Mid-Flinx

  Flinx started to explain that he not only enjoyed but needed his privacy, that he was in fact one of the most private people he knew, but he didn’t want to disappoint her any further. Since he didn’t know what she was talking about, he saw no point in prolonging the encounter.

  But he didn’t object when she laid her head on his chest and closed her eyes.

  The rain ceased early. It seemed that he’d just dropped back off to sleep when their overnight refuge was once again awash in yellow-green light.

  One at a time they climbed out, Saalahan effortlessly giving Flinx a boost to the top of the branch. Their emergence was greeted by a flock of opportunistic aerial predators. Soaring low on silvered wings evolved to blind prospective prey, they beat in frustration with meter-wide wings at the curtain of protective vines.

  Saalahan dismissed them with a derisive snort that was mimicked in comical fashion by the two younger furcots. Meanwhile Teal had leaped lithely from the broad branch on which they stood to a smaller one nearby and slightly lower down, indifferent to the thirty-meter drop between.

  As Flinx looked on, she shinnied up a thigh-thick vine that was striped with blue, carefully avoiding several nearby that to his eye looked exactly the same. Reaching a knot formed by two woody creepers, she vanished into an explosion of enormous purple and red blossoms whose oversized stamens were a bright, metallic gold.

  “What’s she doing?”

  Saalahan only grunted, leaving it to Kiss to explain. “Mother is gathering something.” She toyed with her chestnut tresses.

  “Food.” It struck Flinx that his stomach was not aching because Teal had spent some time resting her head against it, but from a demanding emptiness.

  “No.” Morning muted Dwell’s gruffness. “No food in a Tolling bush. Maybe beyond.”

  “Is that what those flowers are called?”

  “Of course.” The boy’s sharp-edged tone returned. “Don’t you know anything?”

  “Very little,” Flinx confessed.

  Teal wasn’t gone long. She retraced her steps, making the same death-defying leap back to the main branch with the same casual aplomb as before. With a prideful smile she opened one of her gathering pouches, filled now with thumb-sized yellow fruit, and then found a place to sit. Saalahan chided her, urging that they move deeper into the forest before pausing to eat.

  “Oh, hush, Saalahan. Set your big green backside down somewhere and relax. This is a special place. Maybe we’ll spend another night here.”

  “Lazy.” The big furcot sniffed. It lumbered off into the arboreal veldt, the two younger ones following like a pair of six-legged green bears trailing their mother. Thanks to their coloring, they vanished from sight almost immediately.

  Looking on, it was difficult for Flinx not to envision some sort of familial relationship existing between them. Once again Teal insisted it just wasn’t so.

  Idly stroking Pip, he stared out through the curtain of vines across the valley in the forest. “Won’t we be in danger up here without the furcots?”

  “People can look after themselves without furcots.” She gestured to her son. “Dwell, sit sentry.”

  The boy beamed as his mother handed him the long tube she had been carrying strapped to her back. For the first time Flinx got a good look at the snuffler. Hewn from a special hardwood that remained green even after curing, the tapering weapon was a deft blend of half-remembered high-tech and determined improvisation. Keeping his fingers clear of the hand-tooled trigger, Dwell also took charge of a sack of gas-filled membranes and a quiver of poisoned darts.

  Settling himself in a crook where a smaller branch met its parent, he steadied the snuffler on his legs, stuffed one of the globular membranes into the opening in the rear, closed the cover, and let his gaze rove the surrounding environment. Unless something in the way of an immediate threat manifested itself, the lethal darts would remain safely in their protective quiver.

  Thus positioned, Flinx decided, the boy looked considerably older than his ten years.

  Kiss wandered freely, studying crawlers and plants but never straying far from the two adults or her brother. No matter how focused she became on any object of curiosity, she always looked up to check and evaluate her surroundings every couple of minutes.

  Sitting across from Teal, Flinx watched with interest as she removed a hand-carved wooden disk from her backpack. It looked as if it had been sliced whole from a benign gourd. From her water jug she poured a small amount of liquid onto the center of the disk. Instantly it began to swell and thicken, the sides curving upward. Once it had absorbed all the available moisture, the result was an impermeable bowl that, when dehydrated, could be packed flat for easier transport.

  Taking the small yellow fruits from her pouch, she carefully squeezed them over the bowl one at a time, discarding the pulp. When she was through, she removed a small sack from her backpack and dumped the flourlike contents in with the juice. A small mixing stick stirred the combination to a thick paste.

  When Kiss returned with a double handful of blue-black berries, her mother added them to the mash. The result was not only visually pleasing but smelled of a promising alien tartness.

  “Now what?” asked Flinx when it seemed that no additional ingredients were to be forthcoming.

  Teal smiled. “We wait.”

  “For what?”

  “For the sun to work its magic.”

  It didn’t look much like magic to Flinx. As the morning wore on she added a second species of berry, this one orange and pear-shaped, and more water.

  Eventually the furcots returned, the young ones exhibiting an unexpected delicacy of touch as they dumped two unbruised mouthfuls of some heavy cream-colored tuber on the branch. Saalahan’s contribution was a stubby-legged two-meter long tree-dweller that looked like a giant nude mink, which Teal expertly gutted and filleted.

  The furcots then filled a space atop the branch with dried wood and tinder, and the mink fillet joined the tubers in an embracing fire. There was no fear of it spreading. Not when every centimeter of exposed vegetation existed in a condition of permanent damp.

  Flinx found the meal nourishing if without excitement. After the first swallow, Pip downed choice bits of meat without hesitation, though she balked at the roasted tuber. A few unsoused berries completed her breakfast, leaving her bulging contentedly in the middle. The fact that the flying snake was an opportunistic omnivore surprised most who encountered her, but Teal and her children accepted the minidrag’s diet without question.

  The moisture in Teal’s fermenting surprise kept the bowl hydrated and prevented it from returning to its original shape. Only when they had finished eating did she offer it to him, eyes shining.

  “Disiwin,” she told him, as if that explained everything.

  He eyed the syrupy red-orange liquid dubiously. “What’s it supposed to do?”

  “Make you feel good. Help you to see clearly. Drink, and forget about silly privacies.” She giggled like a schoolgirl.

  He wondered how he could politely refuse the local beer or whatever it was, and decided he couldn’t. Not after she had gathered the main ingredients and brewed it herself. Mindful as he accepted the bowl of the precipitous drop on either side of the branch, he prayed it didn’t contain a powerful hallucinogen, or if it did, that he’d retain sense enough not to see if he could fly.

  Sensing his discomfort, she reassured him. “Don’t worry, Flinx. Saalahan knows how disiwin affects persons. The furcots will watch over us.” When still he hesitated, her expression fell. “You won’t try it with me?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just that I haven’t had a headache since I’ve been here. Not even a twinge.” He studied the colorful concoction. “I’d hate to induce one voluntarily.”

  “Headache?” She frowned. “What’s that?”

  He touched various places on his head. “Pain, throbbing aches, here and here.”

  Her reaction was a mixture of concern and amazement. “I’ve nev
er heard of such a thing.”

  “Are you telling me that your people don’t get headaches? All humans get headaches.”

  She shook her head guilelessly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He steadied himself. “Maybe after I drink some of this stuff you will.” He brought the rim of the bowl to his lips, then lowered it slightly. “How much should I take?”

  “Half. There isn’t a lot.”

  There really wasn’t. When he’d taken his share he handed the bowl back to her, wiping his lips with the back of one hand. He watched as she slowly, almost ceremoniously, drained the remainder of the bowl’s contents.

  He felt no different. Surely a few swallows of berries, juice, and water couldn’t upset his equilibrium that much. It wasn’t as if he’d chugged a liter or two of hard liquor.

  She patted the wooden surface next to her. “Here, Flinx. Come and lie down beside me.”

  Wary of the children’s proximity, he moved to comply. The hard, unyielding wood beneath his spine was reassuring. Overhead, the brilliant mottled green of the hylaea soared another hundred fifty meters to meet the sky.

  Without question the most extraordinary world he’d ever visited, he decided. Too extraordinary to have been overlooked and forgotten. Feeling his eyelids growing heavy, he allowed them to close. Something like a living rainbow flashed by on wings of translucent carmine.

  A sleep potion, he thought. Nothing more. Or perhaps it affected Teal’s people differently. If so, she was about to be disappointed. He determined that a midday siesta was a fine idea.

  He felt Teal take his left hand in her right and squeeze gently. That was the extent of physical contact, allowing him to relax even more.

  A bath, he avowed silently. He was floating in a warm bath of carbonated milk, not a muscle tensed in his body. Yellow-green warmth enveloped him completely, permeating his entire being. It blossomed to encompass Teal, the branch they were lying on, and the gigantic tree beneath whose crown they were reposing.

  Billions, trillions, of individual growths paraded in grand and leisurely procession at the edge of his awareness. Their fronds reached out to caress him; sometimes tickling, sometimes soothing, at other times healing wounds he hadn’t known he’d had.

  How, he found himself wondering in the midst of his bath, did the bases of the great boles keep from rotting? The soil at the surface must be saturated all the time. How deep went the dirt that formed the top of what Teal referred to as the Lower Hell? A few meters, a dozen, a hundred? If the latter, what colossal equivalent of earthworms probed and prodded and turned the unimaginably productive loam? He thought he could see them, blind and pale and wide as whales, working their way over and around roots the size of starships.

  He saw the Home-tree with its symbiotic vines-of-own, now modified to accommodate the presence of people. The people of the six tribes were there also, living and loving and, most important of all, surviving in a place where no human was designed to survive. All living things great and small he encountered while floating in the warm bath of himself.

  Teal lay next to him, drifting but not distant. The children were nearby, alert and watchful, understanding if not quite comprehending. They weren’t old enough, not yet. A little farther off he sensed the comforting, slightly fuzzy mental meanderings of the furcots, attentive and independent, and something more.

  Pervading the entire surging, bloated, deeply interlocked ocean of life was a maternal greenness that made him feel as if he were an infant nestled once again safely against its mother’s bosom. That was remarkable because try as he sometimes did, he’d never been able to remember her.

  Here was a different kind of mother; the boundless, globe-girdling forest, matriarch and life-giver to all who dwelled within, be they the monarch of all trees or the smallest peeper clinging to the tip of a bare branch. The furcots were a part of that, perhaps a more important and less enigmatic part than Teal’s people or anyone else suspected.

  Her ancestors had bent and twisted themselves to fit into that forest. Those who hadn’t, who had fought against accommodation and assimilation and sought to remain apart, had perished.

  A stabbing pain made him wince in his sleep. It had no physical source and it went straight through him. Not a headache, though. It was a touch of the darkness he had experienced not so very long ago, a splinter of that vast, amorphous evil that existed far beyond the range of any human perception.

  Except his own. Even that was not entirely valid, he knew, since he was not wholly human, having suffered callous prenatal modifications over which he’d had no control.

  As before, it frightened him, just as it frightened the all-pervading greenness that cradled him. Impossible as it seemed, there was a chance it could be dealt with, manipulated, turned aside. Even as the bright spark bloomed in his mind it began to dissipate before he could fully grasp it. Away it fled, into the deepest recesses of his mind. But this time it was not lost.

  He was that spark, he realized. Only he could do battle with that incomprehensibly immense evil. Not alone, but with assistance. With the aid of a triangle of great forces.

  One flashed instantly to mind, startling him because it had been so long since he’d thought of it. A single machine, an ancient device left behind by a civilization clever enough to build but not to survive. It continued to function, dormant and waiting, on a far-distant world. Just as he knew it, it knew him, for he had once unconsciously utilized it to save friends. It remained resting, and Flinx knew he had not been forgotten.

  Second was the greenness, expansive and eager to help, but innocent of much of its power. Anarchic by definition, it required another source to supply focus. Not what he was, Flinx sensed, but what he could become.

  Completing the triangle was a mind he felt he knew but did not recognize. Greatly expanding and hugely developed, it dwelled in ignorance of its importance to the triad. If the effort was to have any chance of success, all three components of the triangle had to be brought together, for a two-sided triangle cannot stand.

  The triad was a weapon, the most impressive never envisioned. Once brought together in a harmonious whole, all that would be lacking was a single vital component.

  It was not what those well-meaning but misguided thinkers who had tinkered with him while he was in the womb had intended when they had vectored his genes, but it was what had resulted.

  I am a trigger, he realized with stunning clarity.

  A unique destiny, he realized—if indeed he was thinking. It was probably fortunate he was not, at least not in the commonly accepted sense. The evil he would one day be forced to confront could not be comprehended by a mere human mind, however singularly adjusted.

  Terrifying and soul-destroying enough to know that it was preparing to move.

  He thought that was the end and saw that it was not. Because there was another device; not a component of the triangle, but one that had been left behind on another world eons ago by a race of daring and resourceful builders. Having sourced the location and strength of the evil and realized they were incapable of resisting it, they had constructed a much larger device to transport themselves to a place where not even it could follow. And not only themselves, but their immediate neighborhood.

  Flinx was shown the device, and its still functioning consequentialities, and was left breathless and awed.

  Even as this was taking place, a part of him wondered how the greenness had come to know about it, and how it was presently being imprinted on his own mind and soul. His wonderings were swept aside by an overwhelming, imploring urgency.

  The triad must perforce be joined, before it was too late.

  This was something he would have to do on his own, he saw. For while the greenness was expansive of thought, it was constrained by what it was.

  A dream, he mused. A dream of a bath of carbonated warm milk. Nothing more than a product of his imagination, fired by the disiwin Teal had fed him. He smiled in his bath. Disiwin—dizzy wine. S
uitable.

  With the realization that one is dreaming comes inevitably a reassessment of one’s condition, followed by an urgent desire to Wake Up.

  He blinked and sat erect. A smiling, contented Teal lay next to him.

  “Did you have good thoughts, Flinx? Do you feel all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.” Fully awake, he took in the enveloping hylaea, the glistening arboreals, the brilliant-hued flowers, the vines and lianas and epiphytes and symbiotes. Each flaunting independence, it seemed impossible they could all be tightly interconnected. Yet there was no denying that they were, the whole unimaginably greater than the sum of its parts. It was an analogy that could be extended further, beyond the boundaries of any single world, to encompass entire systems, star clusters, galaxies.

  And all of it under threat.

  He shook his head. That had been some dream. Why should he think of the Krang, in a place like this? Years ago, it had been. The Tar-Aiym weapon was real enough, as was the evil the Ulru-Ujurrians had thrust him toward. What was their place in all this? Were they the third component of the triad? Somehow they didn’t seem to fit, though he could hardly rule them out.

  What triad? It was only a dream. He rubbed his palm along the branch, scraping skin on the rough bark. The pain was reassuring, a sharp not-a-dream.

  Feeling a tickle on his cheek, he glanced down to see Pip anxiously caressing him with the end of her tongue. Smiling, he ran two fingers down her head and neck, along her spine.

  Her triangular head.

  Now he was drawing absurdities out of a dream, he admonished himself angrily. He was twenty years old. Absurd to expect him to deal with anything more dangerous than a taloned flier or sharp-toothed climbing carnivore. How could he bring together forces as vast as individual world-minds and the ultimate product of Tar-Aiym civilization? He had trouble enough trying to decide if he wanted to sleep with the woman next to him!

  What was the critical third component of the triad?

  Damnably persistent dream!