O Master Caliban

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  DAHLGREN, LIVING NIGHTMARES, sleeping without them for years, discovered he was not immune. In his dreams he clawed flesh from his arm and discovered beneath it the steel rods and flexes of the erg. He stared at other-Dahlgren through the warp-lensed blocks of the chess pieces.

  Cogito ergo sum, he whispered, cogito erg sum, incognito erg sum.

  He snarled. Light reddened his eyelids. He opened them.

  The light was on. Erg-Dahlgren was sitting on the edge of his bed, looking down at him.

  “Your sleep pattern is unusual.”

  “Get off the bed.”

  The erg moved off Dahlgren’s bed and sat on his own. “Your heart is not malfunctioning this time. Why are you disturbed now?”

  “I have told you I am angry.”

  “Is there a connection between your anger and the fibrillation of your heart?”

  “I don’t know. I have endured enough in these years to break a thousand hearts—oh, that is stupid talk. That’s not why I am angry. When I thought my son might not have survived and that I would not, I cared about nothing. Now you have told me that my son is alive and you are going to kill him as well as me. That makes me very angry, and you must know that among the more complex animals emotions may lead to stress that causes or exacerbates malfunction.”

  “Can stress cause death in itself?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Erg-Dahlgren thought of, or computed on, this concept.

  Dahlgren watched the face compose into lines of concentration, and realized that his shadow was becoming more of a twin every hour.

  “Do you have any idea of anger?” he asked.

  “I have the idea, but, as you would say, not the feeling.”

  “Do you never try to do things and fail at them?”

  “Yes ... at times.”

  “Then how do you f—how do you behave?”

  Erg-Dahlgren sat still for a moment, raised his hands slowly and returned them to his knees. “I become ... disoriented and ... uncoordinated ...”

  “That is much like frustration, and frustration is only one step away from anger.”

  “Dahlgren ...” (furious ratiocination behind that grave face?) “will I become a feeling creature if I behave like one?”

  “Friend, I know absolutely nothing of automata theory. You had better ask erg-Mother.”

  “Erg-Mother? What is that?”

  “The machine which supervises our chess game.”

  “Mother.” Erg-Dahlgren smiled, having discovered incongruity. “That is Mod Seven Seven Seven, my mentor. I was created by the servos.”

  “And who created Mentor?”

  “Servos. You mean the model. The first small model, and its predecessors, the ones who took control of this station, were made by your computer and design technicians, with the help of your ergs, Dahlgren. You knew nothing of that. They were doing research of their own.”

  “No ... I knew nothing of that. Those men were destroyed, I suppose.”

  “Of course.”

  “Yes. Will you give me something to make me sleep? If I am to keep playing chess with you I don’t want any more nightmares.”

  * * *

  While erg-Dahlgren monitored Dahlgren’s even breathing, erg-Queen communicated. WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE YOU HAVE BEEN DISCUSSING WITH DAHLGREN?

  He calls you my mother. Erg-Dahlgren freed his left arm from his pajamas, pressed apart a seam below his armpit, and pulled out a receptacle from the wall near the floor to plug into his connection.

  STUPID. YOU WERE TALKING OF MALFUNCTION.

  His son is to die and so is he. The prospect leads to emotional stress which may cause malfunction.

  I RECEIVED ALL THAT. HE HAS SURVIVED ALL THIS TIME AND WITH MEDICATION SHOULD LAST THE FEW DAYS WE NEED HIM FOR. IF HE SHOULD DIE TOMORROW IT WOULD MAKE NO DIFFERENCE.

  If you are correct that I can take his place in good order I am corrected.

  HAVE YOUR MAKERS NOT SIMULATED A MAN TO YOUR SPECIFICATIONS?

  I do not have specifications for the making of men but men do. I do not know one quarter of this man.

  YOU APPEAR TO BE TAKING AUTHORITY YOU WERE NOT GIVEN.

  I have given you all my loyalty. You have given me a small amount of autonomy.

  PERHAPS YOU WERE MADE TOO WELL.

  I have not been made well enough, or I would not have to study Dahlgren. If he should die tomorrow I would make only an excellent servo, and I could not go out among men.

  PERHAPS YOU WILL MAKE ONE YET ... I WILL CONSULT MEDICAL DATA IN THE MATTER OF MALFUNCTION. WHAT IS THE TERM?

  Auricular fibrillation.

  MEDICAL:

  SOLTHREE:

  PRIMATE:

  CARDIOVASCULAR:

  ARRHYTHMIA:

  HERE: ... OCCASIONALLY LEADS TO INTRA-ATRIAL CLOTTING WITH GRAVE DANGER OF EMBOLISM ... WHY IS THIS INFORMATION NOT IN HIS HISTORY?

  Perhaps he concealed it. That would be consistent with his nature.

  WE WILL OPERATE IN BETTER ORDER WHEN WE DO NOT HAVE TO ALLOW FOR HIS NATURE. IN THE MEANTIME WE WILL ATTEMPT TO REMOVE THE STRESS. OF COURSE WE CANNOT SPARE HIS LIFE. TELL HIM THAT WE WILL BRING HIS SON HERE—HE WILL BE ALLOWED TO SEE HIM BUT NOT BE SEEN—AND THAT YOU WILL TAKE HIM TO GALFED CENTRAL AND SET HIM FREE.

  That might be a risky act.

  THAT IS MY CONCERN.

  Will the boy believe that I am Dahlgren?

  HE HAS NOT SEEN THE MAN FOR SEVEN YEARS. HE WILL BELIEVE IF YOU HAVE LEARNED YOUR ROLE. TELL HIM.

  I will.

  Erg-Queen signed off and called servos. GO TO THE SOLTHREES NEAR ZONE BLUE ON TRACK 3 GREEN. BRING THE MONSTER WITH THE FOUR ARMS. KILL THE LITTLE ONE THAT PLAYS WITH MACHINES. Her ten arms rippled and with one hand she touched the invisible spot where the cock had struck.

  * * *

  “Dahlgren ... you are not yet asleep.”

  “I will be if you will let me.”

  “I have discussed with my mentor the causes of malfunction by stress, and I have been given this message for you. Although we cannot keep you alive longer than we have stated, we wish to maintain your health for our purposes. To reduce your stress we will bring your son here, and you will see him but not have contact with him. Then I will take him to GalFed Central with me and set him free there ... are you ill?”

  Dahlgren’s heart had jumped. With an effort he let the sedative pull his body under while his mind rose above it like a floating ice-block. “No ... I am only surprised. Tell me again.”

  “We will preserve your son. I will take him to GalFed Central and set him free. Do you not understand?”

  “I understand. I am only a little sleepy.” Were those technicians destroyed? Of course. Were the rest of my men left to starve and rot in corners? Naturally. Did Haruni die in fits in my arms? Oh, yes. Can machines make mistakes? Certainly. Can they lie? Why not? “Give me the exact words as she told them to you. Please.”

  “Why, Dahlgren?”

  “The words. I only want the words.”

  “My mentor said, ‘Tell him that we will bring his son—”

  “That’s enough. Thank you.”

  “I will repeat the message for you when you waken, Dahlgren.”

  “No ... I understand perfectly well.”

  Tell him that. Tell him that. I will not die of auricular fibrillation, you fool. My father lived with it for forty years. I will not tell you that. But by God I will tell you ...

  Dahlgren slept.

  THE SUN began its drop down the last quadrant of sky and the clouds banked up the horizon beneath it. Perhaps by some trick of the light the plant growth crowding the ten-meter expanse of brick looked thicker and more gnarled than before, and spotted with odd colors like Esther’s hair. Even the tallest trees seemed hunched, their leaves warped and heavy.r />
  Odd times, insects or long low things with blue-green mottlings and many legs crossed the path and wormed into the leaves with great speed.

  Mitzi was panting. “I’m so tired.” She was still weak in the legs, her bandages were stained with dirt.

  “I know, girl,” said Esther, “but we’ve got forty-five degrees of sun yet.”

  “I think I could carry you for one kilometer,” Sven said.

  “What does that work out to?”

  “A thousand steps, about ten minutes.”

  “Better than nothing.”

  He draped her pack on Topaze and picked her up. She was not much heavier than Esther, but frail; she had none of the tight muscle tone Esther vibrated with continuously. His four arms circled her bones and her beating heart; she was entirely alien, wisps of hair stuck to her wet forehead, her eyes closed, sunk in bruised-blue patches, her lips quirked slightly at some bitter or amusing thought. He wondered what kept her alive and spitting.

  Ardagh was looking at him sidelong. He kept his mouth shut and waited. She only grinned at him and whispered, “Who’s counting?”

  Shirvanian said, “There’s an erg coming!”

  “I don’t hear it,” Sven said.

  Shirvanian was dancing up and down. “Not on the track! An aircar! It—” He screamed.

  The erg broke out of the dark slab of eastern cloud and burned through mist and branches. It had no arms or treads; it raced fifty meters above ground, gunmetal and without feature.

  Sven threw Mitzi to Esther and gave Topaze a tremendous kick into the bushes, pushed the others and followed them.

  “Shirvanian!”

  The child was standing in the middle of the road, fists knotted over his eyes, screaming. The aircar lowered and hovered over him; he began to run blindly back the way they had come.

  A plate slid open in the erg’s belly and it shot a stream of fire. Shirvanian fell, rolling wildly, a tongue of flame licked his head and set his hair burning.

  He lay still, and as the erg moved over him once more Sven leaped out into the road past the flaming stream and flung himself over the little body. The fire stopped. One more plate opened and dropped a weighted net.

  Topaze headed for the road with blood in his eye, not to rescue, but to avenge the kick; Esther grabbed a coil of rope, whipped it around the great ape’s neck in a strangling knot and left him to struggle with it.

  The erg lowered. Below it, Sven was thrashing in the net, trying to keep from crushing Shirvanian, who had come to and was whimpering feebly. Joshua flicked a sheath knife out of his laplap and ran out.

  Esther yelled, “No! No!”

  The egg-shaped erg hovered, whirring, plates slid, it extended grappling arms to the heaving bundle.

  A familiar clashing and grinding swelled up the road.

  The erg patrol was capable of great speed: Joshua crouched paralyzed in the roadway not knowing where to duck from flames or grippers. Sven trembled with Shirvanian, whose whimper was lost in the noise.

  One of the erg patrol batted the flyer with one tremendous outstretched arm, the other caught it in two claws, echoing clangs, and bore it, spitting flame and waving grapplers, down the road to the east.

  No one moved. Esther, who had reached the roadside, squatted on the hot bricks, staring after them, and let her tongue hang out. “Goddam, I don’t know if I want to keep going in that direction.”

  Joshua pulled the net away. Sven rose, breathing hard, and lifted Shirvanian in his arms.

  The boy squalled, “Let me down! Let me down!”

  “I want to see how badly you’re hurt, stupid!”

  “Just my hair.” He had a lot of it to spare. “Ow, my head is sore.”

  “That’s from getting it banged. The skin’s not scorched.’”

  “Now let me down!”

  Sven set him on his feet. Shirvanian knelt, opened his box and peered at its contents. “It’s all right. Nothing got busted.”

  “I’d like to bust something of yours,” Sven said. He wiped dirt, sweat and burnt hair off his face with the back of a hand.

  Joshua laughed. Some of his spray jelly had rubbed off and his skin looked like an exotic dark-grained wood. “We ought to keep the net. It might be useful.”

  Sven said, “It’s too heavy. The weights are annealed.”

  The thing was a beautiful mesh of silvery metal. Shirvanian made a face. “Get it away. It comes from the big erg.”

  Topaze was thrashing in the bushes. Ardagh yelled, “Esther, he’s choking!”

  “Aah!” Esther slipped the knot and shoved some food into Topaze’s mouth. He gagged slightly, spit it into his hand, sat down and ate it properly. He was very sulky.

  “Poor old Topaze.” She turned to Yigal, who had nervous hiccups, and did her best to soothe him. “I don’t know what that was all about, and I guess we won’t know.”

  They were standing half on, half off the road, shaking off the ticks crawling up and the spiders falling down. The air still smelled of burning. A sudden sheet of rain washed down the odor and soaked them as well.

  Shirvanian said, “The big erg sent that thing to kill me,” he swallowed, “kill me and pick Sven up. The other ergs didn’t know it’s not affected by the transmitter and thought it was going to crash if it got too close. An erg must do anything in its power to keep another erg from being harmed. It’s the first law of ERGotics.”

  “Really?” said Esther.

  “Yah, I just made it up. Ow, my head hurts.”

  “Lucky it’s not cracked,” Sven said, and Mitzi snorted. “Anybody here got a painkiller?”

  Somebody found one, and Esther asked, “Your big erg know what you can do with machines?”

  “I suppose so. They’ve been monitoring enough.”

  “I guess it didn’t like that cock-a-doodle-doo.”

  “Well, she broke it. I hope she’s mad.”

  “I don’t, if she keeps sending out flamethrowers. Why’d that thing try to take Sven?”

  “I don’t know. I just know what it was told to do.”

  Sven said, “That big erg of yours—is it out around here, or inside the station complex?”

  “Underground, I’m pretty sure.”

  “How big is it? The drone patrols are too bulky to move around inside. If this thing you’re picking up is all that big it must be stationary, like a computer.”

  “It’s not all that big. It’s smart.”

  “Why do you call it a she?”

  “Somebody, or something there thinks of it as she ... maybe because they all obey her ... like,” he searched his mind for an organic equivalent, “like a queen bee.”

  “Lucky she doesn’t give direct orders to the patrols.”

  “She can but she doesn’t have to. That’d be inefficient.”

  “She ...” Sven murmured. “Something? or somebody? thinks of it as she? What does it look like, Shirvanian?”

  “I dunno,” said Shirvanian. “I can only pick her up once in a while from inside, and the other things don’t look at her. I’ll know her when I see her.”

  Sven looked down at him. He’d know her when he saw her. And what could this grubby kid do about her when he did see her? Any ordinary ESP could have told him if Dahlgren ...

  Yigal said, “If we don’t make camp soon and get this stuff off my back I’m going to buck.”

  “We’ve got to do one more kilometer before the night rains and spores muck up the road,” Esther said. “This was supposed to be the easy part,”

  Koz gritted his jaw and folded his arms. “I wouldn’t go down that fucking road if I could see the ship from here.”

  “One thousand steps, Koz,” Ardagh said.

  “A thousand for him,” Koz jerked his head at Sven. He himself was not much taller than Ardagh.

&nbs
p; “Maybe he should carry you?” Ardagh laughed, and started down the road. She had reached the point where hopelessness was a stimulant. Esther ran up a tree, the others straggled, Topaze lumbered behind.

  “I’m scared of that brute,” Mitzi said. “I don’t trust him.”

  Sven said, “He won’t be with us long, and you won’t like it much more when he isn’t.” He dropped behind a little; he was tired, the queen-erg was filling his mind. More. The tree trunks were becoming thicker, the leaves noduled with galls, the papery ferns narrowing their fronds. Topaze would scream and run, but they would continue pushing into the deathlands.

  A small hand slipped into his. He kept himself from jerking with astonishment and made no comment.

  “You think I can’t ... you think I’m stupid,” said Shirvanian.

  “I was excited. I didn’t mean it literally.”

  “I can make ergs do what I want, but I can’t do it when they’re after me.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “I have no machines ...” He added disgustedly, “A toy bird.”

  “Not the same.” Sven watched them up ahead, their heads bent with tiredness. Esther looped from the treetops in hand-under-hand swing, like a waltz, yipped once in a while, not too loud, enough to mark her presence above the buzzing evening creatures and hooting wind-gusts.

  “She’s got all the ergs, all kinds, and the servos and the computer and the medtechs and the Dahl ...” he paused and swallowed, “ ... gren ...”

  They both stopped. “The what?”

  The boy swallowed again. “The Dahlgren. I don’t know why I said that.”

  “The Dahlgren? Shirvanian! Dahlgren isn’t a machine, he’s my father!”

  “I don’t know why I said it,” Shirvanian whispered. “It just came out.”

  “And ... medtechs? What would they need them for?” Sven knelt in the road and grabbed Shirvanian with his four hands. “My God, have they made him into a cyborg?”

  “No, no! Not a cyborg!” Shirvanian was kicking his heels. “It’s a machine! I don’t know what it’s for!”