by Set Wagner
“You knew,” she whispers fiercely. “You knew the whole time that…he…that it—” She looks down and only now realizes what she has been leaning on. She jumps back as if her hand has been scalded.
“No, I didn’t know!” Reder snarls at her. “Nobody knew how their kids looked. None of the video materials they gave us contained a kid. But I did guess and thought you guessed too and that none of us were talking about it just because—”
“Because it was easier that way?” I interrupt, once again shutting off the saw and that diabolic paralyzer device.
Without paying the least attention to his wound, Reder waves his hands angrily, spattering blood in all directions. “It’s high time we ask ourselves why they hide their kids from us!”
“They don’t hide them at all,” Elia objects, nodding toward the poor, still terrified, “strange”—no, simply young—Yusian.
“Anyway, what difference does it make?” Reder again attempts a reasonable tone. “While we may not have planned it this way, this is still our best possible option. If we can find out how to kill their young, our battle will be won! Just think about it—consider the implications.”
I dismiss his ravings with an unambiguous warning gesture and turn to Elia. “Give him a tranquilizer and knock him out. Then you can see to his hand.”
Chapter 40
The Yusians’ relief gushed toward me as if a dam had burst its gates. Had their responses been material, I would definitely have drowned in their relief and then been crushed by their approval, as if their entire civilization had collectively patted me on the back and said, “Bravo, bravo! We are pleased with you.”
I was also feeling pretty happy with myself but for completely different reasons. I had penetrated a considerable distance into their system and could comprehend it much more fully with my enhanced senses than I ever could have on my previous entering. It was gradually calming down, regaining its balance because the danger had dissipated. My memory revealed its happy ending—like a Yusian fairy tale—and now the inhabitants of the system were jubilant. That prepared them for the moment of sterling, true, ultimate contact with me, and I too was ready.
My situation during this transitional stage hadn’t been bad at all. I had managed to retain complete human consciousness, even though that consciousness now resided in a plasma robot and that robot was—the devil knows where. For now I wasn’t allowed to see through his eyes or follow his movements. It was as if I were suspended, so to say, halfway between. Apparently the system had only admitted me far enough into its structures to allow my memory to be shared and was now making final checks. But those didn’t threaten my further plans either, because I had already determined that, even at this “spiritual” level, Yusians had no telepathic abilities.
More precisely, they can’t just read anyone’s memory, be the individual human or Yusian. To do so, they always need the active cooperation of the subject. Thus their “spiritual union” is primarily expressed through sharing identical opinions, opinions resulting from the uniformity forced upon them by the system. So they are individuals with free will, but their wills haven’t been stimulated to act individually for a long time. For a very long time—but no longer!
So enough with the delaying checks. It was high time for me to break in this plasma double-image machine again and to ride it down the chronal tracks of their polyplanet system. I had something else to show them, but it wouldn’t be a memory. It would happen in the present and, instead of a fairy tale, was going to have all the attributes of a thriller.
“My patience is coming to an end,” I pronounced. My voice echoed and reverberated as if coming from the abyss—or just from that pseudobed where my physical body lay. “I’m ready to terminate the contact!”
My threat had the desired effect: suddenly I could see through the eyes of the plasma robot. But that proved to be of almost no use, just convincing me that, even after this second exchange of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, I still lacked adequate knowledge to comprehend what I was seeing. Totally alien to me, a chaotic profusion of fiber pipes connected in three-dimensional configurations spread in every direction. Or maybe fiber shaped like pipes? Their gauge varied from a few centimeters to a meter or even more, and all of them were swaying, as if moved by a gentle breeze, and constantly vibrating. Their varying colors were shadowy, as if covered with ash, and their connecting knots loosened at one moment and then tightened the next, as if in reaction to their contents.
I shook off my bewilderment and tried to determine the position of the plasma robot—and thus myself as well—but I can only describe it as being suspended somewhere, with no ground under my lower limbs and nothing concrete either around or above me. I was just there, floating in a Yusian nowhere like some grotesquely enlarged fly trapped in one of the wide hollows between the fiber pipes.
But I hadn’t come this far just to dangle, a nowhere man going nowhere. I had to move on, to find the center of the system and deliver the crucial psychological blow. “To the center. To the center!” I multiplied this command in my mind as if using a stamp and also programmed it into my plasma robot: “to the center!”
I heard a sharp, rending sound, perhaps imaginary, but then I realized that it came from all the resolve in the depths of my being. Nothing would stop me. I was firing my self, launching myself like a torpedo, heading right for my target. Cutting the knots and breaking the pipes until everything around began quaking. Blue geysers shot out, leaving gaping chasms of blackness. Energy streams stormed and swooped at me, but I swooped back at them. White sparks surrounded me—my own aura—and then were transformed into striking lightning by my incredible speed. As the lightning tore through the upcoming currents, I overtook them one after another, going forward and up—and up.
But they kept repeating endlessly, seemingly chaotic and heterogeneous but actually frighteningly alike. These were the components of the system, united by unbreakable chronal connections—interacting through them instantly and automatically. Without will that could be broken. Without emotions that could be kindled. Without spirit that could stand against mine, yet they were overcoming my élan with their united monotony, snuffing out my diminishing white sparks.
My flight against the currents was over. Now they carried me at dizzying speeds through absolute time. I clenched my teeth to resist screaming, but even my teeth seemed to be melting. Then the next current whirled me straight downward. I painlessly crashed into blackness and continued to fall until a dim light penetrated the dark, as bleak as ashes. I had returned to the nowhere I started from. Yes, the same place—because it must always be the same. No journey can change it. No élan. No target, because there is no center here. I smiled bitterly: so this was the sum total of their “united spirituality” and what it was like to be its first human colonist.
I stretched an upper limb, a padded, shapeless semblance of an arm, and touched one of the fiber pipes. Gradually increasing the pressure, I tried to shake it. Nothing changed. It continued to vibrate and sway gently exactly as it had before I approached it. I let go and stepped on it instead, thinking that at least my vibrations would have some effect on it. Not visibly at least, but although it looked as soft and yielding as before, as accepting, it was actually hardening after each contact with me. This was, in fact, the reactive function of these psychoplasma fiber pipes. I placed my robot self next to its closest knot and lay down, pressing my communication zones against it. Although they were still in a rudimental stage of development, they were able to begin transforming the vibrations into homogenous sensations of stability, security, and steadiness. Of safety. The fiber pipes were conduits for defense, for universal reassurance—coziness.
I felt that flow of unmediated, unmitigated well-being and hurried to pull back, although I knew it would be to no avail. The zones would continue to merge and expand no matter what I wanted. Before long they would fill me with these sensations, and who knows what else, in any position, nonstop, whether I was in my plasma r
obot or my physical body. On Eyrena or on Earth—it wouldn’t matter because from now on I would always be here as well, in this alien dimension from which nothing and nobody can ever escape. It has no exits—a closed defense cycle designed to reduce even the most powerful sensations of its collective components, myself included, to safe uniformity.
I began to wander through the ancient deceitfulness of its seeming diversity, moving without direction, some psychoplasma hybrid from which the Yusian collective consciousness would indifferently suck out my spiritual energy—my feelings, thoughts, hopes—and canalize them. So what’s new about this story? Isn’t it as human as it is Yusian?
Chapter 41
As I stood, not even throwing a shadow in that ashy dimension but gathering my anger, I was not alone in this initiative. Many people were helping me, known and unknown, far from me and from each other, as far away as Earth. I thought about the hundreds of terminally ill people, torn between hope and despair at their upcoming journey to mythical Eyrena; the prisoners with life sentences; and the incurably insane people—all future colonists, elected and prepared so that they could be sacrificed on the altar of Zungian diplomacy to propitiate an alien civilization.
I yearned to avenge Genetti as well, a highly respected scientist who had been belittled into a confused, frightened old man. I evoked him in my mind together with his executioner: Vey A. Zung, who because of his undeniable talents had become Earth’s most powerful leader. For ten years, Zung had bowed and scraped before Yusians, listening to their pretensions and pretending to agree while choking on his own helpless hatred—exactly like mine now.
Others came to my aid from even further away. Fowler, Stein, and Odesta had sacrificed their lives for a cause they couldn’t really understand but that they knew to be human—three corpses that left behind two killers. I thought about those two: one had lost his moral courage, while the other, severed from himself, was now both lying on a Yusian “bed” and wandering here in the shape of a psychoplasma idiot. I reopened even my freshest psychic wounds, returning in my mind to the bunker just after I aborted the vivisection.
I load the delirious Reder onto the truck, his hand probably permanently crippled. “Come on!” I urge Elia, but she has already made the most difficult decision of her life. She has chosen to stay behind with that huge, incomprehensible Yusian child. She knows that this is the only way she can support me. It is a fateful decision, but I accept it. She smiles reassuringly as the armored gates slowly close, cutting her off from my range of vision. In the end, I disable them from the outside; she will be unable to leave. Nor does she, or I, know whether I will come back to free her—or be forced to destroy her.
I still didn’t know, mired in this spectral limbo. I tried to marshal as much negative energy as I could, to concentrate it into a force strong enough to attack the all-leveling system, no matter where. The important thing was to make a break in it. I chose the knot across from me as a target, aimed my “chest” at it, and accelerated myself.
“Chuks! Chuks!” A sudden scream echoed. “Settled me as first! The contact going to be in me. In us! It’s before happening!”
I staggered, unable to believe my eyes—either pair! Chuks in a psychoplasmic incarnation—the only possibility here—but also transformed into an unrecognizable hybrid, Yusian inside but on the outside bearing my body, my face, although enlarged, asymmetrically stretched, semitransparent, and also somehow layered. In that monstrous shape, Chuks floated proudly toward me and stopped in front of me, on the same fiber pipe, greeting me with maddening, unearthly enthusiasm—with joy—with serene, even tender, fondness! There could be no doubt that it was sincere. My God! Out of habit I tried to hold my temper, but this time I didn’t succeed. Training and self-control—all drowned in the immense absurdity of the situation.
“But why? Why do you like me, you cretin? I didn’t save your little freak! I’m holding him as a hostage. I can destroy him right now! On Earth I broke up terrorist groups, even ultraterrorist groups. I learned a lot from them, and I’m here to put that knowledge to work. Against you. Can’t you understand that, after all I’ve said and done?”
“Don’t return those ‘all,’” he said in his singsong voice. “They are now nothing, Chuks.”
“Chuks? I’m not one of your Chuks! Do you think I stopped the vivisection so that I could give you the object with a tender embrace of love and friendship? Ha! Do you realize how extremely exorbitant the price of that object was for us? We also created an annihilation that even you couldn’t manage yet! And we destroyed our defractor.”
“But you leaned on a chance.”
“You didn’t keep the little Yusian at home and let him shuffle back and forth and look around. That’s what gave us our chance! But if you hadn’t, we would have lured somebody else—most likely you! I could have done that myself. Staging that ‘accident’ in order to provide living material for their examinations was the real mission of the people here. Their bosses on Earth decided that they would be able to deceive you, but your stupidity exceeded even their most optimistic expectations—exceeded them and turned this into a nightmare!”
“Leave roads of past, Chuks—Ter.” The psychohybrid Chuks smiled softly with my lips. “Us unite contact of ourselves!” he screamed exultantly and skillfully scooted toward me, spreading my “arms” to hug me.
When I pushed him back, he pressed again with maddening persistence. I lost my temper; my last inhibition collapsed. I twisted my limbs around him, lifted him up, and threw him down with all the strength I had. Sprawled on his back, he dangled in that position two or three meters below me. He didn’t get up, just kept spreading his arms and bringing them together again as if practicing for the inevitable, though postponed, hug.
“You filthy, damned creature! All those zones, folds, crinkles, and who knows what on your bodies make me sick. All that is yours makes me sick! I don’t want it!”
I bent down and, with uncontrollable fierceness, bit into the folds around my “chest.” I gripped them with the determination of a bulldog bearing down. I could sense and even hear the splitting and cracking, and I used all my force to widen the wound. I tore one fold after another to shreds, ripping the flesh that was a part of me here. I hurled the pieces far from me, and they landed, as if drawn by unknown forces, on the fiber pipes. As they melted, the fibrous surfaces quickly absorbed them. I finally managed to expose my own human form, to remove the last traces of the grotesquely pliant Yusian layers. I found it strange that I had felt no pain, but beneath me Chuks was writhing, apparently in mortal agony.
I stared at him. Now he looked like me much more than before. My image had condensed on his image so that I actually saw an indescribably deformed representation of myself. The eyes, however, were my own, somehow unchanged, which made them looked even more—more alien, as if they were pinned onto his barely visible forehead membrane. They were frantic with fear—somebody else’s fear—and still burned with that alien “love,” obtrusively soft, ravenous “love.”
“I want nothing to do with your so-called feelings! More than anything else, I despise them. And who gave you the right to counterfeit my face?”
I jumped on him, sank up to my ankles in the plasma that had copied even my heart. I felt it there inside, under my feet, pounding futilely. I stepped aside into the allegedly empty space, gritted my teeth to withstand the pain, and thrust my nails into my eyes pinned to his forehead.
It wasn’t merely pain but the very fires of hell. Still, it was intoxicating! I tore the eyes from the head and threw them into the abyss. I tore at the creature’s “skin” and ripped out its “organs” and chunks of its “flesh,” scattering the pieces and roaring the whole time. I had become the animal that rips off its own paw to free itself from the trap.
The Yusian didn’t resist, just lay there, staring at me from under the last remnants of my face. He seemed to radiate suffering, overwhelming disappointment, and despair at the destruction of his broken dreams. The pathe
tic creature simply endured my savage attempts to reduce him to nothing, to destroy him both here and there, whether in this realm or some other, more material one. I would kill him wherever I found him!
I knelt on his naked, annoyingly limp, torso and drove my hands deep into his center zone, which instantly turned red. I got ready again and…
After a noticeable delay, the system finally reacted. I was stopped just centimeters short of my goal. A force field surrounded us both and enclosed us in separate capsules. A few seconds later, accompanied by a loud sucking sound and an ultraviolet light, the capsule that had wrapped itself tightly around my skin disengaged itself and floated upward, disappearing into a newly formed opening in the fiber above. I heard another, much louder, sucking sound, and the opening also disappeared.
I slowly unclenched my fists, having rid myself of my negative energies, and turned my attention to Chuks. He was still in his capsule, which obviously had functions very different from what mine had already performed. The Yusian was submersed in a dusky-blue substance, the now familiar Yusian blood, but for as long as I watched him, he didn’t regain his senses. His entire torso continued to writhe in agony, and his frontal zones were so dark that they resembled huge holes. Rotary jets of the substance periodically sprayed them, but Chuks’s body rejected the fluid each time. For some reason, the “transfusion” wasn’t working.
I approached his capsule, bent, and extended my arm. It felt as if I were submerging it into electrical jelly. When I pressed my palm against the zones that had gone dark, they felt ice cold, maybe because my hand was so hot. Somehow my touch seemed to effect a heat exchange, and through the material of the capsule, I could feel the torso gradually relax, and the dark zones regained some of their color, though they were still a sickly yellow.