Combat SF by Gordon R. Dickson (ed)

Author:Gordon R. Dickson (ed) [Dickson, Gordon R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi, Science Fiction
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1981-06-06T23:00:00+00:00

PATRON OF THE ARTS

Fred Saberhagen

After some hours’ work, Herron found himself hungry, and willing to pause for food. Looking over what he had just done, he could easily imagine one of the sycophantic critics praising it: A huge canvas, of discordant and brutal line, aflame with a sense of engulfing menace! And for once, Herron thought, the critic might be praising something good.

Turning away from his view of easel and blank bulkhead, Herron found that his captor had moved up silently to stand only an arm’s length behind him, for all the world like some human kibitzer.

He had to chuckle. “I suppose you’ve some idiotic suggestion to make?”

The roughly man-shaped machine said nothing, though it had what might be a speaker mounted on what might be a face. Herron shrugged and walked around it, going forward in search of the galley. This ship had been only a few hours out from Earth on C-plus drive when the berserker machine had run it down and captured it; and Piers Herron, the only passenger, had not yet had time to learn his way around.

It was more than a galley, he saw when he reached it—it was meant to be a place where arty colonial ladies could sit and twitter over tea when they grew weary of staring at pictures. The Franz Hals had been built as a traveling museum; then the war of life against berserker machine had grown hot around Sol, and BuCulture had ineptly decided that Earth’s art treasures would be safer if shipped away to Tau Epsilon. The Franz was ideally suited for such a mission, and for almost nothing else.

Looking further forward from the entrance to the galley, Herron could see that the door to the crew compartment had been battered down, but he did not go to look inside. Not that it would bother him to look, he told himself; he was as indifferent to horror as he was to almost all other human things. The Franz1 s crew of two were in there, or what was left of them after they had tried to fight off the berserker’s boarding machines. Doubtless they had preferred death to capture.

Herron preferred nothing. Now he was probably the only living being—apart from a few bacteria—within half a light-year; and he was pleased to discover that his situation did not terrify him, that his long-growing weariness of life was not just a pose to fool himself.

His metal captor followed him into the galley, watching while he set the kitchen devices to work. “Still no suggestions?” Herron asked it. “Maybe you’re smarter than I thought.”

“I am what men call a berserker, ” the man-shaped thing said to him suddenly, in a squeaky, ineffectual-sounding voice. “I have captured your ship, and I will talk with you through this small machine you see. Do you grasp my meaning?”

“I understand as well as I need to. ” He knew his captor was an utterly alien and inanimate thing, built in some segment of time and

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