O Master Caliban

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  The ten arms beat against the body like two giant hands, ringing an echoing chord. Sven said nothing.

  NOW TELL ME YOU DO NOT KNOW WHERE MOD DAHLGREN IS.

  “I don’t! I don’t know where he is now!”

  BUT DO NOT TELL ME THAT SHIRVANIAN HAS DONE ALL THIS. HE IS IN A CLOSET CRYING FOR HIS MOTHER. THERE IS ANOTHER HUMAN BEING FREE IN THIS BASE, OR MORE THAN ONE. TELL ME, DAHLGRENSSON, THAT THIS IS NOT SO.

  “The others died, they died,” Sven whispered. The arms rose.

  * * *

  The closet door opened.

  “Shirvanian,” Behind erg-Dahlgren the servo stood, humming quietly, not moving.

  “That’s me,” said Shirvanian. “Hullo, Mod Dahlgren.”

  “Quietly,” Esther whispered. She was trembling at the sight of Dahlgren’s doppelganger.

  Erg-Dahlgren looked down at the small filthy child with a rats’ nest for a head of hair. “Shirvanian?”

  “Who did you expect,” Shirvanian hissed. “Turing or von Neumann?”

  “I do not know who those are.”

  “Give me the control.”

  Erg-Dahlgren handed it over. Shirvanian ripped off the tape. “Okay. Now go to Mod Seven Seven Seven and lie like hell—and leave the door open here. We’ll do the rest.”

  “Is that really what Dahlgren looks like?” Mitzi asked.

  “That’s what Mod Dahlgren looks like,” Esther said.

  The footsteps died away, and outside the guardian erg turned and rolled westward along the shadowed corridor, pausing every once in a while by the wall on either side to pull at and rip out the recharging sockets it found there.

  * * *

  I HAVE ASKED EIGHT QUESTIONS, said erg-Queen, AND I HAVE RECEIVED TWO ANSWERS. ONE: SHIRVANIAN WAS KIND ENOUGH TO TELL ME HIS NAME. TWO: YOU HAVE TOLD ME WHERE MOD DAHLGREN WAS, BUT HE IS NOT IN THAT PLACE NOW. REGARD THESE ARMS, DAHLGRENSSON. THEY ARE ALL CAPABLE OF CARRYING HEAT, AND THEY WILL EMBRACE YOU.

  Sven regarded them. He couldn’t keep his eyes away from them. The air smelled of their heat.

  MOD DAHLGREN!

  The arms fell; Sven gave a faint whimper. His nose was running and his mouth was dry. His arms and torso were glued together with sweat, it ran in trickles down his back and inside his thighs.

  Erg-Dahlgren came into the vault. He paused, examined Sven with curiosity, and came to stand beside erg-Queen at ease, arms behind his back. “I am here, Mod Seven Seven Seven.”

  Sven shuddered at the sound of the voice and turned his head away.

  WHY HAVE YOU NOT COMMUNICATED WITH ME?

  “I returned to order only a few moments ago. I was confused. I have been in this area only once. Did you not pick up my signal?”

  Erg-Queen tapped her arms. I WAS ENGAGED OTHERWISE. WHAT CAUSED YOUR MALFUNCTION?

  “I don’t know, Creatrix. I was lying on my bed with my afferents turned down and without knowing I became as nothing.”

  GO TO THE SHIP AT ONCE AND BOARD IT. YOU WILL BE SAFE THERE.

  “Certainly.” He glanced again at Sven before he left. Sven kept his eyes turned away. He did not dare look.

  What now, Shirvanian?

  Get aboard the ship, Mod Dahlgren. You’ll be as safe there as anywhere.

  * * *

  IT IS A PITY YOU WOULD NOT LOOK AT MY WORK, DAHLGRENSSON. NOW IT IS SECURE.

  Sven wrenched at the coils. “Why do you have to kill? Why can’t you leave us alone? We can’t harm you any more!”

  IN THE FOREST ONE THRESHER WAS DESTROYED AND ONE DISABLED. IN THE TREAD-REPAIR CHAMBER ONE SERVO WENT OUT OF CONTROL, DAMAGING EQUIPMENT. AT THE DEPOT TWO DRONES, TWO ERGS IN THE FIVE-HUNDRED CLASS AND FIFTEEN TRIMMERS WERE WRECKED TO THE POINT WHERE THEY COULD ONLY BE SALVAGED FOR PARTS. IN MY HALLS PROVISIONER WENT OUT OF ORDER AND DAMAGED FOUR MACHINES. ON THE LANDING FIELD TWO THRESHERS WERE DESTROYED AND TWO DISABLED WHEN THE TRANSPORT EXPLODED. FIVE MINUTES AGO AN ERG ON THE LOWEST LEVEL HAD ITS BRAIN CENTER DESTROYED—PURPOSELY BY ONE OF MY OWN MACHINES. I ASSURE YOU, SVEN DAHLGREN, THAT FROM THIS MOMENT ONWARD YOU WILL NOT HARM US ANY MORE. WHATEVER POWER MACHINEMAKER POSSESSES IT HAS LOST ITS VALUE, BOTH FOR ME AND FOR YOU.

  Sven closed his eyes and waited for the searing arms.

  The first of the transformers blew up.

  * * *

  Coming out of the third transformer room, Joshua heard not only erg signals but ergs themselves. He ran. The treadway was circular; if he kept on he would reach the entrance to the hangar again, and that would be clogged with ergs. He swallowed in panic, thumbed the button of every doorway, finding traps, storerooms, closets, hallways, hoping for an elevator, on the theory that for speed the ergs would use ramps; in narrow corridors and warrens he would be hopelessly lost, and eventually trimmers, like savage rats, would corner him.

  One door opened into an elevator; he peered into its cavern anxiously: empty. He plunged in, punched the CLOSE plate and the one for third level where the Pit entrance was. Ergs whined by the door and he sank against the wall. Ergs upstairs too, but he would be fighting toward the place he wanted to go. In his pocket he had saved a lump of plastic and a length of fuse for any situation he found urgent or interesting. The blowtorch was half-full; he had most of the rivets. Armed to the teeth.

  The elevator moved slowly, very slowly. It stopped at level two. The door opened.

  Joshua shrank into a corner, pushed his spine into it, wanted to be part of it, a right-angle of steel and concrete.

  Twenty people crowded in, some men, some women, some he couldn’t tell which. They paid no attention to him, and an erg reached in a limb, pressed a button and withdrew it.

  The door closed and the elevator started downward again. Joshua gulped down the lump in his throat.

  The humans did not look at him. Their skins were white, black, red, yellow, blue, mauve; they were dressed in the uniform of Mod Dahlgren with gold emblems on the breast, same material, colors matching or contrasting with skin tone, pleasingly, according to Clothier’s aesthetic values. They were all humanoid in shape, though one did not appear to have a nose, another had a snout and a fringe of tentacles on his/her skull, yet another a narrow reptilian jaw, very short arms and a long balancing tail. They spoke in low tones, not quite to each other.

  “Yes, it’s good to be home again.”

  “It is a pleasure to visit your distinguished planet.”

  “An honor to have participated in this valuable experiment.”

  “Working with Doctor Dahlgren.”

  “Alongside colleagues from all the distances of the Galaxy.”

  “Don’t you agree, Doctor Lindstrom?”

  Mild laughter. “Of course we did not always agree, but—”

  By the time the elevator reached ground Joshua had concluded that these were androids created for the trip to GalFed Central.

  The door opened, an erg reached in a limb to shepherd them. Joshua held his breath. The limb, before withdrawing, scoured the wall, found one more object, Joshua, and plucked him out with a pinch of his sleeve. It did not care that he was wearing sagging dark-blue jersey stained with dirt and sweat. He was dragged along with the crew in their bright, clean cloth and fresh unhuman skins. He might have disabled the servo with his rivet gun, but he did not know how the others would react. They walked without turning their heads, practicing the inane phrases.

  “Conditions were difficult.”

  “If not impossible.”

  “Although we did succeed to some degree.”

  “In stabilizing.”

  “The mutation rate in zones.”

  “In which the specimens were subjected to.”

  “And which statistics will show.”

  Joshua did not discover what the statistics showed. He had been plodding along a tube-shaped corridor; as the light changed he saw that a pair of ga
tes were opening into a narrower tube of shining metal, and he was sure that this led to the ship.

  The servo guide was sending the androids over the step and up the arch two by two. Joshua, odd-man-out, cast about the tunnel and found flanges in its sides, like those of the old buttress trees in the forest. Their shadows were dark; Joshua darted into one and it received him like a mother’s arms. The servo ticked off the last two, closed the gates behind them and locked the heavy latch. It turned and wheeled away, past Joshua and back down the tunnel, its signal faded. Joshua permitted himself to breathe. Mod Dahlgren was not among the androids. Perhaps he was on the ship already, perhaps not. On impulse, Joshua picked the lump of plastic from his pocket, spun it into a string, wound it around the gate latch, thumbed it down firmly, found his bit of fuse and lit it. Then ran.

  He was a few meters away from the main corridor when the explosion boomed. At the tunnel mouth, a swarm of trimmers, signals in his receiver muffled by the blast, appeared from nowhere and everywhere and grabbed Joshua, pulling him in all directions like ants fighting over a leaf. They choked, wrenched, tore. He screamed and a screwdriver smacked his mouth.

  Just as suddenly they dropped him and scuttled off.

  He lay sobbing on the filthy concrete floor, blood running from his mouth. Hands picked him up and set him on his feet. Or tried to. His knees kept buckling.

  “Get up! Hurry, get up!”

  He got his feet planted on the floor, finally, pulled his head up on his sore neck. The steel strength of the arms told him, if not the face. Mod Dahlgren.

  “Who are you? Are you a friend of Shirvanian’s?”

  “Y-yes.” He swallowed blood. One of his front teeth was loose, his throat was swollen. “Josh ... Joshua ... Ndola.” He coughed up the blood, turned his head and spat.

  “I am Mod Dahlgren.”

  “I know ... I—we got you out of Clothier’s storeroom.”

  “I didn’t know that was where I had been taken.”

  “Those trimmers ... they obeyed you?”

  “They do when Shirvanian is around.”

  Joshua’s clothes were ripped, the receiver had fallen out of his ear and been trampled somewhere, the blowtorch had dropped from his pocket, now half torn off, and was crushed. He still had the rivet gun. But he felt broken. “I have to find Dahlgren ... I promised Sven.” He coughed again. “If I could rest a bit ...”

  “Not too long, Joshua Ndola.”

  “And you—what will you do?”

  “I was to board the ship, but it seems the gates are badly jammed.”

  “You’ll have to go to her.”

  “No. I have had enough. Come along, Joshua. I too wish to find Dahlgren.”

  In the vault the lights flickered, went out, came on again.

  WHAT IS HAPPENING?

  Sven opened his eyes, raised his head. “Don’t you know? A transformer has blown up.”

  Heat the arms again, monster. Sport of nature, of everything hideous in men. And we’ll go down together.

  * * *

  Shirvanian waited in the shadow of the corridor, so frightened he thought his heart would shrivel and slither down between his lungs and his liver. His control was in one palm, his eyes were on erg-Queen, he was waiting for the ripeness of a moment and his hands were curved to catch it as it dropped.

  The second transformer blew, and two seconds later the third. The light jumped once like a bomb’s flare, and went down dim, fading into the deep orange, near-red of an ancient dream of hell.

  On third level a corridor went dark; the ergs running it slowed. Their infra-red kept them from crashing into each other, but they skittered along the walls, treads and limbs hooked into doorways. They were lost.

  On first level several ergs paused to recharge; when they found fused sockets they searched for others, but from the others no current flowed. They stood where they were, slowly dying.

  At Transformer 2, where power was still flowing, six recharging ergs of different classes were set upon by a pack of trimmers and threshers with recharge signals beeping. They pulled and clawed sockets, limbs, antennas, sensors. The battle raged for a few minutes, and as the last of their power ebbed, it slowed, wavered, died down. One surviving thresher hugged the last whole socket to its receptor and recharged. Its light sensors were smashed and its antennas broken.

  Now most lights were out in all levels northwest, southwest, and southeast. Hundreds of ergs swarmed toward the lights of northeast, but they had no duties there, they milled about, collided with each other, clogged the corridors.

  Shirvanian’s control was full out.

  * * *

  After a couple of hours of uneasy sleep in great discomfort, Dahlgren was wakened by a sound of metallic creaking. He lifted himself on one elbow, painfully. The creatures about him stirred a little; there was no wind here, no thunder or lightning. During the Pit “nights” there was no light except the faint glow from the band of glass at top level, and now most of that was gone. Power failure? The Pit had its own generators to control heat, light and ventilation, but the switches were outside.

  He parted the leaves of his tree and could see nothing, but he knew with dreadful logic that the noise was coming from the cage and the clones were working at the bars. He did not know why he enraged them, by sight, or smell, or an instinct that had been implanted in them by the ergs.

  The thin pajamas clung to his skin, there were droplets of moisture in his hair and beard. He thought he might simply lie back and let them kill him. They had been created degraded images, they did not even have the ugly dignity of the proto-men who ate lice and flies but carried promises in their gonads. He could not fight them, and he did not want to cry defiance to their gabble.

  Men should live in peace and brotherhood, writes the schoolchild in the essay. Turds. Brothers have fought for millennia. Mothers, daughters; fathers, sons; as I fought Sven Adolphus and refused to lead the life of study—and my own Sven surely despises me. Yet the old man refused to die before he made peace with me. I will never know Sven, and I cannot make peace with these, who have been picked from my flesh like seeds out of an apple. And these machines will become like men, men like me, for in erg-Dahlgren they have already the seed of rebellion; if they break him it will grow again somewhere.

  How they do grunt, those two. Soon they will be out here. Dahlgren, you should have died with the others.

  All that was contemplative and resigned in Dahlgren lay down and turned its face toward darkness, and all that was arrogant, angry and contemptuous picked up his body and clambered down the tree in the silence he had learned as an observer of animal life.

  A bar snapped. The male barked deeply in triumph, and the female made the whistling sound through teeth and nose forced by her harelip.

  Did the breaking of one bar give them enough space to come out? They were pushing, grunting; they were strong enough to bend the bars a little more.

  He crouched at the base of the tree. An unknown sleeper snorted. Rodents squeaked, a bird chirped, insects rustled among the bits of bark on the earth floor; a tiny waterfall splashed and its stream rippled down toward a pond.

  Dahlgren scratched at a couple of insect bites on his shin, and the rubbing of rough skin seemed loud.

  Then the clones yipped together. They had broken out, into a larger prison, and could make what noise they chose. Immediately they found something to squabble about; Dahlgren moved from tree to tree, feeling for every step. He was a big man; he would not spring up easily from a heavy fall.

  The clones fell silent. They might, within two minutes of leaving the cage, have taken the giant step of learning to make peace in order to follow a common aim.

  He backed away from the sound of their movements, cracked branches, growls and snorts. He saw nothing. There was a low diffuse light that turned everything to one in the mist. If he had been able t
o see where he was going they would see where he had gone. The tree clump was the only hiding place in the Pit, and he had to leave it because that was where they would search.

  He slipped back from this shelter, crouched behind a stone, tried to judge where the wall would be: it was lined with heavy lianas, he might find a cover climbing among them and increase the surface over which they must hunt him. Silence now. Grayhead and Ridgeback slept, and all the others. He thought he was likely only a few meters from the wall, and dropped to hands and knees to feel for obstacles and avoid tripping. His body sank into a pool of mist.

  It occurred to him—

  A throttling arm came round his throat and cut off his scream.

  It had occurred to him that their night vision might be better than his own and that one of them could have diverted him with noise while the other attacked from behind.

  * * *

  YOU! erg-Queen cried. YOU!

  Shirvanian came out into the vault, into the lurid dusk. “How long is it since you recharged, Mod Seven Seven Seven?”

  She said to the ergs holding Sven, TAKE HIM!

  The ergs freed Sven, but they did not take Shirvanian. They retracted their limbs and stood still.

  “They should never have made you with those heat arms. Ten of them! All that energy! You can’t use more than two or three at a time, and you didn’t need the heat. Just showing off. You don’t have to call for your friends. They’ll be here in a minute.”

  She surged toward Shirvanian, bowling over Sven. He got to his feet, lunged wildly after her, and missed.

  “Don’t, Sven. She won’t touch me. She has no more power left than a trimmer.”