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

  The multifaceted eyes came to life. Yes, they were still staring at the ceiling, but lights flashed from their depths: shadows passing, spasmodic thrills, and sparks flaring up from some ravenous rage. Something gloomy and amorphous arose from them as teary moisture surfacing on the thousands of lenses started evaporating and soon enveloped everything in a creamy mist.

  The mist grew denser and denser until it formed a thick creamy film that spread its weightless embrace over the entire cave. We all sank into it: the mossy vault, the carpet of rosy tissue, the gigantic eyes, and Chuks—and me as well.

  I reached out ahead of me but couldn’t see my hands. I looked down and couldn’t even see a particle of me in the impenetrable whiteness. I had a crazy desire to ascertain if I was still there. I tried to touch my chest, but my fingers seemed to sink in and penetrated, against my will, deep inside to where my heart was supposed to be.

  Then I realized that I hadn’t made the slightest movement. I was completely paralyzed. In spite of that, the sensation of movement wouldn’t leave me. I seemed to be walking somewhere, anywhere, since the direction existed only in my imagination. At the same time, I was lingering on the edge of the groove that had disappeared, a stiff figure engulfed in the slow rhythm of its own distancing from itself.

  I could see gray Yusian phantoms coming toward me. They surrounded me silently, their contours clarifying as bizarre pictures cut out of paper, and then—then everything changed completely. The white mist lifted, the phantoms took on flesh and splendid colors, and from above, a broad plain was lowered like a stage setting. It passed through us, or rather we ran through it, lay down, and subsided. The heat became unbearable.

  The Yusians clumsily walked off. I followed them. We were all just part of the grave silence that reigned over everything, our presence as ephemeral and hollow as our thoughts.

  There was no sun or sky here. Close above us hung a strange, homogeneous gas; its optical properties turned it into a flat mirror roof, taut from end to end. Reflections of the exiting Yusians wobbled on it, reversed and diminished in size. I tried to find my own reflection among them, but it wasn’t there.

  I slowed down in order to lag behind and then looked up again and saw a Yusian, who must also be lagging behind the main group. Puzzled, I shrugged my totally human shoulders, and he trembled; I waved my hand, and the Yusian above me reeled precariously. When I sped up to rejoin the Yusians now far ahead of me, my Yusian reflection shuffled its feet overhead. I stopped paying attention to it.

  The plain had no horizons, and all its far edges were folded up, as if it were filling up a gigantic container. We moved in it across a desert of tiny black bead–like grains that were also moving, flowing forward with the majestic peacefulness of a mighty river. Some small bristly creatures ran in front of us, leaving circles of light smoke in their wake. Some large drops of mercury floated in the sweltering heat.

  I felt as if we had been walking for hours, but that was surely a delusion. At last the black grainy river changed its course and flowed to the left, past a curved narrow gorge. The Yusians paused at its very edge, so I did too. I leaned over: the gorge wasn’t very deep. Its sides were slanted, colorless, and smooth, as if made of polished quartz. At the bottom were ugly, distorted plants. Actually I was just guessing when I said they were plants. They looked more like the skeletons of primeval reptiles, even in their coloring: clay gray and marked in places as if by shreds of flesh.

  I stepped back from the edge of the gorge, and the Yusians almost simultaneously slid downhill. Feeling abandoned, I followed them. It was much cooler toward the bottom.

  One of the Yusians moved toward me, his approach seeming to take forever. The folds around his chest billowed up and down, and the communication zones on the front of his massive body all turned scarlet, resembling an open, bleeding wound. He kept coming and coming—as if this were happening in a dream, in slow motion, absurdly silent.

  The Yusian was already intolerably close to me yet kept coming. Only two steps separated us—then just one—I raised my hand to keep him at a distance, and he touched my palm with his scarlet flesh. I didn’t flinch.

  “Chuks?” I whispered. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

  “Two of us,” I heard him whisper back. “The rest was before. On my planet.”

  “What are they doing?” I pointed at the other Yusians, who were closing in on one of them in a somewhat threatening manner.

  “Anticipated his indulgence,” Chuks said quietly.

  All the Yusians lay down on the ground except the one they surrounded. Since he was standing, I could see him more clearly now. He had been completely mauled. His limbs were all swollen, his forehead membrane had been torn, and underneath it gaped his empty eye socket. He was shaking all over, seemingly not so much from the physical pain as from some ineffable psychotic disorder.

  He trembled as, for some reason, his body kept developing more wounds, shredding until in the end it burst into blazing blue flames. They spread around with lightning speed and, turning orange, enveloped the Yusians lying on the ground. Chuks and I were out of range, at the very edge of the burning circle that was forming. I impetuously stepped into it.

  I knelt before the intangible flames, dizzy with the shining emotions that were emitted through them, and looked gratefully at the Yusian who was extracting them from his body. He didn’t appear mauled or ugly to me anymore. On the contrary, he was splendid in his fiery “indulgence”!

  I turned around to find Chuks still beyond the bright edge of the burning circle, and I wanted him to be close to me. And he came—I could swear I saw him smile as he approached me, an almost, impossibly human smile that could not be described properly. I lay with my face down and my arms stretched in front of me in the cool smokeless bonfire.

  I lay with my face down—with my arms stretched in front of me. That’s what those robots had done, the ones with the scars! They must have been there, in the deserted base, in a room with flames just like these.

  Yes, but so what? What!

  I couldn’t answer myself. I felt as if feathers were falling over my thoughts, muffling them and burying them.

  But they are very important. I will forget them! Because soon I wouldn’t be me anymore; I was going to be something else.

  Something else? No, Chuks! This game you are playing is totally unacceptable to me!

  I started rising up, centimeter by centimeter, fighting some inhuman force that pulled me toward the ground. As soon as I was back standing on the ground, though, I regained my senses surprisingly fast. I leaned over Chuks, who was still in a blissful trance, and shook him.

  “Come on! Let’s get out of here!”

  He obeyed, bewildered by my rudeness, until we stood opposite each other not far from the Yusian ritual burning stake.

  “Stop this ‘episode’ immediately!” I demanded.

  “No! No!” Chuks was startled. “Have been before. How stop them today!”

  Some inappropriate compassion made me say, “That Yusian in the center of the circle must be dead by now, eh?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, with his ‘fiery indulgence,’ he has—”

  “Everyone does same time or another.”

  “You too, Chuks?”

  “Yes. You too, but another appearance.”

  I nodded my head thoughtfully. Me too, but in another appearance, I repeated to myself and felt that I could really understand what Chuks meant. I hesitated just to be completely sure I was thinking clearly and then asked him directly, “What have you implanted in the brains of the essiko robots?”

  Chuks was silent.

  “Tell me!”

  “Stepping into disapproval, Ter,” he warned me.

  “The hell with your disapproval! Answer my question!”

  “Implanted some our conceptions with some yours. Robots also mutual.”

  “Aha, mutual!” I repeated sarcastically. “Like all of Eyrena with its plants, colonies and a future all planned
by you beforehand. What I fail to understand, though, is what we have to do with all this? We haven’t even been informed of their—mixed nature.”

  “Some informed,” Chuks objected. “Most general nuance of essiko concept on Earth.”

  I felt myself turning pale. It was not just a company then! “And what does this concept include?”

  “Humans must learn gradually.”

  “No! They must know it now.”

  “Now is preparation, Ter. No advantages if come ahead.”

  “Advantages for whom? For you again?”

  “For everyone.”

  “Really? How will you continue the preparation—with that euphoria stuff again, metamorphoses, and rituals?” I pointed angrily toward the Yusians still entranced among the dancing flames. “You want to continue all your rituals, Chuks, to impose them on the colonists until you change their souls—”

  “True,” he interrupted me, “but stimulus in union of two minds.”

  “The foundations of this union are going to be laid here on Eyrena, right?”

  “Yes. Promote that some time now to facilitate process.”

  “And from here you’re going to impose it on Earth as well.”

  “As all our planets,” Chuks added matter-of-factly and then began to explain. “Facing necessity to communicate, Ter, and will form only if we give up our nature and meet where no self recognized but other already known.”

  “Enough! I see through your wicked games now. You want to degenerate us into some human-Yusian hybrids!”

  “Concept ‘degenerate’ not in target.”

  “You bet it is! I repeat: you’re trying to degenerate us into some freaks because you’re unable to accept us the way we are.”

  “Able to accept us?” The creature was trying sarcasm now.

  “Humans, Chuks, are capable of doing anything,” I said with pride, “with one exception: we don’t give up on our own kind.”

  “But why? Directing you into becoming something more than now.”

  His reflections were truly astonishing! “We don’t want to be more than humans,” I emphasized. “We’re completely satisfied with what we are.”

  My last statement, maybe a little exaggerated, unexpectedly caused Chuks to lose his composure. “Humans insufficient!” his voice boomed, and if the walls of the gorge had been real, they would probably have reverberated with the powerful echo of what he said. “Stopped with death man Stein coming toward us! On Earth humans only interpret Yusian presence and do same on Eyrena! Ter visit Chuks by disagreement and so too empty Yusian base. Ter kill there!”

  “I killed that woman by accident. But she deserved it anyway. She was—a traitor.”

  “She help us establish contact, give access her mind. But you—”

  “Stop it!” I objected angrily. “I can only be judged by humans. And what exactly do you think you’re doing? Do you really think that the union of two minds means simply mechanically mixing them together?”

  “Not so simple. Rebellion for our instincts too.”

  “Now I understand, Chuks!” I heaved a sigh of relief. “You Yusians have progressed as far as possible, and now you’re just groping in the dark—just trying variants that aren’t working, but you won’t admit defeat and give them up.”

  This time, to my astonishment, Chuks showed no signs of insult or disagreement. “What our variants under your opinion, Ter?” he asked quietly.

  “Everything that I have seen,” I generalized without hesitation. “For example, what good would it have done for us to meet as two human-Yusians? And what ‘impersonal understanding’ were you talking about just before you brought me into this ritual? No understanding is impersonal because only a person can understand. A real encounter between us, Chuks, is only possible while you are Yusian and I am human. It’s quite obvious, though, that such a personal encounter will be torture for both of us.”

  We fell silent. The gorge beside us was already fading, as were the other Yusians and the skeletal plants, the smooth slanted walls, and the flat mirror roof of a sky above—disappearing just as a mirage gradually disappears.

  It was high time I finished this conversation. I had learned enough for now and, what’s more, had said enough. Enough that I wondered if I would be allowed to leave the Yusian base at all. No doubt Chuks had not given me any involuntary information despite my “professional” interrogation techniques. On the contrary, I knew that he had tried to express himself in a manner more understandable to me, more human. He really wanted me to learn the ultimate goal of essiko. The very way he tried to make it clear to me—with implications, objections, and facts he pretended to be revealing by accident—proved to me that first he wasn’t authorized to give me that information and second Yusians, like humans, are in the habit of monitoring conversations conducted by their representatives. That meant I should hurry my good-bye before they decided what to do with me.

  “Presuppose energy low, Ter.” Chuks also seemed to understand this and was urging me to leave.

  “Yes,” I looked at him with genuine friendliness. “I do feel tired.”

  “Good, good!” he said enthusiastically in his old tone. “Will move you away!”

  He really did move me away, returning me to the “mushroom greenhouse” in the fastest manner possible. We parted there without any further pleasantries, and soon I was also free of my Yusian space suit. I again was supplied clothes similar to the ones I had worn on my arrival, except for their essiko labels, after which I immediately headed for the exit.

  Chapter 30

  After I visited the Yusian base, my life on Eyrena felt even more precarious, so I went directly to my apartment and encoded my own theories about possible Yusian weaknesses. Recent circumstances made me reluctant to entrust this information even to my restricted data bank on the server. Because of weariness and lack of sleep, neither my brain nor my hand worked properly, so the task took me nearly an hour. The text was not as coherent as I had hoped, but I still stored it in my computer and, without editing it, sent it to Reder, copying Vey A. Zung. I was convinced that the two communicated freely and that Reder, regardless of his feelings about me, would forward it to him anyway. Zung would hardly be happy to get the message but would realize that there was too much at stake to leave it unread. If he wanted to read it, he would have to seek the help of my boss, P. R. Franklin, since only Franklin could decipher the secret code I used.

  Next on my list to do were a refreshingly cool bath, a bite to eat, and a meeting with Vernie regarding the robots, but I dozed off first in the tub and then a couple of times while I was eating. In short, I wouldn’t be ready to meet anyone until I had napped for a few hours.

  I woke up around noon. How I managed to sleep for the first time near the cones puzzled me but didn’t matter much anyway. I tried to reach Vernie, but he didn’t answer any of my numerous phone calls. Probably he was at the bunker again, and I still didn’t have the vaguest idea of its real purpose, I must admit.

  I carefully checked my flexor, left the lodge, and descended the irritatingly picturesque stone staircase. From the top of the stairs, I spotted Elia and Jerry entering the medical laboratory. I wanted to follow her, just to say hello, but instead went to the parking lot and programmed my shuttle to take me to the biosector. I landed in front of the building in which, late at night on March twenty-fifth, the robots assembled the biozone extrainer shipped from Earth as instructed by Reder and Stein. The moment had come, or maybe had come and gone, to follow up on a hunch.

  The building consisted of a spacious hall connected to cubicles for the preliminary processing of organic material, apparently specifically for the extrainer. It was functioning even now. I sent the two staff robots outside and immediately entered my emergency password in the system. The information I needed was quickly displayed, and in just a few more seconds, I had deciphered Franklin’s cable to Stein. It was the usual laconic: “Agreed.” Now everything was obvious to me, but look how many days had to pass
before that happened!

  Yes, Fowler and Stein had been IBI agents planted—maybe through Genetti—in the group leaving for Eyrena. When the directive from Genetti’s Special Sector arrived, my boss didn’t know they had been murdered and simply decided to send me here as the official representative of IBI, an official badly needed on Eyrena anyway. So that was why he didn’t object to my urgent dispatch here: he was counting on them to fill me in on the situation in much greater detail than he could himself. That was the exact reason why he gave me an emergency password and a secret code that coincided with theirs. Unlike them, I was traveling openly as IBI, and these would enable us all to contact each other. However, since Fowler and Stein were dead, the password and code had taken on totally different roles.

  So Franklin’s “Agreed” was in reply to a message sent to him by Stein. How exactly Stein sent that message was easy to guess, since the Yusians send nothing from Eyrena to Earth except noncoded reports from the base commander and individual requests from the base for equipment, tools, and materials. Stein had needed to encode his message by incorporating a prearranged phrase in such a request. I could even guess its contents: he must have insisted on permission to return to Earth. Only there could he report fully his already firm opposition to the colonization project.

  I erased my activities from the system and walked outside. The two robots were waiting for me on the threshold.

  “Enter!” I ordered them.

  I waited for them to close the door behind their massive backs and then boarded the shuttle. I took off very slowly, flying low above the plant pillars that had formed overnight. I was thinking of Genetti. Now I understood that the foil he had tried to give me would confirm that Fowler and Stein were also IBI agents. He suspected that they had been murdered, and his heart wouldn’t let him send another man on a certain death mission. Since he was under constant surveillance and couldn’t get in touch with Franklin or prevent my coming here in any other way, he had tried at least to warn me.