O Master Caliban (6 page)

DAHLGREN, BLACK,
played
P-K4. As the imprisoned shell touched the square of bone he saw that he was the flesh toy of metal giants. He pushed the chair back. “Kill me now,” he said, “I will not play your game.”

The erg-Queen advanced one meter. YOUR SON IS STILL ALIVE, ALONG WITH OTHER ANIMALS.

Dahlgren fixed his eyes on her. They had no rays to burn with.

A SMALL CRUISER HAS CRASHED IN THE NORTHWEST SECTION, the erg went on. YOUR SON SAVED THE PASSENGERS AND THEY WILL LIKELY TRY TO COME HERE AND TAKE THE SHIP. OF COURSE THE SHIP IS NOW ONE OF OUR ERGS AND THEY WILL DIE SOONER OR LATER. PERHAPS SOONER. CONTINUE PLAYING.

As if she had not spoken, erg-Dahlgren said, “You wish to go on?” Dahlgren was shaking. “Your pulse has greatly increased.”

He could feel the arterial swellings in neck and forehead, see them in his eyes. “Perhaps I need a pacemaker.” He smiled sourly. “Go ahead.”

2.
N-KB3; N-QB3.

“You usually smile in that way, I think,” said erg-Dahlgren, trying on the half-agonized rictus. “Your humor is what is called dry.”

“I suppose it could be called that.”

3.
N-QB3; N-KB3.

The birdsbeak Knights stood foursquare in the field, their tips pointed delicately upward like nose-cones.

Erg-Dahlgren said, “You see what an amateur I am. I have read that Four Knights is a sound opening, and I have not the time to try many with a human opponent. I will have time later.”

4.
He played Bishop to Knight 5. Dahlgren echoed.

5.
Erg-Dahlgren castled. So did Dahlgren.

“The sides are mirror images,” said erg-Dahlgren. “Very apt. Your heartbeat is slowing, but your face is flushed. Why?”

“I am angry.”

“For what reason? You have been as good as dead for seven years. Before, you were sick and broken. Now you have been brought back to health, you know that your son is alive, and you are playing chess.”
6.
He moved Pawn to Queen 3. “Why are you angry now?”

P-Q3. “When you know that, you will be Dahlgren.”

MITZI CAME OUT
of
it, sore here and there, touch and touch stinging, tickle of coarse hair, giant black tarantula over brushing her wet and cold, waking among fraks and harpies in some scag- jig- or mackhouse in the Twelveworlds of GalFed Central, opened her mouth to scream.

“All these needle marks,” Esther said. “She got some kind of sickness?”

Koz laughed. “Just drugs.”

Mitzi got her eyes open and saw Esther’s, black liquid globes reflecting each a square of pinkish light. No horror there now, just old granny from the backworlds.

“You still feel sick?”

“Yeah.”

“You have a fungus infection with fever and chills. It’ll be better tomorrow. It’ll have to be, because we’re moving out next morning.” She scratched under her chin. “You got a lot of drugs with you?”

Mitzi’s tongue was thick. “Most some joker stole in the spaceport. Nothing left now but the kif ... why, you got some?”

“Ah-ah.” Esther ran her tongue round her mouth, pausing for a moment at the orange splotch, a fallen drop, at the corner of her lip. “Some tricksters from the Declivity, a long while back, were growing a patch of stuff off in a corner, gave me the leaves to chew ... it was very nice, but I fell out of a tree and broke my arm in two places.”

“I bet Dahlgren liked that.”

“He expelled them for trying to turn me into a clown.”

“Huh.” Mitzi tried to sit up, found her head wasn’t screwed on right, and fell back.

“Saved their lives. All the others got killed.”

Esther patted the hot forehead with a wet cloth. “How things turn out, yah, you and me, we’re here. Stay down for a while. You’ll need the strength.”

* * *

Sven butchered half the rabbits, hung them to smoke, and freed the rest among the cabbages except for a couple kept for tomorrow’s meals. Esther crocheted wallets of netting to be slung over Yigal’s back. Water was a problem. In relatively unpolluted places it could be extracted from plants or drawn from eastward-running streams; a transport might have filters in good condition, but some would have to be carried in clay jugs.

The children sorted their belongings. “Keep all drugs and medicines,” Sven said. “Light clothes that cover your arms and legs, ponchos. You don’t need warm things because the temperature in the forest holds steady. Maybe a couple of blankets in case we camp in a clearing.”

Koz’s idol was, of course, a must. “You carry it,” said Esther, “but dump that heavy stuff you’re wearing. Mother Shrinigasa will forgive you when you get back.”

“If,” said Koz.

“See if those boiling bags have sprung a leak, we’ll need them for cooking. Check the alcohol.”

“How do you get that?” Mitzi asked.

“Ferment it from fruit.”

“Can you drink it?”

“If you don’t mind getting sick. Put that stuff away now, Shirvanian, it’s time to sleep.”

In the morning the cock crowed. The metal cock. Shirvanian had gotten up at dawn to finish the work; it screeched and flapped among Sven’s arms as he was exercising, still showing some affinity for human life. Sven righted himself and watched.

The bird was crested and plumed as an imperial eagle; Shirvanian had used the extra neck to lengthen the gimpy leg, set the misplaced wing where it belonged, added an animal’s cry. It still had a slightly mutated look, for Shirvanian, hating waste, had set the two superfluous eyes above the others so that they formed two pairs, like Sven’s arms. Still, it did not look malevolent, but like the novel toy of a Renaissance king.

Shirvanian leaned on the doorway, rapt in self-admiration. Sven said, “That’d be really something for a kid to play with.”

“The beak’s a metal cutter. The claws are magnetic, and it’s erg-shielded. If it hits a vulnerable spot it can do damage.”

Sven blinked at Boy Genius.

“You didn’t think I was doing all that for fun, did you?”

Sven backed away, and the beautiful metal bird went on crowing in the glinting sunlight, scratched savagely in the hard earth.

Everyone admired it, at a distance and with respect. Koz brought out his idol and prayed for a successful journey. Then Shirvanian sent it. There was no launching ceremony. It ran in perfect balance, flapping and screeching, disappeared among the blotchy greens. Shirvanian sighed. Chances were, it would never be admired again.

“Did you shield against erg heat and light sensors?” Sven asked.

“No. That just makes things more interesting.”

Half an hour later, they stopped in the midst of their preparations at the sound of ergs clashing and grinding, noise half muffled in the forest depths. Except Shirvanian, busy packing cabbage sprouts and ferns for Yigal. “Ergs out hunting ...”

Ringing crunch, shriek of backing treads—

“Banged into each other, and didn’t catch it either,” Shirvanian sniggered.

ERG-DAHLGREN PINNED
Black’s
Knight with
7.
B-N5.

Dahlgren echoed the threat and stared at the ancient trilobites with their fork-tailed miters. The sides of the board stood as mirrors.

The blued metal arms of the silver erg rippled down the curve of her front. YOU ARE PLAYING A STRANGE GAME, DAHLGREN. SURELY NOT AN IMAGINATIVE ONE.

“I have not played for nine years ... this set is a zoological exhibit.” Pride shut his mouth. Desperation opened it again. “I am thinking of my son. He cannot harm you. Why is it necessary for you to kill him?” He gripped the edge of the table.

Erg-Dahlgren paralleled his movements, searched his eyes for directions in reproducing the harrowed eaves of his brows.

YOUR SON WILL NOT STAY IN HIS CORNER. HE IS A DAHLGREN.

“I am no longer a Dahlgren. In all those years you rendered that out of me.”

WE HAVE YOUR FILMS, RECORDS, DIARIES. WE KNOW WHAT YOU WERE AND WHAT YOU ARE STILL. OTHERWISE YOU WOULD HAVE LET YOURSELF DIE.

“Why do you need me now?”

BECAUSE WE HAVE NOT REPRODUCED YOU UNTIL NOW.

But there is no argument with a machine, said the core of old Dahlgren, struggling in its block of cracking ice. Did you discuss biogeny with mutant rats? Or vascular dynamics with embryo chicks? My father was right. I much better should have contemplated and shut my mouth, cracked my knuckles.

He bit his lips; erg-Dahlgren gnawed his own.

“I would not do that too much or you will spoil the work of years.”

“Why do you say such things? Do they not make people feel badly against you?”

“You do not feel,” said Dahlgren. “Play.”

8.
N-Q5 intensified the threat against Black’s pinned Knight.

Dahlgren smiled and once again mirrored: N-Q5? He did it with smooth deliberate speed because the move was a tacky one long abandoned by better players.

There was very nearly something in erg-Dahlgren’s eyes now, reflected in the swelling brilliance of erg-Queen’s sensors. Something of Dahlgren. “Is it really prudent of you to imitate
my
moves?”

“In the Symmetrical Variations of Four Knights it is Black’s prerogative to break symmetry. It is the only power he has.”

“It is short-term,” said erg-Dahlgren. With
9.
P-B3 he forked Black’s Knight and Bishop.

Outside, machines clanged and slewed, and erg-Queen lifted her arms. They were thin, each pair branching into strange and different hands. Dahlgren pulled his eyes away, shut his ears and stared at the board; the other had not moved.

The silver erg, arms straight out, rolled to the door, humming; her spiky crown trembled and glinted. The noise grew, clashing, squawking. She swung to and fro like a great pendulum, arms rippling wildly.

Dahlgren, impelled, stood up. The double stayed motionless: perhaps he had been turned off.

Round erg-Queen a small dusty thing skittered, clacking and crowing.

Outside the door the noise stopped.

Dahlgren sat down and stared at the metal bird. It hopped zigzag, tapping the floor with its beak, raising its head every few seconds to crow and flap its noisy wings. Erg-Queen turned to face it. Her line of sensors shone red and diamond-blue.

“What is this?” Dahlgren whispered.

The bird raised burning eyes to the erg, leaped to slam claws on her body and skittered off. She reached with all arms extending and it jumped back, leaped again, clamped magnetically on one arm, drove its piercing beak at her side; it did not even scratch, but she trembled allover, her arm turned fire-red. By then the bird was on the floor again, hopping placidly toward Dahlgren.

He sat still. Watched the four red eyes. Thought that beak could pluck his own in a half-second. For the first time in his life he saw something he knew nothing of, could make no conjecture about, and was completely terrified. The bird jumped to his lap, a hard twelve-kilos’ weight, nestled there, and chirped. Very slowly he placed one hand on the vibrating back and the other on the metal-plumed breast. The bird sat still and looked up at him. “Strange creature,” he murmured, and rubbed down the scales gently, to find the gleam beneath. “First Man, then come the beasts of the earth ...”

The erg moved in.

“This one you cannot control.” Dahlgren stroked the bird. “I wonder why.”

The blue arms extended, snatched the cock, held it high for a second (it crowed once) and smashed it to the floor. It lay whole but still; one scale dropped with a small clink.

Dahlgren sighed and turned back to the board. There was contaminated dust on his hands and clothing but he did not try to brush it off. Erg-Queen backed against the wall once more.

Erg-Dahlgren trembled, blinked, smiled, frowned, lifted his hand to the board and dropped it again. “It is your move.”

Dahlgren, with the frail birdsbeak Knight, took White’s Bishop and broke the symmetry of the board.