Authors: Alan Dean Foster
“Get out of my office. You can leave the way you came in or horizontally. The choice is up to you.”
“It frequently is,” Tse-Mallory murmured. “So many times I wish that it weren’t.” Tse-Mallory dodged with astounding speed as he reached into a breast pocket and threw something that struck Ormann before he could pull the trigger. The small device contained a large electric charge that noiselessly discharged in a single burst.
Ormann convulsed and fell onto his desk, his eyes open, his gun still clenched in his hand, electrocuted. Calmly, Bran Tse-Mallory walked over to the collapsed form. Slipping on gloves, he gently removed the pistol from Ormann’s paralyzed fingers, placed the weapon back in its charger, and quietly closed the drawer. After a moment’s thought, he folded the executive’s hands on the desk in front of him, lifted the limp head, and rested it on the hands. To anyone entering the room, it would appear as if Ormann had fallen asleep at his desk. To anyone examining the body, it would seem that he had suffered a massive heart attack.
Tse-Mallory pocketed his now-harmless voltchuk and left the office. The office manager asked him how the important meeting had gone.
“We came to an understanding,” he informed her kindly. She replied that she was glad it had gone well.
It did not go well, Tse-Mallory thought as he headed for the nearest exit from the Ulricam complex. But we did come to an understanding.
He disliked having to kill. Discussion and debate were always better. His killing days were well behind him, back when he and Tru had formed the two halves of a stingship fighting team. But sometimes, sadly, logic and reason were not enough. Besides, Tse-Mallory had reason to believe that Ormann might have shot him in the back if he’d simply turned to leave.
Aim arguments at a man and he reacts one way, Tse-Mallory ruminated. Aim a gun at him and he is forced to react in another. He wondered how Truzenzuzex was getting along. No doubt his old friend and companion had enjoyed an easy time of it, sauntering in to greet a surprised Flinx and his female friend. Thranx had all the luck.
CHAPTER
14
“High metamorphosis to you, Flinx.”
Awakening from a surprisingly invigorating sleep, Flinx found himself staring up at a trio of faces—a quintet if one counted Pip and Scrap. Two of the other faces were human. The one from which the greeting had emerged was anything but. Flinx sat up too sharply in the bed, and the resultant wooziness momentarily blurred his vision, but not so seriously as to prevent his throwing both arms around the thranx’s upper body.
“Truzenzuzex!”
“You always were competent at incontestable identification,” the thranx replied dryly. “Yes, it’s me. Now please remove your upper limbs from my b-thorax so that I can breathe.” A grinning Flinx complied. “That’s better. You know, I’m currently reading your writer Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis
. It’s about a human who thinks he’s an insect. Fascinating. The details are all wrong, of course.”
“I’ll remember.” Flinx turned his attention to the tall man standing near the bed. “And you too, Bran. Here, on New Riviera.” Flinx shook his head in disbelief.
Standing near the head of the bed, Clarity Held reached down to give him a gentle punch on the shoulder. “Hey, I’m here too, you know.”
“Oh, right. Sorry, Clarity. It’s just that I haven’t seen either of these two disreputable nomads in—six years, isn’t it, Tru?”
“Nearly seven,” the Philosoph corrected him. “You’ve grown, Flinx. And changed, I think, in other ways as well.”
“Well, you two haven’t. You look exactly as I remember you. This is my friend, Clarity Held. Clarity and I know each other from—we know each pretty well, that’s all.” His old friends, Flinx knew, would not pry. “Clarity, this is the Eint Truzenzuzex.”
“We’ve already met.” Reaching out, she playfully teased the tip of one of the aged thranx’s feathery antennae. It twitched away from the touch. “Tru is responsible for rescuing us both.” Her expression fell. “Once Bill finds out he’s failed again to get rid of you, Flinx, he’s liable to try something even more drastic the next time.”
“I don’t think so,” Tse-Mallory commented quietly.
“Oh, and this is Bran Tse-Mallory,” Flinx informed her. “In their youth, Bran and Tru were a stingship team.” He grinned. “Now they just sit around and pontificate.”
“Pontificate,” Tse-Mallory admitted, “and other things. Like looking up old acquaintances.”
“How can you be so certain Bill Ormann won’t try to hurt Flinx anymore?”
Wise, dark eyes peered at her from beneath those explosive eyebrows. “Because he’s not going to hurt anyone anymore, Clarity Held.”
She hesitated. The silence persisted for a long moment before she murmured, “Oh,” and said nothing more on the matter of William Ormann because she suspected, quite correctly, that there was nothing else that needed to be said.
With Clarity’s help, Flinx eased himself off the bed and moved slowly toward his hotel room’s refreshment unit. Pip and Scrap ignored everyone in the room, from whom only benign emotions emanated.
Flinx’s head throbbed but this time not, thankfully, from one of his headaches. The last thing he remembered was trying to free Clarity from her bonds. The important thing was that Clarity was all right. So were he and Pip. And now, to top it all off, to see Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex again! What a wonderful coincidence.
Except that he knew it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. The Commonwealth was too big. Something specific had drawn the wise man and the sage thranx to New Riviera. Flinx had the feeling it was not the climate.
Still, he remained cheerful as he drew not one but two cold tumblers of fruit drink to slake his thirst. Clarity helped herself and offered refreshment for their visitors. Both man and thranx declined.
“It’s wonderful to see you both again. What are you doing here? Do you still serve ‘only your own philosophies’?” Ascetics, she wondered, or just not thirsty? Fully keeping with the persona she had come to know better than ever, Flinx certainly had interesting friends.
Truzenzuzex clicked his mandibles at the remembered comment. Flinx had a fine memory. That was far from the only aspect of his mind that was exceptional, the Philosoph knew.
“Since leaving the United Church, we have pursued our own interests. As you know, Flinx, among them is our study of extinct sentient races such as the Tar-Aiym.”
“The who?” Clarity looked from thranx to Flinx. “I never heard of them.”
“As their history is somewhat obscure, they are not as well known as they should be,” Truzenzuzex continued. “This is a characteristic they share with a number of other intelligences who have also passed from the galactic scene, among whom historic interconnections are still being established.
“Though Bran and I have preferred to carry out our work independent of any institution, governmental or scholarly, we still retain a considerable number of useful contacts within both the United Church and the Commonwealth government. Occasionally, though not often, one of these contacts has a query for
us
. I recently received one such myself.” The head turned so that compound eyes could focus on Flinx.
“It came from Counselor Second of Science Druvenmaquez.”
Flinx said nothing. There was no point in volunteering information that Truzenzuzex already had. But he was intensely curious to see how much his old mentor knew, as well as how he had come by it.
The thranx did not disappoint him. “It seems that the good counselor touched antennae with you in a proscribed place, a world that is only now beginning to appear on highly restricted Commonwealth charts as the straightforwardly named Midworld. He went there in search of you in the course of following up on a tale you had told a certain Padre Bateleur on Samstead.”
“Yes, I remember,” Flinx murmured. Bran Tse-Mallory was watching him closely, he noted.
“While thrown together on this formerly lost, accidental colony world, you inquired of the counselor if he knew me. He told you that he did not. However, when you took your leave and Druvenmaquez returned to his work, he remembered your query and managed to make contact with me. We engaged via space-minus in a most interesting exchange, part of which involved the counselor graciously allowing us to view the transcript of your conversation with Padre Bateleur, the same conversation that moved the counselor to go looking for you himself. A number of things you said to that padre intrigued Bran and myself as thoroughly as they had Druvenmaquez, especially in light of our past mutual encounters with Tar-Aiym and Hur’rikku artifacts. Furthermore, they coincided with work we were already doing. Strange, is it not, how the three of us continue our fascination with ancient races and the artifacts they have left behind?”
“So we decided to come looking for you, Flinx.” Tse-Mallory smiled reassuringly. “We would have wanted to see you again even if we three did not share a common interest in a certain distant region of the cosmos.”
Up until now, Clarity had felt that the conversation was leaving her further and further behind. But Tse-Mallory’s mention of a shared interest in a distant region of space immediately caught her attention.
“Flinx, are they talking about the place you visit in your nightmares?”
Truzenzuzex’s head shifted from one human to another. “So, Flinx, you continue to experience the visions of which you spoke to Padre Bateleur? You feel that you have mentally somehow visited this distant region of space and encountered something there?”
“Something very unpleasant,” Tse-Mallory chimed in. Arms crossed over his chest, he was leaning against the wall beside the bedroom door. He might have been guarding it or simply relaxing.
Flinx sighed. He had never intended the substance of his dreams—or mental projections or whatever they were—to become common knowledge. Or even uncommon knowledge. But in a needy moment while on the run he had confided in and briefly discussed what he had seen and felt with a representative of the United Church.
He was glad to see his old friends again. He only wished their motivation for seeking him out had been otherwise.
“I’ve experienced it, too,” Clarity piped up before he could think to warn her to keep quiet.
Tse-Mallory was instantly alert. “You? But how?”
Noticing Flinx’s expression, she wondered if she might have said something wrong. But weren’t these old friends of Flinx? Wise fellow travelers? Hadn’t they saved them both from Bill Ormann’s maniacal scheming? “Apparently, if someone is close enough to Flinx when he’s having one of these experiences—close enough emotionally as well as physically—she can sometimes share them.”
“Remarkable.” Truzenzuzex’s antennae waggled back and forth with excitement. “Truly remarkable. And what did you experience during this sharing, my dear?”
She looked at Flinx, who shrugged. Schrödinger’s cat was out of the galactic bag.”Might as well tell them, Clarity. If anyone can make sense of it, it’s Bran and Tru. Besides,” he added with a glance in the thranx’s direction, “most of the people I trust in the entire Commonwealth are in this room right now.” Tse-Mallory smiled slightly, while Truzenzuzex made a meaningful gesture with both truhands.
The visitors listened intently while Clarity described her experience. When she had finished, they pondered her words for long moments before Truzenzuzex broke the silence.
“It certainly coincides with what Flinx told Padre Bateleur. You have these experiences frequently, Flinx?”
He shook his head. “Not frequently, no. But more often than when I was younger. They’re entirely unpredictable. What I do have more often are skull-splitting, brain-rattling, mind-numbing headaches. Not only are they increasing in intensity, but I also have reason to believe that they sometimes can affect others who happen to be in my vicinity.”
“Thanks for the warning.” Tse-Mallory’s response was devoid of irony or humor. He had experienced firsthand the volatile potential of the young man’s capricious mind.
“So you can now not only read the feelings of others,” Truzenzuzex was saying, “but you can also project emotions.” The Philosoph seemed remarkably unconcerned for his own safety. “Is this ability as erratic as the original always was, or have you learned how to control it?”
“It’s still erratic, but I am getting better at it. I don’t know how to describe what’s happening. Both processes are becoming more fluid. But as they do so, my headaches grow worse.”
“We must try to find a cure, or at least a palliative, for that. According to your conversation with Padre Bateleur, you believe something existing within or behind the astronomical phenomenon known to us as the Great Void to be a great evil—evil existing in an actual physical sense and not merely as a moral judgment or a quantum probability.”
Flinx nodded somberly while Clarity added vigorously, “That’s certainly how it felt to me.” Remembering, she all but shuddered. “It—it
touched
me.”
“Most intriguingly strange.” With a foothand, the thranx scratched idly at a joint in his carapace. “All this is clearly somehow linked to your unique neurological gift.”
“I don’t think I’d call it a gift.” There was more than a hint of bitterness in Flinx’s reply. “You still haven’t said how you found me.”
Tse-Mallory nodded and stepped away from the wall. “After we determined to try and do so, we began by paying a visit to Midworld. At Counselor Druvenmaquez’s urging and with the aid of the first colonists’ intriguingly adapted descendants, a small scientific station is in the process of being established there. Apparently, there are some—difficulties.”
Flinx repressed a smile. He knew Midworld. “I’m not surprised.”
“It became quickly apparent that you were not there. No unauthorized vessels were in orbit, nor could any be detected elsewhere in the system. So—well, Tru and I put out the word, as it were. We have our own extensive network of contacts, many time-honored and long-established, others that might best be described as nontraditional.”
“It took a while.” Truzenzuzex took up the tale. “The Commonwealth is a big place.” Compound eyes glistened at Flinx. “And you tend to move around a lot.”