a sigh. He believed the promises and they moved him to envy and awe every time he thought about them.

For some time now one of the warriors, black of skin and huge, had been leaning forward with an expectant look, as if he wished to speak. Now Leros, with an inquiring glance, took notice of him.

The man asked: "Lord Leros, tell me this-"

"Address me no more as Lord. Your status from this day forward is higher than my own."

"Very well. Friend Leros, then. Tell me this: when a man has won this Tournament will he then have all the powers and rights that G.o.ds are known to have? I mean not only powers of war, but of the soft and healing arts?"

Leros had to take thought for a moment or two before answering. It had not been one of the usual expectable questions, for instance was Thorun's hall threatened by overcrowding with all the wars, or what kind of sacrificial meat would the G.o.d prefer today. At last he spoke. "The gentle G.o.ddess of healing will certainly listen to any request that man may make." He let out a light sigh. "The G.o.ds listen to one another more than they do to men. But then they still do what they please, unless of course they have bound themselves by formal promise, as Thorun has done regarding this Tournament."

The man nodded soberly. "It is all we can expect," he said, and resumed his place in the circle.

All were silent now. Somewhere in the background a slave was chopping kindling for the first funeral pyre. Leros said: "Then go, all of you, and make what final preparations you will. The first fight will begin shortly."

As soon as the a.s.sembly had dispersed a subordinate priest drew Leros aside and when they had reached a place of relative privacy unrolled a small scroll and showed it to him. "Lord Leros, this was found posted on a tree not far away. We have no clue as yet to indicate who put it up."

The lettering on the scroll seemed to have been made with a dull ordinary pencil of charred kettwood.

The message read:

G.o.ds and men, place your bets. Who of the 64 will be proven the greatest fighter? That one will be, there is no doubt. Will he then envy those that he has slain, and curse G.o.ds-mountain and its lying priests? While your money is out, try to lay a bet on this also: Are the rulers of this mountain fit to rule our world?