Flinx saw Clarity staring. She had convinced herself she was beyond shock, but Maybeso’s brief appearance had proved otherwise. “He goes where he wants,” Flinx explained apologetically, “and he doesn’t have to use a tunnel. Nobody knows how he does it, not even the other Ujurrians, and he doesn’t tell. They think he’s a little strange.”
“Not strange. Mad.” A fourth Ujurrian emerged from the bottomless pit in the center of the room. Looking like a cross between a grizzly bear and a lemur, Softsmooth plopped down on the floor and began cleaning herself. That was when Flinx noted the softly glowing rings each of them wore.
“These?” Bluebright responded to his inquiry. “Toys that help with the digging. We built your ship. We made these. All part of the game, yes?”
“Wait a minute. The other one.” Clarity was gesturing weakly. “The one that appeared behind you, Flinx. Where did he come from? And where did he go?”
“Nobody knows where he comes from,” Moam said, “and nobody knows where Maybeso goes.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand,” she said slowly, “why Ulru-Ujurr is under Church Edict.”
“You have to keep in mind,” Flinx told her, “that the Ujurrians are complete innocents. The AAnn were beginning illegal exploitation of their world when I showed up there. At that time the Ujurrians had no concept of civilization or modern technology or anything related to either. They lived and ate and mated and dug their tunnels. Playing the game, they called it. So I introduced them to a new game, the game of ‘civilization.’ It didn’t take them very long to learn how to build a starship. That was my Teacher. I can’t imagine what they’ve learned by now. How to make rings, apparently.”
“How to have more fun!” Fluff roared. “Got here too late to help Flinx-friend—but not too late to have more fun. Had to find you, anyway. New element has entered the game. Very intriguing. You would say, ‘Involves inexplicable astrophysical and mathematical metastasis.’ ”
“Maybe I wouldn’t,” Flinx said carefully.
“We ought to get out of here.” Clarity was studying the stairway. “More of those fanatics might come looking for their friends.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. There are Ujurrians here.” He spoke to her, but he was thinking at Fluff. “What do you mean when you speak of a ‘new element’ in the game? I thought the rules I set down for you were fairly straightforward.”
“Were, yes. You remember you also taught us that not everyone plays the game by the rules. You explained cheating. This is a kind of cheating.”
Softsmooth took up the refrain, her mental voice distinctly feminine compared with that of the three big males. “You know we have always dug the tunnels, Flinx-friend. Found some interesting ideas for new tunnels in the information the cold minds left behind. Started a tunnel that way.” She smiled, revealing long fangs and bone-crushing teeth. “We can dig all kinds of tunnels; dig through rock, through sand, through what you call spacetime.”
“Fun to dig to other worlds,” Moam commented. “Same world gets boring.” He was inspecting one of the laser pistols Vandervort’s bodyguards had dropped. Flinx was not worried. All Moam was interested in was the pistol’s construction.
Softsmooth carried on. “Been digging many tunnels to other worlds.” She indicated the empty pit. Flinx was careful not to go too close to the edge. If one fell in, there was no telling where and when one might stop.
“Dug tunnel to place your people call Horseye, natives call Tslamaina. Found an interesting thing there.”
“Big machine,” Moam put in. “Biggest machine we’ve seen ever.” The usual feeling of frivolity was absent from his thought.
“Did some studying,” Softsmooth continued. “After a while something really very strange detected us studying and came to chase us away, but we left before it got there.” She smiled again. “We can move quickly when we have to, you know. Found smaller similar things all linked to this one big thing on the Horseye world. Links go like our tunnels, only a lot smaller.”
“What is horse?” Fluff asked suddenly.
“A Terran quadruped,” Flinx told him. “They’re no longer common.”
“Too bad. Image is nice.”
“Shut up, Fluff,” Softsmooth admonished him. “I was talking.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up.”
They exchanged blows, the lightest of which would have killed a large man instantly, before settling back down as though nothing had happened. Clarity had run to Flinx’s side at the start of the fight, and he reluctantly allowed her to remain next to him. His mind was clear, but his emotions were in turmoil.
“Before the really very strange something arrived to chase us away, we found out what the machine was all about.”
“It’s an alarm,” Moam muttered. Flinx saw that he was busily taking the laser pistol apart, his huge fingers picking delicately at the internal circuitry.
“What kind of alarm?”
“To warn against something. Against a big danger. Except that the people it was supposed to warn have all gone away a long time ago.” In Flinx’s mind the mental picture of “long ago” that Softsmooth was projecting stretched into infinity. That was impressive, because the Ujurrians never exaggerated.
“You said you had to find me, anyway. Because of this?” All four ursinoids nodded in unison. “Why come to me? I know nothing of a world called Horseye, much less any weird machines on it.”
“You are the teacher,” Fluff said simply. And then, shockingly, “Also because you are involved somehow.”
“Me?” Pip did a little hop on her master’s shoulder before settling back down. “How can I be involved when this is the first I’ve heard of it?”
“The feeling is there.” Even Fluff was now communicating with great seriousness. “You are the key to something, whether the machine or the danger or something else we do not yet know. We would like to know. It would help in the game. This danger worries us.”
If it was real and it worried the Ujurrians, Flinx knew, then everyone else ought to be properly terrified. “Is the danger imminent?”
“Imminent?” wide-eyed Bluebright echoed.
“Is it going to strike soon?” Flinx inquired tiredly. In their innocence, the Ujurrians could instantly comprehend the most complex mechanical and mathematical concepts while simultaneously misunderstanding much simpler terms.
“Do not know. You must help us to understand this thing,” Softsmooth said. “You are the teacher.”
“I’m not a teacher!” he replied angrily. “I’m just a student. By now any one of you has more accumulated knowledge stored in your minds than I ever will.”
“But you know the game,” Fluff reminded him. “The game of civilization. That we are still learning.”
“This is somehow part of the game,” Bluebright said. All four were staring at him, and he was unable to look into those vast yellow eyes and lie. Here it was again. Just when he was certain, he was through with someone else’s problems, another set materialized to take their place. If he insisted, they would go away and leave him alone. If he insisted.
They were pleading silently. It did him no good to turn away because that meant he had to look at Clarity, which was just as bad. There was no escape for him from himself. Not in this room, at this time, in this place. Maybe not anywhere, ever.
“I can’t do anything to help,” he said finally, “because I don’t know anything about this. Can’t you understand that?”
“Understand ignorance, Flinx-friend,” Softsmooth said without hesitation. “Can fix that.”
Flinx was taken aback. “How? By taking me to Horseye?” He eyed the black pit uneasily.
“No. Can show you a little, maybe. We cannot see it ourselves but can help you to see. Will not be dangerous—hopefully.” Fluff had come over to put a paw on Flinx’s shoulder. “We must know, Flinx-friend. Is important to us, too. It might be serious enough to stop the game. To stop all games.”
Was there really any
thing to think about? Did he really have any choice? Did he ever?
“How are you going to show me? Is this threat nearby?”
“It is very, very far away. We can only guess where. You will have to trust us. Teacher must trust his pupils.”
“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.”