Frost and Fire Read online

  No.

  To fill one time more? Rising, passing hard-filled particle-clouds? Rising, singing, to high place of food-fall source? Indeterminate intersection, fall-angles axes… . Find it, somewhere, up. Cease singing there. Find it, feel it, know it and fall. To mount sky-high, singing, wind-dance, end-dance, touching textures. Feeling, thrusting, calling. Better to fall from high than from some middle height, knowing perhaps, telling …

  Go then, high up, before bursting of bag. To know source. Understand mystery. Fall then, far, silent at last and knowing, down Everdeep, knowing. To have touched. Knowing source, life. Returned Voice? No matter. To know, at singing’s last.

  Inflating now. Like jagged lightnings in body, the pain. To open. Calling, young of his voice, “Go not. Go not now. Stay. Browse and sing.”

  Singing this, too, into storm and fall, counterpoint, inflating. Growing, pain like heat. To go. To go. High. To sense, to sing back, feeling …

  Rising, slowly. Going. Rising. Hello, hello. Going. Goodbye, good-bye.

  Touching, textures of cloud. Soft, hard. Warm, cool. Rising, tower of warm air, there. Join it.

  Easier way, thus. Mounting faster. Fountain of warmth. Riding, rising. Higher. Through clouds. Up.

  Bright cracklings, wind-pushed clouds, browsers, food-fall. Higher …

  Soaring, expanding. Hot pains, creaking of bag. Faster. Tossed and spinning.

  Song-dampening, clouds, winds, crackling. Voices tiny, tinier. There below, fire-flecked, cloud-dappled, wind-washed, fall-swept, small—young of this voice, listening. Listening.

  Higher …

  Singing back, this voice. Telling. Telling, of lift and drift. Of rising. Below, young of this voice, hearing …

  Rising …

  … into heat, into continuing foodfall.

  “Voice here, voice here”—singing of this voice, to singers there.

  Going, down the song? Hearing, some voice, somewhere? Above?

  Higher …

  Singing, more loudly now, within heat-rise. Reaching, reaching… . Expanding, creaking. Pain, hot and spreading.

  Is heat, all…

  Beat, beat, beat, beat, beat. Following, pulse of the Everdeep. Matching, pulse of this voice. Slow, steady. Calling. Sending song of this voice back down …

  “Voice here… .”

  Answers not.

  Again …

  “Returned Voice? Breaking soon, this bag, this voice. Sing back.”

  Answers not. Higher. Higher. So high, never. Below, all clouds. Evercloud. Smothered, songs of the young of this voice. Too far …

  Above, tiny. Something, something… . Singing, strange voice, strange song, never of this voice heard… .

  Understanding not.

  Higher. Hotter …

  “Voice here.

  Something, somewhere above. Far. Too far. Louder now, strange singing. Matching it, this voice, now. Trying. To it, “Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm? Returned Voice? To Ever-deep, soon, this voice. Bear this voice, bodyfeed this voice, down. Down Everdeep, Returned Voice. To place of ever-calm, food-full skies, no mating, no birthing, no bagburst, strifeless and ever song perfect. Hello, hello? Returned Voice? Returned Voice. Hello? Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm.”

  Above and tiny. Above and tiny. Fast-moving. Too far. Too far. Goes not up, the singing. Varies not the song from on high. No answer.

  Shuddering, creaking, tearing. Heat, heat. Now, now the breaking.

  The pain …

  Buffeted, swept sidewise. Turned. Spinning. Collapsing. Grows smaller, skies, all. Falling. Falling. Smaller. Goodbye. The fall, the fall of this voice begins.

  Down, twisting. Faster …

  Faster thanfoodfall, through clouds, back, cooler, cooler, unvoiced, shrinking. Lights, fires, winds, songs, fleeing past. Loud, loud. Good-bye. Pulse of Everdeep. Hello. Returned Voice? Falling …

  Spiral symmetry vectoring indicates —

  Pulsing is all… .

  After dinner Rick, vaguely troubled, walked to the control center. It bothered him now, having stepped on the other man’s pet idea. Ten minutes’ penance, he decided, should be sufficient to sop his conscience, and he could check his own instruments while he was in the place.

  When he entered the bright, cool chamber, he saw Morton doing a small dance to a sequence of eerie sounds emerging from one of his monitors.

  “Rick!” he exclaimed as he caught sight of him. “Listen to this stuff I picked up!”

  “I am.”

  The notes of the creature’s death song emerged from the speaker.

  “Sounds as if one of them rose to an unusual height. I’d figured them for a lower lev—”

  “It’s atmospheric,” Rick said. “There’s nothing down there. You’re getting neurotic about this business.”

  He wanted to bite his tongue immediately, but he could not help saying what he felt.

  “We’ve never picked up anything atmospheric at that frequency.”

  “You know what happens to artists who fall in love with their models? They come to a bad end. The same applies to scientists.”

  “Keep listening. Something’s doing it. Then it breaks off suddenly, as if—”

  “It’s different, all right. But I just don’t think anything could cut it down in that soup.”

  “I’ll talk to them one day,” Morton insisted.

  Rick shook his head, then forced himself to talk again.

  “Play it over,” he suggested.

  Morton pushed a button and after several moments’ pause the buzzing, humming, whistling sequence started anew.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier,” Morton remarked, “about communication …”

  “Yes?”

  “You asked what we’d have to say to each other.”

  “Exactly. If they’re there.”

  The sounds rose in pitch. Rick began to feel uncomfortable. Could there possibly? …

  “They would have no words for all of the concrete things which fill our lives,” Morton stated, “and even many of our abstractions are based upon the possession of human anatomy and physiology. Our poetry of valley and mountain, river and field, night and day with stars and sun would not come through well.”

  Rick nodded. If they exist, he wondered, what would they have that we want?

  “Perhaps only music and mathematics, our most abstract art and science, could serve as points of contact,” Morton went on. “Beyond that, some sort of metalanguage would really have to be developed.”

  “A record of their songs might have some commercial value,” Rick mused.

  “And then?” the smaller man suggested. “Would we be the serpent in their Eden, detailing wonders they might never experience directly, causing them some strange existential traumas? Or could it possibly be the other way around? What may they know or feel that we have not even guessed?”

  “I’m getting some ideas for breaking this thing down mathematically, to see whether there’s a real logic sequence behind it,” Rick said suddenly. “I think I’ve seen some linguistic formulations that might apply.”

  “Linguistics?” Morton observed. “That’s not your area.”

  “I know, but I love math theory, no matter where it’s from.”

  “Interesting. What if they had a complex mathematics that the human mind simply could not comprehend?”

  “I’d go mad over it,” Rick replied. “It would snare my soul.” Then he laughed. “But there’s nothing there, Morty. We’re just screwing around… . Unless there’s a pattern,” he decided. “Then we cash in.”

  Morton grinned.

  “There is. I’m sure of it.”

  That night Rick’s sleep was troubled by strange periodicities. The rhythms of the song throbbed in his head. He dreamed that the song and the language were one with a mathematical vision no bilaterally symmetrical brain could ever share. He dreamed of ending his days in frustration, seeing the thing cracked by brute computer force but never being able to comprehend the elegance.
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br />   In the morning he forgot. He located the formulations for Morton and translated them into a program of analysis, humming an irregular tune which never went quite right as he worked.

  Later, he went to a port and stared for a long while at the giant ringed world itself. After a time it bothered him, not being able to decide whether he was looking up or looking down.

  ITSELF SURPRISED

  I’d never thought Fred Saberhagen would allow anyone else to write a berserker story, so I was surprised when he told me he was going to do just that, with Berserker Base (Tor, 1985), obtaining stories from Foul Anderson, Ed Bryant, Steve Donaldson, Larry Niven, and Connie Willis. Would I do one, too? Sure, I said. I was flattered, honored even. And it would give me an opportunity to try out an interesting notion Fd come up with on reading A Hideous History of Weapons, by Cherney Berg (Crowell-Collier, 1963). In following the development of weaponry from the primitive through the sophisticated Fd noted that weapons and defenses and new weapons really did appear to arise in response to each other with such a chartable predictability that the area might well be viewed as one of the few classic examples of a dialectic doing just what dialectics are supposed to do — thesis, antithesis, synthesis, ad nauseum. All I had to do was consider the berserker as the thesis and apply the formula.

  Thanks, Fred; thanks, Cherney; thanks, Hegel… .

  * * *

  It was said that a berserker could, if necessity required, assume even a pleasing shape. But there I was no such requirement here. Flashing through the billion-starred silence, the berserker was massive and dark and purely functional in design. It was a planet buster of a machine headed for the world called Corlano, where it would pound cities to rubble—eradicate an entire biosphere. It possessed the ability to do this without exceptional difficulty. No subtlety, no guile, no reliance on fallible goodlife were required. It had its directive; it had its weapons. It never wondered why this should be the way of its kind. It never questioned the directive. It never speculated whether it might be, in its own fashion, itself a life-form, albeit artificial. It was a single-minded killing machine, and if purpose may be considered a virtue, it was to this extent virtuous.

  Almost unnecessarily, its receptors scanned far ahead. It knew that Corlano did not possess extraordinary defenses. It anticipated no difficulties.

  Who hath drawn the circuits for the lion?

  There was something very distant and considerably off course. … A world destroyer on a mission would not normally deviate for anything so tiny, however.

  It rushed on toward Corlano, weapon systems ready.

  Wade Kelman felt uneasy as soon as he laid eyes on the thing. He shifted his gaze to MacFarland and Dorphy.

  “You let me sleep while you chased that junk down, matched orbits, grappled it? You realize how much time that wasted?”

  “You needed the rest,” the small, dark man named Dorphy replied, looking away.

  “Bullshit! You know I’d have said no!”

  “It might be worth something, Wade,” MacFarland observed.

  “This is a smuggling run, not a salvage operation. Time is important.”

  “Well, we’ve got the thing now,” MacFarland replied. “No sense arguing over what’s done.”

  Wade bit off a nasty rejoinder. He could push things only so far. He wasn’t really captain, not in the usual sense. The three of them were in this together—equal investments, equal risk. But he knew how to pilot the small vessel better than either of them. That and their deference to him up to this point had revived command reflexes from both happier and sadder days. Had they awakened him and voted on this bit of salvage, he would obviously have lost. He knew, however, that they would still look to him in an emergency.

  He nodded sharply.

  “All right, we’ve got it,” he said. “What the hell is it?”

  “Damned if I know, Wade,” replied MacFarland, a stocky, light-haired man with pale eyes and a crooked mouth. He looked out through the lock and into the innards of the thing quick-sealed there beside them. “When we spotted it, I thought it was a lifeboat. It’s about the right size—”

  “And?”

  “We signaled, and there was no reply.”

  “You mean you broke radio silence for that piece of junk?”

  “If it was a lifeboat, there could be people aboard, in trouble.”

  “Not too bloody likely, judging from its condition. Still,” he sighed, “you’re right. Go ahead.”

  “No signs of any electrical activity either.”

  “You chased it down just for the hell of it, then?”

  Dorphy nodded.

  “That’s about right,” he said.

  “So, it’s full of treasure?”

  “I don’t know what it’s full of. It’s not a lifeboat, though.”

  “Well, I can see that.”

  Wade peered through the opened lock into the interior of the thing. He took the flashlight from Dorphy, moved forward, and shone it about. There was no room for passengers amid the strange machinery.

  “Let’s ditch it,” he said. “I don’t know what all that crap in there is, and it’s damaged anyway. I doubt it’s worth its mass to haul anywhere.”

  “I’ll bet the professor could figure it out,” Dorphy said.

  “Let the poor lady sleep. She’s cargo, not crew, anyway. What’s it to her what this thing is?”

  “Suppose—just suppose—that’s a valuable piece of equipment,” Dorphy said. “Say, something experimental. Somebody might be willing to pay for it.”

  “And suppose it’s a fancy bomb that never went off?”

  Dorphy drew back from the hatch.

  “I never thought of that.”

  “I say deep-six it.”

  “Without even taking a better look?”

  “Right. I don’t even think you could squeeze very far in there.”

  “Me? You know a lot more about engineering than either of us.”

  “That’s why you woke me up, huh?”

  “Well, now that you’re here—”

  Wade sighed. Then he nodded slowly.

  “That would be crazy and risky and totally unproductive.”

  He stared through the lock at the exotic array of equipment inside. “Pass me that trouble light.”

  He accepted the light and extended it through the lock.

  “It’s been holding pressure okay?”

  “Yeah. We slapped a patch on the hole in its hull.”

  “Well, what the hell.”

  He passed through the lock, dropped to his knees, leaned forward. He held the light before him, moved it from side to side. His uneasiness would not go away. There was something very foreign about all those cubes and knobs, their connections… . And that one large housing… . He reached out and tapped upon the hull. Foreign.

  “I’ve got a feeling it’s alien,” he said.

  He entered the small open area before him. Then he had to duck his head and proceed on his hands and knees. He began to touch things—fittings, switches, connectors, small units of unknown potential. Almost everything seemed designed to swivel, rotate, move along tracks. Finally, he lay flat and crawled forward.

  “I believe that a number of these units are weapons,” he called out, after studying them for some time.

  He reached the big housing. A panel slid partway open as he passed his fingertips along its surface. He pressed harder, and it opened farther.

  “Damn you!” he said then, as the unit began to tick softly.

  “What’s wrong?” Dorphy called to him.

  “You!” he said, beginning to back away. “And your partner! You’re wrong!”

  He turned as soon as he could and made his way back through the lock.

  “Ditch it!” he said. “Now!”

  Then he saw that Juna, a tall study in gray and paleness, stood leaning against a bulkhead, holding a cup of tea.

  “And if we’ve got a bomb, toss it in there before you kick it loose!” he added.<
br />
  “What did you find?” she asked him in her surprisingly rich voice.

  “That’s some kind of fancy thinking device in there,” he told her. “It tried to kick on when I touched it. And I’m. sure a bunch of those gadgets are weapons. Do you know what that means?”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Alien design, weapons, brain. My partners just salvaged a damaged berserker, that’s what. And it’s trying to turn itself back on. It’s got to go—fast.”

  “Are you absolutely certain that’s what it is?” she asked him.

  “Certain, no. Scared, yes.”

  She nodded and set her cup aside. She raised her hand to her mouth and coughed.

  “I’d like to take a look at it myself before you get rid of it,” she said softly.

  Wade gnawed his lower lip.

  “Juna,” he said, “I can understand your professional interest in the computer, but we’re supposed to deliver you to Corlano intact, remember?”

  She smiled for the first time since he’d met her some weeks before.

  “I really want to see it.”

  Her smile hardened. He nodded.

  “Make it a quick look.”

  “I’ll need my tools. And I want to change into some working clothes.”

  She turned and passed through the hatch to her right. He glared at his partners, shrugged, and turned away.

  Seated on the edge of his bunk and eating breakfast from a small tray while Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances swirled about him, Wade reflected on berserkers, Dr. Juna Bayel, computers in general, and how they all figured together in the reason for this trip. Berserker scouts had been spotted periodically in this sector during the past few years. By this time the berserkers must be aware that Corlano was not well defended. This made for some nervousness within the segment of Corlano’s population made up of refugees from a berserker attack upon distant Djelbar almost a generation before. A great number had chosen Corlano as a world far removed from earlier patterns of berserker activity. Wade snorted at a certain irony this had engendered. It was those same people who had lobbied so long and so successfully for the highly restrictive legislation Corlano now possessed regarding the manufacture and importation of knowledge-processing machines, a species of group paranoia going back to their berserker trauma.