Mid-Flinx (28 page)

A relieved Flinx let out a long sigh. The creature standing before him had four legs, two arms, and a pair of limbs that could be employed as either, according to the demands of the moment. It wore very little; a double pack strapped across its thorax, and leggings that were more decorative than functional. Its insignia was inlaid in the shoulder of one truarm.

From half his height the iridescent-gold compound eyes gazed back at him thoughtfully. Feathery antennae inclined in his direction.

“I am Counselor Second Druvenmaquez,” the thranx informed him, “and you are Philip Lynx.”

“I’m honored. Also very surprised.” He slipped the sidearm replacement for the one Coerlis had taken into the empty holster attached to his belt. “How did you get here, sir? I see only this shuttle and the one belonging to—”

“We know who it belonged to,” the Counselor interrupted him. “I arrived by means of personal flier, escorted by appropriately armed military personnel who through dint of considerable effort managed to keep me from being devoured by overly enthusiastic representatives of the local aerial fauna. A more extraordinary assortment of wings, teeth, and claws I have never seen before and hope never to encounter again.

“An electronic bypass allowed me to enter your shuttle, whereupon my escort returned to their waiting craft. With great eagerness, I should imagine.

“What an astonishing world this is. Do you know that in the time I have been waiting for you I have witnessed over a hundred life-and-death battles involving the local flora and fauna, and that on two occasions extremely large predators actually attacked this landing vessel? Fortunately its hull resisted their energetic but primitive assaults. Needless to say, I have not spent much time outside.” He shook his head to express wonderment, a gesture the thranx had picked up and adopted at the beginning of their long and intimate association with humans.

Using his tongue against his upper palate, Flinx responded with a clicking sound to indicate understanding, responding to the human gesture with one utilized by the thranx. He did it automatically and without thinking, as would have any human in the presence of a thranx. The relationship between the two species had progressed beyond clumsy, heavy-handed etiquette.

“Imagine a creature of the air big enough to try and fly off with a shuttlecraft! I wonder what its young must look like! Thank the Hive this vessel was too heavy for its intentions. You would think such a formidable predator would realize instinctively that metal and ceramic composites are not very nutritious.” The Counselor made a gesture with both truhands.

“I am glad you finally came. I am no explorer and this is not a posting I looked forward to eagerly.”

Flinx spoke as he led the Counselor forward and activated the shuttle’s food unit. It had minimal capacity, but he was hungry enough for something familiar to eat, whatever the unit chose to dish out.

“If you think the struggle for survival is competitive up here, sir, you should see what it’s like down in the jungle.” The unit whined and gave birth to a seasoned soy patty, bread, and some steamed, reconstituted carrots. Flinx attacked them as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks and had suddenly been presented with the specialty of the house from the finest restaurant on New Riviera. Occasionally he would pause to pass a choice bit to Pip.

“Yet you have survived in its depths.” The Counselor was studying the young human thoughtfully. “I have been able to follow your progress with this craft’s instrumentation because your positioner has been on continually. You have been moving around quite a bit.”

Flinx spared a glance for the tiny device attached to his belt. “I didn’t dare fool with it, sir. If I’d lost the signal I never would have been able to find my way back here.” He shoveled in a mouthful of carrots. “I suppose it’s unnecessary to point out that there’s an AAnn vessel in orbit. Probably a warship.”

Counselor Druvenmaquez’s antennae flicked significantly. “Wrong tense, my young human friend. There
was
an AAnn warship in orbit. Though this is an unpopulated and overlooked world, it still lies within Commonwealth space.”

“Wrong adjective,” Flinx informed him. “It’s not unpopulated.”

“There is native intelligence?”

“In a manner of speaking.” He finished the last of the soy patty and followed it with more bread. “Must have been one of the first human colony ships to go out. If it was pre-Amalgamation, that means the people here have been surviving, on their own and completely out of touch with the rest of humanxkind, for something like seven hundred years.

“The descendants haven’t completely forgotten their origins, but they’ve been living here long enough to revert to a semiprimitive condition. When word of this world gets out, Commonwealth anthropologists are going to have a field day.” A small smile broadened his expression. “If they can survive long enough in the field to complete any work, that is. As for the taxonomists, there are billions of new life forms here that will need to be classified. Whole new classes, maybe even new phyla.

“There’s also evidence of a comparatively recent, illegal attempt at settlement and exploitation. It didn’t succeed. Nothing survives here for very long unless it learns to cooperate with the world-forest. Try to dominate it and you’re plant food.”

“Remarkable.” The Counselor’s antennae bobbed with excitement. “This world will have to be reentered into the Commonwealth catalog. I would think ‘for study only—no development,’ would be the most appropriate classification. What is the population of survivors?”

“I don’t know. They’re split into half a dozen tribes. The one I made friends with seems to be doing fairly well.”

“Friends. That explains how you have been able to survive in this rain forest of all rain forests.”

Flinx bit into the last of the bread. “Wouldn’t have lasted long without them. They’ve not only learned how to survive in the forest, they’ve evolved the better to fit in to the particular niche they’ve chosen.”

“Humans are extraordinarily adaptable,” the Counselor agreed.

Having no antennae to wave, Flinx gestured with the remnants of his bread. “Wait till you meet your first furcot, sir.”

“Furcot?” Truhands semaphored anxiously. “Please, this is all too much to digest at once, and in any event I am not the one to whom you should be elucidating. I am no xenologist.” A truhand and foothand gestured pointedly. “I came here searching for
you
, not alien mysteries, human or otherwise.

“Arriving here we encountered first the AAnn interloper and subsequently another vessel registered to a noted mercantile House on Samstead, in addition to your own craft. When the second vessel did not respond to normal hailings, it was boarded. The presence of the AAnn was self-explanatory, as is that of most trespassers.” The triangular, golden-eyed skull cocked sideways. “Perhaps you can explain the presence of the other?”

“I was involved in an altercation with the owner. A personal dispute that he chose to pursue beyond the bounds of reason. He and his people chased me all the way to this world and down into the forest.”

“What happened to him?”

“The forest.”

The Counselor Second nodded knowingly, executing another useful acquired human gesture. So fond of such gestures were the thranx that Flinx knew they used them often among themselves, even when no human was present. There was a certain cachet to it, just as there was among humans who utilized the click-speech of High thranx as a favorite party patois.

“Having spent much time under difficult circumstances in this remarkable environment, I suspect you would like to immerse yourself in warm water.” The thranx understood the philosophy behind water cleaning but had a positive horror of baths, understandable for a species that could not swim and whose air intakes were located just below their necks. A thranx could stand with its head well above water and quietly drown.

“Actually, I’ve had access to a warm shower every night, sir, but without any kind of cleanser. I’d enjoy that very much.”

The shuttle’s facilities were Spartan but serviceable. More welcome still was the change of clothing he found in the bottom of the storage locker.

“What happened to the AAnn?” he asked as he changed. The elderly thranx had not even an academic interest in his naked form, and Flinx suffered from no nudity phobia, anyway.

“Ah, the
Keralkee
. I’m afraid we had an altercation of our own. They refused to comply with a request to allow boarding or to cooperate in any way. You know the AAnn. There was a certain Lord Caavax LYD—”

“I made his acquaintance.”

“Did you?” The Counselor’s eyebrows would have risen if he’d had any. “A typical AAnn aristocrat. Noble of bearing, arrogant of mien. Stubborn and devious.

“They tried to run, covering their flight with undeclared fire. Their vessel suffered a reactive implosion before they could activate their drive. Presently their components are dispersing throughout this system. It is to be regretted.”

So Lord Caavax had survived his ordeal in the forest and made it safely back to his ship, only to run afoul of a Commonwealth peaceforcer. A fight had ensued that he and his crew had lost. No doubt it had pleased him to go out in that fashion. His line would acquire honor from the manner of his passing.

Remembering the icy, emotionless tone of the AAnn’s voice when he’d ordered one of his soldiers to kill Dwell and Kiss, Flinx was unable to summon a twinge of regret at his demise.

“For an unknown world, it has been very crowded here of late.” The Counselor regarded the much taller human thoughtfully. “How did you find it?”

“I didn’t. When I was fleeing Samstead I asked my nav system to take me to the next inhabitable world on whatever vector we happened to be pointing.” He spread his hands wide. “This is where I ended up. It wasn’t planned and there was no intent behind it.”

“That’s very interesting.” The Counselor considered his prosaic surroundings. “As this world has been uncharted and utterly overlooked, its location shouldn’t be in your vessel’s navigation files. Unless whoever programmed the system knew something Commonwealth Central did not.”

The Counselor was quite correct. The
Teacher
shouldn’t have known the location of this world, much less that it was capable of supporting humanx life. However, the
Teacher
’s assembly had not been supervised by a recognized humanx concern. The ship had been cobbled together by the Ulru-Ujurrians, who did indeed have access to knowledge that was denied even to Commonwealth Central.

Had his arrival here been as much an accident as he’d come to believe? Or was it part and parcel of another of the Ulru-Ujurrians cryptic and incomprehensible “games”?

Raising his gaze, he stared past the attentive Counselor Second, half expecting one of the massive, furry Ulru-Ujurrians to pop into the cabin expecting to sample the food. It would be wholly in keeping with, say, Maybeso’s unpredictable nature. How that singular species negotiated space-time was something so far outside known science as to verge on magic.

Maybe if he played his part in the Great Game to their satisfaction, they would teach him that trick some day.

“What are you thinking?”

Flinx blinked at the Counselor, who was eyeing him closely. “Nothing, sir. Actually, I was remembering a game.”

The thranx emitted the clicking sound that passed for laughter among his kind. “Did you win or lose?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if there are winners or losers in this game. All you can do is keep playing and hope someday to find out.”

“Someday you’ll have to tell me more about it.” Reaching into his slim backpack, the Counselor withdrew a sealed thranx drinking utensil and sipped from the traditional coiled spout.

“Speaking of telling things,” Flinx pressed him warily, “what brings a Counselor Second to this unrecorded world? You know my name, too.”

The Counselor made a gesture of polite acknowledgment. “Why, I should think it obvious. You bring me here, Philip Lynx.”

Flinx kept his voice and expression perfectly neutral. “It seems a long and difficult way to come just to make my acquaintance. I’m nobody important.”

“That remains to be seen. Do you recall a brief but interesting conversation you had recently with a Padre Bateleur on Samstead?”

Flinx remembered the kindly father. “So he reported my situation? That was good of him, but I wouldn’t have expected a Counselor Second in charge of peace enforcement to take an interest in one person’s problem, much less command a peaceforcer to try and protect him from the likes of Jack-Jax Coerlis.”

“I am not with peace enforcement,” declared Druvenmaquez quietly. “I am Counselor Second for Science, with a particular interest in astronomics.”

Flinx blinked. “Astronomy?”

“You spoke to the padre of a recurring dream. The average human or thranx would have thought it nothing more than that and soon forgotten all about it, but Padre Bateleur providentially decided to pass it along for analysis. It was deliberated by a couple working for Commonwealth Science on Denpasar, on Terra, before being passed along to Bascek on Hivehom.

“By this time it had acquired a lengthy file of opinion and relevant facts. When it finally came to my attention I was instantly intrigued, and set a formal study circle to working on it. When I was presented with their summation, I became even more intrigued by how someone such as yourself, with no access to extensive scientific facilities, had managed to come to similar conclusions.”

Flinx frowned “And that’s what you came all this way for? That’s what brought you all the way out here?”

Druvenmaquez nodded, the artificial light gleaming off his blue-green, exoskeleton. “That is correct.”

“How did
you
find this planet?”

The Counselor made the thranx equivalent of a shrug. “I expect that once he had committed to an interest in you, the good padre Bateleur had your position monitored in case he wanted to talk to you again. This interest would extend to recording the departure vector taken by your vessel as well as that of the contentious human pursuing you.