Teaser
“The Humanoid Universe”
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Originally published in the June 1980 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact.
The Humanoids existed for only one purpose and in that they succeeded beyond their inventor’s wildest nightmares.
When he stepped off the ramp at Terradeck, his father’s wife was waiting, muffled so heavily in a hooded winter cloak that he hardly knew her. She hugged him hard. For a moment, smiling through her tears of delight, she looked young again, strong and happy, but then he saw her haggard pallor and felt the weight of desperation on her.
“Don’t talk.” Her words were soundless. “Just come with me.” They picked up his bag and took the Terratown tubeway. Halfway there, she led him off the pod and up through a surface entrance. Here so near the pole, with Summersend past, the air was already sharp with frost. The blood-red sun barely cleared the black north horizon and the summer shrubs were naked sticks jutting out of the first thin snow.
An icy gust struck him, and Nera Nyin was gone. Through all the long flight from Malili, he had clung to his memories of her and her planet, but now Kai’s gritty chill had dissolved them like a dream. The braintree’s mystery, the bloodrot’s menace, his last hope of some safe haven from the humanoids, all lost behind him. Aching inside, he bent into the wind and caught Cyra’s match-stick arm.
Nobody else had got off with them. She frowned around them and waved toward a walled summer villa on a little hill above the station.
What did you learn—Her breach was short. “Out on Malili?”
“Not much.” He leaned to shield her from the wind. “The planet baffles me. Even if I was born there.”
“Brong?” Her dark-shadowed eyes asked more than her papery voice. “Bosun Brong?”
“He put me up at the Lifecrew station. Friendly enough in his peculiar way—but those golden hands!” The chill bit deeper. “Sometimes they frighten me.”
“Did you find—” She looked up to search his face. “Humanoids?”
“A rhodo source.” He shrugged uneasily. “Couldn’t reach it. Brong wouldn’t drive me there or even let me leave the perimeter alone.”
“Bloodrot’s the reason.” Her bleak features twitched. “That’s what got his hands.”
“Bloodrot and rockrust.” He could see the many-colored rust again, a fantastic fragment of that lost dream. Splashed everywhere outside the sanitized perimeter, crumbling every metal except gold to foul blue mud. “Brong said no machine could last to reach that rhodo site.”
She tugged him up the frozen slope toward the villa. Shivering a little, he began to share her dread. Though many centuries gone since their forebears fled the humanoids on the worlds of the runaway sun, those implacable black machines would never forget the built-in benevolence that drove them everywhere, to serve and obey and guard mankind from all they saw as harm.
“Your father didn’t want—warn as to call you.” He bent to catch her broken whisper. “I suppose it hurts his pride to admit—admit how much we need you now.”
“Why now? Nobody on Malili seemed to know what’s going on.”
“They’re—here!”
“The humanoids?”
“Already this side of Malili.” He had paused, but her quivering fingers gripped him harder, urging him on. “We were afraid they would intercept your ship.”
The shallow snow crunched under their boots and the purple sky ahead seemed suddenly foreboding. When they came to a stone bench niched into the villa wall, Keth made her stop to rest. He sat and caught his breath.
“We’ve been trying.” Warily, she watched the path behind. “Trying everything we can. But people won’t believe the humanoids are real—and now we’re hunted for murder. Bridgeman Greel was our last hope for help. An old admirer of mine. Wanted to marry me, back at the Academy. Still too sentimental to turn us in. I begged him to listen.”
Her bent head shook.
“He wouldn’t, not really. If the humanoids hadn’t found us in a thousand years, he didn’t think they’d find us now. Wouldn’t even watch our rhodar detector. Still half convinced your father’s what the shipwatch calls him: Con man and killer!
“For my sake, he did set up a hearing for us. A few space engineers and junior fleet officials—he promised they wouldn’t talk. In spite of the promise, the shipwatch picked up Nurse Vesh. Pretty harsh with her, but she managed to warn us. We packed up the rhodar and got away. So here we are.
“Greel’s gone on to Northdyke. He’s letting us hide in the keeper’s lodge, but our welcome’s pretty thin. Officially, if the shipwatch gets back on the trail, he doesn’t know we’re here. So now it’s just us—to stop the humanoids!”
Shivering, she pushed herself off the bench.
“Just us, Keth.”
They found his father in the tunnel shop under the keeper’s lodge. He stood up when they came in, as sternly straight as if he expected a formal Crew salute. Keth took his hand, shocked at its fleshless yellowness. Still the man’s grip was firm.
“Well, Skipper!” He tried to smile, but all Keth saw was the blue spider-sear crawling up the white stubble on his cheek. “We need you now.”
For a moment Keth couldn’t speak. His throat hurt and tears burned his eyes. Now that he knew the story of his mother and the scar, he understood and forgave many things. He could have flung his arms around his father, but this unbending man wanted no embrace.
“Vorn did send two kilograms of palladium.” He nodded at the worn spacebag. “And I was able to pinpoint one rhodo source. That braintree east of the Zone my mother died trying to reach—”
His father stiffened, recoiling from him, and the scar shone whiter than the untidy beard around it. He saw Cyra start, as if that tragedy were new to her. Recovering quickly, she begged him to open the bag.
“Enough to shield a city.” With a pale smile, she lifted the little white ingot in her wasted hand. “If they give us time.”
They showed him the new rhodar unit, standing on a bench. A clumsy-seeming toylike thing made of mismatched parts joined by heavy cables that spilled like vines across the floor. A luminous needle in a little holo tank swung across one curved scale and rotated above another.
It was soundless. All three stood around it, too breathless for talk. Cyra’s lean hand shook at the controls until she stopped to massage it. The needle hung motionless at first, while glowing green shadows crept into the tank. Suddenly in focus, they formed a tiny image of the device itself, a smaller toy. Their own doll-forms moved in around it, quickly dwindling, lost in an instant beneath the green-shining shape of the lodge, the doll-house villa above it. The villa shrank, the model city shrank, the diminished planet shrank until its toy sister world swam into the scan. The needle wavered. Cyra wrung her thin blue fingers and bent to make another fine adjustment. The needle steadied, pointing not quite at Malili, but at the moving rhodo source.
“The same intense source, which has to be a humanoid ship. Speed no longer tachyonic. Already this side of Malili.”
“You’ll have to act fast,” his father said. “And hope for better luck than you can reasonably expect.”
He learned then that he was to go on to Northdyke and try again for the aid they had failed to find.
“Take your own rhodo compass,” Cyra told him. “To demonstrate the danger. When the ship gets close enough, you’ll be able to pick it up.” He stayed with them that night while she worked late, assembling a hand weapon for him. A shielded monopole in a flat pocket case no longer than his finger.
“Keep it with you.” She showed him how to activate it. “But don’t use it unless you must. It ought to knock out a humanoid at close range, but those farther away would detect the rhodo field.”
“What’s close range?”
“A few meters, I hope. One or two at least. Just point it and push the slide. If it works, you stop the humanoid.”
“If it doesn’t, you’re in t
rouble.” His father frowned, absently fingering the blue-ridged scar. “Their top priority has always been their own defense, and the only danger they know is rhodo attack. Human beings aren’t allowed to play with rhodo toys.”
Cyra didn’t want to risk the rhodar again, for fear the humanoids might already be near enough to pick up its search beam, but she thought his tachyon compass would still be safe. They carried it up into the dim and frigid suntime for a trial. Alive at once, the pointer crept slowly along the jagged north horizon to overtake and pass the dull-red sun.
“They’re here,” she whispered. “In orbit now!”
He rode the tubeway north. With the Bridge about to meet, Northdyke was crowded, the hotels filled. The shabby room he found was off a disreputable tunnel under a factory district beyond the exclusive Meteor Gap suburb.
Cyra had given him Greel’s office address in the Bridge complex, but the receptionist there said he was away, attending a meeting out of the capital. At the Vorn headquarters, a security officer said all the top fleet executives were at an emergency meeting out of the capital. When he called the regent’s residence, a secretary said the regent was out of the capital.
At last, next morning, he found Greel in. An impatient, wheezing, fat-faced man, hard of hearing and loud of voice, the aging Bridgeman received him with a scowl and kept him standing in front of a vast black marble desk.
“So you’re Kyrone’s son?”
“With news for you, sir. Urgent news from him and Cyra Sair—”
Not listening, Greel turned to peer and mutter into a hooded holocom. He began again, “My father—”
“Frankly, I’ve heard too much of your father.” Greel glowered at him. “A paranoid fanatic. Possibly a murderer. I feel no obligation to him. Certainly none to you.”
“Sir, a tachyonic transport from the Dragon is now in orbit around Kai.”
He had brought the compass in his bag, and he stepped forward with it now. “I’ve got scientific evidence—”
“Stand back, Kyrone.” Greel batted the air with a fat white hand. “I’ve heard your father’s ranting about the wicked humanoids. A delusion as old as Kai.”
“Cyra’s a scientist.” He tried to swallow his resentment of the old man’s arrogance. “She has detected and traced the humanoid ship with rhodo—”
Greel was now frowning into his holocom.
“Listen, sir!” Desperate, Keth lifted his voice. “The humanoids took the Kyrone. They took the Fortune, with the Navarch aboard. They’re back again. Let me show you—”
With an ironic grunt, Greel swung to him. “I’ve news for you, young man. About that object in orbit. It’s the Fortune herself—”
“Sir!” Keth stared. “That can’t be true—”
“Don’t contradict me!” Greel’s white fat quivered. “I’ve seen the Navarch himself. Last night at a confidential meeting at his summer villa in Meteor Gap. He’s to address the Bridge today. Excuse me now.”
Keth rushed to the Bridge chamber in time to push into the packed guest gallery. When Commodore Zoor appeared at last, escorting the aged leader to the podium, the sudden hush was almost painful.
“Old?” He heard puzzled murmurs. “He looks go young!”
The lawmakers rose to cheer. Keth stood with them, staring. In holo interviews, the Navarch had always been leaning on some younger aide, looking withered and infirm. Now he glided ahead of the fattish commodore, moving like a dancer.
“Fellow shipfolk—”
Smiling serenely, oddly casual, he strolled aside from the microphones and spoke without notes, his unaided voice pealing through the chamber with surprising clarity and power.
“We’re glad to be back. Our long absence must have been a mystery. I understand that the holo people have aired reports that our ship was disabled by collision with a meteor or forced down in the jungles of Malili.
“The truth, however, is stranger. The history of our voyage will amaze you, and its outcome promises to open a dazzling new epoch in the history of Kai. I’ll tell you about it, but first I must correct an old misapprehension—an unfortunate misconception of the humanoids.”
He waited for a rustle of surprise to die. “Demon machines! That’s how we’ve always been asked to see them—as part of the legend that our forefathers came here to avoid them. A tragic error, friends!” His head shook gravely. “Due, I suppose, to the destruction of our historical records during the Black Centuries.
“Friends, we’ve met the humanoids!”
Shock stilled the chamber for an instant, before the first scattered gasps swelled into an unbelieving uproar. The Navarch stood waiting, poised and clearly pleased, the dull old eyes that Keth recalled now strangely bright. At his commanding gesture, all sound subsided.
“In flight to Malili, the Fortune was just reaching escape velocity when we were overtaken by a humanoid craft—a tachyonic cruiser so large that we had been hauled aboard before we knew what was happening. Humanoid units came aboard to offer us the service ordained by their wise Prime Directive.
“They’re beautiful!”
His lyric voice pealed against the vault. “You’ll all be meeting them soon. Black, of course, but cleanly shaped and shining, swift and graceful in every motion, attentive even to unuttered thoughts, totally devoted to human ease and comfort. Now, as I recall their universe—the new universe that they’ve created for mankind—it seems a dream of paradise.
“They escorted us to see fairylands you can’t imagine. Whole populations free of want and care and fear and pain, happily relieved of class and competition, living in the joy and splendor we have come back to promise you.
“Each of us found wonderlands where we longed to stay—grandeurs so dazzling, beauties so piercing, delights so enchanting, that leaving them was agony. Yet none of us stayed, even though we were offered the option, because the humanoids have promised to transform Kai.
“That’s why we’re back. To dispel your old fears, my friends, and deny the old lies. To welcome you into the humanoid universe. Tachyonic transports will arrive soon, and our old spacedecks must be modified to support their enormous weight. You, too, must be prepared. The service of the humanoids is never imposed. It must be fully explained and freely chosen.
“I beg you, friends, to reflect well before you choose. If you accept the humanoids, they can transform Kai into a more perfect paradise than any religion ever promised. If you refuse, they’ll pass on and leave us alone.”
His voice sank into a solemn pause.
“Without them, our future—without them, friends, we have no future. Our uranium and thorium will be exhausted. The promise of Malili has already faded, its tempting riches denied us by its hostile life and savage people, by its total deadliness. Our choice is simple—paradise or death.
“Think well friends!”
Beaming with that unbelievable youth and charm, he bounded off the platform. A staggered silence hung behind him, unbroken until the Bridgemen surged to their feet, most of them applauding madly but a few yelling questions he hadn’t stayed to answer. Order of a sort came slowly back, spreading around one lawmaker who said he had been aboard the Fortune.
“Fellow shipfolk!” At last he claimed attention. “Please calm yourselves. We’ve no reason for alarm. The humanoids, I assure you, were never the devils of those unfortunate legends, but simply the best of all possible machines. The most efficient, the most versatile, the most powerful ever invented. They repair and replace themselves. The service they offer is totally free. They can’t harm any human being, because they’re all controlled by a higher law than ours, wisely designed to keep them faithful forever.”
“Then why are we here?” some skeptic shouted. “Why didn’t our forefathers stay to adore them?”
“The records are lost.” He shrugged. “If our ancestors ever had any actual complaint against them, you must recall that the humanoids they encountered were early models that may have been less perfect than these.
; “In the last thousand years, we’re informed, they have improved themselves enormously. Their powers of motion and perception have been multiplied. Their computer plexus has become a true galactic brain. The annihilation of matter gives them literally limitless energy, which they devote to human good.”
Smiling benignly, he waited for a murmur to subside. “Though I understand your apprehensions, I have seen these new humanoids. I’ve seen their universe, where many trillion human beings live their lives in perfect happiness and ideal peace, supported in bountenous abundance by trillions of willing machines—” Keth was on his feet, seeking a way out of the jam in the gallery, but the ringing words caught him again: “—surprises waiting for us. Many of us were elderly when we boarded the Fortune. Some of us infirm or ill.
You’ll observe that the humanoids have healed us. Understanding the human mechanism far better than we ever did, they tend it with skills never known to human medicine—” Overwhelmed, he escaped from the chamber.
He stumbled out into the corridor, feeling battered. The Navarch’s story was starkly incredible to him, but most of the Bridgemen had swallowed it whole. The old war against the humanoids had seemed forlorn enough before. Now, clearly, it was lost.
With no actual purpose left, he wandered through the mobs in the capital tunnels and rotundas, listening for what he could learn. Here and there he came upon others who had seen the humanoid universe, each set apart by that glow of joyous vigor. At one crowded corner, Commodore Zoor was on a news holo, announcing the advent of the new humanoids. Despite the fat, even he looked fitter, his puffy features grown somehow commanding.
“—total happiness!” Still hesitant and high, his nasal voice had acquired a new fluency and power. “The humanoids ask for nothing. They bring us everything. Friends, you’ll learn to love them—”
Keth pushed out of the crowd and drifted blankly on, lost in thoughts of Chelni Vorn. Had she too come back on the Fortune, transformed into a humanoid evangelist? Her image aching in his memory, he wanted to call Vara Vorn to ask if she was there. Half angry at himself for the impulse, he shrugged it off. She was doubtless now part of Zelyk’s total happiness.
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 51