O Master Caliban (23 page)

She shrugged her arms, her body from the cloth. “Now you see my flesh ... do you want to turn off the light?”

“No. I wish there was more light.” Her body was firm and strong. “It’s like a sculpture.” She smiled, and his brows quirked ruefully. “Somebody told you that before.”

“No ... I never truly believed I was ugly. It
only hurt because so many others thought so.”

Argus swerved and lunged about them but they did not. They mated slowly and in stillness like warm sculptures. At completion Ardagh lay with Sven’s body curved about her, his hand on her breast, his breath on her shoulder, and when Argus said, SVEN, SKIMMER 178 IS DESCENDING, it seemed to her that his voice was almost apologetic.

* * *

Sven, pulling on his clothes, picked up the mike and said, “Shut down all systems except light and air. We’re stopping here.”

YOU SAID WE WERE GOING HOME, SVEN.

“We are, but I won’t be driving.”

ALL RIGHT, SVEN. WE’LL PLAY SOME MORE TOMORROW.

Sven paused for a moment with the mike in his hand. He said, “Goodbye, Argus,” and hung up.

The transport stopped, and there was silence.

Ardagh was dressed. Face turned away from Sven, she unlatched and opened the door. The noise was startling.

“Now have I got it,” said Joshua. “Pit in the center, labs around it, quarters west, machines east—really fine detail we have here, all five levels of it—clockwise from north about mid-level: biolabs, infirmary, computers, design, radio, power plant due south, outside that, ship silo; lowest level: machine hangars, Pit maintenance, transformer rooms off corridor circling Pit floor at northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest. I need a compass.”

“The transformer rooms are numbered,” said Sven. “Or they used to be. Northwest one and going clockwise. That level is actually below the Pit floor.”

“Remember some more,” said Joshua.

“I used to race—not Argus, he’s too big—I used to sit on top of a servo and race around there. The machines didn’t mind the noise.”

“The staff must have really liked you.”

“They weren’t allowed to have kids. Not here. They came for terms of three to five years.”

Joshua pulled the chronometer off his wrist. “Anybody want this? I don’t dare put out any signals ... no, I guess you don’t either.” He dropped it on the floor and ground his heel on it. Licked his lips. “That was a beautiful thing.” Shirvanian was knocking his clenched fists together. “Shirvanian? Your box?”

“Dropped it in the waste compacter.” He was shivering. “Wouldn’t give it to her.” He took the esp control out of his pocket, carefully turned it up a few points, and passed it over. Joshua taped it to his bare chest. Mitzi had cut an oblong of material from her poncho and was attaching it to the leg of his jumpsuit with grommet pliers.

“Why don’t you turn it up all the way?”

Shirvanian, eyes downward on his fists, muttered, “’Too much power ... I get hyper ... like at the depot ...”

Joshua wound three strings of plastic around his thin waist, twined four fuses about them, loaded the clip of rivets into the gun, and tucked it into the front of his laplap.

“Make sure that thing doesn’t go off at the wrong time.” Mitzi handed over the jumpsuit.

“Don’t worry, Mitzi, I’ll take good care of it for you.” He got into the suit, dropped the blowtorch into the new pocket, tucked in the last two fuses and the lighters, and draped the remaining plastic around his neck like a modish scarf. With all that, he did not look much bulkier than before. Shirvanian handed him a small button receiver and he hooked it into his ear. Then he stood motionless for a moment.

“What’s the matter?”

“I was just ... looking for a word ...”

“Take a leak,” said Mitzi.

The erg hummed above, an electric bee swarm, the magnetic grapples rang CLING CLANG CLUNG CLONG on the transport’s flanks like a chime of bells.

“Too late,” said Joshua.

Shirvanian said, almost whispering, “Clothier will be waiting for you.”

“It better be.” He and Sven ran for the vestibule separating the three chambers, dragged up the floor hatch, and Joshua ducked down into the hot cramped space of the lower compartment. Sven settled the hatch carefully over his head.

The hour was twenty-five: thirty and counting.

* * *

Skimmer lifted. The transport swung forward, backward, forward, backed to the stationary and hung. The erg did not rise very far, since there were no obstructions, or travel, so burdened, with great speed. “About forty kph,” said Shirvanian. “Maybe an hour.”

The children were crammed together in one corner; Sven and Esther against the opposite wall, silent, eyes half closed. They had been parties separated by their aims, allied by their fears. They joined for
a few minutes thinking of Joshua alone in the tool compartment among the wheels, shafts, and gears. He was far enough from the engines not to be burned by their stored heat, near enough to be very uncomfortable, and too uncertain about timing to dare wait anywhere else. Skimmer picked up speed.

Shirvanian had his knees pulled up and hid his face against them. Mitzi was clenched into herself, biting her lips, probably wishing for some of that stuff lost in the spaceport. Ardagh, square torso flat to the wall and hands on knees, joined eyes with Sven. “Is it really possible to pull off this thing?”

Sven said, “Shirvanian has to get out of sight. You make sure.”

“I can’t think what to do.”

Esther cackled. “Be your own natural selves.” Her hands, unconsciously grooming, never stopped picking at her fur. She stayed next to Sven but did not touch him.

Sven, separated from all, was like a man of an ancient tribe who had been given the prerogatives of a god for a short time in order to enrich a sacrifice. Without talent, power or weapon he was preparing to confront erg-Queen.

IT SEEMED
strange
to Dahlgren that the Pit had survived and been maintained; perhaps its warped life forms and degraded humanity were erg-Queen’s monument to herself. “Creatrix of Animals, I declare in
My works.”

“What are you saying?” asked Ridgeback, lying drowsy on a full belly. The clones, exhausted by fighting, coupling and bar-bending, were asleep.

“Nothing. I am raving.”

“What is that?”

He did not answer. He was again among animals, and he longed for Esther and Yigal. He was surrounded by green leaves in warm earth and he wished he were back in his own cold land. Grayhead was writhing slowly nearby. Thinks had moved away to a fresh patch of earth.

The arc light had circled the Pit slowly, and was dimming to simulate evening. Dahlgren, joints aching, looked for a resting place. The earth was damp; insects swarmed over his boots, his pajamas were soaked with sweat and mist.

“Stranger,” said Ridgeback, “do you not sleep?”

“I am not used to being in this place. I am afraid of those Us in the cage; they hate me and will kill me if they can.”

“They sleep all the dark,” said Grayhead.

Dahlgren found a clump of dwarf trees, some dying. The Pit had grown as scruffy as a half-forgotten zoo. Like many another deity Creatrix formed life but did not always provide for it. Dahlgren picked leaves and made a nest in a tree crotch the way he had learned from Topaze.

As he settled grunting in this uncomfortable couch he heard a crackling and looked out. The serpent Grayhead had wound its length about a dead tree and was crushing it; insects scattered madly out of the rotting wood. Grayhead’s scales rippled and a seam parted down the midline of its back. It dropped from the tree, squirming in the slough of loosened skin, its little legs flailed to untangle itself. Immediately an army of tiny lizards emerged from beneath leaves and stones, attacked the ragged skin, each ripped off and bore away a shred in its jaws, eating as it ran. The serpent coiled itself in its new coat of gray scales and slept. Dahlgren closed his eyes and listened to the insects rustling their way back into the crevices of the shattered tree.

JOSHUA FOUND
his
cramped quarters more disturbing than the heat. With one ear he heard the tinging of cooling metal beyond the compartment wall. The other, through the receiver, was picking up Skimmer’s signals. He could not understand them; the receiver was meant to tell him when ergs were nearby, not what they were broadcasting. His knowledge of machines and explosives was very modest: he knew from working in underdeveloped regions how to dodge terrorists and get old crocks working; he knew far better how to prevent run-off in parched areas and increase the yield of breadfruit trees. Now that he was prepared for action his fear was blunted by a faint sense of the ridiculous.

His mind strayed to the group above him. He knew that Mitzi, Ardagh and Shirvanian were worried about him, but his thoughts lingered on Sven. He himself was a lonely person, but Sven was lonelier, and of all the tasks Joshua was to perform, freeing Dahlgren, at Sven’s insistence, was the last.

He touched the compartment wall at his head: it was very warm, but not stinging. He rolled over to a crouching position on folded knees and banged his head on the ceiling, neutralizing his sense of the ridiculous. He picked up the penlight and screwdriver which had been left on the floor for him, lit the one and with the other began to loosen the bolts of the wall in front of him; he did not have Shirvanian’s time sense and he could not afford to wait for the last minute.

Skimmer slowed and his heart quickened. He flattened himself for the inevitable thump. The transport went down sighing on its tires. All of its metal parts creaked, he bounced slightly, and there was one sharp crack that suggested the break of a wall’s radiation shielding. He pulled the compartment barrier away quickly, wriggled between the engines where the heat blasted his face, whipped the plastic off his neck and wound it as far as he could reach around the still quivering shaft of the transmission. The grapples sang once on the walls and retracted, the signal grew fainter and stopped; he could not hear what was happening above. Sweating, he squeezed an arm into his pocket to pullout a lighter and a fuse, and waited. The twitters and warbles of smaller machines told him that his companions were being taken away, and he swallowed hard. The branching point was here: the ergs would immediately take the machine away to examine—goodbye Joshua—or would examine it on the spot, or would leave it alone for a few minutes while they attended to the humans, allowing him to slip away. He took a mental read-out of Shirvanian’s directions:
The ergs inside the station have no life sensors, only heat and light, except for erg-Dahlgren, erg-Queen and Clothier; don’t run into one where you’re the only warm object in the area or you contrast with the surroundings, otherwise you’re okay.
He was not okay. The operating alternative was the second, one he dreaded almost as much as the first but had allowed for by breaking his watch. A
twee-wheep
in his ear told him that at least one erg was going round the transport, checking for time-bomb traps. He had no choice now. He plunged three minutes’ worth of fuse into the plastic, lit it with a shaking hand, pulled back agonizing centimeters into the compartment as flame whispered and flickered, unzipped his suit and took out the rivet gun; then pushed up with head and shoulders on the hatchway and confronted a small servo in the center of the guttered chamber. It had picked up the flash and heat of his fuse.

He grabbed the blowtorch in his left hand as the erg flicked a tentacle, knocked it down with the tank, the coil gave him an agonizing crack on the shin as it whipped back.

Joshua yelped and swore, let the blowtorch fall, dropped forward between the reaching tentacles, hugged the metal creature savagely, pushed the muzzle of the rivet gun against a sensor lens and squeezed the trigger. The rivet drove in with a crunch, the erg jerked and backed away, its treads shrieked.

Joshua jumped up and forgetting the pain in his leg hopped forward, planted a boot against the erg body and gave it a mighty shove out the open back doors and into the darkness, picked up the torch and flung himself out, ran past the wheeling erg. Three others sped toward it. He ran.

He was on a small landing field with several skimmers quartered on it, a huge dark opening before him; that would be the hangar. It was drizzling, he kept running over the wet macadam, limping now, flash-memories of the erg factory lit before his eyes as he ducked around the doorway of the building and leaned against the wall, panting. The transport exploded.

He did not look out to see the destruction but withdrew farther into the shadow. Two more ergs whirred past him out of the hangar. Lightning flashed with a roar of thunder. In the instant of light he saw that there were not many vehicles in the place, it was too small for erg-skimmers, and along one wall was what he thought must be a row of obsolete machines; he recognized an aircar of a type he knew and had ridden in at home.

His leg throbbed, he was shivering cold with sweat. He put the blowtorch in his pocket and zipped up, keeping the rivet gun in his hand. Fastest gun on Dahlgren’s World! He had an impulse to giggle, but discovered that he was weeping.

He rubbed the tears off his face and sidled along the wall, picked up speed as the pain in his leg eased a bit, because the ergs would be coming back. There was an arch of dim orange light in the opposite wall and he headed for that, feeling his way along by the rough tacky concrete; ergs kept themselves clean to maintain working order but they did not care about their surroundings, and if they cared they would not see them here in conditions of near-darkness. He panicked for a moment at the thought that in the dark he could not be able to work at all. But Shirvanian had words for that too.
They keep the light and ventilation going in most places, mainly because they need some light and the ventilators keep some of the dust away. Mostly
I
think because they’re conservative, they’re following evolutionary patterns. They only change in reaction to the need for survival. Of course they don’t worry about competition or sexual selection, but they do have a kind of ecological economy, like the jungle. You ought to be interested in that, Joshua.

But Joshua, who would kill for food, or in extremis, to save his life, and would not on any other account harm a living creature, was not interested in the ecology of machines, murderous zombies,
things
he found no more alive than a cup or spoon. He did not hate the slime on the walls, but despised the ergs, who killed the forest life, for letting it grow in their hangar.

He stopped by the archway, flattened against the wall, afraid to put his head out into the sickly light. Signals whined in his receiver: the first of the ergs coming in from the field.

Before he could move, a soft voice asked, “Joshua?”

His skin prickled. “Who is it?” he whispered.

“Clothier,” the machine replied, very gentle and tentative for an erg. “I was told to wait for you here, and I sensed you.”

He whipped around the doorway, the clattering erg was nearly on him now, and found a long low black thing waiting, almost invisible in the dimness.

“Hurry and get on,” it said sweetly. “Come along, Joshua. I was told to take you where you want to go.”