Flinx in Flux (10 page)

Chapter Seven

Although she relaxed completely for the first time since he had met her once the shuttle cleared ionosphere, Flinx did not. He had been around too much and seen too much to know that mere vacuum offered no assurances of safety. He watched and listened intently, but nothing came near them. Traffic around Alaspin was nonexistent. The com unit was silent. They were alone.

Clarity Held had been impressed by his description of, the
Teacher.
She was overwhelmed when the long, sleek mass of the starship hove into view beyond the shuttle’s viewports. When she finally set foot inside after transferring through the personnel lock, the only reaction remaining to her was awe.

They were in the area that on a commercial vessel would have been designated a commons but that Flinx domestically called his den. In the center stood a raised pond filled with tropical fish from several worlds. It was surrounded by bushes and well-tended plants. The ceiling was dressed in a type of vine that grew extremely well in artificial light and did not shed.

Flinx was very fond of green. The world on which he had been raised was thick with evergreen forest. Pip’s home world was all jungle and savanna. He had seen enough of both desert and ice to care for neither.

Artificial gravity made it all possible, even the bubbling fountain in the center of the pool that spouted both normal and light water. Heavy water behaved normally on board, but light water could be stained different colors. It was a blend of glycerine and gases encased in incredibly thin polymer membranes. It burst into the air in the form of multihued bubbles that were sucked up to vanish into a cone concealed by the ceiling vines. The cone condensed and recycled the bubbles through the water below.

The furniture was real, rough-hewn wood layered with thickly stuffed cushions that responded musically to whoever sat on them, adjusting their melodies to the movements and emotions of the sitters. Purple and deep blue forms chased each other seemingly at random around the circular walls, like so many bugs at a racetrack. The randomness of the chase was part of the art. The den was a remarkable mix of angular geometric shapes and glowing lights, of green growing things and sparkling water, of nature and science.

Clarity wandered around the room inspecting flora and art. Each element of the decor stood out bright as a child’s eyes, as carefully crafted and arranged as if by a professional. Flinx had simply thrown it all together.

When she was finished, she found her breath again. “You actually do own all this?”

“People tend to give me things.” Flinx smiled in embarrassment. “I don’t know why. A few I’ve picked up on my travels.” He gestured. “The fountain and the plants are there because I enjoy looking at both. There are robots, but I prefer working with growing things myself. I seem to have a way with plants.”

He did not tell her he thought his success with plants had something to do with his empathic telepathy, nor did he mention the theories that stated that plants were capable of emotion and feeling. She already thought of him as weird, even if he had saved her life.

Maybe I should’ve been a farmer, he thought. Not that there was much room for farmers on Moth. If he had asked for help, the kind of plants Mother Mastiff would probably have encouraged him to grow would have been illegal.

“We ought to leave,” she said abruptly, as if remembering what they were doing on his ship.

“We’re already on our way.”

“Where?” She looked around in surprise, but there were no ports in the common room.

“Outsystem, away from Alaspin orbit.” He checked his wrist chronometer. “It’s an easy command to give. The ship takes verbal direction. Much easier than trying to enter it via keyboard. If you hear a third voice speaking, cool, feminine-neutral, that’s the
Teacher.
It’s not capable of reasoning, so don’t try arguing with it. I prefer it that way. I wanted something that would respond immediately to my wishes and not debate possibilities with me.”

“Unlike me?” She walked over to the rock rimwall that enclosed the pool and sat down on the edge, trailing one hand in the water. A flash of crimson steel drifted over on turquoise wings to inspect her fingers. She reached lazily in its direction, and it darted away with a flick of trifinned tail.

“People give you things. Like this ship, you said.”

“I have a number of interesting friends. They built it for me, actually.” He shook his head with the remembrance of it. “I still don’t know how they did it. Somehow it didn’t strike me as the kind of thing they’d be good at, but then, they didn’t seem good at anything. Surprising friends.”

“Oh, how lovely!” She rose and stepped away from the pool. “What’s this?”

She ran her hand over what looked like a dozen Möbius strips orbiting a common center. Where they met and intersected they appeared to vanish into nothingness. When she touched one, a deep bass rumbling filled the common room. Touching another generated a crude whistling. There was nothing holding the arrangement in place a meter and a half above the deck.

“Some kind of gravity projection?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I acquired it without instructions or explanation, I’m afraid.” He nodded forward. “Put your hand in the middle, where the strips converge.”

“Why? Will it disappear?”

He smiled. “No.”

“All right.”

Eyeing him challenging, she slowly moved her hand into the intersecting space. Her fingers were slightly parted. Instantly, her eyes shut tight and a look of pure bliss passed over her face. Her mouth parted slightly to reveal teeth tightly clenched. Slowly her head arched backward, then rolled forward, taking her whole upper body with it like a ribbon caught in a sudden breeze. He had to run to catch her.

He half carried, half dragged her to the nearest lounge and gently placed her on the responsive upholstery. The back of her left hand rested against her forehead, and beads of sweat were collecting on her skin like Burmese pearls. She wore the expression for two minutes. Then she blinked, wiped away the sweat, and turned to face him.

“That wasn’t fair,” she said huskily. “I didn’t expect—anything like that.”

“Neither did I the first time I put my hand inside. It’s a little overwhelming.”

“A
little?”
She was gazing longingly at the floating confluence of Möbius strips. “I’ve never felt anything like that in my life, and my hand was only in there for a moment. But it wasn’t just my hand, was it?” She looked back up at him. “It was my whole body.”

“It was your entire being, your self plugged into a high-voltage socket without the danger. At least, I think there’s no danger. Just that wondrous surge of pleasure.”

“That,” she said firmly as she sat up straight on the lounge, “ought to be illegal.”

He turned away from her. “It is.”

“I never heard of such a device. Where’s it built?”

“On an illegal world by illegal people. There are no restrictions on it because, insofar as I know, it’s the only one of its kind. Nobody else knows it exists. The people who made this ship for me—” He looked around the commons room. “—made that as well. Another gift. They wanted to make sure I felt happy all the time, so they provided me with the means to do so.”

“You could die from that much happiness.”

“I know. Its designers have greater tolerances for everything, including happiness. You have to watch the dose. I only use it when I’m seriously depressed.”

“And do you find yourself seriously depressed often, Flinx?”

“I’m afraid I do. I was always kind of moody, and it’s worse now than when I was a child.”

“I see. It’s none of my business and you don’t have to tell me, but is there anyone else on this ship?”

“Only you and I, unless you count Pip and Scrap.”

She shrugged. “I couldn’t expect you to tell me about your illegal suppliers.”

“I don’t mind. They’re really fine folks. Special. I sometimes find myself thinking that they’re the universe’s chosen ones. They’re innocents. Utter innocents, though I’ve taken some basic steps to remedy that. The Church knows about them, and the government, and they’re afraid of that kind of innocence. My friends are also incomprehensible.”

“Would I know of them?”

“Possibly, but I doubt it.” Moving to a tall blue-green fern, he pushed aside one of the thick fronds to reveal a tiny keyboard. He let his fingers play over the keys. It would have been easier to have entered the command verbally, but he had a childish desire to impress her further.

To anyone unschooled in galographics, the star clusters that materialized in midair between Flinx and the fountain would have appeared haphazardly aligned. Only on closer inspection could a viewer make out the tiny bright green letters that floated above each sun. A very small proportion of the imaged stars were labeled with yellow pinpoint letters instead of green.

“The Commonwealth,” he explained unnecessarily.

The AAnn Empire was not shown, though she did not doubt he could call it up with the flick of a finger. Nor was the Sagittarius Arm visible. The holo displayed only Commonwealth vectors and schematics. While she looked on, the entire complex configuration oriented itself to the position of the
Teacher.

“It’s a long ways out.” He was peering deeply into the slowly rotating holo. “Maybe within Commonwealth boundaries, maybe not. Up near the Rosette nebula, out toward the galactic edge. Not a big world. Not impressive.” He brushed the controls inside the fern, and she saw a green blip brighten to emerald.

His hand moved anew, and the holo shifted drastically. When it halted, a completely different world blazed brighter than any other. “Alaspin.” His hand moved yet a third time, highlighting a world on the very fringes of the Commonwealth.

“Existing world, different perspective. The first holo was legal. A mask. The positions are falsified. These are correct, and proscribed.”

She stared. The new world he had brought to brilliance moved perceptibly, enough to throw off anyone trying to locate it. This time it was not green but an intense red.

“I don’t have much use for a floating map,” she murmured, “but I’ve seen worlds marked green and blue and pink and yellow, but never that color before.”

“It means the world in question is under full Church Edict. No one’s supposed to know it’s there. There are automated weapons stations in multiple orbit stationed six planetary diameters out to prevent unauthorized approaches, much less landings.” He waved his hand, and the entire holo vanished, an evaporative cosmos. “If people knew it was there and Under Edict, someone would try to go there simply because it’s forbidden. The result would be dead adventurers and a discomfited bureaucracy.”

She looked at him steadily. “But you’ve been there. You said the people who lived there built this ship.”

“Yes. My friends, the Ujurrians.” His eyes flicked beyond her as if expecting to see something else. Perhaps something three meters tall and furry. But he saw only plants and fountain.

“Why is it Under Edict?”

“If I told you, I’d be in violation of the Edict itself.”

“I won’t tell. I owe you my life. I can keep your secrets.”

He considered, then looked away and sighed. “I’m getting to the point where I don’t care who knows what anymore. The Ujurrians are a physically large ursinoid race, paragons of ingenuousness by our standards. At least they were when I met them. They are also potentially the most advanced people ever encountered.”

Clarity frowned. “That’s no reason to put them Under Edict.”

“They are natural telepaths,” Flinx told her. “Mind readers. Not empathic telepaths like the flying snakes.” And myself, he added, but not aloud.

She whistled meaningfully. “You mean true mind-to-mind communicators? Like the people in the tridee plays and in books?”

He nodded. “The one thing we’ve always feared more than anything else in an alien race. People who could read our minds when we couldn’t read theirs. And not just our minds. There was an AAnn installation on UlruUjurr. The Ujurrians could read them as well. They chased the AAnn away. I think they can even read Pip’s mind, as much of a mind as she has.” The flying snake looked up briefly from his shoulder before lying back down. “And that isn’t all.”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“They learn on an exponential curve. When I met them, it was almost level. They were living in caves. Now it’s heading upward, and fast. By the time I left they’d learned enough from the files at the AAnn station to start an impressive little city. Also to build the
Teacher,
though I still haven’t figured out how they put the necessary infrastructure together so fast. They also have other abilities.” He smiled slightly. “They like to make jokes, play games, and, dig tunnels.”

“Tunnels? That’s funny.”

“Why is that funny?”

“You’ll find out soon. But they’re not hostile?”

“On the contrary. They’re fluffy and rather amusing-looking and roly-poly—if you can conceive of something three meters tall massing out around eleven or twelve hundred kilos as roly-poly. We got along real well.”

“I would think so.” She was trailing her fingers in the water again. “If they built a ship as a gift for you. How many ships do they have?”

“As far as I know, the
Teacher
is the only ship they’ve ever built.” That reminded him of a certain Ujurrian who was so peculiar that even his fellow Ujurrians found him strange. “There was a male named Maybeso who didn’t need one, though I suppose I shouldn’t say that because I don’t know what his range was.”

Her eyes widened. “Teleportation, too?”

“I don’t know. They call it something else. I think they can do other things as well, but I didn’t know enough to ask the right questions. It’s been a long time, and I need to go back.” He blinked. “You can understand why the Church would put a world like that Under Edict. The Ujurrians are a race of telepathic, possibly teleportational innocents with limitless mental potential. You know how the Outreach Bureau thinks. Just because they’re friendly now doesn’t mean they’ll be friendly tomorrow. ‘Pananoia is survival,’ and that sort of nonsense.”