Berserker Base Read online

  Utterly tired, stretching out alone on the provided blanket, letting his eyes close, he felt locked somehow to the other people he had just met. It was as if he could still feel them around him even as he slept.

  He dreamt again. And again encountered the mysterious control panel, and the gage, displaying rhyming words, whose meaning he could not decipher.

  At the moment he awoke, Lars turned his head to one side on impulse. His line of vision passed out the open doorway of his cell and down the short hallway at an angle, into the common room. There was another doorway beyond that, the door to the Carmpan room, through which one of the Carmpan was looking at him. After a moment of eye contact, the being turned away.

  Well, one of the things known about the Carmpan was their mental powers; there were the Prophets of Probability among them. There was also the demonstrated fact of extremely long-distance (though largely useless, it seemed) telepathic ability possessed by at least some Carmpan individuals, such as the Third Historian, who had also been famed for his communications with Earth. Lars would not have been astonished to learn that his vivid dream had been caused by some exercise of Carmpan mental powers. But he could think of no reason why the Carmpan should care what he dreamed, or if he dreamed at all.

  Had it been some attempt to convey a message, through telepathic contact? Of course the gage-dream had first come to Lars days ago, before he arrived at this base, and before he had known that the Carmpan here existed. But that might not be an argument against true telepathy, as Lars understood what little was known by Earth-descended humans of the subject. Time, he thought, might not always be an effective barrier.

  So, the dream might be a way to convey a secret message of some kind, a communication beyond the berserkers' power to intercept. On that chance, Lars decided that he would not mention the dream aloud.

  The four other ED humans were all awake when Lars rejoined them in the common room. One was eating; two talking, one—Opava, this time—lounging about lethargically. Dorothy Totonac still looked sad, but this time she said hello. Lars ate some more pink-and-green cake, meanwhile exchanging a few words with his fellow prisoners.

  No one else said anything to him about odd dreams. No one remarked that the berserker brain that ran this base was sure to be listening somehow to everything that they were saying, watching everything they did, but Lars was sure that everyone understood that fact, it gave him some minimal of power, to be able to withhold even so little as a dream from the enemy.

  The conversation had not proceeded far when the same door opened through which Lars had been brought into the prisoners' complex. Several of the ant-shaped escort machines entered. None of them were carrying spacesuits. The conversation among the humans broke off, and as if at a signal all stood and faced the enemy.

  There was a moment of silence. Then the door in the third wall, the door that since Lars's arrival had remained closed, slid open, revealing a red-lit passageway beyond.

  Captain Naxos stirred uneasily. "Something new. They've never opened that door since I've been here." The captain was, by some hours, at least, the senior prisoner.

  The half-dozen ant-shaped machines were pointing, gesturing the prisoners toward the newly opened door.

  "Looks like we march," Pat Sandomierz muttered.

  Lars could think of no way to argue for even a momentary delay, and no real reason to try. With his fellow prisoners he moved, under the guidance of the small machines, through an air-filled passage, with atmosphere and gravity held at Earth-standard normal all along the way.

  Dorothy, brightening as if perhaps the novelty of the new passage pleased her, commented: "The Carmpan tolerate our native conditions well. It doesn't work that well in the reverse, or so I've been told."

  No one else felt like making conversation. The passage was no more than thirty meters long. At its far end it branched into a complex of several more chambers cut from rock, each much larger than the sleeping cells, but smaller than the common room. Each chamber was largely filled with exotic-looking machinery. The humans looked at each other blankly; whatever the gear was, none of them could recognize it.

  Lars heard a sound and looked back. Five of the Carmpan were also being brought along through the passage by the small berserker guides, into this complex of chambers full of sophisticated machines.

  Live bodies and mechanical ones milled around. Now each ED human prisoner was paired off—whether at random or not, Lars could not tell—with one of the Carmpan. Lars and his new partner were taken into one of the chambers containing machinery. There were two couches visible. First Lars had to watch as the Carmpan was put on one couch, and there connected into the complex of equipment, by means of wires and other things more subtle. Then Lars himself was taken to the other couch and made to lie down. The small ant-shaped berserkers attached restraints to his limbs, and things to his head.

  At once strange thoughts moved through his mind, as if projected from outside. Visual pictures came, outlandish and indecipherable, though clear.

  Presumably, adjustments were made. Coherence soon evolved. At last there were some clear, plain words:

  I am Carmpan. Do not be more frightened than you can help. I do not believe the berserker intends at this moment to do us permanent harm,

  The message came through clearly, but whether it was coming somehow directly from the Carmpan's mind, or from that mind through the medium of the machinery, Lars could not tell. He opened his eyes, but the relative positioning of the two coaches kept him from looking at his Carmpan partner. The rock chamber that held his body seemed, if anything, less real than the new world of strange communication within his skull.

  It seeks to use our minds, yours and mine, together. We are so different in our modes of thought, yet with this subtle machinery our thoughts can be made in a sense compatible. Together, doing much more than either could do alone. It seeks to use our thoughts to probe the far places where—

  Something in the subtle machinery operated silently, and the contact was broken off. Still, it had provided Lars with understanding of a sort, or at least a theory. It would make sense, or it might, that the huge berserker computer that dominated and ran this whole base was using their two diverse biological minds to try to do what neither mind alone, nor the berserkers machinery alone, could do: to probe whatever section of space had been targeted by the latest sortie of its attacking units.

  That first session was all probing and testing, and it went on for long, exhausting hours. Lars experienced glimpses of life and activity on several worlds, and on ships in space. He had little comprehension of what he was seeing and experiencing, and not the choice about it. He supposed that the Carmpan had no choice either. The berserker was using them, like so much animated radio equipment…

  No radio signal could carry information faster than light through space. The signals of the mind—if that was the right word for those ethereal transactions—were evidently another matter.

  Knowledge of another kind trickled into Lars's awareness, brought perhaps by the cold probe of the berserker itself, coming to drain the man's consciousness of knowledge, being forced by some law to leave something in exchange. Lars understood that ten or more huge berserker craft had been launched from this base some time ago, and the object of the current exercise was to see how well those machines were doing, at a distance impossible or impractical for other types of communication.

  The telepathic session was interrupted. The Carmpan who had been hooked up in tandem with Lars was disconnected and taken out by the guide machines, and another Carmpan brought in. Lars understood that different pairings of live minds were being tried, always one ED and one Carmpan, hooked somehow in… series? Parallel? Did it make sense to look for an electronic equivalent? The Carmpan and ED minds, Lars realized, must complement each other in some way that the berserkers expected to be able to turn to their advantage.

  When the subtle machinery was turned on, Lars got the impression that the enforced contact was much
more unpleasant for the Carmpan than it was for him.

  At last he was unwired, and released from his couch. He had no idea how long the session had lasted. As exhausted as if he had been running or fighting for hours, he was allowed to return to the cell complex, the other prisoners straggling wearily with him.

  They were allowed a brief interlude for rest and food.

  Then they were marched back through the passage, where the testing and probing began again. This time some of the ED prisoners showed mental confusion afterward. Exhaustion became the normal state. But so far the side effects were bearable.

  Repeated sessions went on for what must certainly have been several days. All these sessions at the machines were devoted, as Lars thought, to testing and in some sense training. At last, when the most, compatible partners had been determined, they were put to work together.

  Only then did the first of the real working telepathic sessions take place.

  Lars, hooked up again with one of the Carmpan (he still had no certain way of telling them apart) experienced blasts of mental noise, confusion, gibberish… the touch of the living Carmpan mind alternated with the cold mental probing from the berserker's circuits.

  Time warped away. Future and past were blurred in the realm where dwelt the speeding Carmpan mind, and the hurtling thought of Lars Kanakuru. Now again clear images began to come through, from other minds. They were fragmentary, practically unintelligible. They came and went through the Carmpan mind before Lars could do more than glimpse them.

  A fragment was seized, then tossed aside. Not by Lars.. Toward him.

  Hide this, my Earth-descended ally, partner. This must be hidden at all costs. Do not let the berserker perceive this…

  Lars tried to answer the Carmpan, though at the moment he hardly felt capable of generating a coherent independent thought.

  And yet again, another speeding fragment: Hide this.

  And then the mental landscape was lighted, seared, frozen, all in one instant, as if by lightning. And immediately after that, just as suddenly, the world went dark.

  Presently Lars, drifting in some dreamland, realized that the Carmpan now sharing the machine with him was dead. Lars thought that perhaps he knew the fact even before the berserker did, or just as soon.

  Sudden death in harness, presumably accomplished by the berserker. As Lars read the situation, the berserker considered that the guilty, unreliable badlife had done something treacherous, some telepathic trick. But it did not know exactly what the badlife had done, or that anything of value had been kept from it by being passed on to Lars. Otherwise it would already be trying to turn the mind of Lars Kanakuru inside out…

  … two fragments, that the Carmpan had said must be concealed.

  The Remora program. That was one of them. A mere name. That of a computer program? Or perhaps a program of rearmament, somewhere, the effort of some world getting ready to defend itself against berserkers? As to what the Remora program really was, where it was, or why it had to be kept secret, Lars had no clue.

  He thought the other fragment was, if anything, even more meaningless: qwib-qwib. Not even a real word, at least not in any language that Lars had ever known or heard.

  His general impression from the telepathic visions he had experienced so far was that at least three of the ten or more dispatched berserkers were proceeding about their business satisfactorily. In other cases the berserkers were having… certain difficulties. Life in its many modes could be amazingly tough and stubborn.

  Another brief rest was allowed the telepathic life-units. Then another session began. And now, through the alien filter of a new (and perhaps more malleable?) Carmpan mind, Lars began to perceive another segment of the lives of incredibly distant humans.

  And this information, this vision, he had no choice but to pass on…

  WHAT MAKES US HUMAN

  Aster's Hope stood more than a hundred meters tall—a perfect sphere bristling with vanes, antennae, and scanners, punctuated with laser ports, viewscreens, and receptors. She left her orbit around her homeworld like a steel ball out of a slingshot, her sides bright in the pure sunlight of the solar system. Accelerating toward her traveling speed of .85c, she moved past the outer planets—first Philomel with its gigantic streaks of raw, cold hydrogen, then lonely Periwinkle glimmering at the edge of the spectrum—on her way into the black and luminous beyond. She was the best her people had ever made, the best they knew how to make. She had to be: she wasn't coming back for centuries.

  There were exactly three hundred ninety-two people aboard.

  They, too, were the best Aster had to offer. Diplomats and meditechs, linguists, theoretical biologists, physicists, scholars, even librarians for the vast banks of knowledge Aster's Hope carried: all of them had been trained to the teeth especially for this mission. And they included the absolute cream of Aster's young Service, the so-called "puters" and "nicians" who knew how to make Aster's Hope sail the fine-grained winds of the galaxy. Three hundred ninety-two people in all, culled and tested and prepared from the whole population of the planet to share in the culmination of Aster's history.

  Three hundred ninety of them, were asleep.

  The other two were supposed to be taking care of the ship. But they weren't. They were running naked down a mid-shell corridor between the clean, impersonal chambers where the cryogenic capsules hugged their occupants. Temple was giggling because she knew Gracias was never going to catch her unless she let him. He still had some of the ice cream she'd spilled on him trickling through the hair on his chest, but if she didn't slow down he wasn't going to be able to do anything about it. Maybe she wasn't smarter or stronger than he was, better-trained or higher-ranking—but she was certainly faster.

  This was their duty shift, the week they would spend out of their capsules every half year until they died. Aster's Hope carried twenty-five shifts from the Service, and they were the suicide personnel of this mission: aging at the rate of one week twice every year, none of them were expected to live long enough to see the ship's return home. Everyone else could be spared until Aster's Hope reached its destination; asleep the whole trip, they would arrive only a bit more mature than they were when they left. But the Service had to maintain the ship. And so the planners of the mission had been forced to a difficult decision: either fill Aster's Hope entirely with puters and nicians and pray that they would be able to do the work of diplomats, theoretical physicists and linguists; or sacrifice a certain number of Service personnel to make room for people who could be explicitly trained for the mission. The planners decided that the ability to take Aster's Hope apart chip by chip and seal after seal and then put her all back together again was enough experience to ask of any individual man or woman. Therefore the mission itself would have to be entrusted to other experts.

  And therefore Aster's Hope would be unable to carry enough puters and nicians to bring the mission home again.

  Faced with this dilemma, the Service personnel were naturally expected to spend a significant period of each duty shift trying to reproduce. If they had children, they could pass on their knowledge and skill. And if the children were born soon enough, they would be old enough to take Aster's Hope home when she needed them.

  Temple and Gracias weren't particularly interested in having children. But they took every other aspect of reproduction very seriously.

  She slowed down for a few seconds, just to tantalize him. Then she put on a burst of speed. He tended to be just a bit dull in his love-making—and even in his conversation—unless she made a special effort to get his heart pounding. On some days, a slow, comfortable, and just-a-bit-dull lover was exactly what she wanted. But not today. Today she was full of energy from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair, and she wanted Gracias at his best.

  But when she tossed a laughing look back over her shoulder to see how he was doing, he wasn't behind her anymore.

  Where—? Well, good. He was trying to take control of the race. Win by tricking her b
ecause he couldn't do it with speed. Temple laughed out loud while she paused to catch her breath and think. Obviously, he had ducked into one of the rooms or passages off this corridor, looking for a way to shortcut ahead of her—or maybe to lure her into ambush. And she hadn't heard the automatic door open and close because she'd been running and breathing too hard. Very good! This was the Graces she wanted.

  But where had be wired off? Not the auxiliary compcom: that room didn't have any other exit. How about the nearest capsule chamber? From there, he'd have to shaft down to inner-shell and come back up. That could be dicey: he'd have to guess how far and fast, and in what direction, she was moving. Which gave her a chance to turn the tables on him.

  With a grin, she went for the door to the next capsule chamber. Sensing her approach, it opened with a nearly silent whoosh, then closed behind her. Familiar with the look of the cryogenic capsules huddled in the grasp of their triple-redundant support machinery, each one independently supplied and run so that no system-wide future could wipe out the mission, she hardly glanced around her as she headed toward the shaft.

  Its indicators showed that it wasn't in use. So Gracias wasn't on his way up here. Perfect. She'd take the shaft up to outer-shell and elude him there, just to whet his appetite. Turn his own gambit against him. Pleased with herself, she approached the door of the shaft.

  But when she impinged on the shaft's sensor, it didn't react to her. None of the lights came on: the elevator stayed where it was. Surprised, she put her whole body in front of the sensor. Nothing. She jumped up and down, waved her arms. Still nothing.

  That was strange. When Gracias ran his diagnostics this morning, the only malfunction anywhere was in an obscure circuit of foodsup's beer synthesizer. And she'd already helped him fix it. Why wasn't the shaft operating?