“Kill the thing!” he bellowed. “Kill it now!”
The young man seated on the top step hesitated, but not the tall amazon next to him. She started to raise the muzzle of the neuronic pistol she was holding. Without being touched by any visible weapon, she abruptly slumped forward, rolling down the stairs to fall in a heap atop the dead man already there.
Pip and Scrap were airborne and ready to attack, but for the first time in his life Flinx did not need them. Having fought to break free of the lake, he found he could now break through with little effort. Using Pip as an empathic lens, he was able to project emotions as well as receive them. Maybe more than the lake and his sleep was involved. Maybe it had something to do with the shapes and forms that had tried to touch him. Perhaps he had been touched. He did not know.
Time later to find out, if he lived.
What he had projected into the mind of the tall woman had been fear and overwhelming terror. Now he sent it into her companion, who let out a quavering moan, rose to turn and run, and then fainted on the steps. The older man managed a shot in Flinx’s direction. The bolt just missed him, numbing his arm. Instinctively he responded with greater force.
The result was unintended. The elderly fanatic rose trembling, eyes bulging, and collapsed atop his younger colleague. Unlike his companion, he had not simply been rendered unconscious. Fear had stopped his heart.
Observing the collapse of their opposition, the two bodyguards had halted in the middle of the room, relieved that they would not have to try to dodge the pistols of the fanatics. At almost the same time they noticed that their prisoner was sitting up in his coffin facing them. They did not connect his resurrection to the destruction of their opponents.
An uncertain Monconqui raised his pistol. Clarity saw him, stood up, and screamed.
The two bodyguards proved harder to put down. They were familiar with the kind of fear Flinx had used to eliminate the fanatics from the scene. Nonetheless, every man has his breaking point. Beneath the barrage of withering terror they both eventually keeled over.
Then he was alone in the room except for Clarity and Vandervort. The older woman came around from behind her little fortress of crates and started toward him, a broad smile on her face, hand extended.
“Well, my boy, I don’t know how you did that, but I know you are responsible. I saw you stare them down, or whatever it was you did. First that slime on the stairs and then my own people, who didn’t have the sense to lower their weapons before they could find out we were all on the same side.”
Flinx was climbing out of the coffin. “Which side is that?”
“Don’t listen to her, Flinx!” Clarity blurted out hastily. “She’s the one who had you drugged and put in that thing!”
Vandervort whirled on her. “Just shut up, you little bitch. If you know what’s good for you, you’d better keep your mouth shut.” Still smiling, she looked back at Flinx. He studied her noncommittally.
“Dear Clarity is upset. She’s confused by everything that’s happened, and I must say I don’t blame her.” Vandervort laughed, a velvety, comfortable laugh. “I am somewhat confused myself.”
“Me, too.”
Vandervort seemed to stand a little taller. “I’m certain we can sort all this out.”
“So you’re not responsible for any of this?” His stare was level, his voice calm. Pip hovered close by while Scrap darted uncertainly toward Clarity, back to Flinx, and ended up spinning miserably in the air halfway between the two.
“I didn’t exactly say that. What I said was that it’s all been very confusing.”
That was what she said. What, emanated from her was a combination of fear and anger, not all aimed at the unconscious or dead fanatics piled on the stairway. Some of it was directed at Clarity. Some of it was directed at Flinx.
“If you want to help me so badly, why are you so afraid of me?”
“Afraid of you, young man? But I’m not.” Suddenly realization struck, and she smiled, but this time the smile was uneasy. “You can tell what I’m feeling, can’t you? Not what I’m thinking, but what I am feeling.”
“That’s it. What I’m feeling right now is that you’re not as fond of me as you’re trying to make out.”
“You mustn’t take emotions literally, young man. They can be confused, and confusing. You just knocked out five armed assailants without so much as lifting your hand. I believe I’m entitled to at least be intimidated.”
“But you’re not intimidated. You’re afraid, and that’s something else again. I think you’re feeling that as soon as I turn my back on you, you’re going to go for one of those guns that your henchmen dropped.”
All the color drained from her face. “You can’t feel that. It’s not an emotion; it’s a specific thought.” She retreated a step. “You can’t—”
“Absolutely right. I can’t read thoughts. But if I suggest something and you react to it, I can sense your reactions and thereby tell the truth of it as clearly as if you’d answered honestly. If you’d responded any other way, then I might have hesitated. I might have been unsure. I might’ve been tempted to listen to you.”
“You aren’t going to kill me,” she whispered hollowly. “It isn’t in you.”
“Hey, we don’t know what’s in me, remember? I’m the unpredictable mutant you keep warning everyone against.” He was sickened not by the look of sheer terror on her face but by the fact that he was enjoying it. He sighed. “Enough death.” He indicated the stairs. “Two of them are dead, the rest unconscious. One of the deaths was an accident, and the other the result of a needle shot. I’m not going to kill you, Vandervort.”
The older woman stopped. “What are you going to do?” She was looking past him. “What you did to them?”
“Just made sure they wouldn’t bother me for a while. Tell me: Is there anything you’re really afraid of? Anything that truly frightens you?”
“No. I’m a scientist. I look at everything analytically. I have no fears.”
Suddenly her eyes bulged like those of a fish trapped by a receding tide. Her head went way back, and she turned a slow circle. Fingers dug into hair, and she uttered a single piercing shriek before folding over in a dead faint.
Clarity came out from behind the other crates. “What did you do to her?”
He gazed sadly at the crumpled figure. “The same thing I did to the others. Projected fear into them until their nervous systems were overwhelmed. I sensed crawling things in her mind. Bugs, something else, I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Specifics weren’t required. So much for the analytical approach.”
“Flinx, I’m so glad that everything—”
He turned sharply. “I think you’d better stop right there.”
She did so, puzzled and obviously hurt. “I can imagine what you’re thinking. I had nothing to do with any of this.”
“You knew about it. Tell me you knew nothing of it.”
“I can’t. You’d be able to tell if I was lying. Flinx, I didn’t know what to do, what to think. She told me stories—” She nodded toward the motionless form of her former superior. “—stories about the Society and their work and you. About what you might become. I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want to believe any of it. But she’s so much more experienced than I. I didn’t have any choice. If I’d refused, they would have found someone else to take my place, someone who cared nothing about you.”
“Everyone has a choice.” He lowered his gaze, tired of staring. Tired, period. “It’s just that most people don’t have the guts to make the right one.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry.” She was crying now. “They had you here in that damn box before I knew anything. It was too late for me to stop them. I went along hoping to help you later, somehow, when they’d let down their guard. You’ve got to believe that! You heard me shout a warning, didn’t you? You just heard me tell you that she was responsible for everything that’s happened, that this is all her doing.”
?
??Yes, I heard you. That’s why you’re still walking instead of lying on the floor with the rest. I know you’re telling the truth, or else you’re the most skillful liar I’ve ever encountered.”
“If you know that, if you can sense that, then you must also know that I love you.”
He turned away from her. “I don’t know anything of the sort. Your feelings are strong, but no matter what you say, I can tell that they’re still confused and uncertain. One moment you say you love me, the next you’re afraid of me. Hot and cold. I don’t want that kind of relationship.”
“Give me a chance, Flinx,” she pleaded. “I’m so terribly confused.”
He whirled to face her again. “How do you think I’m feeling? That’s the one set of emotions I can never get rid of. After all that’s happened, how can you think I could ever trust you with anything, much less with my life? Not that it matters, anyway. You can’t share my life. Nobody can. Because, ironically enough, Vandervort may have been right about that. I can’t, I won’t take the chance of endangering someone else in the event I do turn out to be dangerous.
“I was uncertain about that before. Now I’m not. I shouldn’t have let myself get involved with you in the first place. That much of it’s my fault.”
“Flinx, I know what you are. It doesn’t frighten me anymore. You need someone like me. Someone who can give you understanding and sympathy and affection—and love.”
“Someone to help me be human. Is that it?”
“No, dammit!” Despite her best efforts to repress them, the tears began afresh. “That’s not what I mean at all.”
He wanted her to be lying, but she was not.
“While I was asleep, or unconscious, or drugged, or whatever, my mind roamed freely in a way it never has before. I feel better about myself than I ever have. It was more than a rejuvenating rest, Clarity. Something happened to me while I was in that box. I can’t define it yet because I’m not sure what it was. But while I was in there I sensed things. Some of them were beautiful and some were frightening and others were inexplicable, and until I can figure them out, I need to be by myself.
“You go back to whipping out custom genes and designer biologicals, and I’ll get back to my studying. That’s the way it has to be.”
“You’re not being fair,” she sobbed.
“Once I was told that the universe isn’t a fair place. The more I see of it, the more convinced I am of the rightness of that observation.”
The rumbling began as a hum in the ears and a subtle quivering underfoot. The two met somewhere in the vicinity of the stomach. Not an earthquake but something much more pervasive. Clarity rushed to the plastic crates for support while Flinx stood his ground as best he was able. Pip stayed aloft while Scrap finally came to a decision and landed cautiously on Clarity’s shoulder. That was painful for Flinx to see, but he could not waste time worrying about it now.
Of more immediate concern was the fact that the center of the floor was crumbling beneath his feet. He scrambled to one side, staring as the stelacrete and duralloy mesh turned to powder and vanished into the gaping maw of a vast dark pit some three meters in diameter.
The huge creature that stuck its head out of the hole and gazed curiously around the room was as tall as the opening was wide. Its dense fur was mottled with splotches, and it must have weighed close to a ton. The flat muzzle ended in a tiny nose above which a pair of plate-sized yellow eyes hung like lanterns. The ears were comically undersized.
Placing two immense, seven-digited paws on the edge of the hole, it boosted itself into the room, the furry head barely clearing the ceiling. Clarity goggled at it in disbelief as if it were something coalesced whole from a fever dream. Flinx flinched, too, but for a different reason entirely. At that point the monster saw him—and smiled hugely.
“Hello again, Flinx-friend,” it said.
Except its mouth did not move.
Chapter Seventeen
Clarity heard it, too. She was mumbling dazedly to herself. “There’s no such thing as a true telepath. There’s no such thing.”
“I’m afraid there is,” Flinx said with another sigh. He turned to the monster. “Hello, Fluff. It’s been a long time.”
“Long time, Flinx-friend!” It was a mental boom. The massive Ujurrian trundled over to the red-haired young man and rested both massive paws on his shoulders. “Flinx-friend is well?”
“Very well, thank you.” He was somewhat surprised to find that the mind-to-mind, human-to-Ujurrian communication was easier this time than it had been years ago, when he had first encountered Fluff’s species on their Church-proscribed world. It was no longer difficult to understand.
Fluff nodded approvingly as two more giant Ujurrians popped out of the hole like ursinoid jack-in-the-boxes. Flinx recognized Bluebright and Moam. They examined their surroundings with the boundless curiosity of their kind.
“Flinx-friend’s mind is clearing out. Not as much mud inside as before.” Fluff tapped the side of his head with a fat finger.
Flinx gestured to his right. “That’s my friend, Clarity.”
Fluff started toward her, overflowing with gruff good feelings. “Hello, Clarity-friend.” She backed away from him until she was flush against the wall. The Ujurrian halted and looked back at Flinx. “Why your friend frightened of Fluff?”
“It’s not you, Fluff. It’s your size.”
“Oh-ho!” The Ujurrian promptly dropped to all fours. “This better, Clarity-friend?”
She hesitantly stepped away from the cold wall. “It’s better.” Her gaze rose, and she found Flinx watching her amusedly. “These are friends of yours?”
“Can’t you tell by now?”
“But how did they get here? What are they?”
“They’re Ujurrians. I think I mentioned them before.”
“The world Under Edict, yes. That means nobody can get in or out.”
“Apparently someone neglected to inform the Ujurrians of that. As to how they got here, I’m as interested as you are.”
“Heard you.” Bluebright’s mental voice was as distinct from Fluff’s as it was from Flinx’s. “Her mindlight is bright.”
Clarity frowned uncertainly. “What does that mean?”
“It means you have a strong mental aura. To the Ujurrians everything is like a light, brighter or darker to a varying degree. Don’t be intimidated by their size. Oh, they’re quite capable of taking a human being apart like a wooden toy, but we’re old allies. And if it makes you feel better, they’re mostly vegetarians. They don’t like to eat anything that generates ‘light.’ ”
Scrap cowered against Clarity’s neck. It was the first time Flinx had ever seen a minidrag show fear. To the young flying snake, the Ujurrians’ emotional auras must have appeared overpowering. Pip did not fear because she remembered.
“Heard you calling,” Moam explained as he examined the unconscious forms scattered about the room. “Came fast as we could to offer help.”
“Calling?” For a moment Flinx forgot Clarity. “I wasn’t calling. I wasn’t even conscious.” He tried to recall what it had been like floating beneath the surface of the lake. Little remained of that memory, that fading mystic melody of thoughts suspended in morphogas.
“How did you people get here?” Clarity forced herself not to gaze into the black pit. “Flinx told me you made him a ship.”
“A ship, yes,” Fluff said proudly. “A Teacher for the teacher. For us, we don’t like ships. Noisy and confining. We only built his because it fits the game.”
“Game?” She turned back to Flinx. “What game?”
“The game of civilization.” He spoke absently, still trying to remember. “The Ujurrians love games, so before I left Ulru-Ujurr I started teaching them that one. By the time the Teacher was finished they were getting very good at it. I can’t imagine what stage they’ve reached by now.”
“Like some parts of the game,” Bluebright said. “Don’t like others. Keep the parts we like, throw out
the ones we don’t.”
“Very sensible. How’s the tunnel digging coming along?”
“You aren’t making any sense.” Clarity couldn’t disguise her confusion.
“It doesn’t have to make sense. Listen and you’ll learn a few things.”
“Going very well,” Fluff told him. “Still have many more tunnels to dig. Heard you calling. Decided to dig a new tunnel. Fastest digging we’ve ever done, but teacher was in trouble. Got here too late anyways maybe?”
“I’m okay.” It was Flinx’s turn to frown. If he had not known from experience what the Ujurrians were capable of, he could never have asked the next question. “Are you telling us that you tunneled here from Ulru-Ujurr?”
Fluff made a face. “Where else we tunnel from?”
Smiling to show he meant no offense even though he knew they could read the same thing in his mind, he said, “Clarity-friend is right. That doesn’t make any sense.”
The huge Ujurrian chuckled, his voice full of mock puzzlement. “Then how we get here? Was hard work, Flinx-friend, but also fun.”
“That’s it. I’m lost,” Clarity mumbled.
“Not lost,” Moam said earnestly, misunderstanding her thoughts as well as her words. “You start tunnels. Make bend here, then twist, then wrap around like so and so, and lo! There you are.”
“I wonder if they ‘tunnel’ through space-plus or null-space,” Flinx murmured in awe. “Or someplace else the theoretical mathematicians haven’t invented yet. How did you find me? Can you tap into my specific thought signature across all those parsecs?”
“Wasn’t easy,” said Moam. “So we had somebody come and look.”
Flinx’s brow wrinkled. “Come and look? But who—”
A voice from behind made him jump. “Who you think?”
It was Maybeso, looking dour and distressed as always. Even for an Ujurrian, Maybeso was unique. His fellows thought him quite mad. If the inhabitants of Ulru-Ujurr were an anomaly among intelligent races, then Maybeso was the anomaly of anomalies.
“Hello, Maybeso.”
“Good-bye, Flinx-friend.” The giant ursinoid vanished as silently and mysteriously as he had appeared. He was not a talker.