Playgrounds of the Mind Read online

  A TEARDROP FALLS

  Fred Saberhagen’s project was unusual even for a franchise universe. He wrote six friends and asked them each to write a tale of a Berserker fortress. With those in hand, his part would be to write a novel around them, the tale of a Berserker base that manufactured and sent out six fortresses to seek out and destroy life-bearing worlds…

  Shared universes are fun. What’s kept me out of Thieves’ World and some others is laziness and lack of time. The longer I put it off, the more complex the universe gets, and the more I’d have to study what has gone before.

  But I already knew all about Berserkers before Fred invited me in. “Teardrop” nearly wrote itself.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Two miles up, the thick air of Harvest thinned to Earth-normal pressure. The sky was a peculiar blue, but blue. It was unbreathable still, but there was oxygen, ten percent and growing. One of the biological factories showed against white cloudscape, to nice effect, in view of a floating camera. The camera showed a tremendous rippling balloon in the shape of an inverted teardrop, blowing green bubbles from its tip. Hilary Gage watched the view with a sense of pride.

  Not that he would want to visit Harvest, ever. Multicolored slimes infected shallow tidal pools near the poles. Green sticky stuff floated in the primordial atmosphere. If it drifted too low it burned to ash. The planet was slimy. Changes were exceedingly slow. Mistakes took years to demonstrate themselves and decades to eradicate.

  Hilary Gage preferred the outer moon.

  One day this planet would be a world. Even then, Hilary Gage would not join the colonists. Hilary Gage was a computer program.

  Gage would never have volunteered for the Harvest Project unless the alternative was death.

  Death by old age.

  He was aware, rumor-fashion, that other worlds were leery of advanced computers. They were too much like the berserker machines. But the tens of thousands of human worlds varied enormously among themselves; and there were places the berserkers had never reached. The extermination machines had been mere rumor in the Channith region since before Channith was settled. Nobody really doubted their existence, but…

  But for some purposes, computers were indecently convenient; and some projects required artificial intelligence.

  The computer wasn’t really an escape. Hilary Gage must have died years ago. Perhaps his last thoughts had been of an immortal computer program.

  The computer was not a new one. Its programming had included two previous personalities…who had eventually changed their minds and asked that they be erased.

  Gage could understand that. Entertainments were in his files. When he reached for them they were there, beginning to end, like vivid memories. Chess games could survive that, and some poetry, but what of a detective novel? A football game? A livey?

  Gage made his own entertainment.

  He had not summoned up his poem for these past ten days. He was surprised and pleased at his self-control. Perhaps now he could study it with fresh eyes…?

  Wrong. The entire work blinked into his mind in an instant. It was as if he had finished reading it a millisecond ago. What was normally an asset to Hilary—his flawless memory—was a hindrance now.

  Over the years the poem had grown to the size of a small novel, yet his computer-mind could apprehend its totality. It was his life’s story, his only shot at immortality. It had unity and balance; the rhyme and meter, at least, were flawless; but did it have thrust? Reading it from start to finish was more difficult than he had ever expected. He had to forget the totality, which a normal reader would not immediately sense, and proceed in linear fashion. Judge the flow…

  “No castrato ever sung so pure—” Good, but not here. He exchanged it for a chunk of phrasing elsewhere. No word-processor program had ever been this easy! The altered emphasis caused him to fiddle further…and his description of the berserker-blasted world Perry’s Footprint seemed to read with more impact now.

  Days and years of fear and rage. In his youth he had fought men. Channith needed to safeguard its sphere of influence. Aliens existed somewhere, and berserkers existed somewhere, but Gage knew them only as rumor, until the day he saw Perry’s Footprint. The Free Gaea rebels had done well to flee to Perry’s Footprint, to show him the work of the berserkers on a living world.

  It was so difficult to conquer a world, and so easy to destroy it. Afterward he could no longer fight men.

  His superiors could have retired him. Instead he was promoted and set to investigating the defense of Channith against the berserker machines.

  They must have thought of it as makework: an employment project. It was almost like being a tourist at government expense. In nearly forty years he never saw a live…an active berserker; but, traveling in realms where they were more than rumor, perhaps he had learned too much about them. They were all shapes, all sizes. Here they traveled in time. There they walked in human shape that sprouted suddenly into guns and knives. Machines could be destroyed, but they could never be made afraid.

  A day came when his own fear was everything. He couldn’t make decisions…it was in the poem, here. Wasn’t it? He couldn’t feel it. A poet should have glands!

  He wasn’t sure, and he was afraid to meddle further. Mechanically it worked. As poetry it might well be too…mechanical.

  Maybe he could get someone to read it?

  His chance might come unexpectedly soon. In his peripheral awareness he sensed ripplings in the 2.7 microwave background of space: the bow shock of a spacecraft approaching in c-plus from the direction of Channith. An unexpected supervisor from the homeworld? Hilary filed the altered poem and turned his attention to the signal.

  Too slow! Too strong! Too far! Mass at 1012 grams and a tremendous power source barely able to hold it in a c-plus-excited state, even in the near-flat space between stars. It was lightyears distant, days away at its tormented crawl; but it occluded Channith’s star, and Gage found that horrifying.

  Berserker.

  Its signal code might be expressed as a flash of binary bits, 100101101110; or as a moment of recognition, with a description embedded; but never as a sound, and never as a name.

  100101101110 had three identical brains, and a reflex that allowed it to act on a consensus of two. In battle it might lose one, or two, and never sense a change in personality. A century ago it had been a factory, an auxiliary warcraft, and a cluster of mining machines on a metal asteroid. Now the three were a unit. At the next repair station its three brains might be installed in three different ships. It might be reprogrammed, or damaged, or wired into other machinery, or disassembled as components for something else. Such a thing could not have an independent existence. To name itself would be inane.

  Perhaps it dreamed. The universe about it was a simple one, aflow with energies; it had to be monitored for deviations from the random, for order. Order was life—or berserker.

  The mass of the approaching star distorted space. When space became too curved, 100101101110 surrendered its grip on the c-plus-excited state. Its velocity fell to a tenth of light-speed, and 100101101110 began to decelerate further. Now it was not dreaming.

  At a million kilometers, life might show as a reflection band in the green or orange or violet. At a hundred kilometers, many types of living nerve clusters would radiate their own distinctive patterns. Rarely was it necessary to come so close. Easier to pull near a star, alert for attack, and search the liquid-water temperature band for the spectra of an oxygen world. Oxygen meant life.

  There.

  Sometimes life would defend itself. 100101101110 had not been attacked, not yet; but life was clever. The berserker was on hair-trigger alert while it looked about itself.

  The blue pinpoint had tinier moons: a large one at a great distance, and a smaller one, close enough that tides had pulled it into a teardrop shape.

  The larger moon was inconveniently large, even for 100101101110.
The smaller, at 4 × 1015 grams, would be adequate. The berserker fortress moved on it, all senses alert.

  Hilary Gage had no idea what to expect.

  When he was younger, when he was human, he had organized Channith’s defenses against berserkers. The berserkers had not come to Channith in the four hundred and thirty years since Channith became a colony. He had traveled. He had seen ravaged worlds and ruined, slagged berserkers; he had studied records made by men who had beaten the killer machines; there were none from the losers.

  Harvest had bothered him. He had asked that the monitoring station be destroyed. It wasn’t that the program (Ras Singh, at that time) might revolt. Gage feared that berserkers might come to Harvest, might find the monitoring station, might rob the computer for components…and find them superior to their own machinery.

  He had been laughed at. When Singh asked that his personality be erased, Gage had asked again. That time he had been given more makework. Find a way to make the station safe.

  He had tried. There was the Remora sub-program; but it had to be so versatile! Lung problems had interrupted his work before he was fully satisfied with it. Otherwise he had no weapons at all.

  And the berserker had come.

  The beast was damaged. Something had probed right through the hull—a terrific thickness of hull, no finesse here, just mass to absorb the energies of an attack—and Gage wondered if it had received that wound attacking Channith. He’d know more if he could permit himself to use radar or neutrino beams; but he limited himself to passive instruments, including the telescope.

  The two-hundred-year project was over. The berserker would act to exterminate every microbe in the water and air of Harvest. Gage was prepared to watch Harvest die. He toyed with the idea that when it was over, the fortress would be exhausted of weapons and energy, a sitting duck for any human warfleet…but there were no weapons in the Harvest system. For now, Hilary Gage could only record the event for Channith’s archives.

  Were there still archives? Had that thing attended to Channith before it came here? There was no way to know.

  What did a berserker do when the target didn’t fight back? Two centuries ago, Harvest had been lifeless, with a reducing atmosphere, as Earth itself had been once. Now life was taking hold. To the berserker, this ball of colored slimes was life, the enemy. It would attack. How?

  He needn’t call the berserker’s attention to himself. Doubtless the machine could sense life…but Gage was not alive. Would it destroy random machinery? Gage was not hidden, but he didn’t use much energy; solar panels were enough to keep the station running.

  The berserker was landing on Teardrop.

  Time passed. Gage watched. Presently the berserker’s drive spewed blue flame.

  The berserker wasn’t wasting fuel; its drive drew its energies from the fabric of space itself. But what was it trying to accomplish?

  Then Hilary understood, in his mind and in the memory-ghost of his gut. The berserker machine was not expending its own strength. It had found its weapon in nature.

  The violet star fanned forward along Teardrop’s orbit. That would have been a sixty-gravity drive for the berserker alone. Attached to an asteroid three thousand times its mass, it was still slowing Teardrop by .02G, hour after hour.

  One hundred years of labor. He might gamble Harvest against himself…a half-terraformed world against components to repair a damaged berserker.

  He toyed with the idea. He’d studied recordings of berserker messages before he was himself recorded. But there were better records already in the computer.

  The frequencies were there, and the coding: star and world locations, fuel and mass and energy reserves, damage description, danger probabilities, orders of priority of targets; some specialized language to describe esoteric weaponry as used by self-defensive life; a code that would translate into the sounds of human or alien speech; a simplified code for a brain-damaged berserker…

  Gage discarded his original intent. He couldn’t conceivably pose as a berserker. Funny, though: he felt no fear. The glands were gone, but the habit of fear…had he lost that too?

  Teardrop’s orbit was constricting like a noose.

  Pose as something else!

  Think it through. He needed more than just a voice. Pulse, breath: he had recordings. Vice-president Curly Barnes had bid him good-bye in front of a thousand newspickups, after Gage became a recording, and the speech was in his computer memory. A tough old lady, Curly, far too arrogant to pose as Goodlife, but he’d use his own vocabulary…hold it. What about the technician who had chatted with him while testing his reflexes? Angelo Carson was a long-time smoker, long overdue for a lungbath, and the deep rasp in his lungs was perfect!

  He focused his maser and let the raspy breathing play while he thought. Anything else? Would it expect a picture? Best do without. Remember to cut the breathing while you talk. After the inhale.

  “This is Goodlife speaking for the fortress moon. The fortress moon is damaged.”

  The fan of light from Teardrop didn’t waver, and answer came there none.

  The records were old: older than Gage the man, far older than Gage in his present state. Other minds had run this computer system, twice before. Holstein and Ras Singh had been elderly men, exemplary citizens, who chose this over simple death. Both had eventually asked to be wiped. Gage had only been a computer for eighteen years. Could he be using an obsolete programming language?

  Ridiculous. No code would be obsolete. Some berserkers did not see a repair station in centuries. They would have to communicate somehow…or was this life thinking? There were certainly repair stations; but many berserker machines might simply fight until they wore out or were destroyed. The military forces of Channith had never been sure.

  Try again. Don’t get too emotional. This isn’t a soap. Goodlife—human servants of the berserkers—would be trained to suppress their emotions, wouldn’t they? And maybe he couldn’t fake it anyway…“This is Goodlife. The fortress moon”—nice phrase, that—“is damaged. All transmitting devices were destroyed in battle with…Albion.” Exhale, inhale. “The fortress moon has stored information regarding Albion’s defenses.” Albion was a spur-of-the-moment inspiration. His imagination picked a yellow dwarf star, behind him as he looked toward Channith, with a family of four dead planets. The berserker had come from Channith; how would it know? Halt Angelo’s breath on the intake and “Life support systems damaged. Goodlife is dying.” He thought to add, please answer, and didn’t. Goodlife would not beg, would he? and Gage had his pride.

  He sent again. “I am—” Gasp: “Goodlife is dying. Fortress moon is mute. Sending equipment damaged, motors damaged, life support system damaged. Wandering fortress must take information from fortress moon computer system directly.” Exhale—listen to that wheeze, poor bastard must be dying—inhale. “If wandering fortress needs information not stored, it must bring oxygen for Goodlife.” That, he thought, had the right touch: begging without begging.

  Gage’s receiver spoke. “Will complete present mission and rendezvous.”

  Gage raged…and said, “Understood.” That was death for Harvest. Hell, it might have worked! But a berserker’s priorities were fixed, and Goodlife wouldn’t argue.

  Was it fooled? If not, he’d just thrown away anything he might learn of the berserker. Channith would never see it; Gage would be dead. Slagged or dismembered.

  When the light of the fortress’s drive dimmed almost to nothing, Teardrop glowed of itself: it was brushing Harvest’s atmosphere. Cameras whirled in the shock wave and died one by one. A last camera, a white glare shading to violet…gone.

  The fortress surged ahead of Teardrop, swung around the curve of Harvest and moved toward the outer moon: toward Gage. Its drive was powerful. It could be here in six hours, Gage thought. He sent heavy, irregular breathing, Angelo’s raspy breath, with interruptions. “Uh. Uh? Goodlife is dying. Goodlife is…is dead. Fortress moon has stored information…self-defending life…locus
is Albion, coordinates…” followed by silence.

  Teardrop was on the far side of Harvest now, but the glow of it made a ring of white flame round the planet. The glow flared and began to die. Gage watched the shock wave rip through the atmosphere. The planet’s crust parted, exposing lava; the ocean rolled to close the gap. Almost suddenly, Harvest was a white pearl. The planet’s oceans would be water vapor before this day ended.

  The berserker sent, “Goodlife. Answer or be punished. Give coordinates for Albion.”

  Gage left the carrier beam on. The berserker would sense no life in the lunar base. Poor Goodlife, faithful to the last.

  100101101110 had its own views regarding goodlife. Experience showed that goodlife was true to its origins: it tended to go wrong, to turn dangerous. It would have been destroyed when convenient…but that would not be needed now.

  Machinery and records were another thing entirely. As the berserker drew near the moon, its telescopes picked up details of the trapped machine. It saw lunar soil heaped over a dome. Its senses peered inside.

  Machinery occupied most of what it could see. There was little room for a life support system. A box of a room, and stored air, and tubes through which robot or goodlife could crawl to repair damage; no more. That was reassuring; but design details were unfamiliar.

  Hypothesis: the trapped berserker had used life-begotten components for its repairs. There was no sign of a drive; no sign of abandoned wreckage. Hypothesis: one of these craters was a crash site; the cripple had moved its brain and whatever else survived into an existing installation built by life.

  Anything valuable in the goodlife’s memory was now lost, but perhaps the “fortress moon’s” memory was intact. It would know the patterns of life in this vicinity. Its knowledge of technology used by local self-defensive life might be even more valuable.

  Hypothesis: it was a trap. There was no fortress moon, only a human voice. The berserker moved in with shields and drive ready. The closer it came, the faster it could dodge beyond the horizon…but it saw nothing resembling weaponry. In any case, the berserker had been allowed to destroy a planet. Surely there was nothing here that could threaten it. It remained ready nonetheless.