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get on the ship at all. He just had to sit in a cell and answer questions for Andreas and Lachaise. And the
berserker too, it talked to him directly somehow."
"I see." Suomi sipped at his golden goblet of fermented milk. Maybe the stuff made Schoenberg sick,
but he had found that his stomach could handle it without difficulty, and he had grown to like the taste.
Athena was looking at him almost dreamily across the little table. "I haven't really had a chance to tell
you what I think, Carlos," she said now in a soft, low voice. "It was such a simple idea. Oh, of course I
mean simple in the sense of something classical, elegant. And brilliant."
"Hm?"
"The way you used your recordings of Karlsen's voice, and won the battle."
"Oh, well. That was simple, to splice together recorded words to make some phrases that a berserker
ought to find appropriately threatening. The main thing was that the berserker should identify his voice
and so take the strongest, most violent action it could to kill him, forgetting everything else, be perfectly
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willing to destroy itself in the process."
"But to conceive of it was brilliant, and to do it required courage."
"Well. When I heard that its servants were asking about Karlsen, for no apparent reason, the idea struck
me that we might be dealing with one of those assassin machines, a berserker that had been programmed
specifically to go after Karlsen. Even if it was only an ordinary berserker-ha, what am I
SAYING?-Karlsen's destruction would rate as a very high priority in its programming, probably higher
than depopulating a minor world. I gambled that it would just forget its other plans and wreck the ship,
that it would just take it as probable that Karlsen was somehow hiding onOrion with a secret landing
party."
"That sounds insane." Then, flustered, Athena tried to modify the implied criticism. "I mean-"
"It does sound insane. But, as I understand it, predicting human behavior has never been the berserkers'
strong point. Maybe it thought Andreas had betrayed it after all."
The god Thorun incarnate, who had been Thomas the Grabber, strolled majestically into the courtyard at
its other end, trailed by priests and a sculptor who was making sketches for a new spear-carrying statue.
Suomi rose slightly from his chair and made a little bow in Thorun's direction. Thorun answered with a
smile and a courteous nod.
Carlos and Thomas understood each other surprisingly well. The people had to be reassured, society
supported, through a time of crisis. Did Leros and the other devout leaders really believe that a god and a
demigod now walked among them? Apparently they did, at least in one compartment of their minds, and
at least as long as such belief suited their needs. And perhaps in one sense it was the truth that Karlsen
still walked here.
Perhaps, also, the sandy-haired man now known as Giles the Chancellor, who was Thorun's constant
companion and adviser, was to a great degree responsible for the relative smoothness with which the
society of Godsmountain had weathered the upheavals of the past few days. Alas for the Brotherhood.
Well, thought Suomi, likely a world with the Brotherhood victorious would have been no better than
Godsmountain's world was going to be without its secret demon.
There was Schoenberg now, walking near his wrecked ship. Barbara Hurtado was at his side listening to
him as he pointed out features of the rubble-clearing system the slaves were following. It was a result of
his expert analysis of the problem. He had been talking about it yesterday with Suomi. There, where
Schoenberg was now pointing, was the place where the mathematically proven plan of greatest efficiency
called for all the debris to be piled. Schoenberg had come near being killed as a collaborator by Leros
and the winning faction, but intervention by the demigod Karlsen had saved his life and restored his
freedom.
After what had happened to Celeste Servetus and Gus De La Torre-their mutilated bodies had been
found atop a small mountain of human and animal bones in a secret charnel-pit far beneath the
Temple-Suomi could not blame Schoenberg or anyone else for collaboration. Schoenberg had told him
of the tale of ruthless Earthmen who were going to come looking to avenge him, a tale that, alas, had
been nothing but pure bluff. Suomi, though, still had the feeling that Schoenberg was leaving something
out, that more had passed between him and Andreas than he was willing to recount.
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Let it lie. The ship had been irreparably damaged, and the surviving members of the hunting expedition
were going to have to coexist on this planet, in all likelihood, for an indeterminate number of standard
years, until some other ship just happened by.
Athena took a sip of cool water from her fine goblet, and Suomi drank some more fermented milk from
his. She had spent the period of crisis locked in her private room and unmolested-maybe she would have
been the next day's sacrifice-until the ship crashed and the Temple was knocked down about her ears.
Even then she was only shaken up. She, the independent, self-sufficient woman, and by chance she had
been forced to sit by passively like some ancient heroine while men fought all around her.
"What are your plans, Carl?"
"I suspect the citizens here will sooner or later get tired of having the demigod Karlsen around, and I just
hope it doesn't happen before a ship shows up. I think he'll maintain a low profile, as they say, until then."
"No, I mean Carl Suomi's plans."
"Well." Suddenly he wondered if any of the Hunterians, before the crisis, had heard her call him Carl, as
she frequently did. He wondered if that might have contributed to his being so fortunately misidentified.
Never mind.
Well. Only a few days ago Carlos Suomi's plans for his future would definitely have included Athena.
But that was before he had seen her so avidly viewing men killing each other.
No. Sorry. Of course he himself had now killed more people than she had even seen die-yet in a real
sense he was still a pacifist, more so than ever in fact, and she was not. That was how he saw the matter,
anyway.
Barbara, now. She was still standing beside Schoenberg as he lectured her, but she looked over from
time to time toward the place where Suomi sat. Suomi wanted nice things to happen to Barbara. Last
night she had shared his bed. The two of them had laughed about their minor injuries, comparing bruises.
But& a playgirl. No. His life would go on just about the same if he never saw Barbara again.
What, then, were his plans, as Athena put it? Well, there were plenty of other fish splashing in the seas of
Earth, or even, if he could be allowed a mangled metaphor, living demure and veiled behind their white
walls here on Godsmountain. He still wanted a woman, and in more ways than one.
Schoenberg was now pointing up into the sky. Would his rubble pile grow that tall? Then Barbara
leaped with excitement, and Suomi looked up and saw the ship.
Next thing they were all running, shouting, looking for the emergency radios that Schoenberg had insisted
on getting from theOrion and keeping handy. Some trying-to-be-helpful Hunterian had misplaced the
radios. Never mind. The ship lowered rapidly, drawn by the beacon-like appearance of the city atop the
mountain, andOrion already sitting there. A silvery sphere, similar in every way to Schoenberg's craft.
With wild waves Earthmen and Hunterians beckoned it to land on a cleared spot amid the rubble.
Landing struts out and down, drive off, hatch open, landing ramp extruded. A tall man emerging, with the
pallor of one probably raised under a dome on Venus, his long mustache waxed and shaped in the form [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]