“Brave enough,” she muttered. “But he knows the humanoids.”
The year he was six, she sent him to the gym every morning. The other kids seemed strange at first, because they laughed and ran and sometimes whispered when the leader wanted quiet. They weren’t afraid of anything, and they weren’t nice to him.
The leader tried to scold them once, explaining that Keth didn’t know the games because he was born on Malili, but that only made things worse. They called him “moonbaby” and mocked the way he talked. One day a larger boy pushed him.
“You’ll be sorry!” His voice was shaking, but he didn’t cry. “My father—” He thought of something better. “The humanoids will get you!”
“Humanoids, ha!” The boy stuck out his tongue. “A silly old story.”
“My nurse says—”
“So baby has a nurse!” The boy came closer, ready to push him again. “My Dad was an engineer in the Zone, and he says there’re no humanoids there. He says the rockrust would stop them.”
Limping home through the cold tunnels, he wondered if that could be true. What if Nurse Vesh had made up the humanoids, just to frighten him? He found her in her room, reading a queer old printbook.
“You aren’t to fight.” She frowned at the blood on his cheek. “Or did you win? Your father will be angry if you ran.”
“I fell, but it doesn’t hurt at all.” He watched her carefully. “I was talking to a boy. He says there are no humanoids—”
“He’s a fool.”
Her lips shut tight, and she opened the book to show him a humanoid. The picture was flat and strange, but the thing in it looked real. More human than machine, it was sleek and black and bare, as graceful as a dancer. He thought its lean face seemed kinder than hers.
“It isn’t ugly.” He studied it, wishing he knew how to read the golden print on its black chest. “It looks too nice to be bad.”
“They pretend to be good.” She took the old book from him and slammed it shut, as if the humanoid had been a bug she wanted to smash. The puff of dust made him sneeze. “If you ever fall for any of their tricks, you’ll be another fool.”
He wondered how a machine could trick anybody, but she didn’t say. He wanted to ask about rockrust and how it could stop the humanoids, but she didn’t like to talk about Malili. She scrubbed his cheek and gave him his calorie quota, which was never enough, and made him do his lessons before he went to bed.
The next summer he took a recycle route, pulling a little cart to pick up waste metal and fiber. The tunnels were cold, and most of the tokens he earned had to be saved for his winter thermosuit. But one day he found a bright black ball almost the size of his fist, so shiny it made a little image of his face. It rolled out of a trash bin, along with the bits of a broken dish and a worn-out boot.
“A dragon’s egg.” Nurse Vesh shook her skinny head when he showed it to her. “Bad luck to touch. Better throw it back in the bin.”
It looked too wonderful to be thrown away, and he asked his father if it would hatch.
“Not very likely.” His father took it, frowning. “Ten million years old. But you’ve no business with it, Skipper. It must be missing from some museum. I’ll see about returning it.”
His father carried it back to that always-locked room and never spoke about it again. Wondering, he used to search the moontime sky for the Dragon. It was the sun’s sister star, and perhaps the dragons had flown from nests on its queer far planets to leave their eggs here on Kai.
It would have been exciting to watch it hatch. The baby dragon would be too small to hurt anybody. And as lovely as the dark-shining egg, he thought, with glittering diamond wings.
Once he dreamed that it was really hatching while he held and warmed it in his hands. The thing that crawled out of the glassy shell wasn’t a dragon; it was a black humanoid.
Another crawled after it, out of the broken shell, and then a hundred more. They crawled all over him, with clinging icy feet, and his terror of them froze him so that he couldn’t move or scream. He was stiff and chilled and sweating in his berth when Nurse Vesh woke him.
He always shivered when he remembered that dream, but it had made the egg more strangely splendid than ever. He wondered for a long time if it could still be in his father’s room. One day when he came in from his route the place was very still. He peeked behind the curtain and saw the red light winking. He listened and heard no sound. His father and Nurse Vesh were out.
His hand trembling, he touched the door.
2
Cat and Dragon Twin suns of the binary “runaway star” on whose planets the refugee colonists tried to escape from the humanoid universe.
The apartment was a branching cave, carved deep in solid rock. His father’s room was off a long tunnel behind that faded tapestry, far at the back. It was very secret. That was why it was bidden, and why the gray steel door was so thick, and why the light winked to warn his father if it was ever disturbed or left unlocked.
He almost ran when the door swung open, but nothing else happened. He listened again, but all he could hear was his own thudding heart. He tiptoed inside to look for the dragon’s egg. The room seemed very small and bare. A desk with a holophone. A shelf stacked with huge old flatprint books. Blankets neatly folded on the narrow cot where his father slept. A rusty strongbox, with the painted oars of the Lifecrew peeling off the half-open door.
Breathless, he peered inside. Except for a few spilled quota tokens and a tall brown bottle, the strongbox was empty. The dragon’s egg must have gone back to that museum. He was turning to slip away, when a picture stopped him.
A strange old flat picture, made with rough daubs of colored paint. The paint had faded, and the silver frame was tarnished black, but the man in the picture looked alive. Looked like his father.
The same black hair and the same straight nose. The same gray eyes, narrowed like his father’s when his father was angry. But the man in the picture had a thick black beard, and one hand held a queer old projectile gun.
Nurse Vesh was teaching him to read, and he sounded out the symbols on the darkened silver. Kyrondath Kyrone—
Kyrone! His breath came faster, because that was the name of the great new starship, and his own name too. He stood a long time looking, wishing he knew more about his father and the room and the humanoids.
He jumped when he heard somebody walking, but it was only Nurse Vesh, getting up from her nap. He scrambled out of the room and pulled the steel door carefully shut and went on wondering. Though she and his father never talked about the starship with his name, he heard more about it from the holo news and later from his history tapes.
The Kyrone had been in construction out in orbit as long as he could remember. It was to carry people to settle planets of the Dragon, which they hoped would be kinder worlds than Kai and Malili. Later that year, it was ready for the flight. Nobody said that it might meet dragons, but his father tried to stop it.
One day at lunch Nurse Vesh had the holo news on and he heard his father speaking to a meeting. The flight had to be halted, his father said, because the fusion engines would have a rhodomagnetic effect. The humanoids might detect that and find the people who had fled from them to the worlds of the Cat.
Captain Vorn followed his father on the holo, laughing at such fears. The Cat and the Dragon were moving too fast, and the humanoids had been left a thousand years behind. Foolish fears had kept people trapped too long on Kai and Malili. The time had come for another bold escape.
He liked the look of Captain Vorn. A tall, lean man with cool, blue eyes and a quick, brown smile, not afraid of anything. When he spoke next day, his daughter Chelni was with him. She was a sturdy little girl with straight black hair and a stubborn chin. He saw they were fond of each other. He never forgot them.
Or the man with golden hands.
Bosun Brong, his name was. He had come from Malili to be an engineer on the starship. The newsmen said he had been exposed to bloodrot outside the
Zone and lost his natural hands. The metal hands were shining golden levers, graceful and powerful. The holo showed them bending steel.
In spite of his father, the building of the ship went on. He used to wish that he had been aboard. Sometimes he dreamed of the happy new worlds the colonists would find. Happy there, they would never be hungry or cold. Far from sinister Malili, they needn’t fear the humanoids.
For half a year, the holo carried news of the flight. When Vorn reached the Dragon, he found seven planets. The inner worlds were too hot and dry, and the outer ones were cold gas giants, but one in between looked fit for people.
The first lander went down toward it, and everybody waited to hear what the pioneers reported. They never did report. All signals simply stopped. The newsmen couldn’t guess what had happened. One Bridgeman wanted to send a rescue expedition, but the Navarch said it would take too long to build another starship.
Little Chelni Vorn was on the holo again. Her chin was white and shaking. She told the newsmen she had wanted to go with the ship but her mother had kept her on Kai. She blinked at her tears and said she thought the ship was safe, because her father had carried a dragon’s egg to make good luck.
“Luck?” Nurse Vesh sniffed. “He’s a fool.”
That was all anybody knew, till the day Bosun Brong called from the spacedeck. Keth’s father was away, but Nurse Vesh let Brong in. A nimble little black-eyed man in a shaggy winter thermosuit, he seemed to know Nurse Vesh, but she backed away from him, looking pale, when he offered his yellow-gloved hand.
“So you’re Shipman Keth?” His face looked dead, but his voice was quick and warm. “Crewman Kyrone’s son?”
Keth shook his hand. Inside the thick glove, it felt hard and very strong. Nurse Vesh let him sit in the front room and made him a pot of her bitter tisane. Waiting, Brong pulled off the gloves.
“You know about the starship?” Nurse Vesh poured the boiling tisane and stood staring at his golden hands. Her voice was frightened and high. “What happened to Captain Vorn?”
Brong’s hands were very deft and clever with the mug. Keth waited, wondering if they had met whatever laid the egg, till Brong set down the cup and told them about the flight to the Dragon, and the new planet they had found.
“Kyronia, we called it.” His black eyes looked far off, as if he still saw it. “As wild as old Terra must have been before men evolved there. A fine place, maybe, but it nearly killed us all.
“We had three landers. The first one just disappeared. Went behind the planet on its descent and never came back. The second got down on what looked like a nice safe spot—a wide green plain that looked like grassland but turned out to be a layer of weed that hid a sea of mud. The lander slid down through the weed and never came up.
“We had better luck with the last one. Got down safe on a rocky coast and made three trips back to the starship to ferry our gear and the rest of the crew. Vorn came down on the last flight, with a fusion engine ripped out of the ship to make power for the camp. Then he gathered us together around the landing pad.
“Kyronia, he told us, was our last best chance. With luck and work, we could make it a finer home than Kai. We still had troubles to come, but that was life. Working and risking, making and loving, losing and winning. I liked the way he said it. Standing tall on a granite rock, voice ringing back from the cliffs behind us. We all felt proud—
“Till the humanoids came.”
3
Rhodomagnetics A tachyonic energy spectrum linked to the second triad of the periodic table of the elements: rhodium, ruthenium, and palladium. Analogous to ferromagnetics, which is linked to the first triad: iron, cobalt, and nickel.
Nothing ever changed Brong’s dead brown face, but his hands clenched into golden hammers and his voice went sad and slow when he spoke about the humanoids.
“Our lost lander came back that night. We found it on the pad next morning, loaded with humanoids. They had taken the craft without hurting anybody. They always said they could do no harm to any human being. All they wanted was to help us. If we wanted a home on Kyronia, they would build it for us.” He shook his head and made his hands unfold.
“That’s what they did, though Vorn tried to stop them. He begged them to let us do it ourselves. To let us build our own houses and open our own roads and clear our own fields. To use our wits and brawn against a wild planet, fighting to tame it. That’s what we’d come for.”
The gold hands spread and wearily fell.
“They stopped everything. Because they’d come to care for us, commanded by their crazy Prime Directive. Our own tools were too dangerous for us, they said, and our work was too hard. An axe could cut a man. Lifting a rock could rupture him. One microbe could kill him.
“We had to be protected.” Brong sighed and sipped the hot tisane. “In a way, all they did was wonderful. They brought down their tachyonic transport, a hundred times bigger than our starship. They unloaded their great queer machines and built a city for us, there on the cliffs where Vorn had staked out one dirt street for the beginning of our town.
“A beautiful city, in a terrible way.” Brong’s tone turned sadder. “Crystal towers shining like monster gems. Gardens of great bright blooms like I never saw, not even on Malili. All of it wrapped in a rose-colored cloud.
“A cloud I never understood. It smelled like some queer perfume, so sweet I couldn’t stand it, glowing pink at night, so the city was never dark. Somehow shut the planet’s rough weather out, so there was never any wind or cold or rain.
“Magic!” His sad voice fell. “That’s how it seemed to us. Unbelievable at first, floating in that rosy splendor. The humanoids swarmed all around us like little black ants while they were building it. They never sleep. Never rest. Never make a sound. Don’t have to speak, because each unit knows all that any other has ever learned.
“In just a few days, they were ready to move us in. At first, I guess, most of us were glad enough to go, because it looked so grand and wonderful. Because the humanoids still seemed so quick and kind, so eager to do everything for everybody.
“But Vorn never trusted them. He stayed down at the pad, working to convert the fusion engine for our own power plant. Kept a few others with him. When the humanoids invited them into the city, he said they weren’t moving. The humanoids said they had to.”
Brong shook his head and sipped his drink, remembering.
“Vorn told them he and his people would make their own way. The humanoids were always polite, but they answered that fusion energy was too dangerous for men. They were very mild and very kind, but they came swarming in to dismantle the fusion plant.
“At the last second, Vorn blew it up. Only a boiler, but still big enough to kill Vorn and most of his friends. They made the right choice, Shipman.”
Brong blinked solemnly at him.
“Because that fantastic city turned out to be a padded prison, where nothing at all was allowed. Love itself was regulated, because sex can overtax the heart. Most of the inmates had to be drugged to make them think they were happy—the humanoids do have remarkable drugs.
“That’s the story, Shipmate.” Brong peered forlornly up at Nurse Vesh, holding his mug to be refilled. “The sorry tale I’ve brought back to Crewman Kyrone.”
“There’s one more thing he’ll want to know.” She was pouring more tisane. “How did you get back?”
Brong’s small body froze for an instant, as rigid as his face. “I’d seen enough of the humanoids.” He squinted into the mug and set it carefully aside. “Vorn’s explosion had wrecked a hundred of the little devils, and shaken up the rest. In the confusion, I got back aboard the lander. Blasted off before they could stop me. A long flight back home. But here I am, Shipmate. Here I am!”
When his father came, Brong darted to meet him at the door. His father stopped and gasped and stared, not saying anything.
“Well, Crewman.” Brong offered his golden hand. “I see you didn’t expect me.”
; With a hoarse, angry sound, his father waved the hand aside. His face was stiff and strange, the scar growing slowly while. “You—You can’t be here!”
“Yet here I am.” Brong couldn’t smile, but his voice seemed queerly pleased. “Here to say you’re right about the humanoids. I’ve seen them, Crewman, and the sort of world they want to make. A very peculiar sort of hell.”
“I never liked to trust you.” His father nodded grimly. “But I’ll hear what you want to say.”
“I thought you would.” Brong squinted at him, nodding. “Even if we were never friends.”
They went back to that locked room. Listening outside till Nurse Vesh scolded him away, he heard their voices growing sharper and louder. After a long time they came out again, muttering and scowling, to call Vorn’s brother on the living-room holo.
Admiral Torku Vorn was a Bridgeman and a fleet director. He was busy now in conference, the girl said, and she couldn’t interrupt him. When Brong waggled his gold hands and told her he had been aboard the Kyrone, she changed her mind.
The Admiral looked like his brother, but younger and broader and stronger. His face was heavy and red and watchful, a game-player’s face that showed no expression at all while Brong repeated his story. Then he smiled. A warm, wide smile.
“A great tale, Bosun, but a few points puzzle me.” His friendly voice was almost apologetic. “We’ve had no report of any lander returning from the Kyrone.”
“I failed to reach the spacedeck, sir.” Brong hunched down, very tiny in his shaggy winter gear, squinting at the holo. “Crashed on a Darkside ranch. Hiked out to a tubeway station.”
“Could be.” The Admiral nodded quietly. “But I helped design those landers. Their normal operating range is only orbit to planet, not star to star.” His blue-gray eyes were wide and mild. “Bosun, you didn’t come back in any lander. Not from the Dragon.”
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 30
