O Master Caliban (21 page)

SVEN WAS RIGHT;
Shirvanian
needed worry beads. When he had a piece of work to do with his hands he did not need to think: his hands thought for him. When he had to think with his hands empty he felt unraveled. Distraction had always been his problem. He did not care for his thumb, and he found nail-biting loathsome. As an infant he had disliked toys, and his first act after learning to walk at the advanced age of two was to flood forty-three apartments by trying to flush his teddybear down the toilet. He did not masturbate because his childish sexuality had immediately become absorbed by his hand-brain-machine complex. At five he had been intense about chess for a short time, but after spending an afternoon with his father’s first edition of Philidor’s
Analyse du jeu des échecs,
he had walked into a room full of people and perceived the floor as a chessboard and the men and women as pieces, when he found that he could not move them about with the force of his mind he had thrown a tantrum and given up chess.

Now he lay in his bunk, bouncing slightly, quivering with fright. He would reach out and touch the great battlement, the nerve-complex of ergdom. The hive. The dynamo. The heart.

He curled up on his left side and felt the pounding of his heart on the thin mattress. Eighty-seven per minute.

After a while he caught the beating of erg-Dahlgren’s heart, a pump designed to circulate artificial blood in a coarse network of vessels mainly through head, arms and thorax. Steady seventy-two.

Together the hearts created irritating dysrhythms: ricketa-Iubb-pocketa-tick-a-tick-dubb. He considered speeding up erg-Dahlgren’s heart to match his own and decided that would cause dismay. He read Dahlgren’s heart on the erg monitors. LibaTEEPlibaTEEPlibaTEEP. Fibrillating. The man needed quinidine.

Now he had three of them going.

Tick-liba-ricket-a-pock-a-TEEP-dubb.

He thought of astrolabes and armillaries which had measured with their dials, circlets and pointing hands so many times within the time of Man. And he thought of the Queen with ergs moving about her in their orbits. Within the circlet of beating hearts he moved closer to Her Majesty of Machines.

Terror rose in him and he let it wash over and subside. Terror was her force-field. He contemplated her, ten-armed and triple-crowned. She noticed no presence; she was incommunicado, self-absorbed. He surmounted revulsion, stepped within. Her being was a small electrical storm. She had no person, like the Dahlgren, an erg aware of having a body and a character. She had no more than the essences of ironic self-regard and pedantic sadism which had perhaps seeped in from her designers. She was a function of steel, silicon, germanium and selenium, and her passion for control was as mechanical as a baby’s grasping reflex. Her ambience was not female: only her shape suggested gender. Within her steel castellated wall he felt his thought rebounding, his heart constricting, and he withdrew quickly to breathe before the terror mounted again.

Why is Dahlgren not here?
erg-Dahlgren asked.

Shirvanian closed down, shuddering. Opened again, immediately.

HE IS SAFE. YOU HAVE SAID YOURSELF YOU DO NOT NEED HIM, erg-Queen said.

Inside, where the circuits ran silent and motionless, Shirvanian waited, picking threads: (safe? where?) (IN THE PIT) (why?) (BECAUSE THAT IS WHERE THE ANIMALS ARE)
where they used to keep the animals,
Sven said.

He was safe in my company
, said erg-Dahlgren.

BUT YOU WERE NOT. YOU WERE BEING DISTRACTED, AND I AM MUCH MORE CONCERNED WITH YOUR SECURITY THAN YOU ARE WITH HIS, she answered.

This creature wants to save Dahlgren. Get away, idiot, before you’re broken! No, warning him is dangerous, and she must talk.

“There are still a few days before lift-off, Mod 777, and I would like to be sure I have properly finished the task you set for me.

BE SURE OF IT NOW, MOD DAHLGREN. THE DATE HAS MOVED UP AND YOU WILL LIFT OFF IN 30 HOURS.

Erg-Dahlgren broke off in confusion momentarily and regained control.
We will have no docking privileges if we arrive too early.

NO TROUBLE. YOU WILL ORBIT UNTIL IT IS TIME TO SET OUT. THERE IS MORE THAN ENOUGH FUEL. THAT WAY EVERYONE WILL BE SECURE.

(PARTICULARLY DAHLGREN BECAUSE HE AND THE)

(Being! where are you?)

Erg-Queen’s mind was a furiously busy control tower, and Mod Dahlgren’s urgent call came blurred and distant.

Shit,
said Shirvanian
. Get out and shut up! I will speak to you when I can.

He beat about her maze in a fury, trying to pick up that thread once more.

Particularly Dahlgren, because he and the

because he and the

he and the others will be dead

Naturally, as long as Mod Dahlgren is in orbit. All plans secure. Plenty of time. SHALL I KNOCK THEM OFF THE TRACK AND BURN THEM OR LET THEM CRAWL A LITTLE LONGER?

Erg-Queen asked, DONT YOU AGREE, MOD DAHLGREN?

And erg-Dahlgren answered, subdued,
That seems a very wise move.

Shirvanian left erg-Queen and through erg-Dahlgren’s eyes saw the chess pieces, shell and bone in their icy blocks.

In the obvious move, B-N3, White will prevent the further advance of the pawns.

And Black will attack ...

Why not?

Shirvanian walled erg-Dahlgren and himself with the beating of three hearts, and called,
Mod Dahlgren, do you receive me?

I
do.
There was no color to his thought, not fear, despair, or anger.

Are you still willing to help Dahlgren?

I am, but how? I am only her machine now.

You were willing to go to Central and tell what has happened here.

I will do that if I can, but I am afraid Dahlgren will die and so will you.

Would you trust me with your—with your life, to save Dahlgren and us, as well as yourself?

Pause. Small Solthree child, willful, selfish, and unstable ...

I know all of that, Mod Dahlgren. But, like Dahlgren, I am also not a liar.

Yes ... I will trust you.

Good. For starters tell me what, if any, classes you know of in the station complex are not under direct control of Mod Seven Seven Seven.

She controls all classes under maintenance, power source, defense ... she does not control trimmers.

But they give orders to no one.

That is correct. The only other classes that she does not control directly are those under Provisioner, because they took care of the personal needs of the humans working here, and are not often used now.

List machines under Provisioner, with their lines of command.

Erg-Dahlgren did so.

Okay. Now you have to trust me an awful lot. When I tell you to do it, will you lie down on the bed and disconnect your power cells? That will leave you helpless for a while, and I can’t force you to do it, because you’re the one machine that’s so complicated I couldn’t possibly control you in any way. But I swear you will be reconnected soon.

Being—

My name is Shirvanian.

Shirvanian ... I suppose I knew that once, before my memory was wiped. Shirvanian, I have taken risks to save your man and yourselves. I am the one you must trust now.

It’s a deal,
said Shirvanian.

* * *

He came up briefly out of that ocean of electricity where he felt he was drowning. Eyes closed, knees drawn up, hands clasped between them.

“The box,” he whispered. Then squalled, “The box!”

“Here it is, here!”

He freed his hands, moved them without volition in the empty air.

“Open your eyes.”

“I can’t!”

“What do you want?”

“Control. Control ...”

“It’s not here ... look in his bag ... all right, here it is.”

But he had gone down again, hand + brain + machine, into the sea.

PROVISIONER STILL
controlled
a dozen machines for various purposes: some kept down mold and gritty dust or maintained plumbing and vents, others supplied Dahlgren’s needs. But Provisioner’s most interesting employee was Clothier.

Although it was one of the oldest machines on Dahlgren’s World, Clothier was almost as great a marvel as erg-Dahlgren. It was the only machine with an aesthetic sense; its storeroom was lined with thousands of bolts of texture, color and shimmering luminescence. In a small closed society where tempers frayed and morale faltered it soothed by dressing all inhabitants who wore clothes in a manner both suitable and pleasing. For those who, like Dahlgren, did not care if they wore old burlap it made sure the plain materials they chose fitted them with comfort and grace. Once in seven of Barrazan V’s years it had come out to clothe erg-Dahlgren and the android crew.

* * *

Engaged in routine activity with lift-off twenty-nine hours and counting, Provisioner suddenly began to spin and clatter, emitting alarm signals and battering everything it came into contact with. One of its own slaves got in the way, had its directional antennas broken off and it too started to spin. Both reeled around the corridors, knocking holes in walls and denting doors. The rest of the slaves, still powered but uncontrolled, trundled on in the ways they had been going, butted against walls, edged along them like blind rats in a maze ...

Go ahead,
said Shirvanian.

Erg-Dahlgren wondered briefly if he ought to address the God of Machines and decided that the deity was likely controlled by erg-Queen. He unzipped his uniform, freed his left arm from both it and his undershirt, and lay on the bed. He lifted the bared arm, with his right hand pressed apart the seam in the flesh below the armpit, pulled out first the auxiliary power cell and then the ...

* * *

Clothier woke in its stall, summoned by an unknown and powerful voice.

It clasped a heavy bolt of cloth on its back, ran silently down dark hallways, avoided the rampaging ergs by slipping down narrow service corridors, rolled into erg-Dahlgren’s room on thick tires. It snipped a square of cloth with its scissor arm, wrapped the power cells and replaced them in erg-Dahlgren’s body so that the connections did not touch, closed the flesh-seam, dressed the body, automatically ran a steel tendril over the rucked uniform to smooth it, pulled the board stiffener out of the bolt and took two minutes to shred it with a ripper, burn it with a heat-sealer and flush the ashes down the toilet. Then it rolled erg-Dahlgren into the cloth, clasped the now much heavier bolt on its back once more, skimmed back into its storeroom, reshelved its burden, turned down its power and waited.

In the Dahlgrens’ room the vents blew away the odors of burning and the standing chessmen stared each other down across the board.

* * *

Something cold lapped at Dahlgren’s nose and lips. He opened his eyes. A big triangular snakehead was touching him, snout to mouth. “For eating? Food?”

He understood the words, though the narrow black-red tongue made hisses of all its consonants.

“Food?”

“I am not food,” Dahlgren murmured in his dream and raised his hand to touch the gray-scaled head. The pain in his joints assured him he was not dreaming. The hand remained poised. Grayhead flicked its tongue at it.

“That is not food, stupid. That is only one more of Us,” said another voice.

“It is like the Us in the cage. Why is it not in the cage?” Grayhead asked.

Dahlgren sat up slowly. Very slowly, both from stiffness and caution. He had been lying among rocks and ferns, the arc sun overhead far away through mist. “The Pit,” he said.

“The Place,” he was corrected.

Grayhead was a long and many-coiled serpent with three or four pairs of useless webfeet ranged along its sides. The other speaker was a massive creature the size of a tree trunk with a narrow head and mouth, small red eyes, thick stumpy legs. Its ridged brown back reminded Dahlgren of tKlaa and nVrii.

The
lingua
they spoke was a bit slurred because of the limitations of their mouths, but it also had the cadence of an indigenous dialect. He wondered how old they were, if they had predated the rebellion, in some secret place. As Sven had predated it, and the model of erg-Queen.

They had not moved while he sat up, and he was glad they had agreed he was not food, but as he got to his knees they drew away.

“Why are you afraid of me?” He had not felt so sore and weak since his forced rehabilitation.

Ridgeback stammered, “You—you are like the Us in the cage, stranger. They do nothing but fight.”

Dahlgren became aware of the screaming and chattering behind him, and turned. The Pit had the rank smell of the more unpleasant places on the planet, and the clone cage was likely the most unpleasant place in the Pit. Its occupants were rolling on the floor, tugging each other’s hair, biting each other’s faces in an ecstasy of some sort. “They are not always fighting,” Dahlgren observed. He turned away.

“It is time to eat,” said Grayhead.

“I’m not hungry,” said Dahlgren. He sat on a rock, which emitted a sharp exclamation point, and he got up hastily.

“That is Thinks,” the serpent said.

“What?”

“Stranger does not read you,” Ridgeback said. “Thinks is one of Us.”

Dahlgren knelt to examine it. The creature called Thinks did not look as much like a rock as a brain coral half a meter across; very deep brown, the color of polished wood, and actually composed of closely packed layers of frilled and fluted bone. He touched it gently. It repeated, “!”, and then “?”

Dahlgren murmured, “Lower grade ESP than even tKlaa.”

“tKlaa is my mother,” said Ridgeback suddenly, “but I am not a Thinks.” Dahlgren nodded. Mutated clone or artificially conceived child of tKlaa, and her people had racial memory. No biovine on this one either. Well, tKlaa would never know she had had—whatever it was. And Dahlgren’s wife would never know—his heart wrenched—to what use her flesh had been put, either.

He spent an hour exploring the Pit. He avoided the cage; those savage faces of his chilled him. There were other reptiles and mammals, mildly or severely warped variants of species he knew. Perhaps some had come from his own labs, but he thought most had been created by the ergs, because there was only one of each, and no signs of offspring. They were apathetic from long confinement; there was nothing to fight over: each took a different kind of food, one slept on rock, one half in water, one in a tree. They let him examine them, when he asked. They seemed to enjoy his touch, for they had been so long without stimulation. He noted with sadness that their sexual organs were either atrophied or absent. Nothing here reproduced except insects and small scavenging lizards. The erg-created animals had no particular grace, or beauty, but they were alive, and they were the first and last of their kind.

The one of Us they called Thinks he left for the last, because he felt it might be the most interesting. “Will it let me look at it?” he asked Ridgeback.

“It does not care.”

Dahlgren sighed. He did not know why he should care. Death was upon them all. He knelt before the brain coral and peered at it in the dull light. Its bone-flutes were pale in the depths of their creases, and it seemed to glow from within. He turned it over. In the large round opening of its underside there was a pursed mouth and a protruding foot. The mouth contained silt deep in its creases, and threads of glittering slime; likely it fed on soil organisms and rejected the grit. The muscular foot, like a snail’s, would allow it to move and to push soil into its mouth at the same time. Dahlgren approved of this economy, and was about to turn over the heavy casing again when he noticed on the other side of the foot, between it and the bone, a protruding membrane. He slid three fingers into the fold gently and felt a sac of hard round things, like walnuts. His heart thumped. “Are these more of Us?” he asked Ridgeback.

“Yes.”

Dahlgren felt a surge of joy, at this time and in this place, as a lily will spring in a field of thorns. “Parthenogenetic female,” he whispered. “Has she had them before?”

“No.” Thinks was objecting silently but strongly, and he withdrew his hand carefully, not to break the membrane, and turned her over.

So it had taken years for her to grow and hatch these, for true fertility to be born in the Pit.

He realized that the cage was silent and looked up. The male had found a strong heavy stick somewhere and was wrenching at one of the rusty bars, which was beginning to give a little. It stopped when it felt his eyes on it, shoved its face at the bars and began to scream at him; the female joined in. They had borne no children; they were sterile, like some clones, or had become sterile out of rage and frustration, like some captive animals.

A door scraped; a servo appeared, dropped a lump of this and a gob of that before each creature. The Dahlgren male quickly hid the stick under a heap of rubble in the corner of its cage and went on howling, reaching clawing hands at Dahlgren. The servo threw a few moldy and misshapen fruits at it and dumped a heap of them in a trough before the cage, then paused to let fall a few more at Dahlgren’s feet.

Feeling thoroughly demoted, Dahlgren settled his stiff joints on a genuine rock and began sorting through the garbage for something to eat. Every once in a while he raised his eyes to glance at that bending bar.