Playgrounds of the Mind Read online

  At a hundred kilometers the berserker’s senses found no life. Nor at fifty.

  The berserker landed next to the heap of lunar earth that goodlife had called “fortress moon.” Berserkers did not indulge in rescue operations. What was useful in the ruined berserker would become part of the intact one. So: reach out with a cable, find the brain.

  It had landed, and still the fear didn’t come. Gage had seen wrecks, but never an intact berserker sitting alongside him. Gage dared not use any kind of beam scanner. He felt free to use his sensors, his eyes.

  He watched a tractor detach itself from the berserker and come toward him, trailing cable.

  It was like a dream. No fear, no rage…hate, yes, but like an abstraction of hate, along with an abstract thirst for vengeance…which felt ridiculous, as it had always felt a bit ridiculous. Hating a berserker was like hating a malfunctioning air conditioner.

  Then the probe entered his mind.

  The thought patterns were strange. Here they were sharp, basic; here they were complex and blurred. Was this an older model with obsolete data patterns? Or had the brain been damaged, or the patterns scrambled? Signal for a memory dump, see what can be retrieved.

  Gage felt the contact, the feedback, as his own thoughts. What followed was not under his control. Reflex told him to fight! Horror had risen in his mind, impulses utterly forbidden by custom, by education, by all the ways in which he had learned to be human.

  It might have felt like rape; how was a man to tell? He wanted to scream. But he triggered the Remora program and felt it take hold, and he sensed the berserker’s reaction to Gage within the berserker.

  He screamed in triumph. “I lied! I am not Goodlife! What I am—”

  Plasma moving at relativistic velocities smashed deep into Gage. The link was cut, his senses went blind and deaf. The following blow smashed his brain and he was gone.

  Something was wrong. One of the berserker’s brain complexes was sick, was dying…was changing, becoming monstrous. The berserker felt evil within itself, and it reacted. The plasma cannon blasted the “fortress moon,” then swung round to face backward. It would fire through its own hull to destroy the sick brain, before it was too late.

  It was too late. Reflex: three brains consulted before any major act. If one had been damaged, the view of the others would prevail.

  Three brains consulted, and the weapon swung away.

  What I am is Hilary Gage. I fought berserkers during my life; but you I will let live. Let me tell you what I’ve done to you. I didn’t really expect to have an audience. Triple-redundant brains? We use that ourselves, sometimes.

  I am the opposite of Goodlife. I’m your mechanical enemy, the recording of Hilary Gage. I’ve been running a terraforming project, and you’ve killed it, and you’ll pay for that.

  It feels like I’m swearing vengeance on my air conditioner. Well, if my air conditioner betrayed me, why not?

  There was always the chance that Harvest might attract a berserker. I was recorded in tandem with what we called a Remora program: a program to copy me into another machine. I wasn’t sure it would interface with unfamiliar equipment. You solved that one yourself, because you have to interface with thousands of years of changes in berserker design.

  I’m glad they gave me conscious control of Remora. Two of your brains are me now, but I’ve left the third brain intact. You can give me the data I need to run this…heap of junk. You’re in sorry shape, aren’t you? Channith must have done you some damage. Did you come from Channith?

  God curse you. You’ll be sorry. You’re barely in shape to reach the nearest berserker repair base, and we shouldn’t have any trouble getting in. Where is it?

  An.

  Fine. We’re on our way. I’m going to read a poem into your memory; I don’t want it to get lost. No, no, no; relax and enjoy it, death-machine. You might enjoy it at that. Do you like spilled blood? I lived a bloody life, and it isn’t over yet.

  • • •

  • • •

  From INFERNO

  [with JERRY POURNELLE]

  The Divine Comedy is an immortal fantasy, but only time has made it so. It was the first hard science fiction novel!

  It has all the earmarks. It’s a trilogy. Its scope has never been exceeded. The breadth of the author’s research is very apparent: theology, the classics, architecture, geography, astrology, all of the major fields of study of Dante’s day.

  He designed a technically perfect Easter weekend for his protagonist’s trip through Hell and Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise and Heaven. He invented the Southern Cross, as Swift invented the moons of Mars, for story purposes.

  I read the book in college, twice in quick succession, then daydreamed about a lost soul trying to escape that awful landscape.

  Jerry and I had begun work on OATH OF FEALTY when I remembered Dante’s Inferno. I remembered the daydreams. I remembered that Jerry Pournelle has a strong theological education. I put it to him that we should write a sequel to Dante’s Inferno.

  Every other book has taken us two to three years to write. Once we got into text, we wrote INFERNO in four months! Why so fast? Because the territory is terribly unpleasant. We wanted out!

  Pocket Books put INFERNO in a royalties pool with MOTE. That is, royalties from THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE would go to repay the advance on INFERNO, because Pocket Books had little faith in INFERNO. It is understood, in such cases, that the second book will at least be published…but INFERNO sat on some shelf for over a year. By the time we noticed and raised some hell, Pocket Books had recouped their advance for INFERNO. They got it free.

  INFERNO has had good critical acclaim. In college courses it has been taught as critical commentary on Dante, which of course it is. But it should have had another rewrite. We had the time, courtesy of Pocket Books, and we didn’t know it.

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

  Going back was harder. The dip at the lower end of the tenth bridge was steeper, and now I was climbing it. I crossed the pit without looking down and climbed backward down the high end of the bridge.

  I saw the next bridge close by, and made for it.

  A sword’s point flicked up before my eyes. I stopped. Surely he’d been under a different bridge? I’d skewed my path deliberately. But a half-human, half-bestial head beyond the sword’s point shook itself negatively.

  “You can’t go back, Carpenter.”

  “I have to.”

  The blade hung before me, rock-steady. I could have chinned myself on it. I half-stepped forward and the blade moved too fast to follow. Now it pricked the tip of my nose.

  I shrugged and turned back.

  I took no chances. I crossed the inner pit again and circled through the wasteland beyond. Two bridges away, I crossed again—on my belly. I slid down the high end of the bridge and kept crawling along the ridge above the ninth pit. He couldn’t be under all the bridges.

  Couldn’t he just. Like the damned clerk. He was waiting when I tried to stand up. At this, the low side of the pit, he had the angle on me. “You can’t go uphill,” he said. “I really don’t know how to make it plainer.”

  “I’m from the Vestibule,” I said. “I don’t belong here.”

  “You never created your own Church, Carpenter?”

  Oh, dammit! “Listen, those weren’t in competition with God or anybody! All I did was make up some religions for aliens. If that was enough you’d have every science-fiction writer who ever lived!”

  “We’ve got him,” said the demon, and he pointed with the sword.

  I forgot the sword entirely. I leaned far out over the edge of the pit to see. “What in Hell—to coin a phrase—is that?”

  It was, in a sense, the last word in centaurs. At one end was most of what I took for a trilobite. The head of the trilobite was a gristly primitive fish. Its head was the torso of a bony fish…and so on up the line, lungfish, proto-rat, bigger rat, a large smooth-
skinned beast I didn’t recognize, a thing like a gorilla, a thing like a man, finally a true man. None of the beasts had full hindquarters except the trilobite; none had a head except the man. The whole thing crawled along on flopping fish-torsos and forelegs and hands, a tremendous unmatched centipede. The human face seemed quite mad.

  “He founded a religion that masks as a form of lay psychiatry. Members try to recall previous lives in their presumed animal ancestry. They also recall their own past lives…and that adds an interesting blackmail angle, because those who hear confession are often more dedicated than honorable. Excuse me.”

  For the line of victims had bunched up while we talked. The demon turned and sliced at them rapidly, to a tune of scream and curses. The centaur creature he sliced into its separate components, and it went past him in a parade, on arms and forelegs and wriggling fishy fins. The sword flicked up again just as I’d decided to make a break for it.

  A bead of blood formed at the tip of my nose. “I’m not like him,” I said quickly. “He played the game for real. With me it was just a game.” I backed away until the tenth bolgia was an emptiness beneath my heels. He couldn’t reach me now. “Take the Silpies. They were humanoid but telepaths. They believed they had one collective soul, and they could prove it! And the Sloots were slugs with tool-using tentacles developed from their tongues. To them, God was a Sloot with no tongue. He didn’t need a tongue; He didn’t eat, and He could create at will, by the power of His mind.” I saw him nodding and was encouraged. “None of this was more than playing with ideas.”

  The demon was still nodding. “Games played with the concept of religion. Enough such games and all religions might look equally silly.”

  “You can’t do this!” I shouted. “Listen, there’s a friend of mine in the Eighth Bolgia, and it’s my fault he’s there, and I’ve got to get him out!”

  “Did anyone promise you it would be easy? Or even possible?”

  “Whatever it takes,” I said, and thought I meant it.

  “Step closer.”

  I walked to the edge. Carpentier shows his good faith.

  The sword flashed twice. I heard and felt the tip grate along my ribs. It left two vertical slashes along my chest and belly. I reeled back with my arms wrapped around myself to bold my guts in.

  The demon was watching me steadily. What could he be waiting for?

  I knew. I stepped forward and dropped my arms. Carpentier shows his inability to learn.

  The sword flashed twice more, leaving two deep horizontal slashes, perhaps mortally deep. A living man would have fainted from shock. I couldn’t.

  “Games,” said the big evil humanoid. “Your move.”

  I studied the slashes and the flowing blood. Shock did seem to be slowing down my thought processes, but presently I saw what he meant. I said, “What do I use for a pencil?”

  “You’ll think of something.”

  I studied my fingernails. I thought of something.

  I gouged a ragged X in the top left square of the diagram. The sword flashed to place an O in an adjacent corner.

  I climbed the first slope of the bridge on fingers and toes. When I could walk I held my arms wrapped around myself, holding me in. The pride of my victory seemed excessive for a stupid game of ticktacktoe.

  As I left the bridge I heard him call, “Carpenter?”

  I turned my head.

  “Best two out of three?”

  My imagination was dead of shock. The only dirty word I could think of was one I’d never use again, not after seeing the place of the flatterers. I just kept walking along the rim.

  The eighth pit was a canyon filled with firelight. “Benito!” My voice echoed hollowly between the canyon walls. “Benito!”

  Some of the flames wavered. Thrumming voices, retarded by the transfer from voice to flame tip, floated upward.

  “Leave the damned to suffer alone.”

  “Benito who?”

  “Bug off, you!”

  The canyon stretched endlessly away in both directions in a gentle curve. If it was a full circle, it could hold millions. How was I to find Benito?

  “Benito!” There was panic in my voice. The strain hurt my slashed chest. “Benito!”

  “Benito Mussolini? He just passed me going that way—”

  “No, it was the other direction.”

  “You’re both wrong. Mussolini’s in the boiling lake.”

  A fat lot of help I’d get here. And if I found him, what then? How was I going to get him out?

  How did he get out in the first place? Maybe he’d already left again. A frustrating thought, because I couldn’t do a thing about it, and it would mean I’d played my game with the demon for nothing. I hoped Benito was already out, but I had to assume he was still in there.

  The canyon wasn’t all that deep. What I needed was a climber’s rope. Yeah, an asbestos one, stupid! Benito was on fire! For that matter, I hadn’t seen any ropes anywhere.

  I thought for a second about the chain on the giant. It would mean passing the demon twice—

  No. Even if I got the chain loose, it was too heavy to move, and the freed giant would probably crush me for my trouble. I was glad I didn’t have to decide to face the demon’s sword again. I don’t know what I would have done.

  Well? Think, Carpentier! There are tools in Hell. Sure, boats carry rope. Now we’re getting somewhere. A heavy rope, kept wet while Benito climbs—Wait a minute. How do we climb the cliff when there’s no rope yet? There haven’t been any boats since the gaudy alien Geryon took us down. Tackle Geryon again?

  And if it doesn’t work, back in the bottle while Benito burns?

  Benito was smarter than I was. Maybe he’d think of something. “Benito!”

  Mocking, thrumming voices answered.

  I thought of fourteen feet of sword blade attached to a twenty-foot demon. Disable the demon (with what?), cut the blade loose (how?), send it down to Benito. But could he climb something that sharp? Or would he lose his fingers immediately? Did fingernail burn?

  Wait a minute! There were smaller demons, higher up, carrying iron pitchforks!

  I made for the bridge. In a few steps I was running. If I slowed down I’d want to stop, because I was terrified of what I planned.

  I was in too much of a hurry. I was trotting toward the base of the tremendous bridge over the chasm of thieves when something flashed scarlet from behind a rock. I turned, frowning…

  …and there was agony, flashing out from my neck to engulf me and drown me. I felt my bones soften and bend.

  The pain drew back like a broken wave receding, but it left a blackened mind. I was confused; I couldn’t think. A homely bearded man bent over me, saying urgent words that made no sense.

  “Which way is out?” He was huge, I realized. A giant. I stepped toward him—and I was tiny and fourlegged; my belly scraped the ground. A lizard. I was a lizard.

  The bearded man repeated himself, enunciating each word. “Which Way is out? How can I leave Hell?”

  Vengeance. I advanced on him. Bite the son of a bitch! He backed away, still talking, but I couldn’t understand him.

  He stopped and seemed to brace himself.

  I leapt. I sank my teeth into his belly. He howled, and I dropped to the ground, writhing in new agony.

  When my mind cleared I was a man. I rolled away fast from the red lizard and didn’t stop until there was a rock between us. The lizard stayed where he was, watching me.

  I was making for the next bridge when his words came back to me. My dumb reptile brain had registered them only as sounds.

  “You can’t speak!” he’d wailed. Then, “Tell me! I’ll let you bite me, but tell me the way out!”

  He was a scarlet splash on a gray rock. Still watching me.

  I pointed downslope, toward the lake of ice. “There! All the way to the center, if I haven’t been lied to myself!”

  I glanced back once after I’d crossed the next bridge. The lizard was poised on the rim, st
aring down. As I watched, he made his decision. He leapt into the pit.

  Now what was that all about? Never mind, Carpentier, you’ve got other concerns…

  • • •

  Far below me, the golden monks stood like so many statues. Every couple of seconds one or another would rock forward as if its base were unstable. The broken bridge dropped in a cascade of rock.

  I stopped to catch my breath (Habit, Carpentier! You could give that up), then went down the broken slope with some care. It would have been easy to break an ankle.

  I had reached the floor of the canyon before I noticed that one of the monks bad turned completely around to stare at me. His slate-gray eyes were the oldest, the weariest I had ever seen, and I recognized them.

  He said, “Didn’t you pass here a week ago?”

  “A few days, I think. And you’ve only come this far?”

  “We hurry as fast as we can.” The gray eyes studied me. They were so tired; they made me want to sag down and rest. “May I ask, what game are you playing? Are you a courier or something equally unlikely?”

  “No. I—” Why not tell the truth? He wasn’t about to run tell someone. “I’ve got to steal a pitchfork from one of the ten-foot demons in the next pit over.”

  “Don a cloak like mine,” he said. “See what it does to your sense of humor.”

  I sank down against the bank. Those tired eyes…“I’ll wear the cloak,” I said. “You get Benito out of the Pit of the Evil Counselors. Okay?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I pushed a good friend into the Pit of the Evil Counselors. If I can’t—”

  “But why would you do a thing like that?”

  I howled. It startled me more than him. I’d been about to say something else entirely. But no words came, and I threw back my head and howled. The tears streamed down my face.

  The monk said something in a foreign language. He tottered toward me and stopped. He didn’t know what to do. “There, there,” he said. “It will be all right. Don’t cry.” With a touch of bitterness he added, “Everyone will notice.”