the size of a small novel, yet his computer-mind could apprehend its totality. It was his life’s story, his only shot at immortality. It had unity and balance; the rhyme and meter, at least, were flawless; but did it have thrust? Reading it from start to finish was more difficult than he had ever expected. He had to forget the totality, which a normal reader would not immediately sense, and proceed in linear fashion. Judge the flow…
“No castrato ever sung so pure—” Good, but not here. He exchanged it for a chunk of phrasing elsewhere. No word-processor program had ever been this easy! The altered emphasis caused him to fiddle further…and his description of the berserker-blasted world Perry’s Footprint seemed to read with more impact now.
Days and years of fear and rage. In his youth he had fought men. Cha n nith needed to safeguard its sphere of influence. Aliens existed somewhere, and berserkers existed somewhere, but Gage knew them only as rumor, until the day he saw Perry’s Footprint. The Free Gaea rebels had done well to flee to Perry’s Footprint, to show him the work of the berserkers on a living world.
It was so difficult to conquer a world, and so easy to destroy it. Afterward he could no longer fight men.
His superiors could have retired him. Instead he was promoted and set to investigating the defense of Channith against the berserker machines.
They must have thought of it as makework: an employment project. It was almost like being a tourist at government expense. In nearly forty years he never saw a live…an active berserker; but, traveling in realms where they were more than rumor, perhaps he had learned too much about them. They were all shapes, all sizes. Here they traveled in time. There they walked in human shape that sprouted suddenly into guns and knives. Machines could be destroyed, but they could never be made afraid.
A day came when his own fear was everything. He couldn’t make dec i sions…it was in the poem, here . Wasn’t it? He couldn’t feel it. A poet should have glands!
He wasn’t sure, and he was afraid to meddle further. Mechanically it worked. As poetry it might well be too…mechanical.
Maybe he could get someone to read it?
His chance might come unexpectedly soon. In his peripheral awareness he sensed ripplings in the 2.7 microwave background of space: the bow shock of a spacecraft approaching in C-plus from the direction of Channith. An unexpected supervisor from the homeworld? Hilary filed the altered poem and turned his attention to the signal.
Too slow! Too strong! Too far! Mass at 10 12 grams and a tremendous power source barely able to hold it in a C-plus-excited state, even in the near-flat space between stars. It was light-years distant, days away at its tormented crawl; but it occluded Channith’s star, and Gage found that ho r rifying.
Berserker.
Its signal code might be expressed as a flash of binary bits, 100101101110; or as a moment of recognition, with a description embedded; but never as a sound, and never as a name.
100101101110 had three identical brains, and a reflex that allowed it to act on a consensus of two. In battle it might lose one, or two, and never sense a change in personality. A century ago it had been a factory, an auxiliary warcraft, and a cluster of mining machines on a metal asteroid. Now the three were a unit. At the next repair station its three brains might be installed in three different ships. It might be reprogrammed, or damaged, or wired into other machinery, or disassembled as components for something else. Such a thing could not have an independent existence. To name itself would be inane.
Perhaps it dreamed. The universe about it was a simple one, aflow with energies; it had to be monitored for deviations from the random, for order. Order was life—or berserker.
The mass of the approaching star distorted space. When space became too curved, 100101101110 surrendered its grip on the C-plus-excited state. Its
“No castrato ever sung so pure—” Good, but not here. He exchanged it for a chunk of phrasing elsewhere. No word-processor program had ever been this easy! The altered emphasis caused him to fiddle further…and his description of the berserker-blasted world Perry’s Footprint seemed to read with more impact now.
Days and years of fear and rage. In his youth he had fought men. Cha n nith needed to safeguard its sphere of influence. Aliens existed somewhere, and berserkers existed somewhere, but Gage knew them only as rumor, until the day he saw Perry’s Footprint. The Free Gaea rebels had done well to flee to Perry’s Footprint, to show him the work of the berserkers on a living world.
It was so difficult to conquer a world, and so easy to destroy it. Afterward he could no longer fight men.
His superiors could have retired him. Instead he was promoted and set to investigating the defense of Channith against the berserker machines.
They must have thought of it as makework: an employment project. It was almost like being a tourist at government expense. In nearly forty years he never saw a live…an active berserker; but, traveling in realms where they were more than rumor, perhaps he had learned too much about them. They were all shapes, all sizes. Here they traveled in time. There they walked in human shape that sprouted suddenly into guns and knives. Machines could be destroyed, but they could never be made afraid.
A day came when his own fear was everything. He couldn’t make dec i sions…it was in the poem, here . Wasn’t it? He couldn’t feel it. A poet should have glands!
He wasn’t sure, and he was afraid to meddle further. Mechanically it worked. As poetry it might well be too…mechanical.
Maybe he could get someone to read it?
His chance might come unexpectedly soon. In his peripheral awareness he sensed ripplings in the 2.7 microwave background of space: the bow shock of a spacecraft approaching in C-plus from the direction of Channith. An unexpected supervisor from the homeworld? Hilary filed the altered poem and turned his attention to the signal.
Too slow! Too strong! Too far! Mass at 10 12 grams and a tremendous power source barely able to hold it in a C-plus-excited state, even in the near-flat space between stars. It was light-years distant, days away at its tormented crawl; but it occluded Channith’s star, and Gage found that ho r rifying.
Berserker.
Its signal code might be expressed as a flash of binary bits, 100101101110; or as a moment of recognition, with a description embedded; but never as a sound, and never as a name.
100101101110 had three identical brains, and a reflex that allowed it to act on a consensus of two. In battle it might lose one, or two, and never sense a change in personality. A century ago it had been a factory, an auxiliary warcraft, and a cluster of mining machines on a metal asteroid. Now the three were a unit. At the next repair station its three brains might be installed in three different ships. It might be reprogrammed, or damaged, or wired into other machinery, or disassembled as components for something else. Such a thing could not have an independent existence. To name itself would be inane.
Perhaps it dreamed. The universe about it was a simple one, aflow with energies; it had to be monitored for deviations from the random, for order. Order was life—or berserker.
The mass of the approaching star distorted space. When space became too curved, 100101101110 surrendered its grip on the C-plus-excited state. Its
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