Fred Saberhagen Berserker 11 Berserker Kill

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berserker hardware, told both bioworkers that his current job had brought him
aboard the station to stand guard over the valuable cargo.
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Zador and Hoveler, their minds reeling, agreed that the cargo of a billion
protolives was very valuable.
The colonel-neither of his hearers any longer disputed his
identity-said: "Right. No argument. But that's not exactly the cargo
my present employer is worried about."
The station rocked with a nearby explosion. Hoveler demanded: "What's
all this fighting in space around us? Who's attacking?"
"Berserkers, who else?" And with that the colonel left them, to take up his
guard duties where he could best protect the deck of artificial wombs.
But just as he went out the door, he turned back a kind of
metallic eyestalk and added: "If one of you, or both of you, want to come
along, I'll tell you where I've been for the past three hundred
years."
For some time after his recent awakening by the great machine, Frank, despite
the startling things he'd glimpsed just before his capture, had clung
fiercely to his first belief that he was the captive of a
berserker; any other suggestion was nothing but sheer berserker
trickery.
The machine, ignoring this attitude for the time being, told
Frank in good Solarian speech that it had recalled him to duty because
he was the finest tool available with which to fight real berserkers. No one
else could do that quite as well.
And very quickly he had been forced to abandon his belief,
because the machine could show him too much evidence, evidence that he
must at last accept. Puzzling objects, of which
Frank had caught only tantalizing glimpses before he had been overcome
and captured and put to sleep, were now offered for his free inspection.
At last he had admitted: "All right then, you're not a berserker-or
at least you're the damndest berserker I've ever&
you know, the standard behavior pattern is very simple.
Berserker see life, berserker kill. Just like that."
At that point Frank had stopped, and sighed, and capitulated;
the sigh was a realistic sound, a good imitation of real organic
lungs, an effect practiced for so long that Frank now used it
unconsciously. "But you don't operate that way. You never have.
You've killed, but you don't live for killing. All right, I give up.
You look exactly like a berserker, but you're not a berserker. You can't be.
But then just what in all the hells are you?"
It told him, and then it showed him. It had the evidence to prove
these statements too.
Frank thought about it. "The artificial wombs," he said. "That's it, isn't it?
They're what you've wanted all along."
TWENTY-NINE
Dirac, heavily armed and armored, was stalking the latest
optelectronic version of his son through the ten-cube's virtual
version of Westminster Abbey.
And vice versa.
Devoutly the Premier wished that he could turn off at least some of
these damned images. But at the moment the full complement of
illusions was still firmly in Nick's control, and
Nick had the interactive quotient high.
He, Dirac, would have to prevail once more by managing reality.
Dirac told himself, not for the first time, that virtual people,
programs, had their drawbacks just like those of flesh and blood.
One of the problems with the former, from his point of view, was that beings
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like Nick could not really be made to suffer.
Light falling through graphic images of stained glass painted the
virtual stones of the original, antique Hawksmoor's towers in muted pastels,
and left deep shadows around and behind the roots of tombs and monuments
and columns. Dirac as he advanced became aware, by means of subtle clues
of sight and sound, of another presence in the Abbey besides his own and
Nick's. But one glimpse of this additional form in passing, wreathed in
the virtual image of an angelic statue, indicated that it was only
Jenny. The Premier decided that she, definitely a nonviolent woman,
could be safely disregarded for the moment.
His stalking had carried him a considerable way in the virtual dimensions of
the ten-cube, some distance east of the high altar and well into the royal
chapels, before a more suspicious movement caught his eye, an
unwonted stirring in the detailed mirage. The Premier pounced quickly,
moving to grapple with his armored hands the lid of a great stone
sarcophagus. The polyphase matter of the ten-cube's deck and walls
instantly reshaped itself to accommodate the signals from his own visual
cortex, feedback forming a firm stone ledge for him to grab.
With a surge of violence Premier Dirac wrenched open the last resting place of
the half sisters Elizabeth the First and Mary. But in this time and place it
was neither of the ancient queens who lay inside. The form of a much more
modern woman leaped up screaming.
Dirac shouted retribution at his wife, and drove her off, a
screaming wraith among the monuments and tombs.
He prowled on, himself a solid ghost among the thousand imaged graves
and statues.
Without warning gunfire chattered near him, missiles glancing
from the Premier's superb armor. The salvo bruised him, spun him
round and sent him staggering, but that was all. It'd need a better angle, at
shorter range, to bring him down.
Dirac gritted his teeth, delaying his return fire till he should
have a clear target. He was wary of shooting this facility to pieces as he
had the ten-cube on the yacht. He meant to do a lot of planning
yet in this one, designing his new colony.
Once more Nick , still successfully keeping himself concealed, 3
was shouting threats and imprecations.
His father shouted condemnation back and then moved promptly in
pursuit.
"I am damned," Dirac was muttering now to himself, "damned if I am going to be
killed, or beaten, by any recorded person-or, to state the thing
conservatively, with legalistic prudence-by any computer program that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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