Flinx Transcendent (61 page)

Sylzenzuzex returned to her work with United Church Security, vowing to stay in touch with her new friends as well as with her esteemed Eighth. At Alaspin's only large shuttleport, Mother Mastiff deigned to deposit a peck on Flinx's cheek and a slightly longer one on Clarity's prior to her departure for Moth.

“A strange boy, he is,” she grumbled as she prepared to take her leave. “Always was. But he has a good heart. I was never able to keep
him out of trouble. Maybe you'll have better luck.” Before Clarity could offer a reply the old woman let out a disdainful snort and turned away, heading for the final boarding area as her last words lingered behind her. “But I doubt it.”

Looking for a safe place to relax at last, the new couple chose to settle on Cachalot. It proved the perfect choice. The small human population was too busy to have time to pry into the lives of new arrivals. Flinx and Clarity could spend the majority of their time on an automated sailing ship out of sight and out of contact with the rest of the civilization he had saved, and whenever they found themselves isolated or in need of company there always seemed to be a chatty cetacean escort ready to accompany their rented craft. The climate was semitropical, the alien sea idyllic, and for the first time in memory Flinx was untroubled by his persistent headaches.

So it was that after several weeks Clarity was surprised to find him sitting one morning on the prow of their craft, staring out to sea and looking uncertain and depressed. Pip lay coiled sound asleep around his right arm and shoulder, her iridescent scales shimmering in the sun.

“Flinx?”

He looked back at her and mustered a halfhearted smile. She could not have surprised him, she knew. You couldn't surprise Philip Lynx, who felt your feelings coming. She sat down beside him, letting her bare legs dangle off the front of the boat. White spume gurgled merrily beneath the bow. Gliding skalats, the sunlight shining through their quadruple membranous wings, hovered off the starboard side, riding the same breeze that drove the boat forward.

“Is everything all right?” Sudden alarm shot through her. “The thing that was coming this way, the Great Evil—it
is
gone, isn't it? All of it?”

He nodded. “It's gone, Clarity. All of it.”

“Then,” she inquired uncertainly, “what's wrong?”

Turning away from her so she would not have to gaze upon his melancholy visage, he stared out to sea. The horizon was distant, flat, and calm. Only when after a while her hand came up to rest gently on his arm did he look back at her. Though she felt that by now she knew him as well as anyone possibly could, his expression at that moment was quite unreadable.

“Is it me?” she asked in a timid, apprehensive voice.

“No. Oh, no, Clarity!” The verve of his reaction reassured her, though it did nothing to reveal the source of his apparent discontent. “Nothing about you could
ever
disappoint me.”

“Well then,” she prodded him a little more forcefully, “what
is
it?”

He looked away again and it struck her then that he was not upset. It seemed, actually, that he might in fact be just a little embarrassed. He did not, could not, meet her eyes.

“I'm—bored.”

A
LAN
D
EAN
F
OSTER
has written more than a hundred books in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the
New York Times
bestseller
Star Wars: The Approaching Storm
and the popular Pip & Flinx novels, as well as novelizations of several films, including
Transformers, Star Wars
, the first three
Alien
films, and
Alien Nation
. His novel
Cyber Way
won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work ever to do so. Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, live in Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from an early-twentieth-century miners' brothel. He is currently at work on several new novels and media projects. For more about the author, go to
www.alandeanfoster.com
.