O Master Caliban (22 page)

THE ROAD
menders
had finished their work and gone; the yellow brick road wound in darkness, buckling over ridges of broken granite, and dipping in sloughs of crumbled sandstone edged with salt crystals. There was no life except in the occasional vein of lightning that crossed the sky. It was an hour to midnight; in erg-Queen’s terms it was twenty-seven and counting.

In the main chamber of the Argus its crew were sitting on lumpy sacks of dead moss and wilted cabbage leaves. Esther was crouching on Sven’s shoulder with her arm around his neck; everyone looked frightened and sickly.

Shirvanian ran a finger around the remains of his black eye. His voice quavered. “I had to hide him; there was nothing else I could do. She’s planning to kill us and Dahlgren once she gets him up in orbit.”

“All right,” Sven said, “but what will she do when she can’t find him?”

“I—I think she’ll pick us up.”

Sven said, “It’s better than being burnt down. Why do you think she’ll pick us up?”

“Because the only way I could get hold of a machine she doesn’t control was to knock out the one that gives it orders, and the one I chose was in the same class as the one I scrambled before. I left a trail to give her a hint that I’d done it, and make her more curious about me. Maybe I did more than I should have.” He rubbed the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. “I’d have had to come out to check with you, and I couldn’t have made myself go back in there again.”

“Maybe you should have stayed,” said Mitzi.

“I don’t think she’s ready to take orders from me yet.”

Joshua said, “She may decide to burn us anyway.”

“I don’t think so. I’m sure she’ll have to find out where he is and I did my best to make her realize I’d hid him. She was threatening to send out Dahlgren under drugs and hypnosis, but that was just a bluff. Even if she could make him go under it wouldn’t last, or else his heart would give out.”

“Nine years,” Sven whispered, “and he may die first.”

Joshua kept on, “But why’d she move the time up?”

“She was afraid of the erg’s loyalty. She made him too well; they both agreed on that. The more he stayed near Dahlgren the more like him he got, and naturally the more he liked him.”

“It doesn’t sound natural to me,” Mitzi said.

Ardagh asked dryly, “When did you last like anybody?”

Shirvanian scrubbed his forehead again. “When I was in her brain I found out a lot—I found out a lot more than I wanted to.” His eyes were on Sven.

“You mean you found out more than I’d want to know. It always turns out that way.”

Shirvanian was silent.

“Go ahead. I’d better learn while I’m still alive.”

“Your four arms ... she didn’t do that, but the ergs that made her did.”

Sven’s stomach tightened. “Why?”

“They wanted to—to weaken, to demoralize Dahlgren. They did something just after the ovum got fertilized, when the cells start dividing and you get something called a—um—”

“Blastula,” said Ardagh.

“Yeah ... and they knew how much he’d wanted to—to have a kid ... with his wife ...”

“I see.” For a few moments Sven thought his thoracic muscles would tighten till they broke his ribs. Suddenly they relaxed. Esther’s fingers drummed his shoulder.

“Yes, Esther ... you were right ... I admit it. It fits with his being a prisoner, anyway.”

“We haven’t got much time,” said Shirvanian,

Esther said, “Suppose—if they do decide to pick us up—they send a crew to pry us open right here, where it’s about seventy-five rads per hour in the shade—”

“That’s inefficient,” said Joshua. “I’m sure the skimmers have strong enough grapples.”

Sven asked Shirvanian, “Where’d you put the erg?”

“Are you sure you want to know that?”

“We’re going to tell her before we let her pull any of us apart trying to find out. The idea is to stay alive.”

“He’s on a shelf in Clothier’s storeroom wrapped up in twenty-five meters first-quality midnight blue takIon from Sirius Two.”

“What?”

“I can’t help it. That crazy machine thinks like that and it gets to you!”

* * *

One of Argus’s tool kits was open, rattling on the floor, and Joshua and Shirvanian were staring moodily into it.

“What an arsenal.” Mitzi hugged herself with white-knuckled hands.

Joshua lifted out one of the coils of explosive. “What’d they use the plastic for?”

“To blow out rockfalls on the road,” Sven said.

Joshua picked out a rivet gun, a clip of rivets, two lighters ... his hand hesitated over the blowtorches.

“Don’t take the heavy one,” Sven said. “You’ll fall all over it, and you won’t have time for big jobs.”

“How much time do you think we have now?” Joshua asked.

Shirvanian shrugged. “Maybe an hour. She’ll have to make plans too.”

“Ardagh, would you have a book with a blank page we could draw a map on?”

“How’d you guess?” Ardagh picked herself up.

“I can’t draw,” Shirvanian said.

“It’s the right time to tell us. How did you design?”

“On a computer, with a light pen, and then the computer rectified it. It’s in my head all right, I got it out of erg-Queen.”

“As long as you’ve got it in your head I’ll get it on the paper. Come on, we can’t use more than fifteen minutes for that.”

Sven went into the control room, Esther riding on his shoulder. There was nothing more to do. Flyover had stopped, and there were no signals from Surveyor.

“I said terrible things to you, once,” said Esther.

“I thought terrible things. At least what you said was true.”

“Are you upset?”

“I’d have liked to be able to tell him ...”

“Oh yes, I know that one,” said Esther. After a moment, she added, “I did the best I could with my life, but it would have been nothing without you. And Yigal.”

Sven took her hand and kissed it.

“I’ll just go and stay by myself for a bit,” Esther said, and slipped away.

Sven picked up the mike. “Well, Argus, have you found any pirates in the forest lately?”

THERE IS NO FOREST HERE ANY MORE, SVEN. THINGS HAVE CHANGED.

“Yes, they certainly have.”

Ardagh came in and leaned against the wall, face lifted to the screen where the yellow brick road wound in the strange light of the infra-red.

“We might as well drop our brick load,” Sven said. “At least leave a block for anything coming up behind us.” He gave the order and the bricks went out with a clatter.

Ardagh found a sack in the corner and sat on it. “You look like a Brobdingnag from here.”

“I feel small enough.”

“Do you feel very different about your father now?”

“Different, but not as much as I thought I would. After all, how did I get through those years? I tried to make myself believe he had a reason—not only for making me, but for keeping me alive.”

“Because he loved your mother ... and you ... and—and now you’ve found it’s worth living you’ve given your whole life to a—a bunch of petty criminals.”

“That’s dramatizing, Ardagh. I didn’t think you were all that criminal.”

“We weren’t that successful at it ... tried to steal a ship, couldn’t even make a go of that ... just failures.”

“Koz didn’t fail.”

“Yes, but he’s dead ... did you think the rest of us were like that?”

“Oh, no.”

“What did you think, Sven?”

He was thinking of her face as she caught sight of him with Mitzi. “That’s very hard to answer.”

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you. You did so much for us ... I wondered if you thought we were worthless.”

Do you hate me, Esther?
“I thought you were unhappy ...” What did she want from him? “Why do you ask?”

“Because we were all Triskelians ... you might have felt ...”

“Many ranks and orders ... well, I felt that Koz was sick in some way. Mitzi too, I guess. Hates and hurts herself. Shirvanian!” He laughed. “You and Joshua puzzled me ... and then I decided that Joshua probably deserted the Space Academy and had been sent, or was being sent to the Order to duck the disgrace, or the law, or maybe both ...”

“And me?”

“Why should I ask, Ardagh? I’m not the law.”

“I didn’t want you to think—”

“Whatever it is, I don’t.” It hit like a crack on the head, finally.
I
would have liked to be able to tell
... He said gently, “If you want so much to tell me, I’ll listen. And I won’t think any differently.”

After a silence she said, “No. I don’t believe you will. Now I don’t know why I want to tell you ... or where to start. Where the beginning is ...

“The colony. That damned colony. Rotten place, all tundra ... and we took the blame. We! My great-grandparents. And the shape. Servos. School kids used to laugh. Ox, lummox, everything. And the whole bunch insisted on marrying among themselves, even though the geneticists told them they’d better not. Oh no, kids might have faulty bone structure. I think it was because they hated the Terraform Branch and wanted the government to keep remembering what it’d done. Stupid. It’s stupid, people don’t remember that. At the same time they’ve got some kind of inside-out pride, they work harder to show they’re just as good or better. And they’re right, as far as brains and money go. My parents actually are Solthree diplomats. I guess I love them, but they really are a goddam sour lot.”

Sven laughed. “How did you escape?”

“What?”

“Being sour.”

Her face gave in to a smile. “The same reason they work harder. I’m a lot like them, that way. But ...

“I had these two great scholarships to off-world med-schools, where the competition runs in the millions. The first one I interviewed got nervous about my background, mild physical flaw, dissenters in the family; it was like religious prejudice. And they don’t care, the line-ups chew your heels for a thousand worlds. Maybe a lawyer could have made a case out of it, but my family was scared of getting into court for that, into the news media ... they said, try the other one, and if it doesn’t work, forget it, go into something else. I couldn’t do that. So I bought a background.

“Sol Three is a sector capital, pole-to-pole bureaucracy. You can buy any document you want, and I had plenty of spending money. Not too many lies, a few shifts here and there, phony X rays with the medical ... those people are very clever. I got in, I was happy for a while, everything was—I thought everything was going well ... until they started asking for more money or they’d spill it all. After a while I ran out of money, the family caught me trying to sell one of my microscopes, and that was the end of it ... Mitzi says I wanted to be caught, I wanted to disgrace them. Maybe that’s what she wanted. I don’t know.”

“You can’t get back into school? I mean, medical school?”

“Not with my record, plus whatever would be thrown at me if I got out of this alive.”

“Biology? Pathology?”

“I don’t know. I wanted to be a surgeon. I suppose I was lucky to get into the Order instead of one of those really great Juvenile Homes. Maybe I should have left it at that.”

“And the others?”

“You got them down about right. And it’s true, their parents were going to the Conference: it’s a big thing, thousands. Our Center’s on Barrazan Two and we met them on Four because it has a big port facility. They hadn’t seen us for a while and it was on the way.”

“The Order didn’t send anybody out with you.”

“A robot cruiser on a two-day trip, custody of our parents, we stayed in port the whole time ... the Triskelians just didn’t know what they got when they took on Shirvanian—and neither did we.”

“Joshua hated that uniform so much ... and he wore it.”

“I think he wanted to make things easier for his parents ... that takes a kind of pride too. You’ve got the whole story now. And it’s true.” Her voice thickened. “It doesn’t matter much at this point, does it?”

He knelt before her, took her hands in one pair of his own and framed her face with the others. “I’m sorry—”

Her face twisted. “For God’s sake, don’t give me any—”

“Ardagh! I’m sorry you were so unlucky—and so foolish too. I’m sorry I didn’t have more resources to help you with, or the brains to plan more wisely so we wouldn’t be in such a mess. I’m not giving you any pity, and I don’t want any either.”

She turned her face into the palm of his hand and kissed it, wet it with her tears. “You couldn’t have done more. We brought you into the danger.”

“There wasn’t anything to do back there but grow old and die like a beast in a cage.” Like the clones. “And if I hadn’t come out of Zone Green I’d have lived my life thinking my father had helped kill hundreds of people.”

Her face turned back to his; his brows were like arcs of frost on a window. Those were Dahlgren’s, and the nose and sharp cheekbones, but Dahlgren could not have had so generous a mouth. She freed a hand and touched his head; its skin was not tight or shiny but matched his body texture in the same manner as that of many hairless people.

He kissed her lightly, a question. His hand went to the fastener at her neck and paused there. She took it in both of her own and pulled down. He reached back and slipped the bolt of the door.