The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy

by Jack Williamson

  “So Brong was really on the Kyrone when it got to the Dragon?” He tried to conceal a flash of elation. “He says he came back on a shuttle craft.”

  If he had scored, the machine showed no sign.

  “Forgive us, sir, but we doubt that you yourself believe that fantastic falsehood.” It was sweetly patient. “We require the truth, and our investigations suggest illicit use of forbidden science.”

  He dared not say he hoped that was true.

  “We know that your Lifecrew scientists have claimed the detection of rhodomagnetic sources on Malili,” it reminded him blithely, again and again. “If such sources do in fact exist, the native Leleyo are probably responsible.”

  “I know of no such source.”

  “In fact, sir, you do know.” Its soft voice sank in meek apology. “We have acquired convincing evidence of that from our interrogation of the woman who was your childhood nurse and our examination of confidential tapes and illicit artifacts your father and his confederates had attempted to conceal in her residence.”

  He always tried to look blankly bewildered, and knew he always failed.

  “We detect your agitation, sir,” it always informed him. “You cannot conceal your guilty awareness. We know that you were sent to Malili to gather information and obtain palladium for the manufacture of forbidden rhodomagnetic devices. We know that you did question Bosun Brong. We know that you did in fact bring a shipment of palladium back to your father.

  “We know, too, that your father and Cyra Sair did instruct you in the use of illicit weapons they had assembled. We know that you transported two of these to Northdyke. One was found hidden in the room you had occupied. The other was removed from your person—but only alter you had used it in a treacherous and unprovoked assault upon an innocent humanoid unit.”

  It was gently relentless.

  “Now, sir, if you really wish to delay the euphoride your case so clearly calls for, we require a full and accurate statement of the facts about those rhodomagnetic sources on Malili. We require the complete truth about all your associates on Malili. We require your unfeigned aid in locating your father and all his criminal accomplices before their follies can bring harm to us and the people of Kai.

  “Sir, you must speak.”

  Again and again, he tried to walk away from it, pacing around and around the fur-covered bed. If Cyra and his father were still free and armed, if Brong was still a suspect and the Leleyo still unconquered, hope was still alive. He was resolved to say no more.

  It always followed, keeping that careful half-meter away.

  “If you select to be stubborn, that option is yours,” it burbled behind him. “The facts we seek are less vital to us than you appear to imagine, and we cannot inflict harm or pain upon you. We assure you, however, that your ill-judged resistance will neither limit nor delay our execution of the Prime Directive, either here or on Malili. We urge you, therefore, to speak.”

  He always tramped on.

  “The alternative, sir, is euphoride.”

  He kept walking.

  “Take your time, sir,” it urged him gently at the end of the last unending day. “Eat your dinner. Sleep tonight. Think it over. We’ll ask for your decision when you wake tomorrow. You’re a free man, sir, and the choice will be your own.”

  Under its unceasing surveillance, he ate his meager dinner. Pretending sleep, he lay rigid and sweating beneath the stiff white mutox fur, so taut and desperate that the machine begged him to take his euphoride at once. He shook his head and turned his face away. At last, somehow, he must have slept, for a dull thud woke him.

  “Crewman, ahoy!” Standing where the humanoid had been, Bosun Brong was calling softly. “Let’s get going!”

  32

  Psion A quantum of tachyonic energy, lacking charge or rest mass, moving normally at infinite velocity, and always faster than light.

  The slender golden hand, as graceful as a humanoid’s, twitched the stiff fur off his shoulders. Trembling, unbelieving, he sat up. The little black machine lay where it had fallen, blithe smile frozen, steel-colored eyes staring at the ceiling.

  “Can you”—he blinked at Brong and shuddered—“can you get me out of here?”

  “Sorry, Crewman.” Bright metal fingers beckoned him off the bed. “That’s up to you.”

  “How . . .” Blankly, he peered around the room. The glowing doors were still closed, the high windows still opaqued and sealed. “How did you get here?”

  “They’d like to know.” Brong chuckled. “A Leleyo trick I’ve never been free to reveal.” Sadly, he glanced at the stiffened humanoid. “You’ll have to move, Crewman, if you want to leave with me.”

  “To the Zone?” Dazed, he peered again at Brong. “You know a way to Malili?”

  “The Leleyo way.”

  “My father—”

  “Safe in the Zone.” Brong spoke fast. “Arrived there with Crewmate Sair, after a wild escape aboard a stolen shuttle. Rode it all the way across. I learned from them that the humanoids had caught you.”

  “The humanoids—”

  “Surprises waiting, if they attack. The Zone folk are tougher stuff than they found here, and we’re building what Sair calls a monopole to hold the Zone.”

  “Can you”—his voice shook again—“can you show me this Leleyo way?”

  “If you can learn it.” Brong nodded at the fallen humanoid. “Better be quick.”

  “Show me—”

  “You step through a surface.” A gold forefinger flicked as if to mark a line across the carpet. “That’s the model I was taught to visualize. You move through an interface you must try to realize in your mind, out of this room and back into the Zone.”

  “Huh—” He flinched away from the man-proof doors and the man-shaped machine. “I can’t do that!”

  “True.” Brong’s nod was oddly calm. “Not until you know you can.”

  “Tell me—” He gasped for breath. “Tell me how!”

  “You don’t need words.” Brong squinted sharply at him, and warily at the thing on the floor. “I wasn’t taught it with words, and I’m not sure I know them. There’s a grasp you must have. A move you must make—”

  Something jolted the floor. Dull thunder rumbled—the first outside sound he had heard since the humanoids brought him here. Daylight dazzled him. The tall windows had abruptly cleared, and he saw dazing change.

  The interstellar transport was gone. A black pit gaped where it had stood. The stuff from pit and ship shone all around the south horizon, transmuted into fantastic architecture. Terraced pyramids, sky-stabbing needles, marching colonnades, all alive with flowing tides of color.

  “Crewman, look!” Fingers flashing in the sun, Brong pointed to a V of five long teardrops diving across the black rimwall from over the ice cap. “They’re already moving in. Hoping, I guess, to learn the trick—and to stop us if they can. We won’t have long.”

  “The way—” Bewildered, he stared again at Brong. “Is it rhodomagnetic?”

  “No Leleyo word.” The bright fingers waved it aside. “Your mother tried to translate theirs. Her term for it was telurgy, but she never knew enough. I had another lesson from the girl who helped me home after Vesh went through the ice. More from my father, when he helped me and your own father home from the trip I told you about.”

  He turned to squint at the five wheeling teardrops.

  “Time for us to go!” Voice tighter, he darted closer. “We step from here across the telurgic interface to that strip of bare rubble between the old perimeter and the new one, where Vorn’s nukes have killed everything.

  “We’ve got to do it soon!”

  “If I knew how—” Sweating, feeling numb and nearly ill, he caught Brong’s hard hand. “If I could believe—”

  “If you can’t, the humanoids will keep you.” Brong shrugged him off and danced away. “I can’t tell you how, but I’ll try to guide you. We move together. Fix our minds on those ice-crusted rocks, thrust ourselves t
oward them.”

  Trembling, he could only shake his head.

  “Hold that notion of a doorway through the interface,” Brong whispered swiftly. “Only a model, perhaps, but useful to focus the mind. What you must have is faith—”

  “Faith?”

  “Scoffing won’t help you.” With a sharper glance at him, Brong crouched from the silver-glinting teardrops. “I’ve a crutch that might, if they give us time. Stick out your tongue.” He stuck his tongue out, and Brong tapped rust-colored dust on it from a thin gold tube he had worn clipped to his pocket. Salt at first, it burned his mouth and filled his head with a sweet hot reek he remembered—

  Feyolin!

  Suddenly the world was different. The round room became enormous, the ceiling a limitless sky. Chelni’s bed stretched into a snowy desert, mountain-ridged where he had rumpled it, each separate mutox hair a long shining cylinder.

  Quivering with an ultimate compassion, he dropped on his knees beside the rigid humanoid, which was now a toppled giant. The infinite goodness of the Prime Directive wrenched his heart, and he felt a wave of shame for all the gross imperfections of mankind that required such selfless and unceasing care.

  “Crewman!” Brong’s voice was rolling thunder, so deep that his whole being reverberated with it, so slow that he had to wait eternally for each successive pealing syllable. “Shall we go?”

  Brong himself had grown heroic, more magnificent than old Kyrondath Kyrone could ever have been. Nothing in all the ancient ballads could match the desperate daring of his adventures outside the Zone, or the wonder of his shipless flights from world to world.

  Tears of pity burned his eyes when he saw the glow of the golden hands and the unutterable sadness of that scarred and hardened face, evidence of tragedies too dreadful and sufferings too cruel for any man to endure. In a more just universe, he thought, Brong should have had humanoids to serve and save him long ago.

  Wiping at the tears, he swayed toward the luckless wretch, reaching out to comfort him. The cavernous room rocked as he moved. Savage quakes tossed that vast white deseit. The high vault roared with thunder he couldn’t understand, and Brong’s colossal form receded, faster than he could move.

  “Shape up, Crewman!” At last he grasped the thunder-words. “We’ve got to go.”

  He perceived then, pierced with a godlike tenderness, that Brong was afraid. A foolish fear, because the humanoids were infinitely kind. Yet he owed a debt to this blundering hero, who had come here for him across the deadly emptiness of space.

  “I’m ready—”

  He tried to say that, but his tongue seemed swollen from that searing dust. His Ups were stiff, and his parched throat had closed. Though he labored a long time to speak, no sound came.

  Pale with staring horror, Brong had shrunk from the humanoid, and he saw now that it was no longer dead. Though it still lay flat, the golden plate on its chest was vibrating slightly, and its sightless eyes had begun to shine with a colorless rhodomagnetic glow.

  “It’s—awake!” he tried to say. “Spying!”

  Brong’s chuckle rolled like slow and far-off thunder.

  “Let it spy!” Intrepid again, he had shaken off that quaking dread. “Or try to. It will never see where we go, or how, because it is blind to life.”

  Overwhelmed with pity for its wasted wonders, he almost wept. A mere machine, it could feel no joy in all its terrible, rhodo powers, or in all the wisdom stored in its remote and mighty plexus, or in all the myriad worlds it ruled. Lacking life, its robot mind could understand neither love nor hate, hope nor fear, nor even the vast compassion he felt for it.

  “Listen, Crewman!” Brong’s thunder-tones battered him again. “I never meant to get you so high, but maybe you can do it.” Ruthless metal talons sank into his arm. “Look toward the Zone.”

  Spun away from the sun, he searched the pale summer sky for Malili, but all he could see was the luminous splendor of the fantastic palaces the humanoids were building for the fortunate people of Kai and those five bright ships diving toward him fast.

  “Can’t . . . see . . .”

  His tongue tolled and stalled, but he felt Brong hauling again, saw the gold hand flashing, pointing him toward Malili. It was low and pale and gibbous, nearly lost behind those glowing pylons and the five shining divers.

  “Close to the top,” Brong’s slow tones crashed. “Midway between the limb and the sunrise line. A bare slope of broken stone—so watch your feet.”

  The divers looked lovely. He wanted to stay and watch them play.

  “Lean a little.” The golden hooks hurt his arm. “Fix your mind on those rocks. You don’t need an actual step, but hold your image of the window through the interface. Just intend—intend to be beyond it. I’ll count us down, and aid you all I can. Three. Two. One!

  “Now—”

  Nearer thunder cracked. A frigid wind whipped him. A heavy weight crushed his chest. Loose rocks slid beneath his unshod feet. Cruelly burdened, he staggered and fought to stay erect.

  “All right, Shipman?” To his deafened ears, Brong’s voice seemed queerly muffled. “Here we are!”

  He got his breath and found his balance. Standing on a sharp-edged boulder, he blinked around him. The slope of broken rock fell sharply toward a low concrete wall that zigzagged oddly across the slope below. Slim towers stood spaced along it, and the violet shimmer between them burned his eyes.

  Beyond the wall, what he could see of the slope was not entirely gray and bare, but stained with rockrust blues and greens, and still farther below, with red and orange and yellow, the Sunset colors of Malili. Even farther, it was drowned at last beneath a flat sea of gray-blue cloud that reached out and out to remote lemon green horizons beneath a high and tiny crescent—

  Kai!

  That glimpse of it staggered him again. If that far-off, frozen world was Kai, this was—this had to be Malili!

  33

  Clay Forester Astronomer and engineer who led Mark White’s telurgists against Wing IV. Seized and brainwashed, he became a contented humanoid tool.

  Though the wind felt cruelly cold, Brong had lifted his winter cap to mop his hairless head.

  “Good jump, Crewman, but you had me sweating!” Squinting against that painful shimmer, he waved his gold forearm at the zigzag wall. “The new perimeter. Rust and rot and dragon bats down beyond it.”

  Keth staggered on the rock, overwhelmed by too much of everything. With the drug’s aftertaste still burning on his tongue, every sense was amplified. The jungle reeks took his breath. The bitter wind shrieked in his ears, and his eyes stung from the sky’s green glare. Even the old perimeter wall looked strangely near and sharp when he turned to see it, the scarred concrete splotched green and blue where rockrust had reached it. Suddenly he doubted all he saw, shuddering from a sick suspicion that his last meager meal had been laced with euphoride, that Brong’s coming and the leap from Kai and this incredible glimpse of Malili were all hallucination.

  “Come along, Crewman.”

  Brong’s gold hand on his arm felt solidly real, and the ice-edged rocks beneath his bare feet were too cruel to be illusion.

  The aftertaste was turning dry and bitter in his mouth, the tempest of sensation passing almost as fast as it had risen. The sky seemed darker and the wind-roar was dying. Suddenly, all he could smell was dust.

  “Let’s get inside.” Brong gestured at a towered gate. “Still a bit of radiation here.”

  Clumsy under his greater weight, he limped after Brong across loose rockslides and patches of dirty winter snow. After the wonder of the jump and his glimpse of all the glowing splendor the humanoids had spun, the Zone looked commonplace and gray, oddly disappointing, its old glamor gone.

  “If you can jump anywhere—” Already out of breath, he had begun to long again for the power and euphoria of the drug. “Could you take us on from the Zone? To see the braintree? And meet—maybe meet the Leleyo?”

  “Or die of the rot?” Brong wa
s ahead, his voice almost lost on the wind. “You haven’t learned the limits and the dangers. Pretty hard to get where you’ve never been, because you need to really know—to feel—the destination. Vythle gave me holos of Vara Vorn that I used to get to you.”

  They climbed toward the old perimeter. The peak rose against the yellow sky beyond it, steep, narrow streets twisting up among low brown roofs. A bullhorn challenged them from the tower, and Brong waved a recognition signal.

  The gate was Sally Port Three. Two austere young women in dark uniforms came out of the tower to demand a visa and a quota card Keth didn’t have. Frowning with suspicion, they turned to Brong. Zone Command had called an emergency alert, and they weren’t taking chances.

  Glib with words and gestures, Brong explained. Crewman Kyrone was a fleet engineer just in from Kai, here to inspect the new perimeter installations. Caught in a radiation hot spot, he’d had to discard his boots and most of his clothing. If they could call Zone Command—

  They let Brong call. After a nervous wait, they issued Keth a temporary pass and even produced a pair of boots he could wear. Inside at last, Brong led him through a cavernous shop where six bulky golden machines loomed in the dimness. Work sanicraft, he said, used to build the perimeter. He had driven one of them.

  A freightway in back of the shop carried them along a drafty tunnel, back into the mountain and up again to that narrow side street he remembered. Brong unlocked the door beneath the crumbling Lifecrew medallion.

  “Come in. Crewman. I’ll call your folks.”

  He sat down gratefully at the desk below his father’s faded holostat. The giddy spell of feyolin had faded, with all his wild hope of somehow finding Nera Nyin. His bruised feet were numb and aching in the borrowed boots, and the stress of too many risks had begun to catch up with him.

  Still a little winded from the planet’s tiring drag, he wished forlornly that he had been born the more heroic sort that Chelni and his father had hoped to make him, the aggressive fleet executive or the bold Crew leader. He felt suddenly unfit for anything, and his own reality depressed him.