The Halfling and Other Stories

by Leigh Brackett

For man had built better than Nature. The androids were not hampered by the need of food, air and water. A few ounces of chemicals every year or so kept them going. Their lungs were ornamental, for the purpose of speech only. They had no complicated internal structure to break down and their flesh was tough-celled, all but indestructible.

  And because they could be made beautiful, because they had strength and grace and endurance beyond the human, their uses had widened. Entertainers, household servants, fashionable adjuncts to expensive living. Things. Objects to be bought and sold like machines. And they had not been content.

  Kehlin’s eyes were brilliant with the glory of hate. He was as splendid and inevitable as the angel of death and, looking at him, Harrah became aware of a bitter truth—the truth that the big Earthman had denied with his dying breath. Man had wrought too well. These were the natural inheritors of the universe.

  Marith said again, “Wait.”

  This time Kehlin did not stop.

  Marith faced him, standing between him and Harrah’s vulnerable body.

  “I have earned this right,” she said. “I demand it.”

  Kehlin answered without a flicker of emotion. “This man must die.” And he would not stop.

  Marith would not move and behind her back Harrah drew his own knife into his hand. Futile as it was he could not submit to butchery without at least the gesture of fighting back. He looked into Kehlin’s face and shuddered, an inward shudder of the soul.

  Marith spoke.

  “This man has already helped us greatly—perhaps he has saved us by saving me.” She pointed to the bodies. “We’re not free of their kind and what we have to do can’t be done in a minute. We need supplies from Komar—metals, tools, chemicals, many things. If we get them ourselves we run the risk of being recognized. But if we had an agent, a go between—” She paused, then added, “A human.”

  Kehlin had at last halted to listen. One of the other men— Harrah could not, somehow, stop thinking of them as men— spoke up.

  “That is worth thinking about, Kehlin. We can’t spend all our time in the public squares, watching for spies.”

  Kehlin looked across Marith’s white shoulder at the Earth-man, and shook his head.

  “Trust a human?” He laughed.

  “There are ways to prevent betrayal,” said Marith. “Ways you know of.”

  And the android who had spoken before echoed, “That is so,”

  Kehlin played with the knife and continued to watch Harrah but he did not move. Harrah said hoarsely, “To the devil with you all. No one has asked me whether I’m willing to betray my own kind.”

  Kehlin shrugged. “You can join them quite easily,” he said, and glanced at the bodies. Marith turned and took Harrah by the arms. Her touch sent that queer pang through his flesh again, and it was strangely sweet.

  “Death is yours for the asking, now or later. But think, Earthman. Perhaps there is justice on our side too. Wait a little before you die.”

  She had not changed, he thought. Her little white feet that had walked beside his in the dust of Komar, her voice that had spoken to him through the moonlight—they had not changed. Only her eyes were different.

  Marith’s eyes and himself, because of what he knew. And yet he remembered.

  He did not know what he held—child, woman or some alien wicked creature, close in the hollow of his arm. But she was very lovely and he would not let her go.

  He drew a long breath. Her eyes, searching his, were a beauty and a pain so poignant that he could neither bear it nor look away.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll wait.”

  CHAPTER V The Same Beauty

  They had come a long way down from the plateau of Komar, into the jungle that laps around it like a hungry ocherous sea. They had come by steep and secret ways that were possible only to an aboriginal—or an android.

  Harrah, who had been handed bodily down the dizzy cliffs, was more conscious than ever of his human inferiority. He was exhausted, his bones ached with wrenching, and his nerves were screaming. But Marith, so small and sweetly made, had dropped over the precipices like a little white bird, unaided, and she was quite unwearied.

  Once during the descent Kehlin had paused, holding Harrah without effort over a thousand feet of sheer space, between the wheeling moons and the darkness.

  He had smiled, and said, “Tok is following. He is afraid but he is following you.”

  Harrah himself was too much afraid even to be touched.

  Now they stood, the four androids and the man from Earth, in the jungle of Ganymede. Vapor from some hidden boiling spring drifted through the tangle of branches and flowering vines, the choking wanton growth of a hothouse run wild. There was a taste of sulphur in the air and a smell of decay and a terrible heat.

  Kehlin seemed to be listening to something. He turned slightly once, then again as though getting his direction. Then he started off with complete certainty and the others followed. No one spoke. No one had told Harrah where they were going or why.

  Only Marith kept close to him and now and again he would meet her gaze and she would smile, a smile wistful and sad as far-off music. And Harrah hated her because he was weary and drenched with sweat and every step was a pain.

  He hoped that Tok was still following them. It was comforting to think of that furry shape gliding noiselessly along, at home in the jungle, part of it. Tok was not human either. But he too could feel pain and weariness and fear. He and Harrah were brothers in blood.

  The sky was blotted out. The eternal moonlight sifted through the trees, restless, many-hued, tinged here and there with blood from the red glow of Jupiter. The forest was very still. It seemed as endless as the dark reaches of the dreams that come with fever, and Harrah fancied that it held its breath and waited.

  Once they came to a place where the trees were slashed by a vast sickle of volcanic slag. To the north a gaunt cone stood up against the sky, crooked, evil, wearing a plume of smoke on its brow. The smell of sulphur was very strong and heat breathed out of the mountain’s flanks with a hissing sound like the laughter of serpents.

  Lightly, swiftly, the white-skinned beautiful creatures sped across that blasted plain and the man came staggering after them.

  Three times they passed through rude villages. But the huts were empty. Word had gone through the jungle as though the wind carried it and the aboriginals had vanished.

  Kehlin smiled. “They have hidden their women and children,” he said, “but the men watch us. They crouch in the trees around our camp. They are afraid and they watch.”

  At length through the stillness Harrah began to hear a sound very strange in this primal forest—the clangor of forges. Then, quite suddenly, they came to the edge of a place where the undergrowth had been cleared away and their journey was over.

  The picked bones of a rusty hull lay among the trees and beneath its skeletal shadow there was motion. Long sheds had been built. Lights burned in them and figures passed to and fro and vast heaps of metal tom from the ship lay ready to be worked.

  Kehlin said softly, “Look at them, Earthman. Thirty-four, counting ourselves. All that are left. But the finest, the best. The lords of the world.”

  Harrah looked. Men, a few women or creatures made in their semblance, all stamped with the same beauty, the same tireless strength. There was something wonderful about them, working, building, untouched by their environment, apart from it, using it only as a tool to serve them. Something wonderful, Harrah thought, struggling for breath in the bitter heat. Wonderful and frightening.

  Kehlin had apparently given them the whole story telepathically, for they did not pause from their work to ask questions. Only they glanced at Harrah as he passed and in their eyes he saw the shadow of fate. Kehlin said, “We will go into the ship.”

  Some of the inner cabins were still intact. The ship had been old and very small. Stolen, Harrah guessed, the best that they could do, but they had made it good enough. No more than ten men could
have survived in its cramped quarters. Yet thirty-four androids had ridden it across deep space. Darkness, lack of air and food, did not bother them.

  “We brought what equipment we could,” said Kehlin. ’’“The rest we must fashion for ourselves.” The sound of the forges echoed his words. He led Harrah into what had been the captain’s cabin. It was crammed with delicate electronic apparatus, some of which Harrah recognized as having to do with encephalographs and the intricacies of thought-waves.

  There was no room for furniture. Kehlin indicated a small clear space on the deck-plates. “Sit down.”

  Harrah did not obey at once and the android smiled. “I’m not going to torture you and if I had wished to kill you I could have done so long ago. We must have complete understanding, you and I.” He paused and Harrah was perfectly aware of the threat behind his words. “Our minds must speak, for that is the only way to understanding.”

  Marith said softly, “That is so, Earthman. Don’t be afraid.” Harrah studied her. “Will I be able to understand you then?” “Perhaps.”

  Harrah sat down on the hard iron plates and folded his hands between his knees to hide their trembling. Kehlin worked smoothly for a time. Harrah noted the infinite deftness of his movements. A distant humming rose in the cabin and was lost to hearing. Kehlin placed round electrodes at the Earthman’s temples and Harrah felt a faint tingling warmth.

  Then the android knelt and looked into his eyes and he forgot everything, even Marith, in the depths of that passionate alien gaze.

  “Seventy-three years ago I was made,” said Kehlin. “How long have you lived, Earthman? Thirty years? Forty? How much have you done, what have you learned? How is the strength of your body? How is the power of your mind? What are your memories, your hopes? We will exchange these things, you and I—and then we will know each other.”

  A deep tremor shook Harrah. He did not speak. Two sharp movements of Kehlin’s hands. The cabin darkened around him. A swift reeling vertigo, an awful plunging across some unknown void, a loss of identity…

  Harrah cried out in deadly fear and the voice was not his own.

  He could not move. Vague images crowded his mind, whirling, trampling, unutterably strange.

  Memories coming back, confused, chaotic, a painful meshing of realities.

  Silence. Darkness. Peace.

  He lay at rest. It seemed that there had never been anything but this bodiless negation in the very womb of sleep. He had no memories. He had no identity. He was nothing. He was without thought or trouble, wrapped in the complete peacefulness of not-being. Forever and forever, the timeless sleep.

  Then, from somewhere out of the void, vast and inescapable as the stroke of creation upon nothingness, a command came. The command to wake.

  He awoke.

  Like a comet, cruel and bright across the slumbrous dark, awareness came. A sudden explosion of being, leaping full upon him with a blaze and a shriek. Here was no slow gentle realization, softened by the long years of childhood. Here was inundation, agony—self.

  The little part of Harrah that remained cringed before that terrible awakening. No human brain could have borne it. Yet it was as though the memory were his own. He felt the flood tide of life roar in and fill his emptiness, felt the fabric of his being shudder, withstand and find itself.

  He knew that he was remembering the moment of Kehlin’s birth.

  He opened his eyes.

  Vision keen as an eagle’s, careless of darkness, of shadows, of blinding light. He saw a tall Earthman with a haggard face, who sat before him on the rusty deck and regarded him with strange eyes. An Earthman named Tony Harrah. Himself. Yet it was Kehlin the android who looked out of his eyes.

  He started up, wavering on the brink of madness, and Marith’s hands were on his shoulders, holding him steady.

  “Don’t be afraid. I am here.”

  It was not her voice speaking to him but her mind. He could hear it now. He could feel it touching his, sweet and full of comfort. Quite suddenly he realized that she was no longer a stranger. He knew her now. She was—Mari th.

  Her mind spoke gently. “Remember, Earthman. Remember the days of Kehlin.”

  He remembered.

  CHAPTER VI Lords of the World

  He remembered the laboratory, the birthplace, the doorway to the world of men. He remembered the moment when he first rose up from the slab where he had lain and stood before his makers, embodied and alive. He remembered the fine smooth power of his limbs, the bright newness of sounds, the wonderful awareness of intellect.

  Brief vivid flashes, the highlights of seventy-three years of existence, coming to Harrah as though they were his own. The long intensive training—Kehlin, Type A, technical expert. The ease of learning, the memory that never faltered, the growth of mental power until it overtopped the best of the human teachers.

  He remembered the moment when Kehlin first looked upon the redness of human blood and realized how frail were the bodies of men.

  He watched the gradual development of emotion.

  Emotion is instinctive in natural life. In the android, Harrah saw it grow slowly from the intellect. An odd sort of growth, like a tree of crystal with clear, sharp branches—but alive and no less powerful than the blind sprawling impulses of man. Different, though. Very different.

  One great root was lacking—the root of lust. Kehlin’s hungers were not of the flesh and because he was free of this he was free also of greed and cruelty and—this came to Harrah with a shock of surprise—of hate.

  In this uncanny sharing of another mind he remembered testing experimental ships at velocities too great for human endurance. He had enjoyed that, hurtling across infinity like a rogue asteroid with a silent shriek of speed.

  He remembered being cast adrift in space alone. He wore no protective armor. The cold could not harm him and he had no heed of air. He looked at the naked blaze of the universe and was not awed. The magnificence of space did not crush him with any sense of his own smallness.

  He did not expect to be as big as a star. Rather, for the first time, he felt free. Free of the little worlds, the little works of men. They were bound but he was not. Distance and time were no barriers to him. He was brother to the roving stars because both had been made, not born. He wanted to go out to them.

  The rescue ship came and took him in but he never forgot his dream of the other suns and his longing to go among them, clear out to the edge of the universe.

  Instead he gathered data for the scientists in the forbidden places of the Solar System. He walked the chasms of Mercury’s Darkside, where the human mind will crack in the terrible night, where the black mountain ranges claw at the stars and no life has ever been or ever will be. He went deep into the caverns of the Moon. He went into the Asteroid Belt and charted a hundred deadly little worlds alone while his masters waited safely in the shelter of their ship.

  And still he was outcaste—a thing, an android. Men used him and ignored him. They were human and he was an object out of nature, vaguely repulsive, a little frightening. He had not even any contact with his own kind. As though they had some foreknowledge of trouble men kept their androids apart. Harrah was aware, in Kehlin’s mind, of a piercing loneliness.

  There’s no place for you in earth, heaven or hell!

  Marith’s thought crossed his like the falling of tears. “For us there was no comfort, no hope, no refuge. We were made in your image, man and woman. Yet you were cruel gods for you made a lie and gave us the intelligence to know it. You denied us even dignity. And—we did not ask to be made.”

  Kehlin said, “It is enough.”

  Once again Harrah was flung across a reeling darkness. This time the change was not so frightening but in a way it was worse. He did not realize that until he was again fully aware of himself. Then he was conscious of a bitter contrast, a thing both saddening and shameful.

  The mind of the android, that he had shared for that brief time, had been as a wide space flooded with light. Hi
s own seemed cluttered and dark to him now, haunted by ugly shapes that crept along the borders of consciousness. All the splendid strength was gone. The crushing weariness of his body descended upon him, and he looked down almost with disgust at his unsteady hands.

  He did not ask what Kehlin had found in him. He did not want to know.

  “Can you understand now how we felt?” asked Kehlin. “Can you understand how we learned to hate men?”

  Harrah shook his head. “You don’t hate,” he said. “You don’t know the meaning of hate as we do. What I mistook for hatred in you was something much bigger. I’d call it pride.”

  He had seen so much in Kehlin’s mind. Pity for man in his weakness, admiration for his courage because he had survived and built in spite of his weakness. Perhaps even gratitude.

  But Kehlin had called his fellow androids the lords of the world, and he was right. They were proud and their pride was just and they would not live in chains.

  Kehlin shrugged. “Call it what you will, it doesn’t matter.” He looked at Harrah, and for the first time the Earthman saw in the android a softening, almost a weariness.

  “It isn’t that we want to rule men. It isn’t that we want power! It’s only that men have driven us through fear. Should we go down into nothingness because men fear us? Remember, we don’t even have the hope of a hereafter to soften our going!” He shook his head. “It will be a long fight and a bitter one.

  I don’t want it, none of us do. But we must survive and to do that we must rule and perhaps men will come out the better for it. There will never be any peace or real advancement until these wretched little worlds are governed by those who are not of the mass but above it, not driven by every wind that blows.” He was silent a moment, brooding, and then he echoed Marith’s words.

  “Fear. Always fear. The human race is ridden with it. Lust and fear and greed and sorrow. If only they had not been afraid of us!”

  The old blaze of anger came again into his eyes. “With acid and with fire they destroyed us, Earthman. Thirty-four, all that are left. But not for long. Human reproduction is slow and clumsy, but not ours. Only a little time and there will be more of us, many more, and we will go back and take what is ours.”