Sword-Play
An Appreciative Afterword
By
Sandra Miesel
But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of them all.
— Kipling
From the kindling of the first fire to the latest breakthrough in computer design, each technological advance opens new levels of play in an age — old game for the mastery of Life. Calling Man's struggle for control over his environment a 'game' is no idle figure of speech. Ours is a species of players as well as makers. Indeed, these two intertwined qualities describe humanness. Laughter and reason alike set us apart from beasts.
Work and play are meant to reinforce each other. Sundering them is a measure of human imperfection the wages of original sin, some say — and their union is a sign of Eden's innocence. Yet no matter how tragically estranged labor and leisure become, we still dimly feel that matters should be otherwise and wish our work could be joyful as child's play.
Slow-paced primitive societies take time to harmonize work and play. Each new way of working has to be played about so that it can be thought about sanely. Myth and ritual put technology into context, make it 'user friendly.'
Consider the discovery of fire. It brought Early Man far more than light, warmth, protection, or any merely practical advantage. Fire became the focal point of the community, acquired symbolic meanings, participated in ceremonies, appeared in heroic tales, even received worship. Though we harness vaster energies now, echoes of the ways cavemen worked and played with fire resound in us at every sulking of a match.
Likewise, tool-shaping, agriculture, metal-crafting — all the basic innovations — were transformed through playful celebration. These human activities became holy because making and playing were seen as divine operations. In some cultures, the world a creator-god has made is a battlefield for contending supernatural powers. In others, existence is a game the Absolute plays with Itself throughout eternity. The patterns also hold in Judeo- Christian contexts: Holy Wisdom plays beside Yaweh when He lays the foundations of the earth and Christ the carpenter has been symbolized by a clown.
Speculative thought moves beyond imagery to ponder the ethics of work and play. What limits — if any exist on the ways we may shape matter? If a thing can be made, should it be made? How far can the quest for mastery go and by what means? If Life is a game, what are the rules? Does the outcome matter, or are victories as hollow as defeats? Who are the players and what are the pawns? Are the competing sides really different or ultimately the same? Is some supreme referee keeping score?
Fred Saberhagen is genuinely comfortable with these questions. He believes that human acts have meaning and that we can compete for an everlasting prize. His grounding in traditional Western values gives his writing the staunchness of ancient and hallowed stone.
Saberhagen's technical expertise and mythic instinct equip him to fabulize reality and rationalize fable. Scientific data quicken his imagination: he can find a story in a squash seed or a spatial singularity. His innate feeling for archetype transforms specific facts into universal images. Thus in The Veils of Azarloc (1978), outre astrophysics provides a unique metaphor for the blurry barriers Time wraps about us.
Examples abound in his popular berserker series (Berserker, 1967; Brother Assassin, 1969; Berserker's Planet, 1975; Berserker Man, 1979; The Ultimate Enemy, 1979; and The Berserker Wars, 1981). The berserkers are automated alien spacecraft that begin as deadly mechanisms but swiftly become symbols of Death itself. These ravening maws of Chaos, these 'demons in metal disguise' are today's answer to the scythewielding Grim Reaper of old. 'They speak to our fear of mad computers and killer machines with jaws that bite and claws that snatch.' The general pattern governing the wonder-war between Life and Death is embellished with allusions to particular myths (an Orpheus sings in a cybernetic Hades) and legendary historical incidents (a Don John of Austria fights a Battle of Lepanto in space).
While Saberhagen's hard sf can soar into metaphysical realms, his fantasy has a matter-of-fact solidity about it that leaves no room for disbelief. This quality is admirably demonstrated in his Dracula series. These novels (The Dracula Tapes, 1976; The Holmes-Dracula File, 1978; An Old Friend of the Family, 1979; and Thorn, 1980) condense the murky haze of folklore and gothic romance surrounding vampires into premises that can stand the light of day. The Count's ascerbic character and occult gifts are made all the more convincing by the strictly authentic settings (Victorian England, Renaissance Italy, contemporary America) through which he moves. Furthermore, as an unforeseen player in sundry power games, the Count is an agent of rough justice and a witness to some higher law governing all creation.
Fact and fancy are complimentary categories for Saberhagen because, as indicated above, his art depends on disciplined exchanges between the two. Since both possible and impossible worlds have their technologies, either applied science or practical magic, technological issues are prominent in Saberhagen's work.
His concern for making is matched by an enthusiasm for playing, perhaps because his personal hobbies include chess, karate, and computers. Whether mental, physical, or cybernetic, games are a recurring device in Saberhagen's fiction.
His gaming principles can be deduced from the berserker series. Indeed, the berserkers themselves were invented to serve as the antagonist that a games' theory ploy defeats ('Fortress Ship'/' Without a Thought,' 1963). Although most of the battles are fought between computers ('faithful slave of life against outlaw, neither caring, neither knowing'), one killer machine is undone by joining in a human recreational warsimulation game ('The Game,' 1977). Direct personal combat still retains its place — Berserker's Planet features a rigged tournament of duels to the death and dialectical clashes abound. As the series expands, its military campaigns grow more complex, ranging across time as well as space and employing psychological and spiritual as well as physical strategems. The initial struggle for survival gradually unfolds into a conflict of vast cosmic import.
No compromise is possible between the opposing players. The berserkers are 'as near to absolute evil as anything material can be.' Resisting them requires total mobilization and eternal vigilance since no victory over them is ever quite perfect or complete.
The cause of Life turns enemies into allies but alliances change to emnities in the camp of Death. Yet the contending sides are not homogeneous: humans use thinking machines and berserkers incorporate living tissue. The cyborg hero of Berserker Man becomes humanity's paladin without denying the machine side of his nature. In the long run, Life may be more at risk from treachery by the living than from attack by the unliving. The berserkers' 'goodlife' servants are worse than their masters because they freely choose and bleakly enjoy their perversions. These worshipers of destruction are but one particular expression of sentient beings bent toward sin. Before the berserkers came to be, Evil was.
Turns of play proceed by ironic reversals of fortune. The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Pawns have a way of becoming kings — and vice versa. Unable to penetrate the councils of the light, darkness often falls into its own malicious snares. Even when it wields planet-shattering weapons, Evil can be defeated by a child, an animal, or even a plant. Eucatastrophe, the unexpected happy ending, is always possible when the game is bravely — and skillfully played.
The stakes could not be higher. The very nature of the universe is being put to wager of battle. Is existence a circular parade of ants? ('What did it all matter?' asks one villain. 'Was it not a berserker universe already, everything determined by the random swirls of condensing gas, before the stars were born?') Or is it a march towards a glorious destination? Defeating Death's legions vindicates the evolutionary potential latent in every bit of Life.
Likewise, human art, love, holiness, even humor and personal quirks can transcend the laws of probability that govern berserkers. Machine intelligence cannot grasp why 'the most dangerous life units of all sometimes acted in ways that seemed to contradict the known supremacy of the laws of physics and chance.' Capacity for growth and choice is humankind's passport to a paradoxical space-time region — and a boundless future — barred to its unliving foes.
Unto what purpose was the match held? Perhaps to let Life win its laurels under fire. Virtue untried by adversity is meaningless. Moreover, the game does not end where it began. Neither players nor field will ever be the same again. Evil has only improved what it sought to annihilate. The berserker wars are but one set among the
