O Master Caliban

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  “What about it?”

  “That vine on it ... looks like—”

  “The other one was all red. That’s just speckled.”

  “It moved!”

  “The wind, silly!”

  Esther crept forward. “Something shiny there, a piece of metal ...”

  “Watch out—”

  But Esther was jumping up and down and yelling. “tKlaa! tKlaa!”

  The log stirred, slowly raised up a few centimeters on its branches, and snorted.

  Esther gave a great leap and hugged it, crushing vine leaves under her breast. “Oh, my dear tKIaa!”

  hello esther said the log. don’t bend the leaves sweetheart

  “What the hell is that?” said Mitzi.

  * * *

  tKlaa was a reptile without eyes, ears, or mouth; she had an esp range of about a hundred meters, almost the lowest possible. There were three light-sensitive patches running back from her snout, and one beneath it; her two nostrils doubled in function, one as a sperm receptor, the other for food intake. Her belly was covered with sensors for moisture, temperature, and soil nutrients, and her branch legs gave her enough mobility to find them. Her back was deeply ridged, like bark, and its crevices were filled with the soil and humus that nourished the marbled red-green biovine which processed and pumped the nectar she fed on. She was about three meters long, perfectly resembled an old rotting log, and was very sweet-natured. She and her husband had been the only scientists on Dahlgren’s World who were also specimens living out in the forest and risking mutation.

  Esther pulled at one of the branching limbs to stare at the shining thing that had caught her eye, a metal chain with a numbered tag on it. “Years ...” she said. “Where is nVrii?”

  dead his bio mutated think it fell in love with a tree She snorted again.

  Ardagh said, “Those leaves are an awful lot like ...”

  “Think it fell in love with us,” Esther said. She rested her hand lightly on the trembling leaves. A tendril moved over it inquiringly and withdrew. She did not pull away. “I’m so sorry, tKIaa.”

  tried a transplant with mine but no

  They were squatting around her, breakfast forgotten.

  “We’ll eat here anyway,” Esther said. “Go on, start the fire. tKIaa, what have you been doing all these years?”

  lying around thinking not much what happened there esther

  Esther told her.

  did they kill all then

  “As far as we know ... all but you.”

  missed think I’m an old log hey well I am

  “Where is she from?” Joshua asked Sven.

  “I’ve forgotten. She was a soil scientist here.”

  “Her people couldn’t have done much with intelligence if they couldn’t move around.”

  “I don’t know what they did. But there seem to be an awful lot of people who don’t know what to do with it.”

  They ate breakfast. tKlaa turned slowly to let the sunlight hit her sensors, and the vine rippled along her back, put out a tendril that slid into one nostril to drip nectar.

  “Good man,” said Esther.

  miss him

  “Why wouldn’t your bio root on him?”

  too close to me he had no esp

  “I forgot your people mate one ESP to the pair.”

  why both he knew everything I

  Ardagh touched the leaves gently and just as gently they inquired of her. “How do they mate? You don’t mind if I ask?”

  “Why not? You always do,” said Esther. “His bio roots into his sperm duct and pumps the sperm along the same kind of vein that carries food, with little hairs—”

  “Cilia.”

  “That’s right, and empties it into her egg sac.”

  “Babies through the nose,” said Mitzi. “That’s one way of doing it.”

  “It’s all right when it works,” said Esther.

  tKIaa was extremely ugly without being in the least repellent; she had no interesting ideas but she subtly emanated something that created an area of peace and love around her. Ardagh would have called it safety, but she knew how fragile it was.

  “tKIaa,” Esther said, “can we help you any way?’”

  I can help skimmers are out watch it

  “How could you have seen them?”

  birds

  They looked up. Above the trees an orc-thing was squawking, a glint of light on its horn beak, its leathery wings; behind their eyes they caught, through tKlaa, a montage of the clearing with themselves, figurines (edible-too-far-down), a memory of the aircar, a huge gray egg pacing the wingbeat, the bird slewing wildly aside ...

  “Just one?”

  pair crossing twice yesterday one single early today

  “Too bad we can’t catch one of them,” Shirvanian said. “They must be shielded if they want to take Sven through the zones.”

  “You didn’t think so yesterday when your hair was on fire,” said Esther. “Big ideas.”

  “We haven’t heard the erg patrols since yesterday,” Sven said. “Maybe they pulled them in and replaced them with skimmers on account of the transmitter.”

  Esther jumped up and down, “And they may come around again any minute! We better get out!”

  good luck

  “I hate to leave you.”

  you can’t take me glad for the company

  Esther touched the ridged head. “I can do one thing. Where’s a metal cutter?” She clipped the chain from tKlaa’s branch limb and flung the tag far into the bush.

  tKlaa gave her a smile-shaped thought: goodbye dear

  “Come on. Get up, Koz, get up!” He had lain back among the ferns with his eyes closed. He picked himself up slowly, eyes glazed. His suffering turned them silent.

  * * *

  Ardagh took a turn with the machete. tKlaa’s tp field began to ravel and fade.

  “Erg!” Shirvanian yelled.

  They froze. Up to the neck in greens, hair tangled in branches, they had no way to scatter.

  The gray egg dipped, cast a random string of fire, swung up and away.

  They stayed still, except for Yigal and Koz. The one had dug his face in the ground, leaving his hind end peaked like the apex of an irregular triangle; the other had slid off and was picking himself up slowly.

  “What was that for?” Ardagh asked weakly. “A scare?”

  Esther’s face crumpled. “tKlaa ... oh, tKlaa!” She swung back along the path. The faint living resonance of the logwoman was gone. The ground smoked through the clearing.

  Sven called, “Don’t, Esther, don’t!”

  She stopped in mid-swing, dropped, turned. “You’re right.”

  “But why?” Ardagh whispered.

  Esther shrugged. “I suppose the thing homed on us and aimed. By the time it got there we’d gone.”

  “It—” Shirvanian began.

  “Shut up and get going.”

  Ardagh picked up the machete and went on slashing, scythewise. Sven shouldered packs, Esther skittered among the branches above his head. He dared not speak to her for a while.

  But the questions kept burning in his mind, and erupted finally. “Shirvanian said the ergs have got a thing called a Dahlgren. Not my father, I mean some kind of machine.”

  Esther pulled her way arm under arm through the thickets. “Android robot.”

  “What?”

  “Just the first thing that came into my head. They’d hardly name a servo in honor of Dahlgren, would they?”

  “But nobody makes androids any more.”

  “The ergs have, if Shirvanian’s right.”

  “Maybe my father’s dead ... but what would they want ... could it be a copy of him?”

  “They call it a Dahlgren.”

  “But
why?”

  “They might want a Dahlgren to order them around, like the good old days, chop up the forest, pick animals apart, twist things out of shape.”

  Her voice was so bitter and so painful that Sven stopped and pushed down on the part of his mind that said android robot Dahlgren robot android. “Do you hate me, Esther?”

  She dropped down to his shoulder. “Why do you ask?” She hunched on the shifting muscle, arms folded.

  “You’ve always done everything for me. I often thought it was too much. Maybe now you do.”

  “I’m thinking of tKlaa. Yigal, those aborted fetuses that should have been kids. Topaze, big ugly beast. I probably won’t see him again.”

  He straightened and stretched his four arms. Yellowed skin, naked head, he seemed almost an oriental god. “And me too, Mutti?”

  “I did it for Dahlgren.” She jumped and grabbed a liana, rose up yipping into the forest attic.

  Sven shook his head. “And she wanted me to do this.”

  Shirvanian caught up. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. Esther’s upset.”

  “She got tKlaa killed by throwing that tag into the bush. It was a signaler. The erg read it as an enemy on the move.”

  “God ... I’m glad you didn’t tell her that!”

  “I started to. Then I thought she wouldn’t want to know.”

  Esther android robot hates me. It seemed there was a jungle in his head that needed clearing as well. “Esther thinks the Dahlgren is an android robot.”

  “It occurred to me.”

  “I wonder why they want me alive.”

  “I’m not sure ... maybe to test it.” Because I am Dahlgren, said a being. Shirvanian stopped with his mouth open.

  “Then Dahlgren’s dead, and—what’s the matter?”

  “I just felt funny for a minute.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t get sick!”

  “I thought I was getting some kind of signal.”

  Sven pulled ahead. He was fed up with Shirvanian and his signals. “Ardagh, give me the machete.”

  “Maybe I could eat my way through this stuff,” Yigal said. “I’m damn tired of stumbling through it.”

  “I wouldn’t try it, the way it’s mutating,” said Joshua.

  Yigal snorted. “I hate this.”

  “Be thankful it isn’t raining.”

  Clouds slammed the sun and the rains beat down. They stopped to unpack their ponchos while the waters streamed, thunder drummed their ears, the soil frothed to mud under their feet, the counters ticked faster and louder. Far up Esther swung on the slender trunk of a fern; the fronds whipped her face. She looked out over the misty line of the forest top. All that was sweet of Dahlgren’s World lay on that graceful billow, its gray-green sprinkled with red or blue, the silver needles of rain stirring it.

  Sven watched the others crouched in the wetness around him, bent figures lashed with the powers of his father’s world. He stood up, shucked off the poncho and packed it away, took up the machete and broke the path, swinging at the underbrush with his lower arms, breaking branches with his upper ones.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going ahead. Follow when you can.”

  He pushed everything out of his mind, everything.

  “Stop!” Esther yelled. “Stay where you are! There’s something in a hollow here!”

  “What the hell is it now?” He peered across the lancets of rain and fuming mist. “Where?”

  “Southeast by south. Wait till I look.”

  The rain stopped at once. He stood, head bent, water runneling the dirt on his head and shoulders, idly swung the machete, tickling the fern sprouts.

  Joshua rubbed his thin black arms, bitten here and there, welted in one place from the battle with the vine. “I thought this spray was a good idea, once.” He scraped off the last blob or two with a finger and pulled out a rainskin from his pouch.

  “It’s not raining now,” Ardagh said.

  “It will.” The sun flashed for a second, cloud covered it like a lid and rain began again, more gently. “Ha.” He drew on the semipermeable skin. “How much farther today?”

  “Eight kilometers,” said Sven.

  “And you did all this in two days once.”

  “In the dry season. It rains only half the time then.”

  Esther hopped to her perch above Sven’s head.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Something funny.”

  “A trap?”

  ‘”I don’t know.”

  “Well, what?”

  Esther shrugged and bit her thumb.

  “Are we playing riddles?”

  “Something made by somebody and set up.”

  “A machine? What are you trying to say?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it. I never saw anything like it ... yes, I did, years ago ...”

  “Animals?”

  “Yeh. In a cage.”

  “Ergs put it there?”

  “Not our old friends. It’s not in the open.”

  “They’ve got a spy-eye on it,” said Shirvanian.

  “I had a feeling they wanted us to see it.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “They may just be monitoring it for themselves.”

  “Can you tell what it sees?”

  “No! I’m not some kind of electronic telepath.”

  “You must be good for something. Can you turn it off, at least?”

  “I already did,” said Shirvanian, nyah-nyah.

  “Turn it on again,” Sven said.

  “Why? They’ll think it’s a malfunction.”

  “If they’re expecting us here and the eye blinks off, they’ll pop up swarming all over. The little servos can work the underbrush and slice us just as neatly. Who’s monitoring? The factory?”

  Shirvanian thought a moment. “No ... the station.” He had gone pale.

  “Erg-Queen ...”

  The boy nodded. He seemed to shrink and his rain-beaded lashes quivered.

  “You know where the eye is?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ll go look. I’m supposed to be the one they don’t want to kill. The rest keep out of range.”

  “We could all go around,” said Esther.

  “I want to look. I want ... them to see me.”

  “Who?”

  “Dahlgren, if he’s there.”

  “But what for?”

  “Because he’s my father ... I know you think I’m a bit crazy on the subject. I can’t help it.”

  “That’s not what we meant,” said Joshua. “If we lose you we’re lost.”

  “You can come up behind. Just keep your mugs away from the camera.”

  The rain stopped again, and water ran in silt-streams off the leaves and kept dripping. The sun was falling to the horizon, and the forest was silent in one of its rare instants. The counters whispered in the packs.

  Sven wrapped up the machete, hooked it around his shoulder by the twine handle, and crept forward, parting the stalks gently.

  Insects raised chirring voices, birds whimpered, epiphytes fell in dirty plops from the crotches of bowing trees. The ground abruptly shifted downward; grunts and chatters rose from the hollow. Sven divided the last of the branches.

  There was no true clearing, only a space above which three or four lithe trees had been bound together in an arch. From their juncture a cage was suspended.

  It was perhaps three meters square and inside were two creatures on hands and knees; they were human or something like it. A male and a female, hairier than any Solthree had been since Neanderthal. Wild yellow tangles bristled from their heads, lay in thick down on their naked skins, burst out darker from their armpits and hung from their groins like Spanish moss
.

  They turned their heads at the sounds of approach. Though their paws were pronounced their features were not coarse; they had narrow noses, their eyes were startling blue. The female was hare-lipped.

  “The eye is four meters up aimed around your left shoulder,” Shirvanian said. “You should be half in view.”

  “Keep back,” Sven muttered. He had broken into a sweat at sight of the male. “It’s Dahlgren.” In face, feature for feature.

  They smelled like an old animal’s lair. The floor of the cage, a meter and a half above the ground, was littered with straw, half-eaten fruits, lumps of dung.

  “Not the original. That thing’s not much older than you,” said Esther. “The female’s one too.” Above the disfigured lip her face was one with the male’s. Sven rubbed his nose, its same arch and nostril shapes.

  “She’s one what?” Ardagh hissed. “Those are Yahoos! Christ, you’d think they were made to order!”

  Mitzi held her own nose and pulled back. Voice muffled, she cried, “Let’s get out of here!”

  Sven took a step forward. His shoulder itched, as if the eye had set a hot beam on it. Abased images of Dahlgren: my sister? my brother?

  Koz crouched, hands covering his scarred and roughened head, and could not keep his eyes off them. Kneeling, splayed fingers gripping the bars, they stared back.

  They were not as squat as prehistoric men had been pictured, but so thick and graceless they seemed ancient in shape. The female cocked her head to look at them like a child or a monkey, her hair got in the eyes of the male, he twitched his head and snarled, she gave a wild crow and he slammed her with his shoulder; she hit him full in the face with the butt of her hand, he yipped and hooked her under the knee with his foot so that she fell on her rump in the mess, he pushed her down on her back, threw himself on top of her and plunged.

  Koz yelled at the top of his lungs, grabbed a lump of mud and hurled it at the cage. It hit the male square between the shoulder blades and he pulled out of the female with a howl of rage, blue eyes, beautiful in the savage face, wild with fury. He grabbed stuff from the cage floor and flung it, she jumped up and did the same. Koz ran forward, screaming as mud and dung hit him, and Sven grasped him bodily with all arms and carried him back.