O Master Caliban

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  “The outhouse is out back of the house,” Sven said. “Goodnight.”

  Esther gave Yigal a kick in the flank; he grunted and made room for her on the moss.

  Sven swept a heap of straw into a corner in the storeroom. As he was arranging himself on its unaccommodating bulk, a shadow slipped through the doorway. “Sven ...”

  It was Ardagh. “Don’t get up.” She sat beside him in a movement that was graceful for a person of her thickness. “I just remembered something ... I don’t know if I should tell you ...”

  He was a hair’s breadth away from telling her that if she didn’t know she should forget it, but a surprising jet of feeling rose and traversed the length of his body at the nearness of her fleshly female presence. Mitzi notwithstanding, there was nothing wrong with her looks; her hair shone in a flicker of the dying lamplight, and her broad cheekbones were smooth and peach-colored. He propped himself on a set of elbows and hoped she could not see the heat in his face. “What is it?”

  “A newsflash I saw in port on Barrazan Four ... the big outworld conference our parents were going to ... I—”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  She clasped her hands. “Next Thirtyday—that’s about five and a half weeks Solthree—Dahlgren’s coming into the Center to give a report to the Sciences Council.”

  “He is?” Sven sat up. “Are you sure?”

  “They said Edvard Dahlgren, they had pictures, old newstapes ... it couldn’t be another Dahlgren who’s a biologist and has a world to himself.”

  “A world to himself?” Sven laughed. “No, I guess there couldn’t be another one.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “If the ergs took over, and killed so many—what can he be doing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know.”

  She rose to go. “Sven? That transmitter ... the ergs make other machines, don’t they? Would it work on all of them?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I see. I guess I won’t tell the others that.”

  “They’ll think of it themselves. Goodnight, Ardagh.”

  * * *

  She pushed into a bit of space between Mitzi and Joshua. She was shaking—from fear, chill, and the conviction that she should have kept her mouth shut. After a while, in the unending noise of rain and wind, sleep began to wash over her in an uneasy ebb and flow; in the troughs of its waves she saw first Dahlgren’s face, and then Sven’s. It had reminded her ... eyes, nose, forehead and cheekbones ...

  If Dahlgren had shaved off the beard ...

  DAHLGREN HAD done his best to go mad.

  He had howled the length and breadth of the concrete vaults, crawling and sobbing as his friends were plucked from him and slaughtered or starved, flung in heaps to rot into scales, bones and carapaces. Had scraped his knees and palms raw, battered his head against walls. The ergs had let him. He had even prayed, an ineffectual act, since he had never believed in anything but himself, He had torn hair and beard out by handfuls, scored his face with his nails, smashed the empty tanks and cages with his fists, shredded the last of the seedling plants with his teeth. The ergs watched him with camera eyes, sprayed him with antibiotics, set food before him. He splattered it to the floors first, and when he was starving, licked the floors.

  No use. His body was scarred, foul and ragged. His head was hard clear Dahlgren, cold as the waters of his icy lakes.

  “Why do you not kill me?” he screamed. “Why do you not kill me? Why?”

  The ergs moved to and fro, click, buzz, whirr; he hammered his fists on their plates as they passed his live jetsam body and the open graveyard of his men.

  Haruni of Cruxa II had been the last; the little russet stick-man, entomologist and chessmaster, had shuddered to death in Dahlgren’s arms. Dahlgren’s food was poison to him; he had eaten, vomited and died. Now I will really go mad, Dahlgren thought, but he did not, and he had years to go. He ate, choking, slept on cold floors, evacuated in corners; his heart palpitated, his hands knotted; his joints ached and thickened, he believed he would not recognize his face in a mirror if he saw it. His mind observed and collated; watched for weaknesses (none), bolt-holes (none), hiding places (none). They wanted him for something. He had nothing. All dead. Men, foliage, beasts. I am the beast. Sven? Dead, likely, in that far corner. And Esther and Yigal. Subjects, friends. Friends? I mastered. I had no friends. Haruni I killed, gave him my food in misplaced pity. Sven. Esther. Yigal. Begged for them, whined and slavered. Let them go, they will not harm you, and I will come back. Friends? Dead they are friends. Alive they hated icy Dahlgren. Your bones are in the corner, Haruni, I do not even remember your face.

  * * *

  I am Dahlgren and no other, even in wild hair and cankered skin, If I live I will begin again, without ergs, in a small place. And yet again, if I must. That is the Dahlgren I have always been.

  * * *

  His mind withdrew and approached a focus on another plane.

  Perhaps it is a good thing for the universe that there is only one Dahlgren.

  The thought vexed him inordinately.. He crouched in the center of the vault among clanking ergs, while he gnawed some slab of nourishment. His teeth were good.

  This is terrible. All I can do in this obscene place is became more sane. Perhaps if I live long enough I shall die humble. Ultimate punishment.

  His shoulders slumped. An erg paused and stroked him with sensors. He shuddered. Some change would occur.

  “How? How?” He did not know how long it was since he had spoken. He cleared his throat. His voice creaked. “How long have I been here?” Humble. He gagged and spat.

  SEVEN YEARS. The voice boomed around the walls.

  Seven Barrazan V. Nine Solthree. He grunted.

  YOU WILL COME.

  “Leave me.”

  Coils extended, wrapped and lifted him. He was rigid with fury. He could not move or even croak with the coil tight around his chest. The erg carried him to the infirmary entrance and stopped, too big to pass. There were half a dozen small servos clustered at the door to receive him. The files and equipment had been kept intact, or replaced.

  The erg set him upright, and the small steel creatures drew him in with a dozen clawed arms. The walls had cracked in a few places and grown several patches of pink and green mold. Otherwise there was no change. The vents had been cleared and the dehumidifier was working.

  Surrounded waist-high by palpating machines, Dahlgren stared at the opposite wall. His old GalFed uniform was hanging there fresh as on the day of arrival when he had put it in storage. It was too fine for the weather of his laboratory world, though it was a working uniform and not for show. It hung clean and crisp, a dark maroon coverall with three small gold emblems over the left breast: a star, a ringed planet, a circle divided by a cross, ancient symbol both of Earth and of Creation.

  One of the ergs plucked a file card from a rack, inserted and retrieved it from a desk computer. “Place him on the scale.”

  Claws placed him.

  “You weigh twenty-eight kilos less than when you arrived here. We will rectify that.”

  “You ...” Dahlgren searched for his voice and found it. “You intend, I suppose, to fatten me for the slaughter.”

  Ergs had neither humor nor irony. “That is correct.”

  * * *

  They gave him a room with a bed, a bath, a locked door, in an isolation ward for one of the many curious and grotesque diseases on the planet. “No one here is more curious and grotesque than I,” said Dahlgren. The camera eyes did not flicker and the ventilators did not answer. Food came through an opening in the wall. It looked and smelled delicious.

  He ignored it and lay on the bed, falling for hours or days—all illumination was artificial—into light sleep. He dreamed of the old days, but had no nightmares. They came with his waking hours.
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  Ergs arrived, finally, and injected him with stimulants. Fresh food appeared. He ate; it was so rich and fine that he vomited that and the next meal and the one after that. The ergs injected him with anti-emetics and gave him food more bland and simple. He ate it and it stayed down.

  The ergs came to bathe him, heal his sores, give him therapy to cure his swollen arthritic joints, strap him into exercise machines. He began to put on weight.

  He thought of the uniform, which would fit him in a short while, and of the ancient Romans, who used to dress captives in fine clothes before degrading them. His mind remained cold and clear.

  One day or hour he moved, walked and spoke without pain or effort. He said, “This is interesting.”

  Almost at once the ergs came to trim his hair and beard, take away the faded blue hospital clothing, and fit him into his uniform. They put a mirror before him. He recognized himself.

  But that did not interest him, that he was as tall and strong as a man of sixty-three would be under the best of conditions. He did not have the strength to refuse the touch of a single one of those steel claws.

  There was no chance of help, refuge, or escape. He was curious to know what arena he would be made to fight in, how long he would be allowed to fight.

  And why.

  * * *

  They spoke to him, and made him walk and talk; noted his movements and recorded his gestures. It amused him, in his icy way, that there were things they were not sure of about him. It did not occur to him to deceive them.

  They led him down the halls, where the debris had been cleaned away. It amused him, too, that they had gotten rid of the things that would horrify or distract him.

  He was brought into a small room in which there was a screen with a chair in front of it. They locked him in and he sat down.

  The screen flickered and filled with a ceiling view of a group of small ergs gathered about a low table, engaged with an object their meshing limbs hid from sight. They looked like drones attending a queen bee. They withdrew slightly, exposing limbs, a torso, metal-boned and flashing silver. They tightened, trimmed, smoothed; flexed and adjusted.

  “Android robot,” Dahlgren murmured. “Playing with dolls!” A flash of contempt moved him. First curiosity, then contempt. Human feelings. “Am I becoming a man again?” asked Dahlgren. “Perhaps I will even feel ...”

  Fear.

  The ergs slid back and exposed the upper part of the body. It had two arms, five fingers on each. It was boned in gears and spindles, muscled in wires and flexes.

  Above the neck it was, or seemed to be, flesh; it had eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, beard. Dahlgren’s.

  The ergs moved out of the picture.

  The erg-android blinked, straight into Dahlgren’s eyes, blue for blue. An erg approached to snip one lock of beard with its claw, and retreated.

  The android blinked again, pulled back the pink lip comers into the beard, into Dahlgren’s rare smile, and raised a steel-tendoned arm, palm outward.

  “Hello, Dahlgren Zero,” it said. “I am Dahlgren One.”

  * * *

  Dahlgren looked into the eyes and swallowed. Then he sat up straight in his new health, his clean cloth, and said, “How do you do, erg-Dahlgren. I am Dahlgren Man.”

  Erg-Dahlgren smiled again; the screen went blank. Dahlgren touched his ginger-gray hair and beard, his mouth, and closed his eyes. He did not bend. Inside the closed lids he saw himself crawling the rough floor on his bleeding knees and palms. That was peace.

  MORNINGS, SVEN exercised on the beaten earth outside the door. The sun shone pink through haze, the thatch steamed; blurred red lines striped the housefront from the bloodrains of spring and summer; small animals chattered in their hutches. The wind was light now, the birds chimed like bells and flowers twittered as drifting air whirred their blades; insects buzzed and screamed.

  Sven took off his clothes and clasped his upper hands behind his neck; he sprang onto his lower ones and walked on them with legs and torso bent back and upward like a dragonfly’s long thorax, excruciatingly.

  because you are not going to look like some damned freak, said Dahlgren. I don’t want those lower arms hanging limp like a bottled thing in a cheap circus.

  Then why did you make them that way, Dahlgren? But he never asked.

  Now lower left and upper right. Upper left and lower right. Sweat dripped from his nose and chin. I want every muscle growing, every bone. You have seventy-four extra bones, muscles to move them, tendons to hold them, blood vessels to feed them ...

  Sometimes he juggled with stones, or the heavy pods of the luk flower. You won’t have to earn a living as a court jester on Cinnabar Seven, don’t worry. Among Solthrees you will be a Solthree and less clumsy than most. Then why?

  Today he did not juggle. Standing on four arms, sweat dripping, beating blood in his head half stifling him, he wanted to stay that way, not thinking of Dahlgren.

  He blinked, saw an upside-down face, and jumped to his feet.

  Ardagh was leaning against the doorway. She picked up the rag he had left near his clothes to dry himself and handed it to him.

  He took it and wiped himself, not looking at her and not hiding from her, put on the net singlet and pants he wore as sweat-catchers to make up for his lack of body hair. “You have a question about my physiology?” He glanced up and saw that she had turned red.

  “Only about how many extra vertebrae you had,” she murmured. “I wanted to be a doctor. A surgeon.”

  “Can’t you be?”

  “I’m short two vertebrae. My grandparents were fitted for some planet with cold climate and low gravity. The colony went fft and the kids all got left this way, built like servos and with poor coordination.” She added bitterly, “That’s why I’m the Ox to people like Mitzi.”

  “Don’t they do most surgery with machines?”

  “Not in medschool, or in emergencies.”

  “They should have terraformed the planet.”

  “Yeah, like here.”

  He finished dressing. “If I could learn to coordinate, you can.”

  “You have an advantage. Dahlgren is—”

  “What?”

  She swallowed. Dahlgren is your father. Oh yes, tell him that. He was half a meter taller than she, seventy-five kilos heavier. And he was Dahlgren’s heir all right, all the arrogance waiting to develop in good time. “Nothing ... Dahlgren’s going to GalFed Central and he’ll be taking the ship with him. I don’t know what you want to be, but I won’t get to be anything if we stay here.”

  He stood looking at her, not arrogant yet. He didn’t know what to do.

  A black streak crossed the sky, whooping. Esther, finished with her morning exercises in the trees, landed on the thatch and slid to the ground. She yawned. “I need more sleep than I got last night.”

  “We’d better get the others up,” he muttered.

  Shirvanian appeared in the doorway. a peculiar look on his face. “I wet my pants,” he said.

  Esther tousled his hair. “Then I guess we’d better clean you up before your friend Mitzi the Mouth has a chance to use it on you.”

  Sven grinned. “Hey, Mutti, is he taking my place?”

  Esther yipped. “You want your pants changed too?”

  While Sven and Esther made breakfast, Ardagh and Shirvanian waited by the house watching the veiled sun rise in a sky the color of a poison mushroom. The day heated, dim with mist; an enormous butterfly with glass wings and a black body hovered over a red-belled wildflower in the cabbage patch, settled to uncurl its long tube into the nectar.

  Koz came out with Joshua, both neat, the one by nature and the other with effort: Koz’s long napped robe caught dust, straw, and whatever else was light and loose; it took time to comb and braid his long hair, depilate his heavily bearded jaw. The ill nature had washed out of h
is face for the moment with his complicated grooming. “Where’s Alpha Centauri?”

  “That way.” Shirvanian pointed a negligent finger.

  Koz went back into the house and brought out a small gold statuette with a black wooden base. The idol was in the shape of a humanoid female dressed in long ceremonial robes, backed by a three-legged symbol of the sort he was tattooed with. He planted it on the ground toward the distant star and was about to kneel when he happened to glance up. “Hey, look at that!”

  The others whirled. A magnificent blue-black gorilla was coming out of the forest on four limbs, in measured steps, an empty string bag slung casually over one shoulder.

  Esther jumped out the door. “Hey, Topaze!” She hopped up and down, then ran to the great beast, plucking the bell-flower, butterfly and all, as she went. Topaze sat down between cabbages, resting hands on knees. Esther skipped up the huge belly, planted the flower behind his ear, kissed him, and unhooked the string bag from his arm.

  Joshua moved closer, head cocked. “Friend of yours?”

  “Just for breakfast.” Esther grinned. “Don’t scare him, now.” She dashed into the house and brought back the bag filled with garden fruits and vegetables. She tossed it to Topaze, who caught it easily by the handle, picked out a fruit, and ate it peaceably. They stepped closer.

  “Go ahead, pat him if you like, he’s fairly sociable.”

  Ardagh moved up cautiously to admire the pitted snout, sharp eyes, and crested skull.

  “He’s my blood brother,” Esther said. “My backup. If I didn’t work out, Dahlgren was going to try gorillas. But when he got me ... he didn’t keep large stocks or play around once he’d proved something. He just let them mate, thought he’d keep a few around and teach them to do odd jobs.”