Berserker - Earth Descended Part 7

The young woman had her blond hair in long braids, and the little girl, five or six years old, had her hair done in shorter versions of the same. The woman and girl were in the creek with a cake of soap when they first heard the crashing noise. It sounded from the direction of the distant road, like the noise that a clumsy man or a big startled animal would make moving in the brush. The woman immediately got out of the water with her child, the two of them wearing flecks of soap and gooseb.u.mps. Even now in summer the stream was icy, this close to its mountain source.

As the sound grew steadily louder the woman turned an anxious look toward the fine thread of white smoke rising from one of the two teepees in the adjacent clearing. Alders and young ever-greens formed a heavy screen around the clearing, but if it were a man who made that crashing he could not fail to see the smoke and wonder who had made the fire. No other human work would be visible to him in any direction, except the fine contrail of a jet moving close above the lowering sun.

Bold and methodical, the sounds in the brush came nearer. The woman kept looking at the wall of brush across the creek, in the direction of the sounds, meanwhile dressing herself rapidly in a single garment, that might once have been a man's military surplus coverall. It was shapeless and faded but not noticeably dirty. From time to time she made shushing sounds and gestures at her little girl, and as soon as she had covered herself she quickly dressed the child in jeans and faded sweatshirt. The girl's short, light braids came snapping through when the shirt was pulled over her head. Then on the opposite bank of the stream, near the crossing of rough stones, the sounds at last produced their maker.

He had a square tanned face not shaved for a day, with close-cut graying brown hair above it, and he looked to be in his early forties. The strong body swayed, drunk or stoned on something fierce, but then that face looked entirely too straight, too pillar-or-the-community, to sway with anything but alcohol. He was well-enough dressed, in slacks and sport shirt and light jacket that had no doubt been clean at the beginning of the day. Stuffed inside his half-zipped jacket, and in its pockets, there rode a lumpy cargo dully jangling with his movements. It must be beer cans he was carrying so, for in each big hand he held one more of them, empty, the golden circles of their ends marked with dark keyholes where their pulltabs had been taken.

There was nothing in his face to frighten the woman. He was startled and pleased to discover the woman and child and looked intently at them, but then his eyes moved quickly on, joyfully taking in the teepees and the planted field-fenced against deer with posts and string and fluttering rags-and the well-worn paths that made crossings of the clearing and loops around it but nowhere went out to the world.

In a slurred ba.s.s-baritone he cried out: "People! It's beautiful, there's people! In th' middle of th' b.l.o.o.d.y wilderness!"

The young woman turned away from him, as if looking for support. It was on the way. Several more people were approaching, gathering together as they progressed from the farther reaches of the large clearing. There were two more brown and barefoot children, another young woman, with her black hair loose and very long, wearing a man's old shirt and jeans; a black man, with uncut hair bushing under a wide-brimmed hat, wearing tattered suit-coat over blue work shirt, nondescript trousers, brogans. The remaining man looked anglo and his long hair fell straight. He had a brown beard, bare feet, tight-shrunken jeans. Under a shawl patterned in zig-zags his upper body was bare. Symbols popular five years earlier, wrought in bright metal, hung from a chain against his chest. The men were both dusty and sweating as if they had just been working in the field.

Approaching and gathering in silence, the people of the clearing looked at their visitor with various shadings of distaste.

He, on the higher bank across the narrow water, was glad to see them all. "Lovely people. I'd offer all you folks a beer, several beers. But y'see all my tanks are empties." He belched gently and laughed gently, and gently shook his jangling jacket.

The man with the shawl turned his back on the sight. But after pulling at his beard in silence for a moment he turned once more to face it.

Not perturbed by unhappy silence, the visitor announced: "My intentions was, t' distribute these beer cans throughout the len-th and brea-th of this pristine wilderness. But as its already occupied, by such a st.u.r.dy outpost of humanity, I see no need...hey, what you've got here is one of those communal things, I bet. I guess, you're hippies or grokkies or whatever. I'm not very up t'date on what th' word is now. No offense."

His only answer was in the way that they all looked at him, as if at a disaster already happened and nothing to be done about it.

He said: "I first read about places like this, G.o.d it must be twenty years ago, back in the sixties. I was a Boy Scout leader then, I thought tents were a lot of fun." He swayed and dropped a can by accident, and had to catch a branch to save his balance. "Well, tents aren't the worst thing there is, but cities are better.

Walls and roofs and more walls and roofs, I like 'em all in neat rows. Noise and garbage. I've come to like noise and garbage."

"If that's your track," the black man said, "it could be you should've stayed on it."

"I had t' visit th' frontier," the visitor said vaguely. Squinting past the people of the clearing, past their canvas teepees, his face for the first time showed unhappiness. "Now there's your fields. Corn, tomatoes..." He let go his branch and came across the creek, surprisingly quick and surefooted when he concentrated on the uneven stepping-stones. He studied the fields again. "All right. But how d'you work it? No real machines. You just play you're friends with nature, and break your backs. Listen, I grew up on a farm. You need to rent or buy some good machinery, knock down half these G.o.dd.a.m.n trees to make some room, and raise some real crops. And put up houses! Act as if you meant t' stay on and inhabit the planet for a while. But wait a minute." He tried to clear his head with shaking. "Sorry. You're way out here so you can squat on some free land, right?" You'll do things right when you get some money in, isn't that it?"

"We're just not doing things right," the shawled man said, in a remote monotone. "We should all get stoned on alcohol and run across the country leaving a trail of...garbage. Wait a minute." His eyes sharpened, staring at the visitor, at whom he now leveled a bony forefinger. "I've seen you someplace, when I was on a trip to town. I saw you on television, right? Now are you a reporter?"

The blond girl, in a tiny voice that might have belonged to her daughter, put in softly: "I was thinking that I'd seen him, too."

The man did not seem to care whether they had ever seen him or not. "I'm no reporter. I'm just saying-" And with that he abruptly fell silent, looking past the others to the west as if at some-thing deeply disturbing. But when the others turned there was nothing to be noted in the west except the going of the sun. The shadow of a distant mountain was reaching out across the clearing where they stood.

Now the stranger's voice contained a hint of panic. "I'll never make it back before dark." He took a staggering step and almost slid into the creek. "Must be two miles t' where I left my car. Listen, good people, I call for sanctuary for the night. I'll pay you for a place to bunk, inside a tent."

The people of the clearing exchanged troubled glances among themselves. The shawled man told the visitor: "Just wait right where you are, one minute." While the visitor waited the others went to stand in a little knot between the teepees. There the adults conferred.

The black man said: "Can't let him go back right now."

"Why?" the dark girl asked.

"As drunk as he is. Suppose he falls down a ravine, or just gets lost and dies?"

Others nodded with reluctant concern. The shawled man said: "Another point, if he's lost and his car is found near here, then we'll be found too. Swarmed over, investigated. At best we'd have to move."

They all looked at the visitor again. Leaning against a tree where they had left him, he seemed to be yearning after the setting sun.

"Then he can stay the night," the black man said. No one evinced any objection, and together they walked back to their visitor. The black man made the offer: "If you make no trouble you can stay until morning. Leave your garbage in the trash-pit, down that way."

The square-faced man pushed away from his tree with obvious relief. "Thank you, many thanks!" And, a minute later when he had come back from the garbage pit without his beer cans: "I said I'd pay my way.

How's forty bucks? That's what a real motel would cost."

The others felt a common impulse to refuse. But there were always things that needed buying, on the quick trips to town; there was always too little money in the common fund.

"No luggage, so I'll pay in advance. Who'm I paying?"

"Doesn't matter," said the shawled man. Then he reached to take the bills.

Inside the larger teepee everyone sat on canvas groundcloths around the little central fire, which kept out the chill of mountain nightfall, and steamed and bubbled the pots the women hung above it. The stranger had unzipped his jacket. They handed him coffee in a can. The alcohol seemed to be metabolizing out of him, and his hands were shaking just a bit. "Coming home, he said to himself. "Coming home t' find people who want to live like this."

The black man made no pretence of not hearing. "Like I said, go back to the city if that's your track.

You going back, first thing in the morning. You ever come to bother us again, and we'll tell your friends you lived with us three days."

The visitor paid no attention. He had his own speech to make. "Listen, you people, don't live like this.

None of this c.r.a.p about loving nature, you have no idea what she is. Oh sure, the green trees are nice, and the little squirrels. Butyou letthem grow, not the other way round. Keep your nature, your wilderness, in a cage, an' make d.a.m.n well sure the bars are thick." He filled his lungs with mountain air and wood-smoke tang. "That's fine, good air t' breathe. No one knows better'n me how fine that is. But can we trust nature to give us air? If we were smart we'd put all the good air in a big jar, and let out just a little at a time, as it was needed."

"What are you so fearful of?" the blond young woman asked. She seemed really worried for him. "There are only a few bits of wilderness, of real nature, left in the world. Are they going to destroy you?"

The man stared at her intently, but did not seem able to comprehend what she had said. "Yeah, keep a few bits of nature in cages," he replied at last. "Keep trees behind big fences, t'show we're strong enough to do so. Otherwise drive the wilderness out, this is our place here,our place."

"Our place? You think your forty bucks bought you a share?" The shawled man was getting angry fast.

"You didn't put down that much money, mister, to become a partner here. You don'thave that much."

"Listen, it is our place!" The visitor started a fist-pounding gesture that midway lost itself in weariness. He thought things over briefly, then started up again. "I do have money. Fair amount. I'll finance some things for you. Not that I want to move in, I'll go and never come back. But I want you t' do right with this land."

The shawled man said now: "We didn't ask you in to give a lecture. If you weren't so drunk I'd throw you out."

"Well I'm not drunk, grokkie, not that drunk. I could've found my car. Jus' because it's dark outside doesn't mean I can't...be outside. I could go outside right now. The real reason I stayed was to get you people straightened out, make you see where your lives are all wrong." From the square face the words came loudly and righteously; the profaning of the teepee promised to go on and on.

From somewhere the shawled man pulled out the forty dollars in now-crumpled bills, and threw them.

"Get the h.e.l.l out of my sight. Go over to the other tent and sleep it off."

The visitor's voice stopped, and his square certainly failed. He started slowly to pick up the money, and then he let it lie..He looked around at all the faces, and then jumped up and put his hands to his head and ran out side. The others followed in a rapid straggle, calling out confusedly to him and to one another.

After the firelight, darkness struck the eyes like a blow. Full night, clear and moonless, had come to swallow up the land. The stranger had run out under the stars, then stopped after a few strides, looking up. The others gathered around him, talking at cross-purposes while he paid no heed. Eyes quickly began to become accustomed to the dark.

The black man took the visitor by the arm, and pointed forcefully. "Look there, that's the lights of Oakland in the sky, that glow you see. Now I'm gonna walk you to your car, and then you drive-"

"To h.e.l.l with Oakland." It was a changed voice, harder and soberer but somehow more remote. His arms that had been half lifted were going down slowly to his sides. His face was still turned up. "I didn't want to be out at night, in the open...but it's all right. There's the Dipper, tipped to spill...follow the handle south, there's Arcturus. There's Bo-oh-t.e.e.z, Libra, Virgo, Sirius, that blue-white spike, I thought once that it was coming after me, it's on the other side of the sun this season. Canopus, that we like to lock our sensors on, it's somewhere underfoot, you never see it this far north. Yeah, Mars, there's the pock- marked b.a.s.t.a.r.d now, coming on to opposition. I really don't mind looking any more. You can't see much from our little place under all the air."

In her little voice the blond girl said: "I know now who you are..."

He was standing straight, his head thrown back. "The star-clouds, G.o.d, in Sagittarius. Stars like snowflakes in a blizzard. They look like they're frozen stiff, not moving. Flying around at hundreds of miles a second, and so far apart, so far away from us, that you can't see them move. From our place here or Mars, you see them from the exact same angle. So far away. They were there for me to look at, the whole time out and back."

"...the astronaut. The one who was alone for two years after the accident. Alone all the way to Mars and back."

His straightness was that of a statue, standing for a billion years and keeping on even terms of stubbornness, so far, with stars.

"Nature," he said. "Wilderness. My G.o.d, all wilderness."

PATRON OF THE ARTS.

After some hours work, Herron found himself hungry and willing to pause for food. Looking over what he had just done, he could easily imagine one of the sycophantic critics praising it: A huge canvas, of discordant and brutal line! Aflame with a sense of engulfing menace! And for once, Herron thought, the critic might be praising something good.

Turning away from his view of easel and blank bulkhead, Herron found that his captor had moved up silently to stand only an arm's length behind him, for all the world like some human kibitzer.

He had to chuckle. "I suppose you've some idiotic suggestion to make?"

The roughly man-shaped machine said nothing, though it had what might be a speaker mounted on what might be a face. Herron shrugged and walked around it, going forward in search of the galley. This ship had been only a few hours out from Earth on C-plus drive when the berserker machine had run it down and captured it; and Piers Herron, the only pa.s.senger, had not yet had time to learn his way around.

It was more than a galley, he saw when he reached it-it was meant to be a place where arty colonial ladies could sit and twitter over tea when they grew weary of staring at pictures. TheFrans Hals had been built as a traveling museum; then the war of life against berserker machines had grown hot around Sol, and BuCulture had wrongly decided that Earth's art treasures would be safer if shipped away to Tau Epsilon. TheFrans was ideally suited for such a mission, and for almost nothing else.

Looking further forward from the entrance to the galley, Herron could see that the door to the crew compartment had been battered down, but he did not go to look inside. Not that it would bother him to look, he told himself; he was as in-different to horror as he was to almost all other human things. The Frans 's crew of two were in there, or what was left of them after they had tried to fight off the berserker's boarding machines. Doubtless they had preferred death to capture.

Herron preferred nothing. Now he was probably the only living being-apart from a few bacteria-within half a light year; and he was pleased to discover that his situation did not terrify him; that his long-growing weariness of life was not just a pose to fool himself.

His metal captor followed him into the galley, watching while he set the kitchen devices to work.

"Still no suggestions?" Herron asked it. "Maybe you're smarter than I thought."

"I am what men call a berserker," the man-shaped thing squeaked at him suddenly, in an in-effectual-sounding voice. "I have captured your ship, and I will talk with you through this small machine you see. Do you grasp my meaning?"

"I understand as well as I need to." Herron had not yet seen the berserker itself, but he knew it was probably drifting a few miles away, or a few hundred or thousand miles, from the ship it had captured.

Captain Ha.n.u.s had tried desperately to escape it, diving theFrans into a cloud of dark nebula where no ship or machine could move faster than light, and where the advantage in speed lay with the smaller hull.

The chase had been at speeds up to a thousand miles a second. Forced to remain in normal s.p.a.ce, the berserker could not steer its bulk among the meteoroids and gas-wisps as well as theFrans 's radar-computer system could maneuver the fleeing ship. But the berserker had sent an armed launch of its own to take up the chase, and the weaponless Frans had had no chance.

Now, dishes of food, hot and cold, popped out on a galley table, and Herron bowed to the machine.

"Will you join me?"

"I need no organic food."

Herron sat down with a sigh. "In the end," he told the machine, "you'll find that lack of humor is as pointless as laughter. Wait and see if I'm not right." He began to eat, and found himself not so hungry as he had thought. Evidently his body still feared death-this surprised him a little.

"Do you normally function in the operation of this ship?" the machine asked.

"No," he said, making himself chew and swallow. "I'm not much good at pushing b.u.t.tons." A peculiar thing that had happened was nagging at Herron. When capture was only minutes away, Captain Ha.n.u.s had come dashing aft from the control room, grabbing Herron and dragging him along in a tearing hurry, aft past all the stored art treasures.

"Herron, listen-if we don't make it, see here?" Tooling open a double hatch in the stern com-partment, the captain had pointed into what looked like a short padded tunnel, the diameter of a large drainpipe.

"The regular lifeboat won't get away, but this might."

"Are you waiting for the Second Officer, Captain, or leaving us now?"

"There's room for only one, you fool, and I'm not the one who's going."

"You mean to save me? Captain, I'm touched!" Herron laughed, easily and naturally. "But don't put yourself out."

"You idiot. Can I trust you?" Ha.n.u.s lunged into the boat, his hands flying over its controls. Then he backed out, glaring like a madman. "Listen. Look here. This b.u.t.ton is the activator; now I've set things up so the boat should come out in the main shipping lanes and start sending a distress signal. Chances are she'll be picked up safely then. Now the controls are set, only this activator b.u.t.ton needs to be pushed down-"

The berserker's launch had attacked at that moment, with a roar like mountains falling on the hull of the ship. The lights and artificial gravity had failed and then come abruptly back. Piers Herron had been thrown on his side, his wind knocked out. He had watched while the captain, regaining his feet and moving like a man in a daze, had closed the hatch on the mysterious little boat again and staggered forward to his control room.

"Why are you here?" the machine asked Herron.

He dropped the forkful of food he had been staring at. He didn't have to hesitate before answering the question. "Do you know what BuCulture is? They're the fools in charge of art, on Earth. Some of them, like a lot of other fools, think I'm a great painter. They worship me. When I said I wanted to leave Earth on this ship, they made it possible.

"I wanted to leave because almost everything that is worthwhile in any true sense is being removed from Earth. A good part of it is on this ship. What's left behind on the planet is only a swarm of animals, breeding and dying, fighting-"

"Why did you not try to fight or hide when my machines boarded this ship?"

"Because it would have done no good."

When the berserker's prize crew had forced their way in through an airlock, Herron had been setting up his easel in what was to have been a small exhibition hall, and he had paused to watch the uninvited visitors file past. One of the man-shaped metal things, the one through which he was being questioned now, had stayed to stare at him through its lenses while the others had moved on forward to the crew compartment.

"Herron!" The intercom had shouted. "Try, Herron, please! You know what to do!" Clanging noises followed, and gunshots and curses.

What to do, Captain? Why, yes. The shock of events and the promise of imminent death had stirred up some kind of life in Piers Herron. He looked with interest at the alien shapes and lines of his inanimate captor, the inhuman cold of deep s.p.a.ce frosting over its metal here in the warm cabin. Then he turned away from it and began to paint the berserker, trying to catch not the out- ward shape he had never seen, but what he felt of its inwardness. He felt the emotionless deadlines of its watching lenses, boring into his back. The sensation was faintly pleasurable, like cold spring sunshine.

"What is good?" the machine asked Herron, standing over him in the galley while he tried to eat.

He snorted. "You tell me."

It took him literally. "To serve the cause of what men call death is good. To destroy life is good."

Herron pushed his nearly full plate into a disposal slot and stood up. "You're almost right about life being worthless-but even if you were entirely right, why so enthusiastic? What is there praiseworthy about death?" Now his thoughts surprised him as his lack of appet.i.te had.

"I am entirely right," said the machine.

For long seconds Herron stood still, as if thinking, though his mind was almost completely blank.