BERSERKER BASE.

BY.

FRED SABERHAGEN.

PRISONER'S BASE.

In the beginning, in his first minutes of being held captive by the d.a.m.ned machine, Lars Kanakuru had cursed its metallic guts for keeping him alive. The d.a.m.ned berserker machine ignored his curses, though he was sure it heard them, even as it had seemed to ignore the missile he had launched at it from his small oneseater s.p.a.cecraft. Lars never saw what happened to the missile. But he had seen on his instruments how the d.a.m.ned berserker had extended forcefield arms, reaching out many kilometers for his little ship, and he saw and felt how it pulled him into the embrace of death.

Not to quick death. He was not going to be that lucky. Suicide attacks by fanatical humans were perhaps not unknown in this berserker machine's experience, but they must be at least sufficiently rare for it to find their perpetrators interesting. It had evidently decided that he ought to be studied.

Lars had no sidearm with him in the tiny cabin of his oneseater, nothing that he could use to quickly kill himself. And before he could use the materials on hand to improvise a way to do the job, some kind of gas was being injected into the cabin of his fighter, hissing into his breathing air, and he lost consciousness...

When his senses returned to him he was no longer inside his fighter ship. Now, with his head aching, he was stretched out on a hard, unfamiliar deck, enclosed in a small, windowless, and apparently doorless cell. Light, faint and reddish, came from somewhere above, and warmed air hissed faintly around him.

He sat up. Gravity, doubtless artificial, held him with standard, Earth-normal strength. There wouldn't be quite room in the cell to stand erect. Nor room to walk, or crawl, more than a couple of meters in any direction.

Lars did not rejoice to find himself still alive. It was certain now that he was not going to be killed quickly. He was going to be studied.

At the same time, he found that the idea of suicide no longer attracted him. It had been a basically alien thought for him anyway.

So, he had been captured by a berserker machine. Others had survived the experience and had returned to human worlds to tell about it-a few others, benefiting from rare miracles of one kind or another. A very few others, a very few miracles, in all the millions of cubic light years, in all the centuries, across which the human race had had to fight its war against berserkers.

As a veteran s.p.a.ce traveler, Lars could tell almost from the moment of his awakening that he was now in flights.p.a.ce. There were certain subtle indications of motion, alterations in gravity, inward twinges to go with them. The machine that held him captive was outpacing light through realms of mathematical reality, bearing him across some section of the Galaxy, in what direction he had no way of guessing.

The human body was never really totally at home in the inhuman world of flights.p.a.ce. But it had long been a familiar world to Lars Kanakuru, and to find himself in it now was, oddly, almost rea.s.suring.

There had been no prospect of help for him in. the particular sector of normal s.p.a.ce in which he had been captured. That little fragment of the Galaxy, Lars was certain, belonged to the berserkers now, along with the few planets that it held. One of which had been his home...

His immediate physical surroundings were such as to allow him to stay alive, no more. He took stock again, more carefully. His s.p.a.cesuit had been removed, along with all the contents of his pockets. He was still dressed in the coverall and light boots he had been wearing under the s.p.a.cesuit, standard combat gear of the service to which he belonged.

Lars was surrounded by dim reddish light, bound in by cramping metal or ceramic-he was not sure which-walls and floor and ceiling. There was air, of course, of breathable content and pressure, through which from time to time there pa.s.sed a wave of some exotic, inorganic stench. There was, he soon discovered, a supply of water. Almost icy cold, it gushed on demand from a wall nozzle over a small hole in the deck that served as plumbing.

He thought back over the s.p.a.ce battle, the combat mission, that had landed him in this cell. Next time he would do better. He found that he was telling himself that over and over. He couldn't seem to make himself realize that there would be no next time, not for him.

Then he thought ahead, or tried to. As a rule, berserkers killed quickly; human suffering had no intrinsic value for machines. What berserker machines were programmed to want was human nonexistence. But in his case the time for quick killing had already pa.s.sed.

Then Lars tried not to think ahead, because none of the things that were known to happen to berserker prisoners were better than being quickly killed, in fact all of the other things-except, of course, the occasional miraculous rescue-were, in his opinion, considerably worse.

Think about the present, then. Lars Kanakuru decided that it was quite likely that he was the only living thing within many light years. But then it almost immediately occurred to him thai that could not be exactly true. There would be a horde of microorganisms within his body, as in that of every other living human.

He carried a population of a sort along. The idea gave him an odd kind of comfort.

His mental state, he supposed, was already becoming rather odd.

There was no way for him in his cruel simple cell to keep track of time. But in time-it might have been hours, or it might have been a day-he slept again, and dreamed.

In his dream Lars saw a ship's control panel before him, covered with electronic gages, and in the way of dreams he understood that this was the control panel of some new kind of fighter craft. He was happy to see this, because it meant he had escaped from the berserker. But his troubles were not over. One of the gages on the panel was a very strange one, for it seemed to be displaying pairs of rhyming words, and it was very important that Lars understand what this meant, and he could not.

The dream was not really frightening, but still it was incredibly vivid and forceful, and Lars awoke from it sweating, his hands sc.r.a.ping the warm smooth deck. A very odd dream.

He lay there feeling groggy and apathetic. He drank water, and would have eaten, had any food been provided. Well, he wasn't starving yet. The berserker would feed him when necessary. If it had wanted him dead, he'd be that way already. He dozed again, and awakened.

And then there came the realization that the machine that bore him was in flights.p.a.ce no longer.

Presently, faintly perceptible though the ma.s.ses of metal that surrounded him, came sounds and vibrations that suggested a heavy docking. He decided that the berserker that had captured him had reached its base. And that meant that soon he should know exactly what was going to happen to him.

Shortly after he felt the docking, one wall of Lars's cell opened, and a machine came in to get him. The metallic-ceramic body of the mobile unit was shaped rather like the body of an ant, and it was half as large as Lars himself. It said nothing to him, and he offered it no resistance. It brought with it a s.p.a.cesuit, not his own, but one that would fit him and looked to be of human make. Doubtless the suit had been captured too, sometime, somewhere, and doubtless the man or woman who had worn it was now dead, it bore some faded-looking insignia, but in the faint red light the symbols were hard to read.

The berserker tossed the suit at his feet. Obviously it wanted him to wear the suit, not puzzle out its provenance. He could have played dumb, tried to give his captor a hard time, but he discovered that he was no longer at all anxious to find death. He put on the suit and sealed himself into it. Its air supply was full, and sweet-smelling.

Then the machine conducted him away, into airless regions outside his cell. It was not a very long journey, only a few hundred meters, but one of many twists and turnings, along pathways not designed for human travel. Most of this journey took place in reduced gravity, and Lars felt this gravity was natural. There were subtleties you could sense when you had enough experience.

At about the halfway point, his guide brought him out of the great s.p.a.ce-going berserker that had captured him, to stand under an airless sky of stars, upon a rocky surface streaked with long shadows from a blue-white sun, and Lars saw that his feeling about the gravity had been right. He was now standing on the surface of a planet. It was all cracked rock, as far as he could see out to the near horizon, and populated by marching ghost-forms of dust, shapes raised by drifting electrical charges and not wind.

Lars had seen shapes similar to those once before, on another dead world. This world was evidently a small one, to judge by the near horizon, the gravity only a fraction of Earth-standard normal, and the lack of atmosphere. The place was certainly lifeless now, and had probably been utterly devoid of life even before berserkers had arrived on it.

It looked like they had come here to stay. There was a lot of berserker construction about, towers and mineheads and nameless shapes, extending across most of what Lars could see of the lifeless landscape.

The fabrication wasn't hard to identify as to its origin, or its purpose either. What did berserkers ever build? t.i.tanic shipyard facilities, in which to construct more of their own kind, and repair docks for the units that had suffered in battle. Lars got a good look-when he thought about it later, it seemed to him that matters were arranged deliberately by the machine so that he would be able to catch a very good look-at the power and infernal majesty surrounding him.

And then he was conducted underground, into a narrow tunnel, the faceplate of his suit freed of that blue-white solar glare.

A door closed behind him, and then another door, sealing him into a small chamber of half-smoothed rock. Air hissed around him, and then another door ahead of him slid open. Air and sound, and a moment of realization. He was no longer alone. There were other prisoners here, his fellow humans. At the moment of realization Lars was intensely surprised, though later he was not sure why.

Human voices reached him from just ahead. Human figures, all dressed in s.p.a.ce coveralls as he was, looked up. Gathered in a small group were four Earth-descended humans, two women and two men.

The chamber where they gathered was perhaps ten meters square, and high enough to stand in, not much more. It was barren of furnishings, and the four people were sitting on the stone floor. Three other doors, each in a different wall, led out of it. Two of the other doors were open, one was closed.

Three of the people got to their feet as Lars approached. One of the women remained sitting on the floor, in an att.i.tude that suggested she was indifferent to anything that happened.

Lars introduced himself: "Flight Officer Lars Kanakuru, Eight Worlds Combined Forces."

"Captain Absalom Naxos, New Hebrides Strategic Defense Corps." The captain spoke quickly, as if he might be conveying urgently needed information. He was a hungry-looking, intense man, with jet black eyebrows looking almost artificial on a pallid face, and a thin black stubble of beard that appeared to be struggling to establish itself with only moderate success.

Lars said: "Glad to meet you. Wish it could be under different conditions..."

"Don't we all. There's no goodlife here."

The woman who had got to her feet, younger and better-looking than the other, moved a half step forward. "Pat Sandomierz. I'm just a civilian."

"h.e.l.lo." Lars took the hand that she extended. In the background, coming always through the rock, was a noise of machinery, sometimes louder, sometimes faint. Lars a.s.sumed that it was corning from the berserkers' mining and manufacturing operations somewhere nearby.

Pat had truly beautiful gray-blue eyes. She said she had been taken off a pa.s.senger liner by an attacking berserker. She was sure that the crew and all the other pa.s.sengers were dead.

"I'm Nicholas Opava." The second man in the group gave an immediate overall impression of softness. A naturally dark skin kept him from showing a prison pallor. He radiated hopelessness, Lars thought.

Opava said he had been the sole human manning a lonely scientific outpost, from which a berserker had picked him up.

The remaining woman, Dorothy Totonac, was somewhat older than the other people, and looked withdrawn. It was Pat who gave Lars Dorothy's name; Dorothy had finally gotten to her feet, but seemed disinclined to do more than nod.

Lars asked how long, the others had beers here. The answer seemed to be no more than a matter of days, for any of them. A mild argument over timekeeping methods had just started, when Lars was distracted by a glance through one of the open doorways. In the adjoining room, about the same size as the one where Lars was standing, there were other living beings gathered, eight or ten of them. But they were not Earth-descended humans.

Lars reached to take Nicholas Opava by the arm. Lowering his voice automatically, he asked: "Aren't those Carmpan?" For all his s.p.a.cefaring Lars had never seen the like before. But still he recognized those squarish, leathery Carmpan bodies at first glance; almost any educated human, of any world, would do so. Pictures of the Carmpan were somewhat rare, but everyone had seen them.

Opava only nodded wearily.

"We've gotten on quite well with them," Captain Naxos put in, in his businesslike way. "Conditions being what they are, all of us locked up together, they're disposed to be comparatively sociable."

Lars stood staring at the Carmpan. He saw that something he had heard about them was correct: the shape of their bulky, angular bodies did suggest machinery. But he had never heard the Carmpan mind described as in the least mechanical.

Besides mental skills that were bizarre by Earthly standards, and sometimes awesome, the Carmpan were famed also for a general tendency to avoid contact with Earth-descended humans. But now one of the Carmpan was coming out of their room, proceeding toward them. The Carmpan's pace was a slow, rolling but not awkward walk.

"Coming to greet the newcomer, I'll bet," said Pat Sandornierz.

She was right. The thick-bodied being (two arms, two legs, and was the outer surface all scaly modified skin, or in part tight clothing? Lars couldn't tell) was heading straight for Lars. The other two men, and the two women, retreated minimally.

"It is not possible to welcome here." The voice, to Lars, sounded surprisingly clear and Earthly, though the mouth and throat that produced it were obviously from somewhere else. "But it is possible to wish you well, and that I and my fellow Carmpan do."

"Thank you. The same to you." What to say to an alien? "How were you captured?"

An armlike appendage gestured. The wide unearthly mouth shaped Earthly words with uncanny precision. "Unhappily, my friend. Unhappily." With that the Carmpan turned its back on them slowly, and got wilder way again, retreating to rejoin its fellows. Male or female? Lars couldn't tell. He had heard that the Carmpan themselves rarely became interested in the distinction.

"I thought they newer talked to us that freely," Lars mattered, watching the retreating back.

Pat repeated in effect what Captain Naxos had already said: that the Carmpan, constrained by necessity, could be and were being good companions. And yet even the berserker had known enough to provide two rooms, realizing the necessity for a psychological separation between its two kinds of biological specimens.

Lars was ravenously hungry, and there was food of a sort available, the pink-and-green cakes that some of the rare survivors of berserker imprisonment had described. He could see the Carmpan in their room munching cakes of other colors. After Lars had eaten, his fellow prisoners pointed out to him an individual cell that he could use for sleeping, or for such privacy as was attainable. It much resembled his cell on the berserker craft, except that this one was dug out of rock, and its open doorway had no door.

Each prisoner had a similar retreat, with one spare cell still remaining unoccupied. The individual cells used by the Earth-descended prisoners were all located down a little side hall from their common room.

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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.lo. 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 s.p.a.cesuits. 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 pa.s.sageway 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 pa.s.sage, with atmosphere and gravity held at Earth-standard normal all along the way.

Dorothy, brightening as if perhaps the novelty of the new pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ce. 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.