by Set Wagner
“I don’t think at all,” he interrupted me. “Ever since I came to Eyrena, I’ve become totally indifferent to larger concerns. Otherwise—”
“Yes?”
“Well, you’ve seen the situation here. Start thinking about it, and you’ll be tempted to take some action, but if you do—there you go! You find yourself in the morgue. I wouldn’t like to be the next one there.”
Vernie rubbed his hands as if they were cold. Three murders, no killers identified, and all he did was fake increased safety precautions. Clearly neither he nor the others at the base feared for themselves. None avoided being alone; they moved freely everywhere. They gave no evidence that they suspected anyone else on the base, they didn’t comment on the murders, and they didn’t undertake their own investigation. Yes, only people to whom everything is already known—from the motives to the names of the perpetrators—would act like this. Since it was so, I was not only faced with a silent conspiracy but also participated in it myself—in the most foolish role possible. I was both a killer and the only one involved who didn’t know what had happened, what was happening now, and what more was going to happen on this damned planet.
“I can’t promise you anything, Vernie,” I replied. “Nothing.”
Chapter 27
Down. I’m going down the carpeted staircase. I can’t hear my footsteps, but I can feel them. One of my knees is deeply bruised; the newly formed scab is torn, and I’m bleeding again. I keep going down. It’s very quiet in the hotel. Everybody—children and adults—is asleep. I reach the first floor and walk to the lobby. Yes, yes, I’m sure I left them somewhere here. I take a few more steps—then stop. I freeze.
She isn’t aware of my presence there—this bent, unknown old woman. She is arranging and rearranging my autumn leaves. Yellow, red, brown, and motley-colored—she has strewn them all over the small table, and her hands in white gloves keep running over them, changing the picture the leaves form, rustling them into another as if touched by a magic wand. I smile, ready even to approach. It is then that the old woman looks up.
Her face under the dense net of wrinkles is completely expressionless, a chapped mask in which the eyes, overgrown with creamy colored membranes, are barely visible.
Blind! I am gasping for breath, racing back up that staircase. At the same time, I feel a vague, remote compassion for that small boy who, long ago in that lobby, was so frightened by…
Stein’s effigy was burning my fingers. I put it carefully in front of me and examined it: a middle-aged man without any particularly distinguishing features or birthmarks. An ordinary face. His staring eyes revealed some hidden bitterness; his face, frozen as he slightly bit his lower lip, a frown on his forehead, wore the memory of that blind old woman. A memory that has now become mine as well—a small remainder of the dead man, lodged forever in my mind.
But why there, in the Yusian starship, just before the takeoff, did Stein recall this incident from his youth? Was it possible that he was reliving those emotions? Or did something totally different trigger the association?
Odesta had said, “Even in the starship, he continually revised some theory of his that he hoped to prove here, on Eyrena.”
I needed to examine my notes on Stein’s theories more closely.
At one point in their development, the Yusians reached the other four planets orbiting their sun. Two were completely without life, while the third harbored some primitive microorganisms and the fourth a relatively rich flora, as well as some quasianimals—that is, animals with undeveloped reflex systems.
Of course, the microorganisms, plants, and quasianimals instantly became objects of study that eventually brought the Yusians to the Big Idea of creating a biological union of the five planets. Toward that end, they had undertaken a program of directed mutation and a gradual synthesis of all the fundamentally different gene pools they encountered. It is worth mentioning that the gene pool on their home planet was really impoverished. There had never been any other living creatures on that planet than the Yusians themselves.
I was alone in the spacious living room of the apartment where Stein had lived just a few weeks before. I was sitting in the leather armchair by the window, where he probably had spent many hours. The smooth, mirrored surface of the cone outside the window reflected the rays of Ridon and sent them streaming to me in a steady yellow-violet glow.
Just a little before his death, Stein had foreseen the colossal metamorphosis of Eyrena. Moreover, he had described it in great detail, even stating the most likely date of its appearance. Despite a few inaccuracies in his findings, he probably would have been satisfied if he were here now, in his comfortable armchair, viewing the landscape outside, changed beyond recognition. Yet he would hardly have fallen into contemplation at this hour of the day. As Odesta said, “He could work under any circumstances.”
Work—I had spent more than three hours in the server room with his notes, but even if I spent a month there, I could scarcely comprehend the scientific basis of his findings, certainly not the way Reder would, for instance. After all, that was not why I was here. What mattered to me was Stein the person, and I think I was able to grasp his most important traits. The better I knew him, the more deeply I respected this man who had dedicated his life entirely to work.
He had laid out his arguments, conclusions, speculations, and hypotheses conscientiously—I would even say nobly—with no emotional digressions to suggest the frustrations of a scientist faced with something so unfathomable and majestic as Yusian civilization. He had not been afraid to make a mistake; he would not falter before the inevitable “maybe,” “if,” and “probably.” Nor had he trembled with fear for his reputation when he used new and oftentimes awkward expressions imposed on him by a lack of analogies in Earth’s languages. All in all, Stein had proven himself to be one of those few remarkable men who ventured into the unknown with a clear understanding of their limitations but with unbroken faith in the invincibility of the human spirit.
Yet Vernie had described him as “unreal, abstract”!
He had recorded his haphazard thoughts before the indifferent microphone and then systematically arranged them with meticulous care, argued with himself, grown weary, and sometimes given in to despair. But he had never surrendered or stopped being human. “We can’t even imagine how lonely the Yusians actually are.”
Their entire evolution, from the most elementary unicellular organisms to the superbeings they now are, passed in total and absolute solitude. The only engine in their development has always been the planet itself with its physical, climatic, seismic, and other conditions—with its movements, changes, and cataclysms, infinitely more intense and varied than their counterparts on Earth. But did our different evolutionary histories predetermine the huge differences that exist between us now?
The real cause of all our differences, including psychological, is much deeper and runs back in time to the moment we each came into existence. The Yusians actually originated from plants. At least, according to our criteria, they are much more closely related to flora than to fauna. Their body energy comes by absorbing particles and ray emissions from the environment through their entire “skin” surface without interruption. An analogy could be made with the way we breathe—only they “breathe” with their whole bodies. As for their method of reproduction, although we haven’t managed yet to find out what it is, we could say for sure that it’s not sexual. Their nervous system has a fibrous-optical structure, which, while infinitely more complex than that of even the most highly developed Earth plants, is basically built on almost the same principle.
The Yusian main brain is not located in a specific place; rather, it consists of polymorphic tissue layered in different correlated levels. Their senses have evolved to an extent that enables them to register an incredibly wide scope of sound, gravity, and electromagnetic waves, but their sense of sight was created much later. Yes, they created it themselves, more than two or three thousand years ago, when their study o
f biology had advanced so much that they were able to adapt themselves, using prototypes of the organs they found in the quasianimals from another planet in their system.
As for the multicolored zones, and especially those on the front of their “chests,” it is quite clear that they determine the flow of radiant energy in the Yusian organism. However, these zones also serve other functions. Their structure is multilayered, adapted to refracting the absorbed light and, through changes in the consistency of its texture, to filtering out only the chosen spectral color, which can then be constantly adjusted as to its saturation, brightness, and intensity. While this process is instinctive, it can also be consciously directed by the Yusians. We have enough evidence now to state that this is exactly the way they communicate among themselves and that such communication manifests itself in the strictly dosed exchange of certain color impulses. In support of this statement comes the fact that, even though there exists a spoken Yusian language, they resort to it very rarely.
Besides their regulatory and communicative functions, certain conditions allow us to suppose that these zones have another very important function: direct energy exchange. “I will call these specialized organs for immediate mutual assistance, although I’m perfectly aware of the fact that anyone reading this will smile skeptically at this hypothesis, so foreign to our world. Teeth, claws, horns, and thorns—yes, we understand these weapons of the battle for survival. But organs for mutual assistance? This sounds a little too sentimental, doesn’t it?”
Yes, that’s how it sounded to me. And I did smile in disbelief—“organs for immediate mutual assistance” indeed! If that’s true, given that the Yusians were the only inhabitants of their planet, they couldn’t have known the meaning of aggression. Yet many of their acts toward us now appeared to prove just the opposite—or could it be that what we interpret as aggression is really some kind of “mutual assistance” from their perspective?
I stopped thinking about the plant structure of the Yusians as well as about their “assistance.” Stein’s unfinished theory required that I summarize and think over some other much more vital issues.
Realizing the Big Idea of the pentabioplanetary system also made possible unprecedented advances in all spheres of Yusian science. During that period, the Yusians learned how to incorporate many other new states of matter. They began to extract colossal amounts of energy from the vacuum. They laid the foundations for the theory of the memory of matter, proving by experiments the ability of any material object both to store information and to reproduce it.
In that same period, the Yusians delved deeply into the properties of inorganic nature. They managed through biocatalysis to strengthen some of them and in this way to bridge the gap between living and nonliving structures that exist on the molecular level. They then introduced properties of life forms into inorganic matter, thus creating an entirely new species. They also created the first combined, but autonomously functioning, constructions.
“Are creatures. But alive sometimes and almost,” Chuks had told me about the strange walls “deprived of toleration of intelligent touch.” Only now was I beginning to understand what he had meant. I was also beginning to figure out the nature of that “ordinary object” that he claimed powered the starship when “surrounded by substances and energies subordinate to it.”
I felt somehow stupidly relieved. So far, things turned out to be relatively easy to understand—the Yusians are able to make use of quasibiological inorganic constructions. But as I thought of the abyss lying between us, an abyss thousands of years old, and as I considered what Stein called their “chronal management,” my head began to spin.
Reder had said, “If we look at it from the larger perspective, not only Stein but also humankind is just at the beginning. Maybe not even there.”
These new inventions put an even higher goal before the Yusians: to unite the five planets, already unified biologically, on nonbiological and even, later on, inorganic levels as well. During the centuries they struggled toward this goal, they reached something that seemed unattainable, which for us will be even in the realms of our dreams.
They learned to control time.
The foundations were laid with their theory of the memory of matter or, to be more precise, when the Yusians took it upon themselves to analyze where and how material objects stored the information they received during their life span. First, it became clear that, with each and every energy-based process—be it thermal, chemical, nuclear, biological, or whatever!—between participating objects, a specific potential connection existed. Second, this connection remained even if the objects were later separated by great distances. Third, the potential connection so established could be activated under certain conditions and could bring about an instantaneous interaction between these objects.
As instantaneous interactions in space are in principle impossible, they came to the shocking conclusion that they must be realized outside this space, along previously unknown “tracks” between the components that made up its heterogeneous structure. However, where there is no space, there is no matter—if for no other reason than for the lack of space where it can be positioned. What, then, is the conductor of these instantaneous interactions?
There can only be one answer: time. This leads to the next conclusion: along such “tracks” of spaceless, immaterial time, only time can pass. In other words, all instantaneous interactions have a chronal character. Therefore, the connections that provoke them are also chronal, generated by the total time exchange that accompanies any energy-based process. As time for a given object means the continuity of its existence, then time contains in itself all the information of this object, which is nothing but a sequence of “recollections” of its past processes with other material objects. These “recollections,” in their entirety, we call memory.
“These ‘recollections,’ in their entirety, we call memory.” Memory is then recollections transmitted consecutively from one piece of matter to another, becoming a part of its own recollections, passing alongside those recollections to the next link in the chain, and the previous one—and to more and more. Yet each recollection remains untouched, intact. This perspective, or rather my inability to comprehend it, had made me turn off the monitor in the server room and to stare vacantly at it for a long time. When I finally realized that I was nothing but a piece of matter myself, thus part and parcel of this inconceivable exchange of temporal recollections, I was really stunned.
So without even realizing it, I had in myself a universal encyclopedia that contained all, even the minutest, details of existence—only I couldn’t read even a single line of it. All things around me, the door, the floor, the ceiling, the chairs, the lamps as well as my clothes, were similar encyclopedias—mysterious, mute, and inscrutable, to us. But wide open to those who had come directly from time, the Yusians.
“The Yusians have learned to read the recollections of matter,” Stein recorded. “They have also found ways of erasing recollections that they have no need of and turning others into stimulants for new processes.”
All material objects in an open system absorb time from the outside, mark it with their “imprint,” and then release part of it as transformed, individual time. During these transformations, there is no proportional dependency between the intensity of its flow and the intensity of the processes involving the material objects. The “younger” a given object is, the less time it releases per energy unit and the greater its capability to absorb time, as well as energy, from the outside.
Therefore, one of the basic characteristics of material objects—along with mass, weight, elasticity, electrical conductivity, and so on—is their accumulated individual time, replete with recollections, which has different values at any different moment of their existence. The chronal field, unfolded in space and constituting an entirety of the emitted individual times from every material object, is far from homogenous and is continually changing its structure. That flux, that movement of ongoing change, e
xpresses the progress of time.
It is clear that, without space and matter, time would be uniform and devoid of information, so its progress would be zero. Space, with its changing chronal field, is the reality that divides material objects in time, imparting relativity to time at any of its points. Apart from this relative time, however, there is also another time—spaceless, absolute time, which is comprised of all material objects in the universe simultaneously. And despite the fact that they are outside it, it is this time that determines the indivisibility of matter because, on the basis of its already-created-in-the-relative-time chronal connections, it can instantaneously establish contacts among all its forms.
I sat back in the armchair and rubbed my forehead. All this esoteric thinking had exhausted me. Dusk was closing in outside. Clouds gliding slowly over the base like gray gunboats, similar to those on Earth. Then they gathered together, forming entire armadas, the sky visible between them growing smaller. The first raindrops tapped gently on the windowsill as the rain began. It would be nice if Elia were here now so we could listen together to the quiet whisper of this serene shower. It seemed to endow all our surroundings with tranquility and even managed to mitigate the sinister appearance of the cones. Plants! I shrugged my shoulders condescendingly. Just plants.
I already knew, though, that they were not just plants.
It was in that manner that the Yusians established two categories of chronal interactions. The first, which accompanies the processes involving energy in space and creates potential chronal connections between material objects, is relative in nature and continuous as a process. The second, which is realized outside space while activating potential chronal connections, has an absolute character and is instantaneous in nature. One must emphasize the fact that these two types of interactions enable the Yusians to manage their polyplanetary system. They have discovered ways of constructing chronal connections with greatly amplified potential power and activating them selectively, resulting in instantaneous chronal interactions with a regenerative effect—that is, with the ability to reproduce an unlimited number of energy-based processes from the past.
