The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy

by Jack Williamson

  “Crewman, your father meant to murder me.”

  Shocked, Keth could only stare.

  Of course he never said that. All he talked about was economic opportunity and opening cultural contacts and learning the truth behind the braintree myth, but I knew he meant to kill me. Because he tried. And nearly did it, Crewman. If I hadn’t known the art of survival—”

  The gold hands spread and fell.

  “I saved your father, too. In spite of himself. He hated me for it for years, but I suppose it’s why he finally forgave me. If he really has forgiven.”

  Sunk into another brooding silence, he stared at nothing.

  “I think—I hope he has,” Keth said. “Tell me about the trip.”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t.” The sad eyes studied him. “Because you’re sure to take it wrong. You’re too young, Crewman. You’ll take it for high romance and want to make your own adventures. But death’s an ugly thing, no matter where you meet it.”

  “Please,” Keth urged, “I want to know.”

  “If you’ll forget that lunatic request for your own sanicraft—”

  “I suppose I must. At least till spring.”

  “And if you’ll promise”—Brong’s eyes narrowed shrewdly—“promise not to ask how we got back.”

  “I can’t help wondering.”

  “Neither could your father.” His hard features quivered, as if with masked amusement. “Neither can the Admiral.”

  Keth sat waiting, till he began.

  “Crewman, I trust you’ll never see Malili the way we did, because you’d be bewitched. The way your mother was. The color would hit you first. Beauty of a sort, veiling the deadliness. Your mother used to love it. Different, she said, from the colors of Kai, because life here evolved beneath our redder sun, paced to fit our own slow cycles of suntime and darktime. Yellow flamevines growing through the suntimes so fast you see them crawling. Titan trees with insulating bark and strength to stand through the winter storms.

  “We set out on a midsummer Sunrise day. The high slopes were still white with moontime snow, but we were soon down where the naked cliffs and ridges were splashed with rockrust color.”

  Caught up in his story, Brong was fluent now, gesturing with his Hashing hands. Yet those keen little eyes kept stabbing at Keth, until he suspected that the whole tale was told as a warning to keep him inside the Zone.

  “Green and blue and indigo—our sun must have been hotter, your mother used to say, back when the rust organisms evolved. Sometimes lovely—if you don’t mind dying. I was careful with the crawler. But your father—a wild man, Crewman!

  “Made us take a crazy route, south across an arm of the great polar glacier. Three hundred kilometers of hummocked and fissured ice. Beyond the ice—already at the point of no return—a drop-off stopped us.

  “The rim of the ice plateau, too steep for the crawler. A floor of cloud beneath us, so dense we couldn’t see bottom. We turned west along it. Another hundred kilometers, and we never found a safe way down.

  “A kink in the rim stopped us again. The lip of a canyon the glacier had cut. Wild slopes of ice and broken rock tumbling into that sea of cloud. Too rough to let us get down safe, far too steep to let us climb out again.

  “Yet your father pulled his lasergun and told me to take us down. I wasn’t armed. I told him to shoot. He didn’t do that and I wouldn’t move us. He got into the cab while I was asleep and drove us over the brink,

  “A wild time, Crewman!

  “I thought we were dead, but the land itself was wonderful. Your mother would have loved it. Your father let me back in the cab, and I drove us on. Skidding down the icefall into the clouds. Blundering through fog so thick our own lights blinded us. Crashing into boulders that smashed too many of our LTV lamps.

  “Yet somehow we got off the ice alive, onto naked granite that was green and blue with rust. Below the clouds and the timberline, we came down through firebrush thickets and stands of wind-twisted blackwood, down at last into what old Ilo Auli had labeled Leleyo country.

  “It made me wish I’d been born all Leleyo.” His voice sank wistfully. “Your dear mother had told me an old Terran myth about a place she called paradise. I thought we were dead men, Crewman, but we’d found paradise!

  “A wide valley floored with golden grass and scattered with towering dark red titan trees. A little river at the bottom of it, wandering through orange-tinted featherbrush. Something about it.

  He sighed.

  “A cradle of freedom and peace. We drove on across it toward the river, looking for Leleyo. With nothing left to lose, I hoped at least to meet my people. Even your father turned halfway sane, gripped with the riddles the xenologists have never been able to solve.

  “How do the Leleyo exist without machines—that’s what fretted him most. A problem that tantalized your mother, too. We never learned the answer. Though that valley was a paradise when we saw it, think of the winters. Polar winters, Crewman!”

  He shivered.

  “Even here in the Zone, the winter snows are meters deep. There, under the glacier and nearer the pole, they must fall deeper. No place for naked nomads, living on the food they forage. So where do they go?”

  “To the summer pole?”

  “Twenty thousand kilometers away?” Brong shook his head. “Across jungle and storm and mountain and ocean, where we’ve never made a thousand in our best sanicraft?”

  “The humanoids?” Keth peered into his rigid mask. “Could the humanoids be helping them?”

  “Who knows?” He shrugged. “Perhaps your father hoped to find that out when he’d finished killing me. All I wanted was to keep a truce that would get me home alive. Not that I had much hope—at that time I was still a beginner at the art of escape.

  “Your father was riding up in the turret. Before we got halfway to the river, he called on the holocom to say he saw spots of rust spreading on the armor, where the gold was scratched through and the UV lamps gone. Chuckling like a madman when he told me.

  “A little farther on, he called again to say he saw a dragon bat. It dived out of the clouds and went on with us, flapping overhead in low circles. At the river, we crashed through a strip of firebrush and found a group of Leleyo on the bank.

  “Three young-looking couples and a few kids, most of them playing with a red pebble they tossed and caught. A small boy diving in the pool to bring up something they ate. An older man with longer hair and a golden beard, sitting on a rock and smiling at the kids.

  “All of them nude. The glacier melt in the river must have been icy, but they didn’t seem to mind. Lean, graceful people with bright hair and greenish eyes. They looked untroubled by anything. Happy and free—”

  He flexed his mechanical hands, surveying them dolefully.

  “Crewman,” his wistful voice had fallen, “you can’t imagine what that glimpse of them did to me. I felt sick to join them. To get away from your father—things between us were pretty grim by then. To cycle out through the lock and strip off my clothes and dive into that clean pool. To wash off the Crew and the Zone and the whole Kai world.”

  Gloomily, he sighed.

  “It might have killed me, Crewman.” His hard face lifted. “But then I might have lived—that possibility has always haunted me. My mother said I wouldn’t be immune, but there has never been a safe and certain test. The time I was exposed, the medics seemed surprised that I lived to let them amputate my hands.”

  He fell silent again, his dead brown face longer and bleaker than ever. The golden prostheses trembled a little as he opened and closed them.

  “Ah, Crewman!” he moaned at last. “I missed my chance at paradise!”

  18

  Dragon Bat A large mutant winged carnivore derived from a native predator domesticated by the early Leleyo.

  Brong wiped a yellow sleeve across his brimming eyes.

  “We’d stopped our craft on the sandbar just below that stand of featherbrush,” his somber voice went on. �
�The Leleyo weren’t alarmed. In fact, they hardly seemed to notice us. Watching them—”

  He paused to blow his nose.

  “Crewman, you can’t imagine how I felt. Your lovely mother used to talk about their culture. A different sort of civilization, she used to say, based on mind and not on things. Yet in spite of her, I’d always been ashamed of my Leleyo blood.

  “Naked savages! Wandering through the jungle in flight from their own filth, catching bugs and grubbing roots with their bare hands for food. No tools, no books, no homes. Miserable twolegged beasts! That’s the common image, and it was hard for me to believe the happiness we saw.

  “I don’t know what your father thought. After we had watched awhile, he had me take us closer. They still ignored us, but the dragon bat screamed and dived. A bellow that made my flesh crawl, even in our armor.

  “It flapped over us and perched above the bearded man on a rust-green rock beside the pool. Though we kept edging forward, it didn’t move or bellow again. We got within maybe forty meters. Closer than I liked to be.

  “A deadly brute, but sleek and clean, its wings and body covered with fine white fur. It gripped the rock with great black talons that could tear a man in two. Beak black and hooked, strong enough to rip the bubble open and take me out of the cab. Its eye—”

  Brong shivered.

  “Compound, like some Terran insect’s. A great glittering diamond band curving halfway around its head under a wicked-looking, knife-edged crest. You couldn’t tell what it was watching. Everything, I guess. That eye still haunts me.

  “Yet the creature had a beauty your mother would have loved. A quarter-ton of predatory power, so sleek and quick you longed to watch it kill. I wondered why it didn’t dive on those naked people, and why they weren’t afraid.

  “I wondered, too, why they weren’t afraid of us. The kids went on with their pebble game. One couple was in the water—under it, most of the time—making love. None of them seemed to notice us at all, till your father made me creep even closer.

  “The small boy quit diving then and came to meet us, waving for us to stop. A thin little brown-skinned urchin, long hair wet and dripping. Maybe seven or eight. He couldn’t have been to the Zone—our occasional visitors have all been older. But he spoke to us in fluent Kai.

  “ ‘Friends, please bring your gold machine no closer.’ Our sound system picked up his voice. ‘We are not used to ultraviolet radiation, and you will not wish to cause us needless discomfort.’

  “Your father answered that we wanted to be friends. We had come to learn about his people and to search for ores we needed. In exchange, we could offer rich gifts from the civilization of Kai.

  “The boy was not impressed. His people had seen our Zone and found the things of Kai useless on Malili. If we wished to show friendship, we should leave their planet and cease to cause them harm.

  “Your father asked if he had seen humanoids.

  “He laughed. We were the machine people, though if we tried to stay on Malili we would need better machines than the one we rode. He pointed to the blue rust rotting our armor and begged us to move it away from the river while we could, so that its decay would not pollute the pool. He was truly sorry that he couldn’t help us save our lives—

  “Your father had quit listening. I heard him slam out of the turret and bang through the service bay to the loading door. It was sealed and bolted. When I heard tools clattering, I ran back there and found him loosening the bolts.

  “Crewman, I told you he was mad!” Brong sat straighter, his tight voice sharper. “You see, the loading door wasn’t a lock. Opened, it would flood the whole craft with the bloodrot pathogen. That’s what he wanted.

  “A desperate moment, Crewman.” He raised both bright hands as if to guard himself, and his voice rang with drama. “I begged him to stop. He drew his laser. I jumped him, my hands against his gun.”

  He blinked at them, shuddering.

  “I’d never known how quick and powerful they are. Snatching for the lasergun, I ripped his cheek open and had the weapon before he could fire. He fell back against the bulkhead, out cold.

  “I left him there, climbed back to the mike in the cab, and made a pitch of my own to the boy. Promised to move the crawler anywhere he wanted, if his people would help us get back to the Zone.

  “He looked bewildered and unbelieving when I told him what your father had tried to do. Said his own people never harmed each other. He would show me where to take the craft, but he said his people couldn’t save our lives.

  “I got the machine moving and followed him back up the path we had tom through the featherbrush and over a rocky ridge. The dragon bat flapped after us and perched behind us on the rocks. The boy thanked me for moving the machine.

  “He said he was sorry we had to die. If we were afraid of the pain, he would gather sleepweed berries for us. They had a good taste, and they would keep us from feeling anything. I wasn’t quite ready for that. He went back to stand beside the dragon bat, watching us.

  “Your father was coming around by then, dazed and bleeding. He fought when I tried to bandage his face; otherwise he might have had a neater scar. I had to give him a hypo out of our own kit before I could get him into his body gear. When I had done all I could for him, I smashed the lasergun and squirmed into my own safety suit and cycled out of the crawler to meet my people. And that’s it, Crewman.”

  Abruptly, Brong broke off.

  “That’s no place to stop,” Keth protested. “You did get help?”

  “We did get back.” His tone had turned sardonic. “You promised not to ask me how.”

  “I can’t help wanting to know.”

  “You might find something about it in the records of the old south perimeter medical station. We reached the gate on a Sunset day. I was climbing up the snow slopes when the guards saw us, hauling your father like a sled in his safety gear.”

  “Does he know how you got there?”

  “For a long time he wouldn’t ask.” Malice glinted in the little black eyes. “When he did, I told him a dragon bat had carried us. His face had got infected and I’d kept him under hypos. He never knew the truth.”

  Keth sat waiting.

  “Sorry, Crewman.” He spread the shining hands. “When people questioned me—plenty of them did—I said I couldn’t recall the journey back. I’ll admit to you that we did get help, but what it was I’m not free to say.”

  Still Keth waited.

  “Crewman, you’ve caught me on a painful point.” His tone grew plaintive. “Remember what I am. Tom all my life between two worlds with no room for me in either. My Leleyo kin have been kinder than the Kai. They have shared with me, and I intend to keep my obligations to them.”

  “Bosun,” Keth protested, “don’t you have another duty? To your mother’s people? Their claim—our claim is urgent now, because nobody can believe your warnings about the humanoid forces building up on the Dragon. If you would explain how you know—”

  “Even if I tried, you would not believe.” Brong shrugged, bright hands spread. “Leleyo truth was hard enough for me to learn, half-Leleyo as I am. For you, for the Admiral or your father, it would hardly be possible. Leleyo and Kai, the two spheres of mind are as different as the planets. The truth of one is false to the other.”

  He darted upright and moved toward the door.

  “Please, Crewman, let’s say no more about it.”

  “I was hoping for more.” Keth ached with disappointment, still wistfully longing to discover the way to some enchanted valley where he might find Nera Nyin, but he followed Brong reluctantly. “At least we can set up the tachyon compass. It has a language people should believe.”

  With Brong’s secrets out of danger now, he bustled cheerily to help unpack the instrument. They first set it up outside, on the second-floor terrace, but the counterbalanced beam spun crazily there. Moved inside, out of the wind, it steadied, pointing almost east.

  In his old files, Brong found a
copy of the radar chart on which he had plotted the early sanicraft surveys. When Keth drew his direction line, it ran parallel with his mother’s route toward the eastward bend of that great river the glaciers fed.

  They moved the compass down to the north perimeter, and down again to the south. All three compass bearings intersected at a point just beyond the riverbend. Brong squinted sharply at it and uneasily back at him.

  “Crewman, your needle is pointing at a feyo tree. The braintree your mother saw beyond that river before her signals were cut off.”

  “A rhodo source,” Keth told him. “Which means it could be something humanoid. Perhaps an observation probe or a communications device, protected against the rockrust. I want a look at it—”

  “Not this winter.”

  It was late by then, and Brong took him to eat at a noisy all-night place in a tunnel two levels down, where the diners came mostly from the spacedeck and the thorium mine. They sat in a booth at the rear, and he kept pressing for a way to the brain tree.

  Perhaps they could wait for the river to freeze and cross on the ice. Perhaps they could take a boat or pontoons to float the sanicraft. Perhaps they could swing south across the glacier and strike back north beyond the river.

  Brong allowed him no hope. Snows had already fallen on the glacier; the crevasses would be drift-hidden and treacherous. The late-model sanicraft were already overloaded with safety equipment; the weight of pontoons would stall them. Even in the midsummer, a trip to the tree would carry them beyond the point of no return. Now in winter, even the normal maintenance work around the perimeter was difficult enough.

  “Better admit, Crewman. You’re stuck till summer—if the humanoids give us that long.”

  He saw no way not to admit it. They returned to the station and he went to bed on a hard cot in that narrow upper room. Heavy with Malili’s gravity, he lay a long time, turning restlessly, fretting about humanoids and feyo trees and Bosun Brong.