Flinx in Flux (31 page)

“If it’s so far away, how can you show it to me?”

“The same way we found you here.” A huge finger pointed at his neck. Sensing the emotions directed her way, Pip lifted her head curiously.

“Pip?”

“She is,” Fluff struggled to frame a difficult concept, “an amplifier for something deep inside you, inside your mind. Something even we cannot see. Whatever it is that lets you tell how others are feeling and may let you do other things someday. We can help like that, a little. Your small companion is an amplifier. We can be a preamplifier. A very, very big one.” He tilted his head back to regard the ceiling.

“Your body will stay here, but we can send your mind elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere? Can’t you be a little more specific?”

“Toward the threat, the danger. To observe and learn. We cannot do it with ourselves, but we can do it with you. Because you are different from us. Because you are different from anyone else.”

The proportions of the Ujurrians’ little problem were expanding far faster than he could keep pace with. “Why not just dig one of your tunnels in that direction?”

“Because it is too far. Unimaginably far.”

“If it’s unimaginably far, then how can it be dangerous to us?”

“It can move. It does not seem to be moving this way now, but we are not sure. We need to be sure.” Fluff gazed fondly down at Flinx. “We would not force you, teacher.”

“Oh, hell, I know that. Does it make a difference? Just make sure you don’t lose track of me after you shoot me out to wherever it is I’m going.” He took a long breath. “What do I have to do?”

“It might be a good thing for you to lie down, Flinx-friend, so you don’t fall over and hurt yourself.”

“Makes sense. If I’m going to engage in some kind of Ujurrian astral projection, or whatever, I wouldn’t want to come out of it with a sprained wrist.” As always, his sarcasm was lost on his hirsute friends, but it helped to mask a little of the fear that was beginning to surge within him.

He took a step toward the coffin, then quickly changed his mind. He was not going back in that thing. There were a couple of folding beds at the back of the room, and he chose the nearest, lying down after making sure Pip’s coils were clear. He kept his arms at his sides, hoping he was not as stiff and uncomfortable as he must have looked.

“All right. What do I do now? Do you pick me up and throw me toward the ceiling?” He laughed nervously. Each of the Ujurrians stood at a corner of the bed. He could see Clarity between Fluff and Bluebright, eyeing him anxiously.

“Flinx? Maybe you shouldn’t do this.”

“Probably you’re right. But I never have been able to do what was good for me. I always seem to end up doing what’s best for others.” He closed his eyes, wondering if it would make a difference. “Go ahead and do what you have to do, Fluff.”

There was no transition, no delay. He was back in the lake, Pip alongside him. It was not what he had expected. Only this time he was not floating aimlessly. He was capable of movement. Experimentally he swam a few circles, Pip following. The transparent liquid did not pour down his nostrils and lungs to choke him.

By the time he had turned the fourth circle, the lake began to grow dark. He continued to swim and had the feeling he was traveling at great speed, yet his body hardly seemed to be moving at all. Hands and feet moved lazily while the cosmos rushed past.

Transparency and sunlight gave way to streaks of crimson and purple, as if his surroundings were Doppler-shifted to the extreme. Stars and nebulas exploded toward him, only to fade rapidly beneath his feet. An interesting illusion, but no more.

Is this what it feels like to be a quasar? he thought idly.

He would have liked to have lingered to study individual stars and planets. Like electric sparks, images of powerful races and immense galaxy-spanning civilizations impinged briefly on his consciousness and were gone. All were new and unknown, alien and unsuspected. His mind touched on theirs and then broke away, like a wave rising and falling on the shore.

Past the last sapient thought and still racing outward, now little more than a concept himself, a blemish on the precepts of conventional physics. Not a particle to his name, no more than an afterthought cast loose from the prison of the mind.

The stars were all gone by then, and the last of the sapience, and he found himself in a region that should not have existed. A place where vacuum was stained only by forgotten wisps of interstellar hydrogen and the occasional burning star core gleamed like a candle in a bottle set afloat on an ocean of nothingness.

And something else.

Too big to be alive, and yet it lived. A roiling redefinition of life and death, good and evil.

Even as the force that propelled him onward tried to thrust him into its midst, he found himself slowing, recoiling. Whole civilizations he had touched, whole galaxies he had comprehended, but this was too vast and too terrible for his disembodied self to understand. He glimpsed its shadow and turned away, turned inward and ran, fighting his way back along the path he had taken.

Even as he fled, it became aware of him. He tried to accelerate, the universe a flat wash of laser-bright color around him. Sluggish but immense, it reached for the intruder—and missed. By a kilometer, a light-year, a galactic diameter—he would never know. All that mattered was that it missed and left him untouched and unsullied by what it was.

Back in upon himself he fled, at the last instant racing past a great but confused mind that was more innocent and ignorant even than the Ujurrians, an executor of still greater potential. It was an expanding greenness, a pale lime glazed on glass in which he saw himself and Clarity and other humanity reflected. An emerald glue held it all together. Then it was gone.

Replaced by still another, as different from its predecessor as he was from it. Swimming in another part of the same lake. When it raced by and touched him briefly, he felt a great sense of peace. This second sapience was warm and friendly and even apologetic. It was there, and then it was gone the way of the greenness.

Third and lightest touch of all from a consciousness he finally recognized. A lonely calling. Not at all what one would expect from an artificial intelligence. Far out past the edge of the Commonwealth, in the Blight. A weapon and an instrument all at once, waiting for him to return and direct it, blend with it, give purpose to its existence even though all the old enemies were gone.

What now of enemies new? What of those who had built the great warning network centered on Horseye? Whence had they gone and why? None knew. The Ujurrians wanted to know. So did Flinx.

It hit him hard then. He was needed. Because he was an offshoot, a sport, a freak. One those who had built the alarm could not have foreseen. Just as they could not have foreseen the evolution of the greenness, the warmth, and the Tar-Aiym engine of destruction that cried in its loneliness. They had built the alarm to warn them of an inconceivable threat on the farthest fringes of existence and had probably fled because they had not been able to find a way to deal with it.

But the unforeseen had followed them. Life had emerged and evolved beyond what they might have anticipated. Or had they anticipated it, anticipated everything, and left the alarm to warn whatever, whoever might come in after them? The green, the warm, and the weapon.

Only one thing they could not possibly have anticipated: a nineteen-year-old named Flinx.

It was possible that the Ujurrians had sensed this. How, he could not imagine, but the ursinoids were capable of much they themselves did not understand. Like Maybeso, who could teleport when and wherever he wanted to but would not do anything on request and was probably insane to boot.

So much happening all at once, and himself in the middle of it all. There was responsibility here he could not evade. Whatever threatened him threatened sapience everywhere. The great civilizations he had sensed in passing, the intelligences still fighting to emerge from the primordial ooze, the greenness, the warmth, and the weapon that sang. And the Commonwealth,
his
Commonwealth. Mankind, thranx, everyone and everything.

The vastness he had scraped with his sanity was bestirring itself. Preparing to move, though not for a long while. Long in his time or galactic time? He found he did not know. It was something he was going to have to find out.

Which made a great deal of sense. Was he not a student? He would have the help of the Ujurrians, and of his old mentors if he could find them. And he would go out again, beyond normal space, for additional looks. He would go because he was the only one who could. Something would have to be done about what he had detected, if not in this lifetime, then in another. Those who had constructed the warning system had thought so, too.

When he woke up, he was swimming in his own sweat. Pip lay spraddled across his chest, wings spread and limp, utterly exhausted. Four tired Ujurrians were staring concernedly down at him, along with one haggard human.

Clarity took his hand and pressed it to her chest, blinking away tears. Scrap still clung to her shoulder and neck.

As near as he could tell, he had not moved. But when he tried to sit up, nothing happened. Every muscle, every bone in his body ached.

“That was,” he whispered, “exhilarating. Also frightening and informative.”

Clarity put down his hand to wipe at her eyes and nose. “I thought you were dying. You lay there all peacefullike, this wonderful contented expression on your face, and suddenly you started screaming.”

He frowned. “I don’t remember screaming.”

“You screamed,” she assured him, “and you arched and twisted until I thought you were going to break your arms. Your friends had to hold you down.”

“Not so easy,” Bluebright murmured.” Wouldn’t think so much strength in teacher’s little body.”

“I was close to it,” Flinx said suddenly, remembering. “Too close.” He did not have to explain himself to the Ujurrians, who could see it in his mind, but Clarity possessed no such perception. “There’s something out there,” he told her calmly.

“Out where? Near Gorisa?”

“No. Out—there. Beyond the Commonwealth. Beyond our galaxy. Beyond the beyond, I guess. I don’t know how, but they”—He indicated the silently watching Ujurrians.—“and Pip combined to send part of me out past the range of the best visual telescopes. But not the radioscopes. I think they’ve seen it, though the people reading the data have no idea what they’re looking at. I’m not sure what it was, either. Only that it’s dangerous. And big. Beyond beyond, and beyond big.”

Fluff was somber. “No fun this. Serious game.”

“Yes, serious game,” Flinx agreed.

“What we do now, Flinx-friend-teacher?” Moam wondered.

“We try to learn more. There are others involved. Not just me and you, but others none of us have suspected. I have to find out about them, too. It’s going to take work and time. I don’t mind the work. I hope we have the time. I’m going to need your help.”

“Always, Flinx-friend.” The four spoke with a single mental voice.

“I wish you’d talk out loud.”

He turned to Clarity, aware he had been engaging in purely telepathic exchange with the Ujurrians. “I’ve found out what I’m going to do with my life. I thought I was destined to wander aimlessly, acquiring knowledge without purpose. Now I have a purpose. Out there is an empty place. By the laws that regulate the distribution of matter in the universe, it shouldn’t exist. But it does, and there’s something in the middle of it. Something evil. I’m going to try to find a way to deal with it if it starts moving in this direction. In the process maybe I’ll become a complete human being.”

“You
are
a complete human being, dammit!”

He smiled gently. “Clarity, I’m nineteen. No nineteen-year-old is a complete human being.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“No, I’m not.” Softsmooth gave him a hand up from the bed. Pip had barely enough strength to cling to his shoulder. Her pointed tongue hung limply from her mouth.

“I need a drink. Something cold.” For the first time, he noticed the empty room. “Where is everyone?”

“They woke up one at a time,” Clarity explained. She nodded at the place on the floor where Dabis had been lying. “That one came around before any of the others. The first thing he saw was Bluebright holding his disassembled pistol.”

“They all left in a hurry,” Moam said. “We would have talked with them, but their minds were confused and full of fear.”

“I bet they left in a hurry.” Flinx turned to Fluff. “What will you do now?”

“Go back to learning the civilization game.”

“Good. I’ll try to learn some of the new rules. Then I’ll get in touch with you.”

Fluff clapped his paws together, filling the room with a dull boom. “Wonderful! We make a new game of it. Maybe not so serious then.”

“We’ll try,” Flinx told him. “I have studying to do. I have to learn, and to grow.”

“We’ll find you again when it’s time.” Softsmooth put an arm around his shoulders that nearly hid him from view and gave him an affectionate hug. The vertebrae in his neck cracked softly. “Never lose track of Flinx-friend-teacher. Can always ask Maybeso to find you.”

“Yes. I wish Maybeso was here.”

As if on command, the fifth Ujurrian popped into view. His perpetually sour expression had not changed. “Here,” he grunted.

“Anything to add to all this?” Flinx asked him. He knew he did not have to explain what he meant by ‘all this.’ With Maybeso nothing needed to be explained.

“Later,” Maybeso said brusquely, and vanished.

“That is one strange being,” Flinx murmured admiringly.

“Very strange,” Softsmooth agreed. “I think he like you, but who can tell?”

Flinx glanced at the stairs. “I don’t think any of the people who were here will be coming back.”

Clarity had to smile. “You wouldn’t think men that big could move that fast.”