At the table, Chelni whispered instructions about which fork to use and giggled when he sipped the water meant for his fingers. He felt grateful to the Admiral, who saw his discomfort and took attention from him with anecdotes about his encounters with the Leleyo on Malili—shiftless and incomprehensible nomads who refused to wear decent clothing or do honest work or even drink civilized alcohol.
8
Mutoxen Thick-furred mutant cattle bred by the early colonists for survival on Kai; wild migratory herds range the Darkside highlands.
After that first dismal day, things went better at Vara Vorn. The servants were less obnoxious—he suspected that Chelni had asked the Admiral to reprove them. She took him by surface car to tour the towers and tunnels of the north capital; the Navarch and the Bridge moved twice a year, following the sun to the summer pole.
Together they explored the spacedeck and the fleet headquarters and the great museums. In the Kai museum, they walked through an actual ice-cave with its circular clutch of dragon’s eggs still in place; he didn’t tell her why it fascinated him. The Malili museum held models of the Zone installations and a few odd Leleyo artifacts made of tone or stone or gold, and holostats of the Leleyo themselves: bare, brown people with alert, lean faces, looking somehow too aware of everything to fit the Admiral’s mocking anecdotes.
They crossed the edge of the glacier on a motor-sledge to ski on a high and lovely snow-slope. Next day, the Admiral took them far down the Darkside in his private jet to hunt mutoxen on his Rock Flat ranch. The sun there was not yet a day high, the cold still bitter, and they tramped out across the ice barrens in stiff thermal gear, lugging long projectile guns.
He had never seen mutoxen. They were great, ungainly beasts, their dark fur immensely thick for the long hibernations, their eyes huge for the moonless moontime dark. The Admiral had spotted a lone bull from the jet. Pawing snow to uncover the moss it grazed, it let them come within half a kilometer before it raised its big-homed head to sniff the wind. It was still half-blind and dull, Chelni whispered, from its moontime under the drifts, not yet adjusted to the sun.
“Your shot, Kyrone!” the Admiral called softly. “Aim between the eyes.”
His rifle swung and wavered. Dull and ugly as the creature looked, he couldn’t kill it. All he felt was admiration for the stubborn stamina that kept it alive through the deadly winter moontimes. He threw the gun down.
The Admiral muttered something scornful. “Take it, Chelni!”
Her rifle crashed. The dark beast pitched backward and slid down a slope out of sight. With a scowl of disgust, she told him to pick up his gun and clean the mud off it.
The Admiral was already tramping ahead to stalk the cow. They didn’t stop to look at the dead bull. Chelni told him that rangers would follow in an airwagon to take the fur and dress out the meat.
On the flight back to Vara Vorn, he made a clumsy effort to explain why he hadn’t fired.
“No matter, Kyrone.” The Admiral shrugged. “Be yourself.”
Before they left for Greenpeak, Chelni took him up to the Admiral’s office, a huge tower room with views of the black-cragged crater wall and the sun-glinting ice reaching out beyond it into gray-hazed infinity. Hand in hand, they thanked him and said their farewell. When they turned to leave, he asked Keth to stay.
Waiting while Chelni kissed the Admiral and slipped away, he looked around at the silver-framed holostats of Vorn traders and statesmen on the walls, and the models of Vorn spacecraft on a high mantel. The Admiral’s desk was a vast bronze fortress, and all those symbols of status and power gave Keth a chill of awe.
“Relax, Kyrone.” The Admiral’s level gaze seemed warmer than the room. “Chel seems fond of you.”
“I’m fond of her.”
For long seconds of silence, the blue eyes probed him.
“The fleet needs able young people.” The Admiral nodded as if approving him. “Chel says you’ll be out of Greenpeak in one more year, well qualified for the Kai Academy. We can offer you a scholarship there, if you contract to come into the fleet.”
“Thank you, sir. I do hope to qualify for space training. But . . .”
His voice trailed off, because he didn’t know what to say. He was thinking of that silvery dragon’s egg that tried to fall into the sky, but he didn’t want it taken from him before he had a chance to solve its tantalizing riddles for himself. Thinking, too, of Chelni’s notions about the humanoids.
“I want to join my father,” he went on at last. “In the Lifecrew.”
“Better forget it.” The Admiral sat silent for a moment, grave eyes weighing him. “Your father is—was—my friend. An able engineer, till he caught this crazy obsession.”
“Suppose it isn’t crazy, sir?” His own boldness astonished him. “Suppose Bosun Brong was telling the truth about the humanoids on Kyronia?”
“Suppose I’m twenty meters tall?” The Admiral shrugged, his blue stare sardonic. “I know Brong lied about how he got back—it couldn’t have been in any lander. I have to assume he lied about everything.”
“If you don’t believe him, what became of your brother?”
“I used to hope—” The Admiral’s heavy features set into a scowl that frightened him. “But it has been too many years. I guess we’ll never know. There’s no use brooding.”
After a moment of silence, his muscular bulk flowed upright.
“Listen, Kyrone.” Smiling again, though rather grimly, he offered a massive paw. “Chel likes you. I respect your historic name and your record at Greenpeak. I’d like to have you in the fleet. I advise you to forget the humanoids. If you can do that—and you decide you want a place with us—have Chel get word to me.”
“Thank you, sir,” Keth took his powerful hand, “but I don’t expect that.”
In their private pod, on the way back to Greenpeak, Chelni looked at him accusingly and then lay back in her seat to sleep, or pretend to, without saying anything at all. He knew he had hurt and disappointed her.
It seemed to him that she and the Admiral wanted to make him another mutox, shaped and driven and perhaps finally consumed by the will of the Vorns, but he didn’t say so. He didn’t like to fight.
Toward the end of his last year at Greenpeak, Cyra and his father came home from Malili, but only for a visit. He saw them twice, the first time on a school holiday when they asked him and Nurse Vesh to meet them at their Terradeck hotel.
All three were painfully changed. Nurse Vesh had shriveled into a shrill little wisp, feeble and forgetful, but she had somehow hoarded quota points to bring him a crisp-scented bag of rocknut biscuits. He had forgotten how much he loved her.
Cyra looked leaner, too, her warm softness gone. Her jaw was firmly set, sharp lines creased her dark-tanned face and her eyes had a wary squint. Coarse black hairs had grown out of the mole under her eye. His father was thinner and sterner, oddly jumpy when anything unexpected happened behind him. They still lived m terror of the humanoids.
“Seven years gone.” His father’s voice was higher, half its power lost. “The humanoids seven years closer, and we’re still weaponless.”
Cyra astonished him with a gift from Bosun Brong—a small cup of hammered gold, decorated with the sharp-cut image of an oddly shaped tree, the trunk thick and bulging, limbs drooping down all around it; it looked strangely patterned, strangely graceful. He rejoiced in its look and its feel, without knowing why.
“A Leleyo artifact,” she told him. “Very rare, because they do handwork so seldom. Hammered out of a virgin nugget, I suppose. A ceremonial vessel, Brong says, given him when he joined a native cult. He says the plant is called a braintree. A priceless thing, but you aren’t to sell it.”
“Why—” He blinked at its yellow dazzle. “Why for me?”
“He wants you to think well of him, Keth.”
Looking at his father, he saw the spider-sear whiten.
9
Feyolin Illicit Malilian drug used in Leleyo ceremonials;
sources unknown. Reports of strange effects unverified.
Bosun Brong was back in the Zone, they told him, manning the Lifecrew station there while they were away.
“Never trusted him,” his father muttered. “Too full of native tricks and tales you can’t believe. But he does know his Leleyo kin, and he claims he wants to help us. Our last friend—if in fact he is a friend.”
Cyra had failed to reach or even to locate the rhodo sources she had planned to search for.
“No funds to buy or hire or build a sanicraft,” his father said. “We couldn’t get outside the perimeter, and our crude instruments couldn’t tell us much from inside. A number of different sources, we decided, all too weak for us to separate their effects.”
“I did talk to Brong about them,” Cyra added. “He thinks they might be braintrees.” She nodded at the golden cup, which Keth was still fingering dazedly. “Sacred plants, his native friends have told him. He says he’s never seen one.”
“If you want to believe him!” His father was bitterly scornful. “A feyolin addict. High on that, he could say anything. I sometimes wonder if all his wild tale about the humanoids on Kyronia wasn’t a feyolin dream.”
“I’ve thought so.” Cyra shook her graying head uncertainly. “But then again . . .” She was silent for a moment, staring at the golden bowl. “I’m sure he sometimes lies, but he can also do things I can’t understand.”
“Those escapes!” his father rasped. “He won’t explain them. Or how he got home from the Dragon ”
“He says he does it with feyolin,” Cyra said. “He even gave me a sample of the stuff.”
“Illegal!” his father snapped. “Smuggled by his native kin.”
“He wanted us to try it, but of course we wouldn’t.” She shivered. “I got nowhere trying to analyze it. Queer stuff, with a puzzling platinum content. Nothing like any alkaloid we know. I can’t believe it does what he says it does.”
“A squalid little liar!” His father spoke as if in pain, his voice hoarse and high. “Yet what he says—about the humanoids—frightens me!” He turned to Cyra, and Keth saw the crawling scar, bold and white on his ray-burnt cheek. “You heard him, Cy.”
“I heard him.” She turned to Keth with a somber nod. “He says that the drug can take him back to Kyronia—he can’t or won’t explain just how. But he says he can see the humanoids there. Millions of them now. Billions, maybe. All at work. Never stopping, day or night. Spreading that rose-glowing city all over the planet.”
“Building a base,” hi: father grated. “A base against us.”
“And three enormous transport ships,” she said. “A dozen times the size of the one that brought them there. Each one going up in a nest of factories making the parts and more humanoids. When they’re ready, Brong says, they mean to swallow us.”
He whispered, “How soon?”
“Brong doesn’t know.” She shrugged uneasily. “The humanoids never die, and he says they have their own sense of time. But he says the ships look almost complete.”
“That’s why we’re back on Kai,” his father said. “Time’s running out. We were getting nowhere in the Zone. I know most people won’t believe Brong’s warning. But I want to see Vorn and a few others who used to back the Crew. An unlikely bet, but we can’t just quit.”
They were going on to Northdyke, where the Bridge was sitting. Later, returning to the Zone, they would visit him at Greenpeak.
“I want one last look for Mansfield’s private tapes,” Cyra said. “Or whatever records he kept. If they still exist, they could have been buried somewhere in old Mansfort. When I asked permission to search there, years ago, the lower levels were blocked off and dangerous—”
“They—they still are.”
Keth spoke on impulse, breathless with excitement that was half apprehension. That precious object in his desk—could the power that lifted it be rhodomagnetic? Its mysterious makers—could they have known rhodo science? It was still a very private treasure, but suddenly now he saw that he must share its secret.
“I’ve something to show you,” he whispered. “Out of those dead levels. A thing I never understood.”
“We’ll be in Greenpeak.” His father’s face looked drawn and dead beneath the scar. “But we’re leaving for Northdyke tonight. Unless we can turn up new friends—and better ones than Brong—we’re dead.”
They went on to Northdyke. Back in his room at Greenpeak, he set the Leleyo bowl on his desk and sat a long time, dreaming of the perilous allure of Malili and wondering why Bosun Brong should care for him. He leaned at last to open the bottom drawer and test the upward thrust of that white metal ball once more. Dragon’s egg or something else, it was still more precious to him than the bowl. He was almost sorry, at the end of the term, when Cyra called to say they were stopping to see him.
They looked despondent when he met them at the tubeway station. Their story that Brong could see the humanoids on Kyronia had convinced nobody. Most of their old friends wouldn’t even see them. Admiral Vorn had offered them a drink for old time’s sake, but he wouldn’t let them talk about his lost brother or the worlds of the Dragon.
“A stubborn old rautox,” his father muttered. “But I hope to get something out of him yet. The Navarch has named him to be the Zone’s next commander. If we can get him to listen to Brong—”
“If!” Cyra shrugged. “Not very likely.”
Delaying the moment of loss, he took them to meet Topman Taiko, took them to a warball game, took them to evening mess with Chelni, who surprised him with her gracious warmth and promised them to ask her uncle to do all he could. When it was nearly time for them to go, Cyra asked what he had wanted them to see.
“A dragon’s egg,” he said. “An odd one. Metal, instead of rock. It wants to fall up.”
Her mouth hung slack for an instant. They were standing on the duty deck where Chelni had left them, and his father spun around as if frightened by something behind him.
“You found that?” Her eyes were unbelieving. “In the old city?”
“Down under the school. In what must have been a museum. A dozen stone eggs scattered around it.”
“Let me see!”
When they reached his room, his father peered back into the corridor and locked the door. They stared, scarcely breathing, while he freed the little globe from its hiding place under the old tutor tapes and let it float off his hand.
Cyra snatched it out of the air.
“A monopole!” She stood blinking at it, testing its upward pull, her thin hand shaking. “Mansfield’s rhodo monopole!”
His father was reaching, and she let him hold it.
“I thought—” Keth caught his breath. “What’s a monopole?”
“A single rhodomagnetic pole.” Her hungry eyes clung to it, even while she spoke to him. “This one’s evidently positive. Common matter has a slight positive rhodo polarity. A positive pole repels the mass of the planet.”
At last, seeming relieved to have it in her own hand again, she could look at him.
“Mansfield must have saved it from the Deliverance. In case we ever needed it for what he called ‘our ultimate resort’ against the humanoids. Concealed it, I suppose, among those odd stone artifacts.” Her stare sharpened. “Was there anything else?”
“A skeleton,” he said. “Mounds of mud.”
“This could be enough.” He thought she looked younger. “Working from it, I can derive the math. Find a way to induce rhodo forces. To generate new and stronger monopoles. Learn enough, with luck, to fabricate some sort of rhodo weapon.”
“You’re sure?” his father demanded. “Sure that was all?”
“All I saw.”
“You were there alone, down on the dead levels?” Cyra stared. “How’d you get permission?”
“I didn’t.”
He told about those secret expeditions.
“A dreadful risk!” Sitting on his berth, she pulled him down beside her. “If you had fallen, or
lost your light . . .”
He felt her lean body shiver.
“And you never spoke about it?” She looked abruptly at him. “I see that you prize it, but of course you must let us take it.”
“It’s mine—” He checked his own hurt protest. “If you need it, take it.”
“We do.” His father’s voice had firmed. “It should help us prove I’m more than just a con man.”
Suddenly, all their plans were changed. They sent him out to cancel their flight back to Malili and book return passage to Northdyke.
“You won’t be hearing much from us,” his father said before they left. “We’ll have to be as cautious as you were. The humanoids, if they’re on Kyronia, they could detect any reckless use of rhodo power. For all we know, they could have agents already here on Kai. We must keep under cover. Try for private help. Do nothing to give our work away.”
“But we’ll try to keep in touch.” And Cyra added, “We won’t destroy your precious monopole. In time, you’ll have it back.”
“Skipper, you’ve earned your berth.” His father gripped his hand. “We’ll want you in the Crew when you get out of school. That is, unless”—the spider quivered on his tightening jaw—“unless the humanoids get here first.”
10
Black Centuries Age of danger and disorder ended by the first Navarch, the great Kyrondath Kyrone, when he reunited the battling Cities and restored the law of the ship.
Cyra and his father left Greenpeak without waiting for his graduation or saying where they would be. Vaguer than ever, their occasional voicecards told him only that they were hard at work, with never a hint of what their progress was or how they might be reached.
At graduation, old Topman Taiko announced that Boatman Keth Kyrone had earned the Vorn Voyagers scholarship for four years at the Academy. Drinking a melonade with Chelni after the ceremony, he tried to thank her.
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 33
