Flinx in Flux (3 page)

Turning decisively, he resumed his march. He had covered another twenty meters when he heard the humming again. As he spun in exasperation, the yearling quickly landed on a convenient branch, folding its pleated wings tightly against its, narrow body and curling its tail around the wood.

“What’s the matter with you?” He glanced down at Pip, who was staring silently at her recalcitrant offspring. “You’ve got a kid who doesn’t want to leave the nest. What are you going to do about it?”

Flinx was constantly amazed at the complexity of thoughts that could be conveyed by emotions. Pip understood not a word he had said, but the feeling was clear enough. She uncoiled herself, spread her wings, and shot toward the adolescent.

The yearling nearly fell out of the tree trying to avoid her attack. Flinx watched as the two minidrags went around trunks and through branches, panicking the concealed native life and scattering it in all directions.

Finally Pip returned, breathing hard, and settled back on his shoulder. This time he simply stood and waited. A minute passed, two, before he heard the expected hum. The yearling hovered in the crook of two great branches, obviously exhausted and equally obviously unwilling to be driven away. Feeling Pip stir on his shoulder, he put a hand on her neck to calm her down.

“Easy.” She felt without understanding. Her breathing slowed. “It’s all right.”

Her offspring picked up the same feeling and started toward him. He watched while it coiled itself around his left wrist.

“No, you can’t stay. Understand?” He raised his hand and snapped it outward, tossing the flying snake into the air. As soon as he let it fall, the minidrag was back clinging to his arm, a brightly colored bracelet with flashing red eyes.

He flung it away several times. Each time it resumed its grip on his wrist or lower arm. “What the devil am I supposed to do with you?” If a flying snake could cringe, this yearling was doing exactly that. It buried its head beneath one wing.

Cute, damn it, he thought. All of Pip’s offspring had been cute, dainty little leathery sculptures. Each of them carried enough neurotoxin in its poison sacs to kill a dozen grown men in as many minutes. Not so cute.

The minidrag’s emanations were weak and indistinct, like its mother’s. Affection, confusion, loneliness, fear, puzzlement, all mixed up together. Since the flying snake’s intelligence level was far below that of a human being, he could never be sure exactly what it was feeling.

This one was very small, even for a year-old minidrag. Pip was clearly hesitating, trying to divide her attention between her master and her offspring. He wondered how she would react if he became violent with the adolescent. If he directed sufficient anger at it, he had no doubt she would somehow manage to drive it away, even if forced to injure it in the process.

Small as it was, it had probably been the last hatchling, so it was correspondingly reluctant to be weaned. But he had no intention of staying on Alaspin one day longer than absolutely necessary, certainly not to accommodate the feelings of a reluctant adolescent minidrag. There was nothing on this world he wanted to do, nothing he needed to see. All he wanted was to be on his way, wherever that was. He did not need an extra lifeform cluttering up his ship. He sighed aloud. He had been doing that a lot lately, he realized.

“Isn’t much to you, is there?” A tiny, brilliantly colored triangular-shaped head peered out at him from beneath a concealing wing. “It doesn’t work this way. One minidrag, one human. You can’t have a three-way empathic relationship.” The minidrag did not answer.

Perhaps he was not sufficiently mature. Certainly he was the runt of the litter. Flinx raised his left arm so they were eye to eye.

“I suppose if you’re going to hang around, you’re going to have to have a name. What’s smaller than a Pip? A nubbin? No, you’re a throwaway, so I guess we’ll have to call you Scrap.”

Not flattering, he supposed, but appropriate. The small loop of muscle tightened around his arm, though whether in reaction to being named or merely to secure its perch, Flinx had no way of knowing. He would not take up much space, Flinx told himself. Pip could keep her eye on him on board the
Teacher,
which was stuffed with scraps of another kind. It would feel quite at home.

The big minidrag had relaxed against his neck now that her master’s animosity toward her offspring had vanished. She paid no attention to the yearling. Obviously she felt she had done her best to discharge her maternal duties. If her master no longer rejected the adolescent, she did not feel compelled to, either.

He thought no more about his new companion as he retraced his steps. Alaspin was not a benign world. It was home to an impressive assortment of carnivores and poisonous lifeforms that did not discriminate in their eating habits between local and offworld prey. As Flinx had learned on his previous visit, this was no place to take chances, no country in which to relax and sightsee. So he did not think about either Pip or Scrap as he watched where he was putting his feet, trying to step in the muddy depressions he had made when cutting his trail to the lake. Leaves and vines teased his face, and he winced instinctively at each contact.

Although there were jungles more hostile that those of Alaspin, this one was threatening enough for him. He had never had a desire to join the Scouts, those half-mad men and women and thranx who were first to set down on a new world. Not even Pip could protect him against parasites and tiny bloodsuckers. He held tight to his antique machete. At least, he thought, the ancients had had enough sense to make them of titanium. Anything else would be too heavy to wield efficiently.

Another thirty meters brought him into the small clearing where his crawler waited. This was as far as he had been able to bash with it. The machine traveled smoothly over water and through most jungle, but dense thick trees defeated it. Thus he had been forced to leave it here and travel the rest of the way to the lake on foot.

It looked like an oversize chrome canoe on wheels, roofed in plexalloy and articulated in the middle. The highly polished sides reflected much of the burning sunlight, not critical here beneath the trees but vitally important for cooling purposes when out on lake or river. Armored grillwork shielded the underside, protecting sensitive machinery. It was not much wider than the driver’s seat, which enabled it to pass between those trees it was incapable of knocking over. What it really was, was a giant, mobile heat exchanger, able to convey its passengers in relative comfort across Alaspin’s humid, hot countryside.

Flinx had rented it in Mimmisompo, paying with a credcard whose rating, while not astronomical, had lifted the eyebrows of the merchant doing the leasing.

The crawler traveled on double treads, one fore and the other aft. It could carry three passengers seated single file behind the driver. There were no other passengers except Pip, and he really did not need such a large vehicle, but it was the smallest he could find on short notice. So he had shrugged and overpaid. It made even better time on the river than it did on land. An aircar would have been faster, but there were none for rent in Mimmisompo. The prospectors and scientists kept them busy ferrying friends and supplies. Flinx had come with money but no pull. In a small frontier city the latter was often the more important medium of exchange. So he had been forced to settle for the crawler.

No matter. He was only a few days out of town and on his way back. Having established a trail on his way in, it would take him a quarter of the time to return to the river, carefully dodging the leafy emergents the crawler had been unable to push over. Once back on the river, he would be traveling downstream instead of fighting the current. He was looking forward to spending one more night in a hotel instead of the crawler’s cramped quarters.

Mimmisompo sat on the edge of an immense sandy beach, high and dry in the clear season and sopping in the wet. The shuttleport lay farther inland. It occupied one of the few high bits of land in the region, immune to seasonal flooding. Not the sort of place one would choose for a relaxing vacation, but he was anxious to return to it now.

At the top of the ladder built into the side of the crawler he paused to run a magnetic field key over the lock, and heard it click open in response. A blast of cool air struck him as he climbed inside, settled into his seat, and nudged a switch to close the door behind him. Probably no need to lock the vehicle out here in the middle of nowhere, but he had learned early on that the middle of nowhere was a country often frequented by unsavory types, and while the odds of anyone stumbling across the crawler were small, he felt more comfortable when they were entirely in his favor. The sight of an expensive vehicle sitting open and unguarded might be too tempting for even an honest prospector to ignore.

The mental flavor of the five departed young minidrags no longer lingered in his mind, but the crawler’s cabin was still pungent with their odor. It was musky but not unpleasant. The recycler would soon have it cleared out. Curved metal ribs supported the otherwise transparent plexalloy walls and domed roof. After a quick survey of his immediate surroundings he began switching on instruments. Yellow standby lights gave way to green readies.

Like any modern piece of machinery, the crawler took only a moment to run a self-check and declare itself healthy. That done, Flinx turned up the recycler a notch and dug out a towel to wipe his face. You had to be careful when changing environments. While the air-conditioning unit he wore had kept his body comfortable, his face had been exposed to the air. Perspiration poured from his forehead and cheeks, ran down his neck under his shirt collar. The combination of sweat and air-conditioning could bring on a cold faster than anything else known to man.

It was a matter of choice. He could have worn a helmet and insulated himself completely from the local climate, but somehow that seemed the wrong thing to do at the minidrags’ leave-taking. So he had left the helmet in the crawler and had tolerated the heat and humidity for the short hike through the jungle.

Putting the soaked towel aside, he downed a long swig of chilled fruit juice from the driver’s feedline before starting the engine. The electric drive hummed smoothly beneath him. Pip slid off his shoulder to coil around an equipment rack next to the seat behind him. If she felt sad or melancholy at the loss of her five offspring, she gave no sign of it.

Scrap was less willing to find a seat. Despite Flinx’s persistent efforts to dislodge it, the young minidrag insisted on clinging to his wrist. Finally Flinx gave up and put the crawler in motion. The adolescent was not heavy, and before long he would get bored and move off by himself.

The path he had bulldozed in from the river was easy to follow. Fast-sprouting jungle plants were already fighting, for their share of the newly esposed route to the sky. He turned a tight curve, bending the crawler in the middle, to work his way around a tree three meters thick. The vehicle articulated vertically when he followed that maneuver by driving down and through a dry streambed.

Now that he had accomplished what he had come to Alaspin for, he was forced to contemplate what he was going to do next. Life was no longer simple. Once it had been, back on Moth, when all he had had to worry about was keeping dry and getting enough to eat and maybe swiping a few luxuries now and then to help out Mother Mastiff when business was slow. The past four years had complicated his life incredibly. He had seen and experienced more than most men saw and experienced in a lifetime, let alone adolescent boys.

Not that he was a boy anymore, he reminded himself. He had grown physically as well as mentally. Nearly nine centimeters, in fact. Decisions were no longer easy to make, choices no longer straightforward. Being nineteen carried with it a lot of responsibility, for him more than for most. Not to mention the emotional baggage that automatically went with it without right of refusal.

The only problem with seeing a lot, he mused as he guided the crawler through the Ingre jungle, was that he was not happy with most of what he had seen. In general, both man and thranx had been a disappointment to him. Too many individuals were ready and willing to sell out their principles and friends for the right price. Even basically good people like the merchant Maxim Malaika were essentially looking out for their own best interests. Mother Mastiff was no different, but at least she did not have a hypocritical bone in her body. She delighted in being a greedy, money-grabbing lowlife. He reveled in her honesty. She was the best human being she could be, given the sad circumstances of her life.

And what was to become of him? A universe of possibilities lay open to him. Too many, perhaps. He had not the slightest idea which to reach for.

Nor were weighty questions of philosophy and morality all that obsessed him right now. There was also, for example, the increasingly fascinating and complex matter of the opposite sex. As he had spent most of the past four years just surviving, women remained largely an intriguing mystery to him.

There had been some. The beautiful and compassionate Lauren Walder, many years ago back on his home world of Moth. Atha Moon, Maxim Malaika’s personal pilot. A few others, younger and less memorable, who had flashed like brief blue flames through his life, leaving memories that burned as well as confused him. He found himself wondering if Lauren would remember him, if she was still working happily at her obscure fishing lodge or if she had moved away, perhaps offplanet. If she would still think of him as a “city boy.”

He straightened in his seat. He had been little more than a child then, and shy at that. Maybe he was still something of a boy, but he was no longer nearly as shy. Nor did he look half so boyish. That troubled him. Any change troubled him because he could never be certain if it was the result of natural growth processes or his unnatural origin.

Take the matter of his height. He had learned that it was normal for most young men to attain their full growth by age seventeen or eighteen. Yet he had reached his full adolescent height by the time he was fifteen and then stopped cold. Now he had suddenly and inexplicably grown another nine centimeters in twelve months and showed no sign of slowing. He had gone abruptly from slightly below average male height to slightly above it. Height changed one’s perspective on life as well as the way others perceived one.