Jack Williamson - The Humanoid Touch
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- Year:1981
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Jack Williamson: author's other books
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THE HUMANOID TOUCH
by Jack Williamson
Copyright c) 1980 by Jack Williamson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Humanoids Self-directed robots invented to serve and guard mankind. Keth loved the suntimes. Thirty days of light and freedom, while the kind sun climbed and paused and sank. He loved the clean smell and cool feel of the wind and the sky's blazing wonder. In the first sharp days before the thaw, there was ice for skates and snow for sleds, but he loved the warmer days more. The excitement of green things shooting up, sunbuds exploding into rich-scented bloom, great golden-sweet melons ripe at last. Best of all, he loved the Sunset festival, with the leaves burning red, and gifts and games, and all he wanted to eat.
The moontimes were not so nice, because the ice storms after Sunset drove everybody back underground. Thirty days in the narrow tunnel places, where he was always cold and just a little hungry, with lessons to learn and no fun but the gym. He hated the dark and the cold and the black humanoids.
"Demon machines!"
Nurse Vesh used them to frighten him when he was slow to mind her. She was a tall, skinny woman with a frowny face and cold, bony hands. Her husband was dead on Malili, where Keth was born, and she blamed the humanoids.
"Bright black machines, shaped like men." Her voice was hushed and ugly when she spoke about them. "Sometimes they pretend to be men. They can see in the dark and they never sleep. They're watching and waiting, up there on the moon. They'll get you, Keth, if you dare disobey me."
She made him fear the moontimes, when Malili either stood alone or sometimes hung beside the red-blazing Dragon, never moving in the cold, black sky. He could feel the cruel minds of the humanoids always fixed upon him, even through the rock and snow above the tunnels. Sometimes in bed he woke sweating and sick from a dream in which they had come down to punish him. Sometimes he lay awake, wishing for a safer place to hide, or even for a way to stop them. Men must have made them, if they were machines, though he couldn't guess why. Perhaps when he was old enough he could build machines strong enough to fight them.
"They'll never get me," he boasted once. "I'll find a way to beat them."
"Shhh!" Her pale eyes mocked him. "Nobody stops the hu-manoids. Ten trillion machines swarming everywhere but here! They know everything. They can do anything." She chilled him with her bitter, thin-lipped smile. "They'll get you, Keth, if you don't mind me, just like they got your poor, dear mother." He couldn't remember his mother or Malili or anything before Nurse Vesh had come with his father back from Malili to keep him clean and dole out his quotas and make him mind.
"What did they do-" The look on her face dried up his whisper, and he had to get his breath. "What did they do to my mother?"
"She went looking for a braintree." Nurse Vesh didn't say what a braintree was. "Outside the perimeter. Into jungles full of humanoids and dragon bats and heathen nomads. Never got back. You might ask"-her voice went brittle and high-"ask your father!"
He was afraid to ask his father anything.
"On Malili?" He shook his head, wishing he dared. "Where we came from?"
"And where my Jendre died." Her Jendre had been with his father on Malili. She wore a thin silver bracelet with his name on it. Keth had always wondered how the humanoids killed him, but he couldn't ask her because she cried whenever she remembered him. "Ask your father how." Her voice began to break, and her white face twitched. "Ask where he got that scar!" He wanted to ask why anybody ever went to Malili. It looked too far and cold for people. He thought it might be better just to let the humanoids keep it, but he didn't say so now because Nurse Vesh had stopped looking at him. She was leaning with her face against the wall, her lean body shaking. He tiptoed away, feeling sorry for her.
His father was Crewman Ryn Kyrone. A tall, brown man who stood very straight hi his black uniform and worked in a hidden back room where Keth couldn't go. The steel door stayed shut, with a quick little red-blinking light to remind his father when it wasn't locked.
Sometimes his father slept in the room and brought Nurse Vesh quota points for his breakfast, but he was more often away on Lifecrew business. He never talked about that, or much about anything else.
Not even about the scar, a long pale seam that zigzagged down from his hair and split across his jaw. It changed color when he was angry, and he was often angry. When Keth asked for more than his quota. When Keth couldn't tie his boots correctly. When Keth was afraid to go to bed, because he knew he would have dreadful dreams about the humanoids.
Keth knew his father must have been hurt on Malili, perhaps in a terrible fight with the humanoids. They must be very fierce and cruel if they could hurt a man so strong. Once he asked Nurse Vesh if his father was afraid. Her face grew tight, and her pale eyes squinted blankly past him.
"Brave enough," she muttered. "But he knows the humanoids." The year he was six, she sent him to the gym every morning. The other kids seemed strange at first, because they laughed and ran and sometimes whispered when the leader wanted quiet. They weren't afraid of anything, and they weren't nice to him.
The leader tried to scold them once, explaining that Keth didn't know the games because he was born on Malili, but that only made things worse. They called him "moonbaby" and mocked the way he talked. One day a larger boy pushed him.
"You'll be sorry!" His voice was shaking, but he didn't cry. "My father-" He thought of something better. "The humanoids will get you!"
"Humanoids, ha!" The boy stuck out his tongue. "A silly old story."
"My nurse says-"
"So baby has a nurse!" The boy came closer^ ready to push him again. "My Dad was an engineer in the Zone, and he says there're no humanoids there. He says the rockrust would stop them."
Limping home through the cold tunnels, he wondered if that could be true. What if Nurse Vesh had made up the humanoids, just to frighten him? He found her in her room, reading a queer old printbook.
"You aren't to fight." She frowned at the blood on his cheek. "Or did you win?
Your father will be angry if you ran."
"I fell, but it doesn't hurt at all." He watched her carefully. "I was talking to a boy. He says there are no humanoids-"
"He's a fool."
Her lips shut tight, and she opened the book to show him a humanoid. The picture was flat and strange, but the thing in it looked real. More human than machine, it was sleek and black and bare, as graceful as a dancer. He thought its lean face seemed kinder than hers.
"It isn't ugly." He studied it, wishing he knew how to read the golden print on its black chest. "It looks too nice to be bad."
"They pretend to be good." She took the old book from him and slammed it shut, as if the humanoid had been a bug she wanted to smash. The puff of dust made him sneeze. "If you ever fall for any of their tricks, you'll be another fool."
He wondered how a machine could trick anybody, but she didn't say. He wanted to ask about rockrust and how it could stop the humanoids, but she didn't like to talk about Malili. She scrubbed his cheek and gave him his calorie quota, which was never enough, and made him do his lessons before he went to bed. The next summer he took a recycle route, pulling a little cart to pick up waste metal and fiber. The tunnels were cold, and most of the tokens he earned had to be saved for his winter thennosuit. But one day he found a bright black ball almost the size of his fist, so shiny it made a little image of his face. It rolled out of a trash bin, along with the bits of a broken dish and a worn-out boot.
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