The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy

by Jack Williamson

  Next morning, crossing the rotunda from mess on his way to classes, he met her as she came from the commandant’s office. The tears gone and her dark hair done, the spacewear exchanged for a trim green business suit, she looked aloof and secure. With a strange little ache, he recalled the time they had seen each other nude. In a different sort of world, he thought, she might have become as wonderful as Nera.

  “Keth!” She came to shake his hand, her grasp warm and firm. “I wanted to say good-bye. I’m going with Zelyk for a hunt on the Darkside till it’s time to board the Fortune.”

  “I wish you happiness, Chel.” His own voice was stiff and unnatural. “You and—whoever.”

  “If you do—” Her face twitched and tightened. “If you do, you’re still a fool.” She swung slowly away and suddenly back. “You could have been—” Her voice broke. “We’ll both be sorry!”

  She strode away.

  Sometimes, in the empty days that followed, he almost wished he had gone with her to Malili. Nothing came from Cyra and his father, or from Nera Nyin. Without a fleet contract he could never train for space. Chelni’s future might be brighter than his own, he thought, in spite of her obnoxious cousin.

  Duskday came, and the holo showed the Navarch at Terradeck on the first leg of his official visit to the Zone. The reporters said nothing of Chelni, but he caught one glimpse of her, walking up a ramp into the shuttle. Her long stride looked defiant. At the top of the ramp she turned back for a moment, lifting one hand in an odd slow gesture before she disappeared. With a painful throb in his throat, he wondered if her wave had been meant for him.

  He was alone in his room one evening, later, reviewing for a test in pilotage astronomy and feeling somewhat forlorn because he could never hope to use what he was learning, when a news flash interrupted the tutortape.

  “Bulletin! Vorn Fortune lost!”

  The holo bead of a live and troubled reporter replaced the canned astronomer. Ship officials and fleet executives had now confirmed an unexplained interruption of radio contact with the spacecraft. All transmissions had abruptly ceased two days ago, just as she reached escape velocity. The announcement had been delayed at the request of authorities, who still insisted that they saw no reason for alarm.

  On her maiden voyage, commanded by Commodore Zelyk Zoor, the Fortune carried every possible safety device. All her systems had been well tested before the Navarch embarked, with no malfunction suspected. Observers on the Kai and Malili satellite stations had reported nothing unusual.

  Ship authorities denied any possible link with the unsolved disappearance of the starship Kyrone, a dozen years ago. They indignantly rejected suggestions that the humanoids were responsible in either case. The Kyrone had been lost on a long and hazardous flight to the unexplored worlds of the Dragon. Here, near home, the Fortune faced no such dangers. The ship expected early news of her safe arrival in Malili orbit. Certainly there was no need to revive the long-forgotten Lifecrew.

  “Call ’em the Crime Crew!” A sardonic shipwatch warden squinted into the holocam. “A gang of clever extortion artists, running a racket five hundred years old. Gone underground now, with ship support cut off, but playing the same old game. Pay off, they tell you, or the humanoids will get you. Their current leader is a hood who calls himself Ryn Kyrone, disgracing that fine old name. Now in hiding from a murder charge, but still crying humanoid.”

  14

  Tachyon Compass A device for locating distant rhodomagnetic sources through differential field effects on a rhodo monopole.

  For all the booming confidence of those ship spokesmen, the Vorn Fortune never reached Malili. Searchcraft found no wreckage, no evidence of solar flares or meteor streams or any other hazard, no humanoids. The Bridge assembled to replace the missing Navarch with a temporary regent and Vorn Voyagers skipped a dividend.

  Shipwatch investigators came back twice to grill Keth about Cyra and his father, but he had no more to tell them. That final year dragged on. He went to his classes and dreamed sometimes of Nera Nyin and woke once from a nightmare of implacable black humanoids swarming after Chelni Vorn.

  Graduation was only days away when a voicecard came for him. Too hasty in his breathless hope that it was from Cyra and his father, or perhaps even from Nera, he slid it into the reader upside down. When he got it right, he heard Nurse Vesh.

  Her voice quavering and faint, she said she had always loved him. She begged him to visit her before it was too late. She had made a tubeway reservation for him, and she gave him an address in Terratown.

  The trip took only an hour. He found her tunnel on a rather shabby lower level. Though the message had left him expecting to find her gravely ill, she seemed surprisingly spry, bustling about her tiny place to brew him a pot of icevine tisane.

  “The humanoids!” Her own cup rattled in the saucer as she sat down to face him, her shrunken face drawn with the dread he remembered. “Your father says they’ve come.” Her old voice sharpened with self-vindication. “Like I always knew they would.”

  His father wanted to see him, she said, but they must be cautious. When his drink was gone, she looked out through a service port to be sure nobody had followed him into the tunnel and caught him in a sudden desperate embrace before she let him out.

  He found Cyra and his father in a little shopping district, levels lower and even shabbier, half across the city. Dim legends crawled through the flickery holorama over their doorway. QUOTA POINTS EXCHANGED. INSTRUMENTS REPAIRED. USED HOLOTAPES BOUGHT AND SOLD.

  The tunnel door was locked. After some delay, his ring was answered by a deeply bent slattern with a dirty bandage around her head.

  “Sorry, sir,” she whined. “Closed because of illness—” She blinked and whipped off the bandage. “Keth, dear! Come on in!”

  It was Cyra, her straggling hair streaked with gray, her face seamed and haggard even when she smiled to welcome him. They found his father hunched over a bench in the tiny workshop that had been a kitchen, looking as trouble-worn as Cyra, blue shadows under his bloodshot eyes and grizzled stubble on his chin, though no beard grew on the blue spider-sear.

  They took him back into the seedy little burrow where they lived.

  “The humanoids?” He looked at his father. “Actually here?”

  “Near enough.” His father’s voice was a dusty rasp. “We’ve picked up moving rhodo sources, which must be humane d ships. They hovered for months around Malili. One intercepted the flight path of the Vorn Fortune, then turned back toward the Dragon.”

  “So they took the starship?” Thinking of Chelni, he felt dazed.

  “The way they took the Kyrone ”

  “So?” he whispered. “Now?”

  “We expect them back.”

  “We’re trying to be ready.” Cyra reached for his arm, as if she needed his support, “Your monopole has been useful. We hope—with luck—to have a defensive weapon.”

  “She’s an optimist.” His father gestured bleakly at the cheap and dingy room around them. “Skipper, we’re pretty desperate. I’ve made blunders. Went to a fleet owner I’d known on Malili, Shian Vladin. Wealthy enough, and generous at first, but greed got hold of him when he saw our rhodo equipment. He wanted to build his own rhodo fleet and run the Vorns out of space. A skeptic about the humanoids, I guess, and a bigger fool than I was.”

  His face hardened under the stubble, the old scar bolder.

  “At the showdown, he got ugly. I hit him with a metal figurine. He died. I arranged his body at the foot of a stair, but that failed to stop suspicion. We had to get out of Meteor Gap. We’ve been under cover since then, with all our funding cut off.”

  “But the loss of the Fortune could help us,” Cyra insisted. “With more people aware of danger, we’ve a better chance for support.”

  “Maybe!” His father scowled. “We’re still suspected of killing that grasping idiot.”

  “We can demonstrate rhodo science—”

  “Cyra can,” his father said. �
��She’s the technician.”

  “What we hope for is a more powerful monopole,” she said. “One strong enough to shield all Kai—interfering with the rhodo beams that link and drive the humanoids. The design’s nearly done. Construction will take time—if they give us time—and materials we don’t have now. We’ll need a good deal of rhodium, or preferably palladium. That’s expensive. Rare on Kai, but mined in Malili.”

  “That’s why we had Vesh call you, Skipper.” His father paused a moment, red eyes weighing him. “We need an agent in the Zone. To press the Admiral for funds—he’s still a possible ally. To buy and ship palladium. To keep an eye on Bosun—”

  “Please, Ryn.” Cyra raised a pale hand. “Brong’s our friend.”

  “If you believe him.” His father scowled. “I don’t.”

  “I believe he’s really seen the humanoids on the Dragon,” she said. “Because their ships do operate from that direction.” Back in the shop, they showed him his monopole, now installed in what they called a tachyon compass. The little palladium ball was fixed at one end of a pivoted rod, a gray lead block at the other, all swung in a circular case with luminous diodes around the rim. A rhodium shield was hinged to cover the ball.

  “A hundred times more sensitive than my own early instruments,” Cyra said. “They had to depend on the residual rhodomagnetism of native palladium. But I’m afraid the humanoids could pick up the field effects of this. Don’t move it without the cover in place.

  “You’re to take it to the Zone. Try to pinpoint those rhodo sources. Find out what they are. Braintrees, as Brong admits they could be? Leleyo artifacts? Humanoid probes? Or something else entirely? We need to know.”

  “And keep alert for spies,” his father rasped. “The humanoids could have agents anywhere. From what we know of their history, I expect them to be cleverer than we are, and utterly ruthless about eliminating any sort of rhodo threat to their power.”

  “The hazards are real.” Cyra looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t want to involve you—”

  “But you are involved.” His father cut her off. “Shall we swear you in?”

  It took him a moment to understand.

  “Think about it, Keth.” Cyra raised a warming hand. “Think of the odds. People have resisted the humanoids on many thousand planets. So far as we know, only the Deliverance ever escaped.”

  “I don’t need to think.” His own unexpected tears blurred their faces. “I’ve been waiting-waiting all my life for this.”

  They sat up most of the night, shaping plans. Cyra had made reservations for his flight to the Zone.

  “But we’ve no funds for your fare. We must ask you—”

  She faltered and stopped.

  “Vesh has located a private collector who wants your Leleyo cup,” his father said. “Take it to her, and she’ll have your travel documents.”

  He agreed, though his first elation was already fading. Looking more sharply at Cyra and his father, he had begun to sense their own haunting uncertainties. Two aging people, worn down with toil and disappointment, now in hiding from a murder charge—how could they hope to match the limitless knowledge and power of the humanoids?

  A shock of pity struck him when they went back at midnight into the shabby little dwelling room for supper. Cyra murmured an apology—in hiding, they couldn’t get legal quota points. They tried to serve him first, and he saw they both were hungry.

  15

  Kai Zone Kai beachhead on Malili, located on the highest point in the south hemisphere, sanitized with neutron devices and screened against malignant organisms with ultraviolet radiation.

  His father gave him the Lifecrew oath. That long night was nearly gone, and they were all groggy with fatigue. He knelt at a bench in the narrow kitchen workshop, both hands on a little lasergun Cyra had lent him.

  Swaying unsteadily, but still resolutely upright, his father intoned the solemn old phrases for him to repeat. To the last limits of body and brain, respecting all the ancient obligations of crew to ship and the lawful commands of his duly sworn superiors, honoring the memory of the first Navarch, he would defend the planet and the people of Kai against the humanoids and all other enemies whatsoever, so long as life endured.

  “We’ve said you’re a Crewman, Skipper.” Sternly rigid as another machine, the scar ridged and purple in the iron-gray stubble, his father waited for him to rise and make his first salute. “Now you must prove it.”

  Cyra helped him pack the compass in the same battered space-kit that his father had always carried to the Zone and went out ahead to be sure nobody was watching. He left her peering down the tunnel after him, looking exhausted and forlorn.

  He stopped at Crater Lake only long enough to pick up the hammered cup. In exchange for it, Nurse Vesh gave him his tickets and the quota card he was to use. The name on it was J. Vesh. A forgery, he guessed, that she had been using to buy food for them.

  Nobody questioned it. Reeling with weariness by then, he slept on the shuttle. Though people on the spacecraft were talking uneasily about the Vorn Fortune, they climbed past escape velocity without incident and met no humanoids on the flight to Malili.

  “Shipman Vesh!”

  Walking down the ramp into the windy chill of an early suntime on Malili, at first he failed to recognize the name. Bosun Brong stood waiting, waving a yellow glove. Keth waved, but stopped at the foot of the ramp, gripped by Malili’s wonder.

  The sky’s color: orange-yellow toward the low and unseen sun, fading away into yellow-green. The wind’s smell: a faint enticing spiciness, perhaps of jungle blooms, edged with a fainter, stranger taint. Even the noise: porters and cargo handlers shouting, horns honking, a shuttle engine screaming in a test stand.

  Malili, the forgotten planet of his birth, real! His childhood nightmare world of fearful bloodrot and frightful humanoids. The cloud-veiled mystery sphere he had seen from Kai, always alluring with its promises of unknown knowledge and new life for his race. The home of Nera Nyin.

  “Shipman!”

  Brong had darted ahead. Running to overtake him, he staggered and nearly fell. His body suddenly too heavy, he stopped to get his balance and his breath.

  “Careful, sir.” Brong dashed back to grasp his arm. “You weigh half more here, but our richer oxygen compensates. You won’t notice it long.”

  He followed again. When they were off the spacedeck and out of its din, Brong stopped to offer a thick-gloved hand. They stood a moment inspecting each other. The tiny man looked tinier, his rigid features leaner.

  “So now you’re a man!” His voice rang with the same surprising resonance, rich with pleasure. “A shipman and a crewman! Come along to the station. I’ll have your bag sent.”

  Feeling drunk with the marvels of Malili and perhaps with its denser air, he stared around him as they went on. Back at the spacedeck crowning the peak. Up at the massive buildings around it, all gray granite sawn from the mountain the shuttle terminals and shops, freight decks, fleet agencies, ship offices. Brong pointed out the tall pile the Lifecrew had built when it still ruled the Zone, now flying the blue Vorn pennant. Space in the Zone had always been precious. Dark, slit-like streets ran steeply down the slopes from the spacedeck, the upper stories balconied or terraced to give tunnel-dwellers their summer feasts of air and sky. As they walked, he thanked Brong again for the Leleyo chalice and confessed that it had been sold.

  “No matter, Shipman,” Brong shrugged. “I liked its shape and I hoped you would. But, after all, it was only a toy, made by a child to hold the blood of the tree. The grownups never bother with such trinkets.”

  A carved stone medallion had been moved from the old Lifecrew tower to mark the new station. Two symbolic oars crossed above a symbolic hammer in a symbolic human hand. Some mischance had mangled the hand. That, he thought, was symbolic too. Not very new, the building had a narrow front on a dusty side street three blocks down the hill.

  “Modest quarters, Crewman.”

  Brong bowed him
in and showed him three small rooms. A front office, with a time-dimmed holostat of a stern young man in Lifecrew black hung above the battered desk—he was startled to recognize his father, shaven clean and not yet scarred. A room behind, where Brong lived. Another above, once Cyra’s lab, now ready for him.

  “The humanoids will doubtless build us something fancier.” Brong was bleakly ironic. “Unless we get them stopped.”

  They climbed to the room that would be his. From its narrow terrace he could see the steep slant of the street and, far away and below, a tiny slice of the Malili horizon. Only a flake of blue cloud, it beckoned his imagination.

  “So much I want to know.” Eagerly, he turned back to Brong. “All about Malili and the Zone. But first—about the humanoids.” He searched in vain for expression on that hard, husk-like face. “Cyra says you’ve seen them.”

  “There’s a substance.” Brong stared back at him, eyes warily blank. “Illegal, so I don’t say much about it. But it does allow me to see.”

  “The humanoids?”

  “By the billion.” Brong nodded, his low tone sober. “Swarming everywhere over Kyronia—that virgin planet of the Dragon Captain Vorn tried to claim. Spinning their glittering prisons over half of it. Wrecking the rest to build more billions and the transport ships to bring them here.”

  The tilt of his yellow-capped head made his unhappy face look longer and sadder.

  “How soon?”

  “All I know is what I saw.” Brong shrugged. “A month ago, I saw them loading a ship. It frightened me, Crewman.”

  He shivered in the gritty wind that whipped the terrace.

  “Endless black ranks of them, pouring out of the factories that made them, marching over their roads to climb the gangways. More of them than you can imagine. The Admiral called the seeing a wild nightmare when I spoke to him. I’m afraid he’s wrong.”