Berserker - Earth Descended Part 8

"No,"he said finally, and waited for a bolt to strike him.

"In what do you think I am wrong?" it asked.

"I'll show you." He led it out of the galley, his hands sweating and his mouth dry. Why wouldn't the d.a.m.ned thing kill him and have done?

The paintings were racked now on row and tier on tier; there was no room in the ship for more than a few to be displayed in a conventional way. Herron found the drawer he wanted and pulled it open so the portrait inside swung into full view, lights springing on around it to bring out the rich colors beneath the twentieth-century statgla.s.s coating.

"This is where you're wrong," Herron said.

The man-shaped thing's scanner studied the portrait for perhaps fifteen seconds. "Explain what you are showing me," it said.

"I bow to you!" Herron did so. "You admit ignorance! You even ask an intelligible question, if one that is somewhat too broad. First, tell me whatyou see here."

"I see the image of a life-unit, its third spatial dimension of negligible size as compared to the other two.

The image is sealed inside a protective jacket transparent to the wavelengths used by the human eye. The life-unit imaged is, or was, an adult male apparently in good functional condition, garmented in a manner I have not seen before. What I take to be one garment is held before him-"

"You see a man with a glove," Herron cut in, wearying of his bitter game. "That is the t.i.tle,Man with a Glove. Now what do you say about it?"

There was a pause of twenty seconds. "Is it an attempt to praise life, to say that life is good?"

Looking now at t.i.tian's thousand-year-old more-than-masterpiece, Herron hardly heard the machine's answer, he was thinking helplessly and hopelessly of his own most recent work.

"Now you will tell me what it means," said the machine without emphasis.

Herron walked away without answering, leaving the drawer open.

The berserker's mouthpiece walked at his side. "Tell me what it means or you will be punished."

"If you can pause to think, so can I." But Herron's stomach had knotted up at the threat of punishment, seeming to feel that pain mattered even more than death. Herron had great contempt for his stomach.

His feet took him back to his easel. Looking at the discordant and brutal line that a few minutes ago had pleased him, he now found it as disgusting as everything else he had tried to do in the past year.

The berserker asked: "What have you made here?"

Herron picked up a brush he had forgotten to clean, and wiped at it irritably. "It is my attempt to get at your essence, to capture you with paint and canvas as you have seen those humans captured." He waved at the storage racks. "My attempt has failed, as most do."

There was another pause, which Herron did not try to time.

"An attempt to praise me?"

Herron broke the spoiled brush and threw it down. "Call it what you like."

This time the pause was short, and at its end the machine did not speak, but turned away and walked in the direction of the airlock. Some of its fellows clanked past to join it. From the direction of the airlock there began to come sounds like those of heavy metal being worked and hammered. The interrogation seemed to be over for the time being.

Herron's thoughts wanted to be anywhere but on his work or on his fate, and they returned to what Ha.n.u.s had shown him, or tried to show him. Not a regular lifeboat, but she might get away, the captain had said. All it needs now is to press the b.u.t.ton.

Herron started walking, smiling faintly as he realized that if the berserker was as careless as it seemed, he might possibly escape it.

Escape to what ? He couldn't paint any more, if he ever could. All that really mattered to him now was here, and on other ships leaving Earth.

Back at the storage rack, Herron swung theMan with the Glove out so its case came free from the rack and became a handy cart. He wheeled the portrait aft. There might be yet one worthwhile thing he could do with his life.

The picture was ma.s.sive in its statgla.s.s shielding, but he thought he could fit it into the boat.

As an itch might nag a dying man, the question of what the captain had been intending with the boat nagged Herron. Ha.n.u.s hadn't seemed worried about Herron's fate, but instead had spoken of trusting Herron....

Nearing the stern, out of sight of the machines, Herron pa.s.sed a strapped-down stack of crated statuary, and heard a noise, a rapid feeble pounding.

It took several minutes to find and open the proper case. When he lifted the lid with its padded lining, a girl wearing a coverall sat up, her hair all wild as if standing in terror.

"Are they gone?" She had bitten at her fingers and nails until they were bleeding. When he didn't answer at once, she repeated her question again and again, in a rising whine.

"The machines are still here," he said at last.

Literally shaking in her fear, she climbed out of the case. "Where's Gus? Have they taken him?"

"Gus?" But he thought he was beginning to understand.

"Gus Ha.n.u.s, the captain. He and I are-he was trying to save me, to get me away from Earth."

"I'm quite sure he's dead," said Herron. "He fought the machines."

Her bleeding fingers clutched at her lower face. "They'll kill us, too! Or worse! What can we do?"

"Don't mourn your lover so deeply," he said. But the girl seemed not to hear him; her wild eyes looked this way and that, expecting the machines. "Help me with this picture," he told her calmly. "Hold the door there for me."

She obeyed as if half-hypnotized, not questioning what he was doing.

"Gus said there'd be a boat," she muttered to herself. "If he had to smuggle me down to Tau Epsilon he was going to use a special little boat-" She broke off, staring at Herron, afraid that he had heard her and was going to steal her boat. As indeed he was.

When he had the painting in the stern compart-ment, he stopped. He looked long at theMan with a Glove, but in the end all he could seem to see was that the fingertips of the ungloved hand were not bitten b.l.o.o.d.y.

Herron took the shivering girl by the arm and pushed her into the tiny boat. She huddled there in dazed terror; she was not good-looking. He wondered what Ha.n.u.s had seen in her.

"There's room for only one," he said, and she shrank and bared her teeth as if afraid he meant to drag her out again. "After I close the hatch, push that b.u.t.ton there, the activator. Understand?

That she understood at once. He dogged the double hatch shut and waited. Only about three seconds pa.s.sed before there came a sc.r.a.ping sound that he supposed meant the boat had gone.

Nearby was a tiny observation blister, and Herron put his head into it and watched the stars turn beyond the dark blizzard of the nebula. After a while he saw the berserker through the blizzard, turning with the stars, black and rounded and bigger than any mountain. It gave no sign that it had detected the tiny boat slipping away. Its launch was very near theFrans but none of its commensal machines were in sight.

Looking theMan with a Glove in the eye, Herron pushed him forward again, to a spot near his easel.

The discordant lines of Herron's own work were now worse than disgusting, but Herron made himself work on them.

He hadn't time to do much before the man-shaped machine came walking back to him; the uproar of metalworking had ceased. Wiping his brush carefully, Herron put it down, and nodded at his berserker portrait. "When you destroy all the rest, save this painting. Carry it back to those who built you, they deserve it."

The machine-voice squeaked back at him: "Why do you think I will destroy paintings? Even if they are attempts to praise life, they are dead things in themselves, and so in themselves they are good."

Herron was suddenly too frightened and weary to speak. Looking dully into the machine's lenses he saw there tiny flickerings, keeping time with his own pulse and breathing, like the indications of a lie detector.

"Your mind is divided," said the machine. "But with its much greater part you have praised me. I have repaired your ship, and set its course. I now release you, so other life-units can learn from you to praise what is good."

Herron could only stand there staring straight ahead of him, while a trampling of metal feet went past, and there was a final sc.r.a.ping on the hull.

After some time he realized he was alive and free.

At first he shrank from the dead men, but after once touching them he soon got them into a freezer. He had no particular reason to think either of them Believers, but he found a book and read Islamic, Ethical, Christian and Jewish burial services.

Then he found an undamaged handgun on the deck, and went prowling the ship, taken suddenly with the wild notion that a machine might have stayed behind. Pausing only to tear down the abomination from his easel, he went on to the very stern. There he had to stop, facing the direction in which he supposed the berserker now was.

"d.a.m.n you, I can change!" he shouted at the stern bulkhead. His voice broke. "I can paint again. I'll show you...I can change. I am alive."

TO MARK THE YEAR ON AZLAROC.

They had been quarreling in the ship, and were still at it when they disembarked and left its sprawling metal complexities behind them. Ailanna snapped at Hagen: "So what if I misplaced your camera! What does it matter if you have one more picture of the stars? You can take a dozen when we depart." And when it turned out that they had missed the ground transport machine that was taking the other pa.s.sengers across the smooth undulations of the golden plain toward the city, Hagen was almost expecting her to physically attack him.

"Son of a n.o.body!" Ailanna hissed. "Where are we to stay if you have made no reservations?" A kilometer away was the only real city on the star, and Hagen realized that to one coming to Azlaroc for the first time, the city must look quite small. On the surface there appeared only a few fairy-land towers, and little evidence of the many chambers and pa.s.sageways dug out beneath the plain.

"I haven't made up my mind where to stay." He turned away from her and began to walk after the transport machine.

She followed. "You can never make up your mind about anything." It was an old intermittent quarrel. If the reservations had been in perfect order, there would have been something else to quarrel about.

She nagged him for a hundred meters across the plain, and then the scenery began to come through to her. The enormous golden-yellow land was humped here and there by paraboloid hills and studded with balanced spheres of matter. The surface looked more like something man-made than like soil, and it stretched in places up to the low, yellowish, sunless sky, in asymptotic spires that broke off in radiant glory at an alt.i.tude of a few hundred meters, at the upper edge of the region of gravity inversion.

"What's that?" Her voice was no longer angry. She was looking toward the top of a golden sphere which loomed over the distanceless horizon, at right angles to the way they were walking. The sphere reminded Hagen of a large planet rising, as seen from some close-in satellite, but this sphere was entirely beneath the low, peculiar sky.

"Only part of the topography." He remained calm, as usual, taking her bickering in stride.

When they had gotten under-surface in the city, and arranged for lodgings, and were on their way to them through one of the smaller side pa.s.sage-ways, Hagen saw some man or woman of a long-past year approaching through the pa.s.sage from the other direction. Had there been three or four people of the present year or of recent years in the same part of the corridor just then, the pa.s.sage of such an old one would have been almost un-noticeable. The old one did not appear as a plain solid human figure. Only a disturbance in the air and along the wall, a mound of shadows and moire patterns that throbbed with the beat of the pulsar somewhere beneath their feet. The disturbance occupied hardly any s.p.a.ce in this year's corridor, and Ailanna at first was not aware of it at all.

Hagen reached out a hand and took her by the upper arm and forced her, strong woman that she was, into three almost-dancing steps that left her facing in the proper way to see. "Look. One of the early settlers."

With a small intake of breath Ailanna fixed her eyes on the figure. She watched it out of sight around a corner, then turned her elfin face to Hagen. Her eyes had been enlarged, and her naturally small chin further diminished, in accordance with the fashion dictates of the time, even as Hagen's dark eyebrows had been grown into a ring of hair that crossed above his nose and went down by its sides to meld with his mustache. She said: "Perhaps one of the very first? An explorer?"

"No." He looked about at the ordinary overhead lights, the smooth walls of the yellowish rock-like substance of the star. "I remember that this corridor was not cut by the explorers, not perhaps until '120 or '130. So no settler in it can be older than that, of course."

"I don't understand, Hagen. Why didn't you tell me more about this place before you brought me here?"

"This way it will all come as a wonderful surprise." Exactly how much irony was in his answer was hard to tell.

They met others in the corridor as they proceeded. Here came a couple of evidently ten or fifteen local years ago, walking in the nudity that had been acceptable as fashion then, draped with ten or fifteen of the sealing veils of Azlaroc so that their bodies shimmered slightly as they moved, giving off small diamond-sparkles of light. The veils of only ten or fifteen years were not enough to warp a settler out of phase with this year's visitors, so the four people meeting in the pa.s.sage had to give way a little on both sides, as if they were in a full sense contemporaries, and like con-temporaries they excused themselves with vacant little social smiles.

Numbers, glowing softly from the corridor walls, guided Hagen and Ailanna to their rooms. "Hagen, what is this other sign that one sees on the walls?" It was a red hollow circle witha small pie-cut wedge of its interior filled with red also.

"The amount of red inside shows the estimated fraction of a year remaining until the next veil falls."

"Then there is not much of the year left, for sightseeing. Here, this must be our door. I would say we have come at a poor time."

Opening the door, he did not reply. Their baggage had already been deposited inside.

"I wouldn't want to be trapped here, Hagen. Well, the apartment's not bad...now what's the matter?

What have I said?" She had learned to know at once when something really bothered him, which her inconsequential bickering rarely seemed to do.

"Nothing. Ample warning is always given so the tourists can get away, you needn't worry.

She was in the bedroom unpacking when something came in through the illusory window that seemed to give upon the golden plain. Where a sawtooth range of diminishing pyramids marched in from the horizon there came a shimmer and a sliding distortion that was in the room with her before she knew it, that pa.s.sed on harmless through her own flesh, and went its way. She gave a yelp of fear.

Hagen was in the doorway, smiling faintly. "Didn't I mention that we might be sharing our apartment here?"

"Sharing-of course not. Oh. You mean with settlers, folk of other years. That's what it was, then.

But-through the wall?"

"That wall was evidently an open pa.s.sage in their time. Ignore them, as they will us. Looking up through their veils they can see us-differently, too. While diving I have asked them to describe how we look to them, but their answers are hard to understand."

"Tell me about diving," she said, when they had finished settling in and were coming out of doors again.

"Better than that, I'll show you. But I'll tell you first, of course." As they walked out onto the plain, Hagen could hear the pulsar component of the triple system beating as sound, the sound coming now from overhead, thick and soft and at one third the speed of a calm human heart. It came through all the strangeness of s.p.a.ce that lay between him and the invisible pulsar that locked its...o...b..t intricately with those of a small black hole and of the world called Azlaroc.

He said: "What is called diving, on Azlaroc, is a means of approaching the people and things that lie under the veils of the years. Nothing can pierce the veils, of course. But diving stretches them, lets one get near enough to the people of the past to see them more clearly and make photographs." And more than that, more than that, oh G.o.ds of s.p.a.ce, thought Hagen but he said no more.

On the plain other tourists were also walking, in this year's fashion of scanty garments each of a hundred colors. In the mild, calm air, under the vague yellowish sky that was not really a sky, and bathed in sunless light, Hagen had almost the feeling of being still indoors. He was heading for a divers' shop that he remembered. He meant to waste no time in beginning his private search in earnest.

Ailanna walked beside him, no longer quarrel-some, and increasingly interested in the world around them. "You say nothing at all can pierce the veils, once they have fallen in and wrapped themselves about this planet?"

"No matter can pierce them. And this is not a planet. I suppose 'star' is the best term for a lay-person to use, though the scientists might wince at it. There's the divers' shop ahead, see that sign beside the cave?"

The cave was in the side of a sharp-angled rhombic hill.

Inside the shop they were greeted by the pro-prietor, a settler swathed in more than a hundred veils, who needed electronic amplifiers to converse with customers. After brief negotiation he began to take their measurements.

"Ailanna, when we dive, what would you like to see?"

Now she was cheerful. "Things of beauty. Also I would like to meet one of those first, stranded explorers."

"The beauty will be all about. There are signals and machines to guide the tourist to exceptional sights, as for the explorer, we can try. When I was last here it was still possible to dive near enough to them to see their faces and converse. Maybe now, when a hundred and thirty more veils have been added, it is possible no longer."

They were fitted with diving gear, each a cara-pace and helm of gla.s.s and metal that flowed like water over their upper bodies.

"Hagen, if nothing can pierce the fallen veils of the years, how are these underground rooms dug out?"

Now his diver's suit had firmed into place. Where Hagen's face had been she saw now only a distorting mirror, that gave an eerie semblance of her own face back to her. But his voice was familiar and rea.s.suring. "Digging is possible because there are two kinds of matter, of physical reality, here coexisting.