Kate Wilhelm - The Killer Thing

And another day that he had walked to the edge of the desert and it had found him, and again the beam had turned rocks red, melted them. He couldn’t remember if that day had been before or after the day that he had gone out in the dinghy landing in the sand only to be covered over when the winds blew that night. It hadn’t followed him. When he returned to the shelter of the mountain ridge, it had been there, waiting. Why hadn’t it gone out after him? He gnawed his knuckles. Why had he left it so far behind? If it came now and mixed a new trail with the old ones, he wouldn’t be able to count on his detection system to tell the old from the new. It could sneak up on him, catch him unaware, unprepared, and then the beam would flow along the ground, melting what it touched, searching, always searching for him. Why didn’t it simply repair its own dinghy and get the hell out? It could afford to leave him alone; he was not a threat to it now. All he was was one weak, sick man, no threat to anything or anyone…

Why do you have to declare war and demand control of whole planets? Why can’t you simply trade for what you want and need? Why do you have to burn and destroy and kill first?

Lar couldn’t understand. He smiled at her helplessly. He had found her sitting at the river-bank, a book across her legs, her eyes half closed as she stared at the light patterns on ripples of water where the river swirled around a sand bar. He tried to explain it to her, but she cut him short.

You don’t even know why, do you? You have been told that this is the way it is to be, and you have accepted that unquestioningly. What kind of a threat was Mellic to your people? It was five thousand years since our last war on Mellic itself; we had forgotten how to wage war. The thought of killing another being sickened us. How did we threaten you and your people? You could have acquired the land you needed for a base, to further your space explorations. You didn’t have to conquer the entire planet and bring about its ruin as you did. You wonder why you are hated wherever you go? Do you really wonder?

We have gambled everything on continued growth.

You refuse to curb any of your appetites.

That isn’t it! Any organism needs to grow, or die…

You bred yourselves off your original planet, and now you spread through the galaxy like a disease…

We don’t hate any of the peoples we have found. We try to arrange peaceful alignments with them…

You don’t hate them because you have been taught that they are not people. How could one hate inoffensive animals, or peaceful birds? Why don’t you allow yourself the luxury of thinking? You should take one week, go alone into the woods, or up the mountain, and do nothing but think, Have they ever left you alone long enough to think? Look at me! I am a person! Just as you are a person. I am not simply a barrier to your world’s expansionistic dreams. I am a human being who bleeds and hurts. I lie awake at night and remember the quality of peace as it was, my brothers, my father, all alive and happy, now dead, burned out of existence, as if they never had lived. Did they threaten you? My father made lloyars. Like your violins, to make music, to free the mind of its earthly concerns and allow it to approach heaven… My brothers… a poet and a surgeon, threats to spur plans for eternal expansion? Can you look at me and honestly say you believe me to be less than human?

Lar, I am sorry…

No! Don’t tell me that! You can’t be sorry until you have suffered as we have. Not until you have felt alone as we have, alone and helpless. Not until you can know that the villages you have disintegrated with your beams contained people, real human beings who died in terror and pain… and alone.

“Stop! Stop! I won’t listen to you!” Trace shouted, jerking himself upright from the seat-bed, glaring wildly about the tiny dinghy as if he expected to see others inside it with him. His hand trembled when he touched it to his eyes. He had seen her! He had felt the breeze from the river, smelled the strange smells of the mosses, the ferns with their pungent sweet odours, the violet and blue flowers that bowed over the water. He had felt the impatience with her that he had been unable to conceal as she mouthed platitudes based on ignorance of the realities of the galaxy. It had been real! Something had happened to time itself, placing him back there again, living it over again…

He clutched his head in his hands and squeezed hard, thankful for the answering pain. A dream. He had dozed, dreamed. He listened to the wind, subsiding now, and knew that he had to eat. The thought of the tubes disgusted him, but he needed the strength they alone could give him now. Then he would go over his maps and plan for the next morning, and after that sleep. Perhaps it would end with the next morning. He would find the other dinghy, get through the screen somehow and take its water and fuel, boobytrap it, and then blast off for the orbiting ship, out of range of the inhuman killer that was inexorably closing in on him. He shivered when he thought of it out in the wind, never stopping, keeping steadily on his trail no matter how devious he tried to make it.

A logic box, Trace. That’s all it is; a logic box. It can’t think anything new or original, can’t feel anything, has to do what it’s been told to do, in the ways it’s been taught to do them. Someone taught it to kill. That’s all it knows, to kill.

Who, Trace wondered, had been its teacher after Venus and the carnage it left behind it there? Who had given it the invisibility shield, and in the name of heaven why? Especially why. Didn’t he realise what he was doing when he gave it that? Had he been so blind, so selfishly determined to try it out that he never even considered what he was doing? Had someone purposely made it invincible and then turned it out to kill whoever and whatever got in its path? Who had hated mankind enough to do that?

There was no time. There was only now, and all else was data to be scanned indiscriminately with no temporal reference, as before and after. There was no future to be considered, anticipated, or feared. There was no future. Only the ever present now. It was going no place, to do nothing. It had no directive other than to maintain itself. It had no need for food, for heat, for radiation shielding. It had discarded those things from the fleet ship that was still accelerating at maximum speed away from Venus and the Solar System. Behind it in space a trail of unnecessary items marked its path: seats, beds, clothing, pressure suits, food, everything that was not stored away within something else, everything that could be picked up and taken to the airlock to be released.

It scanned: “…survival itself might depend on your being able to dismantle any part of the ship and reassemble it.” A bit of data, picked up and recorded from a drill several miles away from the laboratory. Survival meant understanding the ship, being able to break it down and rebuild it. It began breaking it down, first the control board itself, studying the wiring, tracing circuits, deciphering coded information. It rebuilt the control board and moved on to the analogue computer. It learned to feed it questions, learned the range of its ability to answer. It moved on to the construction of the ship itself, the walls, floor, furnishings…

There was no time. There was endless time. There was time enough to work through the ship, inch by inch, and learn each part, break down each part and rebuild it. After this was done, it scanned again: “You have to be able to go into warp sector immediately with no warning. Nothing can touch you in warp. It could mean the difference between a hit and a miss.”