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standard astrogation models.
The computer at the moment was using no color or other
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distinguishing shading to represent berserker territory. In fact, as the slow
tide of the long conflict ebbed and flowed, it would have been impossible to
delimit that wasteland with anything like up-to-date accuracy. Nor could
anyone say with any substantial probability where the damned machines had
originated, though the captured records, sketchy as they were, offered
a tersely convincing explanation of how they had come into being.
In this particular display, a somewhat outdated version of their domain of
devastation could be marked out, demarcated by tagging the suns of all
the worlds known to have been attacked in the era of Solarian
civilization. A smaller domain, largely enclosed within the first,
represented that of the planets known to have been sterilized of life.
One of the investigators had now keyed in these presentations, evoking a
strategic situation inevitably some years out of date.
No one in the group now gathered expected to find in this database
much in the way of berserker bases, factories, or strongholds.
If some person of ordinary height, employing the witchcraft of virtual
reality within this chamber, swelled in a moment by a factor of a
billion in physical height and width, he or she was still somewhat less than
two billion meters (two million kilometers)
tall. The observer was now in effect much bigger than the biggest planet, yet
in his eyes the scale of the surrounding display, as far as its more
distant reaches were concerned, seemed hardly to have changed.
His body length had now become comparable to the diameter of Sol, a roughly
average star. But if the explorer's objective in using the chamber had been to
bring the Galaxy down to a size through which he might hope to climb or swim
in a few minutes'
effort, he had really made little headway. The division (in effect)
of all the distances involved by a factor of a thousand million still left the
expanded human facing mind-cracking immensity.
"Unless you want to swim in one place all day, you'll have to grow a lot more
than that."
Math conquers all-if only numbers are to be evaluated.
Eventually, having evoked more multiples, the hopeful swimmer attained a scale
on which the Galaxy looked no bigger than a tall building. This did not
occur until the would-be observer had magnified his own height to
something like a thousand light-years. On this scale any solar system
had long since disappeared into the microscopic-or would have done so had
the computer not been careful to create beacons.
Now, moving about within the VR chamber, temporarily free of the restraints
of gravity, one got the impression that the whole
Galaxy had indeed been made to fit inside. On this scale the three main spiral
arms were readily distinguishable, with Sol-thanks to the computer-findable as
a tiny blinking beacon well out in the
Orion-Cygnus curve.
Someone made the necessary adjustments to bring the display's version of the
Mavronari Nebula into focus at a handy size. The investigators looked and
felt their way around and through the image without coming to any
helpful insights.
Someone remarked that most astronomers and astrogators would ordinarily
regard the Mavronari as tremendously dull.
There were a hundred other nebulas much like it in known space, and they were
of interest only as obstacles to astrogation, save to a few cosmologists.
Anyway, whoever had created and updated the display had evidently possessed
few details on the subject.
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The small black box that one of the fleet commander's staff was now
loading into the VR mechanism contained information exactly duplicating that
in the box which the berserkers had recently stolen from the Imatran
archive, or which-in a scenario considered less likely-that machine had
quickly read in the archive and then utterly destroyed.
The computers controlling the display inside the ten-meter cube
granted each observer a central viewpoint this time, choosing as a
first scene a defense controller's bunker slightly below the Imatran
surface. Then the scenario was run in other modes-at first look none of
them very helpful.
Realtime rolled by as the study continued. Disappointment soon set in
once more.
"Run it again?" asked a software specialist.
"Yes. No. Yes, in a minute. But first-" Commodore Prinsep rubbed
tired eyes. "Well, people, all I can actually see when I
look at this record is what appears to be a very peculiar berserker attack.
Unique in its own way. The most recent onslaught upon
Imatra was also thoroughly untypical, but the two were unlike in at least one
intriguing characteristic-I mean that the attacker of three centuries ago
retreated after having shed relatively little blood."
There was a murmur of agreement.
The speaker went on: "Have any of the rest of you yet discerned
any additional nontrivial contrasts, or similarities, between the two
engagements?"
"Not I."
"Nor I. Not yet." There was a chorus of similar answers around the circle.
The commodore pushed at the point relentlessly. "So no one yet has any
idea what our contemporary berserkers might have found in this record to
cause them to break off their own attack so abruptly?"
No one did. But one adviser offered: "Viewing the recording certainly
brings home the essential strangeness of that raid of three hundred
years ago. One sees excerpts, and reads the accounts, of course, but
somehow one doesn't grasp the full peculiarity of the event that
way. As you say, sir, it was a mugging, a mass kidnapping, rather than
a wholesale murder."
"Yes. While, as we all know, wholesale murder is a berserker's sole aim in
life."
No one smiled.
"In a way, such a great peculiarity worries me more than simple
slaughter. Because it indicates that there's something very important that we
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