murderous

ahead, you tell me."
Her seat companion looked thoughtful. He seemed to be taking the assignment seriously. "Well. Two hundred and five years ago, right here—that is, right in the workshop that we're going to visit, and right under the noses of the Guardians—Georgicus Sabel encountered a functioning berserker, a remnant of their attacking force of several hundred years before that. He tried to bargain with it. He proposed giving it something it wanted, for something, scientific information, that he thought he could get from it in return . . . .
"To deal with a berserker, to play the role of goodlife, wasn't what he had started out to do, of course. He began by seeking Truth, you see. That's Truth with a great big scientific capital T."
"But since he dealt with a berserker, he was goodlife. Wasn't he?" Commander Blenheim knew the story very well, from the relatively inaccessible official Templar records as well as from the public histories. She knew what Sabel had been. He had been goodlife without a doubt. Guilty of that which in the Templar universe of thought was still the one great and unforgivable sin, the act that negated any possible good intentions—the provision of service and aid to a berserker, one of those murderous robots that went about its age-old programmed task of eliminating from the universe the blight of life. To Templars—to any human being except the perverted goodlife, but to Templars in particular—berserkers were malignance personified in metal.
So much Anne Blenheim knew, beyond a doubt, about Sabel. But she wanted to learn at first hand what the Prin—what the general