O Master Caliban

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  But the more they saw of her the less strange she seemed. With her intelligence exponentially increased, Esther had become simply another species of extraterrestrial human being.

  Yigal, who stood fourteen hands high and spoke with the tongue of a man, was no more than a beautiful white goat; Dahlgren, master of animals, had made sure he would not become a beast with a human spirit trapped inside it. Yigal ate his leaves and tupped his dams, had an eye for the weather and the world’s predators.

  But Sven was a Solthree, one of their own species, and they had never seen one with four arms.

  For his own part, Sven, who had known very few of his species in the years he spent in the station, recognized with a deep inner excitement, almost to the point of discomfort, the beings he had been shown in books and on film, whose words he had read and heard, whose thoughts and emotions he had been given for his own. Of all such persons, he was very uncomfortably aware that none had four arms. He said diffidently, “Now maybe you’ll tell me who you are.”

  “I’m Ardagh,” one of the girls said, not the shrill-voiced one who had yelled from the ship. “Our parents are Solthree United Nations delegates to the big GalFed conference. Our ship was late and all the arrangements for entertaining kids had gotten made, so they lumped us together and packed us off on what was supposed to be an educational tour.” She grinned. “I’m afraid we’re not very well matched.” She was about sixteen, short, chunky and heavily muscled; she had long straight brass-colored hair.

  “Joshua Ndola,” said the next boy. His knees were drawn up and his arms folded over them. He was Sven’s age, very thin, tall, and black of skin. He was the most formally dressed of the lot in the dark-gray, silver-starred uniform of some space academy.

  “Mitzi.” Head turned back against the wall, eyes closed, older than Ardagh or perhaps only looking older; pale and curly-haired, more monkey-faced than Esther, smoking some kind of drug in a tube, it gave off a thick sweet smell.

  “Koz.” About seventeen; he was wearing a long blue robe and had his dark hair dressed in complicated braids and knots, his face tattooed with small blue things like bugs. It was very hard to imagine where he came from or what he did.

  “And you? What’s your name?” to the small boy.

  The one who made him uneasy.

  “Shirvanian.” Voice as sulky as his fleshy mouth. Thick black hair falling over his forehead, deep skin color, round face ... I want Mama. Clutching the box; it looked heavy and glittered with bright designs. I want to know ... and the ergs had moved in ...

  Sven found eyes resting on him, finally. Ardagh’s.

  * * *

  No offense there. Ardagh merely wanted to be the greatest surgeon who had ever lived. Sven was wearing a close-fitting pair of homespun pants and a rabbitskin vest that left his arms bare. She was watching the play of muscles as he shifted on the stool or twined his arms. An undercurrent of thought that she had seen him, no, surely not him but someone with a face like his, somewhere ...

  Hairless head, likely mutation effect. Yellowish skin, wild genes again, he was not oriental. Fine pale brows and thin eyelashes, weird with brown eyes. And the arms. Rounded shoulders to accommodate both sets in free movement, and a chest not hollow but filled with muscle. Plenty of pectoral to move those well-developed limbs. And, as far as she could see, no deltoids on the lower pair ...

  He said, “Did you want something?” There was a glint in his eyes.

  Before she could stop herself, she blurted, “Excuse me, but do you have an extra set of clavicles?”

  He threw back his head and roared with laughter, deep bass. “No, but I do have four scapulae! Do you want to see?” He began to unhook his vest.

  Mitzi snarled, “For God’s sake, Ardagh!”

  The girl went deep red.

  “But I don’t mind,” Sven said.

  Esther reached over and flicked his ear. “Save the anatomy lesson. The food’s hot.”

  “And I’ve got four nipples too,” Sven laughed. She flicked his ear again.

  Koz stood up. “I’m starved. Come on, Mitzi.”

  She was the only one left sitting. A fine smoke-stream rose from the burning drug.

  The tattooed boy knocked the tube out of her mouth. “Get rid of that crap! We had enough of that goddam stink on board.”

  She opened her yellow eyes wide. “Did you? You slobbered your filthy betel juice all over the place!”

  “Come and eat,” Sven said quietly. He rose with all his arms held out, in invitation and, if necessary, threat.

  Mitzi giggled. “You look like one of those robots.” But she pulled herself up and helped finish the stew down to the last scrape of the bowl.

  * * *

  Koz pushed his bowl away. His face was haggard, and the blue tattoos writhed in the stubble of his young beard. “Look, we’re very grateful, but we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Nobody knows you’re here because the radio went, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But if you were on a tour they should know where you were headed.”

  “Back to Barrazan Two, then shipping out to GalFed Central.”

  There was something about the line of his mouth. Esther twitched; if Koz had been Sven he would have gotten slapped for lying. She said gently, “You’re on Barrazan Five. I think you were going the wrong way.”

  “How would we know? The thing was out of kilter!”

  Five pairs of eyes.

  Shirvanian got up and began to explore, touching and listening.

  Sven said, “It doesn’t matter where you want to go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He means they have no radio,” Shirvanian said from the storeroom. He was sniffing at the primitive machinery, turning his head one way and another for the whisper of the generator and the drip of the water still.

  “We could’ve built one, but it’d only be a toy. You couldn’t raise GalFed or even Barrazan Four on it, and the ergs would pick up the signal.”

  “But we can’t just be stuck here! There must be a radio at the station headquarters. Isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Sven said.

  “All right, then. We’ve heard about Dahlgren’s setup, and the erg machines and the mutations—”

  “I haven’t,” Mitzi said.

  “You threw away the tape because you’re too damn lazy to listen. One thing, it never said the ergs were tearing people apart and taking their ships away.”

  “It must have been made a while ago,” Sven said.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure. I think those machines were so smart they could build machines even smarter ... maybe they thought they ought to be working for themselves instead of anybody else ... unless somebody human set them on to it.”

  Dahlgren, perhaps, getting tired of playing with animals?

  Esther said, “I don’t think they needed anybody to set them on to it. Being with Dahlgren, alongside him, building new machine forms at the same time he built or changed life forms ... they picked up a pattern.”

  “They picked up a pattern of killing living things. I suppose you could say they got that from Dahlgren.”

  “You were saved,” Ardagh said.

  “Dahlgren got us away ... we were all that was left by the time they were through with the—rebellion.”

  Machines crashed and clanged under the wind; the children turned silent. “I told you they’ve been coming closer,” Sven said dully.

  Ardagh whispered, “What do they want here?”

  “They have life sensors. You’re strange to them and they’re curious ... and of course they’d like to get rid of me. Ergs don’t care for life forms very much. They should be leaving in a few minutes. They always come back, hours or days.”

  Mitzi’s teeth were chattering. “I hate t
his. I hate it!”

  “Oh shut up,” Koz said. He turned to Sven. “They haven’t hurt you.”

  “They’d like to. They swing their arms and buzz at me, but they can’t get me. I don’t know why, and I don’t ask ...”

  “What about Dahlgren?”

  “He left us here and went back. They let him do that. I think he must be dead by now.” I hope, forgive me, I hope he’s dead ... I don’t want to think he did all this.”

  “But what happens if a ship comes for service?”

  “I suppose they get out and service it. This has never been anybody’s favorite stopping place.”

  “You said they’ve got a radio. They must have one to communicate with ships.”

  “I haven’t been there for nine years Solthree. The station complex is a hundred and fifty kilometers away. We’re up at the northwest tip of the triangle ... and when the ergs took over they turned up the reactors, killed off the closest life forms and sent the rest into wild mutations. Radiation doesn’t bother them. This was supposed to be a non-rad area, Zone Green. But it’s not any more.”

  Shirvanian got the pocket counter out of his bag. “Do you know what your background radiation was when you came here?”

  “No ... I was too young to care.”

  “Point four millirads,” said Esther.

  “It’s a bit more than that now.”

  “The winter storms wash the stuff down from the dust clouds in the east.”

  Shirvanian thought for a minute. “With a steady background of about point four mr a person should pick up a body burden of about thirty-odd rem over nine years ... and I guess that wouldn’t be too good to grow up in ... but a hundred and fifty kilometers ... you’d only get readings of a few rads per hour by the time you got to the reactors, and that doesn’t sound like runaway radiation.”

  “The ergs built big earthworks on the zone boundaries to use as baffles. That’s how the dosages were originally controlled. In Zone Blue, you’ll see the counter jump.”

  “Maybe you should ask Yigal,” Sven said. “His dams move through the zones.”

  Yigal gave a loud ironic snicker. “Indeed.” He opened his eyes and raised his head from the moss pile. “All the kids I sired,” he got up, dug his head into the nearest bin, and pulled it out with a cabbage impaled on one horn, “were aborted monsters.” He twisted his head, tossed off the cabbage, sat back on his haunches in time to catch it with his front hooves. It was his one trick.

  Koz ground his teeth. “There has to be a way!”

  A gust of wind drove rain through the curtains and made the lamp swing.

  “Does there?” Sven flung out all four of his arms. When he gestured his lower arms repeated the movements of his upper ones a split second later; sometimes he seemed to have a shadow image. “If we could have gotten away do you think we’d still be here? You think we’re happy? It’s a filthy place, and outside in the wilderness it’s twenty times worse.” He was tired and irritable. First outworld people he’d seen in half his life and they had to be this lot. “Suppose you got past the ergs, the radiation, wild mutations, crazy native life, storms—if you found a radio and a ship, would you know how to use them?”

  Out of the silence, Shirvanian said, “I would—or if I couldn’t, which isn’t likely, I’d make the ergs do it for me.”

  Mitzi shrieked, “You shut up, you dirty stupid brat, you can’t even keep your pants dry! You got us into this rotten mess!”

  Koz reached over and slammed her on the side of the head so hard she went crashing against Joshua’s shoulder and knocked him off the bench.

  Esther snaked out an arm like a steel cable, picked up Koz by the collar, and dumped him in the moss bin.

  “All right, Esther,” said Sven.

  Shirvanian burst into tears, Ardagh turned white, Koz and the others picked themselves up, spluttering.

  Esther grabbed Shirvanian and wiped his face with the palms of her hands. “I didn’t do it!” he yelled. “They made me! LET ME GO!”

  Koz brushed moss off, spitting. “You let him go and I’ll wring his neck for him!”

  Joshua calmly found his seat on the bench again. “I thought you were committed to nonviolence.”

  “I’m sick of you! I’m sick of this place!” Mitzi was shaking with tears of rage. “I hate you all!”

  “You’re scared and tired,” Esther said, brushing up moss, straightening clothes, drying tears. She was crazy-clean, or perhaps a bit crazy from trying to keep clean in such a place. “Sven, it’s time to sleep.”

  “Mutti, I’m scared and tired too. But I get more scared when I think ... Ardagh? Joshua? You seem to have your heads on. What is this? The ergs moved in on me tonight, your ship went the wrong way—and Shirvanian can operate interplanetary radio? What is this kid, ten years old?”

  “I’m not stupid! I can operate a radio!”

  Ardagh pulled her hands away from her face and the red welled into it.

  “He’s got some kind of psi,” she whispered, “It works on machines ...” She looked around. “Don’t glare at me. We can’t muck it up any worse than we’ve done already.”

  “Machines?” Sven stared down at Shirvanian, who had untangled himself from Esther and backed into a comer, red-eyed and pouting. “I’ve known a couple of ESPs—but machines?”

  “He’s supposed to be a genius—”

  “Genius idiot.” Mitzi, trembling, was trying to light a stick of kif.

  “I’m not an idiot! I don’t wet my pants!”

  “I’m glad of that,” Esther said. “We don’t have very good laundry service here.”

  “What were you trying to do?” Sven asked.

  “Get away!” Koz was near tears himself. “We wanted to get away!” He added in weary disgust, ‘Why else do you think we’d have this brat with us?”

  “But why?”

  “Because we were so goddam tired of ...”

  “Of what?” Esther rumpled her gleaming brow. “Tired of good food and clean beds and seeing everything in the Galaxy?”

  “You wouldn’t understand!”

  Sven said, “I think I do. This much. You needed Shirvanian’s psi ... to steal a ship.”

  “It was a robot! He was supposed to be able to take us wherever we wanted to go. But after he cut the radio and the radar to break the trail—”

  “Everything went wrong,” said Ardagh. “He’s no pilot, just a kid with a power he can’t control.”

  Shirvanian said coldly, “I also cut the retros when we landed. Otherwise we’d all be dead.”

  “I see ... that’s why the ship didn’t blow up.”

  “He’s very good at turning things off,” Koz said. “Too bad some people can’t do that with their mouths.”

  “Oh Koz, go set up your joss and pray to your Mother Shrinigasa. We need all the help we can get.”

  “Don’t you ridicule my religion.”

  “I’m not,” Ardagh said. “I’ll pray to her if it’ll do any good.”

  Sven shook his head at the five incomprehensible beings. “The ergs moved in ... Shirvanian, did you turn them on?”

  “I turned off your transmitter,” said Shirvanian.

  “Transmitter?” He blinked. “Where do I have a transmitter?”

  The boy shrugged indifferently. “I dunno. Someplace inside you.”

  Sven slowly lifted his left arms and pushed a thumb between the lower sets of biceps and pectoral. “This hard thing here, could this be it? I always thought it was a tumor ... what does it do to the ergs?” He strained his eyes to see the place on his skin. It might have been a crease.

  “Gives out a static signal that knocks out their systems. Within a limit.” Shirvanian tapped his nails on his box. “I wanted to see them up close. That’s why I stopped it.” He was looking very smug.

  Sv
en wanted to strangle him with all four hands. He was frightened at the feeling; he had never gotten angry at ergs. “Esther, did you know?”

  “No, sweetheart. Everything I know I picked out of the air. Dahlgren never held consultations with his specimens. But Topaze has a rad counter. No reason why you can’t have a transmitter.”

  ‘Who’s Topaze?” Koz wanted to know.

  “You’ll meet him tomorrow. I don’t think you’re quite ready for him yet.”

  “All this doesn’t tell us how to get out of here,” Koz said.

  Shirvanian tapped his box again. “You won’t get out without my help. I can turn it off any time I want.”

  Before the others could mince him, Esther wrapped her arms around him once-and-a-half. “Little genius, you’re a little stupid. Once that transmitter goes off the ergs will come and tear us every one in little pieces and we’ll turn into nice green glop to fertilize the ground. Now wrap yourself in a blanket and pack yourself off to sleep on one of those beds. You have enough to work your busy brains on tomorrow.”

  “But will you get us to the station!” Koz yelled.

  A thunderbolt crackled, a tree crashed nearby, and a sheet of rain slammed the roof. “Not in that,” Sven said mildly. “Do what the lady says.”

  Mitzi shrugged and murmured, “Just like home. Mama Ape, Papa Goat and Big Brother Spiderman.”

  Ardagh was pulling a knitted jumpsuit out of her duffel, “You should know Mitzi’s got a name for everyone. I’m the Ox, Koz is the Nut, Shirvanian’s the Gearbox. Joshua’s the Black Prince. He got off light.”

  Esther laughed and regarded Mitzi with a quirked brow. “What’s your name for yourself, girl?”

  Mitzi dropped her kif stick on a white tile and stamped on it; wrapped in her poncho, she flung herself on the mat.

  Esther picked up the butt and dropped it in a refuse bin. “Tomorrow ...”