The Candle of Distant Earth (29 page)

Walker smiled. “I'm sure, George.” He reached out to stroke the dog's back, running his fingers down the dense fur. “I've hopped the train I want to be on. I got on board some time ago, I think. It just took a while to admit it to myself.” He shrugged meaningfully. “After persisting and fighting and struggling so long and so hard to get back here, it turns out there's no here here for me anymore.”

By now at least partly convinced that their former Vilenjji tormentor really did no longer mean them any harm, the dog allowed himself to relax. “How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen galactic civilization? I'm glad, Marc. More than glad. I'm happy. I can live out my life without having to hide my ability to talk. Or my intelligence.” His gaze narrowed as he eyed the watchful Vilenjji sharply. “You're sure about this ‘understanding' Marc says you and he have reached?”

The Vilenjji reached toward George, who flinched instinctively. But the gesture ended in a stroke, albeit one that was rough and sucker-lined. “I am not ready for, nor am I in a position to suggest wholesale changes in the structure and purpose of the association. But if better means of making a profit can be devised…” He left the thought hanging, along with a steady look at the human.

Walker found himself thinking back, all the way back to his original abduction that crazy night at his camp in the Sierras. This had all begun with a group of aliens who had abducted him with the intention of putting him up for sale. Of making use of him. For some time now, he had been making use of aliens. Sessrimathe and Niyyuu, Hyfft and Iollth, Tuuqalia and K'eremu and others; all had been caught up and put upon and cajoled in the service of him and his three friends. It was not unlike the ways and means he had employed to great success during his work with the Chicago Commodities Exchange.

He found that he was looking forward to the future with high expectations indeed. As to Earth, he would always have his memories to tide him over any unforeseen bouts of homesickness. Memories, and George. He would forgo visits to Starbucks for adventures in star systems. Instead of keeping tabs on football, he could watch the well-mannered, carefully structured internal wars of Niyu.

Niyu. There was someone there, as thoroughly and truly an alien as any he had yet encountered, whose acquaintance he very much wanted to renew. What would Viyv-pym-parr think if he returned? Of one thing he was certain: the rabid and active Niyyuuan media would have a field day with such a reunion, however biologically platonic.

Could there be anything more? In the spirit of scientific inquiry that had become one of his new motivations, he fully intended to find out.

But not right away. The Tuuqalians would want to go home, but the Iollth had pledged themselves to him—for a while, at least. As for the K'eremu, Sque had said that they had accompanied him in hopes of adding to their immense store of universal knowledge. As he was their nominal leader, the Niyyuu might go along with any decision he chose to render—for a while, at least. Especially if their avid and ever ambitious media had anything to say about it.

There was plenty of time yet before his extraordinary diversity of friends had to return to Niyu, and to their respective other homeworlds. Plenty of time for him to further cement relations with, and try to dissuade from the abduction and selling of sentients, the Vilenjji Pret-Klob. Time to travel, to explore, to
see.

Rising, he turned and addressed the pair of contented (and now fully recovered) Niyyuu. “We're not going on to my homeworld. My companion and I”—he indicated George, whose tail was metronoming briskly—“have decided that locating it was return enough. We'll be going back to Niyu, I expect.”

All four of the female's tails swayed back and forth in a vigorous visual expression of professional contentment. “That wonderful news to hear, Marcus Walker! The longer expedition journeys, the more opportunities we have for making fine and memorable recordings.”

Walker nodded encouragingly. “That's what George and I were thinking. As official representatives of the Niyyuuan media, you two might as well be the ones to so inform Gerlla-hyn.” He grinned, as much to himself as for the benefit of aliens unfamiliar with the meaning behind the expression. “Tell the Commander-Captain that the fleet (
the fleet!
he thought wonderingly) will be taking the scenic route home.”

They did not quite comprehend his words, their own translators functioning shy of the comprehensiveness needed to fully interpret the human's comment, but they would understand soon enough.

“Did you then have particular routing in mind?” the male inquired tentatively.

Walker considered. Untutored and undereducated in astronomy, he would have been forced to confess an ignorance of his own homeworld's immediate galactic neighborhood. That there was much to experience in its vicinity he had no doubt. The galaxy, as he had already involuntarily seen, was replete with endless wonders. A tug at his leg made him look down. As he did so, George released the grip his jaws had taken on a pants' leg.

“I don't know about you, man, but as for myself, I've always had a serious urge to see the Dog Star.”

Walker smiled. Not too many years ago, and regardless of source, such a request would have been no more than a mild joke. Not, he reflected as he contemplated his astounding and astoundingly familiar starship surroundings and the three aliens who waited on his reply, anymore.

Nor for him and his small and inordinately loquacious furry friend, ever again.

J
eron was very proud of the telescope his parents had given him two birthdays ago. In the time since then, he had mastered its use and added one accessory after another to the basic unit. He'd spent hours and days photographing the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, working his way out to those of Uranus and Neptune as well as distant nebulae and star clusters.

But this morning he was confused. The tiny section of night sky he had set his scope to automatically scan had come back with an anomaly. It was one of those distant areas of the solar system where nothing was supposed to exist. Which was precisely why he had been scanning it. Amateur astronomers tended to find the most interesting things where nothing was supposed to be, and thus where the professionals did not bother to look.

The sequence of photographs showed a mass of incredibly small objects where none ought to be. Furthermore, they appeared and disappeared over an all too brief series of sequential images. Present and gone, far too rapidly to be wandering asteroids, or cometary fragments, or anything else for which he could think of a reasonable, rational explanation. Despite checking and rechecking his scope and its attendant devices and finding them in perfect working order, he knew that the objects' appearance had to be the result of a functional irregularity. Had to be, because they could not be anything else. He could just see himself forwarding and reporting to one of the professional organizations that vetted the thousands of reports turned in by dedicated amateurs such as himself a sighting of a tightly packed cluster of baffling, inexplicable objects located somewhere in the vicinity of Neptune's giant moon Triton.

Especially when the number of them totaled thirteen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A
LAN
D
EAN
F
OSTER
has written 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 and Flinx novels, as well as novelizations of several films including
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.

By ALAN DEAN FOSTER

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

The Black Hole

Cachalot

Dark Star

The Metrognome and Other Stories

Midworld

Nor Crystal Tears

Sentenced to Prism

Splinter of the Mind's Eye

Star Trek
^®
Logs One–Ten

Voyage to the City of the Dead

…Who Needs Enemies?

With Friends Like These…

Mad Amos

The Howling Stones

Parallelities

The Icerigger Trilogy:

Icerigger

Mission to Moulokin

The Deluge Drivers

The Adventures of Flinx of the Commonwealth:

For Love of Mother-Not

The Tar-Aiym-Krang

Orphan Star

The End of the Matter

Bloodhype

Flinx in Flux

Mid-Flinx

Flinx's Folly

Sliding Scales

Running from the Deity

Trouble Magnet

The Damned:

Book One: A Call to Arms

Book Two: The False Mirror

Book Three: The Spoils of War

The Founding of the Commonwealth:

Phylogenesis

Dirge

Diuturnity's Dawn

The Taken Trilogy:

Lost and Found

The Light-Years Beneath My Feet

The Candle of Distant Earth

The Candle of Distant Earth
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2006 by Thranx, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.delreybooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-345-46132-2

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