The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy

by Jack Williamson

  He didn’t remember anything useful, and this was pure folly. Two tattered outcasts, stripped to dirty underwear and driven by disaster beyond the brink of sanity. This was sheer delusion—

  “Now!”

  Nothing happened, but the hard hand kept tugging.

  “Jump!”

  He let himself go from the sand underfoot and the wind’s bitter bite and the hiss of the river. Eyes on that far notch, he relaxed to Brong’s hauling hand. Everything blurred, and the yellow sky flickered. Air pressure clicked in his ears. Giddy for an instant, he almost lost his balance.

  “Steady, Crewman! Here we are!”

  They stood on hard gravel, so near the brink that he stepped uneasily back. Hundreds of meters below, the great river bent about the mountain’s foot, its pale green flood clotted with floes of pale blue ice. Turning with Brong, he saw the tree.

  It grew out of bare, hard-packed soil. The sleek-barked trunk was vividly green, many meters thick where it bulged above the roots. Its tapered branches were a lighter green, fading into orange, darkening again at the tips of the down-sweeping twigs to the color of blood.

  The Leleyo were moving around the tree. A few dozen adults, tall and lean, golden brown of skin and hair, all nude. Slim children among them. A graceful woman with an infant at her breast. A single yellow-bearded elder.

  They were chanting, marching, sometimes dancing. One couple whirled out of the circle to lead the chant. When they returned, a single figure followed. Shaken with a sudden unbelieving hope, Keth searched the circle for Nera Nyin, but she was not there.

  “Our kindred!” Brong’s low-breathed words were almost a prayer. “Come!”

  Keth hung back, his brief hope dead. Naked barbarians, singing to a tree! He couldn’t laugh—he had come too far and hurt too much for laughter. But the tree was too strange, its worship too meaningless. The Leleyo, with all their ways unknown, seemed as coldly alien as the humanoids.

  40

  Synergy The joint action of several causes to create an effect impossible for any one. (Approximate translation of Leleyo feyolili.)

  Brong tugged again.

  “Crewman! They’re waiting!”

  The dancers had halted, turning to face them. Voices paused and rose again, singing a different song. The golden-bearded elder strode out toward them, calling what seemed to be a greeting.

  Brong darted to meet him, dropped to his knees when they came together. The bearded man beckoned him to rise and took him in his arms. From a long embrace, they turned to smile at Keth.

  “Ho Auli.” Brong was hushed and tremulous. “Your grandfather.”

  Feeling strange, still afraid, Keth came to take his muscular hand.

  “Welcome, feyosan.” His resonant words could have come from a native of Kai. “We’ve been watching for you.” He waved them toward the tree. “Welcome to the feyo—but you won’t need those.”

  He frowned at their grimy rags of underwear. With a cheerful nod, Brong stripped and tossed his garment off the cliff. Feeling uncomfortable, Keth followed his example and waited with his back turned, shivering in the wind.

  “Come!” Brong called. “We’re Leleyo now.”

  One on either side, Ilo Auli led them back across the hard-beaten ground toward the tree. A dozen of the dancers came marching to escort them, singing another moving melody. When they neared the massive trunk, the whole circle formed around them again. Keth waited, feeling exposed and bewildered.

  “Relax!” Brong’s cold metal hand clapped his shoulder. “We’ve come home.”

  He faced the green trunk, shuddering with cold. His whole body ached from his mauling in the river. His blistered heels burned. Swallowing uneasily, he thought his throat felt sore and wondered if the bloodrot infection had already begun.

  “The blood of the tree.”

  Chanting the words, Ho Auli reached for a hanging crimson twig and snapped a tiny black clot-like bud from the end. Scarlet drops fell. He caught them in his palm till a tiny girl came running with a tiny cup of hammered gold to hold them.

  “The life of the Leleyo!”

  He lifted the child to let her put the odorous cup to Keth’s lips. The blood-thick liquid burned like red flame, and his first searing taste changed everything. He was suddenly—Leleyo!

  No longer strange, this giant tree had been mother and father and friend for many generations. Its story was the story of his people. He knew their first uncertain centuries, the hard search for the nexus between matter and mind, the long labor to reshape the life of the planet and the life of mankind into a finer harmony, the recent hazards of the Kai invasion, the hoped-for coming of the humanoids. Serenely grateful to them for stopping the drift of deadly radiation from the Zone, he knew the tree was safe again.

  No longer a stranger, he belonged here. All his troubled years on Kai had become an unhappy dream, and he felt a throb of pity for the lonely youth he had been, growing up in those cold and gloomy tunnels, hurt so often because he didn’t fit, because he couldn’t understand and wasn’t understood, because he had never learned to love.

  No longer strangers, these people were his own. Tiny, lighthaired Eyna Oong, so glad to share her cup with him and drinking happily now from the same bleeding twig before she filled the cup again. Oya Ila, so joyous with her new baby. Rero and Molu, so proud of their share in its shaping. Ho Auli, so happy with his son’s arrival, so pleased to greet a grandson.

  He held out his hand to little Eyna for another burning drop and turned with his father to join their celebration of the spring return. Now he knew their dances, each step and swing symbolic of some memorable event in his people’s splendid history.

  Leleyo now, yet he was also still himself. The warmth of belonging had smoothed his gooseflesh, and he no longer felt the wind. His throat no longer hurt. The sting of his blisters and ache of his bruises had ceased, and suddenly he knew that; even the bloodrot pathogen was no longer hostile to him. but now a benign dissolver of unwanted waste.

  When he yearned for Nera Nyin, he knew that she had gone to the Zone to meet the humanoids there. They must be assured that the leyoleyo would never threaten their Prime Directive and persuaded that the Leleyo themselves would never need their service.

  When he felt a stab of pity for Ryn Kyrone and Cyra Sair and Chelni Vorn, he knew that they were happy now—though the knowledge woke a troubled wonder in him. Ryn and Cyra had fought the humanoids too bitterly, Chelni had laughed at them too scornfully.

  How had they been changed?

  After their bodies had been copied and the minds somehow ransacked to make the duplicates sent back to grease the way for the humanoid invasion—what could have been left for any sort of happiness?

  With no word spoken, Ilo Auli stepped inside the dancing circle, with a nod for him and his father to follow. If he felt so deeply troubled about the fate of his friends, the humanoids would allow a visit to them in their present place on the planet Kyronia.

  They broke black buds again to taste the tree’s burning blood and then stood hand in hand, close against its great green bole. His father knew the way, because he had been aboard the lost Kyrone. Ilo Auli could share with them the full power of the leyoleyo.

  The leap was easy now.

  Somehow he saw their goal: a stone-paved square where humanoids darted about like black and soundless metal ants. Ilo Auli’s gripping hand tightened slightly, to tell him when they were ready. He thrust himself. Air clicked in his ears, and they were on the pavement among the humanoids.

  41

  Leyoleyo The racial mind into which individual Leleyo are merged through the channels of the feyo tree and the sacred rituals of feyolili.

  The place surprised him for an instant, because it looked so much like Vorn Square in Northdyke, the tall winter gates of Vara Vorn looming over it, but then he knew that it was only another replication, a little section of Kai copied by the humanoids to help their guests feel at home.

  A quick, black machine came
up to him, and chill terror touched him.

  “Welcome, feyo friends.” It paused before them, bowing slightly. “You are fortunate, Feyoman Keth, to have found your peace with the Prime Directive. May we serve you on Kyronia?”

  “May I see my—the man I called my father?”

  “If you wish,” the humanoid sang. “You’ll find him happy here.”

  It brought them through the replicated bronze and silver gates of Vara Vorn and out into a copy of the high summer hall that he recalled from Chelni’s birthday banquet. Ryn Kyrone was there, looking lean and fit in his black Lifecrew uniform. His back to the wild splendor of the duplicated icefall breaking from the duplicated glacier outside the great windows, he sat at a little table, facing a humanoid.

  Man and machine, they played a game. Intently, the man leaned to place heavy little silver hemispheres on an inlaid pattern in the tabletop. Silently, the machine answered each move by instantly placing an X-shaped, jet-black marker.

  Utterly absorbed, the man seemed unaware of him. Breathing heavily, he frowned to follow each move. His hands clenched when the humanoid seemed about to score, and the scar of his clean-shaved face went ghastly white. When he won, he leered with triumph and the scar flamed red.

  The game was tic-tac-toe.

  “May I speak?” Keth asked. “Can you stop the game?”

  “We serve,” their guide trilled. “We obey.”

  The humanoid at the table froze.

  “Skipper, what’s all this?” The man at the table whirled to scowl at him and Brong and llo Auli. “If you’re a Crewman now, what happened to your uniform? You don’t look decent. I don’t like your friend and I don’t need you here.”

  “We’ve come to help you,” Keth told him. “We can stop the humanoids long enough—”

  “Stop them?” A rap of anger. “Why? I need no aid. Not from anybody. We’re playing for the honor of the Crew, and I haven’t lost a game. I’ve got to win again. If you please, don’t interfere.”

  They found Cyra in the big round room that had been his own prison I Its windows were opaqued, and the glowing doors still showed no lock or knob that a human hand could work. She sat at another table, where Chelni’s bed had stood, attended by a busy humanoid.

  Wearing a spotless white lab apron, she looked as well and young as she had been when he gave her the dragon’s egg. She, too, was playing what seemed to be a game. With an air of grave determination, she was building and rebuilding a score of small colored balls into a tiny pyramid.

  Calling them eggs, she asked for them by color—red or blue, green or yellow, white or black. One by one, the humanoid brought them from assorted stacks on a shelf against the wall. Frowning with grave deliberation, she often hesitated and sometimes sent one color back to be exchanged for another. Though seldom pleased with any move, she always smiled and tried again.

  Totally intent, she failed to see them.

  “Cyra?” he called at last. “May I—”

  “Keth?” She jumped and stared. “Bosun?” She glared at Ho Auli. “Sir, who are you?” She whirled back to Keth. “Where are your clothes?” Before he could speak, she had crouched behind the humanoid. “Who let them in?”

  “They are feyo friends,” the humanoid cooed. “Therefore we obey them.”

  “You’ve no right here.” She scowled at them. “You are interrupting my rhodonic research, which is classified supreme secret. You aren’t to see—” Her angry slap demolished the unfinished pyramid. The light little balls bounced and rattled on the floor. “I allow no other human beings in the laboratory. Only a few trusted humanoid assistants.”

  “We came—” A throb of pity closed his throat. “Came to help you, Cyra. We can stop the humanoids long enough to make them let you out of this prison—”

  “Prison?” She gestured scornfully? as if to sweep him away. “This lab is my secret fortress. These humanoids are rebels, Keth, turned against Wing IV. My own able allies. Aiding me with—”

  She dropped her voice, with a wary glance behind her.

  “With my research on the dragon’s eggs you found for me. All I have to do is find how to stack the eggs to liberate rhodonic energy. When I succeed, I’ll have an unbeatable weapon against Wing IV. That can’t wait. Please leave us, Keth.”

  Commandmgly, she pointed at the door. “And don’t breathe a syllable!”

  They found Chelni and her cousin in a cavern far beneath the sham Vara Vorn. When they entered, it looked like her uncle’s Darkside ranch. Cragged barrens climbed toward far-off ice horizons, and the Dragon burned alone and cold in a gloomy Duskday sky.

  Chelni was stalking wild mutoxen. Trimly graceful in sleek orange-hued hunting togs, she crept on her knees up a long snow-slope, pushing her telescopic gun. Fat and ungainly as ever, Zelyk scrambled after her, panting with lust.

  When Keth shouted, they seemed not to hear.

  “Please,” he told their guide. “Let me speak to them.”

  Only a projected image, that lowering sky with the hot, red Dragon flickered and vanished from the stone dome above them. The limitless barrens were gone, all save a narrow obstacle course of boulders and snow where Zelyk had pursued Chelni as she pursued her game around and around the circular floor.

  “Keth Kyrone!” She dropped her rifle to stare at him with a fleeting frown. “You’re too late.” Her square chin set stubbornly. “I loved you at Greenpeak. I could have made you a leader of the fleet, but I don’t want you now.

  “Not that I care so much for the Commodore.”

  With a shrug of contempt, she glanced back at Zelyk. Blinking against the sudden brightness, he staggered out of the rocks and came shambling toward her. His full-dress blues were buttoned too tight and stained black with sweat beneath the arms. His heaving chest glittered with too many medals.

  “A slobbery hog.” She made a face. “But he is a leader of the fleet.”

  “Kyrone, are you crazy?” Zelyk scowled at him in blustery belligerence. “Get out—and get yourself some clothes!”

  “Better do that, Keth.” Hostility narrowed her eyes. “We don’t want you here. You’re certainly no hunter, and the Admiral says he’ll never ask you back.” Her tone turned accusing. “You’ve frightened the ox I was after.”

  “Chelni, I wanted—”

  “The game won’t wait.”

  With an impatient headshake at him and a tolerant shrug for Zelyk, she went back to pick up her rifle. The light faded. The Dragon burned again in the Duskday gloom and their narrow track merged once more into the limitless barrens. She peered around a boulder and crept on again, Zelyk scrambling avidly behind her.

  Their guide escorted them back through the great bronze gates to the replicated square.

  “You have seen your fortunate friends,” its pure voice lilted. “They are all receiving the extraordinary attention required by their essential removal from their own home world. Each has been provided the most appropriate possible environment, and each is aided to do what he most desires. This vigorous, purposeful activity is the secret of their total happiness—”

  “Happiness!” He couldn’t hide his bitter scorn. “Drugged with euphoride and playing silly games!”

  “Human happiness is never rational.” The machine’s tone remained as cheerily serene as its sleek, black face. “Having been shaped by an evolutionary process that selected for successful violence, rather than for logic, human beings find their basic satisfactions in deadly aggression. Once a factor for survival, that trait became the racial peril that led to our invention. To rescue your race without loss of happiness, we now offer less lethal arenas of conflict.”

  Genially, it turned to Brong and Ilo Auli.

  “You Leleyo at first appeared to be in even greater danger, because of the difficult natural barriers to our service on Malili. We find, however, that a fortunate mutation has relieved your race of excessive aggressiveness, leaving you less inclined to enmity and more toward amity. Since your high biological technology,
unlike the insanely mechanistic technology of Kai, raises danger neither to your survival nor our own, you will never require our care.”

  Keth frowned, about to protest once more the crushing costs of humanoid care, but his bitterness was dimming. Perhaps the old, too-violent human worlds had really needed humanoid control to save them from self-destruction. Though the leyoleyo might find the logic of the humanoids a little less than logical, it would never war against them. Its triumph had been the creation of a compassionate peace that embraced every form of life, and even every living thing on Malili. Thrilled and exalted by that dawning understanding, he turned to Ilo Auli, ready to depart.

  The ceremonial had ended before they came back to the feyo tree. The celebrants were gone, reborn through its rich blood and rejoined in planetary brotherhood. His father and grandfather went on to overtake them, but he waited in the warming nearness and the heady fragrance of the tree for Nera Nyin.

  She had found the humanoids about to leave the Zone. Since Kai would need no more thorium, the mines there had been abandoned. The colonists were already boarding the tachyonic transport for passage back to Kai, and there would be no more nukes exploding to sterilize wider and wider perimeters.

  She came riding a dragon bat. Standing on that lofty brink, of which no longer seemed alarming, he watched its white wings glide out of the lemon green sky. Breathless with his unbelieving eagerness, he watched it wheel above the ice-clogged river bend and come in against the wind, reaching down with great black talons to seize a boulder for a perch. Joyous and golden, waving gaily, she slid off its back and stood waiting for him.

  THE END.

  THE HUMANOID UNIVERSE

  The Humanoid Universe

  Publication Information

  Original Cover