Flinx Transcendent (27 page)

Barryn was taken aback. How did one respond to something so outrageous? If it was a testament of undying love, it was the most outlandish one he had ever heard.

“But,” she finished with a sigh as she resumed walking, “you can still take me to lunch. I won't deny that I don't get lonely sometimes, even with Bran and Tru's regular visits.”

“The old guy and the bug?”

Her smile returned. He was glad to see it, though the words that accompanied its resurgence left him feeling, for a second time, that she just might be patronizing him.

“Maybe one day there'll be a chance for you to meet and talk to them. I think you'd be surprised. They also have a tendency to get around….”

Barryn felt that he was making progress. Slow progress, to be sure, but moving in the right direction. Though the occasional condescension she displayed toward him was offensive, he chose to ignore it. If she wanted to feel superior, as long as it advanced their relationship he was perfectly
willing to let her. Given time, he was confident that would change. While not the brightest guy in the world, or even the brightest at the medical complex, he knew he was not stupid.

It was a routinely beautiful morning. They were lying side by side on the beach, relaxing atop cooling air lounges. From time to time he felt free to admire her out of the corner of a shaded eye. With the body bandage now gone she was more beautiful than ever. And her joy at its removal had only increased his determination to forge a liaison.

Then, and for no discernible reason, that damned cold-eyed pet of hers suddenly went nuts.

One minute it was lying at her feet, a coil of somnolent iridescent color. The next, both he and Clarity were jolted from their dozing by a loud retort. What sounded like a large piece of canvas cracking in the wind was the snap of a pair of pleated wings opening wide. Sitting up, Barryn gaped at the flying snake as it shot skyward. He had watched it take to the air many times before, but never so explosively.

Clarity was no less bewildered. “Scrap—get back here!” The minidrag didn't hear her. It was already rocketing inland, heading straight for the heart of the medical complex.
“Scrap!”
She looked for support to the man now sitting up on the lounge beside her. Her bewilderment was plain. “I've only seen him react like this once before, and that was a long time ago.”

As always, Barryn refused to refer to the vicious flying creature as a “he.”

“Maybe it senses a threat. You've told me that it responds to your feelings.” Rising from the lounge, he moved to sit down beside her. When he slipped a comforting arm around her now fully healed shoulders, she did not pull away. “Are you feeling threatened?”

“No,” she muttered restively. “I feel fine.” She was staring in the direction of the complex. “I can't see him anymore. It's not like him to fly out of sight.” She started to stand. “I'd better go look for him. If Scrap's sensing a threat where none really exists, he could frighten some people. It's happened before.”

I can't imagine why
. Barryn kept his sarcasm to himself. Why would anyone get upset to suddenly find a venomous airborne alien reptiloid darting in front of their face? He couldn't care less about the
minidrag or why it had abruptly gone shooting off inland. His real concern, his real interest, lay with Clarity. Anyone else confronted by the flying snake would have to deal with it themselves.

“Just stay here and relax.” He squeezed her bare shoulder a little tighter. “I'm sure your pet will be right back as soon as it determines you're not in any danger. In any event,
I'm
here.”

She didn't bite on that, but he refused to let it discourage him. If luck was really with him, the flying snake might never come back. As in any large medical complex, there was a security team. Maybe one of them would shoot the little monster.

“Oh.”

Clarity did not shout the exclamation. Her voice remained level and controlled. But the strangest expression came over her face as she sat there beside him. It was one he had not encountered previously and did not recognize. Slipping free of his reassuring, mildly possessive grasp, she rose and started toward the complex.

“Clarity? Clarity, love?” he called after her in confusion. She appeared not to hear him.

Peering in the direction she was walking, he expected to see the flying snake returning to its master. But there was no sign of the minidrag. Meanwhile, ahead of her a single figure had detached itself from the crowd of convalescents, medical personnel, and visitors. It was walking toward her, and she was advancing toward it. Tambrogh Barryn's gaze narrowed.

Though he did not recognize the stranger, Barryn could not escape the certainty that the other man's arrival did not bode well for his hopes regarding Clarity.

Upslope, Flinx halted. She looked exactly as he remembered her. No, he corrected himself quickly. She looked much better than he remembered, because the last time he had seen her she had been enveloped in a halo of sweat and blood, her torso ravaged from behind. Looking at her now, that horrific image finally began to recede into memory. The medtechs and their instrumentation had done their job well. She had been restored to him. Her beauty, her movement, her form intact and unmarred.

Also her full neuromuscular functionality, as evinced by the hard slap she gave him right across his face. She had to reach high to make the necessary contact. Though intimately familiar with her person, Pip
still would have reacted to such a hard blow—except that Pip was nowhere to be seen. As soon as they had reached the entrance to the medical complex she had elevated skyward to leave on some unknown errand of her own. Flinx was not concerned. He could sense that she was somewhere nearby. Whatever had drawn her away, she would not pass out of perception range of her friend and master.

Reaching up, he touched his stinging cheek where Clarity had struck him. “I missed you, too.”

“All this time.” She was staring hard at him, so tense that the muscles in her neck were twitching. “One minute we're fighting for our very lives at the shuttleport; the next I wake up immobilized in a hospital chamber. No sign of you, no kind word, no knowing if you're alive or dead. Eventually your big friend and your bug friend show up to tell me you've taken off yet again on your fanatical quest halfway across the galaxy.”

Though appropriately abashed, he did not try to evade the issue. “A galaxy in need of saving, Clarity.”

She nodded briskly. “Uh-huh. We talked about it, remember? We also talked about you and me. We talked about that, too.” She indicated their surroundings, taking in the beurre lawn, the structural complex, the lake, and by inference the entire welcoming world of Nur.

“You were gone over a year. More than enough time for me to heal—physically. How long are you here for this time? A week? A month?” Her unhappiness was manifest in her tone as well as her expression. “I'm not letting you leave again. Ever. Not without me. I can't take it. I wouldn't have made a good wife to an ancient Terran sea captain, Flinx, waving understandingly as her husband disappeared over the horizon for two or three years to hunt cetaceans, or discover uncharted islands, or …”

She was crying now. Tenderly, he took her in his arms. One moment she was sobbing against his chest and the next she was pounding on it with both fists. “I won't let you leave me again, Philip Lynx! I won't! I'll have your heart if I have to cut it out and keep it next to me in a cryosac!”

He smiled affectionately down at her. “I've never met another woman capable of such an extreme degree of homicidal affection. You really think I would risk losing someone so unique? Okay.”

Sniffling, furious at her own emotional vulnerability, she rubbed
crossly at first one weeping eye and then the other as she frowned up at him uncertainly. “‘Okay’? What the hell do you mean, ‘okay’?”

“I mean okay, that I concur.” He stared evenly into her damp eyes. “I'll never leave you again.”

Anger and ardor merged in confusion. “You're giving up your search? For the Tar-Aiym weapons platform? But what about the Great Evil, the danger that's coming toward us from out of the Great Emptiness? You showed it to me, I know it's real. Have you given up all hope of somehow confronting it?”

What is it you want me to do?
he thought in bewilderment.
Marry you or save civilization? Make up your mind
. He felt a headache starting, only this time the basis was utterly different from the one that usually plagued him.

“No, I haven't,” he finally replied. “Here lately it seems I was always getting sidetracked by other matters, but that's all over and done with now. I've recommitted myself. I intend to do my utmost to relocate that example of ancient advanced technology—even though I don't think it will do any good. Not when pitted against what's coming this way. But I promised Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex that I'd try to find it, and that's what I'm going to do. With one adjustment.”

She blinked, waiting. “Adjustment? What adjustment?”

“You're coming with me. Just as you were supposed to do before the fanatics from the Order of Null attacked us at the shuttleport outside Sphene.” He lowered his eyes. “That is,” he mumbled awkwardly, “if you still want to.”

Staring back at him, she sounded incredulous. “You didn't stick around long enough for me to heal sufficiently or I'd have gone with you this last time. Do you really think I'd say no now?”

“I—I wasn't sure. After leaving you that way…. Clarity, everything was happening so
fast
. I felt I had no choice. Bran and Tru felt I had no choice.” He met her gaze once again. Strolling staff and patients were staring at them, murmuring and pointing. He ignored them.

“I've learned more about myself since I've been away. A lot more. Some of those things I needed to know, like whether civilization is really worth saving. Some were things I didn't want to know. Some I had to know the answers to whether I wanted to learn them or not. I'm still
struggling to deal with the consequences.” He would tell her what he had discovered about his patrimony later, he decided.

She saw the pain in his face, heard it in his voice. “And,” she whispered as she put a hand on his arm, “what
have
you decided? Are you continuing with this crazy search to fulfill a promise you made to your friends—or because you believe that civilization really is worth saving?”

He managed a smile. “Both, I think. But one of the things I realized is that I can't do this without support. For a certainty, not without you.” He put a hand on each of her shoulders. “No matter where I was, no matter what outlandish world I was on—Arrawd, Jast, Visaria, Gestalt, Blasusarr—I wondered if what I was doing was the right thing, because everything I was doing and all that I was experiencing was without you.” His fingers tightened. “I need you
with
me, Clarity. Not waiting for me if and when I finish with it. Whether I can find this artifact again or not, whether the finding of it portends anything effective or not, whether the whole galaxy, or for that matter the entire universe, goes to hell or not—none of it matters to me anymore if I'm not with you.” Reluctantly he let go of her shoulders, dropped his arms, and looked past her, his gaze coming to rest on the quiet waters of the vast lake. His voice threatened to crack.

“I've been so alone for so long, Clarity. I just can't do it anymore. Not even to save the galaxy. Not even to save myself.”

For a long while she said nothing. Then she stepped forward, put her arms around his waist, and drew him to her. A wide, warm smile spread across her face. “Philip—Flinx—you've never really been alone since the day I met you.”

From where he was sitting on the air lounge down on the beach, Barryn had watched the reunion with slowly rising anger. Or at least he had since Clarity had slapped the stranger across the face. That initial delight had given way steadily to dismay, then to despair, and finally to antipathy. Who was this lanky red-haired outsider, to show up after an absence of so many months and try to steal away the woman on whom he, Tambrogh Barryn, had lavished so much time and attention? If it was indeed the shadowy individual known as Philip Lynx, he was in line to receive some choice words at the very least. Rising from the air lounge, his mounting resentment bolstered by righteous indignation, the medtech strode up the
slope toward the embracing couple. That they took no notice of him until he was almost on top of them only served to further stoke his resentment.

A heavy, insistent hand tapped Flinx on the shoulder. “Look here,
thinp
, is your name Philip Lynx?”

The youthful redhead looked around and responded with an unexpectedly gracious smile. “My friends call me Flinx.”

“All right then—‘Flinx.’ My name is Tambrogh Barryn and this lady is
my
friend.” He took a step back, ready for anything. “I know who you are because I've heard her talk about you.”

Flinx turned his smile on Clarity. “Is that true? You talk about me?”

She returned the smile. “You know how it is. Talk long enough and sooner or later every little thing gets mentioned.”

He nodded, then lost the smile. “How good a friend is this gentleman?”

Clarity glanced over at the quietly fuming medtech. “Tam's been very kind to me during the late stages of my convalescence. I'll always be grateful for his company, his kind words, and his support.”

Complimentary as her words were, they were not the ones Barryn wanted to hear. Instead of complaining, he turned his ire on the tall redhead. “I don't know where
you've
been all the time Clarity has been fighting to recover from her serious injuries, but
I've
been right here with her.” Resting his hands on his hips, he struck a deliberately challenging pose. “Doesn't seem to me that anyone who really cared about her would disappear and leave her to recover all by herself. I know she has some odd friends who look in on her from time to time, but that's not the kind of attention and compassion she deserves.”

The last vestiges of Flinx's smile fell away. “You're absolutely right. But it couldn't be avoided. There was”—and his gaze flicked back to Clarity—“some unavoidable business I had to attend to. I didn't want to leave her behind. But she couldn't travel. Promises had been made, and before I realized it circumstances led me to deviate even from those.” Extending an arm, he indicated that the medtech should join him in stepping off to one side.