Berserker - Earth Descended Part 16

There had been important changes made around him. He knew this the moment he started to come out of sleep. Opening his eyes a groggy second or two later, he realized that he was in a new bedroom, much like his old one but different in detail and bigger.

"s.h.i.+p...s.h.i.+p, where am I? What's happened?" "You have been moved during your sleep into a new accommodation, Bart. There is no cause for alarm."

He got up and dressed and ate and eliminated as usual. The walls of this room were metal, and its door was thicker, as he saw when it opened for him to go out.

"Why did you move me, s.h.i.+p?"

"Some of the people were attempting to reach you, to rouse you from sleep at the wrong time. They meant well but it was necessary to prevent their interference."

His door opened into a corridor he had never seen before, leading off in one direction only. It bent sharply several times and was interrupted by two sets of heavy doors that opened as Bart drew near and closed immediately after he had pa.s.sed.

He found himself coming back into the peopled area of the s.h.i.+p from a new direction near the biology lab. The first folk to see him dropped what they were doing and ran to give him a glad welcome.

"I told you he'd be here on schedule!" cried Mal, pounding Bart joyfully on the back. No club in Mai's hand this time.

"s.h.i.+p was just taking good care of him, that's all!" Sigrid pulled him in for a big hug against her heavy bosom.

Later her learned that an intensive effort had been made to "rescue" him from the machines, set him free from his long sleeps. The attempt had collapsed, foolishly, and no one wanted to talk about it. Then everyone had grown a little worried about Bart and all were glad to see him still coming back, if only for a day each year.

Gray was spreading in the hair of the happy crew around him, and several of the male heads were nearly bald. Many of the people looked a little fatter and squintier than when he had seen them last. They gave him a big lunch that was almost a birthday party.

Thirty-seven.

Galina and Solon took him on a tour of their biology lab, which was much enlarged and changed since he had seen it last, with cages holding white rats and hamsters, raised from genetic material obtained from the s.h.i.+p's stores.

"Do you think the long sleeps are harming me?" Bart asked when he had a chance.

"Harming you physically? No, I doubt it." Galina looked at him thoughtfully. "It takes an enormous amount of energy and a great deal of control equipment to keep a human being in such a sleep; even a s.h.i.+p like this couldn't do it for very many people at a time. It's not just freezing in the ordinary sense, you know. Even the orbital electrons within your body's atoms are kept from moving...but don't worry about the physical danger of it, that's extremely small."

She was anxious to resume the biology lessons, and they went on a thorough tour of the lab.

"We haven't been able to get any human genetic material from the s.h.i.+p to work with. Still, in theory it should be possible for us to produce a new human generation here, starting with just ordinary cells from our own bodies. Did I ever tell you anything about cloning cells?"

"No."

"I will. Anyway, it hasn't worked out yet. We're not sure if the s.h.i.+p is interfering in some subtle way, or if there are simply problems we're not aware of."

They showed Bart ma.s.ses of tissue growing in gla.s.s jars. But they had never been able to get the tissue to differentiate properly into all the organs that had to grow in concert to make a person. It looked to Bart as if they hadn't yet even come close to achieving that.

Here and there old colored tapes were stuck to the walls and overhead, but the game they represented seemed to have been utterly abandoned.

The only compet.i.tion Bart heard about today was in raising the best food plants and flowers.

Thirty-eight.

It was depressing to see Helsa now dragging herself around like an invalid, her arms grown thin and her ankles puffy. Others told Bart that Galina suspected some slow, incurable disease. Then they turned the talk to brighter things.

"There's a lot of card playing going on now, Bart," Sharon informed him.

"Card playing?"

"Poker, whist, bridge," said Ranjan. "We'll show you. They're old games we dug out of the s.h.i.+p's records. Then we've also tried two new ways to get through the barriers to reach the control regions of the s.h.i.+p, but neither has worked."

"We haven't really tried them yet," Fuad objected.

"Well, we've run them on the computer," Lotis put in.

"Bah, I tell you, the s.h.i.+p is still using that computer against us-"

"No, I keep tellingyou," argued Ranjan "we've got it blocked off now against any possibility of the s.h.i.+p's gaining access-"

"So you think! I don't agree." The argument was heated, but still showed no sign of coming to blows.

Thirty-nine.

Today there was a prayer meeting, more elaborate in ceremony but less intense in feeling than the last one Bart had attended. He noted that people's clothing, which they now made largely for themselves, was growing more elaborate too, and more voluminous; it covered more of their sagging bodies, and distracted attention from them.

Bart also noticed that a softer, more comfort-able type of chair had been manufactured some-how and was now in general use. The legs didn't look as if they could be unscrewed.

Forty.

It was birthday party time again. Only four candles adored the big cake; each standing for ten years, as someone explained to Bart. The party was opened with a rather perfunctory prayer.

"Bet you don't remember when I took this picture of you, Bart."

"Yes I do."

Several speeches were made, tracing the recent history of progress in science-mainly astro-nomical observations and biological research- and in the arts, mainly sculpture, painting, and drawing. Not much had been done lately in an en-gineering way, a speaker said, which Bart sup-posed meant they weren't getting anywhere with plans to take over the s.h.i.+p.

A new president, Olen, had just been elected for a two-year term, and he pledged in a vague way to get things moving.

All around the table the faces were puffy or lined, continuing to puddle or sag. There was more gray hair than any other color.

Forty-one.

Bart found a number of people playing chess, a game they said they would teach him before the day was over.

About dinner time Basil told him something else, more confidentially. "I'm not going to give you any details, kid, nothing the s.h.i.+p doesn't already know. Information you don't have can't be pumped out of you. I'll just say that this time we really know what we're doing, and we're not likely to be stopped.

We've been a long time getting ready."

Forty-two.

He soon learned that Basil, Mal, and Olen had set out, shortly after Bart's last waking day, on a major effort to force their way into the s.h.i.+p's control areas. They were not back yet, and by now it was doubtful, to say the least, that they ever would return.

Himyar, the sculptor, proudly showed Bart a tall pair of steel doors on which he was carving the history of their little society in a series of panels. He claimed that he had devised a method of grinding stainless steel that worked beautifully.

Helsa was now much better, Bart saw with some surprise. But Sigrid looked unhealthy and was complaining of vague pains. "We're going to try something new," Bart heard Galina tell her cheer-fully.

Evidently the s.h.i.+p was again not helping, or could not.

The garden had once more been enlarged, the entire new area being used for additional food plants.

Forty-three.

Basil was back, had been back for several months, but Bart saw that there was still some-thing new and wild and strange in his eyes and he was still emaciated. The other men weren't coming back, Basil said, and that was about all he had to tell about his great adventure.

The way Basil looked made Bart timid about pressing him with any further questions. Later he heard more of Basil's story from someone else. The three men had tried going out into s.p.a.ce, outside the s.h.i.+p, to reach the aft where they intended to get back in. Something had gone wrong with their equipment; maybe the s.h.i.+p had sabotaged it. They did get back into the s.h.i.+p, luckily in a region where they could find air and water and stored food enough to keep them alive for a time, but the controls had been as much out of reach as ever. Eventually Basil had made his way back, somehow, through a maze of inner decks and pa.s.sageways. He had never made it completely clear just how the other two had died, and Bart got the impression that it might be wise not to press too closely on the question.

Himyar had completed his doors and was working with Vivian on a giant mural of Earth, composed of scenes reconstructed imaginatively from old records.

Sigrid's condition was not much changed from last year.

Fay, having recently been named president in a special election, told Bart it had been decided that he should attend school every waking day. The people were getting ready a course of study for him. "The machines insisted on our attending school, I mean in a formal way, and I don't know why they don't with you, but never mind." She brushed back her graying hair and looked at him as if at a challenge. "It's time and past time that you formed good habits to carry you through the rest of your life."

Forty-four.

Bart heard right away that Sigrid had died, only a few days ago.

Maybe this latest death was still on everyone's mind, and that was why his first day of school didn't go too well. Lotis was teaching, and sort of skipped from subject to subject, and technique to technique.

She knew it wasn't going well, and once she sighed: "Someone else will take a turn at teaching next year, I mean tomorrow. Are you able to learn anything from me, Bart?"

"Oh yes."

His day was almost over before he heard some-thing exciting: it was no longer quite certain that Olen and Mal were dead. At least some garbled message had come in, along disused intercom channels that were thought to connect with control territory. Some almost indecipherable words about surviving.

Maybe it was only garbage belched out by the vast intras.h.i.+p communications delay lines or memory drums, maybe not produced by any of this generation's people at all. But maybe...

Forty-five.

Himyar had put his clever hands to work, toiling in his improved shop, to outfit several people with eyegla.s.ses. Studies on artificial teeth were now well under way, with Solon doing most of the re-search.

The s.h.i.+p refused to do anything along prosthetic lines for anyone, though it still treated routine minor injuries.

Bart heard Edris and Trac and Kichiro praying, but no longer to the s.h.i.+p. He saw Basil, who now stared at walls instead of stars, and still said very little.

School was better today. Fuad as teacher talked with him easily and amused him with stories of old Earth.

Forty-six.