Berserker Omnibus - Berserker Man Part 31

"I was sure you would be."

The air was going from around them now. They had told him that Lancelot would provide him with all the air he needed, all the oxygen, to be exact, and he had no real doubt that they were right. Michel still felt perfectly comfortable as, with dropping pressure, the furled stuff of Lancelot around him crackled a little, a sound suggesting stiff paper wings. The fields were almost invisible and impalpable, and he had no sensation of being sealed or encased in anything.

A medical doctor, one of the group of nearby people all watching Michel with tremendous casualness, said, "You're still breathing." It was somewhere between a comment and a question.

"Yes," said Michel, and immediately became self-conscious about the fact. There was still air pressure, or what felt just like air pressure, in his breathing pa.s.sages, and evidently pressure of some kind capping his nose and mouth to keep whatever was in his lungs from bursting out. Earlier he had been given a brief explanation, which he only partly understood, of how Lancelot's fields, through a thousand painless piercings of his skin, could supply his body with what it needed and take its wastes away to be processed and reused. Now he discovered that he could effortlessly cease breathing if he thought about it, and the reflex to start did not take hold.

A moment later, and he forgot about his body. Above, huge doors were opening, and beyond them shone the stars.

On Alpine, it was possible now and then to see a star. There were days, sometimes even weeks when a nebular window opened and a fingernail-sized patch of the galaxy shone through. When that happened, people tended to gather outdoors at night and point.

The more peaceful stretches of Michel's journey from Alpine to Moonbase had afforded him his first real chance to get a look at what was still commonly called the Milky Way. But looking at the stars through a screen or even a cleared port had been seeing them at one remove. It had not been like this. As the elevator now eased to a stop, flush with the lunar surface, Earth and Sun were both below the horizon, and from edge to edge the sky seemed to be filled with stars.

It was not terrifying for one reason only-it was so utterly remote.

Squinting a little, Michel raised his right arm to point. He remembered to draw breath before he spoke, so his words would come out clearly, and what functioned as a radio transmitter in Lancelot would convey them to the others' suit receivers. He asked, pointing, "What's that?"

"You mean the three stars in a row?" Iyenari responded doubtfully. "That's the belt of Orion-the Hunter, we call him sometimes. You've heard something about our constellations?"

"Not the three stars." Michel jabbed the sky with a forefinger trailing parabolic whorls of silver gauze.

"Farther over there." The thing he saw was almost dazzling, and contained colors that he could not remember having seen before. Words to describe it were not easily come by.

"Taurus? The Bull . . ."

Abruptly Michel realized that the others, looking with normal and unaided eyes, could not see the thing at all. Thedazzlewas all in short wavelengths of radiation that only Lancelot allowed his eyes to see. As preparations for the day's first tests continued, Michel glanced back from time to time at the object in the sky. Gradually he learned how to dim the dazzle reaching his eyes, and at the same time to magnify the source somewhat. A ragged-looking cloud of gases of some kind, a gigantic explosion still in progress but frozen by its own vast scale to seeming immobility. How far away? Some hundreds of light-years, at a guess.

Centered on the platform of the risen elevator there extended a plain of fused basalt several hectares in extent, flat as a parking lot amid a gently rolling sea of lunar regolith whose waves and cups reached in every direction eight or ten kilometers before rising to make the interior rim of a broad impact crater whose name Michel had not been told. Poles had been erected around the platform, in a square a few score meters on a side, roofed and walled by a network of some kind of rope or wire. The holes in the net, Michel noticed, were just too small to allow an object the size of his own body to pa.s.s through. The construction, he thought, might have been borrowed from the court of some game in which a large bouncing ball was used.

Around Michel a hundred suits of s.p.a.ce armor groaned faintly, making adjustments to the topside cold and vacuum. Their wearers, mostly busy with other matters, did not appear to notice. When Michel himself moved, he could hear Lancelot faintly crackling, weak spasms across the audio spectrum.

He asked Dr. Iyenari about the crackling, and tried to absorb an answer completely unintelligible, a few words of physics tied up in math. Maybe someday he would have learned enough in school to understand that. Meanwhile it seemed preferable to try to feel out an answer for himself.

"Ready to give it a try?" Tupelov's tall, suited figure was towering over him. The Secretary always spoke to Michel as to a respected equal.

"Sure." Below, while Michel was being robed in a tight-fitting gym suit of bright orange and then in Lancelot, they had discussed briefly what was to be tried today, simple free flight in s.p.a.ce. As the thought returned that things were being rushed a bit, bright lights suddenly flooded the basalt area. Michel knew another momentary dazzle before Lancelot scaled down the radiation impinging from the sources directly into his eyes. Rushing things, but they must have their reasons, good ones, because it was certain that neither Tupelov nor any of the others here wanted their pet subject to get hurt.

Now technicians had surrounded Michel closely, to fit him with additional Lancelot-components. Here came tube-shaped things and egg-shaped things and cubes. All vanished somehow into Lancelot's fields, leaving the gauzy wings and robes no more substantial-looking than before. None of the additions seemed to add up to any more weight or bulk.

Michel let his attention drop away. Four levels below where he stood, and maybe a dozen kilometers to the lunar east, his mother was conversing, brightly and eagerly, with another lady, a vice-president of the Academy. His mother thought it was a coincidence that an Academy official, a real one this time, had just happened to be on Moonbase at this hour with some time available to talk. . . .

Dr. Iyenari was speaking, for the benefit of some recorders. "Today, we want to begin by using only a simple tidal collector in a forcepower mode. We'll charge with that continuously, while using a pre-stored charge for the maneuvers. Only elementary maneuvers are planned for the first trial with this subject. He will rise from the ground to a height of two or three meters, under the nets, and make a controlled descent. When we have a successful trial up to that point, we'll decide how much farther we want to go today."

Michel knew that Lancelot had a backup power supply too, a hydrogen lamp that as far as he could guess was several times as large as it needed to be, whatever the designers' reasoning. The lamp rode somewhere in the haze extending for a meter or two to the rear of Michel's shoulder blades. It existed now, the scientists had told him, only in a quasimaterial form, the molecules of its once-solid structure represented by a patterning of forces. What would have been forces in an unmodified lamp were now no more than sketches of something more abstract and subtle still, despite which the hydrogen lamp kept right on working anyway. Of course, as one of the scientists had said, solid matter was itself no more than a patterning, of something that Michel thought he could now almost perceive, at moments, when he reached for it in the proper way with his new senses. . . .

Having run his own check on the power lamp, a check that he himself did not understand very well and could not have explained to an engineer (who would not have understood it either), Michel forgot that it was there. Turning round slowly in place, as was required of him in the last stages of today's fitting, he noticed that the far slopes of the crater wall were turning into a sort of grandstand, acquiring a considerable population of suited humans and their choice machines. Some were scientific observers.

Many, he realized, zooming his perceptions in among them here and there, were guards of one kind and another.

"Step over here now, please, Michel." They led him to where a great yellow X, micrometrically exact in its dimensions, had been marked on the pavement. His feet in the soft-soled shoes that they had given him were positioned carefully at its center. From somewhere a fragment of his mother's voice, recognizable by tone and breathing pattern, came through the background noise of all kinds. Still four levels down, she was talking with cheerful animation about Art.

What would it be like to hold a piece of wood in his hand, a knife in Lancelot's, and carve? Entrancing as this speculation was, he had only a moment for it before voices were once more demanding his attention.

"All right, Michel?"

"Yes. All right."

The nearest other person stood some ten meters from the yellow X, the nearest machine a little farther still.

"There'll be no countdown or anything, just whenever you're ready. Can you get off the ground now?

Slowly. Don't worry if nothing moves just at first. . . ."

He never doubted that in Lancelot he would be enabled to move as he had never moved before. There were, though, certain other problems. Just at the moment when his slipper-light shoes were losing their tenure on the pavement, an alarming potential of sideways acceleration threatened to achieve reality and almost did. Michel shied like a novice bike-rider from an incipient fall. His reaction was just a little too strong. At the moment of rising from the ground, he lurched minutely toward the nets (whose purpose he now thought he understood) that were waiting for him in the opposite direction. Around him, voices muttered, people tried to suppress excitement and triumph so that he should not be distracted by it.

One voice, tense, encouraging, spoke to him openly, but he did not need that voice either and he tuned it out. He needed no encouragement and he realized now that there were no helpful instructions anyone could give him. Probably no one had ever thought this way before. Michel, drifting above the surface gently, experimented, trying to understand that first unexpected sideways surge. It was something, he thought, deriving from the motion of the Moon itself beneath him. Dimly, when he made the effort, he could now begin to feel the great slow harmonies of rotation, of revolution riding revolution as the Moon's track rode that of Earth and the Earth marched with the Sun toward some constellation never to be seen in Alpine's skies.

That one monotonous voice continued to encourage him, as if its owner thought it was a lifting force.

s.p.a.ceborne, Michel turned slowly in the bright lights, close beneath the wide-stretched upper net. Gauze robes swirled from him as he turned, and lifted faces ringed him in. The school play. Never in his life before or since had he been the center of so much attention, until now. Maybe they would all soon applaud. . . .

He raised his right arm, a gesture from the play, and with comfortable and sensitive fingers touched the soft toughness of the net, which someone had told him was three meters from the deck. Avidly following the movement of his arm went the aimings, adjustments, swallowings of cameras and recorders, so different in their working from human eyes and minds.

Join us. Be- Probably the calling did not come from berserkers, or not from berserkers alone. Be. Something.

Something that could perhaps be contained in the wordmachine; there seemed to be no human word that really fit.

No. In the manner of an easy, floating swimmer, he guided himself all the way across the top of the cabled cage. The voice that had been talking to him all along now registered as Tupelov's, and still it went on, excited and encouraging. It was starting to give orders now, and Michel listened to it, enough to get the gist of what it wanted. Obediently he made his way completely across the cage and back, then came down again just where he had started.

As soon as his feet were planted once more on the yellow X, a dozen people closed in upon him with a rush. Frank Marcus was there as soon as anyone, and Michel leaned on one of the rolling boxes, putting a little distance between himself and the suited people who came crowding on his other side. As soon as the first burst of questioning was over, and the leaders had turned away from Michel to confer among themselves, Frank remarked, "First time I tried it, Michel, I d.a.m.n near went through the net. So did the only other person who's ever got this far with it. We were all more or less expecting you'd do the same.

They said it would be better not to warn you, just to let you find your own way. Maybe they were right."

"Who was the only other person?"

"Another pilot. He hit the net, and then went crazy."

Michel said, "Just when you were starting to take off, something dragged you sideways."

"Yeah." Frank's hardware was all utterly motionless, and Michel knew somehow that the man was listening very attentively.

Michel stuttered and fell silent. He didn't know how to begin to tell what he had done to avoid the deflection, how he had managed the steady flight; he didn't know if the right words or even the right language had ever been invented. And it shook him somehow that Frank, an adult well ahead of other adults in this line of business, just stood there waiting patiently to hear.

On that first day of s.p.a.ce trials he made two more successful flights, performing maneuvers of gradually increasing complexity. He wasn't tired when they called a halt.

For the next two days he toured Moonbase with his mother and Ensign Schneider, carved a little, rested when they urged him to, though he still hadn't done anything that made him feel tired. He played, halfheartedly, security guards in view, with children whose parents worked at the base. Meanwhile he was told that the first flight tests were being evaluated, and some minor changes being made in Lancelot.

Then he was once more riding the giant elevator to the surface in his orange gym suit and gauzy immaterial robes. Frank Marcus, riding up beside him once again, had this time been transformed by being put into what he called his own flight suit, a single ovoid box.

On the surface the first thing Michel noticed was that a slow-dawning Sun had fired some distant crater-rims with silver. The second change he saw was that the cabled cage had been removed.

Tupelov's visored face smiled down at Michel in yet another careful inspection. Then the man awkwardly turned away. Suited cripples, the lot of them, Michel thought suddenly, and had a sudden feeling of kinship with Frank.

The squat metal ovoid beside Michel was beginning to look like the drawing of a speeding bullet, or of a large artillery sh.e.l.l perhaps. A striated blurring grew in the surrounding s.p.a.ce, as careful technicians robed Frank in his own version of Lancelot.

When Frank next spoke, it was with his radio turned off; so that the sound came to Michel only, through the contact between the fields they wore. "Kid, I think they're rushing us a little."

With a mental order, Michel cut off his own radio transmission. "Me too," he answered.

"You feel all right about it?"

"I don't know. I guess so. They haven't told me yet exactly what they want today."

"They don't tell you a lot, do they? It's gonna be elementary combat maneuvers. I've tried it once before.

They'll fly some kind of drone device out across the crater and you and I'll take turns trying to catch up with it and attack."

"Oh. What kind of weapons?"

"Remember what I said when you asked me about controls?"

"Oh. Yeah." Michel considered what the natural weapons of his body had to be. Fists and feet would have to be included, and he supposed he could do some damage with his teeth. There had to be more to it than that. He would find out when the time came.

The order came for Frank, who was to fly first, to take his place at the starting point, the now-familiar yellow X. Someone announced that the drone was ready now. In the past few days Michel had seen a good many of the machines at Moonbase and he had no difficulty in recognizing the basic type of the flying drone: a powered hoister, many times stronger in lifting capacity than any single human muscular system could be, though certainly not speedy in comparison with other transport devices. Its small engine was a miniature of the type used for centuries in s.p.a.cecraft when traversing gravitational fields-it worked by warping gravity in its interior, allowing its own fields to grip and haul against the stuff of s.p.a.ce itself.

A flash of red light and a radio tone signaled that launch was imminent. Then the semi-robotic drone ran forward a few steps, on six extremely stable though awkward-looking legs. It lifted, limbs folding back at once against its blunt ma.s.s of a body, a little bigger than a man's. Faster than a man could run it flew, just off the deck, heading straight in the direction of the crater's most distant curve of wall.

Frank's start signal sounded, and the blunt bullet of his housing rose in pursuit at once. His takeoff was skewed badly at the start; people hit the deck to give him room. But he got his motion quickly under control even as he accelerated after the fleeing drone. In the spotlights that followed him across the plain his gauze webs looked like a brief trail of rocket exhaust against the starry black above.

The drone clumsily sought to evade Frank, but he closed with it rapidly, now hurtling like a missile. It accelerated also, but to no avail. Impact against the far wall of the crater seemed imminent, and observers nearest the threatened point were scrambling for revetments when Frank overtook his prey.

Like enormous extensions of his short metal arms, his Lancelot's immaterial talons closed on the target.

His field-web flared, like the wing feathers of some giant raptor braking. At the moment of capture the target gave up, shutting itself off. In a slower, laden flight, Frank wheeled it round and bore it back beneath him to the basalt pad.

"Get the idea, Michel?" This from Tupelov.

"I think so."

"We'll go once more with Marcus, first, if he's still . . . How're you doing, Colonel?"

"Ready." Michel could detect the mutual dislike in both voices, and in Frank's an extra strain that must be due to wearing Lancelot.

A few minutes' delay went by, for reorganization and to give Frank a rest. Michel teetered on his toes, ready to fly, wishing they'd let him. Then at last the flying drone lunged away again, and again Frank went racing after it. This time he made a better takeoff.

For this trial the drone had been programmed to take defensive action, and although the point of interception was almost the same, what followed was not. An explosive struggle flared at the focus of all the observers' eyes and cameras. Michel, trying to watch, found that he had taken off without realizing it, and was again drifting easily three meters above the deck, looking over a wall of suited adult bodies.

At the focal point of a dozen spotlights, the distant combatants were down, amid a splashing of quick-settling dust. The drone, struggling to escape, was allowed only defensive action. Frank was not so limited. His aggression took form in an extension of his Lancelot's fields, forming what looked like a flat paw of enormous size. As quickly as an arm could swing, it struck at the drone, pounding the powerful lifter down out of s.p.a.ce and against the rocks. Dust and gravel flew, but the drone bounced up at once, still struggling to escape.

Gray, tenuous-looking limbs extending themselves from his Lancelot, Frank grappled with his prey. Both of them were down on the surface now, spinning in a dance made stately by the slow parabolic sheets of dust and gravel that their movements launched in the low gravity. Frank's forcefields, like a wrestler's arms, clamped the drone's machinery against his own. In the background of Michel's attention, timers continued to spin their digits: fifteen seconds now since Frank had launched, twenty seconds- Three seconds more and Frank had the grip he wanted, despite the drone's six wrestling limbs. One more second after that, and he had delivered the finishing blow.

In the drone's electronic nervous system something snapped, and this time it did not bounce up from rock. A moment later Frank, his own hardware evidently a little bent somewhere inside, was in limping flight back toward the starting marks, his inert trophy suspended beneath his shimmering bullet-shape as though in great translucent claws.

This time, as soon as he had landed, people and support machines surrounded him, inflating a temporary air bubble. In a moment the top of his box had been opened. Michel, now standing on the deck again and peering between suited bodies, caught a glimpse of human flesh inside the box. He saw what appeared to be bearded facial skin, mushroom pale in the overhead lights, running in a narrow strip across the front of a t.i.tanium skull.

Something-could it have been something in the att.i.tude of that mostly-metallic head?-made Michel turn then and look in the opposite direction. In the rear circle of watchers there stood a woman in a suit no different from the rest, a woman Michel now remembered having seen at various Moonbase times and places without having given her any particular thought. She was young, and her skin was very dark, her lips full as if she pouted. But she did not pout. She merely stood there looking with the rest at Frank, but her gaze as the canned man came partially into view was much more intent and very different from the rest.

Someone came to Michel with a question, and he soon forgot about the woman. The maintenance operation on Frank was quickly completed, and Frank was rolling to a place beside Michel again.

With radio transmitter off, Frank asked him, "They tell you what they want now?"

"Only that I'm going up next. I figure they want me to chase the drone a few times."

"Yeah. Then after that they're going to have you and me spar a little."

"Spar?"

"A make-believe fight. Well, not quite make-believe. Ever see boxers, just practicing? Like that, heavily padded gloves. Don't sweat it, n.o.body here wants you to get hurt, believe me."

The idea of fighting against Frank seemed somewhat unreal. But the part about n.o.body wanting him, Michel, to get hurt was so obviously and logically true that it took most of the alarm out of the prospect of a fight.

A fight. He had once or twice been through angry, childish scuffles with playmates. Once another boy had punched him in the lip, made his mouth bleed . . . but of course that was all before Lancelot, long before. And so it had really happened to someone else. . . .

"Ready, Michel? Let's see if you can catch the drone."

He walked on poised feet to the starting mark, and there thought readiness for flight, so that his toes just rested on the mark. A new drone had been pushed forward, and now on command lurched into flight toward the distant crater wall. Michel snapped himself back from a brief reverie, into complete attention on the job at hand. He willed himself after the drone, and with the willing saw the yellow X-mark fall from beneath his feet and fly away behind him. Arms half-extended, he leaned forward, thinking flight. Far ahead the drone receded, dragging spotlights with it.

Think flight, pursuit, and overtaking, and now the patch of brilliance centered on the drone grew larger, nearer. Think flight, speed, catching up . . . it had very little to do with imagination. Imagine yourself jumping up from your chair and running across the room, and you stayed seated.

He could feel that his commands to Lancelot were fumbling, groping things, only beginning to find out their true paths. But in the main they worked. Adjusting his vision now, he saw the closing drone in a far wider spectrum than that of light. He could have counted the scratches on its surface at hundreds of meters' distance, and gauged the depth of each.

All this in the five seconds following his takeoff, and in a few seconds more he had caught up with the speeding drone. Effortlessly matching its course, he approached it from above and spread his arms. His own child's arms were far too short to encircle the metal body, but at his wish Lancelot reached out field-arms three meters long, tailored to be just the proper size. Michel closed his own arms, and sensed the captured weight as Lancelot's grip clamped on. With that the drone went dead, became sheer hurtling weight, trying to fall. Lancelot's power effortlessly coped. Michel's own flight path did not dip by a centimeter from where he wanted it to be.

Spontaneous cheers broke from the small crowd of watchers as Michel flew in a wide curve with his catch. He dumped the dead drone-carefully-at Tupelov's feet just seventeen seconds after it had been launched. He couldn't remember what Frank's time on his first flight had been, against an unresisting target.

Again there was a short break for rest, for evaluation, for many questions. Then Tupelov, beaming, announced: "Michel, we're going to have Colonel Marcus fly out now, as fast as he can, and take evasive action. Think you can catch him?"

"Yes," said Michel, and immediately thought to himself: That was too blunt. I should talk in a way to make them all feel a little more comfortable with me. They were going to be less and less comfortable, he expected, as things went on.

Seconds later, he and Frank were both on their starting marks again. Then Frank was off, precisely on time, lifting more smoothly than before. Michel, as his own timer zeroed, found himself fractionally hanging back, responding to a sudden internal urge to make what promised to be a dull chase more exciting. Then he released himself, imagining vaguely an arrow flying from a bow.

The soft-looking waves of the Moon's surface were flickering underneath him once again. As Michel closed, Frank turned, trying to evade. Now just ahead of them a high portion of the crater's rim glowed in an uneven line with the new day's silver fire. Michel followed. Frank turned again, and yet again, a darting, last-second maneuver this time, but it did him no good. The bullet of his ovoid body came underneath Michel precisely, and the boy slapped it with the field-extensions of both his hands.

Frank grunted an honest congratulation. Again there was jubilation on the radio. They flew back to the pad together, Michel slowing his own pace to that of the tired flyer beside him. Then, this time carefully tamping momentum back into the reservoirs where Lancelot could hold it stored, Michel dropped back onto the basalt surface.

The Secretary once more loomed above him, beaming. "That was very good, Michel. That was excellent. Do you think you could go faster still? But remember, stay below the crater rim. The defense computers get the electronic jitters sometimes; we don't want you showing up on their detectors."

"I think so. Yes, I could." A little more modest and thoughtful, that was it, a better answer this time.