Flinx Transcendent (42 page)

On his right shoulder Pip immediately went taut, alerted to something commanding and unseen. The pebbly surface beneath Flinx's feet
began to vibrate. From somewhere far below emerged the first inklings of a deep, pulsating mechanical moan that grew progressively more audible. The throbbing in his head grew abruptly more intense.

He considered stepping back, then steeled himself. There
was
no going back, really. Not now, not here. Ignoring the pain and a growing dizziness, he stumbled forward until his legs bumped up against the platform. Leaning forward, his hands resting on the edge of a superficially simplistic structure that was designed to accommodate a much larger body, he shook his head as he fought to retain balance and control.

Seeing him falter, Clarity started forward, only to find herself restrained by both Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex. Her worried gaze remained focused on Flinx. He was starting to sway, and not because of the increasingly frequent tremors under their feet.

“Let me go! He's in trouble, he's … !”

“… Doing what needs to be done, child.” The philosoph's gleaming compound eyes regarded her sympathetically. “Collect yourself, have courage, and watch.”

Unable to break free of the combined human-thranx grasp, there was little else she could do.

“It hurts….”

Trembling slightly, Flinx reached one hand up to his forehead. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This was not how he remembered it. This …

A voice, or words, or a sudden thought. Somewhere between migraine and migrant. Inside his head. Inside his own thinking, but not his. Yet for all that, familiar.

WELCOME—BACK.

Just like that, his headache was—gone. Evaporated like spit on the sun. His skull still throbbed, but there was no pain. Refusing to dwell on the apparent contradiction, he climbed up onto the platform and lay down, positioning himself in the center. Slithering upward from his shoulder, Pip bundled herself into a tight coil near the top of his head. In a normal prone resting position she would have done so on his chest or his stomach. Reaching up, he stroked her muscular shape affectionately. She was and always had been his friend. His companion. His protector.
Also an empathetic lens, involuntarily and reflexively focusing his peculiar Talent.

Taking a deep breath and using his heels, he pushed both of them upward. Up, until his head emerged beneath the second smaller, inner dome. He shut his eyes. Or perhaps they were shut for him.

Looking on from outside, Sylzenzuzex vocalized a sequence of clicks, whistles, and exclamations the likes of which she had never intoned before. Nearby, Clarity's eyes got very, very wide. As for Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex, they simply stood flanking her while providing the comfort of their physical presence. They had seen it all before.

The inner dome above Flinx's head began to pulsate with metallic bursts of the most intense deep purple. The outer dome exploded in a blistering burst of color in every conceivable hue: scorching crimson, crushing azure, fluorescent pinks, and electric greens. At unpredictable intervals balls of colored lightning swelled to form bulges on the upper curves and crest of the dome. When they reached a certain blazing, crackling volume, they detached themselves and rose like electrified balloons toward the distant apex of the Krang's interior.

All that only signaled the beginning.

The great pipes and cylinders that lined the kilometers-high walls had sprung to life with sound as well as color. While bands of intense color ran up their towering flanks like flights of electricity from God's own van DeGraff generator, something deeper and harsher, wilder and more profound than the rumble underfoot began to fill the vast interior space. It caused Clarity to cover her ears, and then it made her drop her hands and listen. The vibrations penetrated her flesh and being and soaked directly into her bones.

“That's music!” she shouted, trying to make herself heard above the martial alien thunder.

Next to her Tse-Mallory nodded, leaning close to yell into her ear. “Tar-Aiym music. Alien harmony and dissonance. Instrumentation of a scale and scope unequaled anywhere in the Commonwealth.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Contemplate it: mass as Mass.”

She raised an arm toward the dome that was now fully enveloped in opaque, coruscating color. “What about Flinx? Does he hear it?”

On her other side the venerable philosoph turned from shout-whistling at Sylzenzuzex. “Only Flinx knows what he hears! And what he hears,
Kssa!!lk
, is barred to the rest of us. What we learned on our previous visit, so many years ago, is that this relic of an ancient people is both a musical instrument
and
a weapon.”

Indicating that she understood, she returned her attention to the color-masked platform. Beneath the two domes occasional glimpses of her beloved flickered within the maelstrom of color and light. She assumed he was still alive and all right. She assumed so because she had to.

Flinx kept waiting for the pain in his head to return. It did not. Instead, he experienced a lucidity of perception he had come into contact with only rarely before. Experimentally, tentatively, he tried reaching out, as he had done when lying on a similar platform beneath a similar structure inside the great space-traversing Tar-Aiym weapons platform itself. There had been no pain then, either. He had communicated successfully, albeit briefly and with notable directness and simplicity. This exchange would be more difficult, more fraught with uncertainty. His intention was not merely to make and maintain contact, but to ignite nothing less than a conversation.

WELCOME BACK.

He was positive that was what he had heard. Or felt, or sensed. The Krang was still alive.
He
was still alive.

Now he had to make his attempt while keeping it that way.

Above his head a coiled Pip twitched and spasmed, the unthinking Alaspinian minidrag serving as a lens to focus and intensify her master's feelings. As he had on the weapons platform, Flinx tried reaching out. He was but dimly aware of the vast play of light and sound that was going on around him. Would the ancient artifact respond to his mental push with more than just color and harmony and the tintinnabulation of alien percussion?

“You remember me,”
he struggled to project. To
feel
. It was the mental equivalent of expectantly spreading his hands to his sides.

It was sufficient.

Naisma
was established.

CLASS-A MIND … I REMEMBER YOU. YOU COME SEEKING
HELP TO DEAL WITH THE THREAT THAT APPROACHES FROM BEYOND THE RIM.

Having no time to waste on it, Flinx withheld his astonishment.
“You know of it?”

IT DOMINATES. IT LOOMS. IT THREATENS ALL OF EVERYTHING. HOW COULD IT EXIST UNOBSERVED?

Enthralled, he thought back to one singular experience of the past several years—and then to another, and another.

“You've been with me, of me. You pushed me to perceive the Evil.”

ISELF, AND OTHERS.

“What others?”
Flinx contorted slightly on the platform.

OTHERS WHO KNOW YOU. OTHERS YOU CAN KNOW BUT I CANNOT. OTHERS WHO ARE AS DIFFERENT FROM ONE ANOTHER AS YOU ARE FROM I. BUT OTHERS WHO ALSO KNOW AND FEAR THAT WHICH THREATENS ALL. SOMEHOW YOU ARE THE KEY TO THE ONLY CHANCE OF STOPPING IT. YOU ARE THE ONLY LINK THAT EXISTS BETWEEN US.

The key. Flinx had heard that before. In dreams both asleep and awake. What was he now? Asleep? Awake? Or drifting in a state of which no physiologist had dreamed and for which there was therefore no definition.

“Why me?”
he asked, not for the first time.

YOU ARE AN ANOMALY. YOU ARE A SINGULARITY. NOTHING THAT CAN BE PREDICTED CAN HALT THE AD VANCE OF THE THREAT. WHAT YOU ARE IS—NOT PREDICTABLE.

“I understand. I and my friends have given much time and thought to possible ways of stopping or diverting the menace that comes for all. There is another like you, another built-mind of the Tar-Aiym. I have seen it, been on it, communicated with it. Its structure contains multiples of yourself and the great force you can project. I and my friends believe it may be strong enough to stop the Evil.”

I CANNOT MOVE. I AM FIXED TO THIS PLACE, AND TO THE CORE OF THIS WORLD THAT POWERS ME. I CANNOT FIGHT THE INVADER. NOR CAN THE OTHERS. NOT ALONE. PERHAPS TOGETHER WE MIGHT DO SOMETHING—YET WE
DO NOT KNOW HOW. AS THE KEY, WE HAVE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT KNOW THE WAY.

The way? What was the Krang talking about? The only “way” Flinx knew was the possible one he had debated with Truzenzuzex and Tse-Mallory.

“
I do have one idea,”
he explained solemnly.
“Reach out, if you can. Seek the individuality that is akin to but greater than yours. Define and locate and enlighten it. Give me the coordinates. I and my friends will go to it. I will lie therein as I lie here, and give that of myself that no one and nothing else seems able to give—be it some kind of ‘key’ or whatever. If you and the triad of my dreamings can be there with me, at that moment, then we will see if the combining of our thoughts and minds somehow works to stop what is coming to destroy all.”

As sound and color raged throughout its structure, the Krang within was silent. Then: IT SEEMS TO ME NOT THE WAY. IT SEEMS TO ME NOT ENOUGH STRENGTH. IT SEEMS TO ME NOT ENOUGH OF ENOUGH. BUT … YOU ARE THE CLASS-A MIND. I WILL COMPLY. MEANWHILE … BE STILL, AND AT PEACE, AND … WAIT.

Outside the dome Clarity was doing her best to restrain herself. So intense was the all-enveloping color and so luminous the lightning that she could no longer see Flinx where he lay on the interior platform. Primordial alien harmony continued to hammer at her ears and assault her sanity. In the shadow of Tse-Mallory's and Truzenzuzex's continuing composure, she forced herself to stay calm.

But as the light storm shattered her senses she could not keep her fear from continuing to deepen.

“Are you sure he's all right?” she yelled at Tse-Mallory.

Eyes of deepest, clearest blue peered into her own. “We can't be sure of anything here, Clarity!” A long arm waved to take in their heaven-storming surroundings. “We can't know anything for certain until this stops!”

It was no comfort, no comfort at all. But she was too focused, too engaged, and frankly too enraptured by what was swirling around her to cry.

Flinx could feel himself being drawn outward. He did not marvel or wonder at the sensation, having experienced it numerous times before.
Born on the strength of the Krang's projection, he soared through space. Stars passed by in the wink of a mental eye, sprawling nebulae appeared and vanished in an instant of thought. Seeking, searching, uniting—until at last a connection was made. Feeble at first, it strengthened quickly when a response was received. There came a kind of joy he could not share as artifact made contact with artifact. He was present at the exchange, he perceived, but even though his facilitator tried, little of what transpired could be imparted to him.

Two machine minds were exchanging communication. Two artificial intelligences that had previously been unaware of one another's existence. After five hundred thousand years, like was communicating with like. It was curt, it was efficient, it was enabled. Much simplified, it was two weapons talking to one another. Two weapons, at least one of which had the capacity to destroy worlds. The entire passage of information, during which the equivalent of many complete libraries was exchanged, took less than one minute.

Key
, he thought.
Trigger
. Such power as the wandering Tar-Aiym platform represented. Would it be enough? The Krang didn't seem to think so. But it had to be tried. There was nothing else.

It was over as soon as it had begun. He felt himself receding, falling back, his perception shrinking. Down past suns and worlds unknown, through vortices of energy and disks of dark matter; back, back toward a single dead world circling a long forgotten sun.

He opened his eyes. Actual purple momentarily replaced visual purple, and then both were gone in a double blink. An echo of symphonies unimagined echoed briefly in his ears, already fading to pianissimo. The voice that was replacing it and growing rapidly stronger was familiar.

“Flinx, Flinx!” Clarity was atop the dais and at his side as soon as he straightened and slipped out from beneath the inner dome. He would have reached for her except that he felt a weight falling from his head. Extending his arms, he caught Pip just as she tumbled. The minidrag was completely spent, completely limp, and if possible even more exhausted than her master.

With him holding the flying snake it was difficult for Clarity to kiss him, but she did her best. Tse-Mallory was next at his side, helping support him. Behind them Flinx saw the two thranx looking on and gesturing
concern. Above and in the distance, colors were fading as they retreated like pale syrup down the multitude of cylinders that lined the towering interior walls of the Krang.

Tse-Mallory didn't waste time. “Anything? How did it go? Familiar, new, shocking, reassuring—say something. Talk to me, Flinx.”

Heedless of both the sociologist's physical size and intellectual stature, Clarity interposed herself between him and his subject. “Leave him alone—for a while, anyway. Can't you see that he's completely drained?” Without waiting for Tse-Mallory's response, she turned back to Flinx. “Are you all right? Can I get you something from the skimmer?”

He took a step and nearly fell. Between Clarity and Tse-Mallory, he did not. “Water. Water would be—good.”

Whirling, she raced down the dais to where they had stacked the supplies they had brought from the skimmer. Following more slowly, Flinx and Tse-Mallory were joined by Sylzenzuzex and her Eighth.

“What was it like, Flinx?” With both left hands Syl gestured back at the now dormant platform. “What happened there, under all that noise and light and color?”

“Contact occurred,” he told her weakly, “and it was tiring.”

“I can see that. You were a brave boy, once,” Truzenzuzex told him. “Now that bravery is backed by maturity.”

A weary Flinx smiled down at his old mentor. “Don't count on it. How many minutes was I under?”