He shivered a little, blinking at his yellow glove.
“My mother thought I hadn’t inherited my father’s bloodrot immunity, but there has never been a test. The time I was exposed, they burned off my hands before they really knew. It’s time, I think, to take the chance.”
“I—” Keth’s breath caught. “May I go?”
“And risk the rot?” In sad astonishment, Brong shook his head. “Think about it, Crewman. For myself, I could have an even chance. For you—” His sad voice fell.
“I know the humanoids,” Keth told him. “Too well to care—”
“If you want—” Brong studied him, and suddenly stripped a glove off to offer his hand. “Well go together, Crewman.”
He gripped the hard metal, and it squeezed back with an almost painful force. With a murmur to Vythle, Vorn opaqued the vast windows. She bent to the hushed holophone, while he stalked back and forth across the darkened room.
“Bosun, I envy you.” He came padding back to them. “The two of you. Because I’ve lived the way I liked. If I knew less about the way bloodrot kills—” His cragged face turned bitter. “If we two had any sort of chance . . .”
Vythle rose from the holo.
“I got through to Sally Port Three.” She turned to Brong. “Your craft is cleared through the gate—if you get there in time. You’ll have to move. The guards report disorder. Mobs in the tunnels and most of the slideways stopped.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” Keth whispered. “Thank you both.”
“Move!” Vorn gestured them out. “The luck of Kai to you!” Glancing back at the dead humanoid as they left, he saw Vorn and Vythle beyond it, ignoring it, slipping into a desperate embrace. She murmured something, her voice still softly calm.
They found all the slideways idle and the main tunnels blocked with shouting crowds. At one jammed intersection, a news holo was hooting and flashing a bulletin alert. Commodore Zelyk Zoor—his humanoid copy—exploded into the field.
“Peace, friends!” it bawled. “I bring you peace!”
The mob fell silent, awed by its more than human power.
“You can forget your fears,” it thundered into the tunnels. “Because I bring good news from Kai. The humanoids are there, and you wouldn’t recognize the barren little rock where most of you were born. Their infinite benevolence has created the ease and plenty and boundless joy once reserved for dreams of paradise.
“Paradise, friends!”
The vibrant voice soared and suddenly fell.
“Yet I have a painful warning for you. Because evil people are seeking to rob us of these great gifts. One of them—friends, it breaks my heart to say this—one of these human demons is my own cousin, Admiral Torku Vorn, whom I have come to replace as Zone Commander through this era of transition. Two monstrous traitors are with him. The Leleyo halfbreed sometimes known as Bosun Brong, and the infamous Keth Kyrone—”
As if overcome with horror, the image bent its face into quivering upraised hands.
“Friends, I can scarcely bear—scarcely bear to speak of him.” The rolling tones shuddered and broke. “Keth Kyrone—the unspeakable demon that ripped the skin from my lovely bride while she was still alive!”
It wiped at streaming tears.
“They’re out among you, friends. For my poor Chelni’s sake —for all our sakes—I beg you to hunt them down before they do more harm. The humanoids are reluctant to let me urge you to any violence, but their own wise Prime Directive impels them to act for the greatest good of the greatest number. Their guiding logic decrees that these few hideous fiends must be destroyed, for the sake of innocent billions.
“So search for them, friends! Recent holostats of all four will be displayed—the fourth is the former Commander’s merciless gun-girl. All four have fled from Zone Command. With the spacedeck closed, they’re somewhere still among you.
“Kill them, friends! For our dear humanoids and the sweet sake of peace—”
Brong twitched his sleeve.
“Come, Crewman! Let’s get off the mainways.”
36
Symbiosis A relationship between life forms that enables each to aid the survival of the other. The Malilian ecology includes a network of mutant symbiotic systems fostered by the Leleyo.
Keth followed into an empty side tunnel. Half a block along it, they found an importer’s cave, left unlocked and abandoned. A freightway from it dropped them to gate level before the power went off. Seeming at home in the blinding dark, Brong guided him out at last into the sanicraft maintenance shop, where the great golden machines loomed and gleamed under dim emergency lamps.
Brong unsealed a massive door. Heart thumping with mixed elation and dread, Keth followed him through cramped and shadowy spaces into the narrow cab. The icy air had a stale chemical bite. After the heavy thunk of the closing door, the stillness seemed grave-like.
In a dark-goggled helmet, too intent to talk, Brong seemed nearly as alien as another humanoid. His deft gold fingers brought the craft alive. Ventilators whirred. The console glowed. Cleated tracks clanking on bare concrete, they lumbered up a long ramp into yellow-green daylight. Brong hailed the guards.
“Sanicraft Auli to Sally Port Three. Exit cleared by Zone Command for perimeter patrol.”
They waited. Keth sat with Brong in the cab. Breathing hard, peering up through the bubble at the laser turret over the gate, he half expected a blinding bolt. For a long time there was no response. He began to wonder if the guards had already joined the humanoids.
“Sally Port to Auli.” A sudden thin voice squeaked out of Brong’s helmet. “Hold where you are.” The squeaking grew keener. “Conflicting orders. Can’t make out who’s in command.”
“Admiral Vorn against the humanoids.” Brong’s chuckle seemed oddly uncaring. “Let ’em fight it out, and the winner take the rot!”
He mopped sweat from his still brown mask. The ventilators whispered. The big machine quivered once, and Keth heard the muffled thump of some far explosion. Small sounds rustled and chirped m Brong’s helmet, and a tiny voice tweeted, “Fighting reported in the tunnels. Zone Command dead.”
“As we’ll all be,” Brong chuckled again. “Unless we fix that hole in the perimeter.”
“True enough, Shipman. Life comes first.” The yellow barrier jerked and rattled aside. “Exit open.”
They lurched out through the gate and down across shattered stone and thawing snow, toward the blue flicker of the new perimeter. Keth turned in his seat to look back. Soaring above the rust-mottled wall and the Zone’s brown roofs, the transport seemed even huger than the one he had fled on Kai. Wide gangways sloped out of its bright black mirror, already dark with landing humanoids.
With no glance back or any word for him, Brong kept them grinding and skidding down the slope. Before they reached the new wall, faint voices began to whistle and chitter in his helmet. Abruptly he stopped the craft and spun the turret to face the peak and that overwhelming ship.
Listening, he raised a shining hand for silence. They waited, until at last a yellow-striped command wagon crashed through the tower gate and came lurching recklessly after them. Brong shed his helmet and darted out of the cab.
“Can’t we fight?” Keth called after him. “Or run for the jungle?”
“Cheer up, Crewman!” Brong was unbolting the loading door. “If we must fight, we’ll have help.”
It was Admiral Vorn who staggered aboard with a red-spattered bandage around his head, Vythle guiding him.
“Ambush!” he muttered. “That humanoid copy of Keth’s father. Waiting for us at the gate. Touched me with a laser, but
Vyth shot it down. We’re going with you, Bosun. Nowhere”—his hoarse voice broke—“nowhere left!”
Brong rebolted the door and dashed back to the cab.
“Guard your eyes.” The bubble burned blue when he lit the sterilamps. He showed Keth a second pair of goggles. “We get a healthy dose of UV, even here inside,”
Vythl
e offered to man the laser turret.
“Qualified!” Vorn rumbled. “As the humanoids know.”
Brong let her climb into the fighting turret. They lumbered on down the slope. Watching the flash of Brong’s hands on the controls, Keth felt as helpless as the blind man crouching on the signal seat behind them. The world he knew was lost. Looking for another ahead, all he saw beyond that painful flicker was a gray and endless waste of cloud beneath the greenish yellow sky.
“Approaching Telegate Three,” Brong called as they neared the outer wall. “Request exit to inspect exterior U V—”
“Exit denied!” his helmet squeaked. “Patrol permit voided. Return at once—”
He snapped off the angry whine and drove them toward the yellow metal barrier.
“Hang on! We’re ramming through.”
The impact checked and rocked the craft, but the barrier crashed down. They crunched across its wreckage and plowed into deeper snows beyond, where no nukes had wanned the rocky ledges that tilted down forever into that gray abyss.
Brong called for Vythle to watch for pursuit, but she reported nothing. The zigzag wall sank behind. The UV shimmer faded. At last the brown-roofed peak was gone, but still the tachyonic transport leapt above the snows into the lemon sky. Keth shivered from a helpless sense of blind steel eyes fixed on them forever.
“Cheer up, Crewman!” Brong must have sensed his mood. “Our choice is made—if we had a choice. At least for now, we’re still free. All Malili ahead. Look alive, and I’ll show you how to run the craft.”
With care against overloads and voltage surges, the twin reactors might last two years. “Likely longer than we will,” Brong murmured. The sterilamps on their flexing booms must be kept burning against the armor, the filter system kept intact, the air pressure positive.
“Watch for rocks that could scratch us,” he muttered. “Rocks on the ground or out of the air—the dragon bats dive-bomb intruders. Watch for mud—rust can start under it. Watch for your life!”
They dropped at last into a great U-shaped canyon carved by old glaciers, its rust-mottled walls plunging up so far that even the starship was hidden. On a level stretch of ice, Brong let him take the wheel.
Afraid at first that the heavy machine might lurch, in spite of him, into some deadly rock, he soon learned to enjoy its immense responsive power. He was almost sorry when Brong took over again to climb a long boulder-strewn moraine. Before they reached its summit, the holocom began chirping for attention.
“Take it, Crewman.” Brong gestured at the tank. “Not that I look for good news.”
Keth lit the tank and shrank from the blindly smiling image of a humanoid.
“At your service, Keth Kyrone,” it lilted. “We advise you and your companions to abandon your irrational attempt to evade our care. We urge you to wait where you are until we can overtake you and escort you back to safety.”
“We’ve seen your service, and we refuse it.”
“But. sir, you cannot do that.” Its sweet tones rose in mild protest. “Each one of you has gained forbidden knowledge or abetted forbidden behavior. You will each, therefore, require our most attentive service so long as you survive.”
“You’ll have to catch us first!”
“We can do that, sir,” it assured him brightly. “We are following in three vehicles which we have modified to double their power. We advise you most urgently to stop and wait. Attempting to continue your reckless adventure, you can only destroy your own vehicle and lose your fives.
“In obedience to our wise Prime Directive—”
Brong’s gold hand slashed at the switch, and the black image vanished.
“Let’s not have the devils homing on our signal.”
Beyond the moraine, they dived into that featureless fog. The world shrank around them. A luminous blue in their lamps, the fog was blinding. Dark rock masses loomed out of it, just meters ahead.
Reducing speed, Brong steered between dim greenish shadows that came and went on the hooded screen of the sonar-scope. Keth found comfort in the cover of the fog, but only for a moment. Nothing could blind the sightless humanoids.
Vythle came down from the turret to look after Vorn. When he grudgingly admitted his pain, she found supplies in an aid locker and changed the dressing on his eyes. She wanted him to go back to a berth, but he sat stubbornly at the signal station, silently brooding.
Keth explored the galley and heated food. Though Vythle tried to feed Vorn, he would eat nothing. Brong took a few bites from the tray Keth brought, his gold fingers nimble with fork and cup, his dead face intent on the screen’s greenish glow. The ventilators sighed. Transmission gears whined. The whole craft quivered now and then to a muffled crunch of stone beneath the tracks. Keth began to feel the fog would last forever.
“Machines!” Vorn muttered suddenly, perhaps to himself. “I always loved them. A lovely little toy heat engine, on my fourth birthday. My first holoscope, programmed with odes about the old heroes saving their cities back in the Black Centuries. The private jet the fleet assigned us when I married. The Vorn reactors, when I took charge of them, pouring out the power that made us great. Our space machines. Even these golden sanicraft when I got to the Zone, and all the linked equipment defending the perimeter. But now—”
Keth heard his teeth grate.
“Humanoid machines!”
37
Life A transient early stage in the evolution of mind.
Later, after Vythle had gone back to her berth, the blind Admiral spoke of them.
“Misfits, both of us. I hated Greenpeak and the Academy. Silly rules and stupid teachers. Discipline that killed everything alive. I hated most of the Vorns I knew—proud fools ruled by stale tradition, repeating history’s dusty blunders. I hated society—the abject worship of status and money and power. Even hated my wife, for loving all that.”
He sat defiantly straight, empty hands flat on the signal board, white-bandaged head flung back as if trying to see.
“So I came to Malili. Found most of what I wanted here in the Zone. A place where rules were made to break, and guts meant more than names. And Vythle—”
He sat a moment silent.
“I think the name’s her own invention. Born down in the bilges—where my wife would have held her nose. Learned a game where you had to break the rules to stay alive. Scratched her way to shipfolk status and the Navarch’s staff. My own sort of misfit; I knew her in a second when we met. We’ve had fine years together. But now . . .”
His heavy body caved down upon the signal board.
“Now the humanoids are playing by their own mad rules.” He lay there silent, until Keth thought emotion had overcome him.
“History!” His slow voice rumbled again, more thoughtful than bitter. “Look at man’s history. A symbiosis, an ecologist might call it; bonds between machines and men. Links with the axe and the reactor. The counting stick and the computer. The raft and the starship. We took a million years to build the humanoids—the best machine of all!”
His chuckle was a hollow rattle that may have been a sob. A little later, yielding stubbornly to fatigue and pain, he asked Keth to help him back to his berth. At Brong’s command, Keth went to his own. He lay down unwillingly, expecting the lurching of the craft and the strain of the chase to keep him on edge, but suddenly Vythle was shaking him awake. It was time for them to drive.
That tiny blue-lit fog-world still shut them in. He took the wheel, picking their path among the shadowy masses on the sonar screen, while she ran the inertia tracker and traced their path across the chart. Her quiet skill surprised him.
“I think we’ve made it!” His spirits had risen. “If we ever get below the fog, we’ll surely meet the Leleyo—”
“Nothing they can do.” Her flat matter-of-factness astonished him again. “Our world now is this machine. We die when it does.” Smiling faintly in the greenish glow of the screen, she looked cool and sure and lovely. “A fact you have to take. After
all, it’s what we bargained for. All you had better expect.”
She studied him, nodding gravely.
“The Bosun, of course, can hope for more. If he turns out to be immune.”
Brong was driving again when they came down through the ceiling of cloud. Snow and ice were gone. Though the somber greens and blues of rust still stained the rocks around them, scarlet firegrass splashed a level meadow ahead, and the lower hills that fell away beyond were yellow and gold, hazed blue beneath the denser air.
Vythle climbed back into the fighting turret, and Keth took another driving lesson. To his surprise, Brong seemed to be seeking out hazards, skirting the lip of a cliff above a foaming river, sliding across a dangerous talus, jolting needlessly around the rocky rim of another inviting firegrass glade.
“Trying to hide our trail?”
“Or set a trap.” Brong had pushed up his goggles to scowl at the maptank. “That flat’s a mating place for dragon bats. They don’t like it violated.”
On a long plateau where clumps of yellow goldoak scattered the red firegrass, Brong let him drive again. Rust-dark crags rose into the cloud-roof behind them, but the landscape ahead looked less forbidding.
“The Leleyo?” He turned hopefully to Brong. “Could we meet them here?”
“Sorry, Crewman, but we can’t make miracles. They never get so high so early in the season. So don’t go dreaming of your lovely Nera Nyin. Here in bloodrot country, don’t you forget, her first naked touch could kill you.”
Depressed, he said nothing.
“Here’s what I hope for.” As if trying to cheer him again, Brong lit a map in the tank. “Your mother’s goal on her last trip—”
“The braintree?”
“The feyo tree.” The bright forefinger pointed. “We’re keeping close to her route. Beyond that range is the river she couldn’t cross. Doubt that we can. But we’ll try to get near and wait till our friends gather for their early summer feyolar. If we’re lucky—”
“Bosun!” Vythle’s call rang from the fighting turret. “Something I want you to check.”
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 48
