A lift took them up to the fifth floor. When the doors opened, dry, spicy air wafted in. Yuri peered around curiously. The fifth floor was different from the rest of the building, which mainly housed human-style offices. In front of him was a wide open space, with a hologram ceiling of an alien sky. Two huge gas giants hung above him, one with a vivid emerald cloudscape, the other more like Saturn but without the rings. Both had a plethora of moons, every one of them different, from planetoids locked under ice oceans to smog-smothered continents studded with sulfur volcanoes, from barren mono-deserts to jungle hellholes.
“Is that…?” Yuri began.
“Their original home world?” Stéphane finished for him. “Non. It’s an enhanced Jim Burns picture; they bought the rights to the original. Something about it appealed to them.”
Yuri shook his head. Just when you thought you had a handle on the Olyix, the universe twisted ninety degrees and took it away from you again.
There were several of the aliens lumbering about the room. The main bulk of an Olyix was a fat disk two meters in diameter, with a semi-translucent skin that revealed a great many purple organ shapes lurking inside. The thin curving fissures between them were filled with thick fluid, which pulsed slowly around the body, and always made Yuri slightly queasy. Five stumpy legs emerged from the underside, with the forward limb nearly twice as thick as the other four. Clearly visible within each leg were helixes of muscle bending and flexing around a dark central rod of gristle. The wide hooves lacked the elegance of the legs with their sophisticated flexibility, which for some reason always made Yuri think of a donkey clopping along.
He watched carefully as one approached—and yes, each footfall was cumbersome, thudding down loudly on the marble floor. That was to be expected; not one of the weird creatures weighed less than 150 kilograms. There was a broad oval head above the body, and a fat ring-neck provided it with limited mobility. The nose extended to the circumference of the body, with a bulging gold-tinted compound apposition eye on the upper surface. At the front of the body’s midsection was a flaccid skirt of clear tissue hanging down, which put Yuri unnervingly in mind of a loincloth of jellyfish. The lucid substance formed a shape mimicking a human hand and extended it toward Yuri on the end of a stubby tentacle.
Yuri clenched his jaw against the revulsion he knew he was about to experience and put out his hand. The Olyix flesh flowed around his palm, feeling like oiled velvet that had just come out of a fridge. He smiled as he shook hands. Someone had explained the whole human etiquette routine to the Olyix when their arkship arrived in the Sol system, and the aliens had swiftly incorporated the correct formal procedures into their dealings with people ever since. Privately, Yuri wished a prankster had got there first and shown them
Boris reported a link being opened. “Pleased to meet you, Director Alster,” the Olyix’s vocalizer unit said in a husky female voice. Another attempt at endearment. If you were male they used a female voice, and vice versa. Yuri wondered why nobody had ever bothered explaining political correctness to them.
“That’s just Yuri, please,” he said, withdrawing his hand as soon as politeness allowed.
“Of course. My quint designation is Hai. I personally am Hai-3.”
“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Hai-3.” Yuri resisted the impulse to look around the room and guess which, if any, of the other Olyix bodies were also Hai. An Olyix quint always kept at least a couple of itself on board the
“I am happy to assist. Your message indicated you proceed with some urgency.”
Yuri glanced at Stéphane. “That is correct.”
“You need me gone?” Stéphane asked.
“This could be quite sensitive.”
“Officer Marsan has our full confidence,” Hai-3 said.
“Okay. I’m tracking a missing human, who may be a case of an illegal brain transplant. So I need to know if such a thing is theoretically possible, and the critical component behind the theory seems to be Kcells, which would be used to reconnect the nervous system. Is it possible to use them like that?”
A slow ripple made its way along Hai-3’s loose flesh, tracking left to right. “This is most unfortunate,” it said. “We have heard rumors of our Kcells being misused in this fashion.”
“That’s all we have as well, rumors and conspiracy theories. Which is why I’m here. I need to know once and for all if it is real.”
“Have you any proof of this allegation?” Stéphane asked flatly.