Berserker Omnibus - Berserker Man Part 30

"Alpine is a dangerous planet, Carmen, in more than one way. I mean it's hard to keep a secret from the berserkers, once even a few people on Alpine know it. I don't mean to insult your compatriots, but there it is."

"Goodlife." Her mouth made a little grimace over the word. "The Alpine government is always warning about berserker-lovers, telling everyone to keep military matters secret. But Sixtus always says those goodlife stories are just a device to boost morale. Though I never quite understood why they should have that effect."

"I have access to a lot more information on the subject than Sixtus is likely to see. Take it from me.

Michel would have been in real danger if word had leaked out about why he was really being brought to Earth."

Carmen's eyes were suddenly wide. "When the berserkers attacked us in the Bottleneck Did that have anything to do with-?"

"Did they know anything about Michel? I really don't know." He tried a rea.s.suring smile. "Fortunately you came through it." Actually there had been an additional reason for not telling the Alpine government what was up: in their own somewhat desperate situation vis-a-vis the berserkers, they might have declared Michel a valuable national resource, or something along that line, and forbidden his export. Not that they would then have been able to use him, of course. The right human operator was only half of Lancelot, and to develop the other half had been the work of decades even for mighty Earth.

"I'd like to talk to Michel now, Carmen, fill him in on what's going on. I just wanted to make sure that you were filled in first." The woman nodded slowly. Tupelov was thinking that this was going better, much better, than it might have gone.

When he signaled the outer office, Michel entered immediately, looking as Lombok had described him, and wearing casual clothes grown somewhat too small. Tupelov saw that the boy had already acquired a chunk of soft Earth pine, which nestled like an angular egg in one of his hands; a little carving knife was in the other. Michel looked silently from one adult to the other, his own somewhat pinched face unreadable.

As if welcoming a distinguished adult, the Secretary got up and showed him to a chair. If he'd had any forethought he would have had a softer drink than wine laid in.

"I've just been explaining to your mother," he began, while shaking hands, "that your trip to the Academy is going to have to be delayed." He glanced, as charmingly as possible, back to the woman. "Oh, we'll see to it that he gets one." They would, too, if Michel and the Academy both lasted long enough. "But it might not be for a year or more."

He turned back to the boy, who did not look in the least stunned. "Michel, we have some s.p.a.ce suits and other equipment that we'd like your help in testing." Tupelov was ready to explain that he was not joking.

"I know," Michel answered unexpectedly. He was gazing now with a curious frown at the wallscreen on the Secretary's right, the one unrolling old and jumbled data. "That thing's not working, is it?"

Tupelov turned to the screen and back to the boy. He stared. "How do you know?"

"If you mean about the screen, it's all . . ." Michel made a helpless gesture with one thin arm, throwing away something beyond fixing. "I guess the hardware's all right-almost all right-but the figures are-funny."

"And how did you know about the suits? The things we want you to test?"

"Oh, I don't know what they are. But I know it's you who really brought me. I mean that whole fleet wasn't doing anything else, as far as I could see. It came to Alpine just for us-for me-and brought us straight back here. And what use couldIbe to you, except for some kind of test, or an experiment?"

Carmen's eyes were rounding as she listened to this one-in-a-hundred-billion being who had somehow turned out to be her son. Before either adult could reply, a communicator sounded on Tupelov's desk, and he bent over into its zone of privacy to answer. When he straightened up again he said, "They're ready for us to come to the lab and take a look at Lancelot. Shall we?"

In a chamber not far below the surface they first confronted Michel with the thing they wanted him to wear. The chamber was big enough for football, and its edges were crowded with improbable devices.

Its ma.s.sively girdered ceiling was relatively low, only five meters or so above the floor, and brilliant with pleasant lights.

At one edge of the vast cleared s.p.a.ce in the center of the room, the thing they wanted him to test was waiting, suspended from the overhead and looking vaguely like a parachute harness. Only vaguely.

Actually Michel was reminded not so much of military hardware as of costumes from a school play when he was seven. In the play there had been crowns, and gauzy robes, and for one actor a magic wand to wave. Here no rods of power were visible, but when they had him standing right under the suspended harness someone turned something on, and immediately there were robes in profusion, trailing away from the fragmentary suit across the otherwise empty floor. He recognized it as a great web of some kind of forcefields. The fields seemed to wave in a manner that suggested they were being driven by a racing wind, and after thirty meters or so they vanished, into their own self-contained distance. Michel understood that the waves and folds were really patterns generated in the eye, which wanted to see solidity where there was no more than a certain interference with pa.s.sing light.

He exchanged smiles with his mother, who stood very near him, holding the arm of Ensign Schneider and looking nervous. Then, while murmuring replies to the questions of the technicians who now began to fit the first straps of the harness to him, he turned his head to look at the mirage of field patterns. He let his eyes and mind play with them, seeking out reality beneath.

Tupelov had quietly excused himself, and was now in an adjoining room where some of his science department heads and other important people were watching the fitting via wallscreen; the idea was that the technicians could get on with these preliminaries better if not too much rank was in the way.

Entering the small room, the Secretary acknowledged greetings with a nod, took one look at the screen, and asked the a.s.sembly bluntly, "What do you think?" He knew how premature his question was; but he knew also that if he didn't keep prodding some of these people they'd let things drag on forever. Also an observer from the President's staff was in the group, and the Secretary wanted to be sure the President understood just who was trying to hurry things along.

One of the scientists, a bearded man whose bulging forehead made him rather look the part, shrugged.

"Hardly seems the warrior type."

Tupelov stared. "You mean no big muscles, no steely glare, no commanding presence? You know none of that means s.h.i.+t in terms of the performance we require."

The scientist looked back boldly, though it no doubt cost him an effort. "But that's all we have as yet to evaluate, hey?"

The President's observer, who had arrived from Earth within the hour, interrupted. "But, Mr. Secretary.

What exactly is it that makes Michel the ideal candidate for this job? I mean, I've been shown on paper how well he matches the desired profile. But what is this genetic makeup of his supposed to produce in the way of action?"

"All right. First of all, you can see they're taking their time out there with what looks like a routine job of fitting on some straps. It's really much more than that. There are several powerful kinds of psychic feedback involved, even at the minimum power settings they're using. Most people, you and I included, would already be screaming and trying to get away if we were standing where Michel is now."

The slight, pale-haired figure out there kept turning his head, looking around. That was the only sign that anything might be bothering him.

"But surely," said the President's woman, "what he has is not just-stolidity, or a high pain threshold?"

Tupelov violently shook his head. "One, that kid has as great an affinity for machines as any engineer we've ever tested-so great it gets spooky sometimes. Two, his Intelligence Spectrum goes across the board in high numbers-though not the very highest. Again, an IS like that is ideal. Three, he is simply off the scale in human empathy.

"So far, we might have found a number of good candidates without leaving Earth, where we have ten billion or so citizens to choose from. But we also needed, and Michel also has, an awesome psychological toughness and stability-you might call that stolidity. I suppose. Now what does all this add up to? Well, I've seen an independent evaluation of his measurements, by one of Earth's great psychologists who has no idea what we're up to. She thought the subject might be expected to found a great religion-except for one thing: the leaders.h.i.+p potential is simply not there."

The lady from the President's office tilted her head to one side. "You make that sound like an advantage too, Mr. Secretary."

"Oh, it is." Tupelov bit at a thumbnail, for the moment looking like the village idiot. "You don't yet understand the powers that Lancelot will eventually bestow upon its operator."

After a moment he went on: "My own bet might be for Michel to become a great saint in someone else's church-except we come back to that affinity for mechanism of all kinds, which is simply too overwhelming not to play a great part in his life."

"He doesn't tinker, does he? I thought he carved."

"Oh, it'll come out eventually-it has to. Incidentally, as we were walking over here, I asked him why carving instead of some other art. And he answered without having to think: Carvings last, he said.

They're something that lasts."

The fitters kept gleefully a.s.suring him that he had most of the suit on, now-as if just getting it on were some sort of an ordeal, which, when he thought about it, he supposed might be true for most people.

There were all sorts of signals feeding back from the intricate forcefields into his brain-but he could ride the current, he could keep his balance, even if he had not yet discovered any way to steer. Later he would ask about controls-for now, he had enough to do.

Michel was distracted from his learning by the entrance into the vast room of someone much different from any human being he had ever met before. The newcomer came rolling upon tall wheels in a series of three boxes connected almost like cars of a toy train, and of a size that would have been convenient to ride on. The a.s.sembly was superficially like some of the freight-robots that from time to time appeared here in the background. But the boxes' shapes were all wrong for ordinary freight, and the path of the self-guided conveyance was not deferential enough by several centimeters as it cut across the path of two technicians walking. Nor did the people working with Michel react as to a mere machine's arrival. Their hands paused and their heads turned.

The train rolled to a stop nearby. "Hi, kid," said a casual voice from the front box, its timbre confirming Michel's guess that the occupant was an adult male.

"Hi." He'd heard and read of a few people, in very bad shape physically, who preferred artificial bodies of this style to those of a more humanoid shape-which could never really, Michel supposed, be human enough.

The voice said: "I've tried on that thing you're wearing. Doesn't feel too good, hey?"

"I don't mind it."

"Great! Idomind it, but I can wear it. So maybe, if you have any questions as the work goes on, I can help you find an answer." The tone was infinitely more confident than the words.

"There don't seem to be any controls at all," Michel remarked.

After a pause the voice from the box asked him: "Does your body have any?"

"I see."

"Kid-Michel-what you're wrapped up in there is biotechnology carried to the ultimate. Way ahead of this little circus train I ride around in usually. By the way, my name is Frank."

There was an interruption; the technicians were ready to turn on something else. They did, and with the altered flow of power Michel's perceptions s.h.i.+fted. For him, the meters of solid lunar rock and regolith above his head became transparent. This was followed by another and even more startling transformation, as what had been the black and starry sky turned into something else, an infinite cave draped by innumerable lines and veils of force. It was a s.h.i.+ning mansion whose limitlessness would have frightened him if he could ever have felt fear at anything so impersonal. Slowly his awe pa.s.sed, and he discovered that he could turn away from that new universe and close the Moon overhead once more, willing his perceptions back to his immediate surroundings in the hangar.

In a moment he reached out in a different direction. Two underground levels below, a pair of officers who moved as if they thought themselves very important were talking as they walked together. "The astragalus," said one, "is one of the proximal bones of the tarsus; and it was used in ancient times in randomizing-"

Distraction: Eleven-point-six and a little more kilometers away, a large-sized pebble was falling at meteoric speed toward the lunar surface. An eye-blink later some automated defense machine had taken aim and obliterated the pebble in mid-flight; a mere twitch in a single cell of the complex electronic organism that comprised the main defenses of Moonbase.

Distraction: Somewhere on Moonbase's deepest level, behind doors with the gravest security warnings on them, a hologram-model of the galaxy was packed all round its Core with white blank volumes representing the uncharted and unknown. Amid these a fanatically precise technician was creating an electronic label for something that looked vaguely like a geodesic sphere made out of toothpicks. The label said merely: TAJ. It was something built on a scale of size above that of even the most enormous stars.

Distraction: Something stirred with a life of its own, inside the lower abdomen of the youngest of the female technicians nearby, as two of them reached up to fit Michel with the blinding circlet of what looked like his crown. And even in the heavily s.h.i.+elded boxes of the canned man Michel could detect organic stirrings, peristalsis.

Distraction: A great buzz, which he soon realized must be the thermal motion of air molecules about him.

In a moment, he had learned to tune it out.

When the fitting was over, some twenty minutes after it had begun, he emerged from the helm and harness blinking at the odd version of reality that he had accepted for eleven years with so little thought.

He would never be the same.

FOUR.

The little personnel printout with TEMESVAR ELLISON in block capitals across its top went skittering over the surface of the desk, tossed by Lombok's nimble little fingers. Tupelov's big, soft, nail-bitten ones fumbled it up on the second try.

"His biomother," Lombok announced, in laconic explanation. "Genetic pattern fits too well to leave any real doubt. And she was on Alpine at the right time."

"So?" One glance at each side and Tupelov had read the printout, which outlined Elly Temesvar's service career from enrollment to the time of her resignation approximately eleven years ago. "Doesn't ring any . .

. oh. Wait. This is the girl who was with Marcus, on the second sighting of the Taj. When he went right through part of it trying to shake off a berserker. So she's also Michel's-"

Breaking off in mid-sentence, the Secretary looked at the printout again, executing with unconscious perfection an actor's double-take.

"Exactly," put in Lombok "It looks like Frank Marcus is almost certainly his father. I'll do a genetic pattern study on that too, to make sure."

Tupelov signed agreement. "But very quietly. Do it yourself. Marcus . . . hasn't seen this yet, of course."

"Of course not. No reason to think that he has any suspicion of the relations.h.i.+p. Or that Michel has either."

"The dates all mesh . . . so she got pregnant on that mission. But it says nothing here about her being pregnant when they returned to base-no reason why it should, I suppose-or about pregnancy being a reason when she resigned a few months later. It just quotes her as saying she had, quote, 'lost interest in her career,' unquote. Well, after six months alone with Marcus I can understand anyone quitting."

"If you'll note," said Lombok, "Alpine was the first place they put in at, on their way back to their original base, CORESEC. It would seem she just had the pregnancy terminated at the first place she reasonably could, and never mentioned it to the service doctors."

"Yeah . . . yeah . . . I want to think about this. We'll keep it very quiet for now."

"Agreed?"

"But you're standing there looking at me, Angelo, as if you want permission to do something."

"I think I ought to go see just what Elly Temesvar is up to now. Talk to her. Maybe even bring her to Moonbase, if I can, on some pretext."

"Why?"

"What she is will have some bearing on what Michel is, and will become. And it strikes me that from her service record alone we just don't know very much about her."

"We know her present address?"

"On Earth. At least she was there last year. She agreed to take part in a routine census-sampling then.

Someplace called the Temple of the Final Savior."

"Sounds like a religion. I never heard of it, though."

"Nor I. There are always new ones; they come and go."

Tupelov was silent for a few seconds. He put a finger in his mouth, took it out, picked at the cuticle. "I'm not sure we ought to bring her up here just now. It might only draw attention."

"I would like to have permission to do so, at my discretion. After that ambush at the Bottleneck, in such force, we have to a.s.sume that the enemy knows something of Michel's importance, and that he's here.

Then word will soon reach their local goodlife friends, on Earth. It's not impossible that they'll also know that Temesvar's his mother. The records in the adoption center are supposedly quite secure, but it's on Alpine."

"Yeah. That place. All right, Angelo, if you think you must."

Michel had the feeling that things were being rushed.

He had been on Moonbase just a little longer than one standard day, and this was the second time he had put on Lancelot, and now he was wearing it as his only protection as he rode a large platform elevator up to the airless, frozen nightside surface. The hundred or so adults who rode with him, military people and scientists and technicians, wore s.p.a.cesuits, all of them . . . well, almost all. Frank, as he said, carried his own s.p.a.cesuit with him wherever he went.

Frank's little train of boxes was at Michel's right as they rode up, and at his left stood Edmond Iyenari, head of the scientific team, whose engagingly ugly eyes kept studying Michel keenly from behind their faceplate as the elevator rose.

"All right, Michel?" Dr. Iyenari asked.

"All right."