O Master Caliban

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  The blued metal arms of the silver erg rippled down the curve of her front. YOU ARE PLAYING A STRANGE GAME, DAHLGREN. SURELY NOT AN IMAGINATIVE ONE.

  “I have not played for nine years ... this set is a zoological exhibit.” Pride shut his mouth. Desperation opened it again. “I am thinking of my son. He cannot harm you. Why is it necessary for you to kill him?” He gripped the edge of the table.

  Erg-Dahlgren paralleled his movements, searched his eyes for directions in reproducing the harrowed eaves of his brows.

  YOUR SON WILL NOT STAY IN HIS CORNER. HE IS A DAHLGREN.

  “I am no longer a Dahlgren. In all those years you rendered that out of me.”

  WE HAVE YOUR FILMS, RECORDS, DIARIES. WE KNOW WHAT YOU WERE AND WHAT YOU ARE STILL. OTHERWISE YOU WOULD HAVE LET YOURSELF DIE.

  “Why do you need me now?”

  BECAUSE WE HAVE NOT REPRODUCED YOU UNTIL NOW.

  But there is no argument with a machine, said the core of old Dahlgren, struggling in its block of cracking ice. Did you discuss biogeny with mutant rats? Or vascular dynamics with embryo chicks? My father was right. I much better should have contemplated and shut my mouth, cracked my knuckles.

  He bit his lips; erg-Dahlgren gnawed his own.

  “I would not do that too much or you will spoil the work of years.”

  “Why do you say such things? Do they not make people feel badly against you?”

  “You do not feel,” said Dahlgren. “Play.”

  8. N-Q5 intensified the threat against Black’s pinned Knight.

  Dahlgren smiled and once again mirrored: N-Q5? He did it with smooth deliberate speed because the move was a tacky one long abandoned by better players.

  There was very nearly something in erg-Dahlgren’s eyes now, reflected in the swelling brilliance of erg-Queen’s sensors. Something of Dahlgren. “Is it really prudent of you to imitate my moves?”

  “In the Symmetrical Variations of Four Knights it is Black’s prerogative to break symmetry. It is the only power he has.”

  “It is short-term,” said erg-Dahlgren. With 9. P-B3 he forked Black’s Knight and Bishop.

  Outside, machines clanged and slewed, and erg-Queen lifted her arms. They were thin, each pair branching into strange and different hands. Dahlgren pulled his eyes away, shut his ears and stared at the board; the other had not moved.

  The silver erg, arms straight out, rolled to the door, humming; her spiky crown trembled and glinted. The noise grew, clashing, squawking. She swung to and fro like a great pendulum, arms rippling wildly.

  Dahlgren, impelled, stood up. The double stayed motionless: perhaps he had been turned off.

  Round erg-Queen a small dusty thing skittered, clacking and crowing.

  Outside the door the noise stopped.

  Dahlgren sat down and stared at the metal bird. It hopped zigzag, tapping the floor with its beak, raising its head every few seconds to crow and flap its noisy wings. Erg-Queen turned to face it. Her line of sensors shone red and diamond-blue.

  “What is this?” Dahlgren whispered.

  The bird raised burning eyes to the erg, leaped to slam claws on her body and skittered off. She reached with all arms extending and it jumped back, leaped again, clamped magnetically on one arm, drove its piercing beak at her side; it did not even scratch, but she trembled allover, her arm turned fire-red. By then the bird was on the floor again, hopping placidly toward Dahlgren.

  He sat still. Watched the four red eyes. Thought that beak could pluck his own in a half-second. For the first time in his life he saw something he knew nothing of, could make no conjecture about, and was completely terrified. The bird jumped to his lap, a hard twelve-kilos’ weight, nestled there, and chirped. Very slowly he placed one hand on the vibrating back and the other on the metal-plumed breast. The bird sat still and looked up at him. “Strange creature,” he murmured, and rubbed down the scales gently, to find the gleam beneath. “First Man, then come the beasts of the earth ...”

  The erg moved in.

  “This one you cannot control.” Dahlgren stroked the bird. “I wonder why.”

  The blue arms extended, snatched the cock, held it high for a second (it crowed once) and smashed it to the floor. It lay whole but still; one scale dropped with a small clink.

  Dahlgren sighed and turned back to the board. There was contaminated dust on his hands and clothing but he did not try to brush it off. Erg-Queen backed against the wall once more.

  Erg-Dahlgren trembled, blinked, smiled, frowned, lifted his hand to the board and dropped it again. “It is your move.”

  Dahlgren, with the frail birdsbeak Knight, took White’s Bishop and broke the symmetry of the board.

  SHIRVANIAN WOKE screaming. The sounds ripped his throat. “I don’t want it, I don’t want it broken! No! No! Don’t let them break it, Mama! Don’t—”

  Esther had him outside in the corner of the back wall, wrapped in a bundle, before the others were stirring. “Shu-shush!”

  “Mama! I don’t want it to be broken! I—”

  “You don’t want to wake the others, love.” She wound her arms around him. “What’s broken? Is it the bird?”

  He choked on a sob. “Yes.”

  “You were dreaming, I think.”

  “No, no! The erg broke it, the big erg!”

  “Where?”

  “Back there!” He twisted his head wildly. “In the station.”

  So it’s gone ... well, well. I wonder what it did—or if. “Hush! Some things are made to be broken.”

  “What things?” Half asleep now, but still trembling.

  What indeed? Bombs, bones, grenades, poison vials, promises. She pleated her brow, scanned the dark, and found them. “Eggshells,” she whispered.

  He giggled. “Huh, that’s silly ...” He pressed his head hard against her meager breast, and slept.

  * * *

  Ready or not.

  Yigal grumbled at the weight of the mesh panniers on his back. “Beast of burden! What use is the tongue of a philosopher?”

  “Damn little.” Esther tucked in another handful. “Half of this is your feedbag, Beauty.”

  She checked the house for the last time. Stained dusty thing; the thatch steamed and sprouted young ferns, the chimney was cold; the screens and shutters were up, the bins were emptied—not quite.

  “Joshua! What are you doing?”

  “Going native.” Joshua, with sober joy, was removing his junior spaceman outfit with its stars, bars and spangles and dumping it piece by piece into the refuse bin. He picked up a red laplap, wrapped and tucked it round his loins, took a spray tube and proceeded to cover his exposed skin with pearly liquid. “Better than cloth. Technology has reached the tribes.” He spat contemptuously into the bin. “Why do you think I wanted to get away?”

  Esther shook her head. In the storeroom she found Ardagh staring at the books. “Take your choice.”

  Ardagh smiled. “I wish I could ...”

  “Yah, seventy-five kilos ... I’d take this one.” She picked a book off the top shelf with her long reach. “Twelve hundred pages. Not much.” She flicked the leaves. “Anyway, I know it by heart.”

  “The Catarrhine Primate and Its Trans-Solar Analogues ... did you read a lot?”

  “Me? I can read, but I’m too impatient. Sven read to us in the evenings when I was sewing and knitting and all. Yigal always wanted to hear Montaigne’s essays, I dunno why.”

  Ardagh thought of Sven, all patience and muscle, plowing his way over and over along the endless winding contemplations of Montaigne, up the mountain of facts about the catarrhine primate. “Think you’ll ever come back here?”

  “I doubt it.” The still and the generator had been dismantled and their parts neatly stacked. “I became a housekeeper because I had to, and this was my house.”

  Out
side, she pulled the doors firmly to and thumped the shutters with her fists.

  They were waiting, the children in jumpsuits except for Joshua, hauling backpacks to their shoulders, Yigal laden, Sven with an expressionless face. Mitzi, still pale and quivering in the legs, leaned on Yigal, gripping a horn.

  “Where’s Topaze?” Ardagh asked.

  “He’ll fall in later. I’ve got his breakfast.”

  The sky darkened, splashed drops, the wind whirled the treetops and blew Ardagh’s hair into her mouth. “Lovely morning,” she said.

  “It’s the best you’ll get here,” said Sven.

  They had barely crossed the road when the ergs came.

  “Don’t run,” Sven said. They waited in the brush while two great bulks shimmered down the brickway, knocking aside a tree, pulling down a liana that crackled as it fell.

  Sven said, “Look hard, Shirvanian. Think you can catch one of them? Even stop one?”

  The child was silent. His bird had been broken, his proper creation, and he had not quite known the implications when he sent it out to die.

  The ergs bore toward the house, pulped the gardens beneath them. Sven watched them. A powerful sadness filled him. Esther jumped to his shoulder. She touched his face; he folded his arms and looked on as the ergs smashed the hutches, lifted heavy limbs to stave in the walls and pound down the roof. The structure crumbled into dust and splinters: walls, thatch, timbers, pots, chairs, books, tanks, piping, stove. With one powerful swing that tottered the chimney into the other rubble, they turned and went away.

  “Hah, eggshells,” said Esther.

  Then she growled, leaped for a tree, swung to its top in ten handholds—it was a great fern and bowed pliant—caught a liana, ran along it, grabbed for a higher branch.

  The others cried after her, fainter as she scalloped, jerking tightly in the arm socket as she caught and caught. “Shut up!” Looping the air, oiled whip, black writing on green lace, soared over the trundling ergs, clung to a treetop and barked obscenities, broke branches, nests, clumps of detritus from crevices, flung them down fifty meters from the forest attic to splatter on the metal slabs. Birds squawked, bats woke squeaking, lizards ran awry.

  The ergs hummed, thrashed, slammed her tree without shaking her loose; she slipped away, back as she had come, brachiating, unwinded. Her eyes were bloodshot. She dropped down again to Sven’s shoulder and sat biting her thumb.

  “Mother of Worlds, I thought you’d gone for good,” Koz said.

  “What a fuss, Esther,” said Yigal. “You never did like housekeeping.”

  10. NXB. Erg-Dahlgren set the dark trilobite outside the field, beside his own. A servo came in and swept up the bird.

  Dahlgren moved Pawn to Bishop 3.

  “How pleasing,” said erg-Dahlgren. “The board is symmetrical once more. Now I expect you will want food and rest.”

  HE HAS NOT PLAYED LONG ENOUGH TO NEED THAT.

  “I am tired,” said Dahlgren. He put his elbows on the table and his face in his hands. His heart pounded his ribs like a fist.

  HE IS SHAMMING.

  “That is not so,” said erg-Dahlgren. “His heart is fibrillating.”

  HE HAS NO HISTORY.

  “Nevertheless, he is having a paroxysm.”

  “How do you know?” Dahlgren whispered.

  “I am bonded to your electrochemical system.”

  “Oh, I have found a brother!” Dahlgren laughed weakly, with despair. A servo came at once and injected him.

  “That will stop soon,” said erg-Dahlgren. “Then you will come away.”

  So he is not altogether her puppet; he has some autonomy.

  * * *

  There were two beds in the room now.

  “Do you sleep?” Dahlgren asked.

  “No. I will watch you.”

  “I don’t think I could sleep very well with someone staring at me.”

  “I meant that I would monitor you. Lie quietly, recharging if necessary, and not disturb you. Give me your clothing and I will have it cleaned.”

  “Leave it. It has something of earth and air on it.”

  Erg-Dahlgren watched him remove it, and followed, put on the same hospital pajamas. “That is only dirt.”

  “My shadow, if you want to think like me, think of walking on the land, among men, without barriers and monitors.”

  “Dahlgren, in this place nothing has ever been free, neither your men nor your animals with their tubes and electrodes.” He handed Dahlgren comb, towel, and cleansers. “Not even you have ever been free.” He sat on the bed. His hair and beard were gold and silver lines in the lamplight. “You are chained to hunger, fear, lust, sweat, bowels. You need air, warmth, sleep. Every heating unit and ventilator in this place is running for your sake, because we do not need them.”

  Dahlgren jeered at his argumentative self, trapped once again—from that long loneliness?—into debating with a machine. “You make a point for your superiority. Quite. I have never killed a man and I have never allowed an animal to die without learning something from it. I am the first animal you are looking to learn from before you kill. Now get me some food. I am hungry.”

  THE ROAD looked moss-colored. Ardagh bent to scratch it, and found that it was actually green brick and free of growth. She stood, lifted the heavy hair from her neck, and began to braid it. “Too bad I haven’t the figure for a loincloth like you, Joshua. It looks cooler than this baby bunting I’m wearing.”

  Joshua laughed. “You are wearing what everyone in my country wears; I’m considered an eccentric.”

  The wind was down, and the sun, bright orange at the moment, flickered through the heavy arching trees. “Why are the greens so thick here?” Ardagh asked. “I thought jungle was supposed to be quite clear under the trees.”

  “The tracks were kept clean and the seeds found space to root beside them,” Esther said. “There was an old colony here and their slash-and-burn left clearings for new growth when they moved. Our patch was part of that.” Joshua had bent to observe the insect life in a puddle beside the track. “You’re going to get your legs bit.”

  “The gel leaves bugs with stingers full of muck, and the poison sits on top till I wash it down at night. If I don’t touch it and lick my fingers I’m safe.”

  “You bring that from home with the diaper?” Mitzi asked. She was feeling much better.

  “I invented it at home.”

  “I thought they taught that in the Academy,” Ardagh said. “Emergency landing procedures.”

  “I could teach them,” Joshua said without arrogance. He picked up a leaf fragment and watched an ant, or something like it, clenching it with tiny jaws, thrashing miniscule legs; he set it down, brushed fern fronds lightly with his hand. “My father is one of my country’s ambassadors ... the forest tribes did not care much for our government faction, so to placate them the president gave them our children for a year, to educate, in exchange for theirs ... in ecology, conservation, geobotany. I found I enjoyed it more than anything I had done in my life. It was a great chagrin for my father in a family oriented to outworld government service ... several of my cousins are in space—one is the commander of a survey ship and she is perfectly happy.” He laughed. “It is much wetter here than in my forest.”

  Mitzi drawled, “Naturally your father thought you had no balls.”

  “But you know better, Mitzi,” Joshua said mildly.

  “Shirvanian!” Esther yelled, “that’s dangerous!”

  Shirvanian was flat on his belly in gumbo. He stood up stained in green and brown, and held out an object. “Piece of the ship.”

  “Keep it for a souvenir and come on!”

  Shirvanian, ignoring her, rubbed mud off the scrap on the seat of his pants. “First the ergs took the ship and they would have killed us—and then they sent that stupid bird that wo
uldn’t have hurt anybody. Why?”

  “I think,” Sven swallowed hard, “the bird was sent for me. It—it was a kind of mockery of me.”

  “But that’s two kinds of orders.”

  “You mean the bird was sent from Headquarters and the drones from the outside repair depots where they nest. There doesn’t seem to be a connection, even though all stations must be able to communicate.”

  “That’s right.” Shirvanian turned the crumpled piece of metal, smelled and tasted it. “Nobody at Headquarters handled the ship. I think the patrols were obeying old orders to search and destroy, and nobody bothered to change them.” He shrugged and tossed the fragment away.

  “Why didn’t you keep it, Shirvanian?” Koz asked. “Add a piece here and there and we could have built ...” he sighed.

  Shirvanian stopped dead. “What is it?”

  “Something flying. Very high up.”

  In a minute a high cicada’s whine drew a singing arc above the clouds. It bisected the sky and faded over the eastern horizon. “An aircar,” Sven whispered. “They’ve never come out here before.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Sometimes track surveying, mostly burning down overgrowth around the depots.”

  “They have flamethrowers?”

  “Yes.”

  Rustling in the foliage made them jump.

  Topaze lumbered out of the brush on all fours; they swallowed in relief.

  “Halloo!” Esther grabbed a handful of luk seeds, sprang to his shoulders, popped the food into his mouth with one hand and affectionately slapped his rump with the other. He reached a finger to scratch under her chin and clasped her two feet over his breast gently with one hand.

  The green road stretched into the haze, wind gusted in the treetops driving wet leaves, nests, blossoms downward. Yigal’s hooves clacked on the pavement, Esther trundled on Topaze’s shoulders, her busy hands grooming his great crested skull, her eyes raised to the arch of the trees and the invisible track of the erg beyond.