Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 05 - Ultimate Enemy.pdf

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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 1979 Ultimate Enemy
Once more I, Third Historian of the Carmpan race, thankful to Earth-descended humans for their defense
of my world and of many worlds, have recorded for them a series of my visions. Relatively unfettered by
time or space, my mind has roamed the Galaxy in past and future to gather pieces of the truth of the great
war of life against unliving death. What I have set down is far from the whole truth of that war, yet it is
true.
Most of the higher intellects of the galaxy will shrink from war, even when survival depends upon it
absolutely. Yet from the same matter that supports their lives, came the berserkers. Were their Builders
uniquely evil? Would that it were so...
THE SMILE
The berserker attack upon the world called St. Gervase had ended some four standard months before
the large and luxurious private yacht of the Tyrant Yoritomo appeared amid the ashclouds and rainclouds
that still monotonized the planet's newly lifeless sky. From the yacht a silent pair of waspish-looking
launches soon began a swift de-scent, to land on the denuded surface where the planet's capital city had
once stood.
The crews disembarking from the launches were armored against hot ash and hot mud and residual
radiation. They knew what they were looking for, and in less than a standard hour they had located the
vaulted tunnel leading down, from what had been a sub-basement of the famed St. Gervase Museum.
The tunnel was partially
collapsed in places, but still passable, and they followed its steps downward, stumbling here and there on
debris fallen from the surface. The battle had not been completely one-sided in its early stages, and
scattered amid the wreckage of the once-great city were fragments of berserker troop-landers and of
their robotic shock-troops. The unliving metal killers had had to force a land-ing, to neutralize the
defensive field generators, before the bombardment could begin in earnest.
The tunnel terminated in a large vault a hundred meters down. The lights, on an inde-pendent power
supply, were still working, and the air conditioning was still trying to keep out dust. There were five great
statues in the vault, including one in the attached workshop where some conservator or restorer had
evidently been treating it. Each one was a priceless masterwork. And scattered in an almost casual litter
through-out the shelter were paintings, pottery, small works in bronze and gold and silver, the least a
treasure to be envied.
At once the visitors radioed news of their dis-covery to one who waited eagerly in the yacht hovering
above. Their report concluded with the observation that someone had evidently been liv-ing down here
since the attack. Beside the work-shop, with its power lamp to keep things going, there was a small
room that had served as a re-pository of the Museum's records. A cot stood in it now, there had been
food supplies laid in, and there were other signs of human habitation. Well, it was not too strange that
there should have been a few survivors, out of a population of many mil-lions.
The man who had been living alone in the shel-ter for four months came back to find the landing party
going busily about their work.
"Looters," he remarked, in a voice that seemed to have lost the strength for rage, or even fear. Not
armored against radiation or anything else, he leaned against the terminal doorway of the bat-tered tunnel,
a long-haired, unshaven, once-fat man whose frame was now swallowed up in clothes that looked as if
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they might not have been changed since the attack.
The member of the landing party standing nearest looked back at him silently, and drummed fingers on
the butt of a bolstered handgun, con-sidering. The man who had just arrived threw down the pieces of
metallic junk he had brought with him, conveying in the gesture his contempt.
The handgun was out of its holster, but before it was leveled, an intervention from the leader of the
landing party came in the form of a sharp gesture. Without taking his eyes off the man in the door-way,
the leader at once reopened communication with the large ship waiting above.
"Your Mightiness, we have a survivor here," he informed the round face that soon appeared upon the
small portable wallscreen. "I believe it is the sculptor Antonio Nobrega."
"Let me see him at once. Bring him before the screen." The voice of His Mightiness was inimi-table and
terrible, and no less terrible, somehow, because he always sounded short of breath. "Yes, you are right,
although he is much changed. Nobrega, how fortunate for us both! This is indeed another important find."
"I knew you would be coming to St. Gervase
now," Nobrega told the screen, in his empty voice. "Like a disease germ settling in a mangled body. Like
some great fat cancer virus. Did you bring along your woman, to take charge of our Culture?"
One of the men beside the sculptor knocked him down. A breathless little snarl came from the screen at
this, and Nobrega was quickly helped back to his feet, then put into a chair.
"He is an artist, my faithful ones," the screen-voice chided. "We must not expect him to have any sense of
the fitness of things outside his art. No. We must get the maestro here some radiation treatment, and then
bring him along with us to the Palace, and he will live and work there as happily, or unhappily, as
elsewhere."
"Oh no," said the artist from his chair, more faintly than before. "My work is done."
"Pish-posh. You'll see."
"I knew you were coming..."
"Oh?" The small voice from the screen was humoring him. "And how did you know that?"
"I heard... when our fleet was still defending the approaches to the system, my daughter was out there
with it. Through her, before she died, I heard how you brought your own fleet in-system, to watch what
was going to happen, to judge our strength, our chance of resisting the berserkers. I heard how your
force vanished when they came. I said then that you'd be back, to loot the things you could never get at
in any other way."
Nobrega was quiet for a moment, then lunged from his chair—or made the best attempt at lung-ing that
he could. He grabbed up a long metal sculptor's tool and drew it back to swing at
Winged Truth Rising, a marble Poniatowski elev-en centuries old. "Before I'll see you take this—"
Before he could knock a chip of marble loose, he was overpowered, and put into restraint.
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When they approached him again an hour later, to take him up to the yacht for medical examina-tion and
treatment, they found him already dead. Autopsy on the spot discovered several kinds of slow and gentle
poison. Nobrega might have taken some deliberately. Or he might have been finished by something the
berserkers had left be-hind, to ensure that there would be no survivors, as they moved on to carry out
their programmed task of eradicating all life from the Galaxy.
On his voyage home from St. Gervase, and for several months thereafter, Yoritimo was pre-vented by
pressing business from really inspect-ing his new treasures. By then the five great statues had been
installed, to good esthetic advan-tage, in the deepest, largest, and best-protected gallery of the Palace.
Lesser collections had been evicted to make room and visual space for Winged Truth Rising; Lazamon's
Laughing (or Raging] Bacchus; The Last Provocation, by Sarapion; Lazienki's Twisting Room; and
Remembrance of Past Wrongs, by Prajapati.
It chanced that at this time the Lady Yoritomo was at the Palace too. Her duties, as Cultural Leader of
the People, and High Overseer of Educa-tion for the four tributary planets, kept her on the move, and it
often happened that she and her Lord did not see each other for a month or longer at a
time. The two of them trusted each other more than
they trusted anyone else. Today they sat alone in the great gallery and sipped tea, and spoke of business.
The Lady was trying to promote her latest theory, which was that love for the ruling pair might be
implanted genetically in the next gener-ation of people on the tributary worlds. Several experimental
projects had already begun. So far these had achieved little but severe mental retar-dation in the subjects,
but there were plenty of new subjects and she was not discouraged.
The Lord spoke mainly of his own plan, which was to form a more explicit working arrangement with the
berserkers. In this scheme the Yoritomos would furnish the killer machines with human lives they did not
need, and planets hard to de-fend, in exchange for choice works of art and, of course, immunity from
personal attack. The plan had many attractive features, but the Lord had to admit that the difficulty of
opening negotiations with berserkers, let alone establishing any degree of mutual trust, made it somewhat
impractical.
When a pause came in the conversation, Yoritomo had the banal thought that he and his wife had little to
talk about anymore, outside of business. With a word to her, he rose from the alcove where they had
been sitting, and walked to the far end of the gallery of statues to replenish the tea pot. For esthetic
reasons he refused to allow robots in here; nor did he want human servitors around while this private
discussion was in prog-ress. Also, he thought, as he retraced his steps, the Lady could not help but be
flattered, and won toward his own position in a certain matter where
they disagreed, when she was served personally by the hands of one so mighty...
He rounded the great metal flank of The Last Provocation and came to a dumb halt, in shocked surprise
so great that for a moment his facial ex-pression did not even alter. Half a minute ago he had left her
vivacious and thoughtful and full of graceful energy. She was still in the same place, on the settee, but
slumped over sideways now, one arm extended with its slender, jeweled finger twitching upon the rich
brown carpet. The Lady's hair was wildly disarranged; and small wonder, he thought madly, for her head
had been twisted almost completely around, so her dead eyes now looked over one bare shoulder
almost straight at Yoritomo. Upon her shoulder and her cheek were bruised discolorations...
He spun around at last, dropping the fragile masterpiece that held his tea. His concealed weapon was
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half-drawn before it was smashed out of his grip. He had one look at death, serenely towering above
him. He had not quite time enough to shriek, before the next blow fell.
The wind had not rested in the hours since Ritwan's arrival, and with an endless howl it drove the restless
land before it. He could quite easily believe that in a few years the great pit left by the destruction of the
old Yoritomo Palace had been completely filled. The latest dig had ended only yesterday, and already the
archaeologists' fresh pits were beginning to be reoccupied by sand.
"They were actually more pirates than anything else," Iselin, the chief archaeologist, was saying. "At the
peak of their power two hundred years ago they ruled four systems. Ruled them from here, though
there's not much showing on the surface now but this old sandpile."
"Ozymandias," Ritwan murmured.
"What?"
"An ancient poem." He pushed back sandy hair from his forehead with a thin, nervous hand. "I wish I'd
got here in time to see the statues before you crated them and stowed them on your ship. You can
imagine I came as fast as I could from Sirgol, when I heard there was a dig in progress here."
"Well." Iselin folded her plump arms and frowned, then smiled, a white flash in a dark Indian face. "Why
don't you ride with us back to Esteel system? I really can't open the crates for anything until we get there.
Not under the com-plicated rules of procedure we're stuck with on these jointly sponsored digs."
"My ship does have a good autopilot."
"Then set it to follow ours, and hop aboard. When we unpack on Esteel you can be among the first to
look your fill. Meanwhile we can talk. I wish you'd been with us all along, we've missed having a really
first-rate art historian."
"All right, I'll come." They offered each other enthusiastic smiles. "It's true, then, you really found most of
the old St. Gervase collection in-tact?"
"I don't know that we can claim that. But there's certainly a lot."
"Just lying undisturbed here, for about two cen-turies."
"Well, as I say, this was the Yoritomos' safe port. But it looks like no more than a few thousand people
ever lived on this world at any one time, and no one at all has lived here for a considerable period. Some
intrigue or other evidently started among the Tyrant's lieutenants—no one's ever learned exactly how or
why it started, but the thieves fell out. There was fighting, the Palace destroyed, the rulers themselves
killed, and the whole thing collapsed. None of the intriguers had the ability to keep it going, I suppose,
with the so-called Lord and Lady gone."
"Just when was that?"
Iselin named a date.
"The same year St. Gervase fell. That fits. The Yoritomos could have gone there after the ber-serkers
left, and looted at their leisure. That would fit with their character, wouldn't it?"
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"I'm afraid so... you see, the more I learned of them, the more I felt sure that they must have had a
deeper, more secret shelter than any that was turned up in the early digs a century ago. The thing is, the
people who dug here then found so much loot they were convinced they'd found it all."
Ritwan was watching the pits fill slowly in.
Iselin gave his arm a friendly shake. "And—did I tell you? We found two skeletons, I think of the
Yoritomos themselves. Lavishly dressed in the midst of their greatest treasures. Lady died of a broken
neck, and the man of multiple..."
The wind was howling still, when the two ships lifted off.
Aboard ship on the way to Esteel, things were
relaxed and pleasant, if just a trifle cramped. With Ritwan along, they were six on board, and had to fit
three to a cabin in narrow bunks. It was par-tially the wealth of the find that crowded them, of course.
There were treasures almost beyond imagining stowed in plastic cratings almost everywhere one looked.
The voyagers could ex-pect a good deal of leisure time eri route to marvel at it all. Propulsion and
guidance and life-support were taken care of by machinery, with just an occasional careful human glance
by way of cir-cumspection. People in this particular portion of the inhabited Galaxy traveled now, as they
had two hundred years before, in relative security from berserker attack. And now there were no human
pirates.
Lashed in place in the central cargo bay stood the five great, muffled forms from which Ritwan
particularly yearned to tear the pads and sheeting. But he made himself be patient. On the first day out he
joined the others in the cargo bay, where they watched and listened to some of the old recordings found
in the lower ruins of the Yoritomo Palace. There were data stored on tapes, in crystal cubes, around old
permafrozen circuit rings. And much of the information was in the form of messages recorded by the
Tyrant himself.
"The Gods alone know why he recorded this one," sighed Oshogbo. She was chief archivist of a large
Esteel museum, one of the expedition's sponsoring institutions. "Listen to this. Look at him. He's ordering
a ship to stand by and be boarded, or face destruction."
"The ham actor in him, maybe," offered Chi-nan, who on planet had been an assistant digger for the
expedition, but in space became its cap-tain. "He needed to study his delivery."
"Every one of his ships could carry the record-ing," suggested Klyuchevski, expert excavator. "So their
victims wouldn't know if the Tyrant himself were present or not—I'm not sure how much difference it
would make."
"Let's try another," said Granton, chief record-keeper and general assistant.
Within the next hour they sampled recordings in which Yoritomo: (1) ordered his subordinates to stop
squabbling over slaves and concubines; (2) pleaded his case, to the Interworlds Government, as that of a
man unjustly maligned, the represen-tative of a persecuted people; (3) conducted a video tour, for some
supposed audience whose identity was never made clear, of the most breathtaking parts of his vast
collection of art...
"Wait!" Ritwan broke in. "What was that bit? Would you run that last part once more?"
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