The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy

by Jack Williamson

  Asleep at last, he dreamed of that magic valley with its crimson titan trees. Brong was with him, and they were searching for Nera Nyin. They heard her voice at last, singing in a yellow glade. She saw them and ran to meet them, tall and nude and beautiful.

  Brong darted ahead of him, reaching out to greet her. When his metal hands touched hers, he began to change, growing more and more mechanical until he was a golden humanoid. She left Brong and came on to him, her bright smile alluring, her arms open wide.

  He fled from her, in terror of being changed.

  “Crewman!” The real Brong woke him. “Zone Command wants you on the holophone.”

  “News for you, Crewman Kyrone.” It was Vythle Klo, sleek and tall and very grave. “Your father has called the Admiral from Kai. About some sudden emergency—he was not specific, but you’re to return at once. We’ve arranged your passage back, on the same ship you came out on. The Admiral is sending your father two kilograms of palladium. You may pick it up here, on your way to catch the shuttle. You will travel again as Shipman Vesh.”

  19

  Ehodar A system for determining direction and distance through tachyonic radiation effects.

  When he stepped off the ramp at Terradeck, Cyra was waiting, muffled so heavily in a hooded winter cloak that he hardly knew her. She hugged him hard. For a moment, smiling through her tears of delight, she looked young and strong and happy, but then he saw her haggard pallor and felt the weight of trouble on her,

  “Don’t talk ” she breathed. “Just come with me.”

  They picked up his bag and took the Terratown tubeway. Halfway there, she led him off the pod and up through a surface entrance. Here in the south of Kai, with Summersend past, the air was already sharp with frost. The blood-red sun barely cleared the black north horizon and the summer shrubs were naked sticks jutting out of the first thin snow.

  Nobody else had got off with them. Walking against a bitter wind toward a walled summer villa on a little hill above the station, they were alone. Cyra glanced back and began to talk.

  “Your father didn’t want us to call you.” She caught his arm and clung. “I suppose it hurts his pride to admit how much we need you now.”

  “Why now?” Dread brushed him. “In the Zone, nobody told me what the trouble is.”

  “They’re here!” The wind had begun to take her breath, and her voice had sunk to a husky whisper. “The humanoids. Not yet on Kai, but in space near Malili. We were afraid they would intercept your ship.”

  He had stopped to listen, but she tugged him anxiously on. The shallow snow crunched under their boots and the purple sky ahead seemed suddenly foreboding.

  “I didn’t get much from the Admiral—”

  “That may not—may not matter now.” Still tramping doggedly on, she had to gasp for breath. “We must do—with what we have.”

  They came to a stone bench niched into the villa wall, and he made her stop to rest. Warily watching the path behind, she whispered again: “We’ve been trying, Keth. Everything we could. We finished the rhodar and picked up another moving source—it must be a humanoid ship—approaching from the Dragon at tachyonic velocity when we picked It up.”

  “The one the Bosun saw them building?” The wind felt colder. “If he had been believed—”

  “No matter now.” She shrank from the wind. “We did try, Keth. I went to Bridgeman Greel. A friend back at the academy, long ago—he wanted to marry me once. Still too sentimental to turn us in for murder. I got him to listen to your father.”

  Her bent head shook.

  “He didn’t listen, really. Said he never took much stock in the humanoids. Wouldn’t try to understand the rhodar demonstration. Half convinced in spite of me that your father is the con man the shipwatch calls him. Con man and killer.

  “For my sake, he did set up a meeting for us. A few space engineers and junior fleet officials, all warned not to turn us in. The Zoor engineer asked more about the rhodar than we wanted to tell him. but nobody else was much impressed.

  “Though Greel had promised to protect us, somebody tipped off the shipwatch. They picked up Nurse Vesh the day after the meeting. Pretty harsh with her, but she outguessed them. Got a message to the hideout in time for us to get away.

  “So here we are. Greel’s gone on to Northdyke, letting us stay here for now in the keepers lodge, though our welcome’s wearing thin. Officially, if the shipwatch gets back on our trail, he doesn’t know we’re here.”

  Cold fingers quivering, she clutched his arm again.

  “That’s why, Keth, why we had to call you back. Because we’ve done all we can. There’s nobody even to laugh at us now, with the Bridge already scattered for the Summersend recess. No quorum to act on anything till they meet again at Northdyke. No hope from the new regent, either. He’s a retired shipwatch commander, more apt to fear us than he is the humanoids.”

  Shivering, she pushed herself off the bench.

  “We had to have you, Keth.”

  They found his father in the tunnel shop under the keeper’s lodge. Ke rose when they came in, as sternly straight as if he expected a formal Crew salute. Keth gripped his hand, shocked at its fieshless yellowness.

  “Well, Skipper!” He tried to smile, but all Keth saw was the ridged blue scar crawling through the white stubble on his cheek. “We need you now.”

  For a moment Keth couldn’t speak. His throat hurt and tears burned his eyes. Now that he had heard the story of his mother and the scar, he understood and forgave many things. He could have flung his arms around his father, but this unbending man wanted no embrace.

  “Vorn did send two kilograms of palladium.” He nodded at the worn spacebag. “And I was able to pinpoint one rhodo source. That braintree, east of the Zone, my mother died trying to reach—”

  His father stiffened, recoiling from him, and the scar shone whiter than the untidy beard around it. He saw Cyra start, as if that tragedy was new to her. Recovering quickly, she begged him to open the bag.

  “Enough to shield a city.” With a pale smile, she lifted the little white ingot in her wasted hand. “If they give us time.” She looked at his father and then at him, her gaunt face twitching. “Time to find the means we need to complete the weapon—”

  They showed him the new rhodar unit, standing on a bench. A clumsy, toy-like thing made of mismatched parts joined by heavy cables that spilled like jungle vines across the floor. A luminous needle in a little holo tank swung across one curved scale and rotated above another.

  It was soundless. All three stood around it, too breathless for talk. Cyra’s lean hand shook at the controls until she stopped to massage it. The needle hung motionless at first, while glowing green shadows crept into the tank. Suddenly in focus, they formed a tiny image of the device itself, a smaller toy. Their own doll-forms moved in around it, quickly dwindling, lost in an instant beneath, the green-shining shape of the lodge, the doll-house villa above it. The villa shrank, the model city shrank, the diminished planet shrank, until a toy Malili swam into the scan. The needle wavered. Cyra wrung her thin blue fingers and bent to make another fine adjustment. The needle steadied, pointing not quite at Malili.

  “Still approaching.” Her eyes sick, she locked from his father to him. “The same intense source. Speed no longer tachyonic. Already this side of Malili and decelerating toward a Kai orbit.”

  You’ll have to move fast,” his father said. “And hope for better luck than you can reasonably expect.”

  He learned then that he was to go on to Northdyke and try again for the aid they had failed to find.

  “Take your own compass,” Cyra told him, “to demonstrate the danger. When the ship gets close enough, you’ll be able to pick it up.”

  He stayed with them that night, while she worked late, assembling a hand weapon for him, a shielded monopole in a flat pocket case no longer than his finger.

  “Keep it with you.” She showed him how to activate it. “But don’t use it unless you must. It ou
ght to knock out a humanoid at close range, but those farther away would detect the rhodo field.”

  “What’s close range?”

  “A few meters, I hope. One or two at least. Just point it and push the slide. If it works, you stop the humanoid.”

  “If it doesn’t, you’re in trouble.” His father frowned, absently fingering the blue-ridged scar. “Their top priority has always been their own defense, and the only danger they know is rhodo attack. Human beings aren’t allowed to play with rhodo toys.”

  Cyra didn’t want to risk the rhodar again, for fear the humanoids might already be near enough to pick up its search beam, but she thought his tachyon compass would still be safe. They carried it up into the dim and frigid suntime for a trial. Alive at once, the pointer crept slowly along the jagged north horizon to overtake and pass the dull red sun.

  “They’re here,” she whispered. “In orbit!”

  20

  Navarch The head of the ship, chosen by the Bridge, which is a parliamentary body elected by the duly franchised shipmen.

  He rode the tubeway north. With the Bridge about to meet, Northdyke was crowded, the hotels filled. The shabby room he found was off a disreputable tunnel under a factory district beyond the exclusive Meteor Gap suburb.

  Nobody wanted to hear his news of the humanoid invasion. A junior official at the space admiralty cut him off in scornful anger. The regent had warned against malicious rumors, and at this critical time, such wild tales were a danger to the ship. Refusing to listen, he ordered Keth out of the building.

  Cyra had given him Greel’s office address in the Bridge complex, but the receptionist there said he was away, attending a meeting out of the capital. At the Vorn headquarters, a security officer said all the top fleet executives were at an emergency meeting out of the capital. When he called the regent’s residence, a secretary said the regent was out of the capital.

  Nobody would say where or what the meeting was, but he began to feel a tightening expectancy. That night in his room he heard a holo newsman’s rumor that the regent would present a startling announcement to the convening Bridge. Though the regent himself was not available for comment, informed sources were suggesting that a second zone was being opened on Malili to exploit a fabulous Vorn thorium strike in the north hemisphere.

  Keth shook his head at that; Brong would have known of any such strike. He tried the tachyon compass again. Even in his room, many levels down, the needle followed a crawling point on the south wall, seeking what had to be a humanoid transport.

  At last, next morning, he found Greel back from that mysterious meeting. An impatient, wheezing, fat-faced man, hard of hearing and loud of voice, the aging Bridgeman received him with a scowl and kept him standing in front of a vast black marble desk.

  “So you’re Kyrone’s son?”

  “With news for you, sir. Urgent news from him and Cyra Sair—”

  Not listening, Greel turned to peer and mutter into a hooded holocom.

  He began again, “My father—”

  “Frankly, I’ve heard too much of your father.” Greel glowered at him. “A paranoid fanatic. Possibly a murderer. I’ve been tolerant—far too tolerant—because I knew Cyra long ago. But I feel no obligation to him, and certainly none to you, young man. With the Bridge about to meet, I’ve no time—”

  “Sir, a tachyonic transport from the Dragon is now in orbit around Kai.” He had brought the compass in his bag, and he stepped forward with it now. “I’ve got scientific evidence—”

  “Stand back, Kyrone.” Greel batted the air with a fat white hand. “I’ve heard your father’s ranting about the wicked humanoids about to descend on us. A delusion as old as Kai.”

  “Cyra’s a scientist.” He tried to swallow his resentment of the old man’s arrogance. “She has detected and traced the humanoid ship with rhodo instruments. I can show it to you, in orbit now—”

  Greel was frowning into his holocom.

  “Listen, sir!” Desperate, Keth lifted his voice. “The humanoids took the Kyrone. They took the Fortune. They’re back again. Let me show you—”

  With an ironic grunt, Greel swung to him.

  “I’ve news for you, young man. News I’m just this moment free to reveal. About that object in orbit. It’s the Fortune herself—”

  “Sir!” Keth stared. “That can’t be true—”

  “Don’t contradict me!” Greel’s white fat quivered. “I know she’s back, because I’ve seen the Navarch himself, last night, at a confidential meeting at his summer villa in Meteor Gap. He came down on the first shuttle, looking very fit. He’s to address the Bridge today—and you will excuse me now.”

  Keth rushed to the Bridge chamber in time to push into the packed guest gallery. Startled whispers around him spread conflicting reports about the Fortune’s return and what the Navarch would say. When Commodore Zoor appeared at last, escorting the aged leader to the podium, the sudden hush was almost painful.

  “Old?” He heard puzzled murmurs. “He looks so young!”

  The lawmakers rose to cheer. Keth stood with them, staring. In holo interviews, the Navarch had always been leaning on some younger aide, looking withered and infirm. Now he glided ahead of the fattish commodore, moving like a dancer.

  “Fellow shipfolk—”

  Smiling serenely, oddly casual, he strolled aside from the microphones and spoke without notes, his unaided voice pealing through the chamber with surprising clarity and power.

  “We’re glad to be back. Our long absence must have been a mystery. I understand that the holo people have aired reports that our ship was disabled by collision with a meteor or forced down into the jungles of Malili.

  “The truth, however, is far stranger than any such rumor. The history of our voyage will amaze you, and its outcome promises to open a dazzling new epoch in the history of Kai. I’ll tell you about it, but first I must correct an old misapprehension—an unfortunate misconception of the humanoids.”

  He waited for a rustle of surprise to die.

  “Demon machines! That’s how we’ve always been asked to see them—as part of the legend that our forefathers came here to avoid them. A tragic error, friends!” His head shook gravely. “Due, I suppose, to the destruction of our historical records during the Black Centuries.

  “The tragedy arose from a sinister distortion of the truth. The principal villains seem to have been the founders and the leaders of the Lifecrew—the infamous organization that has always claimed to be protecting us against evil humanoids, inventing terror tales about them to insure its own support. Though it fell into a deserved decline when we found no humanoids on Malili, a murderous extortionist named Kyrone has recently been trying to revive its malevolent lies—the lies we have returned to expose.

  “Friends, we’ve met the humanoids!”

  Shock stilled the chamber for an instant, before the first scattered gasps swelled into an unbelieving uproar. The Navarch stood waiting, poised and clearly pleased, the dull old eyes that Keth recalled now strangely bright. At his commanding gesture, all sound subsided.

  “In flight to Malili, we were just reaching escape velocity when we were overtaken by a humanoid craft—a tachyonic cruiser so large that the Fortune had been hauled aboard before we knew what was happening. Humanoid units came aboard to offer us the service ordained by their wise Prime Directive.

  “They’re beautiful!”

  His lyric voice pealed against the vault.

  “I wish, friends, that I could show them to you now, but you’ll all be meeting them soon. Black, of course, but cleanly shaped and shining, swift and graceful in every motion, attentive even to unuttered thoughts, totally devoted to human ease and comfort. Now, as I recall their universe—the new universe they’ve created for mankind—it seems a dream of paradise.

  “They took us to tour half a hundred of their worlds. Kyronia first—the planet of the Dragon, where they arrived just too late to rescue the heroic Captain Neelo Vorn from the amphibian mon
sters that had attacked his brave little colony.

  “A savage planet then, but the humanoids have already transformed it. Filled it with palaces more magnificent than men ever built for themselves, and pleasure gardens more exotic. Yet, in comparison to the older worlds they showed us, it’s still crudely backward.

  “They escorted us to see fairylands you can’t imagine. Whole populations free of want and care and fear and pain, happily relieved of class and competition, living in the joy and splendor we have come back to promise you.

  “Each of us found wonderlands where we longed to stay—grandeur so dazzling, beauty so piercing, delights so enchanting, that leaving them was agony. Yet none of us stayed, even though we were offered the option, because the humanoids have promised to transform Kai.

  “We need no longer scheme to loot Malili to keep our world alive, because the humanoids can transmute our own naked stone into any material—even into boundless energy—to build and power our new utopia. They can even remake our wretched climate, to warm us through the moontimes and illuminate the Darkside.

  “That’s why we’re back. To dispel your old fears, my friends, and deny the old lies. To welcome you into the humanoid universe. Tachyonic transports will be arriving soon, and our old spacedecks must be modified to support their enormous weight. You, too, must be prepared. The service of the humanoids is never imposed. It must be fully explained and freely chosen.

  “I beg you, friends, to reflect well before you choose. If you accept the humanoids, they can transform Kai into a more perfect paradise than any religion ever promised. If you refuse, they’ll simply pass on and leave us alone.”

  His voice sank into a solemn pause.

  “Alone forever, I believe, because our fast-moving binary star is carrying them beyond easy contact with their central computer plexus on Wing IV—we’re already outside the normal limits of their service. Other settled worlds are eager to receive them, and there are limits even to their vast resources. They won’t be offering us a second chance,