Berserker - Earth Descended Part 11

"They fear to tip the environmental balance. You see, it can be shown mathematically-or so my experts tell me-that the long-term effects of another ma.s.s launching of missiles will be worse for Ungava than for us, regardless of where the missiles land." Was there, in the minister's almost immobile face, a glint of some brand of humor? "Of course for a first-hand answer, you will have to ask the Ungavans themselves."

His trip began next day with a flight from Vellore to an advanced military base, set amid the chalky cliffs of the southern coast. The next leg of his journey pa.s.sed aboard a fast courier-recon plane, which deposited him upon a barren ocean islet, then took off in a hurry, headed back the way it had come, and vanished in a moment.

Surf pounded tranqualizingly, but then some wild sea creature screamed as if in torment. Waiting on the flat, lichen-spotted rock, Shen-yang studied the horizon and tried to use the time for thought. He still could not believe in the existence of the Ungavan strategic missiles-those utter, bitter fanatics would have used them, sometime in the past forty years. Themselves held on the rack of war, year after year, by a merciless enemy-they would have struck back as hard as possible. No claim had ever been made that they were superhumanly forgiving, and it was un-reasonable that they should be so reluctant to add some pollution to the atmosphere.

He could hear the Ungavan aircraft coming before he spotted it; it was moving somewhat more slowly than the Condamine courier. Shen-yang waved as the smooth metal shape made one leisurely pa.s.s overhead. He felt a little foolish for his wave when the aircraft had landed and he had walked to it and found it was unmanned.

A gla.s.sy canopy had retracted, above an empty, spartan seat and a small s.p.a.ce for luggage. Shen-yang climbed in, and as his weight came down into the seat, the gla.s.s slid closed again above his head. A moment later he was airborne. The plane flew at a good speed, close above the waves. It turned smoothly a couple of times, avoiding a line of squalls.

In time a coastline grew, ahead. He thought his vehicle slowed somewhat as the land drew nearer-to give him a good look?

There, just inland among rocky hills, was ground-zero of some horrendous blast, a decade or more old.

Gla.s.sy and sterile hectares were surrounded by the stumps of crags and recent, tender life in the form of scattered, stunted-looking greenery.

Farther from the central scar, the stumps of buildings, half-buried now in drifted sand, made a larger ring.

This, then, had been a city, and probably a harbor. There were no signs that humans had ever tried to reoccupy the place.

He rode on. His homework-reading had informed him that the whole Ungavan continent was hardly more than one great, wide range of mountains. Between the barren peaks and crests, long valleys, some still fertile, twisted or ran nearly straight, marked here and there by narrow lakes. Now he could see people and machines working in some of the sheltered lowlands, tending or gathering crops. As his aircraft bore him through one valley at low alt.i.tude, he could see how some of the farmers looked up at his roaring pa.s.sage, while others kept their attention on the earth. A few times he pa.s.sed small buildings, never large enough to house the numbers of people he beheld.

The landing strip, he saw upon approaching it, looked like a plowed field too-no, itwas a plowed field.

Whatever his craft put down in the way of landing gear engaged the shallow furrows neatly, and the landing felt pleasantly slow and safe, if not exactly smooth.

His canopy slid back. People in drab, ill-fitting uniforms were all around him, smiling, most of them talking at the same time in accents newly strange to Shen-yang's ears. His ride had come to a stop under cover of a great tree. He was being helped out, and in a moment he was standing within a chest-high revetment between great rocks decorated with twin portraits of the High Leader. Leafy branches made a visually impenetrable cover overhead and hung on all sides in a s.h.a.ggy veil. Welcome clamored on all sides, and there was no counting the hands held out for him to shake. The general impression was of youth, eagerness, and energy.

When a girl handed him a hot drink and some simple food, Shen-yang noticed what he thought were radiation keloids on her arm and side. He thought the scars were not boldly enough undraped to be meant for intentional display. He supposed the whole countryside must be chronically hot. Well, before leaving home he had taken what medical steps he could in the way of radiation prophylaxis for himself.

They led him to a car, a ma.s.s of twenty or more people all enthusing at the same time about the rare privilege that he was being granted. The privilege was a talk with the High Leader himself; the young folk dropped their envious voices to a whisper whenever they mentioned that old man by his t.i.tle or his name.

Four or five got into the car with him, and they were off. The road twisted and turned, seemed to be inside a tunnel as often as not, but still gave him a good chance to see the countryside. Not that there was anything much different from what he had already seen. Blast-marks, crops, workers, rocky hills. Here and there the entrance to some other tunnel, enigmatically unmarked. Once an organized gaggle of children pelted the speeding car with flowers and waved more pictures of the leader at it. The pictures and the flowers and some of the growing crops possessed the only bright colors to be seen below the sky. Everyone wore drab, and everyone looked busy.

He was taken to the High Leader at once, and, despite all the awed fore-shadowing, with practically no ceremony. He found that old man waiting for him in a simply furnished cave, a great chamber beneath an immensely beetling brow of limestone and about one third open to the air.

two simole chairs and one small table in the cave, and a cl.u.s.ter of cables pa.s.sing crudely through it at the back. Shen-yang found himself left alone there with a toughly stout and greatly aged man, whose long white sideburns, a personal trademark, looked exactly as they did in all the pictures. What the pictures could not show was in the eyes.

They were seated, Shen-yang at a little distance from the old man and his table, upon which he seemed to like to rest his calloused, age-grooved hands, as if it were a lectern.

"And did you have a pleasant journey across the ocean?"

"Pleasant enough. I marvel at how well your air service runs. It must be difficult to keep it going."

The old man appeared pleased. "Mr. Shen-yang, there is really no secret to how we keep things going.

We rely not upon our machines but upon our people. That is why we shall win this war in the end."

Shen-yang thought to himself that had his air-craft failed in midflight, no ma.s.s of a hundred or a million peasants rushing out to catch him in their arms would have helped in the least. So, on a surface level, what the old man had just said was nonsense. But Shen-yang thought that there were other levels in the statement, and in those other levels somewhere there was truth.

Still, he was not going to let it pa.s.s unchallenged. "You do have machines, though, and to some extent you do depend upon them."

"We use complex machinery when it is available and when it suits our plans. We do not use it when it is not suitable; therefore we do not need it, and our victory does not depend upon it."

If this old man, thought Shen-yang, tells me that this mountain we are under will turn to jelly in the next minute, my mouth will fall open with surprise when it does not. Dare I-can I-say tothis man that the war is over?

The leader, after a courteous pause, was going on. "The enemy, on the contrary, has all along relied upon machines to crush us. That is why he must fail in the end."

"Your losses no doubt have been terrible."

"They have been great. I myself have walked for a kilometer on the dead bodies of my people, because there was no s.p.a.ce between dead bodies to put down one's feet. That was after the blast and firestorm at Kinjanchunga. But it is not huge losses that sap a people's will." Whatever words the old man said seemed to come out of his mouth engraved upon eternal slabs of granite. "What saps their will is a too-great concern with things that do not matter."

Shen-yang hitched his hard chair a little closer. "What matters-" he began and had a thought in mind that he could never afterwards recall because it was melted in a vast disruption of the world. A blue-white welder's torch came on to seal the sky, with one electric flick, across the entrance to the cave, and Shen-yang had a mad and trivial thoughtIdidn't mean it about the jelly, and then the whole mountain made a fist and struck him in the mouth.

His chin was bleeding. Both of his ears now rang numbly. What sound had just come and gone was already as far beyond memory as it had been beyond hearing in its pa.s.sage. He got up from where he found himself on hands and knees on the smooth cave floor and saw the High Leader, a fussy housekeeper, setting up his small table and his own old chair again. If the leader had been in the least damaged, or even excited by the blast, he did not show it.

With commotion, there were suddenly a dozen, a score, of frightened men's and women's faces looking in around one rocky corner and another. Not one looked for a moment at Shen-yang, but he was free to study them-the faces of people who had briefly felt their souls' in peril but who were once more convinced of their salvation when they saw their G.o.d was still alive, unhurt, and with His people.

The old man had a sharp, practical-sounding question or two for them, in the local tongue, which Shen-yang could not follow. Answers were received and orders issued. The people as they turned away now looked elated by his new challenge.

Turning back to his guest, the old man addressed him once more in their common tongue. "More missiles may be on their way. It seems the Condaminers have tagged you with a tracer of some kind for them to home on, something our own search devices failed to detect, planted on you, your clothing, or perhaps your luggage. Doubtless they calculated that you would be having a talk with me shortly after your arrival here. To kill me, they will spare no effort." He turned toward the rear of the cave, gesturing Shen-yang to follow. "Their superior technology, you see. And you see that again it avails them nothing."

Around a fold of rock, an aide was standing by an open door. A moment later the three of them were descending in an elevator, which looked as neat as anything in Hondurman's foreign ministry.

"Here we will be safe." After the old man had said that, no missile in the world would dare to touch them.

When they got out of the elevator at its lowest level, Shen-yang looked about him, at the size and shape of the place in which he found himself, at the instruments ranked below the clock and the leader's portrait, at the texture of the walls that spoke to an expert eye of super-toughness.

The leader looked at him, started to say some-thing, and then waited, bright eyes probing.

"This is what weused to call a technicians' bay," Shen-yang announced in a slow voice. "And-through that door-there will be an inter-continental ballistic missile waiting in its silo."

His host made a grave gesture of a.s.sent.

"You have them, then," said Shen-yang. "Do you really have a thousand?"

Again, the confirmation.

"Then, all this time...why didn't you fire them when you could?"

"When I could, Mr. Shen-yang?" The leader's face shivered into a thousand wrinkles, because that of a smiling, wise old demon. And he raised, on a chain that hung around his neck, the carven symbol of his party and his faith. Shen-yang could see the tiny studs projecting from it, coded secretly no doubt, so that one man alone possessed the power, day or night, to....

"When I could? There is nothing to prevent my firing them now-more than eleven hundred strategic missiles. But I chose, not to fire, forty-six years ago. And as of this moment, that is still my choice."

Shen-yang felt more dazed by those absent blasts than by the real ones he had endured. "To-to save the atmosphere-?"

The old man smiled. "No, we can survive that, too, if need be. Our people's medicine is working on the problems and will solve them. Besides, already only the resistant ones of us are left. No, we have another reason for not launching.

"Our greatness is born of great adversity and nurtured on it. When we have blown away the Condaminers' cities and more than half their lives, what is left of them will be stronger and harder to defeat than they are now. Why, Mr. Shen-yang, should I go strengthen my foe? Their leaders, in their hearts, would be delighted if I did."

Shen-yang thought of Vellore, indefensibly open to the sky, to cruise missile and MIRV, to laser-reflecting warheads. He thought of the buried, hardened nerve centers and wondered if Hon-durman himself ever came up above the ground.

Iwant to go home,thought Shen-yang, with a physical revulsion for this place so strong he almost started for the elevator.Away from this world of madmen.

The aide was approaching, a bright red wireless communicator of some kind in his hand. The old man took it with a nod and said into it at once: "Do you call now to see if I am still alive?" Even as he spoke, there came another G.o.dlike blast far above; the living rock around them shook and trickled powder. "Of course, I am alive. How can you slay a man, who is an idea first of all, with a machine?"

A few more words were exchanged. Then the fleshy old arm held out the device to Shen-yang. "There is someone who wishes a few words with you."

When he held the thing for his own use, Hondurman's face was visible in its little screen, and Hondurman's voice came through. "My government's deepest apologies, Mr. Shen-yang, if any military action of ours has in fact endangered you. Of course you knew that you were entering a combat zone-"

"I'm still alive," he interrupted. "By the way, you were right about the missiles here."

A slight bow was visible. "It appears that you were right, all along. Our Council of Ministers has just been reorganized, and it now agrees to the Ungavan conditions for peace talks to resume. Our new government deplores the latest launchings, disclaims responsibility for them, and will take disciplinary action against the officers responsible. Our official position is that the war is essentially over and the situation must be normalized before our world rejoins the galaxy."

"I was right about its being over, yes. But wrong about one other thing." Shen-yang paused. "So, you're changing leaders to get the peace talks going? That's what losers do, you know."

The eyes in the small screen were haunted. "And just what else, sir, did you suppose we were?"

BIRTHDAYS.

One.

Looking back, Bart could never clearly remember any part of his life before the day when the Ship first woke him from a long, artificially induced sleep, and guided him to the nursery to see the babies. That day and the first few that followed were very confusing to live through.

The Ship's machines, working with paint and gla.s.s and light, had made the nursery s.p.a.cious-looking and cheerful. Bart counted twenty-four cribs. To count babies would have been harder, because only those who happened to be napping were in their beds. The rest crawled or sat or toddled on the soft-tiled deck, sending up a racket and getting underfoot of their attending machines and images. The babies were all the same age, just about a year old the day Bart first saw them. They wore white diapers, and some had on green hospital gowns like Bart's only of course smaller.

Bart was not tall for almost fourteen but he could easily lift one bare leg after the other over the low barrier the machines had placed to keep the little kids from tottering or crawling out of the nursery into the corridor. The corridor led in one direction to Bart's small private room and in the other-so his memory, working in a new, selective way, informed him-to the rest of the habitable Ship.

Thebabies squalled, gurgled, blubbered, or took time out to stare in silence at the world. They made nothing much of Bart's coming in among them. The images that the machines kept project-ing and moving around the infants were of solid-looking adult humans, speaking and smiling; they evidently took Bart to be just one more image. The babies reacted more strongly to the machines because of the physical contact they had with them.

"Pick one up, if you wish," the Ship said in his ear. It was able to project its conversation so there was no way of telling just what direction the words came from. The Ship's voice sounded human, but not quite male or female, not quite young or old.

Like a good obedient boy Bart bent to have a try at picking up a baby. The chubby belly felt cool against his hands above the papery diaper and the head of dark, scanty curls turned so that the liquid brown eyes could stare at him uncertainly.

"See how the machines hold them," counseled the Ship. "Their arms are of basically the same form as yours."

He shifted his grip.

"The prime directives under which I operate are very clear. One human parent, adoptive or real, is necessary to the successful maturation of children; images and machines are psychological-ly inadequate for optimum results. Therefore, after receiving some elementary preparation for the role, you will serve as adoptive parent for the first generation of colonists."

Colonists.The word evoked in Bart the abstract knowledge that the Ship had started from an orbit around Earth, and was outward bound to seed humanity somewhere among the stars. How long ago the voyage had begun, and whether he himself had witnessed that beginning, were questions that his memory could not answer. Nor did he feel any urgency attached to them. Somewhere in Bart's lost past he had learned that the Ship was to be trusted utterly and now he could wait patiently for a better understanding of what it meant by its announcement that he was to be a parent. Meanwhile he watched the infants, played a little with them, and tried to comfort and distract those who cried. It seemed to be the thing to do.

The machines labored ceaselessly, patting, changing, feeding, washing, wiping up. Twice they dispensed cups of soup-like stuff for Bart to drink. There were no clocks to watch but he was certain that he had been in the nursery for hours. At last, one of the machines took him lightly by the arm and pointed back down the corridor whence he had come.

When he had closed himself into his little plastic-walled bedroom the Ship's voice said: "You will be given a substantial breakfast when you wake again. That will be one standard year from now."

Two.

He awoke as on the first day, as if from a sound night's sleep, and at once sat up to look over the rim of his bed, which curved around him like a padded bathtub, warm and dry and clean. Just how he was being put to sleep or awakened he didn't know, but certainly there was more to it than he could see or feel; somehow his gown had been taken off him while he slept and he was naked.

There was a new gown laid out on the room's single small chair, or the same one, washed clean of baby s.h.i.t and pablum, and he put it on after using the toilet and washing his hands and face. Froma panel in the wall he got his promised breakfast, consisting of a warm, milky drink in a plastic cup, and a tray holding chunks of bread, the breadcrust hot and crunchy and with pieces of fruit and cheese inside.

One standard year, the Ship had said...but his hands looked no bigger, nor did the muscles in his thin arms. His face looked no different in the wall mirror, and the fine tawny hair on his head had maintained its crewcut length. There were still no more than a couple of dozen brown pubic hairs curling at the bottom of his belly and he was sure he was no taller.

When he got to the nursery, though, he could well believe a year had pa.s.sed: it certainly had if these were the same kids. A few were in their beds as before, but now those lying stretched out almost filled the little cribs. The majority were running about, keeping their balance reasonably skillfully for the most part, and busy with a mult.i.tude of toys. They wore shirts now, and shorts or pants over their diapers.

This time the babies were aware that Bart was more than just another image and some of them took fright at first and clung to the machines. But he kept walking around and talking to them, as the Ship instructed him to, and soon they started to warm up to him.

Again he spent the day in socializing, and this time shared the little kids' food when it was dis-pensed by the machines. Meaty-tasting, mildly chewy chunks of stuff, and harder, biscuit-like objects that came in both sweet and sour flavors, it tasted good enough to be adult fare. Last year-yesterday-the babies had been drinking from nippled bottles, but today they got water and colored drinks in little cups.

Though he hadn't questioned the Ship on it, Bart was still thinking over the announcement that he was to be a parent. He could imagine himself at the head of an enormous dining table, all these kids, grown a little older, sitting round it, but beyond that his imagination was soon lost. He told himself to be patient; the Ship would provide explanations and instructions as they became necessary.

The continual racket was wearying. By the time the babies were all bedded down for what must be their regular night's sleep, with the lights dimmed, he was ready to go to sleep himself. At a word from the Ship, he walked back yawning to his room.

Three.

Again he seemed to be experiencing nothing more than an ordinary night of restful slumber, and again when he awoke he hadn't grown or gotten older. This time he found a pair of shorts and a pullover shirt laid out for him.

After dressing and breakfast he walked to the nursery. Before he got there he could heara year's worth of change in the children's voices, forming clear words now as they called to one another.

When the new gla.s.s doors of the nursery opened to let Bart in, he saw that bigger beds had been installed, and the walls moved back to make more s.p.a.ce for play. The kids looked different-and bigger again, of course. After an initial shyness, not so intense as yesterday's, they all came crowding around Bart so that he walked through a little sea of waist-high heads. Here and there a bulge of diaper still peeped out of someone's shorts.

"What's your name?" one tiny voice cried out, insistent above the babble of the others.

"Bartley. Everyone calls me Bart." Who had called him that? Family? Friends? There were still no specific memories available. "What's yours?"

"Armin." Or maybe Ermin was what the child answered. Bart wasn't sure if the speaker was a girl or a boy. The group seemed about evenly divided as to s.e.x.

Again he ate and played with them through the day. This time all accepted his presence un-questioningly before an hour had pa.s.sed-though he didn't get the feeling that any of them recalled his earlier visits.

Today, he noticed, there were fewer projected images of adults about.