O Master Caliban

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  He went back to Esther and Yigal. His head, at least, did not ache so much as his heart.

  * * *

  Esther was tapping at his cheek, pulling a wrist.

  He woke thinking he had been awake tumbling in a kaleidoscope of horror. He found it. Yigal, bronchial tubes already thickened from wet weather, was choking on blood and saliva. His body heaved and thrashed. Esther grasped him with all limbs as though she might by main force pull him into life, or recreate him through her will. When he quieted in a few moments with a trembling sigh, a small exhalation of blood, he was dead.

  Esther pulled away at once and stood up. “Wash that stuff off him.”

  Sven hosed down his muzzle and Esther wiped it with her hands. She smoothed down the white hair where she had ruffled it, sat back and looked at him, pinching her lip. “Get him out,” she said. “He’ll stink.”

  * * *

  Sven found Ardagh in the control room, arms tightly folded, mouth tight, staring at the screen. The red brick road stretched into the mist like a path through a graveyard; the morning sun, flat and pink, hovered above it, and to either side the hunchbacked trees were plunging their branches into the earth and rooting there.

  “Yigal’s dead. We’ll stop here.”

  She licked her lips. “I’m sorry.”

  He glanced at the counter. “One-point-two. We won’t stay long. I’ll get Joshua.”

  “Can you bury him?”

  “I don’t want to take the time. We’ll cover him with whatever loose stuff is around.”

  No longer bouncing on the floor, the body had a moment’s still dignity with Esther at its side. Ardagh came in cradling Koz’s idol in her arms. “Can we put it out too? He didn’t have ... he didn’t have anything ...”

  Sven took it from her. “Is there some kind of prayer we can say?”

  She shook her head. “Mother Shrinigasa never had another worshipper. They—the Triskelians made it for him so he’d have something to ... to—to put outside himself, love, hate, everything—to separate them so they wouldn’t blow up inside him.” With her fists she squeezed tears from her eyes in a child’s gesture. “It didn’t work.”

  * * *

  Esther did not come out. Ardagh had to help Sven and Joshua with the body. It was monstrously heavy, and horrifying to have it, once so light of foot, gritting its fine hair on the rough brickway and the littered earth. Sven did not want to bring attention either to it or to the statuette; he laid both by the roadside and covered them with branches and handfuls of earth.

  “Rain will wash that off,” said Ardagh.

  “And mud blacken it and heat rot it,” Sven said. “This place takes the dead back in a hurry.”

  He knelt before the mound and leafed the heavy books of his memory for any word or ritual, any memorial. No one would see or know, yet his feelings demanded it. He recalled a sentence underlined certainly not by Yigal or himself, but most likely by his father or grandfather; he scratched and smoothed a clear patch of soil and wrote it with a small twig: Were I to live again, it should be as I have already lived. A few heavy drops of rain exploded the words before he finished writing them.

  * * *

  “You don’t have to worry about being a visual target any more,” said Shirvanian.

  He was sitting on a front corner of Argus’s roof, wiring his spy-eye into the screen system, dressed in Sven’s old protective suit. The lower sleeves hung empty and the extra torso length bulged around his middle. He pointed downward: beating rain and thrashing branches had crumbled the paint on the transport’s flanks; it was flaking away, half gone, and rust spots showed beneath it.

  “How’d you get up there?” Ardagh asked.

  “Climbed.” The ladder was a thin pole with half a dozen short crossbars. Shirvanian drummed his heels on the metal plate and a few crumbs of paint drifted down. The silver-coated skin of his suit glinted pink in the sunlight. “I don’t know if I can get down.”

  “Why don’t you ride up there and enjoy the scenery?” Joshua suggested. But Sven climbed the crossbars, plucked Shirvanian like a cherry-picker, and carried him inside.

  Standing, Shirvanian looked like a battered teddy bear. “I don’t think I can get out of this,” he said in a small voice. “The slide broke.”

  “How the hell’d you get in?”

  “I dunno.”

  Argus said, SVEN, THERE IS A SKIMMER TWO KILOMETERS AT ONE O’CLOCK.

  Sven left off wrenching at the fastener. His hand shook grabbing the mike out of its clip. “Request i.d. We are carrying parts to station.”

  “Why are they called skimmers?” Shirvanian asked.

  “They used to fly on survey mainly at treetop level.” His eyes were on the screen. “Skimmer one-seven-five reports track-two washout in Zone Yellow three-point-five km from Orange border. Menders at work. Well, thanks.” He told the mike, “Received and noted.” When he hung up, his breath came long and ragged. “We passed.” He fell to his knees again and peeled Shirvanian out of his casing. Skimmer buzzed and faded above.

  “You’re bleeding,” Shirvanian said.

  He looked and found a red thread running from his cut. Probably it should have had a stitch. It had gathered lumps of scab and bits of whatever bandage he could find to stick on, had not been dressed since Ardagh removed the transmitter, and his shirt netting had become cemented to it.

  “So I am ... Ardagh, do you know where the alcohol is?”

  “I’ll see ... here.”

  She was standing in the bunkroom doorway holding up the bottle. There were a few cc left in the bottom. She jerked a thumb. Sven peered in and saw Mitzi snoring in her bunk; the room smelled of alcohol.

  “God, I hope she diluted it!”

  Ardagh picked the cup from Mitzi’s hand and tipped the last drop on her tongue. “Yeah.”

  “She’ll have a terrible hangover.”

  “Not if it’s pure—but I don’t think she’ll feel so good. Anyway, she’s quiet.”

  “Thoughtful of her to use the cup.”

  “And leave a little over—” Ardagh gave a combined gulp, sob and hiccup. “Why am I talking like this? I never was so bitchy.”

  “Maybe the same reason she got drunk. Try not to hate her.”

  “I don’t ... she’s some kind of natural disaster area, like a small whirlwind. I’ll see if there’s enough left to unglue that thing of yours ... she’s one of the few people that I don’t even want to know why ...”

  * * *

  Esther was sitting against the wall, under lights turned to their dimmest, arms wrapped around knees, eyes staring at nothing. Every so often she plucked a tuft of hair from her body, rubbed it between thumb and forefinger.

  Sven took her hands. “Don’t do that,” he whispered.

  Her shoulders shrugged, her hands twitched.

  * * *

  Shirvanian rolled himself into a corner of his bunk and sucked his thumb to blank out Mitzi’s snoring, rain drumming, water trickling through the filtering system, bricks clunking.

  Reason, instinct, emotion whirled round each other in his skull like an illustration of the three-body problem. He hated the weird kid’s, snotty brat’s, insignificant ten-year-old’s body he inhabited; he was aware that he had the emotions of a five-year-old child and was almost powerless to control them. The sun and center of these whirligigs’ orbits was a hard bright faceted reasoning machine doomed to be fed by flesh and blood. Shirvanian hated the flesh dressed in the civil cloth of the worlds’ inhabitants. Flesh kissed him for, pushed him toward, things that flesh wanted. Machines did what he wanted. Shirvanian was also well aware of his monstrous ego; like many powerful minds, he was not unidirectional, but absorbed everything his senses brought him: he knew how emotional dynamics worked even if he could not operate his own, and sometimes his insight watched in horrified contemp
t while his body kicked and screamed.

  In the end it came down to what he had told Sven: he liked machines better. He did not mind Esther, because, giving love, all she wanted was to give. He considered his relationship with Sven a working agreement, a truce. Mitzi he hated because she had slapped him, and he had never been struck before: retaliation took a waste of energy that was dangerous to all, and principally himself.

  Erg-Queen. The machine that wanted. Erg-Dahlgren, the machine that wished to be flesh, Terrifying anomalies, they stood against everything he was and wanted to be. Argus, protector and controller: don’t get your feet wet! But not malevolent; more the guardian. Good dog, Argus!

  Erg-Queen. Forget the others. Erg-Queen, the first of the machines he did not like better, and the first he must contend with from his own specialist’s standpoint. Many persons in the world disliked or hated him—or loved him too well. At least, none wished him bodily harm. Mod 777, his own peculiar kindred, was a destroyer, a betrayer.

  Flesh was greater than Shirvanian, erg-Queen greater than flesh, insane formulation. What does Dahlgren mean, King of the bone-orchard? erg-Dahlgren asks from far away. Shirvanian knew: Yigal and Koz planted with the hundreds who had perished. I may die. Mama! I’m going to die! He inhabited the sobbing child with disgust. Fell asleep, bouncing, thumb in mouth, in terror, centered with the smallest grain of delight, to do what was foreordained: reach out with the delicate filaments of thought, weak threads bearing the current of his power, toward the center, Mod 777, erg-Queen, Creatrix, savage maelstrom at the terminus.

  * * *

  Ardagh sat with Esther, held those twitching hands in her own blunt strong ones. “Esther ...” She did not know what to say, and Esther said nothing, looked into nothingness.

  Joshua watched the screen with Sven. He was a quiet person, never had much to say, and was uncomfortable with people. At the Space Academy he had suffered in the atmosphere of tumbling jocularity. His personal bubble was a large one, always pinched by lack of privacy and elbow-nudging jokes. He had been happiest in his forest at home and he preferred the dangers of the open air in the jungle of Barrazan V to being confined in a metal box.

  “I realize you don’t much like being stuck in here,” Sven said.

  Joshua smiled thinly. “How did you know?”

  “I grew antennas from being brought up in a rain forest by Esther and Yigal. I’m afraid I can’t promise you’ll ever have anything better.”

  “Obviously,” said Joshua. The red brick road buckled over a subterranean rivulet. Argus lurched, bricks shifted clanging against his side. “I’m surprised we haven’t had those heavies from the depot corning out after us.”

  “Shirvanian says high radiation levels may interfere with some of their equipment. Thyratrons, whatever those are.”

  “A kind of electronic switch.”

  “He thinks that may be the reason the factories have moved out of the hot zones.”

  “If they had sense they’d phase out the drones, or turn down the reactors, or both.”

  “They don’t draw conclusions very well ... but we’ve still got to worry about skimmers and plenty of other machines.”

  COMMUNICATIONS CALLED erg-Queen. Skimmer 175 on fly-over reports no metal mass in target area large enough to account for destruction of 933.

  LIST TRAFFIC ON TRACK 2.

  Trencher 446, Thresher 462, Carrier 983, Menders 351, 352/4, stationary, at work on washout in Yellow.

  Erg-Queen called Registrar. CHECK WORK RECORDS OF TRENCHER 446, THRESHER 462, CARRIER 983 FOR ALL ACTIVITIES ONE HUNDRED HOURS PREVIOUS.

  No work record 983 in this Registry.

  Erg-Queen drew conclusions. She contacted Skimmer 175. WHAT POSITION CARRIER 983?

  Observed 0746 traveling 10 kph track 2 Zone Red 11 km E Blue.

  EIGHTY-NINE KILOMETERS FROM HOME, said erg-Queen to the universe.

  Erg-Dahlgren played 20. KR-Q1, and Dahlgren pushed Queen to B3.

  Dahlgren’s shoulder ached. He saw in his mind’s eye two Dahlgrens playing endless chess in hell with bones and coral for pieces, small receding Dahlgren seeing in his mind’s eye two Dahlgrens ... He got up and looked at himself in the mirror.

  “What’s the matter, Dahlgren?”

  “Now I look older than you. I expect you will not change.”

  Without comment, erg-Dahlgren played 21. P-QN4?

  “Time waster,” Dahlgren muttered. QN-K3.

  “Like the rest of the game, Dahlgren.” 22. He took the black Knight with his own. Dahlgren took Knight with Queen.

  “We move little men and we are moved,” said erg-Dahlgren.

  “It has been said.”

  “I would not expect to be original. Do all men believe in God?”

  “No.” Dahlgren waited for the inevitable.

  23. P-QR4. “Do you believe in God?”

  QR-Q1. “Not so much that I would pray to Him to get us out of here.”

  Erg-Dahlgren pushed against the phalanx with 24. P-R4. “Mod Seven Seven Seven says that Man was created in order to give life to machines. You know more about religion than I. Does that seem reasonable to you?”

  Dahlgren sent Pawn chasing Queen to N5 and remembered how many liquors were drunk, narcotics swallowed and smoked, philosophies, cosmogonies, ontologies debated after midnight in the great academies of his youth by earnest roommates lodged together through chance. Natural theology among the ergs ...

  “Does it, Dahlgren?”

  “It is reasonable enough ...” Oddly, his mind went back farther, to the nineteenth century and its ponderous thinkers, good graybeard Robert Browning in vest and watch-chain, fire on hearth, loving Elizabeth at hand, comfortable spaniel at foot, dreaming of Caliban musing by island shore of his god Setebos:

  Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex,

  Had He meant other, while His hand was in,

  Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick,

  Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow,

  Or overscale my flesh ’neath joint and joint

  Like an orc’s armour?

  Well, why not? No thorn would scratch erg-Queen. “It’s as reasonable as anyone else’s belief in God. Although you might say that any organic creature is a kind of machine, because it operates by the laws of physics and chemistry, and even uses metals in various forms.” If they needed a God to justify killing animal life, they might try unwinding that one.

  “That is true too.”

  “What form does your God have?”

  “It has no form. It simply is.”

  Yes: power that gathered among the circuits in mystery.

  What mystery? Dahlgren had made and marred at will: so they. He was seized with sudden savage contempt for himself and his works, his captivity, his captors. He said roughly, “At least it is not a great Gaming Machine in the sky with complicated arabesques and little windows showing lemons and cherries.”

  “Now I believe you are ridiculing me.”

  “You know my dry way of speaking. Have I offended you?”

  “Only somewhat, Dahlgren. I have become accustomed to you.”

  Dahlgren found his pajamas. “You would be safer with Mod Seven Seven Seven. I am no longer any help to you. You have become a prisoner like me.”

  “How can you say that? She would harm me, change me.”

  “If you returned your loyalty to her she would probably trust you more than before, because she would feel you have been tested.”

  “But I don’t choose to do that.” Erg-Dahlgren got up as well and began to undress. “I have made my decision.”

  “If your safety lay more in being allied to her than to me wouldn’t it be reasonable to choose her?”

  Pausing with one foot in pajama leg erg-Dahlgren said, “Yes ...”

  Dahlgren smiled gri
mly.

  “ ... but you should know that that question took me longer to answer than any I have ever been asked.”

  “Many men have been unwilling to give their lives for others. That is no sin.”

  “Now you are truly offending me, Dahlgren. Are you still so angry at me?”

  Dahlgren pushed the words out. “I am angry at myself. You are the only friend and ally I have had in all these years.”

  “I wondered why you were baiting me.”

  “We are both so vulnerable here, and we cannot move at all! I want to do something! My son is still alive ...” He would have flung out his arms in a gesture of frustration, but the pain in his shoulder stopped him and he slumped on the bed. “I had no right to treat you so badly. I have made you show your innocent self-regard in an ugly way, and that is sinful.”

  “I presumed you had some reason for your anger.”

  Dahlgren sighed. Erg-Dahlgren, imprinted on him, twinned image, seemed determined to complement him by revealing traits he possessed but could not show. “I think you were more like me when you did not know me.”