O Master Caliban (16 page)

“Try what?” said Mitzi.

“Rattling. Unbalance it. I knocked out the three-two-one without this, but I didn’t half know what I was doing, and I’d better know now.” Sven pulled up beside him. “Stay by the bottom of the pole, but don’t touch it, it may be sensitive.”

The servo churned along the coarse roadbed, kicking spray that joined with the yellow mist. Ardagh and Joshua coughed and spat the foul stuff. “I’ve played with one of these,” said Shirvanian. “I think ... I know ...”

“How close will it come?”

“Twenty-five meters.”

“It might sense us.”

“If it does I’ll have to use your transmitter, and then I won’t find out anything.” He slitted his eyes and pulled in his self, watching the turns of the treads on the rough macadam. His head sank inward like a turtle’s and his tongue lapped at one corner of his mouth. With finger and thumb he calipered the knob of his instrument, and the erg slowed. It made a quarter-turn, gritting on the road, swung back just beyond ninety degrees, swung forward again like a pendulum, its arms extended and shook, clattering against one another, and its upper carriage rocked on the chassis. Then it stopped, folded in its arms and went on.

“That’s rattling,” said Shirvanian. “Next one I’ll really do the work on.”

“I think you’ll have to do it a bit sooner, sweetheart,” said Esther. “Number one’s coming round behind us.”

They turned. The five-fifty, a hundred meters back of them, was bulling its way among the trees, crushing the undergrowth. Its sounds had been covered by lashing wind and the clanging from the factory.

“Look!” Ardagh cried, pointing downward. The other machine had made a smart-right-angled turn and was climbing the slope.

Shirvanian stood up.

“What are you doing?”

“Keep your heads down!” There was a pop, and pieces of spy-eye fell in shivers of metal and glasstex around the pole.

“We’ve got to get out—”

“There.” Shirvanian pointed to a copse southward. “Transmitter’s on.”

They scrambled, Yigal light on his feet over the loose shale between the thickets in spite of his load, the others sliding and grasping. It was not until they had reached the illusory shelter of the growth that they realized Shirvanian was not with them. He was standing on the rim near the pole, head turning to watch one and the other of the machines about to pincer him.

“That transmitter’s not working!” Sven yelled. They were far too close, twenty meters, fifteen. Shirvanian paid Sven no attention, kept his eyes on one, then the other, lids narrowed, smiling faintly, ineffably smug. He took his eyes off them long enough to turn the knob of his control and stood still with his arms raised slightly from his sides, powerful and a little repulsive, the prodigy in velvet and ruffles about to lift the baton to the giant steps of Beethoven’s Seventh.

“He’ll get mashed,” Mitzi whispered.

Ten meters, five, gathering speed toward the rim’s top, and he stepped away.

The machines crashed horridly head on, and he ran, tripping and stumbling, to where the others were huddled. Echoes were still ringing, the ergs’ grapplers wrenched and twisted in efforts to free themselves, they seemed to be embracing, were in fact wedded.

“Biggest ones I ever worked on,” said Shirvanian.

They did not dare call him showoff. His horrifying risks had paid off. Mitzi’s teeth chattered, Joshua’s skin was grayish, Koz’s fists were clenched and pressed together. “We’d better get down to the hangar,” Joshua said.

“Then they’ll be after us by the hundreds. I want them busy up here. You can go over where the channel breaks through at the western edge.”

Esther said, “I think we’ll stick together.”

“I can take care of this by myself.”

“There’s been a few things you couldn’t take care of by yourself,” Ardagh said grimly.

Shirvanian shrugged irritably. They kept their eyes on the locked and struggling machines. The flanks were pocked with rust, and water channels ran down them in crazy patterns.

“You can’t handle many more of those,” said Sven.

The machines stopped suddenly, their arms flipped and rang on their sides. Shirvanian turned off his power. “They won’t send them. They’ll send repair crews, and I want a lot of them. Listen ...”

Rain, wind ...
rrrackticktick

A little thing scuttled up the slope, a spiny echidna, it’s limbs were screwdrivers, metal punches, wire clippers, magnetic clamps, pliers.

“That’s what they’d send after us. They’d pick us to pieces, like those bats we saw in the forest ...”

ticktick
...
racktick!
A second and a third trimmer crossed the edge. They swarmed the huge metal bulks like insects.

“They’d never get those things apart,” said Ardagh.

“They could,” Sven said. “I’ve seen them.”

Mitzi whispered, “Isn’t it time to go?”

“Not for me,” said Shirvanian. Mitzi pushed a couple of knuckles in her mouth and bit. “Go on,” he said.

“We’ll stay,” said Sven.

rricktick.
Two more. They pried, chiseled, levered.

“They’ll turn on us,” said Koz. His teeth were clenched.

“If they got them apart they’d call a drone, and then we’d have them on us,” said Shirvanian. “But they won’t. I want more up here. Keep them busy.”

tick.
Six, seven, a dozen, ants in metal carapaces with savage antennas. Probed, wrenched the stalled ergs. “When I yell
Go!
run down to the hangar.”

“We’ll run into more of them below,” Sven said.

“If
this works they won’t be interested in you.” He turned up again, fingered the control delicately.

The trimmers went on working, not faster, but more forcefully; the mist eddied around them. Occasionally one would waver, with screwdriver or chisel, before plunging it at the wreckage.

ticktick.
Three, four, five. The great ergs were crawling with small ones.

Shirvanian rotated with thumb and finger. The trimmers stove, wrenched, twisted. Their noise, an armored battle, drowned every other sound. He sat like a boy at the shore watching crabs in mating dance. Turn. The tools became weapons that ravaged the metal bulks.

Shirvanian licked his lips. And the small things came, like lemmings to the sea. The big servos were almost invisible under their dreadful crew. What could be seen glittered in edges of ripped metal. The trimmers began to attack the layers of their fellows beneath, with sounds to make the teeth ache.

Koz backed away in a scrabble of hands and heels, the
kek-kek-kek
of hysteria rising in his throat. Ardagh followed and put her arms around him.

Sven said, “Shirvanian.”

The boy did not hear, or did not choose to listen.

“That’s enough!”

“I can make them and I can break them,” said Shirvanian.

Sven stood up. “I said, that’s enough, Shirvanian!” The boy did not move.

“We’ll get out now,” Sven said.

“Yah.” Esther hopped over to Mitzi. “Take some of the packs off Yigal. You can slide downhill easier than he can.” Mitzi skittered away. Esther got out the machete, unwound it, and sliced the ropes that haltered Koz. “I’m taking a chance on you, do you hear?” She kissed him. He looked up at her with eyes of sudden clarity and awareness. “Maybe you’ll do,” she said. She wound the machete with a quick flip and hung it over her shoulder. Ardagh took Koz’s hand and pulled him up, and they began to heft the discarded packs.

Sven said to Joshua, “You take his feet.”

“Right.”

Shirvanian sat oblivious before the writhing mass.

He had time for one yelp as Sven grabbed him from behind, clasping with two palms the hand that held the control, locking it in place. The other two arms went around his waist, and Joshua had him by the feet. Shirvanian writhed and shrieked, but they went over the edge, sliding downhill in a Laocoön tangle beside Koz, Mitzi, and Ardagh, who were alternately skittering on the dry plant stems or rolling like rag bales with their bundles whacking about them.

Esther jumped on Yigal and howled him into a gallop along the rim southeast toward the channel; she held up the machete with its fluttering rag, a hallucinatory black figure of Time or Death on a white mount. At the base of the next spy-eye standard she pulled at his horn, yelling, “Stop!” and reached out—

“Don’t, Esther, it’s—”

—and grabbed the pole with her free hand. It was not electrified. “Find the others!” He skipped down, white streak sinking into yellow smog, and she climbed three-limbed, holding the machete. At the top she swung the blunt edge at the spy-eye. It popped at the same time the worn blade snapped; she shrank away from flying pieces, flung down the useless tool, climbed down, sprang over the littered ground and went downhill head pulled in knees up and arms wrapped about them arse over teakettle.

* * *

They picked themselves up, coughing in the miasma. Ardagh was limping and Mitzi spitting blood from a bitten tongue. Sven’s wound had opened, staining his bandage and net shirt; one of his lower arms had wrenched, and he did not like moving it. Esther, a fuzz ball covered with dust and dry stems, unfolded herself and scuttled over to check Yigal, who was standing quite calm and clean. “You look disgraceful,” he said.

“Hush! Where’s Koz? Joshua?”

Both of them, graceful and athletic, were only a bit winded. Shirvanian, freed now, had flung himself face down in the mud, kicking and pounding with his fists, one of them still clutching the control. Two servicing ergs, much larger than the others, rolled by, heading for the battleground, and paid them no attention.

Sven cried, “Get up!”

“No!” Shirvanian howled.

Sven grabbed him, tucked him under two right arms. “Stop that stupid tantrum!”

Shirvanian waved his arm. “I’ll break this!”

Sven picked it out of his fist, and dropped him. “You can’t be controlling anything in that state.” He turned back the dial and dropped the thing down his shirt front.

“You’ll ruin it!” Shirvanian jumped up, eyes wide with horror in his mud-painted face. “My box! Where’s my box!”

“In your bag,” said Esther. “You’ll get it when I give it to you.” She slung the bag over her shoulder.

“The hangar’s over there,” Joshua said. “It’s so thick here you can’t—”

His mouth gaped; they whirled and found a tremendous drone bearing on them from behind. They had not come unnoticed after all.

Shirvanian yelled, “Transmitter’s off, and I don’t care! I don’t care! Serves you right!”

Mitzi’s face twisted, and with one clawing movement she ripped at Shirvanian’s belly, tearing cloth, tape and transmitter. The metal button came away in crumbled pieces. It had not survived the trip downhill. “Broken!”

Esther yelled, “Get away! Run! Through the channel!”

How? The erg would crush them before they’d gone ten meters.

Esther shrieked, the
yi-yi-yi
of her treetop call, and leaped straight into the huge machine’s sensor complex.

“Esther!” Yigal ran after, and a swinging limb glanced his head. He fell and lay twitching. Sven jumped forward and hauled him away with supreme effort. The others did not run; they screamed and were rooted.

The erg stopped. Its limbs reached, clawed, and clashed together; Esther was not there. She swung, screeching with rage, from one to another, dancing on wire probes, butting her heels at lenses, whirling in figure-eights around gripper tentacles till they tied themselves in knots grabbing for her. She was a bee, a fly, a whip, a dancing black chromosome. How long did she have? An eternity of ten seconds. Less. A second erg was bearing toward them out of the mist.

Shirvanian gagged and swallowed, reached out blindly toward Sven. Touched him. “Give it to me! Please! Give it to me.”

Sven dug in his shirt and handed over the control. Shirvanian did not even look at it. Mitzi sobbed, “All right, you sonofabitch! You better show!”

Shirvanian did not hear. Esther ducked, grabbed, swung like a pendulum, as if she were in some giant testing ground in Dahlgren’s lab and knew where the next attack would come, a centimeter away from miscalculation, an instant from the second erg ...

Shirvanian turned up to the limit, closed his eyes and prayed, perhaps to Vulcan or whatever other world’s Great Artificer he fancied.

Three seconds. The erg, both ergs, slowed ... slowed ... slowed ... did not stop but retarded, delayed, moved in slow motion. Creeping, trancelike, moved ...

Esther jumped down. “Yigal!”

He pulled himself to his feet, shook his head. “All right, it’s all right.”

“Then run! For God’s sake, run!”

Now they could outpace ergs. Esther jumped to Sven’s shoulder, panting. Joshua grabbed one of Yigal’s horns and urged the dizzy beast; the others slung their packs and ran toward the hangar.

Inside the broad doorway darkness, silence, stillness. They fell against the wall, gasping. Row upon row of machines, deserted by their servicers, waited, every size and shape imaginable.

To the mist had been added the fumes of machine oil. Ardagh coughed and rubbed her runny nose. “Where’s the transports?”

Shirvanian whimpered, “I can’t see!” His nose was bloody and he had the beginnings of a black eye.

“Those things—are still coming,” Esther puffed.

“Some of this stuff is stripped down.” Shirvanian pointed at his pupils opened in the dimness. “Those are just empty casings.”

Sven swung his head. “I don’t see transports. Nothing.”

“Look!” cried Shirvanian.

Fifth in rank against the western wall there was one transport, nearly hidden behind some other machine’s tanklike mass. It was hard to miss, once spotted, painted freshly in yellow and green diagonal stripes in sharp contrast to the dented and crusted flanks of the other ergs. It was a huge oblong, almost as big as the house had been.

“That’s the Argus!”

Shirvanian headed for it.

“Stay away! It’s got to be booby-trapped!”

“I know,” said Shirvanian. “We’ve got about two minutes.” Noises from the factory were blocked here, but not the rumbling of the slowly approaching ergs.

Esther looked the thing up and down. “They want us to pick it. They must think we’re ninnies.”