O Master Caliban (15 page)

The erg hesitated for a moment, and left.

“But don’t expect me to eat it,” Dahlgren muttered.

He wished for a chair, for the moment, because he expected discomfort shortly.

ACTIVATE EDVALG.

EDVALG IS ACTIVATED. WHAT IS YOUR REQUEST, CREATRIX?

Creatrix indeed. ADD SVENSSEN. ERASE EDVALG. THIS STORE IS NOW DESIGNATED SVENSSEN.

SVENSSEN INSERTED. ERASURE:
EDVALG

INSERT KEY: EDVARD DAHLGREN SON OF SVEN ADOLPHUS DAHLGREN.

INSERTED.

IF THIS CODE: SVENSSEN, IS USED HEREAFTER AT ANY TIME BY ANY
MACHINE OR PERSONAGE OF ANY ORDER, RANK OR NUMBER YOU ARE TO ... He paused to listen, and thought he heard a steadier and more purposive noise rising. IF THIS KEY: EDVARD DAHLGREN SON OF SVEN ADOLPHUS DAHLGREN IS USED HEREAFTER ... The metallic sounds came closer. Dahlgren went on adding locks, blocks and barriers. UNDER EITHER OR BOTH OF THESE CONDITIONS THIS STORE IS TO BE ERASED. He left himself a minute for the core statement.

INSERT ALL MEMORY OF THE NAME SHIRVANIAN AND ALL REFERENCES TO AND ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE NAME AND BEING SHIRVANIAN NOW IN THE MEMORY STORE OF MOD DAHLGREN ONE INTO THE STORE: SVENSSEN.

INSERTED.

DEACTIVATE ALL MEMORY OF THE NAME SHIRVANIAN AND ALL REFERENCES TO AND ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE NAME AND BEING SHIRVANIAN IN THE MEMORY STORE OF MOD DAHLGREN ONE.

DEACTIVATED.

REACTIVATE THIS MATERIAL APPLYING TO THE NAME AND BEING SHIRVANIAN INTO THE STORE OF MOD DAHLGREN ONE ONLY UPON THE UTTERANCE BY THE MAN EDVARD DAHLGREN OF THE VOCABLE “SHIRVANIAN” IN THE HEARING OF MOD DAHLGREN ONE AND ON CONDITION THAT THE UTTERANCE OF THIS NAME “SHIRVANIAN” IS HEARD BY AND INSERTED INTO THE MEMORY STORE OF MOD DAHLGREN ONE. UPON THIS UTTERANCE AND UNDER THESE CONDITIONS ERASE THE STORE: SVENSSEN. VOICE IDENTIFICATION: He picked up the microphone and said, “Shirvanian.” Now I hope that is the correct spelling.

He switched off at the moment the servos whined through the door, slamming it back so hard it re-bounded in its slide, and wrapped their cold tentacles around him.

“YOU ALL RIGHT,
Shirvanian?”

“I guess so. I don’t want that thing coming after me again.”

“Which thing?” Esther asked.

“The Dahlgren. If he gets his memory wiped maybe he’ll leave me alone.”

The boy looked sick and exhausted. He made her uneasy, and not him only. “I never thought there’d be a time when I missed the sound of those drones.”

“That’s only because they’ve switched to flamethrowers.”

Ardagh thought it was time to change the subject. “Did Dahlgren do a lot of work with apes, Esther?”

“He was interested in genetic engineering and its influence on behavior, but he was a coordinator, not an intense specialist. Besides, all apes are expensive, and many are protected species, particularly gibbons. I once heard him say he couldn’t bring himself to stuff an ape into a glass box measuring this much by that much with a tube stuck here and a tube stuck there and a lot of nuts and bolts in its skull to hold the electrodes in its brain. He saw too much of that as a student and it made him sick.”

“How’d he get gibbons?”

“That was a funny story. On the way out here somebody bound somewhere else smuggled them on board, intending to unload them at a stopover. Just one breeding pair. Dahlgren found out. Gibbon traffic is illegal; he took them away and told the fellow he’d blow the whistle if he didn’t keep his mouth shut. Not very pretty—but those were my parents, and I’d be the ape in the glass box.”

“And that’s why he picked you, rather than, say, a chimp, for experimental purposes ...”

Esther jumped to Yigal’s back. The trees were becoming so unpleasant-looking she did not want to swing in them. The leaves were narrow, the branches brittle, the bases had thickened like low palms and grew scales tipped with spines. “No, ma’am. He chose me for my beauty.”

Ardagh smothered a laugh, and then examined Esther. With her economy of grace and strength, her fine features and vivid character, even with the odd-colored spots on her dark fur, she was certainly beautiful, especially against Yigal’s pure white hair.

“I’m not joking,” Esther said. “Chimps look like caricatures of men, and their brains are nearly halfway there. Dahlgren’s a show-off. He wanted to start from less and not end up with something people would say was funny and cute. I’m sure as hell not cute.”

“Neither is Topaze,” said Ardagh.

Esther laughed. Of them all, Esther, who never failed to groom herself, and Yigal, whom she groomed, looked fit. The rest were ragged, dirty, scratched, reeking of adolescent sweat; Shirvanian drawn with strain, Koz the worst because of his scabbing and slowly healing welts.

“Take it easy,” said Yigal. Sven was trying to pull him ahead.

“I want to talk.”

“What now?” Esther asked.

Sven murmured, “Joshua’s got a Triskelian emblem on his rain suit.”

“Is that so? Mitzi’s got it stamped on the arches of her bootsoles. Want to guess where it’ll turn up next?”

“I don’t think I do ... Ardagh told me something about the Triskelian Order. Celibate, ceremonial religion? It doesn’t fit.”

“It could be that’s not all of the truth. There may be more ranks in that order than we know of.”

“She said there were a lot. I wonder if we can trust them.”

“We’ll have to, now. We saved their lives, Shirvanian saved ours. But I’m not surprised. There had to be something more than pure chance holding that cranky bunch together.”

Koz, Mitzi, Shirvanian? Unpleasantness of character wasn’t synonymous with deviancy ... but Ardagh? Joshua? “If they get together and try something—”

“We’ll know what to expect.”

“We’ll know we have to expect something—but when?”

“Oh, I think about the first branch point: when—or if—we get a machine.”

Sven turned and saw them murmuring among themselves. Plotting? “They look exhausted right now. I wonder if they’d have the strength. You think they’d try to kill us?”

“No! Koz might break down, but I don’t think it’d enter their minds. They might try to strand us. They’re still childish—they wouldn’t realize what a half-baked idea it was.”

“Childish or not, there are too many of those ideas floating about here,” said Yigal. “We are depending on a ten-year-old brat with a very strange mind.”

“Ayeh,” said Esther. “It’s time to start cutting south. Too bad. The bricks are rather pretty here.”

“Yes,” said Sven. “I can hardly wait to see all the other lovely colors.”

There were fewer trees, thicker seedlings warping and dying faster. Occasionally some strange growth, a foreign or indigenous mutation, resisted hardily and took hold with a splendid display of vivid metallic leaves and flowers that shrugged off dust and water and clashed in the wind.

“Ugh, those are repulsive,” said Ardagh. “They look as if the ergs made them.”

“Maybe they did,” said Sven.

Even the beetles, low broad things with steely carapaces, seemed machine-made, and the rodent forms had spines and scales, or were perhaps misshapen reptiles, Flying creatures avoided the area. There were no berries, and the bugs would have raveled the most leathery craw. It was hard to deduce what any creature would eat here.

Shirvanian said, “They’ve probably got a reactor there, but it’s not leaking ... can we rest before we go much farther? I’m still tired, and I want to think.”

“Put down a groundsheet,” said Esther. “We’ll eat now.”

Mitzi said, “There haven’t been any machines at all out today.”

“They stayed home,” said Shirvanian. “Waiting for us. Plenty of them.”

“And no plans,” said Joshua.

“Sven’s memory of the factory isn’t a map. Any plan might get picked up by erg-Dahlgren and the Queen’d get it. Even if his memory’s been wiped he’ll still connect with me at odd times. We’ll have to make choices when we’re forced to.”

An aircar buzzed them, laid a random streak of fire a hundred meters away. They picked themselves up from flattened positions. “There’s one for you,” said Shirvanian. “Clumsy, or trying to make us think it is.” The rain began once more.

“Whatever it is, we could have been wiped,” said Sven.

“No, I don’t think they’re sure of catching us all this way ... they think human beings are pretty sneaky—which they are—and it’s simpler to lay a really good ambush.”

“That makes me feel a lot better,” said Sven. It seemed to him that they had reached some kind of plateau of terror; they ducked and dodged, picked themselves up and went on eating. Where the fear had been there was an ache, a depression linking them, like heavy chains: Yigal hardly spoke, Esther plucked and snapped thorn branches, the children seemed to be breathing hard all the time, the air was heavy with moisture, and Ardagh, suffering either from allergy or a cold, had run out of tissues and was wiping her nose on her sleeves. The all-weather clothing was spotted with mildew, the food was growing mold; they scraped off the mold and ate it.

* * *

The factory was in a small valley. Parts of it had been used to grow marsh plants, sections marked off in squares for hydroponic tanks, the flooded bottoms as shallow beds to trace the mutation rates of fry and fingerlings. The ergs had chosen it because it was free of heavy growth; they had only to cut one deep channel at the southernmost point to let all the water out. They kept the growth down by burning and defoliants; the slopes were still faintly marked by plot lines.

The place was a bowl of night, filled with deep rumbling, lit once in a while by sparks from the huge stacks, emblazoned with rust splotches on the slopes of its metal roofs; nothing resisted the rains of Dahlgren’s World very long. Mists hung over it, thickened by smoke and rising in odd shapes from the heat: winds sliced them and rains whipped them down; they regathered endlessly, blackened or shot with fire.

The sun hung over one corner of this valley like a smutted lantern; there were four or five slowly revolving spy-eyes mounted on poles around its rim, mainly to regulate traffic coming and going. The ergs did not expect enemies or attacks. There were no fences.

* * *

Sven and the others gathered in a small thickly-grown hollow beyond the rim, northwest from the channel, at the base and out of range of one of the spy-eyes.

“You can’t see anything in that muck,” said Esther.

Shirvanian unpacked the small receiver he had made to test the erg-bird. The bird had been a showpiece, a seamless creation, but the instruments he made for himself were uncased accretions of wires, transistor chips, helixes and solder knobs, and looked like the viscera of small animals under dissection. “Moderate reactor, running properly. I won’t touch that.”

“Why not? Why not turn it off? You’ll have to do that at the station.”

“I don’t see why. There’s other ways of shutting off power besides tampering with protective devices and taking the risk of blowing everything up. I don’t want to start trouble. All I want is a machine.”

“Where are they?”

“Can’t see much through the smoke ... there’s two roads spiraling the slopes ... in and out traffic for drones and other big ergs. I think they start from ...” rain and wind shoved at the smog for a moment, pushing it north; it spread again as the gust died ... “yah, that big low building opposite the channel ... probably the hangar ... there’s no chimneys.”

“The upcoming road branches off toward the tracks,” Sven said.

“Too slow for us.” A big servo emerged and began to wind around and upward. “Suppose we drove one straight from the hangar through the channel—it’s probably full of rubble and rock chunks—I wonder if we’d ruin the treads?”

“Not on a transport. They’re versatile, they’ve got auxiliary wheels, runners, balloon tires, legs. They use the treads on the undergrowth.”

“Transport’s what we need. We can’t travel in a drone or a servo. Where does the channel run to?”

“South or south by west,” Sven said.

“We don’t want to go that way,” Mitzi said.

“We will if it’s the only way.” Shirvanian said to Sven, “Suppose ergs were patrolling
all
roads, as well as the northern track, by mechanical habit when it wasn’t worthwhile to change them, or to check up on crash landings or meteors they thought were crashes. If we got to the middle road we might find it clean.”

“It might be faster—but there’s a lot of forest between here and track two.”

“The growth is thinning, and we’d have a water channel for a while.”

“And a lot of ergs chasing us.”

“Yah.” He moved away a few meters and lay on his belly, watching the mist-blurred factory and its lumbering machines, still clutching the radio.

Esther saw that his lips were trembling, and whispered to Sven, “He’s scared silly.”

“So am I.”

“He’s got more to do.” She flicked another glance. “Should I tell him to empty his bladder and embarrass him, or let him wet his pants and embarrass himself?”

“I’ll tell him.” He slipped aside to Shirvanian and whispered. The boy slid back into the undergrowth. When he emerged, Sven said, “That servo will be passing below in a little while.”

“Six minutes.”

“It’ll pick us up. We’d better move.”

“Maybe.” He bit his lip, moved a dial. “You recognize that machine?”

“Yes. It’s in the five hundred range, maybe a five-fifty. Quite old. I haven’t seen any new ones.”

“No. They just repair and replace here. All their new ideas come from Headquarters and get put into erg-Queen and the Dahlgrens ... and the ship. If they make the big jump they can pick up any new machines they want all over the Galaxy—”

“The big jump! You’ve never said anything like that before!”

“Yes I did! I said the Dahlgren would take his place at ... but I never thought—”

“Is that why they’ve started making androids?”

Shirvanian swallowed. “I don’t know! You’re ragging me again! Maybe I just got some stupid idea. Taking over other planets—I don’t know!”

“All right, calm down. I’m not trying to upset you. It’s just—everything keeps growing. What about this servo?”

“I scrambled a three-two-one at Headquarters. I don’t know whether I should try rattling this one.”

“It’s a lot bigger.”

“Three and a half minutes ... okay, let it go.” He pulled back, and Sven followed.

“What are we doing?” Esther asked.

“Right now we’re waiting till the next erg comes by, if it’s not bigger.” He held the receiver to his ear. “How many transports like the Argus were there?”

“About a hundred. They may still use them for hauling ore and parts. I hope so.”

“What about shielding?” Joshua asked.

“Anything carrying men would have been shielded,” Sven said. “I don’t know about other machines.”

Wind gusted, splattering filthy drops from the pit before them, and they huddled under the narrow metallic leaves. Their skin streamed with sweat, had become chafed and rashy in its creases. “Oh God, I used to hate the Midwest,” said Ardagh.

Shirvanian unpacked from his box the instrument he had used to stop the threshers. “What’s that?” Sven asked.

“Control for my esp signal. What I turn things off and on with. I’ve made better ones than this. When it works I can amplify and calibrate, bugger up feedback systems.” He crawled up the rim. “There’s another—a five-twenty, real antique but it moves fast. I’ll try with that.”