There are always people who want to revise history. No hero is so great that someone won’t take a shot at him. Not even Jack Halfey.
Fortunately I missed.
A TEARDROP FALLS
Two miles up, the thick air of Harvest thinned to Earth-normal pressure. The sky was a peculiar blue, but blue. It was unbreathable still, but there was oxygen, ten percent and growing. One of the biological factories showed against white cloudscape, to nice effect, in view of a floating camera. The camera showed a tremendous rippling balloon in the shape of an inverted teardrop, blowing green bubbles from its tip. Hilary Gage watched the view with a sense of pride.
Not that he would want to visit Harvest, ever. Multicolored slimes infected shallow tidal pools near the poles. Green sticky stuff floated in the primordial atmosphere. If it drifted too low it burned to ash. The planet was slimy. Changes were exceedingly slow. Mistakes took years to demonstrate themselves and decades to eradicate.
Hilary Gage preferred the outer moon.
One day this planet would be a world. Even then, Hilary Gage would not join the colonists. Hilary Gage was a computer program.
Gage would never have volunteered for the Harvest Project unless the alternative was death.
Death by old age.
He was aware, rumor-fashion, that other worlds were leery of advanced computers. They were too much like the berserker machines. But the tens of thousands of human worlds varied enormously among themselves; and there were places the berserkers had never reached. The extermination machines had been mere rumor in the Channith region since before Channith was settled. Nobody really doubted their existence, but…
But for some purposes, computers were indecently convenient; and some projects required artificial intelligence.
The computer wasn’t really an escape. Hilary Gage must have died years ago. Perhaps his last thoughts had been of an immortal computer program.
The computer was not a new one. Its programming had included two previous personalities…who had eventually changed their minds and asked that they be erased.
Gage could understand that. Entertainments were in his files. When he reached for them they were there, beginning to end, like vivid memories. Chess games could survive that, and some poetry, but what of a detective novel? A football game? A livey?
Gage made his own entertainment.
He had not summoned up his poem for these past ten days. He was surprised and pleased at his self-control. Perhaps now he could study it with fresh eyes…?
Wrong. The entire work blinked into his mind in an instant. It was as if he had finished reading it a millisecond ago. What was normally an asset to Hilary—his flawless memory—was a hindrance now.
Over the years the poem had grown to 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. Channith 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 decisions…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 1012 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 horrifying.
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
