O Master Caliban by Phyllis Gotlieb Read Free Book Online Page B

a butcher had been at it.
    “Has that got a receiver?” Sven asked.
    “No, a transmitter ... I think I need a radio, I guess I’d better make one.” He reached for his box, and an odd look spread over his face.
    Esther said, “Just a minute.” She quietly removed him from his work and led him to the outhouse.
    When he was settled again Sven said, “Come outside. Esther, you know the layout.”
    It was calm for the moment, the mist had retreated, the soil was drying out. Esther squatted on the hard patch of earth by the door, and they gathered around her in an arc except for Mitzi, who hunkered against the streaked wall, eyes closed and face turned to the orange sun, smoking and letting the ash fall where it would. “Talk,” she said. “Just a lot of talk.”
    With a sharp stick Esther drew a large triangle, apex pointing eastward, base half the length of its perpendicular. “Open radiated tract,” she said. “You are here.” Northwestern tip of base, she placed a stone. Beyond the apex she drew a circle like a dot at the end of an exclamation point. “Crops for men and animals at ground level, shielded with walls and low-energy force-fields; underground, the labs. And here,” between the two areas she drew five dots, “the reactors. I think there were five. Dahlgren’s World.”
    “How do you know so much?” Koz asked.
    “Ha. Everybody knows how curious a monkey can be. Not everybody knows how smart ... look here.” She bisected the triangle from apex to base and bisected the halves, touched the three lines lightly. “These are brick roads, service alleys for the ergs. Remember they have jogs where they cut through the earthworks at the zone boundaries so the polluted air doesn’t rush right through. Now,” across the triangle, starting from apex, she drew meridians, north to south, “one: white; two: yellow; three: orange; four: red; five: blue; and last,” she touched the remaining sector that included the stone, “green, which you remember was originally non-rad. And I hope you’ve been taking your anti-rad.”
    “What route are we taking?” Joshua asked.
    “The brick road,” she touched the top line, “the one you crossed last night.”
    “What?” Koz yelled. “You’re crazy! The ergs and the radiation—”
    Esther said, “I don’t worry about ergs because I travel in trees, but the forest is too slow going for you. I’m not scared of radiation because I doubt I’ll be fertile much longer, or that I’ll ever meet a male gibbon I want to look in the face every day for the rest of my life. I’d go alone if I knew what was up ahead and how to handle it, but I’m not that strong or smart. The ergs that come out around here will avoid the transmitter; we’ll see what Shirvanian can do about the others. Topaze will come with us till it gets toohot for him; when he turns back we’ll stop and think.”
    Ardagh asked, “How did they distinguish the zones besides building earthworks?”
    “By using different-colored bricks on the roads, as you can see from our floor.”
    Shirvanian said from inside, as his hands turned and fitted almost of their own will, “Then you must have had men coming out on inspection in shielded vehicles, because the ergs wouldn’t need colors.”
    “That’s the kind of thing I hope we’ll find,” Esther said.
    “They’d have aircars too,” said Joshua. “Jungle grows in layers from ground to treetop, they’d want to observe that, and the colors would be survey markings.”
    “Even they’d need shielding,” said Shirvanian.
    “They had them, I’ve been in them,” Sven said. “The ergs cut them up long ago. Their aircars fly higher, and they don’t look like ours.”
    Koz tossed a pebble at a butterfly. “Why the hell do we have to stay inside the triangle? There’s much less radiation outside, I bet.”
    Esther said, “Swamps, sulfur pits, stinking lakes, sandstorms, places where colonists tried to settle and the second growth’s so