O Master Caliban

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  But they had come from everywhere around him, docile ergs. They had grown themselves souls, like Esther and Yigal. Another Dahlgren, so he can twist things out of shape. And he had. Sane Dahlgren, who had given his voice to his son’s game. HOME, SVEN?

  The house in the forest, its plots and hutches. Eat, sweetheart.

  THE BINS ARE FULL, SVEN. WHAT NOW?

  “Steady as you go to track two.”

  AND EAST THEN? HOME?

  “And east.” Point nine on the counter and nowhere to go but up.

  ERG-QUEEN did not waste a millisecond chasing the store: SVENSSEN around the computer; she simply considered briefly whether Dahlgren in seven years of crawling and puking and howling like a mad dog through the vaults had learned anything worth storing, and decided that he had not; he had wished to frustrate her: that was obvious. She gave orders to send the chessboard to his room and lock the door on him and his erg-brother to save herself further disturbance. Then she set her servos the problem of rerouting erg-Dahlgren’s ten million microcircuits to minimize his eccentricity without spoiling everything that had been accomplished.

  When Skimmer reported the hit on Argus she removed that problem from her list of priorities. Since they had swept Dahlgren’s World seven orbits ago ergs had not engaged in battle situations. They had learned, from men, how to subvert men and keep secrets, but their exemplars had never waged open war. So ergs had experimented on animals and machines, had repaired and replaced, made Dahlgren’s ship their own, shifted the drone patrols from serving the techs to keeping watch on Sven in the event that he might prove threatening or useful, to watching for meteors or crashes, keeping roads clean, servicing the odd stray ship. Even the aircars they had created were not attack vehicles but mainly burners to control overgrowth on tracks or factory grounds. Erg-Queen saw the destruction and damage of several powerful machines by a few humans as a grave annoyance, but not a great marvel; she knew men were devious.

  White Queen had taken Bishop and threatened Knight. Black Knight had retreated.

  Dahlgren sighed. “I wish I could believe that we had accomplished something, but I wonder. Now we are locked in.”

  Erg-Dahlgren had nothing to say. He moved 16. KR-K1.

  Dahlgren answered P-KB4.

  “Opening your King,” said erg-Dahlgren.

  “King of the bone-orchard.” Dahlgren laughed harshly. “And creating a phalanx.” Four-armed Sven, monkey, goat ... and oh, ten-year-old self-styled genius. “You see I can chase the Queen from here.”

  “If you can unlock the door,” said erg-Dahlgren.

  I have a key, a magic word. Shirvanian. It trembled on his lips. Magic? It worked when it chose. There was a world to unlock.

  17. P-Q4. “That takes care of that,” said erg-Dahlgren.

  P-KB5. Eye to eye with White Queen, Pawn aslant from Bishop. “But I don’t know where they are,” Dahlgren muttered.

  “At the red brick road,” said erg-Dahlgren.

  Dahlgren stared at him. “Oh my God, shut up!”

  Erg-Dahlgren shook his head helplessly. “But Dahlgren, I have such odd th—”

  “Think of something else!” Plug one leak ...

  “It has to do with what I was to forget.” 18. He pulled Bishop back to R2. “But there is a being that knows me, Dahlgren.”

  PxP. “Do you know what Mod Seven Seven Seven is doing?”

  19. NxP. “Only what she tells me ...”

  Dahlgren played N-B2 to keep his Knight. “Do you know if she has tried to break into the store?”

  “No. She has not contacted me since we were locked in. But Dahlgren, I am afraid. I have gone through The Middle Game in Chess a hundred times.”

  Dahlgren asked sourly, “Have you ever read Chess in the Machine Age?”

  TOWARD MIDNIGHT Argus made his turn eastward on track two, and a few minutes later began to thump and clang alarmingly.

  The children woke and crowded into the control-room door, red-eyed and cranky. “What the hell is that?”

  “Argus picking up loose bricks,” Sven said without taking his eyes off the screen.

  “Hey, Shirvanian, you better get to work on that.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Sven said. “We aren’t sure what conditions are like out there. We may need to do some road-mending.”

  “How are we supposed to sleep?”

  “When he gets the first layer down on the metal there won’t be so much noise. Just the odd clunk. He hasn’t got that much storage space.”

  “It puts on extra weight,” said Joshua. “It’ll slow us down.”

  “Not compared to the equipment he’s got in his undercarriage already—tires, engines, fuel tanks, sweeper arms.”

  “Some crazy machine,” said Mitzi. “Plays kid games and picks up bricks.” She retired in disgust. The others followed, except Joshua.

  “I’ll take over. I should have started an hour ago.”

  “What’s the difference? I couldn’t sleep ... I was thinking of Yigal.”

  Joshua set his narrow body in a corner of the small cabin and braced his feet against the lurching and thumping. He said slowly, “Nobody ever asked, and maybe it’s not the right time ... but ... why a goat? I mean a goat who talks lingua, sounds like a philosophy professor, and likes Montaigne’s essays? Surely it wasn’t ... it wasn’t some kind of joke.”

  “No ... a lot of things were pretty funny here, I mean compared to life on civilized worlds, what I’ve heard of them—but it was no joke. The goats were here for many years before the station was set up. Some colonists brought a few, because they’re tough and can eat just about anything. When they lifted off they didn’t bother taking them. By the time the crews came down to work here there was a big pack of them, all wild. Some got killed off when the area was cleared, and the rest escaped into the wilderness. Then they kept wandering back into the cultivated areas; they were fierce as wolves, and cunning too. And an awful nuisance because they mucked up the experimental plots and in the hot areas where they died of radiation, or when they didn’t abort, mutated into terrible-looking things. Just before I was born there were maybe a dozen left ... and one day somebody brought in a dam that was dying horribly trying to give birth, so they killed her and found the biggest kid they’d ever seen or heard of ... I don’t think he was even full term ...”

  “And that was Yigal?”

  “Yeah ... they had all this synthetic milk ready for me—I was born a few days later, so ... we were both pretty odd-looking, so we got a lot of attention. He was a gentle creature, not like the others. I used to play in his straw ... his skull was so big—I think his brain measured something like eighteen hundred cc at full growth—they thought he’d never be able to hold his head up. But he did. They could tell right away he was smarter than a dog, and one day somebody said, ‘Here’s your milk, Yigal,’ and he said, ‘Milk’ and everybody went wild. He talked before I did.”

  “But how did he get from there to the essays of Montaigne?”

  “Oh ... Dahlgren’s idea of a liberal education. We had tapes and cassettes but he never gave up books. Yigal hung around with me and listened in, because I learned to read on that stuff. He couldn’t read—he wasn’t any Houyhnhnm—and I never read in French! If we’d been using Solthree languages he’d never have learned to speak. Lingua was designed for so many different kinds of minds and speech organs, it’s so phonetically simple ... Montaigne’s a sensible man, if you take him a page at a time and leave out a couple of hundred quotes in Greek, Latin and Italian ... I guess ... I guess his ideas fitted in with Yigal’s ... view of the universe ...” His mouth was twisting uncontrollably.

  “Let me take over now, Sven. I’ll call you if I have trouble.”

  * * *

  Esther had dimmed the lights and was sitting silently beside Yigal, stroking, grooming, touching.

  Sven l
ay on his side near them, propping up his head on his two right hands. He realized that he had a headache growing to an intense focus of pain at the top of his skull, and his eyes hurt as if he had rubbed sand into them.

  Yigal breathed raspingly; occasionally he coughed.

  “I don’t think he feels anything,” Esther said. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “I would have liked to be able to tell him he did well.”

  “He didn’t need to be told.”

  “I needed to tell him.”

  Eventually she fell into a light doze with her head on Yigal’s flank and her arms curved over him. She muttered once in a while, unintelligible sounds like a forest animal’s.

  Sven tried to compose himself. Stared at the dim light. That hurt his eyes more, and the pain ran down his neck and into his arms and back. Why not two heads, Dahlgren? Would they both ache at the same time? Argus jerked and clanged. If they were riding Argus they’d both ache. Why not two transports instead of one, this old creaking box, vulnerable. Split the party up? Dangerous. One on automatic to use for a decoy? Wouldn’t last long, and the wrong one might get hit. They only left us one, anyway, and at least it’s the one I can control. Control! mustn’t play dangerous games, SVEN.

  Argus, for God’s sake, those machines have gone renegade!

  YES, SVEN. I UNDERSTAND.

  * * *

  Some game I get to play when that machine treats me like an idiot.

  You are a boy playing games and it treats you like one, says Dahlgren.

  Any time an aircar goes by I get radio messages, How’s it going, Sven, catch any spies yet?

  Dahlgren laughing, laughter so rare it should not have been wasted on ridicule. You ought to wear a false moustache.

  And you’re treating me the same way!

  No, I’m not, Sven. I’m quite serious.

  What’s a moustache?

  If I shaved the beard off my chin, the hair left on my lip would be called a moustache.

  And I’d look pretty silly with that when I’m nine years old and I don’t have any hair anyway.

  You are too literal-minded, I think, like your father. I am not making fun of you. I very rarely do such things. I meant to suggest a disguise, something to keep you from being recognized, that would not put you or anyone else in danger.

  Disguise? With four arms? Oh, bitter reproach ...

  I did not say that you should disguise your body, Sven ...

  * * *

  He sat up and the pain hammered the top of his skull. He had drifted off. With four arms? Did I say such things? Or is that what I would tell him now?

  But he gave me that ... false moustache.

  He stood up. Oh God, my head.

  The children would have painkillers. Mitzi the peripatetic illegal Pharmaceutical Co. But they would be asleep, exhausted. Or maybe not. His head ballooned, he felt half-irrational, Esther muttering, Yigal snorting. Thunder rattled, or was it Argus? Tomorrow Light the stove, Sven! the mist will push in at the windows past the dripping thatch, Yigal will toss a cabbage on his horn and damn the east wind.

  But he won’t, he’s dying. I am literal-minded, and I have the false moustache.

  And the damnedest headache. And maybe ... maybe they’re awake, talking away the night and the fear.

  There was an intercom switch to the bunkroom. His hand hesitated at it; eavesdropping. But if they were quiet, presumed asleep? He’d keep the headache. He pushed the switch—

  Screech!

  —and turned down the volume.

  “—don’t care! I can’t stand that ape howling! The goat’s dying, and that leaves two, and we can push them both out!”

  Ardagh hissed, “Stop it, Mitzi! You’re waking Shirvanian.”

  “Shit on him! He gives me the creeps too!”

  “If you’d get to sleep you’d—”

  “I can’t sleep! That leftover from a geek show, all he’s after is his Dahlgren and if they got the ship we’d end up in Central and not look like poor misunderstood kids either!”

  Ardagh said gently, “We don’t look like that right now—and I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere near the ship with or without them.”

  ‘We can try and do something! There’s only two of them and there’s four of us.”

  Sven stood with his head against the cold metal, crying like a big booby.

  “Four? With big strong Shirvanian? Joshua just might be able to handle Esther, and I’m not sure of that. And Sven—”

  “Him! He’s so musclebound a good shove—”

  “I thought you liked him, Mitzi.” Ardagh’s voice narrowed to a deadly edge. “What’s the matter? Wasn’t he any good?” Scuffle. “Don’t you shoot your dirty nails at me or I’ll break your wrists! I’m not the Ox for nothing!”

  Sven slid the two doors that separated him from the bunkroom and with a pair of arms for each parted the scratching grunting figures; he gave each of them a hard impartial push and turned on the light.

  Mitzi and Ardagh were glaring up at him from the floor, still so full of rage they did not even bother to rub the places they had hit when they went down. They had bathed and cleaned up as well as they could and did not look so much like weathered castaways any more, but beneath the anger their faces were ledgers of fear and weariness. Ardagh had a scratch on one cheek. Shirvanian was scrunched in a corner of his bunk, a shadow with large animal’s eyes.

  “I was listening in,” Sven said.

  Mitzi snarled, “Oh, sneaky!”

  Sven leaned on the doorway and wiped down his face with two palms, steadied himself against the endless lurching with the others. “I have a terrible headache and was hoping if you were awake you might give me something for it.”

  Ardagh said through her teeth, “I don’t get headaches.”

  Mitzi got up on her knees, slowly, found her cosmetics bag at the foot of her bunk, and thrust a pill at him. He washed it down with a handful of water in the lavatory without looking at it. He did not care at that moment whether it made him sick, sleepy, or dead. When he turned back to the girls Ardagh was picking herself up, Mitzi was still on her knees. “I want you to come into the control room for a minute, Shirvanian too.”

  Ardagh touched her cheek and muttered, “I’ve got to wash my face first.”

  “Yeah,” Mitzi said. “You might get hydrophobia.”

  Ardagh grinned suddenly. “Only from bites, dear.”

  “Sorry.”

  * * *

  The five made a tight fit in the cubicle. Joshua, eyes on the screens, said, “I thought I heard some noises. Was there something I should have done?”

  “No. It would have been a risk.” He picked up the mike. “Argus, we’re putting on our false moustache.”

  RIGHT, SVEN. NINE-EIGHT-THREE IT IS.

  “What’s that?” Joshua asked.

  ‘When I was a little kid, playing games with Argus out in the forest, the transports and aircars used to pick up my messages, ask for i.d. and say, ‘Hey, Sven, is that you? Catch any pirates lately?’ and break up laughing or clacking their mandibles or rattling their antennas. Maybe they thought I was a spoiled kid ... but I got mad and complained to Dahlgren. After he finished laughing he gave me a disguise, what he called a false moustache, the i.d, and class of an old ore carrier that got knocked over by a falling tree in a storm when it was carrying a full load. After that it was only good for scrap, but nobody bothered to cross it off the register, and it was forgotten. Dahlgren remembered because he saw it happen ... it looked a lot like Argus, and several other nine-eighties were running. Nobody ever questioned it. Dahlgren might have told them not to, so I’m not sure it’ll work.”

  Shirvanian asked, “Did they ever do any refining at the station, any kind of factory there?”

  “None that I know of.”


  “Then nine-eight-three has to be a parts carrier, not an ore carrier. And if we meet anybody we have to pick up and challenge them first, before they attack on spec.”

  “You’re right. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Mitzi yawned elaborately. “Is that all you wanted to say?”

  “No,” Sven said. “I’ve hardly got started. Shirvanian may realize but you don’t that the ship at the station headquarters isn’t one of those little things that you jump in and push a button, like the one you came in. It brought everything here, and was bedded in a silo, and hasn’t lifted off more than two or three times since, to bring in more equipment. It takes dozens of crew and can’t move without them. We had a shuttle for transporting workers, but the ergs broke it up when some of the people were trying to escape in it. They may have built another, and that would be an erg. The big ship, if they plan to use it, will certainly be an erg by now.

  “The radio will be in their control. They’ve probably been sending out fake messages and reports for years, or GalFed would be here by this time, and we wouldn’t. There’s no way for me to find Dahlgren and let you stumble around looking for the ship and radio, no way we could work as separate parties. Everything we’re heading toward is behind one solid wall of ergs. Whatever you’re afraid of going back to, outworld, has got to be very pale compared to that.”

  Joshua said wearily, “Then what’s the use of all this?”

  “Maybe nothing. But it was you who wanted to do it, and we’re doing it. And Esther and I ... and Yigal, are running and dodging instead of letting ergs creep up on us while we grow old or go crazy. Maybe—maybe it’s not such a bad thing for machines to become ... people. But they have to become people we can live with. They can’t be allowed to kill everyone else in the district while they’re creating themselves.” He grinned at the expression on Ardagh’s face. “You think I sound like a Dahlgren? Then I’ll bring up my last point. This thing, this Argus,” he stretched out his arms and they ducked, “is mine, no matter what kind of rattletrap you think it is. It belongs to me, Sven Adolphus Dahlgren, son of Edvard Dahlgren. You can forget the Adolphus, but you’d better remember the rest when you’re feeling feverish and want to go off alone. It’s mine. It won’t move without my permission. I didn’t have access to the crew controls, but whenever I turned it in I had to give directions allowing particular crews to use it. Sometimes I forgot and was dragged out in the middle of the night to do it. Remember, no Sven, no Argus. Put a knife to my throat, you’ll have to cut it. That’s all.”