Concept YUS (Cross-World Murder Cases Book 1) Read online

  “I’m returning from the biosector,” Redder explained. “I’m late. Yesterday was filled with worries and troubles. Otherwise, I would’ve come then.”

  I gave him a penetrating look. He clasped his hands behind his back as if embarrassed by them. He was swaying to and fro, deftly springing from his heels to his toes, his horsy face revealing his diligent efforts to concentrate. This look assured me that he was feeling as mentally unstable as I was and that I had every chance of maintaining my advantage in our conversation.

  “But why start with a lie?” Reder added, waiting for my response.

  “Why indeed?”

  “There’s no point,” he said, agreeing and shaking his head. “So listen! Until now, I’ve been avoiding you on purpose. I was keeping my distance, because I was unsure of what to do.”

  “And you’re no longer unsure.”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  I decided to take advantage of his confiding mood, which most likely would never be repeated, at least not with me. “Have a seat,” I offered. “Coffee or something refreshing?”

  “No, no!” He waved his hand. “Don’t bother. I’m probably making a mistake anyway.”

  “What makes you say that?” I leaned toward him to encourage his response.

  “Only a fool is always sure he’s right!”

  Reder gave me such a broad and spontaneous smile that he exposed most of his large teeth to the gums. I liked him more and more, especially with such a smile.

  “Well, here goes.” He sat down opposite me. “Last night you spoke to Odesta and, I’m sure, were very impressed with her. Nice, quiet, sensitive, and dedicated. I, however, had some reservations about this woman, even before the murders. Something about her contradicts the idyllic image she tries to maintain with such Jesuit zeal. And after the murders? Then I started watching her more closely and confirmed my suspicions: Odesta Gomez is not a sincere person!”

  Reder wasn’t smiling anymore. Just the opposite: he was frowning and breathing heavily. It was obvious that he was engaged in an exhausting inner struggle to control his frenetic outbursts—just as I had been. Only I was now in excellent control of myself!

  I listened carefully, filled with compassion for his inner struggle.

  “She, Odesta Gomez, found the bodies. She went, she claimed, just like that, following her intuition, to the forest. We were all searching in the opposite direction, but she—intuition. Come on!” He clenched his bony fists and stared at me. “Look, Inspector, she personally may not have killed anybody, but I have no doubts whatsoever that she is involved in this business.”

  The malice in his voice vaguely worried me. Was it really possible for someone to talk like that while experiencing the euphoria?

  “It’s more likely, for example, that she herself might have incited Fowler,” Reder continued. “He was an honest and—somewhat naive young man. Who knows how she might have influenced him? Besides, she is surely adept at hypnosis. What could be easier than to apply it in the morning hours of Eyrena, when we are all more susceptible? Yes, she must have incited Fowler to kill Stein and then intercepted him. Because he would have been horrified by what he had done, she could easily have convinced him to take his own life. Oh, yes! Believe me, Inspector, Odesta is a dangerous woman, despite her appearance of kindness! In general, such women are the most dangerous.”

  His eyes pierced mine, vivid and sharp. I thought that I should immediately end this conversation but instead heard myself encouraging it, “Give me some specific examples. Your accusations so far are completely groundless.”

  “Examples, examples! I’m afraid to give you examples! I shouldn’t be specific, because…because.” He pressed a palm against his lips, and his features contorted in sudden terror.

  He looked feverish too. Was he sick? I was filled with remorse. Why had I suspected him a while ago? He was trying to help me, maybe even taking some risks for me, and I had practically accused him of false accusations!

  “I understand that something is preventing you from being entirely open with me,” I whispered discreetly. “If that’s the case, I don’t ask you to ignore your feelings. I’m sure they are absolutely justified.”

  Reder nodded gratefully. “Thank you. Just remember to keep an eye on Odesta Gomez. Don’t let her out of your sight and be alert! That’s all the advice I can give you. If you follow it, you’ll discover some shocking facts. But, I warn you again: be careful! She…she…is a traitor!” He trembled and sighed deeply and then whispered in an exhausted and barely audible voice, “There, I’ve told you. I’ve said it! After months of unbearable silence!”

  “Calm down,” I mumbled.

  “Yes. I’m calm. Although I’ll probably pay for these words with my life.”

  “What are you saying!”

  “The truth!” he shouted tragically.

  The rumble in my head had grown to a continuous monotonous roar. Something was wrong here, but what? Odesta! I felt painfully disappointed. I had believed her, to a certain point, and she? A traitor. But Reder, Reder—what a fate! So far from Earth, burdened with a monstrous secret for months—now, just to help me, willing to suffer the nightmarish consequences of its revelation. A human!

  “Man,” I began, but a small remnant of self-restraint stopped me.

  “Yes?” He made a mistake by encouraging me.

  Distance! Distance! I mentally ordered myself. Just in case: distance! “What exactly did you mean by calling her a traitor?”

  “Oh, let’s not talk about it anymore!” Reder insisted then suddenly laughed.

  I couldn’t help but laugh in response. Suddenly I was filled with unspeakable relief. We both sighed deeply. I felt almost dizzy with friendliness.

  “How do you find it here?” he asked me intimately.

  “Bad,” I whispered back.

  “Unfortunately true! What do you think about the colonization?”

  “I think it’s a betrayal!” I grew enthusiastic. “It’s an act of pathetic, conformist policy!”

  “Even more unfortunate! But what should we do, Inspector? How can we resist it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you intend to try?”

  What a straightforward, calculated, direct question! “Do you intend,” and so forth. Yes, Reder is no fool. But then neither am I. “No,” I snapped. “I don’t.”

  “Aha, so I have misinterpreted some of your actions.”

  “What actions, Reder? What? Since I arrived I haven’t had any time to act. I’ve been too busy coping with the sunrises, the trees, and…and…the people here.”

  “What about on the starship?”

  “What?”

  “Did somebody take up your time there? Or something?”

  “I don’t think even you understand your own insinuations,” I replied. “And if so, why bother to make them?”

  He looked at me for another minute or two, clearly disappointed, and then finally rose to leave. When he reached the door, however, he stopped, turned around, and took a few quick steps toward me.

  “She is a tra-i-tor!” he whispered quite audibly. “She is obsessed by the Yusians, remember that! She’s completely on their side!”

  Then he was gone, leaving me staring with amazement at a closed door. “Tra-i-tor, tra-i-tor.” The syllables knocked around behind my forehead. “Tra-i-tor.” The rhythm speeded up, becoming light and playful, dispersing my anxiety caused by Reder’s last words and replacing it with a wonderful, carefree feeling. I threw my head back, closed my eyes, and burst into incontrollable, frenetic laughter.

  Chapter 17

  I remained extremely agitated all morning. Several times I would doze off until my own excited exclamations woke me up, take cold refreshing showers—and a hot one as well—for relaxation, perform breathing exercises, and set off looking for Elia, only to return, bouncing from the door to the hall to the staircase and then back. During all that time, I was flooded with emotions—emotions from quiet tenderness to lou
d and inexplicable joy. I think it was the joy that finally calmed me down: after a final exhausting burst of laughter, I fell into a sound and healing sleep.

  I woke up with Reder’s image in my mind, and the feelings it evoked now had nothing to do with tenderness and joy.

  I hurried out of my apartment, went down to the dining hall for a quick lunch, and immediately set off for the parking lot. There I called one of the robots, told him to “give me a lift” to the biosector, and we both climbed into the shuttle that Stein had used.

  Of course the flight was very unpleasant, especially after the floor had thinned into a transparent, springy membrane beneath our feet. I instinctively reached for that rolled-up, little rug but didn’t spread it—although my boss always says, “To fight your weaknesses when it isn’t necessary is also a weakness.”

  We landed in front of the biosector lab. I ordered the robot to wait for me in the shuttle and, assuming that Reder might be watching me, peacefully strolled to the entrance. The unfurnished, tiled foyer led to sliding glass doors, behind which spread a huge greenhouse. The plants there caught my interest, but I postponed visiting them for now. Instead, I turned my attention to the stairs leading to the basement where, judging by the muted noises, somebody was working at the moment.

  I walked down the stairs and continued along an empty, dimly lit corridor. Before I reached the source of the noise, however, I had to pass by a room that had no door. Peeping in, I discovered something between a workshop and a laboratory. There, bent over a complicated network of thin plastic pipes, stood two robots, obviously in a state of tense expectation. When I approached them, they didn’t even move or look at me, so I also waited, though not knowing what for.

  At last something in the pipes moved and then rattled as if rolling back and forth, and their surfaces quickly frosted over. When they became completely white, one of the robots stood up. It was SN23, one of the two robots I had seen yesterday. He lifted the elastic nozzle of the last pipe and pulled out its flap. The rattling stopped, and light-brown threads started running from the nozzle into a vessel placed under it for that purpose.

  “They are not merging,” said the other robot, SN14.

  “Yes,” SN23 said. “He’ll be happy anyway.”

  The frost on the pipes melted, running onto the floor, and SN23 capped the nozzle and then placed the vessel in one of the sinks. After filling it up with water, he left the room. I went to have a closer look at the threads in question. Not only had they not “merged” but now, obviously affected by the water, they were also twisting together to form small sheaves that were gradually being covered with dark-brown husks.

  “Soon they’ll be ready stems,” SN14 said.

  Since I was bent over the sink, when I turned my head, I could see his knees—with brownish stains on them. They were the same stains I had seen on the robot that had deliberately passed by me with SN23 while I was trapped in that sticky substance among the cones. Only that robot had been marked SN17.

  “Where did you get those stains?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” SN14 answered.

  “Come here,” I ordered him.

  After a short hesitation, he approached me. I could see that his knees were covered with biopolymer plates and that only these plates bore the brownish stains. I circled him and ascertained that his elbows and the joints between neck and back were also covered with biopolymer plates, but only the plates at the elbows were stained. Apparently the robot had lain on his “belly” for some reason, resting on his elbows, on something that had interacted only with these plates.

  “Besides you, what other robots have such stains?”

  “Serial Numbers Seventeen and Thirty-One.”

  “When you came to Eyrena, did you already have them?”

  “No.”

  “Then they’re not a fabric defect, so you should know how they appeared.”

  “I don’t know,” insisted the robot.

  I left without further comment. When I reached the end of the corridor and found out that the noises I had heard came from some automatic machinery, I went straight back to the foyer. I opened the sliding doors and entered the greenhouse. As far as I could see, Reder wasn’t here either, and besides SN23, no other robots were in sight. I walked down the concrete path along the plants. They were separated into tanks of different nutrient solutions. Though none of them looked familiar to me, I was very impressed by their wide variety. Some of these plants were well above human height, while others were barely half a meter high. Some species were so flat that they looked two-dimensional, but others resembled the three-dimensional models of complicated chemical formulae, consisting of different-size spheres that awkwardly branched in every direction. Their colors varied from dark green to the lightest chartreuse, and their shapes from wide and bush-like to narrowly pointed spears.

  When I noticed that one of the plants in the row ahead was moving, I quickly approached it. Originally large and smooth, like a huge rounded bottle, it now began to flatten. At the same time, it spun to the left, whipped by its roots, which were taking large scoops of the nutrient solution.

  The plant spun faster and faster. Its lime coat darkened, its tip split open, and the whole plant was suddenly wrapped in a halo of fluffy white fibers. These fibers whirled around it and grew thicker while the plant itself was gradually shrinking. At last it was reduced to a slim spindle shape, and the spinning slowed. Light fibrous slivers started raining down. As they reached the tank, they melted into the solution.

  I moved on, feeling that I had watched a skillfully edited science fiction movie. I reached another eccentric plant, which in front of my eyes spouted sharp, daggerlike spikes. Yet another plant bent into an arch and then split in two, then in three, and on and on until it looked like a living vaulted cathedral.

  I called robot SN23, who had been standing guard all this time next to the sliding doors, which he had carefully closed.

  “What are these plants?” I asked him.

  “Cacti,” he answered.

  “Aha. Which exactly are the cacti?”

  “All of them.”

  I took a long look at the rows of cacti, and more cacti. “Well done!” I mumbled.

  “Yes, well done,” the robot said, “because their mutations increase their storage abilities.”

  “Storage?”

  “Yes. By nature they’re adapted to store water, but these can now collect and concentrate many other substances. Only they do that spontaneously, and we are trying to make it compulsory. Otherwise it would be impossible for us to connect them into a common system.”

  I recalled the shellfish with its “transformed future” that Chuks had shown me on the starship and smiled smugly. These cacti were at least equally as “transformed”!

  I left the greenhouse and headed to Stein’s workplace or, more accurately, his creative studio. It was a one-floor concrete structure situated near the central building. Like all the other structures in the biosector, it clearly was not built by the Yusians. In other words, there were no wood carvings, no mosaics, no weather cocks, and the like. It included only a kitchenette, bathroom, and small study, with furniture as simple in appearance as the person who had worked here for months.

  Simple and already in that perfect, somehow deadly, order with which the robots—as if impulsively, unconsciously vindictive—can erase all traces of a human’s spiritual presence. Not a single personal possession remained. The sofa and upholstered chairs didn’t retain one wrinkle from the weight of Stein’s body. Wherever he might have kept a picture of a loved one, a book, a clock, or some other insignificant but treasured memento was now empty and impeccably clean.

  I ended my inspection of these quiet, sterile, depersonalized rooms and stopped in front of the computer. All Stein’s information had indeed been deleted, and in the simplest way: by reformatting the disks. Even the date of that operation was deleted. Stein would not have done this to his own computer, I thought. Only somebody unfamiliar wi
th the information stored there and how it could possibly implicate them would do so. Somebody in a great hurry.

  I turned off the computer and, checking the map, went to look for Reder. I found him in one of the experimental fields, surrounded by orange markers. He was working on something but noticed me from a distance and hurried to meet me before I was close enough to see what it was. We nodded to each other coldly.

  “We never finished our conversation this morning,” I said.

  “Yes, but unfortunately I’m very busy now,” Reder replied.

  “So am I. That’s why I suggest we be as brief and clear as possible.”

  “Deal.”

  There was neither hostility nor irritation in his behavior. At the moment, he was just a busy man eager to get back to work.

  “When did you realize that Stein wasn’t in the biosector?”

  “At about twelve o’clock.”

  “That’s when you were supposed to start some experiment?”

  “So you know.”

  “When had that experiment been planned?”

  “Long before the twenty-sixth.”

  “But you chose exactly the twenty-sixth to conduct it?

  He shrugged his shoulders. “That was the first day after the equipment arrived. We had no reason to delay.”

  “What equipment?”

  “The experiment couldn’t be conducted without the new biozone extrainer, which arrived from Earth on the twenty-fifth.”

  “When was it delivered to you in the biosector?”

  “We picked it up ourselves the same evening.”

  “On the evening of the twenty-fifth, you went with Stein to the landing site, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the starship was there,” I remarked.” Did you meet any Yusians?”

  “Of course not! They are never around when we collect the shipments.”

  “Except for the extrainer, what else did you take?”

  “Nothing. Fowler was supposed to transport the rest of the shipment in the morning.”

  “According to one of the robots you interrogated, on the twenty-sixth at about seven forty, Stein left for the site where you had been working.”