The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy

by Jack Williamson

  His hunger had begun to pinch, and he tried the gray jelly. Though the flavor was bland and unfamiliar, it tasted better than it looked. Thirsty, he found a tiny hose he could suck for a lukewarm, sweetish fluid. Suddenly sleepy—so suddenly that he wondered dully if the fluid had been laced with euphoride—he crawled into Chelni’s bed and dreamed of Nera Nyin.

  He was on Malili in the dream, wandering the summer jungles in search of her. Troubled only slightly by the spreading scarlet spots of bloodrot on his hands and feet. He thought she knew the cure. If only he could find her in time—

  She was singing, at first far away. Following her voice, high and sweet and clear, he struggled through sucking quicksands, fought through tangles of thorny vine, swam across enormous, weed-choked rivers. Storms howled against him, and bellowing dragon bats hurled huge ice masses out of the sky. Yet he reached her at last, crawling on hands and knees through a Darkside blizzard—and found her changing into a darkly smiling humanoid.

  “At your service, sir.” The high sweet voice belonged to his actual jailor. “We perceived unhappiness in your sleep. Unless you accept us fully, we must administer euphoride.”

  “I—I’ll try to accept you.” Still shuddering from the dream, he muttered that unwilling promise. “But let me go to the bathroom first.”

  Gliding ahead of him, it must have made some signal, for the glowing door slid open.

  “I want a door like the old one,” he whispered bitterly. “One I can open.”

  “But, sir, you’ll never need to open any door. Its voice was merry music. “We’ll always be with you.”

  “Even in here?”

  “Always, sir. Too many of you, left in lavatories unattended, have tried to drown yourselves.”

  It followed him inside, waited alertly, let him wash himself in a tiny basin of tepid water.

  “At least,” he gritted wryly, “let me dry myself.”

  “As you wish.” It gave him a towel tissue. “We allow you every freedom possible.”

  Back in Chelni’s room, he begged it to clear the opaqued windows. It sang a soft refusal. Until he had demonstrated a complete and sincere acceptance, no breach of his seclusion would be allowed.

  “When you are ready,” it pressed him gently, “we require information.” Systematic and relentless, it wanted facts he couldn’t recall about his mother and his birth in the Zone. It demanded far more than he had ever been told about his father and Cyra and the Lifecrew.

  Torn between his terror of euphoride and his fear of betraying the

  Crew, he set himself to play a grim little game. So long as the conquest of Malili was not complete, it seemed to offer at least some faint possibility of sanctuary. Forlornly, he tried to hope the humanoids themselves might inadvertently tell him how to get there.

  His strategy was digression and delay. He tried to spend all the time he could on detail he thought would be meaningless, avoiding or claiming ignorance of everything else. Pausing when he could think of any excuse, begging for water or sleep or a visit to the bathroom, he searched for revealing clues in the questions he was asked—clues he never found.

  A patient player, the tiny machine always agreed to every interruption he asked for, but always called him very promptly back. Its melodious voice and its frozen features told him no more than the questions did. Its own secret strategy, he soon suspected, was better than his.

  Day after day, it drew him through all he could recall about his lessons with Doc Smart and his father’s new wife and his school years at Greenpeak. Sometimes, seeking more delay, he asked for news of things outside, or begged it again to clear the windows and let him see. Its replies were always courteous, always brief.

  Under the Prime Directive, the humanoids were augmenting their required service to the people of Kai. A second transport had already landed at Terradeck and a third would soon be due. The windows could not yet be cleared, however, because he had yet to demonstrate the full acceptance he had promised.

  The man-proof elevator door was never opened again, certainly not while he was awake. The humanoid kept an exact half-meter from him, gliding beside him when he walked the floor, waiting in the bathroom, standing rigid at the bedside while he slept. When he woke, it resumed interrogation.

  Sometimes he tried to demur.

  “Why ask me?” he expostulated when it began to press for all he had ever known or felt or thought about Chelni Vorn. “You have her shut up in some other prison. You’ve copied her body and no doubt drained her brain. Why not ask her? Or is she drugged with euphoride?”

  “Even the most willing human being can never inform us fully,” its reply came back at last. “Human knowledge is never entirely consistent or complete, because the human brain is only a crude and transient mass of watery cells, error-prone and glacier-slow. It sleeps, it forgets, it dies. In contrast, sir, our central plexus is eternal and error-free, a billion times larger than your fallible brain and a trillion times faster.

  “We therefore beg you, sir, to admit your limits, painful to you as the truth may be. No human being ever knows himself or any other. To serve you as we should, we must come to know each one of you better than you ever knew yourselves. Our questions must continue.”

  Its unrelenting quest for all his impressions of Chelni took three long days. He had to tell of the time they stripped and his feeling when she stood ahead of him in class and the mutox he couldn’t kill on her uncle’s Darkside ranch.

  At first he felt relieved when it went on to Bosun Brong, but its implacable demands for detail became more and more intolerable. Again and again, he was pressed for more than he could recall. When he spoke once of Brong’s sad eyes in a long sad face, the machine seized upon the adjective.

  “Your information is inadequate,” it protested. “Your word sad is not precise. Though it does imply a regrettable unhappiness, it does not show the cause. We require a full account of every specific indication you were able to observe.”

  When he failed to produce specific indications, it went on to Brong’s golden hands, wanting to know their origin and history, how they looked and how they worked and how they were powered.

  On point after point, he said he didn’t know.

  It always insisted that he did. “We detect an effort at deception, sir. We require the truth. Your alternative is euphoride.”

  Again, when they came to Nera Nyin, it drew out far more than he ever meant to say. It dug out his first thrill of admiration for her physical perfection, his astonished delight in her casual nudity, his fascination with the history and culture of her mysterious people, his total enchantment with everything about her. Seeing through all his efforts at concealment, it discovered their night together, his feyolin high, his ache of loss when she vanished from the Academy.

  Seeming to believe he had seen her since, it spent a whole day probing for some confession of that, suggesting that he must have met her on his trip to Malili, searching for evidence that she and Brong and even he might share a secret means of interplanetary travel.

  “We know that your Lifecrew scientists have claimed the detection of rhodomagnetic sources in Malili,” it reminded him blithely, again and again. “If such sources do 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 illicit rhodomagnetic devices. We know that you did question Bosun Brong. We know that you did bring a shipment of pallad
ium 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 after 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 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 still a suspect and the Leleyo still unconquered, hope was 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 happily 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 to speak.” He always tramped on.

  “The alternative 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 sightless unceasing surveillance, he ate his scanty 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!”

  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 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. “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 rim wall from over the ice cap. “They’re already moving in. Hoping I guess to learn our tricks—and to stop us if they can. We won’t have long.”

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

  “The Leleyo have another word,” Brong shrugged, “for powers I’ve never entirely understood. Your mother called it telurgy—but she never knew enough.”

  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 toward them.”

  Trembling, he shook 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 sharp glance, 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 from that night with Nera Nyin.

  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 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 a man to endure. I
n 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 desert. 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 lips were stiff, and his parched throat had closed. Though he labored a long time to speak, no sound came from his mouth.

  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 shone 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 quite so high, but maybe you can make it yet.”

  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 the fleeting glory of those five bright and lovely ships driving toward him fast. “Can’t—”