Limits (13 page)

Harvest had bothered him. He had asked that the monitoring station be destroyed. It wasn’t that the program (Ras Singh, at that time) might revolt. Gage feared that berserkers might come to Harvest, might find the mon
i
toring station, might rob the computer for components…and find them s
u
perior to their own machinery.

He had been laughed at. When Singh asked that his personality be erased, Gage had asked again. That time he had been given more makework. Find a way to make the station safe.

He had tried. There was the Remora sub-program; but it had to be so
versatile! Lung problems had interrupted his work before he was fully sa
t
isfied with it. Otherwise he had no weapons at all.

And the berserker had come.

The beast was damaged. Something had probed right through the hull—a terrific thickness of hull, no finesse here, just mass to absorb the energies of an attack—and Gage wondered if it had received that wound attacking Channith. He’d know more if he could permit himself to use radar or ne
u
trino beams; but he limited himself to passive instruments, including the telescope.

The two-hundred-year project was over. The berserker would act to e
x
terminate every microbe in the water and air of Harvest. Gage was prepared to watch Harvest die. He toyed with the idea that when it was over, the fo
r
tress would be exhausted of weapons and energy, a sitting duck for any human warfleet…but there were no weapons in the Harvest system. For now, Hilary Gage could only record the event for Channith’s archives.

Were there still archives? Had that thing attended to Channith before it came here? There was no way to know.

What did a berserker do when the target didn’t fight back? Two centuries ago, Harvest had been lifeless, with a reducing atmosphere, as Earth itself had been once. Now life was taking hold. To the berserker, this ball of co
l
ored slimes was life, the enemy. It would attack. How?

He needn’t call the berserker’s attention to himself. Doubtless the m
a
chine could sense life…but Gage was not alive. Would it destroy random machinery? Gage was not hidden, but he didn’t use much energy; solar panels were enough to keep the station running.

The berserker was landing on Teardrop.

Time passed. Gage watched. Presently the berserker’s drive spewed blue flame.

The berserker wasn’t wasting fuel; its drive drew its energies from the fabric of space itself. But what was it trying to accomplish?

Then Hilary understood, in his mind and in the memory-ghost of his gut. The berserker machine was not expending its own strength. It had found its weapon in nature.

The violet star fanned forward along Teardrop’s orbit. That would have been a sixty-gravity drive for the berserker alone. Attached to an asteroid three thousand times its mass, it was still slowing Teardrop by .02 G, hour
after hour.

One hundred years of labor. He might gamble Harvest against hi
m
self…a half-terraformed world against components to repair a damaged berserker.

He toyed with the idea. He’d studied recordings of berserker messages before he was himself recorded. But there were better records already in the computer.

The frequencies were there, and the coding: star and world locations, fuel and mass and energy reserves, damage description, danger probabilities, orders of priority of targets; some specialized language to describe esoteric weaponry as used by self-defensive life; a code that would translate into the sounds of human or alien speech; a simplified code for a brain-damaged berserker…

Gage discarded his original intent. He couldn’t conceivably pose as a berserker. Funny, though: he felt no fear. The glands were gone, but the
habit
of fear…had he lost that too?

Teardrop’s orbit was constricting like a noose.

Pose as something else!

Think it through. He needed more than just a voice. Pulse, breath: he had recordings. Vice-president Curly Barnes had bid him goodby in front of a thousand newspickups,
after
Gage became a recording, and the speech was in his computer memory. A tough old lady, Curly, far too arrogant to pose as Goodlife, but he’d use his own vocabulary…hold it. What about the technician who had chatted with him while testing his reflexes? Angelo Carson was a long-time smoker, long overdue for a lungbath, and the deep rasp in his lungs was perfect!

He focused his maser and let the raspy breathing play while he thought.
Anything else?
Would it expect a picture? Best do without. Remember to cut the breathing while you talk.
After
the inhale.

“This is Goodlife speaking for the fortress moon. The fortress moon is damaged.”

The fan of light from Teardrop didn’t waver, and answer came there none.

The records were old: older than Gage the man, far older than Gage in his present state. Other minds had run this computer system, twice before. Ho
l
stein and Ras Singh had been elderly men, exemplary citizens, who chose
this over simple death. Both had eventually asked to be wiped. Gage had only been a computer for eighteen years. Could he be using an obsolete pr
o
gramming language?

Ridiculous.
No code would be obsolete. Some berserkers did not see a repair station in centuries. They would
have
to communicate somehow…or was this life thinking? There were certainly repair stations; but many be
r
serker machines might simply fight until they wore out or were destroyed. The military forces of Channith had never been sure.

Try again. Don’t get too emotional. This isn’t
a soap
. Goodlife—human servants of the berserkers—would be trained to suppress their emotions, wouldn’t they? And maybe he couldn’t fake it anyway…“This is Goodlife.
The fortress moon—” Nice phrase, that.
“—is damaged.
All transmitting devices were destroyed in battle with…Albion.” Exhale, inhale— “The fo
r
tress moon has stored information regarding Albion’s defenses.” Albion was a spur-of-the-moment inspiration. His imagination picked a yellow dwarf star, behind him as he looked toward Channith, with a family of four dead planets. The berserker had come from Channith; how would it know? Halt Angelo’s
breath
on the intake and, “Life support systems damaged. Goodlife is dying.” He thought to add,
please answer
, and didn’t. Goodlife would not beg, would he?
and
Gage had his pride.

He sent again. “I am—” Gasp. “Goodlife is dying. Fortress moon is mute. Sending equipment damaged, motors damaged, life support system damaged. Wandering fortress must take information from fortress moon computer sy
s
tem directly.” Exhale, listen to that wheeze, poor bastard
must
be dying; i
n
hale—“If wandering fortress needs information not stored, it must bring o
x
ygen for Goodlife.” That, he thought, had the right touch: begging without begging.

Gage’s receiver spoke.
“Will complete present mission and rendezvous.”

Gage raged…and said, “Understood.” That was death for Harvest. Hell, it
might
have worked! But a berserker’s priorities were fixed, and Goodlife wouldn’t argue.

Was it fooled?
if
not, he’d just thrown away anything he might learn of the berserker. Channith would never see it; Gage would be dead. Slagged or dismembered.

When the light of the fortress’s drive dimmed almost to nothing, Tea
r
drop glowed of itself: it was brushing Harvest’s atmosphere. Cameras
whirled in the shock wave and died one by one. A last camera showed a white glare shading to violet…gone.

The fortress surged ahead of Teardrop, swung around the curve of Harvest and moved toward the outer moon: toward Gage. Its drive was powerful. It could be here in six hours, Gage thought. He sent heavy, irre
g
ular breathing, Angelo’s raspy breath, with interruptions.
“Uh.
Uh?
Goodlife is dying. Goodlife is…is dead. Fortress moon has stored info
r
mation…self-defending life…locus is Albion, coordinates…” followed by silence.

Teardrop was on the far side of Harvest now, but the glow of it made a ring of white flame round the planet. The glow flared and began to die. Gage watched the shock wave rip through the atmosphere. The planet’s crust parted, exposing lava; the ocean rolled to close the gap. Almost suddenly, Harvest was a white pearl. The planet’s oceans would be water vapor before this day ended.

The berserker sent, “Goodlife. Answer or be punished. Give coordinates for Albion.”

Gage left the carrier beam on. The berserker would sense no life in the lunar base.
Poor Goodlife, faithful to the last.

100101101110 had its own views regarding Goodlife. Experience showed that Goodlife was true to its origins: it tended to go wrong, to turn dangerous. It would have been destroyed when convenient…but that would not be needed now.

Machinery and records were another matter.
As the berserker drew near the moon, its telescopes picked up details of the trapped machine.
It saw lunar soil heaped over a dome. Its senses peered inside.

Machinery occupied most of what it could see. There was little room for a life support system. A box of a room, and stored air, and tubes through which robot or Goodlife could crawl to repair damage; no more. That was reassuring; but design details were unfamiliar.

Hypothesis: the trapped berserker had used life-begotten components for its repairs. There was no sign of a drive; no sign of abandoned wreckage. Hypothesis: one of these craters was a crash site; the cripple had moved its brain and whatever else survived into an existing installation built by life.

Anything valuable in the Goodlife’s memory was now lost…but perhaps the “fortress moon’s” memory was intact. It would know the patterns of life
in this vicinity. Its knowledge of technology used by local self-defensive life might be even more valuable.

Hypothesis: it was a trap. There was no fortress moon, only a human voice. The
berserker moved in with shields and drive
ready. The closer it came, the faster it could dodge beyond the horizon…but it saw nothing r
e
sembling weaponry. In any case, the berserker had been allowed to destroy a planet. Surely there was nothing here that could threaten it. It remained ready nonetheless.

At a hundred kilometers the berserker’s senses found no life.
Nor at fifty.

The berserker landed next to the heap of lunar earth that Goodlife had called “fortress moon.” Berserkers did not indulge in rescue operations. What was useful in the ruined berserker would become part of the intact one. So: reach out with a cable, find the brain.

It had landed, and still the fear didn’t come. Gage had seen wrecks, but never an intact berserker sitting alongside him. Gage dared not use any kind of beam scanner. He felt free to use his sensors, his eyes.

He watched a tractor detach itself from the berserker and come toward him, trailing cable.

It was like a dream. No fear, no rage…hate, yes, but like an abstraction of hate, along with an abstract thirst for vengeance…which felt ridiculous, as it had always felt a bit ridiculous. Hating a berserker was like hating a ma
l
functioning air conditioner.

Then the probe entered his mind.

The thought patterns were strange. Here they were sharp, basic; here they were complex and blurred. Was this an older model with obsolete data pa
t
terns? Or had the brain been damaged, or the patterns scrambled? Signal for a memory dump, see what can be retrieved.

Gage felt the contact, the feedback, as his own thoughts. What followed was not under his control. Reflex told him to fight! Horror had risen in his mind, impulses utterly forbidden by custom, by education, by all the ways in which he had learned to be human.

It might have felt like rape; how was a man to tell? He wanted to scream. But he triggered the Remora program and felt it take hold, and he sensed the
berserker’s reaction to Gage within the berserker.

He screamed in triumph. “I lied! I am not Goodlife! What I am—”

Plasma moving at relativistic velocities smashed deep into Gage. The link was
cut,
his senses went blind and deaf. The following blow smashed his brain and he was gone.

Something was wrong. One of the berserker’s brain complexes was sick, was dying…was changing, becoming monstrous. The berserker felt evil within itself, and it reacted. The plasma cannon blasted the “fortress moon,” then swung round to face backward. It would fire through its own hull to destroy the sick brain, before it was too late.