The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy

by Jack Williamson

  Brong climbed to join her. Keth drove on, more confidently now. The big machine had begun speaking to him, the whine of the drive rising and falling with every change in load from slope or soil. His mind meshed with it, he could almost forget the humanoids.

  Their attack stunned him.

  A dazzling flash. A thunder crack. The machine lurched and moaned and stopped. Ringing stillness and utter dark. He thought for an instant that he had been blinded, but then he could see the console’s glow.

  “Here to help us!” Savagely mocking, Vorn’s shout echoed through the craft. “Our metal symbiotes!”

  Though that first blast had opaqued the pilot bubble, Brong and Vythle were still in action. Motors hummed, training the fighting turret. The big laser crashed twice. Silence then, till he heard Brong climbing back down to the cab and knew the battle was over.

  “They’re dead—dead as we are!” Brong cleared the bubble and stood clicking his metal fingers, peering bleakly at the console. “If they ever had three machines, the others were already lost. Maybe in that river or to the dragon bats. Vythle got the one that knocked us out.”

  He tramped moodily on to inspect the reactors.

  “Vyth? Is Vyth hurt?”

  Vorn came staggering out of his berth in his underwear, the soiled bandage askew on his head. He groped along the passage until Vythle ran to meet him. They clung together.

  The whir of the fans was fading. A warning horn croaked and died. Red danger lights winked and dimmed on the console. The maptank went dark. A sudden bitter stink of burnt paint and plastic took Keth’s breath.

  “Killed us.” Brong came back, fingers clicking faster. “In too many ways. UV’s out. Right track fused. Cooling system gone. Both reactors dead—quenched and ejected when the meltdown started. Air pressure falling fast.”

  “Done for?” Vorn shook his blind head, pushing Vythle back. “Already done for?”

  “The craft is,” Brong said. “We get out now or not at all.” He pulled escape gear out of the locker. The suits were stiff gold-filmed plastic with helmet bubbles and airpacks. At first unwilling, Vorn let Vythle seal him into his coverall. Brong loaded their harness with survival gear. Gold-bladed machetes.

  Tubes of water and semifluid food. Lamps and ropes and rolled shelter sheets. Heavy gold-plated projectile guns.

  “Hang on to the guns.” His voice in the helmet was hollow and strange. “They’re your best medicine for bloodrot when that time comes.”

  38

  Machine Originating from makeshift compensations for the manifold defects of primitive organic life, the machine evolved into the ultimate vehicle for intelligence.

  Power packs and suit pressure checked, Brong unbolted and opened the loading door. Keth climbed down to the firegrass, still black and smoking from the laser bolt, and turned to help Vorn. Vythle followed. She said something, but the helmet reduced her voice to a dull reverberation.

  A few meters out, Keth turned back to stare. The damage appalled him. Only stumps and fragments were left of the sterilamp booms and the signal superstructures. Half the hull was black, its shielding gold vaporized.

  He left it, tramping after his companions. In the golden suits and mirrored helmets, they looked almost alike: Brong the smallest, Vorn the bulkiest, Vythle still somehow feminine in the way she moved.

  On a stony ridge beyond the crimson firegrass field, Brong unrolled a stiff yellow chart and gestured toward a V-shaped notch between haze-blued hills far off in the east. A river had cut it, he said, flowing down to join the greater glacial river that ran beneath the braintree.

  “No promise we’ll ever get there.” His radio voice was distorted and shrill, hard to make out. “But at least we’ll be farther from the humanoids.”

  Clumsy in his own heavy gear, aware again of Malili’s dragging gravity, Keth moved to offer aid to Vorn and Vythle. They stood together, awkwardly embracing. He caught the other arm, and they blundered after Brong toward that far V.

  “Service!”

  Faint and strange, that high sweet voice needled through his helmet. It froze him for a moment. When he looked back, the humanoid was gliding after them from the yellow glitter of the wreckage.

  “We urge you, shipfolk! Return!”

  A changed humanoid. Its singing tones were still the same, and its slender shape. It danced across the charred firegrass with the same fluid grace. Its golden brand still glinted. But the rest of its sleek and sexless nudity was no longer black, but clad now in harlequin velvet, blazing blues and lurid greens.

  Vorn’s helmet rang to a furious roar, and Vythle clung to his inflated sleeve to stop his mad rush toward the humanoid. Keth unsheathed his golden blade. Brong sprang aside, nimble in his suit, apparently just watching.

  “Service . . . difficult . . .” Its voice slowed, the high tones falling. “You must. . . come back . . . to the Zo—”

  The last vowel stretched out into a sustained musical hum that slowly sank and finally ceased. Gone rigid, the dead thing toppled toward them and fell into the scarlet firegrass, blind eyes down. A faint pull of blue dust rose around it—spores of the rust, Keth supposed, feeling grimly grateful for them.

  “Guess that settles that.” Brong’s radio voice had a sardonic snap. “They’ll never serve Malili.”

  They took turns assisting Vorn, who wanted no aid. He stumbled on rocks and clumps of brush, even when Vythle was calling anxious warnings. Sometimes he fell and seemed unwilling to rise again. Keth could sense his savage mood.

  Though they slogged and blundered hour after hour toward that blue-veiled V, it never seemed nearer. Inside the unyielding armor, Keth sweated and itched in spots he couldn’t reach. The heavy boots wore blisters on his heels. Yet Vorn and Vythle were his most urgent concern; their plight seemed even bleaker than his own.

  Neither the yellow-green sky nor the landscape changed. Only their bodies and the gold-cased chronographs told them when that long day was gone. Brong picked a level resting spot, showed them how to get food and water through the helmet tubes, how to work the elimination valves.

  Keth sprawled on a firegrass bed, too tired at first for sleep, too miserable in the cramping suit. A muffled crash woke him. Sitting up stiffly, he found Vythle standing a few meters away, her gold gun drawn.

  “Sorry, Keth.” Her radio voice was abrupt and brittle. “Thought I’d seen a humanoid. Half asleep when I fired. Nothing, I guess.”

  Brong had lifted his bubble-covered head, but then sank silently back. Vorn was lying on a scarlet hummock beyond. Vythle stepped back to him and stood beside him, as if on guard. Keth went back to sleep.

  “Wake up, Crewman!” Brong banged on his helmet. “We’ve a long way to go.”

  He looked for Vythle and found her still standing over Vorn, as if she hadn’t moved. His suit had collapsed around him, the pressure lost. One empty glove made a bright spot of yellow on the red grass a few meters from him—perhaps tom off and tossed away.

  Feeling numbed, he edged near enough to see the thin bones of hand and wrist reaching out of the flattened sleeve, still wet and red. A gold ring gleamed, unchanged. Grass and rock were stained red-black where fluid had drained out of the sleeve. Though Vorn’s gun was still on his belt, there was a round, black hole in the side of his helmet.

  Shaken, he turned away toward Vythle. She moved slightly toward him and stood still. He searched for her face, but all he could see in the golden mirror of her helmet was the diminished image of his own bulging suit. Though he wanted to offer some sign of compassion, she seemed so remote that he found nothing to say.

  “It’s all right, Keth.” Her tone surprised him with calm warmth, its note of pity even for him. “He had come as far as he could or wanted to. We’d hoped, of course, for more time together. Because we were in love. But I don’t regret the choice we made. Neither did he.” The bright helmet tilted, and he thought she was looking down at Vorn. “It’s better than life beneath the humanoids.”

  Brong
had come up beside them. Her yellow gloves took both their hands, her grasp quick and clinging. After a moment she waved them toward that far-off V and turned back to stand over Vorn.

  Beckoning him, Brong tramped silently on. When he glanced back, she still stood there, erect and bright and motionless. When he looked again, a thicket of orange thorns had hidden her. A little later, his helmet echoed to a distant gunshot.

  Brong paused for a moment, listening.

  “A hard thing, Crewman.” He was slogging on again. “But Malili never was a friendly place—not except to the Leleyo. The Admiral and his girl were well aware of that before they came with us.”

  A little later he stopped again, mirror-face turned to Keth.

  “Crewman, let’s strike a bargain. So long as we’re together, we’ll look after each other. If a time comes when we must separate, there’s something I must tell you. Something that may help you, though I can’t say it now. Till you’ve heard that, let’s agree that neither one will shoot himself. Promise, Crewman?”

  “I”—he had to gulp—“I promise.”

  Brong clapped a hard glove on the hard shoulder of his armor, and they tramped on together. As if searching for a topic not so painful, he began to talk about the feyo tree. All his life, he had heard the hints and rumors of its sacred power. With luck enough, in spite of everything, they might yet live to see it.

  “Could you—” Keth whispered. “Can’t you jump us there?”

  “If I could—” Brong’s voice rustled in his helmet, faint and forlorn. “I’ve been groping for it, Crewman. With all I know from the maps and all I remember from what your poor mother said when she got that glimpse. Not quite enough. If we were near enough to see it—”

  Fighting taller walls of thorns, retreating once from a bottomless bog of thick blue mud, they were three days reaching the river. It flowed deep and fast, and something had dyed it darkly green. Spores of the rust, Brong said, and Keth recalled that they were also the bloodrot pathogen.

  They slashed through the last thorn thickets and slept on a long gravel bank where spring Hoods had piled driftwood. When he woke, Brong was already at work on a raft, trimming logs and rolling them back into the shallows, binding them with thornbrush withes.

  The raft took two days to build. Poling out into the current at last, they floated three more days toward that slowly widening V. It became a yawning canyon as they neared it, where the narrowed river foamed against dark, rusted cliffs and plunged into unexpected rapids.

  Plumes of pale green spray danced ahead, above rocks that blocked half the channel. Mad currents caught and spun the creaking raft. Standing one at each end, they fought to fend it from collision. Keth leaned to push them past a foam-veiled boulder. His pole shattered. He staggered forward, slipped, went down into wild water.

  Though he tried to swim, the suit was too heavy, the rapids too savage. Carried under, he couldn’t see. The water mauled and battered him. His helmet rang from dazing impacts. After a time, he couldn’t breathe.

  The next he knew, he lay somewhere aground. The roar of the rapids was gone, and he saw yellow sky. Twisting painfully, he found himself on a flat sandbar in a litter of splintered driftwood.

  He was suffocating. Too desperate to think of consequences, he fought the latches with clumsy gloves and thrust the helmet off.

  39

  Braintree The feyo tree of Malili, derived from a wild plant whose fragrant poison sap attracted and killed animal prey, but mutated by the Leleyo into a sacred symbiote.

  The air was cool and sweet. He lay gasping long lungfuls of it. Growing slowly more awake, he began to savor the scents of Malili—odors of soil and growth, of rain and decay, all spiced with faint aromas he had no name for.

  Strength returning, he sat up. The river ran in a wide bend around the sandbar, diminishing walls of yellow-red thorn brush reaching far beyond the arc of dark green water. The splintered logs up and down the beach could have come from the raft, but he saw no trace of Brong.

  Tender from bruises, his body felt sticky and foul. He peeled off the rest of his suit, shivering when the wind hit him. Wading into the shallows to bathe, he stopped to shudder when the icy water stung his blistered heels.

  After one sick instant, he waded on. The blisters didn’t really matter; the bloodrot pathogen wouldn’t wait for breaks in the skin. The water felt good when he got over that first chill, and he scrubbed himself gratefully before he splashed back to the sandbar.

  Turning over what was left of his gear, he found the machete missing, and his last tubes of food and sterile water. No matter. His danger now was not starvation. Since he had washed in the green-stained river, he might as well drink it.

  Still clipped to the wet yellow belt, the gun did matter. With a little nod of satisfaction, he snapped it free—and reeled from a shock of horror that left him weak and ill. The gold plate was peeling away from green velvet patches on the steel. Cold and shaking, he tried the trigger. It snapped off under his finger. In a spasm of terror, he flung the weapon toward the slack green water.

  “Hold it, Crewman!”

  That hailing voice seemed too hearty to be real. He scowled uncertainly at the little figure limping around a thorn thicket, but it was Bosun Brong, wearing only a tom scrap of muddy underwear, gold hands flashing.

  “Don’t forget our bargain.”

  “I won’t shoot myself,” he promised wryly. “But I don’t have much to cheer about.”

  “More, maybe, than you know.” Brong came up to him and beckoned at a shattered log. “Sit down, Crewman. There’s something I’ve delayed telling you. Too long, maybe, but I didn’t know how you’d take it. Afraid you’d be ashamed of me.”

  He waited, too tense to sit. Brong darted a little way toward him and stopped again, that tight, brown, scar-marked face twitching as if with feeling it couldn’t express.

  “Crewman, I’ve always thought—” Something checked him. “I’ve always thought—” he whispered. “I believe you’re my son.”

  The damp wind was suddenly chillier and the rivers hiss louder. That faint strange aroma became a reeking pungence. Keth sat down heavily on the log.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me.” Brong blinked at him, a forlorn brown wisp in the soiled shreds of underwear. “I know my looks don’t show it. Dwarfed by that illness when I was an infant. You take more after my father, Do Auli—”

  “My own father—” Keth tried to get his breath. “The man I thought—”

  “Your mother’s husband.” Brong spoke with a sudden force. “He always hated me, because I loved your mother. Hated her, I’m afraid—even for making these for me.” Sadly, he flexed the golden hands. “She loved me, Crewman—if you can grasp what that meant to me. A genetic freak. A twisted midget. A suspect carrier of the rot. I adored her. We were alone for weeks together outside the perimeter in the craft I drove for her—”

  He drew a long uneven breath.

  “If I ever blamed myself, it was only for bringing his displeasure upon her. If she ever regretted anything, she never told me so. Though of course we both were sick because he suspected too much to let us out together again. If—”

  Ruefully, he sighed.

  “A hard man, Crewman! But a quiet one, too. And loyal in his own way to the Crew and his duty. He never actually accused us, though things enough made it plain how he felt.”

  “That must be why”—Keth whispered—“why he was always so stem and cold with me.”

  “So you do believe me?” Brong bent eagerly nearer. “And you aren’t ashamed?”

  “Why—” He stood up unsteadily and reached to grasp Brong’s hard hand. “Thank—thank you—father!”

  “You are my son!” Brong ignored his reaching hand, and they came together in a trembling embrace. “You see why I had to tell you now. Before you tried to harm yourself. Because it’s possible you’re immune. I don’t know which genes are dominant, but if my own odds are one in two, yours should be one in fou
r.”

  “How soon do we know?”

  “Hard to say.” Brong limped back from him. “I’ve seen people die. None, I think, lived over a day after exposure. The eyes and the lungs can begin to bum in just a few minutes.”

  “I feel all right yet—I think!”

  “Too soon to celebrate.” Brong’s squinted eyes surveyed him. “Too much we don’t know. Both of us could be only partially immune—maybe delaying the attack and leaving us longer to die. Even if we don’t get the rot, there are other jungle bugs to watch for, like the infection that crippled me.”

  “What about your hands?”

  “I’m watching them.” Brong turned them uncertainly.

  “There may be steel inside, but your mother made them well. No damage yet that I can see.” He sighed. “We must wait.”

  Waiting, they limped along the dense thornbrush barrier and out to the tip of the sandbar. A desolate place to die. Yet, no matter how long they lived, they had no tools to cut through the thorns or build another raft. He saw no way to leave it. Gazing wearily along the endless yellow jungle wall that curved back upon the green shimmer of the river at the next long bend —he abruptly caught his breath.

  “Bosun!” Trembling, he pointed. “Father! Isn’t that where the tree is?”

  Far away and pale with haze, a blunted mountain cone rose above the jungle. On the steep north slope, he found a flat-floored notch. Brong shaded his eyes to peer at it, and hard gold fingers gripped Keth’s arm.

  “Crewman, that’s the tree!”

  “Can you—can you jump us to it?”

  “I can’t.” The metal hand slowly relaxed, and Brong shook his head. “No more feyolin. Lost my last grain of it, swimming ashore. But if I can’t—” His grip grew tighter. “Keth, if you recall what you learned when we jumped from Kai, I think we can.”

  “I don’t remember much—”

  “The tree stands on that flat bench.” Brong’s bright hand flashed at it. “A thick, green trunk with paler branches and bright-red twigs. We’ll drop to the rim, just north of it. I’ll count us down. Three, two, one—”