A jester by his efforts may give laughter to others, but by no labor can he seize it for himself.
I have touched minds that worked hard at revelry. Men and women who poured time and wealth and genius into costumes and music and smiling masks, seeking escape from the terror of the world . . . but who found no laughter.
And no escape.
Finding himself alone and unoccupied, Felipe Nogara chose to spend a free moment in looking at the thing that had brought him out here beyond the last fringe of the galaxy. From the luxury of his quarters he stepped up into his private observation bubble. There, in a raised dome of invisible glass, he seemed to be standing outside the hull of his flagship Nirvana.
Under that hull, “below” the Nirvana’s artificial gravity, there slanted the bright disk of the galaxy, including in one of its arms all the star systems the Earth-descended man had yet explored. But in whatever direction Nogara looked, bright spots and points of light were plentiful. They were other galaxies, marching away at their recessional velocities of tens of thousands of miles per second, marching on out to the optical horizon of the universe.
Nogara had not come here to look at galaxies, however; he had come to look at something new, at a phenomenon never before seen by men at such close range.
It was made visible to him by the apparent pinching-together of the galaxies beyond it, and by the clouds and streamers of dust cascading into it. The star that formed the center of the phenomenon was itself held beyond human sight by the strength of its own gravity. Its mass, perhaps a billion times that of Sol, so bent spacetime around itself that not a photon of light could escape it with a visible wavelength.
The dusty debris of deep space tumbled and churned, falling into the grip of the hypermass. The falling dust built up static charges until lightning turned it into luminescent thunderclouds, and the flicker of the vast lightning shifted into the red before it vanished, near the bottom of the gravitational hill. Probably not even a neutrino could escape this sun. And no ship would dare approach much closer than Nirvana now rode.
Nogara had come out here to judge for himself if the recently discovered phenomenon might soon present any danger to inhabited planets; ordinary suns would go down like chips of wood into a whirlpool if the hypermass found them in its path. But it seemed that another thousand years would pass before any planets had to be evacuated; and before then the hypermass might have gorged itself on dust until its core imploded, whereupon most of its substance could be expected to reenter the universe in a most spectacular but less dangerous form.
Anyway, in another thousand years it would be someone else’s problem. Right now it might be said to be Nogara’s—for men said that he ran the galaxy, if they said it of anyone.
A communicator sounded, calling him back to the enclosed luxury of his quarters, and he walked down quickly, glad of a reason to get out from under the galaxies.
He touched a plate with one finger. “What is it?”
“My lord, a courier ship has arrived. From the Flamland system. They are bringing . . . ”
“Speak plainly. They are bringing my brother’s body?”
“Yes, my lord. The launch bearing the coffin is already approaching Nirvana.”
“I will meet the courier captain, alone, in the Great Hall. I want no ceremony. Have the robots at the airlock test the escort and the outside of the coffin for infection.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The mention of disease was a bit of misdirection. It was not the Flamland plague that had put Johann Karlsen into a box, though that was the official story. The doctors were supposed to have frozen the hero of the Stone Place as a last resort, to prevent his irreversible death.
An official lie was necessary because not even High Lord Nogara could lightly put out of the way the one man who had made the difference at the Stone Place. Since that battle it seemed that life in the galaxy would survive, though the fighting against the berserkers was still bitter.
The Great Hall was where Nogara met daily for feasting and pleasure with the forty or fifty people who were with him on Nirvana, as aides or crewmen or entertainers. But when he entered the Hall now he found it empty, save for one man who stood at attention beside a coffin.
Johann Karlsen’s body and whatever remained of his life were sealed under the glass top of the heavy casket, which contained its own refrigeration and revival systems, controlled by a fiber-optic key theoretically impossible to duplicate. This key Nogara now demanded, with a gesture, from the courier captain.
The captain had the key hung round his neck, and it took him a moment to pull the golden chain over his head and hand it to Nogara. It was another moment before he remembered to bow; he was a spaceman and not a courtier. Nogara ignored the lapse of courtesy; it was his governors and admirals who were reinstituting ceremonies of rank; he himself cared nothing about how subordinates gestured and postured, so long as they obeyed intelligently.
Only now, with the key in his own hand, did Nogara look down at his frozen half-brother. The plotting doctors had shaved away Johann’s short beard and his hair. His lips were marble pale, and his sightless open eyes were ice. But still the face above the folds of the draped and frozen sheet was undoubtedly Johann’s. There was something that would not freeze.
“Leave me for a time,” Nogara said. He turned to face the end of the Great Hall and waited, looking out through the wide viewport to where the hypermass blurred space like a bad lens.
When he heard the door ease shut behind the courier captain he turned back—and found himself facing the short figure of Oliver Mical, the man he had selected to replace Johann as governor of Flamland. Mical must have entered as the spaceman left, which Nogara thought might be taken as symbolic of something.
Resting his hands familiarly on the coffin, Mical raised one graying eyebrow in his habitual expression of weary amusement. His rather puffy face twitched in an overcivilized smile.
“How does Browning’s line go?” Mical mused, glancing down at Karlsen. “ ‘Doing the king’s work all the dim day long’—and now, this reward of virtue.”
“Leave me,” said Nogara.
Mical was in on the plot, as was hardly anyone else except the Flamland doctors. “I thought it best to appear to share your grief,” he said. Then he looked at Nogara and ceased to argue. He made a bow that was mild mockery when the two of them were alone, and walked briskly to the door. Again it closed.
So, Johann. If you had plotted against me, I would have had you killed outright. But you were never a plotter, it was just that you served me too successfully, my enemies and friends alike began to love you too well. So here you are, my frozen conscience, the last conscience I’ll ever have. Sooner or later you would have become ambitious, so it was either do this to you or kill you.
Now I’ll put you away safely, and maybe someday you’ll have another chance at life. It’s a strange thought that someday you may stand musing over my coffin as I now stand over yours. No doubt you’ll pray for what you think is my soul . . . I can’t do that for you, but I wish you sweet dreams. Dream of your Believers’ heaven, not of your hell.
Nogara imagined a brain at absolute zero, its neurons superconducting, repeating one dream on and on and on. But that was nonsense.
“I cannot risk my power, Johann.” This time he whispered the words aloud. “It was either this or have you killed.” He turned again to the wide viewport.
“I suppose Thirty-three’s gotten the body to Nogara already,” said the Second Officer of Esteeler Courier Thirty-four, looking at the bridge chronometer. “It must be nice to declare yourself an emperor or whatever, and have people hurl themselves all over the galaxy to do everything for you.”
“Can’t be nice to have someone bring you your brother’s corpse,” said Captain Thurman Holt, studying his astrogational sphere. His ship’s C-plus drive was rapidly stretching a lot of timelike interval between itself and the Flamland system. Even if Holt was not enthusiastic about his mission, he was glad to be away from Flamland, where Mical’s political police were taking over.
“I wonder,” said the Second, and chuckled.
“What’s that mean?”
The Second looked over both shoulders, out of habit formed on Flamland. “Have you heard this one?” he asked. “Nogara is God—but half of his spacemen are atheists.”
Holt smiled, but only faintly. “He’s no mad tyrant, you know. Esteel’s not the worst-run government in the galaxy. Nice guys don’t put down rebellions.”
“Karlsen did all right.”
“That’s right, he did.”
The Second grimaced. “Oh, sure, Nogara could be worse, if you want to be serious about it. He’s a politician. But I just can’t stand that crew that’s accumulated around him the last few years. We’ve got an example on board now of what they do. If you want to know the truth I’m a little scared now that Karlsen’s dead.”
“Well, we’ll soon see them.” Holt sighed and stretched. “I’m going to look in on the prisoners. The bridge is yours, Second.”
“I relieve you, sir. Do the man a favor and kill him, Thurm.”
A minute later, looking through the spy-plate into the courier’s small brig, Holt could wish with honest compassion that his male prisoner was dead.
He was an outlaw chieftain named Janda, and his capture had been the last success of Karlsen’s Flamland service, putting a virtual end to the rebellion. Janda had been a tall man, a brave rebel, and a brutal bandit. He had raided and fought against Nogara’s Esteeler empire until there was no hope left, and then he had surrendered to Karlsen.
“My pride commands me to conquer my enemy,” Karlsen had written once, in what he thought was to be a private letter. “My honor forbids me to humble or hate my enemy.” But Mical’s political police operated with a different philosophy.
The outlaw might still be long-boned, but Holt had never seen him stand tall. The manacles still binding his wrists and ankles were of plastic and supposedly would not abrade human skin, but they served no sane purpose now, and Holt would have removed them if he could.
A stranger seeing the girl Lucinda, who sat now at Janda’s side to feed him, might have supposed her to be his daughter. She was his sister, five years younger than he. She was also a girl of rare beauty, and perhaps Mical’s police had motives other than mercy in sending her to Nogara’s court unmarked and unbrainwashed. It was rumored that the demand for certain kinds of entertainment was strong among the courtiers, and the turnover among the entertainers high.
Holt had so far kept himself from believing such stories, largely by not thinking about them. He opened the brig now—he kept it locked only to prevent Janda’s straying out and falling childlike into an accident—and went in.
When the girl Lucinda had first come aboard ship her eyes had shown helpless hatred of every Esteeler. Holt had been as gentle and as helpful as possible to her in the days since then, and there was not even dislike in the face she raised to him now—there was a hope which it seemed she had to share with someone.
She said: “I think he spoke my name a few minutes ago.”
“Oh?” Holt bent to look more closely at Janda, and could see no change. The outlaw’s eyes still stared glassily, the right eye now and then dripping a tear that seemed to have no connection with any kind of emotion. Janda’s jaw was as slack as ever, and his whole body as awkwardly slumped.
“Maybe—” Holt didn’t finish.
“What?” She was almost eager.
Gods of Space, he couldn’t let himself get involved with this girl. He almost wished to see hatred in her eyes again.
“Maybe,” he said gently, “it will be better for your brother if he doesn’t make any recovery now. You know where he’s going.”
Lucinda’s hope, such as it was, was shocked away by his words. She was silent, staring at her brother as if she saw something new.
Holt’s wrist-intercom sounded.
“Captain here,” he acknowledged.
“Sir, reported a ship detected and calling us. Bearing five o’clock level to our course. Small and normal.”
The last three words were the customary reassurance that a sighted ship was not possibly a berserker’s giant hull. Such Flamland outlaws as were left possessed no deep space ships, so Holt had no reason to be cautious.
He went back to the bridge and looked at the small shape on the detector screen. It was unfamiliar to him, but that was hardly surprising, as there were many shipyards orbiting many planets. Why, though, should any ship approach and hail him in deep space?
Plague?
“No, no plague,” answered a radio voice, through bursts of static, when he put the question to the stranger. The video signal from the other ship was also jumpy, making it hard to see the speaker’s face. “Caught a speck of dust on my last jump, and my fields are shaky. Will you take a few passengers aboard?”
“Certainly.” For a ship on the brink of a C-plus jump to collide with the gravitational field of a sizable dust-speck was a rare accident, but not unheard of. And it would explain the noisy communications. There was still nothing to alarm Holt.
The stranger sent over a launch which clamped to the courier’s airlock. Wearing a smile of welcome for distressed passengers, Holt opened the lock. In the next moment he and the half-dozen men who made up his crew were caught helpless by an inrush of metal—a berserker’s boarding party, cold and merciless as nightmare.
The machines seized the courier so swiftly and efficiently that no one could offer real resistance, but they did not immediately kill any of the humans. They tore the drive units from one of the lifeboats and herded Holt and his crew and his erstwhile prisoners into the boat.
“It wasn’t a berserker on the screen, it wasn’t,” the Second Officer kept repeating to Holt. The humans sat side by side, jammed against one another in the small space. The machines were allowing them air and water and food, and had started to take them out one at a time for questioning.
“I know, it didn’t look like one,” Holt answered. “The berserkers are probably forming themselves into new shapes, building themselves new weapons. That’s only logical, after the Stone Place. The only odd thing is that no one foresaw it.”
A hatch clanged open, and a pair of roughly man-shaped machines entered the boat, picking their way precisely among the nine cramped humans until they reached the one they wanted.
“No, he can’t talk!” Lucinda shrieked. “Don’t take him!”
But the machines could not or would not hear. They pulled Janda to his feet and marched him out. The girl followed, dragging at them, trying to argue with them. Holt could only scramble uselessly after her in the narrow space, afraid that one of the machines would turn and kill her. But they only kept her from following them out of the lifeboat, pushing her back from the hatch with metal hands as gently resistless as time. Then they were gone with Janda, and the hatch was closed again. Lucinda stood gazing at it blankly. She did not move when Holt put his arm around her.
After a timeless period of waiting, the humans saw the hatch open again. The machines were back, but they did not return Janda. Instead they had come to take Holt.
Vibrations echoed through the courier’s hull; the machines seemed to be rebuilding her. In a small chamber sealed off from the rest of the ship by a new bulkhead, the berserker computer-brain had set up electronic eyes and ears and a speaker for itself, and here Holt was taken to be questioned.
The berserkers interrogated Holt at great length, and almost every question concerned Johann Karlsen. It was known that the berserkers regarded Karlsen as their chief enemy, but this one seemed to be obsessed with him—and unwilling to believe that he was really dead.
“I have captured your charts and astrogational settings,” the berserker reminded Holt. “I know your course is to Nirvana, where supposedly the nonfunctioning Karlsen has been taken. Describe this Nirvana-ship used by the life-unit Nogara.”
So long as it had asked only about a dead man, Holt had given the berserker straight answers, not wanting to be tripped up in a useless lie. But a flagship was a different matter, and now he hesitated. Still, there was little he could say about Nirvana if he wanted to. And he and his fellow prisoners had had no chance to agree on any plan for deceiving the berserker; certainly it must be listening to everything they said in the lifeboat.
“I’ve never seen the Nirvana,” he answered truthfully. “Logic tells me it must be a strong ship, since the highest human leaders travel on it.” There was no harm in telling the machine what it could certainly deduce for itself.
A door opened suddenly, and Holt started in surprise as a strange man entered the interrogation chamber. Then he saw that it was not a man, but some creation of the berserker. Perhaps its flesh was plastic, perhaps some product of tissue culture.
“Hi, are you Captain Holt?” asked the figure. There was no gross flaw in it, but a ship camouflaged with the greatest skill looks like nothing so much as a ship that has been camouflaged.
When Holt was silent, the figure asked: “What’s wrong?”
Its speech alone would have given it away, to an intelligent human who listened carefully.
“You’re not a man,” Holt told it.
The figure sat down and went limp.
The berserker explained: “You see I am not capable of making an imitation life-unit that will be accepted by real ones face to face. Therefore I require that you, a real life-unit, help me make certain of Karlsen’s death.”
Holt said nothing.
“I am a special device,” the berserker said, “built by the berserkers with one prime goal, to bring about with certainty Karlsen’s death. If you help me prove him dead, I will willingly free you and the other life-units I now hold. If you refuse to help, all of you will receive the most unpleasant stimuli until you change your mind.”
Holt did not believe that it would ever willingly set them free. But he had nothing to lose by talking, and he might at least gain for himself and the others a death free of most unpleasant stimuli. Berserkers preferred to be efficient killers, not sadists.
“What sort of help do you want from me?” Holt asked.
“When I have finished building myself into the courier we are going on to Nirvana, where you will deliver your prisoners. I have read the orders. After being interviewed by the human leaders on Nirvana, the prisoners are to be taken on to Esteel for confinement. Is it not so?”
“It is.”
The door opened again, and Janda shuffled in, bent and bemused.
“Can’t you spare this man any more questioning?’ Holt asked the berserker. “He can’t help you in any way.”
There was only silence. Holt waited uneasily. At last, looking at Janda, he realized that something about the outlaw had changed. The tears had stopped flowing from his right eye. When Holt saw this he felt a mounting horror that he could not have explained, as if his subconscious already knew what the berserker was going to say next.
“What was bone in this life-unit is now metal,” the berserker said. “Where blood flowed, now preservatives are pumped. Inside the skull I have placed a computer, and in the eyes are cameras to gather the evidence I must have on Karlsen. To match the behavior or a brainwashed man is within my capability.”
“I do not hate you,” Lucinda said to the berserker when it had her alone for interrogation. “You are an accident, like a planet-quake, like a pellet of dust hitting a ship near light-speed. Nogara and his people are the ones I hate. If his brother was not dead I would kill him with my own hands and willingly bring you his body.”
“Courier Captain? This is Governor Mical, speaking for the High Lord Nogara. Bring your two prisoners over to Nirvana at once.”
“At once, sir,” Holt acknowledged.
After coming out of C-plus travel within sight of Nirvana, the assassin-machine had taken Holt and Lucinda from the lifeboat. Then it had let the boat, with Holt’s crew still on it, drift out between the two ships, as if men were using it to check the courier’s field. The men on the boat were to be the berserker’s hostages, and its shield if it was discovered. And by leaving them there, it doubtless wanted to make more credible the prospect of their eventual release.
Holt had not known how to tell Lucinda of her brother’s fate, but at last he had managed somehow. She had wept for a minute, and then she had become very calm.
Now the berserker put Holt and Lucinda into a launch for the trip to Nirvana. The machine that had been Lucinda’s brother was aboard the launch already, waiting, slumped and broken-looking as the man had been in the last days of his life.
When she saw that figure, Lucinda stopped. Then in a clear voice she said: “Machine, I wish to thank you. You have done my brother a kindness no human would do for him. I think I would have found a way to kill him myself before his enemies could torture him any more.”
The Nirvana’s airlock was strongly armored, and equipped with automated defenses that would have repelled a rush of boarding machines, just as Nirvana’s beams and missiles would have beaten off any heavy-weapons attack a courier, or a dozen couriers, could launch. The berserker had foreseen all this.
An officer welcomed Holt aboard. “This way, Captain. We’re all waiting.”
“All?”
The officer had the well-fed, comfortable look that came with safe and easy duty. His eyes were busy appraising Lucinda. “There’s a celebration under way in the Great Hall. Your prisoners’ arrival has been much anticipated.”
Music throbbed in the Great Hall, and dancers writhed in costumes more obscene than any nakedness. From a table running almost the length of the Hall, serving machines were clearing the remnants of a feast. In a thronelike chair behind the center of the table sat the High Lord Nogara, a rich cloak thrown over his shoulders, pale wine before him in a crystal goblet. Forty or fifty revelers flanked him at the long table, men and women and a few of whose sex Holt could not at once be sure. All were drinking and laughing, and some were donning masks and costumes, making ready for further celebration.
Heads turned at Holt’s entrance, and a moment of silence was followed by a cheer. In all the eyes and faces turned now toward his prisoners, Holt could see nothing like pity.
“Welcome, Captain,” said Nogara in a pleasant voice, when Holt had remembered to bow. “Is there news from Flamland?”
“None of great importance, sir.”
A puffy-faced man who sat at Nogara’s right hand leaned forward on the table. “No doubt there is great mourning for the late governor?”
“Of course, sir.” Holt recognized Mical. “And much anticipation of the new.”
Mical leaned back in his chair, smiling cynically. “I’m sure the rebellious population is eager for my arrival. Girl, were you eager to meet me? Come, pretty one, round the table, here to me.” As Lucinda slowly obeyed, Mical gestured to the serving devices. “Robots, set a chair for the man—there, in the center of the floor. Captain, you may return to your ship.”
Felipe Nogara was steadily regarding the manacled figure of his old enemy Janda, and what Nogara might be thinking was hard to say. But he seemed content to let Mical give what orders pleased him.
“Sir,” said Holt to Mical. “I would like to see—the remains of Johann Karlsen.”
That drew the attention of Nogara, who nodded. A serving machine drew back sable draperies, revealing an alcove in one end of the Hall. In the alcove, before a huge viewport, rested the coffin.
Holt was not particularly surprised; on many planets it was the custom to feast in the presence of the dead. After bowing to Nogara he turned and saluted and walked toward the alcove. Behind him he heard the shuffle and clack of Janda’s manacled movement, and held his breath. A muttering passed along the table, and then a sudden quieting in which even the throbbing music ceased. Probably Nogara had gestured permission for Janda’s walk, wanting to see what the brainwashed man would do.
Holt reached the coffin and stood over it. He hardly saw the frozen face inside it, or the blur of the hypermass outside the port. He hardly heard the whispers and giggles of the revelers. The only picture clear in his mind showed the faces of his crew as they waited helpless in the grip of the berserker.
The machine clothed in Janda’s flesh came shuffling up beside him, and its eyes of glass stared down into those of ice. A photograph of retinal patterns taken back to the waiting berserker for comparison with old captured records would tell it that this man was really Karlsen.
A faint cry of anguish made Holt look back toward the long table, where he saw Lucinda pulling herself away from Mical’s clutching arm. Mical and his friends were laughing.
“No, Captain, I am no Karlsen,” Mical called down to him, seeing Holt’s expression. “And do you think I regret the difference? Johann’s prospects are not bright. He is rather bounded by a nutshell, and can no longer count himself king of infinite space!”
“Shakespeare!” cried a sycophant, showing appreciation of Mical’s literary erudition.
“Sir.” Holt took a step forward. “May I—may I now take the prisoners back to my ship?”
Mical misinterpreted Holt’s anxiety. “Oh, ho! I see you appreciate some of life’s finer things, Captain. But as you know, rank has its privileges. The girl stays here.”
He had expected them to hold on to Lucinda, and she was better here than with the berserker.
“Sir, then if—if the man alone can come with me. In a prison hospital on Esteel he may recover—”
“Captain.” Nogara’s voice was not loud, but it hushed the table. “Do not argue here.”
“No, sir.”
Mical shook his head. “My thoughts are not yet of mercy to my enemies, Captain. Whether they may soon turn in that direction—well, that depends.” He again reached out a leisurely arm to encircle Lucinda. “Do you know, Captain, that hatred is the true spice of love?”
Holt looked helplessly back at Nogara. Nogara’s cold eye said: One more word, courier, and you find yourself in the brig. I do not give two warnings.
If Holt cried berserker now, the thing in Janda’s shape might kill everyone in the Hall before it could be stopped. He knew it was listening to him, watching his movements.
“I—I am returning to my ship,” he stuttered. Nogara looked away, and no one else paid him much attention. “I will . . . return here . . . in a few hours perhaps. Certainly before I drive for Esteel.”
Holt’s voice trailed off as he saw that a group of the revelers had surrounded Janda. They had removed the manacles from the outlaw’s dead limbs, and were putting a horned helmet on his head, giving him a shield and a spear and a cloak of fur, equipage of an old Norse warrior of Earth—first to coin and bear the dread name of berserker.
“Observe, Captain,” mocked Mical’s voice. “At our masked ball we do not fear the fate of Prince Prospero. We willingly bring in the semblance of the terror outside!”
“Poe!” shouted the sycophant, in glee.
Prospero and Poe meant nothing to Holt, and Mical was disappointed.
“Leave us, Captain,” said Nogara, making a direct order of it.
“Leave, Captain Holt,” said Lucinda in a firm, clear voice. “We all know you wish to help those who stand in danger here. Lord Nogara, will Captain Holt be blamed in any way for what happens here when he has gone?”
There was a hint of puzzlement in Nogara’s clear eyes. But he shook his head slightly, granting the asked-for absolution.
And there was nothing for Holt to do but go back to the berserker to argue and plead with it for his crew. If it was patient, the evidence it sought might be forthcoming. If only the revelers would have mercy on the thing they thought was Janda.
Holt went out. It had never entered his burdened mind that Karlsen was only frozen.
Mical’s arm was about her hips as she stood beside his chair, and his voice purred up at her. “Why, how you tremble, pretty one . . . it moves me that such a pretty one as you should tremble at my touch, yes, it moves me deeply. Now, we are no longer enemies, are we? If we were, I should have to deal harshly with your brother.”
She had given Holt time to get clear of the Nirvana. Now she swung her arm with all her strength. The blow turned Mical’s head halfway round, and made his neat gray hair fly wildly.
There was a sudden hush in the Great Hall, and then a roar of laughter that reddened all of Mical’s face to match the handprint on his cheek. A man behind Lucinda grabbed her arms and pinned them. She relaxed until she felt his grip loosen slightly, and then she grabbed up a table knife. There was another burst of laughter as Mical ducked away and the man behind
Lucinda seized her again. Another man came to help him and the two of them, laughing, took away the knife and forced her to sit in a chair at Mical’s side.
When the governor spoke at last his voice quavered slightly, but it was low and almost calm.
“Bring the man closer,” he ordered. “Seat him there, just across the table from us.”
While his order was being carried out, Mical spoke to Lucinda in conversational tones. “It was my intent, of course, that your brother should be treated and allowed to recover.”
“Lying piece of filth,” she whispered, smiling.
Mical only smiled back. “Let us test the skill of my mind-control technicians,” he suggested. “I’ll wager no bonds will be needed to hold your brother in his chair, once I have done this.” He made a curious gesture over the table, toward the glassy eyes that looked out of Janda’s face. “So. But he will still be aware, with every nerve, of all that happens to him. You may be sure of that.”
She had planned and counted on something like this happening, but now she felt as if she was exhausted from breathing evil air. She was afraid of fainting, and at the same time wished that she could.
“Our guest is bored with his costume.” Mical looked up and down the table. “Who will be first to take a turn at entertaining him?”
There was a spattering of applause as a giggling effeminate arose from a nearby chair.
“Jamy is known for his inventiveness,” said Mical in pleasant tones to Lucinda. “I insist you watch closely, now. Chin up!”
On the other side of Mical, Felipe Nogara was losing his air of remoteness. As if reluctantly, he was being drawn to watch. In his bearing was a rising expectancy, winning out over disgust.
Jamy came giggling, holding a small jeweled knife.
“Not the eyes,” Mical cautioned. “There’ll be things I want him to see, later.”
“Oh, certainly!” Jamy twittered. He set the horned helmet gingerly aside, and wiped the touch of it from his fingers. “We’ll just start like this on one cheek, with a bit of skin—”
Jamy’s touch with the blade was gentle, but still too much for the dead flesh. At the first peeling tug, the whole lifeless mask fell red and wet from around the staring eyes, and the steel berserker-skull grinned out.
Lucinda had just time to see Jamy’s body flung across the Hall by a steel-boned arm before the men holding her let go and turned to flee for their lives, and she was able to duck under the table. Screaming bedlam broke loose, and in another moment the whole table went over with a crash before the berserker’s strength. The machine, finding itself discovered, thwarted in its primary function of getting away with the evidence on Karlsen, had reverted to the old berserker goal of simple slaughter. It killed efficiently. It moved through the Hall, squatting and hopping grotesquely, mowing its way with scythelike arms, harvesting howling panic into bundles of bloody stillness.
At the main door, fleeing people jammed one another into immobility, and the assassin worked methodically among them, mangling and slaying. Then it turned and came down the Hall again. It came to Lucinda, still kneeling where the table-tipping had exposed her; but the machine hesitated, recognizing her as a semipartner in its prime function. In a moment it had dashed on after another target.
It was Nogara, swaying on his feet, his right arm hanging broken. He had come up with a heavy handgun from somewhere, and now he fired left-handed as the machine charged down the other side of the overturned table toward him. The gunblasts shattered Nogara’s friends and furniture but only grazed his moving target.
At last one shot hit home. The machine was wrecked, but its impetus carried it on to knock Nogara down again.
There was a shaky quiet in the Great Hall, which was wrecked as if by a bomb. Lucinda got unsteadily to her feet. The quiet began to give way to sobs and moans and gropings, everywhere, but no one else was standing.
She picked her way dazedly over to the smashed assassin-machine. She felt only a numbness, looking at the rags of clothing and flesh that still clung to its metal frame. Now in her mind she could see her brother’ s face as it once was, strong and smiling.
Now, there was something that mattered more than the dead, if she could only recall what it was—of course, the berserker’s hostages, the good kind spacemen. She could try to trade Karlsen’s body for them.
The serving machines, built to face emergencies on the order of spilled wine, were dashing to and fro in the nearest thing to panic that mechanism could achieve. They impeded Lucinda’s progress, but she had the heavy coffin wheeled half-way across the Hall when a weak voice stopped her. Nogara had dragged himself up to a sitting position against the overturned table.
He croaked again: “—alive.”
“What?”
“Johann’s alive. Healthy. See? It’s a freezer.”
“But we all told the berserker he was dead.” She felt stupid with the impact of one shock after another. For the first time she looked down at Karlsen’s face, and long seconds passed before she could tear her eyes away. “It has hostages. It wants his body.”
“No.” Nogara shook his head. “ I see, now. But no. I won’t give him to berserkers, alive.” A brutal power of personality still emanated from his broken body. His gun was gone, but his power kept Lucinda from moving. There was no hatred left in her now.
She protested: “But there are seven men out there.”
“Berserker’s like me.” Nogara bared pain-clenched teeth. “It won’t let prisoners go. Here. The key . . . ” He pulled it from inside his torn-open tunic.
Lucinda’s eyes were drawn once again to the cold serenity of the face in the coffin. Then on impulse she ran to get the key. When she did so Nogara slumped over in relief, unconscious or nearly so.
The coffin lock was marked in several positions, and she turned it to EMERGENCY REVIVAL. Lights sprang on around the figure inside, and there was a hum of power.
By now the automated systems of the ship were reacting to the emergency. The serving machines had begun a stretcher-bearer service, Nogara being one of the first victims they carried away. Presumably a robot medic was in action somewhere. From behind Nogara’s throne chair a great voice was shouting:
“This is ship defense control, requesting human orders! What is nature of emergency?”
“Do not contact the courier ship!” Lucinda shouted back. “Watch it for an attack. But don’t hit the lifeboat!”
The glass top of the coffin had become opaque.
Lucinda ran to the viewport, stumbling over the body of Mical and going on without a pause. By putting her face against the port and looking out at an angle she could just see the berserker-courier, pinkly visible in the wavering light of the hypermass, its lifeboat of hostages a small pink dot still in place before it.
How long would it wait, before it killed the hostages and fled?
When she turned away from the port, she saw that the coffin’s lid was open and the man inside was sitting up. For just a moment, a moment that was to stay in Lucinda’s mind, his eyes were like a child’s fixed helplessly on hers. Then power began to grow behind his eyes, a power somehow completely different from his brother’s and perhaps even greater.
Karlsen looked away from her, taking in the rest of his surroundings, the devastated Great Hall and the coffin. “Felipe,” he whispered, as if in pain, though his half-brother was no longer in sight.
Lucinda moved toward him and started to pour out her story, from the day in the Flamland prison when she had heard that Karlsen had fallen to the plague.
Once he interrupted her. “Help me out of this thing, get me space armor.” His arm was hard and strong when she grasped it, but when he stood beside her he was surprisingly short. “Go on, what then?”
She hurried on with her tale, while serving machines came to arm him. “But why were you frozen?” she ended, suddenly wondering at his health and strength.
He ignored the question. “Come along to Defense Control. We must save those men out there.”
He went familiarly to the nerve center of the ship and hurled himself into the combat chair of the Defense Officer, who was probably dead. The panel before Karlsen came alight and he ordered at once: “Get me in contact with that courier.”
Within a few moments a flat-sounding voice from the courier answered routinely. The face that appeared on the communication screen was badly lighted; someone viewing it without advance warning would not suspect that it was anything but human.
“This is High Commander Karlsen speaking, from the Nirvana.” He did not call himself governor or lord, but by his title of the great day of the Stone Place. “I’m coming over there. I want to talk to you men on the courier.”
The shadowed face moved slightly on the screen. “Yes, sir.”
Karlsen broke off the contact at once. “That’ll keep its hopes up. Now, I need a launch. You, robots, load my coffin aboard the fastest one available. I’m on emergency revival drugs now and I may have to re-freeze for a while.”
“You’re not really going over there?”
Up out of the chair again, he paused. “I know berserkers. If chasing me is that thing’s prime function it won’t waste a shot or a second of time on a few hostages while I’m in sight.”
“You can’t go,” Lucinda heard herself saying. “You mean too much to all men—”
“I’m not committing suicide, I have a trick or two in mind.” Karlsen’s voice changed suddenly. “You say Felipe’s not dead?”
“I don’t think he is.”
Karlsen’s eyes closed while his lips moved briefly, silently. Then he looked at Lucinda and grabbed up paper and a stylus from the Defense Officer’s console. “Give this to Felipe,” he said, writing. “He’ll set you and the captain free if I ask it. You’re not dangerous to his power. Whereas I . . . ”
He finished writing and handed her the paper. “I must go. God be with you.”
From the Defense Officer’s position, Lucinda watched Karlsen’s crystalline launch leave the Nirvana and take a long curve that brought it near the courier at a point some distance from the lifeboat.
“You on the courier,” Lucinda heard him say. “You can tell it’s really me here on the launch, can’t you? You can DF my transmission? Can you photography my retinas through the screen?”
And the launch darted away with a right-angle swerve, dodging and twisting at top acceleration, as the berserker’s weapons blasted the space where it had been. Karlsen had been right. The berserker spent not a moment’s delay or a single shot on the lifeboat, but hurled itself instantly after Karlsen’s launch.
“Hit that courier!” Lucinda screamed. “Destroy it!” A salvo of missiles left the Nirvana, but it was a shot at a receding target, and it missed. Perhaps it missed because the courier was already in the fringes of the distortion surrounding the hypermass.
Karlsen’s launch had not been hit, but it could not get away. It was a glassy dot vanishing behind a screen of blasts from the berserker’s weapons, a dot being forced into the maelstrom of the hypermass.
“Chase them!” cried Lucinda, and saw the stars tint blue ahead; but almost instantly the Nirvana’s autopilot countermanded her order, barking mathematical assurance that to accelerate any further in that direction would be fatal to all aboard.
The launch was now going certainly into the hypermass, gripped by a gravity that could make any engines useless. And the berserker-ship was going headlong after the launch, caring for nothing but to make sure of Karlsen.
The two specks tinted red, and redder still, racing before an enormous falling cloud of dust as if flying into a planet’s sunset sky. And then the red shift of the hypermass took them into invisibility, and the universe saw them no more.
Soon after the robots had brought the men fom the life-boat safe aboard Nirvana, Holt found Lucinda alone in the Great Hall, gazing out the viewport.
“He gave himself to save you,” she said.”And he’d never even seen you.”
“I know.” After a pause Holt said: “I’ve just been talking to the Lord Nogara. I don’t know why, but you’re to be freed, and I’m not to be prosecuted for bringing the damned berserker aboard. Though Nogara seems to hate both of us . . . ”
She wasn’t listening, she was still looking out the port.
“I want you to tell me all about him someday,” Holt said, putting his arm around Lucinda. She moved slightly, ridding herself of a minor irritation that she had hardly noticed. It was Holt’s arm, which dropped away.
“I see,” Holt said, after a while. He went to look after his men.