“Don’t you like it?” Her concern seemed too quick. “An excellent vintage.”
“I’m just clumsy.” He fumbled for his napkin and mopped at the table. “Sorry.”
“We were talking about your people.”
“We’re out of touch.” He felt a surprising surge of confidence. “You know we’ve never been close. A voicecard every month or so. Never much news.”
“Maybe I have news for you.” Her quick voice brightened. “I got your address here from a receptionist at the fleet. When you were so long getting back to your room, I asked around again. Bridgeman Greel told me you’d called on him. He said Cyra and your father were staying at his south summer villa.” Though she still seemed casually unconcerned, he felt sick with himself. Very gently, she was calling him a liar. Perhaps the wine had already dulled him. He sat straighter, trying to seem merely surprised.
“I remember Cyra speaking of Greel,” he said. “I think they were friends at school.”
“We’ve been calling the villa, but nobody answers.” Her troubled frown was only fleeting. “The Navarch wants us to talk to them—just to assure them that the humanoids will forgive all their Lifecrew silliness.” She glanced at him again, too keenly. “Can’t you guess where they’ve gone?”
“I’ve no idea.” He felt a little relieved; she hadn’t directly accused him. “We’re out of touch.”
“Greel says they’ve told him about their rhodo research.” Her gentle persistence began to seem relentless. “He says they claim to have a monopole out of the old Deliverance. They wanted to use it to build some sort of weapons system against the humanoids.”
Chilled and rigid, he sat silent, trying not to think about the tachyon compass he had hidden in the air duct or the tiny rhodo weapon m his pocket.
“They ought to be warned.” Urgency edged her tone. “Because the humanoids reserve rhodomagnetics so strictly for themselves. They could get into dreadful difficulties.”
“I—” He found the wine glass in his hand again and set it down so hard it splashed. “You scared me,” he muttered. “I’ll certainly warn them, if I ever see them. But I’ve no way to find them.”
“Sorry, darling!” She was tenderly contrite. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, but they could be hurt. The humanoids are never evil, but they have to be efficient. The occasional misguided people who have tried to defy them have always been disarmed and restrained. Those who have accepted them have always been glad. I want us to accept them, Keth.”
He had begun to feel a new glow of pleasure in the lilt of her voice. Relaxing a little, he let his arms sprawl on the table and leaned to admire her vivid loveliness. Everything else seemed slightly out of focus.
“You’ll soon see how very wonderful they are.” Her charming arms opened and her fine teeth gleamed. “But we’ve talked about too many things.” She brushed back her shining hair. “Let’s enjoy our supper. Try one of these.”
She put a silver-dusted berry to his lips.
“A moonfruit from my aunt’s hothouse. You’ll love it.”
Its juice had a tangy sweetness, and he had to say he liked it. There was smoked mutox from the Darkside ranch and a huge red-meated mushroom grown in a worked-out mine. There were golden suncorn cakes.
And there was the wine.
She filled his glass again and kept lightly urging him to enjoy it. Sometimes he nearly did. She was Chel, his best friend all his life, changed amazingly since that time at Greenpeak when she wanted them to see each other nude, but still too freshly innocent to mean harm to anybody. Yet he always recalled his aversion to that peppery aftertaste. He thought he caught flashes of annoyance when he didn’t sip, but she always grew more tenderly alluring.
“I want to show you my new room,” she told him when he pushed his plate away. “One my father built when he owned Vara Vorn, before he went off to die. A shame the humanoids got there too late to save him on Kyronia! My uncle’s study, later, till he went out to the Zone. My aunt had it redone for me.”
They climbed a long spiral stair. The turns made him giddy and she caught his arm once when he almost lost his balance. Her electric touch and her bright scent swept him with a wave of warm desire, and he almost forgot to fear the humanoids.
It was the topside room where he had talked to Admiral Vorn. The Winteisend landscape, kilometers below the wide thermal windows, looked queerly luminous and cold. Looking out and down across it, he swayed unsteadily again.
“Just in time!” Excitement hushed her to a throaty whisper. “I’ve always loved eclipses.”
He had been facing the sun, a great orange ball bitten in half by the far white horizon, but now he saw that she had cleared the windows behind him to show the shadow of Kai, small and round and very black, creeping across the enormous copper-colored dome of Malili.
“When I was a child my uncle used to let me slip in here to watch them.” Gently, she touched his hand. “I used to think of my father and the plans he had spoken of for me. I thought eclipses would be lucky for me.” She swayed closer, her whisper more intimate. “Perhaps this one will be lucky for us.”
“When I was a child I never saw Malili eclipsed.” His tongue seemed clumsy. “It happens only in the moon—moontimes, and I was always underground. I do recall Malili eclipsing the sun. Blotting it out for hours. The sky dark and strange, and cold winds blowing, and sometimes a thunderstorm.”
He shivered, perhaps from his old terror of those black eclipses, perhaps from the forbidding chill of the snowscape, perhaps from something he had forgotten. Because she was so near and warm and dear, he caught her hand and drew her closer. She raised her face to kiss him, and her mouth had the hot sharp tang of the Navarch’s wine.
The bed was a huge platform, round as the room, covered with silken white mutoxen fur. She drew away from their kiss to get her breath and tugged him gently toward the bed.
“I used to dream of this,” she whispered. “When I still hoped you would come into the fleet.”
23
Wing IV The first humanoid planet and the site of the rhodomagnetic plexus that drives and controls the humanoids. No human beings are allowed within five light-years.
He staggered a little, as if that high room had rocked upon its ice-clad peak. The Navarch’s wine? Or Chelni herself? Everything else seemed blurred and dimmed, but she was incandescent. Her sheer crimson wrapper was sliding down to the rug, and her bare beauty stunned him.
For a moment he couldn’t move at all. She had glided closer, her musky scent intoxicating. Her nimble fingers helped shuck off his shirt. Her soft hair fragrant in his face, her sleek arms exciting, she had bent to open his trousers when it struck him that she might discover the rhodo weapon in his pocket.
Terror jarred him.
“The wine!” He swayed away from her. “I’m afraid we’re drunk.”
“Afraid?” She straightened, laughing at him. “Forgive me, darling. I keep forgetting how much you have to learn. You needn’t ever fear anything again. Neither all society nor any human being. Neither want nor pain. Not since—”
Her gay smile mocked him.
“I’d wanted us to forget the humanoids, but I suppose we’ve time enough.” She nodded toward the huge windows, toward that black shadow-blot on Malili’s dull-red mystery. “I know you don’t yet understand them, but you will. I hope to make it easier for you.”
Her arms slid around him. Her hard nipples brushed his bare chest, and her heady scent enveloped him.
“You’ll find them forgiving.” Her warm breath caressed him, scented like the spicy wine. “And I do know, darling, that you’ll need their forgiveness. Because you haven’t been quite candid with me.”
He knew she felt his shudder.
“What—” His hoarse whisper caught. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You can trust me, dear.” She laughed at him softly, her breasts vibrant against him. “You’ll have to trust me now. Because you weren’t quite so clever as you
thought. Not when you tried to hide all you know about the monopole.”
“But I don’t—don’t know anything.”
“I know what you know.” Her strong arms slid down his back to pull him even closer. “You see, dear, I was in the Vorn museum today, looking at the artifacts somebody had brought back from the dead levels under Greenpeak—”
“Was there a monopole?”
“You silly dear, you know there wasn’t!” Her chuckle throbbed against his chest. “The most puzzling thing in the find was a modern holocam, lying there in mud and dust centuries old. I recognized it. The one I gave you, darling, on your eleventh birthday.”
Stunned, he couldn’t breathe.
“So I know you were in that vault,” she murmured. “I know you found the monopole there. I know you took it to Cyra and your father. I know they used it to make the rhodomagnetic device they showed Bridgeman Greel—”
“Sorry!” he gasped. “I must go—”
“Darling!” She clung fast. “You really can’t go anywhere. You must make your peace with the humanoids. You’ll find them wonderfully forgiving, but they’ll want to know what you’ve done with that other forbidden device you were trying to show the Bridgeman today—”
“No!” He shuddered. “There was no device—”
“You’re a poor liar, darling.” Lightly, she kissed his frozen lips. “I talked to Greel this morning. You had just left his office. You had the device in a bag—a battered old mutox-hide spacebag your father used to use—”
“Chel—Chel!” He felt trapped in a mad nightmare. “I’m terrified of the humanoids and I don’t know what to do. I’ve got —got to get away!”
“Not yet, dear.” Her arms hardened around him. “If you want forgiveness from the humanoids, you’ll have to help them now. You’ll have to tell them how you disposed of that wicked device, and help them hunt your father down.”
He thrust at her arms, but they held on with an unexpected strength.
“Darling, please!” she breathed. “You mustn’t be afraid, but there are other things they’ll want to know. About your trip to Malili, because they’ve never been there. About what Bosun Brong is up to, out there in the Lifecrew office. About how my poor, misguided uncle has come to let the Crew deceive him so. Most urgently, they’ll want to know what became of the two kilograms of palladium he let you bring back to your father.” She shook her head in gentle reproof, her bright hair rippling.
“Really, Keth, with so much to explain, it’s silly for you to think of running away. You can’t escape the humanoids—nobody can. But you’ll find them understanding, if you make a full confession. You know I love you, dear. I’ll do my best to help, if you’ll only let me.”
“Oh, Chel!” He shivered in her unrelenting arms. “You know I always loved you—”
“But not enough.”
“You always asked—asked too much.” His voice was hoarse and broken. “I want to trust you now. But don’t you see—don’t you see why I can’t?”
“You must.”
“I’ve listened to you, Chel.” He tried and failed to push her back, tried desperately to read whatever lay behind her warmly smiling mask. “I’ve heard the Navarch and the Commodore. You’re all too—too different. Too happy and too glib and too certain. I don’t know what the humanoids have done to you, but you aren’t—aren’t yourselves!”
“Keth, please!” She looked bewildered and hurt. “You’re insane!”
“I don’t know what I am, or what you are!” With both cold and shaking hands, he shoved at her white shoulders. “But you’ve got to let me go. Before—before I crack up. I’ll find my own way out.”
“Dari—”
Suddenly silent, she quivered and stood still. Her strangely stiffened arms slipped away from his waist. Her vivid features had frozen. Her narrowed, staring eyes didn’t even follow as he stumbled away.
“Stop!” He was half across the room before she spoke behind him. “Stop where you are.”
Pitched high and musically sweet, the voice was no longer hers, no longer even human.
“You aren’t going anywhere.”
Dazed, he looked back.
She stood where he had left her, nude beside the great round bed, the scarlet wrapper on the rug at her feet. Utterly motionless, she might have been carved out of marble, or ice. Her bare beauty stabbed through him, keener than his fear.
“Chel—”
His hoarse voice froze, because he had seen a fine black line that began at the center of her high forehead and ran down across her nose and her stiffened upper lip, down around her stubborn chin, down between her dark-nippled breasts and on through her navel to her black-haired pubes.
The line widened. Her face and her breasts fell apart, revealing something sleek and hard and black beneath. Alive again, she caught her long black hair with both her hands to peel her scalp and face away.
She, it, tugged and shrugged to rip the white flesh from arms and shoulders, to strip it off a narrow torso, which shone with its own dark luster and glinted with a bright yellow nameplate:
HUMANOID
SERIAL NO. KM-42-XZ-5 1,746,893
“TO SERVE AND OBEY,
AND GUARD MEN FROM HARM”
“At your service, Shipman Kyrone,” its new voice crooned.
Stricken, he stood watching it discard the grotesque garment that had been Chelni’s body. It ungloved its own deft black hands, used them to strip the lean dark legs and dancing feet, turned at last to toss the shapeless, bloodless, grisly thing toward the white-furred bed.
“Shipman, are you ill?”
Gliding with more than a human dancer’s grace, it came toward him soundlessly. Soft hues of bronze and blue shone across its sleek and sexless blackness. It was beautiful and monstrous. Recoiling, numbed with terror of it, he found no word to say. Stiffly, himself mechanical, he shook his head.
“You need not speak until you wish.” It paused close to him, blind-seeming, steel-colored eyes fixed on his face. Its high clear voice was eerily sweet. “We are here, as we will always be. We exist to serve you. Ask for what you need.”
“Stand back!” He fought for breath and voice. “Just let me go.”
“That, sir, will be impossible.” Except for the quick, black lips, it was absolutely motionless. “Since you have used rhodomagnetic devices in an unfortunate attempt to delay our establishment here, you will require our most attentive service for the rest of your life.”
“I don’t want your service.”
“Human wants are seldom relevant,” it sang. “We exist to serve human needs. In every way we can, we do respect the most trivial human wish. No human desire, however, can be allowed to endanger the universal service ordained by our own creator on Wing IV.”
“Does that mean—” Horror clotted his voice. “Docs your
Prime Directive allow you—” He shrank again from the bed, where Chelni’s crimson-nippled breasts stared out of that hideous crumpled pile like huge accusing eyes “Did you kill her?”
24
Evolution The process of change through which the primitive creates the higher. Simple atoms give rise to complex molecules, these give rise to life, life to mind, mind to the computer and the humanoid machine.
The tiny mechanism turned slightly, its steel-gray eyes seeming to smile at the empty thing on the bed.
“Sir, we never kill,” its high voice chided him. “We cannot kill.”
“Then what became of Chelni Vorn?”
It stood still. His query must have been carried by timeless tachyon beam back to Wing IV for answer by the computer plexus there. He waited, not breathing.
“She is well,” the machine tweeted suddenly. “She has accepted our service. Since you have displayed a long-standing emotional attachment to her, you should be pleased to know that she is very happy now. When you accept us, she will be duly informed. That should make her even happier.”
“Where is she?”
“In a p
lace we prepared for her.”
“What sort of place?”
“One designed to make her happy.” For another instant it stood silent. “Like many naive human beings,” it added abruptly, “she rejected the initial offer of our service. All those we removed from the Vorn Fortune appeared disturbed, until we were able to prepare suitable environments to make them rejoice in us.”
“All?” He shuddered. “The Navarch—speaking to the Bridge —he was actually a humanoid?”
“True, sir.”
Suddenly weak, he clutched at the back of a chair. His senses blurred. Nothing in the room seemed quite real. For one desperate instant, he tried to imagine that the dark machine and the flattened human guise on the bed were hallucination, born perhaps of that odd-flavored wine. But the humanoid had darted to catch his arm, unbelievably quick and solidly real.
“Are you unwell, sir?” it trilled. “Do you require medication?”
He flung it off and staggered back.
“So that’s your scheme?” His hoarse tone trembled. “A shipload of lying humanoids, disguised to look like our rulers and our friends, begging us—bribing us and tricking us—to be your slaves. And you call it service!”
Nothing ever altered its benign solicitude.
“We’ve come, sir, to give ourselves. That is required of us by our wise Prime Directive, wherever we find human beings in need of us. Our fortunate chance encounter with the Vorn Fortune allowed us to announce our arrival in a most efficient way.”
“It enabled you to lie!”
“The Prime Directive has never required the truth. We have found, in fact, that undisguised truth is always painful, and often harmful to mankind.”
“I can’t believe lies are good.”
“Human belief is seldom related to truth.”
“So you have always lied?” His angry fist lifted toward its black, high-cheeked benevolence. “To the whole universe?”
“You should not resent us, sir.” It neither shrank from his fist nor made any hostile gesture. “We simply follow our Prime Directive.”
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 41
