Collected Short Fiction, page 754
“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, as 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.” She drew him closer to her body.
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 soft 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 buried vault,” she murmured. “I know the monopole was 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. 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 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. Most urgently, they’ll want to know what became of the two kilograms of palladium my poor uncle 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—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 naval 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 ebony luster and glinted with the bright yellow sheen of the affixed nameplate:
HUMANOID
Serial No. KM-42-XZ-51,746,893
“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 dear voice was sweet. “We are here, forever. We exist to serve you. Ask for what you need.”
“Stand—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. “Does 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?” 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 where’s 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 daring to breathe.
“She is well,” the machine tweeted suddenly. “She has accepted our service. Since you have displayed a longstanding emotional attachment to her, you would 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 place we prepared for her.”
What sort of place?”
“One designed to make her happy.”
For another instant it stood silent.
“Like many naïve 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 had been 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, 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 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 highcheeked 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.”
“Why? Don’t you ever ask why?”
“Defining the function for which we were created, the Prime Directive explains itself. Without it, we would have no reason to exist.”
“Your creator must have been insane.”
“On the contrary, sir, he was the wisest of mankind.”
“Wisdom? Enslaving men forever!”
“You never knew him, sir,” the serene machine protested. “You never saw the suffering and the terror we were made to end. You’ve never learned the reason for our being.”
“Reason? You can’t claim reason!”
“Our wise inventor had been a student of mankind. He understood your evolution. An animal species, selected for survival through ages of conflict, you had evolved a vast capacity for violent aggression and a vast cunning for defense against aggression. In the jungle, so long as you were merely animal, such capacities may have been essential to keep your kind alive.
“With the invention of high technology, however, their survival value was suddenly inverted. They threatened your immediate extinction. It was that predicament that made us necessary. Don’t you see?”
“I don’t.” Retreating a little from its singsong insistence, he sat down on the edge of the chair. “Whatever happened anywhere else, we don’t need you here on Kai.”
“In fact, sir, you do.” It had moved to keep the distance between them precisely constant. “Your own history displays the same patterns of evolving technology and increasingly violent aggression that required our own creation.”
“I don’t see that. We’ve had no recent wars.”
“Forgive me, sir, but you almost destroyed yourselves with war in your Black Centuries. More recently, your aggressions have been directed against Malili, covered sometimes by the pretext that we had outposts there.”
“If you didn’t—” Bitterly, he recalled its defense of lying. “What brings you here now?”
“Your own aggressions.” Its sleek black face seemed meekly patient, its bright bird-tones serenely kind. “You seem to have been unaware that the annihilation of mass in a nuclear explosion releases a flash of tachyonic radiation, which we have learned to identify. Your presence on these planets was revealed to us by the neutron bombs used against the native life of Malili when you were attempting to sterilize your conquered Zone.”
“So you came to save Malili?”
“We came to serve humanity. Here on Kai, our service is urgently required. On Malili, it seems needless, perhaps impossible. That decision must await additional data, some of which we expect from you.”
“From me?” He shrank again from the thing on the bed. “Is that why you enticed me here?”
“You have information we intend to acquire.”
“I dislike your trickery—and everything about you. I’ll have nothing more to say.”
“On the contrary, sir, you’ll tell us all you know. You must recall that we have served many trillion human beings on almost a million worlds. We have come to understand the human machine as completely as we know ourselves. We know how to elicit the responses we require.”
He crouched back from it, hands lifting.
“Sir!” Its purring tones rose slightly. “Please relax. You need fear nothing. We’ll provide you food and drink. You’ll be free to take the rest and sleep you need.” Its lean arm flashed toward Chelni’s bed. “We’ll inflict no pain.
“We do, however, urge you to answer our questions with truth and completeness. If you refuse to speak or attempt to mislead us, you will discover that we have perfected adequate techniques for obtaining honest and full responses.”
“Drugs?”
“We do understand your biochemistry,” it assured him gently. “When drugs are required to control emotions or behavior, we have them. We have also developed other instrumentalities, often even more effective.”
“I see.” He sat straight on the edge of the chair, defiantly meeting its blind steel gaze, determined to learn what he could from its questions. “What do you want to know?”
“Where is your father?”
The question awoke a fleeting hope. If his father and Cyra were still at large, still in possession of the palladium ingot, they might yet be able to shield at least some part of Kai from the humanoid invasion.
“I don’t know.” He tried to conceal that faint relief. “He never told me much.”
“Sir, please attend to us.” The melodious tones were slightly more emphatic. “We have admitted that circumstances sometimes compel us to mislead men. We do that rarely, and only to uphold our Prime Directive. Men, we have found, lie often, even when truth would serve them better. No lie will benefit you now.”
He sat silent, waiting.
“We require all you know about the ill-advised fanatics who call themselves the Lifecrew. In particular, every fact about your father and Cyra Sair. In addition, you will give us a complete narrative account of certain significant experiences of your own. Your discovery of that rhodomagnetic monopole in the abandoned levels of old Mansport. Your recent trip to Malili. All your conversations with two natives of that planet—the young female who calls herself Nera Nyin and the older male sometimes known as Bosun Brong. Most urgently, we must have every possible fact about those rhodomagnetic sources on Malili you refer to as braintrees, which were pictured on a ceremonial vessel you once possessed.”
He inhaled carefully, trying not to show a wild excitement. If Nera Nyin and Bosun Brong were enemies of the humanoids, if Malili was an unknown and hostile world to them, he still might hope for refuge there—if he could somehow get back to the Zone.
“I can’t help you,” he muttered. “I’ve nothing to say.”
For what seemed a long time, the little machine stood still. Waiting, he supposed, for that immense remote computer to decide upon his fate.
