Flinx Transcendent (43 page)

“Minutes?” The philosoph looked to his human companion. “Do I misinterpret the chrono?”

“You do not,” Tse-Mallory assured him. He met Flinx's quizzical gaze. “You were lying in state for just under four hours, my young friend.”

Pondering the disparity between perception and reality, Flinx summed up with an observation that was wholly typical. “That would explain why I'm starving as well as thirsty.”

As soon as they were clear of the dais, his companions helped him take a seat on one of the impervious benches that had once served as resting places for Tar-Aiym. Despite his exhaustion he refused to lie down, preferring to remain upright as he drank, ate, and slowly regained his strength. A little water and some appropriate nutrients were enough to revive Pip.

“You said that contact occurred.” Sylzenzuzex was so close that in his weakened state her distinctive perfume threatened to overpower him. “What kind of contact? With the Krang?”

“No. First, there was interchange between myself and the Krang.” He looked up over the water bottle he was holding at the two attentive scientists. “I explained our need. Though doubtful as to its potential, the machine complied with my request. It extended itself. Contact was made with the wandering relic.”

Truzenzuzex and Tse-Mallory exchanged elated murmurs. “You learned its location?” Flinx nodded. The philosoph turned to his human colleague. “We must make preparations to leave here and set out on the relevant vector as quickly as possible.”

Clarity immediately moved protectively closer to Flinx. “What's the matter with you people? Look at him! Don't you realize how frail he is? He needs time to rest and regain his full strength.” Her tone darkened. “He's not an instrument, damn it!”

Tse-Mallory did not blink, did not look away as he replied to her. “I'm afraid, my dear, that he is.”

“Well, I don't care what you think. I've been exposed to this impending horror in more depth than any of you, and I know it won't be here tomorrow, or the next day. There's nothing that can't wait a day or two.”

“The weapons platform whose assistance we seek may not wait,” Truzenzuzex told her. “In a day or two it may travel millions of units of distance. In a week, tens of millions.” He eyed Flinx as the latter sipped from a flexible, self-chilling liquids container. “One does not dawdle with the fate of civilization at stake.”

“It doesn't matter.” Draining the last of the bottle's contents, Flinx leaned against Clarity. Sliding downward, he ended up with his head in her lap. Pip took the opportunity to slither onto her master's body, forming a series of solid serpentine coils on his stomach.

In the absence of eyelids Truzenzuzex's gaze could not narrow, but his tone conveyed the same effect. “What do you mean, ‘it doesn't matter’? Are you once again sliding into depression even as you slide backward on your fundament?”

“No, not at all.” Flinx gazed contently up at Clarity, who bestowed on him the smile that never failed to improve all manner of injuries,
physical and otherwise. “I mean that it doesn't matter because we don't need to hurry to make contact with the weapons platform.”

Tse-Mallory eyed the ever-unpredictable youth uncertainly. “Why not? What Tru just stated holds true.”

“I realize that.” With a pained sigh Flinx closed his eyes, this time, he hoped, to see, feel, and experience as little as possible. “I mean that we don't have to hurry to make contact with the weapons platform because it's coming here….”

Flinx knew what was coming because the Krang had communicated that much to him and because he had sensed it for himself, but a time frame had not been part of the exchange. The weapons platform was coming to Booster. If the Krang was to be believed, that much was a certainty.
When
it would arrive the great machine could not say. When Tse-Mallory gently suggested to Flinx that he go back under the dome and try to find out, Clarity Held went up one side of the brawny sociologist and down the other. Flinx himself had no way of knowing what another attempt so soon at communication with the ancient alien device might do to him. It might result in him receiving a dose of cerebral enhancement, as had the original connection years earlier. Or his simple organically wired human brain might finally snap under the strain.

So they waited. While they did so, Clarity and Flinx and Sylzenzuzex took to exploring the sprawling dead city while the two scientists amused themselves trying to extract harmonic fractals from the recording the skimmer had made of the Tar-Aiym music.

A week passed before the
Teacher
relayed an alarm from shuttlecraft to the skimmer and onward to their individual communits.

“Something has emerged from space-plus to assume a position beyond this system's outermost planet.”

“I know.” Flinx hastened to reassure his vessel's wary AI. “The visitor is expected.”

“Recognizing it and recalling its capabilities, I am most relieved to hear that, Flinx. Its parameters appear to be unchanged. It is as we encountered it previously, some six years ago. The exact time of concurrence …”

“Not necessary,” Flinx told his ship. “I remember.”

“You remember everything.” The ship was not trying to flatter, merely stating fact.

“The luxury of forgetfulness is one that always seems to escape me.” Twisting his head, he glanced down at Pip. The minidrag was sleeping soundly on his shoulder. Seeing his pet so often at peace, he regretted being unable to change places with her.

Rising from where he was sitting deep at the edge of the amphitheater, he tilted back his head to take what might well be his last look at the interior of the Krang. The strangely persistent fog that hung near the distant apex, the ranks of cylinders and pipes that lined the inwardly inclined walls, the operator's dais: sights and memories that had been with him since early adolescence had now been refreshed in adulthood. He would carry them with him always. As the
Teacher's
AI had just reminded him, he never forgot.

Because they were leaving this place behind physically did not mean it would be out of his mind any more than it had been absent from his recurring, often cryptic dreams.

Having had the newly arrived Tar-Aiym artifact described to them by Flinx, Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex were eager to see it for themselves. In her capacity as a security officer for the United Church, Sylzenzuzex had a professional interest in any kind of unauthorized and unrecorded weapons system. And while Clarity was primarily interested in Flinx's health and well-being, she had to admit that she was not entirely devoid of curiosity regarding the visitor herself.

“It's really that big?” she asked as they stepped out of the shuttlecraft and back into the holding bay in the underside of the
Teacher
.

“No.” He didn't smile and was not joking. “It's bigger. You'll see.”

Booster's tired and now distant sol-type star boasted the classic array of rocky inner worlds and outer gas giants. Heading outsystem in normal space, they passed several of these uninhabited, unnamed orbs.
It was not necessary to skim so close in order to make rendezvous with the artifact, but the two scientists would not hear of leaving without using the opportunity to make at least a few nominal measurements in passing.

When the
Teacher
began its approach, everyone gathered in the ship's control room to have a look out the main foreport. Despite what Flinx had told them of the relic, Sylzenzuzex still confessed to bemusement as she gazed upon the spherical object that occupied the space forward and slightly to port.

“Where is it,
tlacchk?”

“You're looking at it.” Standing behind her, Flinx gazed out at the alien sphere from which he had barely escaped with his life some half-dozen years before.

“You mean,” she clicked, “it's in orbit above the surface somewhere?”

“No,” he told her. “I mean that's it. The vessel. The Tar-Aiym weapons platform.”

It did not matter that he had described the artifact to them. Saying that a vessel was planet-sized was one thing. Trying to comprehend the actuality of something so immense was, as he knew well, entirely different.

It looked just as he remembered it from the encounter years ago, when he had been forced to explore its outermost level while being pursued by human assassins, rapacious AAnn, and—one other. He forced himself to push the disturbing memories into the past, to file them in the overflowing folder of similar unsettling incidents from his history. It was all over and done with, and for the sake of everyone he needed to concentrate on the present.

As a planet the cloud-swathed globe was not especially impressive. As a ship, an artificial construct, it exceeded anything humanxkind had ever contemplated except in moments of drugged engineering fantasy and conceptual delirium. Stippled with flecks of yellow and dark red, the thick gaseous cloud cover shone a dreary bronze in the faint light of the distant sun. Leaning over the forward console, Clarity pointed as an irritated Scrap struggled to keep from slipping off her left shoulder.

“Look there, in the northern hemisphere. Is that a storm?”

Flinx looked to where she was pointing. He knew what the vortex
she had singled out portended. The storm was as artificial as the colossal mechanism that had created it.

“I'm pretty sure it's a sign that our presence has been acknowledged,” he told her. What he did not add was that the Tar-Aiym artifact, which was twice the size of the Earth, might be putting forth a welcome because it remembered him from last time.

The
Teacher
might subscribe to the same theory, but all it said was, “I am receiving a directional signal.”

“Follow it,” Flinx replied crisply. Clarity looked over at him.

“I know you've had contact with this—vessel—before, Flinx, but shouldn't we be taking some kind of precautions before going down? Shield activation, maybe, or initiation of—”

“Of what?” He interrupted her gently, nodding out the port at the immense mass of cloud, metal, and who knew what else. “Weapons? I've told you what the Krang can do. This world-sized ship is probably capable of generating a big enough discontinuity to swallow a whole system. At least, that's what we're hoping. Otherwise there's no point to this encounter. What would you suggest as a defense if it decided we were deserving of a hostile response?”

She considered his words, then nodded slowly. “Faint praise, maybe. I see your point.”

As a tiny portion of the swirling, dense, synthetic atmosphere was sucked away by gigantic intakes, a portion of the surface of the weapons platform became visible to those huddled in the control room of the
Teacher
. There were no gasps of incredulity, no mutterings of astonishment at the sight thus revealed. The relic was simply too big, too overwhelming, to inspire any more than an abiding, awed silence. External edifices of metal and ceramic, crystal and metallic glass, and other exotic materials came into view. Some of the structures were the size of cities, others as big as bits of continents. Illuminatories in all colors and hues flashed to life where the veiling methane haze was drawn away.

“It's not just big,” Sylzenzuzex murmured. “It's
beautiful
. To think that somebody built it, that it's a construct and not a natural object, would try belief if I wasn't looking at it myself.”

On Flinx's shoulder, Pip was stirring. “Don't forget that it's a
weapon,” he reminded her. “Quite possibly the biggest weapon ever built.”

Standing at his right side, Clarity eyed the artifact as the
Teacher
began to descend. “I once saw a picture of an ancient Terran weapon, a metal projectile gun that dated from an era well before Amalgamation. It used combustible powder to propel a piece of lead toward a target. What struck me was not the primitive technology; it was the ornamentation. Gold filigree, gemstones, and ivory inlay.” She studied the view outside. “Why do so many sentient species find weapons worthy of decoration?”

A curious Flinx pondered her question as he turned to lead the way to the shuttle bay. “What's ivory?”

Bolts of lightning kilometers high slashed through the thick atmosphere in the vicinity of the downward-spiraling vortex that was clearing a path through the clouds down to the surface. As the
Teacher's
shuttlecraft descended, jostled and rocked by the surrounding synthetic cyclone, an opening appeared below it as a portion of the surface irised open to welcome the diminutive arrival. The aperture was more than wide enough to admit the visitor. It was more than ample enough to admit any city on Earth, had one possessed the means and the inclination to embark on such a visit.

“If the solitary Krang on Booster is powered by the energy of the planetary core itself,” Tse-Mallory was speculating aloud, “then what could possibly drive an artificial world of these dimensions? Not to mention the multiplicity of comparable destructive devices it supports.”

“Plainly an energy source beyond our limited ability to engineer,
kissaltt.”
Truzenzuzex was gazing raptly out the foreport. “Some sort of matter-antimatter drive, which has long been theorized and sought after. Or perhaps the vessel is able to channel the energy of a small white hole for which its builders were somehow able to devise containment.” The valentine-shaped head inclined toward his old friend. “We hardly have the theoretical mathematical underpinning from which to begin to envisage such technology.”