by Set Wagner
I closed my eyes. I only had to choose an object of meditation and that immaterial cosmic world would lower its barriers for me. Open and vulnerable. The balance of that world now depended to a significant degree on my own consciousness. And my psychic energy, unlike the energy of the Yusians, remained my own, unchanneled. That meant I could be very dangerous—very destructive.
I smiled to myself. I had kept my promise and shown them what it really meant to be human. But it would be good to make an even greater impression on them. I concentrated on the “spirit” of one of their volcanoes, sure that I could easily disrupt its balance and the volcano would no doubt erupt in the real, material world, perhaps somewhere near a Yusian dwelling or other structures. Otherwise they wouldn’t have kept this volcano under control, would they?
As these thoughts crossed my mind, I felt my lips spread in a vicious smile and quickly opened my eyes.
“Damn it!” I whispered to myself, shocked. I had often thought that we should complete the colonization but by sending colonists with superior training and education rather than the criminals, terminally ill, and insane. Now, judging by my own behavior, I understood that other qualities would be equally crucial. “Your pliability sure, Ter.” Chuks turned out to be right, at least indirectly. I was pliable, yes, but to the temptations that my victory offered me—yet another proof that the demons in us can be only temporarily and ostensibly crushed.
I moved around a little to test the condition of my body after its long torpor. I had grown numb and was almost lame. I shouldn’t stay here any longer. It would be good for me to be outside anyway when this—nobody knows what—begins. I went to one of the windows and looked out. I didn’t notice anything that had changed or aroused worry. I went back to the bed and, after making sure the tape still held the detonator securely to my palm, started to dress. Before leaving the room, I reached for the flexor on the nightstand, hesitated, and then decided not to take it.
I began to make my way up the street and with every step grew more steady on my feet. I never realized before how good it felt to be in my own body but was also aware it could be turned into a corpse at any moment. That thought also made me anxious for Elia’s safety.
I heard a slight noise behind me and turned around cautiously. A Yusian shuttle was landing in front of the house that I had just left, near the garden gate. A slit opened in the usual way and out hopped Chuks. He’s coming to negotiate! I thought hopefully, moving back in his direction. He moved too, but in a very strange way, tripping and zigzagging. If he were human, I would have assumed he was either drunk or stoned. His forehead membrane was closed, and his space suit absolutely opaque, so I couldn’t guess his condition or mood by either his eyes or the colors of his communication zones. Vaguely suspicious, I stopped. Then to see how he would respond, I took a few steps back.
The creature gave a kind of shriek and without any staggering charged me at full speed. I didn’t try to get out of the way at first, thinking that this was like the other times and he would come to a screeching halt just in front of me. That didn’t happen this time. Luckily I was fully alert, so I just jumped to the side. Otherwise he would have crashed into me, crushing me beneath that massive body weighing nearly a ton.
I quickly recovered from my shock when I realized that the “contactor” must have a new mission now. As a killer—no doubt the first and only one of its kind among the Yusians. Formed there, in that other contact zone, out of my own murderous impulses, and this impulse was now coming back to me as a boomerang.
“Come back to your senses!” I yelled at him. “At the moment you are nothing more than a clumsy, remote-controlled weapon launched by a pitiful collective mechanism that has as its primary and overriding directive its own self-preservation. It wouldn’t be stopped by the fact that, with me, you will also be killing the young Yusian. Is that what you want?”
He again started weaving drunkenly. “Have nothing, have nothing can want,” he managed to reply before rushing toward me again, prepared to use his weight to crush me. I dodged him. Then, after making sure that the detonator was still firmly taped in place, I put my right hand on the wall next to me and hauled myself over into the front yard of the house next door to where I had just “spent the night.” I considered returning there for the flexor and—and ruining everything I had achieved so far.
The alien charged the front gate leading to the yard where I was, crashing through it as if it were made of candy canes. Damn it! It would take the patience of an ox to endure the perverse, grotesque twists and turns of this never-ending game of hide-and-seek.
“At-ten-tion!” I said very slowly and loudly, as if trying to communicate with someone hard of hearing. “If you come near me, I will remove the detonator and throw it away! Then that unlucky little Yusian will scatter on the ground in so many pieces you won’t be able to see them even under a microscope!”
I could see that he hadn’t known about my hostage, Elia, because my threat froze him in midcharge, halfway through the shattered gate. He struggled with his conflicting impulses, unable to find a way out of the impasse. I was quick to press my advantage.
“Yusians! All of you who are observing this spectacle! Don’t you understand that you are now accomplices to it? Your impersonal idleness is over. Make your own decision! My psychic connection with your control center can be cut off either by killing me or by changing the way you manage your system. Killing me means that you choose to sacrifice the young Yusian we are holding. Or you can choose to destroy a psychoconstruction that has petrified your souls. Those are your options. Bring an end to this all-consuming collectivism. It is nothing more than the blind instincts of a herd! Each one of you has to decide, on your own. It is time to make your own choices!”
“Contact is…still before…happening,” murmured the creature like a broken record. “You are…extraordinary element. But colonists…will be in frames.”
I was stunned. The contact? The Yusians had never found the strength of will to question even the contact, and here I was, urging them to give up their collective “mind” after thousands of years of dependency. That was absurd!
But Chuks wasn’t entirely beyond hope. He was struggling against his new mission. He didn’t want to be the first Yusian killer in history. I decided to give him as much time and moral support as I could. Moreover, I completely stopped hesitating about the flexor.
“Chuks, you are nonhumanoids. You are alien to us. That’s exactly why you couldn’t possibly keep any of us in your frames. Humans, whether crazy, normal, or brilliant, always try to gain the upper hand. That’s just human nature. Do you understand?”
“No,” he replied, “not in understanding.”
He stopped “restraining” himself and entered the yard, leaving behind the broken remnants sticking out of the bottom and sides of the huge hole he had made in the fence. Chuks slowly approached me, and just as slowly I backed away.
“What’s not clear, Chuks?” I kept repeating his name on purpose. If human beings suffer a shock or some other trauma, they often respond to the sound of their names. It helps them to identify with themselves again. But so far it hadn’t helped him. On the contrary, his pace was accelerating little by little.
“Tell me, Chuks!” I repeated insistently, authoritatively, “What is not clear to you?”
“Your ultra…ulti—”
“My ultimatum?”
“Yes!” He accompanied his scream with a sharp turn to the left and an abrupt stop.
“Good, good.” I stopped just as abruptly.
“If Ter among truths,” he continued, “why resist essiko? Have been describing that it gives you big interest against us.”
“I have been describing to you, Chuks.” I raised my voice, “I have been describing, showing you and proving to you the same thing over and over, ever since I arrived in this ridiculous parody of a normal human town. That thing is that, the way you have planned it, the contact will inevitably destroy your civilization becaus
e everything you excel us in, we will then be able to turn against you—even in this initial phase, whichever humans become your ‘contactors!’”
Chuks threw himself on his back on the modified grass lawn and bit open his forehead membrane. Unintentionally, I looked into his nonhuman eyes, dark and glowing, reflecting the brightness of the nonterrestrial sun.
“You, Ter,” he began quietly, “envelope yourself in assertion of saving for us.”
“Well, yes, yes,” I murmured, naturally not admitting that what I was really trying to do was to save humans from themselves. Anyone with any desire for power would want to control the awesome Yusian technology. Earth could not survive another Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin with such mind-boggling means at his disposal.
“Until now, Chuks, you could have conquered us or destroyed us physically thousands of times, but you didn’t, because you understand that you too would have lost by such needless destruction. Well, it would be the same with us. The contact now has vital importance for our civilization too—but as equals! Humans too have dreamed of a “meeting of the minds” with other life forms, Chuks, of universal understanding.”
I had the feeling that, flake by flake and layer by layer, I was chipping away at his fossilized soul.
“Run,” he said weakly and then suddenly rose, as if he were jerked up like a puppet on an invisible string. I gathered my strength and pushed him with my shoulder before he could reclaim his balance. He fell on his back again. Jumping over him, I moved to a tree next to the fence, caught the lowest branch, and tried to break it. With two hands I might have succeeded, but because of the taped detonator, I couldn’t try that. The Yusian was back on his feet again and coming at me.
I dropped the branch, climbed over the fence, and walked down the street at my normal pace, looking back from time to time. The Yusian followed at about twenty meters behind me, trying not to shorten the distance. I could see and also hear how this effort was straining his strength. His surface fringe had become longer and began wriggling like green worms. Deep asymmetrical cracks were, maybe neurotically, opening on his body more and more often, each accompanied by a loud hissing. In the end I didn’t even have to turn: the now-continuous hissing revealed his exact location.
I reached the square, intending to cross it and enter the park. Just then, however, the power directing the Yusian broke his resistance, completely overcame him, and forced him toward me. He rushed down the street in a blur. I waited for him a few seconds and then jumped to the side. His body zoomed forward, managed to overcome the accelerated momentum, and stopped in the middle of the square. This attack, as artificial as it was brainless, demonstrated once again that these creatures, whether collectively or separately, had no real clue how to conduct a “battle between the species”!
The Yusian was coming back, although at a considerably slower speed. Turning into the coffee shop with outside tables, I grabbed one of the “plastic” chairs and threw it at him. It stuck to his torso, melted, and flopped down like dough. Then the Yusian vigorously swept away the tables and other chairs between us, but his momentum saved me again. He stopped centimeters after he had passed me, so I took advantage of the opportunity to give him additional acceleration and pushed him from the back toward the nearest window, which even turned out to be useful for him. Without a sound, his body literally flew inside because the “glass” had opened before him and then quickly resumed its wholeness. The chair I threw had “recovered” as well.
Behind the window the Yusian again struggled to right himself. I pulled one of the tables to the tree nearby, stepped on it, and grabbed a suitable, not too thick, branch with my right hand. I jumped from the table, snapping the branch off just in time to confront the Yusian as he came back through the window. This branch wouldn’t melt easily even in direct contact with him, which made him hesitate awhile. I had hoped for this reaction because hesitation encourages thinking and would help him come back to his senses.
I returned to the center of the square and threw away the useless branch. I was ready to play my last trump, to make my last stand. I undid the tape that held the detonator in place on my palm and raised my hand high, brandishing the detonator.
“I’m setting a ten-minute term!” I roared. “Ten minutes! You decide!”
I crossed my hands over my chest so that I could look at my watch ticking the seconds away. The detonator waited as well in its own heartless way. The Yusian was still standing in front of the coffee shop, surrounded by tables and chairs. The “Welcome” sign hung above him, and to the side, I could clearly see a commercial billboard picturing a Coca-Cola and a plate of fruit-filled wafers—all parts of the general insanity.
My watch kept ticking. We had four more minutes to go when the Yusian started plodding across the square. Against the background of white “marble” blocks, he looked fatally discolored. Doomed. He came closer, towering above me. Although heat radiated from him as if from a furnace, he was trembling, freezing—just like the young Yusian before I freed him from the garrotes. Even his eyes had the same look: begging for mercy, terrified of the close breath of death—which in this case was his own breathing.
“Run—Ter!”
I shook my head. “No.”
“No,” he repeated like an echo. His upper limbs alternately extended and shortened, at one point becoming so round that they looked like bombs attached to his torso. I stood in front of him without moving. His forehead had split in two: through the space suit, I could see both parts jerking back and forth as if trying frantically to escape. For the first time, I felt no disgust—only pity and compassion. This creature was struggling to fight for his own soul. He desperately needed help but wasn’t getting any—despite the specialized organs for mutual aid, despite the thousand-year history of taking precautions, and unshakeable vegetable goodness. Nobody was willing to support him. He was a totally solitary, infinitely lonely alien.
His limb flew toward my chest, knocked me down, and held me there. Then his body phlegmatically flopped on top of me, threatening to suffocate me with his weight: a huge mass of flesh—no “bones” right now just because he didn’t need them. He was relaxing his muscles—a soft weapon directed by some psychoconstruction in some other dimension.
Wretches! That’s what all of you are. Oh, and I was wrong: your place is not above us. I alone, a single human being, rose above you.
The body completely covered me now with suffocating, impenetrable darkness. The detonator burned in my palm like a live coal—like Elia’s burning, beating heart. I longed to fly to her now on the wings of meditation, and tell her—what?
I love you. My spirit overcame a whole cosmic world because your life was in my hand. Now I’m losing my strength under this monstrously spread body. I can’t save you. But I would never, never have let the detonator if I had any other choice. Only death can loosen my fingers. This will be our retribution, because the explosion that you will hear for just a split second will echo endlessly in the mind of every Yusian. None of them will ever be the same again.
“No.” The sound coming out of the Yusian chest was almost human. “No!”
We lay for a long time next to each other, Chuks gripping my hand in his alien extremities, gripping the hand that continued to hold the detonator. Around us was something flat and fruitless: exuberant, immeasurable quantities of deactivated pseudoterrestrial substances that resembled dried mud. The square was gone. The entire settlement had disappeared.
We looked at each other and started pulling each other up.
“Damn it! You, rotten cosmic blackmailer!” Chuks cursed me.
Well, now we could communicate normally.
“Come on, don’t effort yourself!” I replied enthusiastically. “Since no result is meeting you.”
The End
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