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hundred thousand human beings in residence. Their stores and parks and
dwellings and laboratories and shops occupied, for the most part, only small
portions of the inner surface, where gravity was normal and the light from the
Radiant was bright. From the outer surface, nearby space was keenly watched by
the sensors of the largely automated defense system; there was a patchy film
of human activity there. The remainder of the six hundred cubic kilometers
were largely desert now, honeycombed with cracks and designed passages,
spotted with still-undiscovered troves of Dardanian tombs and artifacts, for
decades almost unexplored, virtually abandoned except by the few who, like
Sabel, researched the past.
Now he saw a routine warning begin to blink on the small control panel of his
flyer. Close ahead the outer end of the transport shaft was yawning, and
through it he could see the stars. A continuation of his present course would
soon bring him into the area surveyed by
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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy the defense system.
As his flyer emerged from the shaft, Sabel had the stars beneath his feet, the
bulk of the Fortress seemingly balanced overhead. With practiced skill he
turned now at right angles to the Radiant's force.
His flyer entered the marked notch of another traffic lane, this one grooved
into the Fortress's outer armored surface. The bulk of it remained over his
head and now seemed to rotate with his motion.
Below him passed stars, while on the dark rims of the traffic lane to either
side he caught glimpses of the antiquated but still operational defensive
works. Blunt snouts of missile-launchers, skeletal fingers of mass-drivers and
beam-projectors, the lenses and screens and domes of sensors and field
generators. All the hardware was still periodically tested, but in all his
journeyings this way Sabel had never seen any of it looking anything but
inactive. War had long ago gone elsewhere.
Other traffic, scanty all during his flight, had now vanished altogether. The
lane he was following branched, and Sabel turned left, adhering to his usual
route. If anyone should be watching him today, no deviation from his usual
procedure would be observed. Not yet, anyway. Later& later he would make very
sure that nobody was watching.
Here came a landmark on his right. Through another shaft piercing the Fortress
a wand of the Radiant's light fell straight to the outer surface, where part
of it was caught by the ruined framework of an auxiliary spaceport, long since
closed. In that permanent radiance the old beams glowed like twisted
night-flowers, catching at the light before it fell away to vanish invisibly
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and forever among the stars.
Just before he reached this unintended beacon, Sabel turned sharply again,
switching on his bright running lights as he did so. Now he had entered a vast
battle-crack in the stone and metal of the Fortress's surface, a dark
uncharted wound that in Dardanian times had been partially repaired by a
frail-looking spiderwork of metal beams.
Familiar with the way, Sabel steered busily, choosing the proper passage amid
obstacles. Now the stars were dropping out of view behind him. His route led
him up again, into the lightless ruined passages where nothing seemed to have
changed since Helen died.
Another minute of flight through twisting ways, some of them designed and
others accidental. Then, obeying a sudden impulse,
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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy
Sabel braked his flyer to a hovering halt. In the remote past this passage had
been air-filled, the monumental length and breadth of it well suited for mass
ceremony. Dardanian pictures and glyphs filled great portions of its long
walls. Sabel had looked at them a hundred times before, but now he swung his
suited figure out of the flyer's airless cab and walked close to the wall,
moving buoyantly in the light gravity, as if to inspect them once again. This
was an ideal spot to see if anyone was really following him. Not that he had
any logical reason to think that someone was. But the feeling was strong that
he could not afford to take a chance.
As often before, another feeling grew when he stood here in the silence and
darkness that were broken only by his own presence and that of his machines.
Helen herself was near. In Sabel's earlier years there had been something
religious in this experience. Now& but it was still somehow comforting.
He waited, listening, thinking. Helen's was not the only presence near, of
course. On three or four occasions at least during the past ten years (there
might have been more that Sabel had never heard about)
explorers had discovered substantial concentrations of berserker wreckage out
in these almost abandoned regions. Each time Sabel had heard of such a find
being reported to the Guardians, he had promptly petitioned them to be allowed
to examine the materials, or at least to be shown a summary of whatever
information the
Guardians might manage to extract. His pleas had vanished into the
bureaucratic maw. Gradually he had come to understand that they would never
tell him anything about berserkers. The Guardians were jealous of his relative
success and fame. Besides, their supposed job of protecting humanity on the
Fortress now actually gave them almost nothing to do. A few newly-discovered
berserker parts could be parlayed into endless hours of technical and
administrative work.
Just keeping secrets could be made into a job, and they were not about to
share any secrets with outsiders.
But, once Sabel had become interested in berserkers as a possible source of
data on the Radiant, he found ways to begin a study of them. His study was at
first bookish and indirect, but it advanced;
there was always more information available on a given subject than a censor
realized, and a true scholar knew how to find it out.
And Sabel came also to distrust the Guardians' competence in the
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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy scholarly aspects of their own field.
Even if they had finally agreed to share their findings with him, he thought
their pick-axe methods unlikely to extract from a berserker's memory anything
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of value.
They had refused of course to tell him what their methods were, but he could
not imagine them doing anything imaginatively.
Secure in his own space helmet, he whispered now to himself: "If I
want useful data from my own computer, I don't tear it apart. I
communicate with it instead."
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