Limits (12 page)

“We’ll spend our second honeymoon there,” said Jill.

“Yeah,” I said, before I caught myself.

Halfey laughed like hell. “No, no, I want to build it!”

I was feeling drunk and I hadn’t had a drink. Contact high, they call it. I watched those two at the axis as they came together in a tangle of wings, clung together. Objects floated around them, and presently began to spiral outward, fluttering and tumbling. I recognized a pair of man’s pants.

It made me feel as horny as hell. Two hundred million miles away there was a planet with three billion adult women. Out of that number there must be millions who’d take an astronaut hero to their beds.
Especially after I published my best-selling memoirs.
I’d never be able to have them all, but it was certainly worth a try. All I had to do was go home.

Hah. And Thomas Wolfe thought
he
couldn’t go home again!

A shoe smacked into a nearby roof, and the whole house
bonged
. We laughed hysterically. Something else hit almost beside my head: a hen lay on her back in the wheat, stunned and puzzled. The spiral of clothing was dropping away from what now seemed a single creature with four wings. A skinny blue snake wriggled out of the sky and touched down. I held it up, a tangle of blue wool.
“My God!”
I cried. “It’s Dot!”

Jill rolled over and stared. Jack was kicking his heels in the grass, hel
p
less with laughter. I shook my head; I was still dizzy. “What
have
you all been drinking?
Not that Tang mixture again!”

Jill said, “Drinking?”

“Sure, the whole colony’s drunk as lords,” I said. “Hey
…black wings…is
that McLeve up there?”

Jill leapt to her feet. “Oh my God,” she screamed.
“The air!”

Jack bounded up and grabbed her arm. “What’s happened?”

She tried to pull away. “Let me go! It’s the air system. It’s putting out alcohols. Not just ethanol, either. We’re all drunk and hypoxic. Let me go!”

“One moment.”
Jack was fighting it and losing. In a moment he’d co
l
lapse in silliness again. “You knew it was going to happen,” he said. His voice was full of accusation.

“Yes,” Jill shouted. “Now will you let me go?”

“How did you know?”

“I knew before we started,” Jill said. “Recycling isn’t efficient enough. We need fresh water.
Tons of fresh water.”

“If there’s no ice on that rock ahead—”

“Then we probably won’t get to another rock,” Jill said. “
Now
will you let me go work on the system?”

“Get out of here, you bitch,” Jack yelled. He pushed her away and fell on his face.

It was scary. But there was also the alcohol. Fear and anger and ethanol and higher ketones and God
knows
what else fought it out in my brain. Fear lost.

“She’s kept it going with Kleenex and bubble gum,” I shouted. “And you believed her. When she told you it’d last three years. You believed.” I whooped at the joke.

“Oh, shut up,” Jack shouted.

“We’ve had it, right?” I asked. “So tell me something. Why did you do it? I was
sure
you were putting Jill on. I
know
you intended to go with the shuttle.
So why?”

“Chandeliers,” Jack said.

“Chandeliers?”

“You were there. Firestone Gems will sell you flawless blue-whites.
A chandelier of them for the price of half a year’s salary.”

“And—”

“What the fuck do you think I did with my stash?” Jack screamed.

Stash.
His ill-gotten gains from the Mafia.
Stashed as blue-white di
a
monds.

Funny.
Fun-nee.
So why wasn’t I laughing?

Because the bastard had kidnapped me, that’s why. When he found his stash was worthless and he wasn’t rich, and he’d probably face a jail term he couldn’t bribe his way out of, he’d run as far away as a man could go.
And taken me with him.

I crawled over to my doorway. My suit lay there in a sprawl. I fumbled through it to the equipment belt.

“What are you doing?” Halfey yelled.

“You’ll see.” I found the reaction pistol. I went through my pockets, carefully, until I found a ballpoint pen.

“Hey! No!” Jack yelled.

“I’m a public benefactor, I am,” I told him. I took aim and fired. He tumbled backwards.

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.

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 i
n
fected 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 se
t
tled. 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 su
r
prised 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. 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 velocity fell to a tenth of light-speed, and 100101101110 began to d
e
celerate further. Now it was not dreaming.

At a million kilometers, life might show as a reflection band in the green or orange or violet. At a hundred kilometers, many types of living nerve clusters would radiate their own distinctive patterns. Rarely was it necessary to come so close. Easier to pull near a star, alert for attack, and search the liquid-water temperature band for the spectra of an oxygen world. Oxygen meant life.

There.

Sometimes life would defend itself. 100101101110 had not been a
t
tacked, not yet; but life was clever. The berserker was on hair-trigger alert while it looked about itself.

The blue pinpoint had tinier moons: a large one at a great distance, and a smaller one, close enough that tides had pulled it into a teardrop shape.

The larger moon was inconveniently large, even for 100101101110. The smaller, at 4 x 10
15
grams, would be adequate. The berserker fortress moved on it, all senses alert.

Hilary Gage had no idea what to expect.

When he was younger, when he was human, he had organized Cha
n
nith’s defenses against berserkers. The berserkers had not come to Channith in the four hundred and thirty years since Channith became a colony. He had traveled. He had seen ravaged worlds and ruined, slagged berserkers; he had studied records made by men who had beaten the killer machines; there were none from the losers.