Flinx Transcendent (34 page)

“You want to know about the Great Evil that's coming this way. The ‘Purity,’ as you call it. The ‘cleansing’ that you worship.”

A couple of the men and one of the women surrounding him actually lapsed into silent prayer. It was left to the speaker to articulate their craving.

“Our contacts in Commonwealth Science have only been able to provide details of an astronomical nature. So many parsecs purified, so many suns and so much interstellar hydrogen swept away.” Never overtly belligerent even when the talk was of killing him, the speaker's voice abruptly took on a hint of unexpected longing.

“We yearn to know more about that which we strive to facilitate. We feel certain it cannot be wholly and absolutely inanimate. Surely something so vast and all-powerful must be controlled by a consciousness of equal magnitude! A thought process that underlies and directs. Unquestionably there must be more at stake than mere annihilation. There must be purpose, direction, rationale.” Eyes alight with the fire of fanaticism searched the face of the barely restrained young man standing before him.

Flinx finally nodded. “Yes. Yes, there is. You're right. I've seen it. I've perceived it.”

Excited looks and whispers were exchanged by his guards, though they were careful at all times to keep their weapons trained on him and the flying snake that remained wrapped around his right arm and shoulder.

“Alas, our sources have no access to such extra-physical possibilities.” With eyes as hungry as his intellect, the speaker stared at the prisoner. “You must, you
have
to share what you know with us.”

“So I will,” Flinx agreed. “I'll tell you everything. But first, take me to Clarity.”

“Yes, yes, of course! Even those who serve the Purity must not neglect good manners.” Turning, the speaker led the way into the villa. The other members of the Order formed up as an escort on either side of Flinx as well as behind him. Under this heavy guard he was marched into the building.

Slender jets of gel-infused water played in the artificial streams that flanked both sides of the central hallway. At the far end, high double doors opened into an antechamber whose walls and ceiling were decorated in the style of ancient Imperial Rome, albeit a Rome that had been lavished with the latest in contemporary furnishings. Faux Aurelian-era mosaics danced and played on both sides of Flinx as he was led inward.

The next room, the villa's central chamber, had been emptied of furniture, its animated wall mosaics and paintings deactivated. Still more members of the Order were waiting for him. Among them was a singular old man with a bent back. Flinx focused on him immediately. Physically, he was a relic. From the standpoint of emotional strength, however, he easily dominated everyone else in the room. It was also significant that he was one of the very few present who was not visibly armed.

Sitting off to one side on a bench of ersatz marble, a rectangular transparent box held a supine serpentine shape. In a flash Pip spread her wings and, despite Flinx's efforts to restrain her, bolted from his shoulder. The winged form imprisoned inside the perforated, impervious container was alert and active even before she landed atop it. Though they could not make physical contact, mother and offspring proceeded to engage empathetically.

The contemptible folk filling the room would take no more chances with her than they had with Scrap, Flinx realized. It didn't matter. Their number was not important and at least for the moment their armaments were of no interest to him. The only thing that mattered was the solitary figure sitting isolated in the center of the chamber.

Sunlight filtering through a circular pane in the ceiling lit Clarity from above. She looked much as she had sounded over his communit—exhausted and abused. The damage that had been inflicted was visible only in her face—and her eyes. It took them, and her, a long moment to recognize him as he rushed toward her.

“F-Flinx?” She shook her head, blinked, and tried without much success to sound angry. “You shouldn't have come. Now that you're here they'll kill us both.”

“Maybe,” he muttered as he knelt in front of her. “Maybe not.” He wanted to take her in his arms. He could have tried, though in her present state it would have been difficult to get even those rangy limbs around her.

From the neck down she was completely encased in a dirty gray foam that had hardened to a plastic-like consistency. Other than her head and neck, only her hands and feet had been left exposed. He started to reach for the foam casing. Her eyes widened.

“No, don't touch me!” She was trying hard not to cry. “If you try to tear or break or drill through the foam in any way, it will blow up!” She looked toward the watching Order members. “At least, that's what they told me when they were spraying it on.”

A deepening chill washed through Flinx as he straightened and took a step back. Her captors were taking no chances. She was encased in enough material to bring down the entire building: a possibility that apparently did not bother those who had gone to the trouble of fitting her with the untouchable, volatile sheath.

A voice sounded nearby. The Elder had come up behind him.

“Having become all too familiar with your peculiar combative abilities, young man, we of course have taken appropriate steps.” He pointed the cane he was holding at the terrified, immobilized woman seated before them. “She is encased in a latex-based high explosive, which has been intermingled with sensitized nanowiring. Attuned to the microscopic cabling are four button-sized wireless detonators taped to
her thighs, any one of which can by itself set off the entirety of the solidified amalgam. If you attempt to penetrate the material to retrieve the triggers, the material will detonate. The detonators themselves have been individually randomly coded and locked, so they cannot be deactivated remotely.”

Flinx digested this. “Then how can she be freed from the foam without setting it off?”

“An optical wormgrip can be slipped through the slight gap between her body and the encasement to safely remove the detonators. They can then easily be switched off.” The Elder smiled thinly. “Sometimes simple mechanical procedures are more expedient than complex electronics.” He indicated their surroundings. “We intentionally do not have a wormgrip anywhere on this property so you cannot take one of us hostage and demand that we bring it forth. We cannot be forced to turn over that which we do not have.” Eyes that had seen much and were the harder for it met Flinx's.

“Once you have unburdened yourself of the knowledge we seek, someone will be sent to obtain and bring back the tool necessary to free her.”

Flinx scrutinized the hardened explosive spume that had been sculpted around Clarity, looking for a weakness, looking for something the Order might have overlooked. The casing was not skintight—the Elder had explained that there was a gap between foam and body. They had to leave her room to breathe, to sweat, and to twitch a little. But there was no way he could get a hand, much less an arm, into and down the narrow gap between the solidified sheath and her neck, ankle, or leg. He could not get up inside the congealed foam to remove the detonators without the kind of flexible, specialized probe the old man had described. Even if he could have slipped a hand up inside he knew he would not be given the time to try.

If the Elder was telling the truth, deactivating four simple mechanical switches would be enough to completely eliminate the danger to the immobilized, imprisoned Clarity. Except Flinx could not reach them. Nor could she.

How to neutralize their captors and free her? Engaging them in combat would not secure her release. Even if he did strike, all one of
them had to do was shoot or strike hard at the foam casing to set off the sensitive material and kill them all.

There was nothing he could do. Nothing, it seemed, except stall for time by complying with their request. Their eagerness grew palpable as other members began to edge nearer to the human who had perceived the Purity.

“Tell us of the holy place.” The rotund speaker was pleading even as he brandished a lethal handgun in Flinx's direction.

“Speak to us of the coming cleansing!” Hands outstretched, palms upward, a woman beseeched the tall young man in their midst whom she was sworn to kill.

“What is it like? … Does it have shape and form? … Can you do more than sense its presence? …”

The cluster of killers was pathetic in their zeal. Their expressions, their importunate stares, their forthright emotions hung eagerly on whatever he might say even as he could perceive their desire to witness his demise. Even the Elder exhibited unfeigned emotion. Looking forward to and dedicating themselves to the pending death of every living thing in the galaxy, they were desperate to know the particulars of the onrushing instrument of destruction whose arrival they had devoted themselves to facilitating.

“Why should I?” Folding his arms across his chest, Flinx regarded the closing circle coolly. “Clarity's right. When you've heard everything you want to hear from me, you'll kill us both.”

The Elder's expression darkened and his lips trembled slightly as he spoke. “You said that you would tell us everything if we brought you to this woman.”

Flinx shrugged indifferently. “What can I say? Maybe the prospect of imminent death has affected my memory.”

Keeping his pistol trained on Flinx at all times, the portly speaker came up beside the Elder and whispered into his ear. The older man listened, nodding occasionally, until his associate had finished. Then he turned back to Flinx.

“We will make you a proposal. If you will tell us what we wish to know—everything that is of interest to us concerning the cleansing—we will allow both of you to live. But not to go free. I am sure you understand
that we cannot let you go free so long as we feel that you may pose a threat, however slight it may be, to the triumphant approach of the Purity. So we will allow you to live out your natural lives together, in each other's happy company. But only if you agree to do so under our constant supervision.” Leaning both hands on the top of his cane, he eyed Flinx intently. “Under the circumstances, I am sure you can see that this is an offer that is more than fair. Certainly it presents you with a better prospect than death at our hands.”

It would, Flinx thought, if you weren't lying through your biochemically regenerated teeth. Able to read the emotions of those around him, Flinx knew immediately and without question that the Elder, the speaker, and their fervently impatient colleagues had absolutely no intention of carrying out or implementing any such seemingly benign proposal. As soon as he was finished talking, they would kill him, and Clarity thereafter. This realization handed him his first weapon for the clash to come.

They did not know that he knew.

He snuck a furtive glance in Pip's direction. She was wholly preoccupied with trying to find a way into the toxin-resistant box in which Scrap was imprisoned. If he called to her or shouted an order she would likely respond, but he held back. There were too many guns in the room. Too many of the Order for her to take out at once.

Some of the small tools on his belt, like the cutter, could double as weapons. But they had taken that before allowing him inside. It seemed they had left nothing to chance. Except Flinx himself.

To provide cover for his furious planning he started to talk, giving a simplified depiction of his essence traveling through space, his mind-self covering immense cosmic distances in a direction that had only been made known to him years ago. They listened raptly but did not lower their weapons or their guard. While a part of him rambled on with no particular attention to detail or accuracy, the rest of him concentrated on projecting a single dominating, overpowering emotion. Trapped in dangerous surroundings he would typically have tried to project an overriding fear, or perhaps unbridled confusion. He was afraid that the fanatical members of the Order would not respond adequately to the first or wholeheartedly to the second.

So, since they worshipped death and annihilation, he projected life.

Feelings that underscored the beauty of existence, the fulfillment to be had from simply existing, the joy and wonder of continuing consciousness poured out of the tall redhead to inundate the chamber in an emotive flood of intense, all-consuming, ardent delight at the sheer ecstasy of being—each emotion carefully and consciously counterpointed with what the loss of life really meant.

They resisted—he could feel them resisting the projection—but his choice of emotions had taken them completely by surprise. Perhaps anticipating the same kind of emanations of hatred or fear, panic or alarm, that he had projected on their colleagues in the course of the fight at the shuttleport more than a year ago, they were not prepared for an emotional plea for life. As the emotive antithesis of everything the Order stood for, it hit them hard, each and every one. “One by one, they began to fall to the ground in ecstatic reverie.”

Only just conscious of what was happening as his colleagues began to slump to the ground, the speaker tried to aim his pistol at Flinx. Caught up in a surge of support for continued existence and happiness the likes of which he had never encountered or imagined, he failed to get off a shot. Instead, he fell to the floor like the rest of the acolytes and lay there, trembling with the thrill of knowing how good, how important, and how sheerly
true
the simple pleasure of being alive could be.

Of them all, the strongest resistance came from the Elder. More deeply indoctrinated in the philosophy of the Order than any of his presently helpless brethren, he stumbled forward and tried to swing his cane at the volatile foam encasing Clarity. Flinx had no trouble concentrating on and sustaining his life-affirming projection while knocking the old man's attempt aside. Thwarted in his effort, the Elder too finally succumbed to the tall young man's remorseless emanation of contentment.

Flinx surveyed the chamber with satisfaction. Wallowing in the joy he empathetically projected, every member of the Order now lay sprawled on the polished stone floor, each caught up and ensnared in a personal paroxysm of bliss that stemmed from the sheer joy of being. So powerful and focused was Flinx's projection that he felt confident the effects would persist for a good twenty or thirty minutes after he drew back into himself.