by Set Wagner
Or in other words, There is nowhere to run, buddy! You’re showing off in vain. And that was the truth. So why did I give him a reason to say it? Why!
“Your way of expressing yourself is hard for me to understand, Yusian.” I tried to sound both polite and, at the same time, confused. “This tires me. I would prefer to stop our attempts to communicate.”
It may have sounded pompous and negligent, but at least the creature could not say I was “efforting myself” again. He seemed to hesitate a moment before he sang, “All right. My presence will become unnoticeable. Yet must not finalize. Possibility to feel it again.”
“Yes, yes,” I indolently nodded and headed toward the bookcase, picking a book without even noticing its title, although I searched quite a while to “choose” it. Then I collapsed on the sofa to recover from my “jolt.”
I had always known I lacked diplomatic skills, but this time I hit a new low. If I continued to antagonize my host, others would have to pay for my mistakes later. So this is what we have come to—permanently expecting punishment, measuring each word and deed according to only one indicator: whether or not the Yusians will like it. We have turned into wretched toadies.
Pretending to be absorbed in the book, I put my feet up on the table.
How we had longed for contact with other intelligent life! For so many years, we felt isolated and sent out messages. Well, the “brothers” came. And now our greatest desire is to rid ourselves of them. True, thus far they have never harmed us. Yet they hang above our heads like a sword of Damocles, don’t they? And not one of us understands these creatures or their ultimate intentions toward us. But what good would such knowledge do us, since we are helpless to defend ourselves? All we can do is tremble, shaken by Yusophobia. It is gnawing our hearts, bemusing our brains. We are degenerating! The best human virtues are becoming stunted. So why should they be aggressive, since their mere presence has been enough to cripple us?
“Hey, Yusian!”
Yes?” immediately echoed in my ears.
“How long will the flight continue?”
“Who is this flight?”
How to communicate with this weirdo! “The trip to Eyrena.”
“Time depends on you.”
“So—approximately how long?”
“May be between nine hours and eleven days and nine hours and twenty-three days. Depends on adaptation. If you not oppose it.”
I skipped his final remark without any comment. “You probably want to say nine days and between eleven and twenty-three hours?” I suggested.
“Why should say such unpacked facts?” The creature was puzzled.
I returned my attention to the book. What a discouraging exchange! Even if the trip did take twenty-three days, I would bear it somehow, I told myself. Then Jerry jumped up on the sofa, curling against me familiarly, while the robot continued to stand at attention by the exit door, his yellow, unblinking eyes fixed on us. What a motley crew we were, including especially our invisible Yusian host, who had joined us so insolently.
Never before had I dealt directly with robots, but I had heard only praise for this model. Examining him with interest, I decided he resembled those little toy robots in store windows, only full size. Not big enough to create a sense of inferiority, though: no more than a meter and seventy centimeters. The psychologists from essiko know their business—as does the entire company. And they could expect to have no rivals for a decade or two. Their creations are always brilliantly engineered and appear so pleasantly human that they calm the hearts of even their most virulent opponents.
“Siko, come here,” I said kindly.
The robot approached me quickly and nimbly.
“Have you ever been to Eyrena?” I asked him when he stopped in front of me.
“No.”
“Did the man who ordered you to accompany me tell you that you would be staying there?”
“He did.”
“So he explained to you what you will be doing at the base, didn’t he?”
“Yes. I will wait for new orders and will obey them.”
“And who do you have to contact to receive those orders? What is his name?”
“I don’t know.” The robot answered, exactly as I expected.
But I was sure that Zung’s people had filled him with information and instructions I wasn’t supposed to know and that somebody at the base would find a way to get them.
“All right, Siko.” I sighed. “Now go prepare tea for me. And feed the dog.”
Siko turned and hurried toward the kitchen to fulfill my orders. Jerry, however, suspecting that he was trying to run away, leaped from the sofa and ran after him with a menacing growl, fiercely waving his ears. I watched him with a smile; having a dog traveling with me was a wonderful diversion. Besides, he didn’t look troubled at all. Despite his reaction to the Yusian, he had clearly not been mistreated. Humans act similarly when they first meet with such creatures, don’t they? Supposedly this is caused by a temporary “psychosensor overload.”
Soon I heard Jerry crunching energetically from the kitchen, and Siko appeared with the tea. He served it with a plate of cookies, which shows he didn’t lack initiative. I was really beginning to like him and couldn’t blame him because he had been programmed to spy on me.
As I sipped hot, fragrant tea, I picked up the book again. Then I started thinking about the briefcase. The complicated precautions taken to protect its contents—the triple-coded safe, the switch to the gray briefcase, and the metal case (a money box?) inside wrapped in cellophane (for preventing fingerprints?)—all seemed illogical. But those precautions convinced me that the contents were meant only for humans, not for the Yusians. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been entrusted to me.
Suddenly something stirred behind me. Lightly, just a puff. And again. My hair stood on end. I could feel a presence very close, just behind my back. Breathing down my neck. I calmed myself, refused to look back, and slowly sipped my tea before placing the cup carefully on its saucer. Feeling as if electricity ran down my spine, I slowly pulled back from the table. Whoever this was, whatever it was, it was still behind me, so close that I could hear it breathe. I turned my head one centimeter—two—yes! I detected motion out of the corner of my eye. The curtain behind the sofa was slightly swaying. The curtain at the “window.” I clenched my fists and tightened my muscles, ready to confront it on the count of three. One—I took a deep breath.
What was that smell?
Clean air. That was all—simply ventilation. Damn! I could just see that freak laughing from above, laughing at how childish a thirty-year-old human could behave.
I walked around the room for a while before entering the bedroom, where I took off my jacket and tie and threw them on the bed. I began to understand Genetti and Zung, anyone who had been in close contact with the Yusians, much better. Although I was a trained investigator, after only an hour among them, a tiny voice inside me was already screaming, “Alien! Alien!” I kept expecting something terrible to happen, with no idea of what that something might be. I suspected them of maliciousness with no justification and saw menace or mockery all around me with no provocation—maybe. Simply because they were not human? No other reason. No matter how primitive it sounds, this fact could well become an insurmountable barrier for the human psyche.
I retrieved the briefcase from the living room, placed it on the nightstand, and opened it. “Later you’ll receive the code for the case inside,” Genetti had promised, but I was given no such code. Maybe it’s planted in one of my suitcases? Another child’s game: hide-and-seek. On a hunch, I checked the memory of my watch and discovered a seven-number code.
Bending over to block my actions from the Yusian surveillance equipment, I punched in the new code, and the case immediately opened. In other situations, this cloak-and-dagger secrecy would either amuse or irritate me. But at this moment, I lacked the strength for any reaction. I simply froze in that uncomfortable position—hunched over the nightstand, m
y knees bent—and stared at the open case.
It was empty.
Chapter 6
For two days and two nights, I acted as if I’d come on the Yusian starship for a vacation. Of course, those were not my true feelings, but I made an effort to keep up appearances. And that Yusian investigating me must have been really bored with recording how I played with Jerry, read, listened to music, ate, slept, or engaged Siko in long and meaningless dialogues. He certainly didn’t succeed in receiving from me any chances of “incoming conclusions” except, perhaps, that I was yet another dumb human with a brain as big as a pea, or let’s say, as big as that little effigy of my head that I had been given at liftoff.
Even worse, I had reached a similar conclusion about myself. What else could explain why I had believed Zung that there would be some documents in the case—especially after he prevented me from getting in touch with my bureau chief? Franklin, of course, could have provided me with information and instructions.
Now I had no other choice but to accept the current situation. Zung was light-years away, and I was floating in a gigantic black starship. Obviously my return to Earth was not a part of Zung’s plans, nor would Franklin be able to help me from Earth. So I decided to help myself, by doing something useful—like spying on the Yusians. Exactly what I was advised to do by Mr. Zung, who had screwed me.
So, on the morning of the third day, I broke my long silence and asked my invisible Yusian if it would be possible for me to have a tour of the starship. He accepted my wish with what I took to be great amazement, if such a feeling, or any other human feeling, could be assigned to these creatures. As for our conversations after that, nothing was generally new in them. In other words, I offered only trivialities, while his replies, even if they had harbored exceptionally deep meanings, reached me only as depressing gobbledygook.
What I did manage to understand, somehow, was that in an hour I would have to leave my “physical apartness” and experience a “short left connection, whose end” would “swallow” me to “express” me in “concrete form” according to my “model.” I mulled over this while I lay on the sofa, pretending to take a nap.
Seven minutes before the appointed time, the Yusian gave me more proof that neither he nor others like him were very strict in terms of punctuality.
“And here what is desired!” he roared, as if trying to shake the ceiling overhead. Only my willpower saved me from leaping off the sofa. Instead, I rose slowly and calmly left the room. I assumed that “short left connection” meant to turn into the left corridor. But since I expected the corridor to have walls, floor, and a ceiling as on Earth, I was surprised to discover otherwise. What I saw made me feel nostalgia for the squelching floor and the brackets shooting out blinding sparks of my earlier Yusian experience. I now found myself in front of something completely different, a series of closely aligned rings, some spinning clockwise and others counterclockwise. Since I clearly had to pass through them, I cautiously stepped on the first ring and then on the second. By the third one, I was pleased to find that they helped rather than hindered my balance, stabilizing it by transferring me lightly and imperceptibly from one to the other. Thus, in only a few seconds, I reached a barrier, round like the bottom of a cylinder but divided in the middle by a deep vertical cleft that didn’t appear to be wide enough for me to squeeze through. But squeeze through I did somehow—or had it indeed swallowed me?
I emerged, again without understanding how, entirely naked in a well-lit space scarcely large enough to contain me, which immediately shrank even further, wrapping itself around me like a cocoon and filling with darkness. When I thought I would suffocate, it slowly returned to its former size, leaving a swarm of reddish grains on my skin. I could barely suppress the impulse to shake them off, especially after they began splitting and releasing tiny sticky threads that immediately started crawling all over my body.
For a minute or two, I looked as if all my capillaries had risen to the surface. Then the web of threads tightened and blended into a homogeneous, pliable membrane that fit me like a second skin. Next, something heavy poured down on me. I looked up just in time to see a muddy, mucous gush over my face.
“Now are together!” I heard the voice of the Yusian as if in a dream.
“With whom?” I managed to articulate through the membrane that covered my mouth and kept my eyes from blinking. “Together with whom?”
“Model space suit,” came the laconic answer.
Again the cleft opened, this time to spit me out beyond the barrier into a wide, empty hall. Here the membrane in front of my nostrils and my mouth started to pulse lightly. Apparently the air was already Yusian, and the suit was supplying me with needful oxygen while keeping out gas that might harm or poison me.
The suit was unquestionably a brilliant product of bioengineering, and despite my initial antipathy, I had to admit to feeling quite comfortable in it now. I took a few cautious steps. I could sense that the gravitation was far greater than that on Earth, but the space suit compensated for the difference. So it had antigravitation features, and who knows what else? Yes, a wonderful creation! Would we ever be able to invent such marvels?
A slight rustling caught my attention. The Yusian was standing about twenty meters from me, but looking more like a variegated pattern in a huge kaleidoscope than like the creatures who had met me in front of the starship. Quite picturesque. I headed in his direction with great interest.
“Withhold yourself, human!” he unexpectedly yelled at me, before becoming entirely dark.
I stopped, bewildered, and the Yusian withdrew as many steps as I had taken toward him. He stood still for a few moments and then glided toward me—slowly, lightly, and gracefully. Even solemnly. It occurred to me that he might have chosen that wide, empty room to give me more time to admire him as he approached me. I had to admit it was a sight worth seeing, especially when his kaleidoscopic hues returned. Gone was the ugly muddy-brown cover, which my recent experience suggested had been merely his terrestrial space suit.
Here, however, seeing the Yusian in his natural mode—possibly the most unnatural for my human perceptions—blew my mind. Not a living creature but some weird, colorful wave was approaching me, because his forms merged into each other with every move. He was not walking but overflowing in my direction, his limbs stretching and sliding along the mossy blue floor.
And his skin: a veil of stars lightly embracing the side clefts of his torso, glowing like a rainbow. Not homogeneous like our skin, it consisted of various zones—some larger, some smaller; some bulging out, others receding—separated by an exquisite pattern of narrow, asymmetrically branched channels. At that moment, the zones focused their bright rays directly upon me, and I was probably reflecting them back, a living mirror attesting to their multicolor magnificence.
But if I admired the way the Yusian solemnly overflowed in my direction, that admiration disappeared entirely the moment he stopped in front of me and moved aside his forehead membrane. Again I was weighed down by those huge floating eyes—their gelatinous, deadly white substance surrounding dilated pupils as deep and dark as craters sinking into his mind, churning up from those depths the vague motion of that same brain—staring at me.
I have no idea how long we stayed like that—maybe seconds, maybe minutes. This time he didn’t try to mitigate the initial effect their eyes had on us. And because he knew perfectly well what I was experiencing, I supposed he was doing this on purpose: that here, in his own territory, he wanted to hurt me, to make me feel insignificant, dependent, and alone.
When that terrible stiffness caused by his gaze left my body, I stepped toward the creature, looked him up and down, and stretched my face into a smile that amazed even me how the mask of my space suit could stand it without cracking.
“Well, shall we begin our little tour?” I asked him very politely.
“Pass through you, without you having it,” he answered me just as politely.
I laughed. But since the Y
usian remained standing in front of me, and protocol approved silence only if we were moving in some direction, I had to add another comment. “I will be your guest for many more days, and during that time, we will certainly chat very often. Tell me, how do you want me to call you? What’s your name?”
“If you want it, name—Chuks.”
“So, you don’t have a name?”
“Could have not name? I am with you, right?”
“Aha. And does the name ‘Chuks’ have a certain meaning in your language?”
“Yes, is marked. By first two stones hit one another: Chuks! Millions of times before, before.” The Yusian moved back and sank until his upper limbs touched the floor.
“All right,” I murmured. “I will call you Chuks.”
The Yusian stood up. “Me too,” he declared.
Oh my God! How could we ever communicate if we could not even explain to each other what our names were?
“No!” I shook my head. “My name is not Chuks. My name is Terence. Ter for short.”
“So, remain unchanged toward me—or just nostalgia?”
“No matter how you take it, it would be true anyway.”
“Yes, are equalized things.” Chuks probably agreed.
Then he articulated some phrase that I took as an offer for me to follow him, and we headed toward the nearest wall. I assumed that we would stop in front of it, but Chuks kept moving until the wall split and folded around his body upon contact. I passed through the “door” created that way and, after a few steps, turned back. The wall had already closed behind us.
“Deprived of toleration of intelligent touch, but given them urge to be together,” Chuks explained.
“Are you saying that this wall is alive?” I wondered.
“Are creatures. But alive sometimes and almost.”
Though I didn’t understand this answer, I suddenly felt good. Here I was, walking side by side with a Yusian on an intergalactic starship, being treated as an equal. Maybe we are equals, despite their biotechnical wonders, their five planets, and their thousands of years of traveling through space. Well, yes! In the final reckoning, they are the ones who sought us out, aren’t they? Would they do that if they considered us lower forms of life? Probably not. More likely, in some areas we excel them. There must be some! We just don’t realize it yet. They do, however, and that’s why…