Impossible Places (24 page)

“I didn’t steal him,” he replied calmly as he pulled his shirt down over his head. “He showed up here on his own.” He nodded in the direction of the open window. “Let himself in pretty quietly. His fingers must be as nimble as his feet, even if he is short a few. Knows his way around basic security systems, too.” He eyed the man evenly. “I wonder how and where he learned how to bypass those?”

Smiling grimly, the owner shook his head. “Nice try, kid, but it won’t wash. You’re a thief, and we’re turning you over to the police.”

So that was how it worked, Flinx realized. Send the Aslet into somebody’s home, preferably someone who had been in the audience for one of the creature’s earlier performances. That would establish a connection and provide witnesses. Then claim it had been stolen, and threaten to have the “thief” arrested. Unless, no doubt, some sort of accommodation could be reached that would avoid the need to involve the authorities. Even as they stood there confronting one another, the owner and his goons probably had a bought cop or two awaiting their possible arrival down at the nearest police office. Simple and clean. No doubt most confused, challenged victims paid up rather than risk the possibility of spending time in a correction institute, or the indignity of being exposed in a court trial.

“If you had a legitimate claim about a theft, you would have brought the police along with you, instead of these two.” He indicated the pair who flanked the owner.

The shorter man grinned. “You’re a clever little snot, aren’t you? So you’ve figured it out.”

Flinx smiled faintly. “I live offplanet now, but I grew up here.”

The owner gestured with his weapon. “Doesn’t matter. My friends down at the patrol office will listen to me, not you. Of course, such unpleasantness can easily be avoided.”

“I wonder how?” Flinx was much more curious about something else. It would have to wait. “Why pick on me?” He indicated his surroundings. “Neither my mother, whose home this is, nor myself are particularly well off. Why make targets out of us?”

“I don’t pick ’em,” the owner grunted. Turning, he pointed toward the creature huddling in the corner. “He does.” The man squinted at his surroundings. “I agree with you, though. This isn’t one of his better choices.”

Flinx frowned. “The Aslet chooses the mark? How— at random?”

The owner shrugged. “Beats me. When I’m in the mood and have the time to do a little business, I just let him loose. After he’s had time to make his way across part of the city, my associates and I track him down.” Meaningfully, he ran a finger around his neck. “Transmitter is easy to follow.” Reaching into a pocket, he pulled out a tiny device and aimed it in the Anslet’s general direction. “He doesn’t like me much, but that collar makes him do as he’s told.”

“I don’t like you much, either,” Flinx declared quietly.

The owner was not offended. “You’ll do as you’re told, too. I’m not a greedy person. A thousand credits will get all of us out of here, including the monkey, and you’ll never see any of us ever again.” His smile returned. “Unless you decide to catch another performance, that is.”

“No,” Flinx told him.

“No?” The man’s smile vanished. “No what?”

“No money,” Flinx replied. “No credits. Not a thousand. Not a fraction thereof. Get out of my mother’s house.”

The two men flanking the owner stirred slightly. The owner sighed. “Look, kid, if there’s no available credit, you can pay us in goods. I saw plenty of valuable stuff when we came in.” He shrugged indifferently. “Or we can shoot you, take what we want, and if anyone investigates, claim that you attacked us when I tried to reclaim my property.”

In response to Flinx’s rising level of upset and concern, Pip began to dart back and forth against the roof like a giant moth, the equivalent of pacing nervously in midair. Curious, the player-owner looked up in her direction.

“What is that thing, anyway?”

“That,” Flinx murmured, enlightening both the speaker and his two accomplices, “is an Alaspinian minidrag. You don’t want to make her any madder than she already is now.”

“Why not?” The owner smiled. “Is it going to bite me?” The muzzle of his pistol came up.

“No,” Flinx told him. “She doesn’t have to.”

The owner nodded. Turning to the man on his left, he uttered a single brusque command. “Kill it.”

Sensing the man’s intent by reading the homicidal emotion that rose suddenly and sharply within him, Pip darted forward and spat. Striking the would-be killer in his right eye, the gob of corrosive poison ate immediately into the soft ocular jelly and entered his bloodstream, the incredibly powerful neurotoxin proceeding to instantly paralyze every muscle it encountered. When it reached his heart and stopped that, the man collapsed.

His single shot went wild, blowing a hole in the roof and showering the room with shards of photosensitive gengineered silicate. Rising above the noise, the now panicked shouts of the owner and his surviving associate echoed through the room.

From a drawer in the bed’s headboard, Flinx pulled the small pistol he always carried with him in places like Drallar. Unfortunately for the intruders, he did not have time to reset it to stun. The second henchman got off one blast, destroying a fair chunk of the wall behind Flinx’s bed, before Flinx put him down for good. Given time, he would simply have used his nascent ability to persuade all three of them to leave. Regrettably, the attack on Pip had reduced the time available for subtle emotional projection to none.

Bug-eyed, the owner fled. He made it as far as the front door he and his friends had blown in. Before he could dash through the opening, something brightly colored, diamond-patterned, and superfast materialized before his eyes.

Then there was only the brief but intense burning, burning in his eyes before he died.

Emerging from the bedroom, his small pistol still gripped tightly in one hand, Flinx walked over to the body of the owner. Smoke rose from his face, the hallmark of an angry Pip’s attentions. In his other hand, Flinx held the small device the man had withdrawn from his pocket and pointed in the direction of the alien Aslet. He’d dropped it in his haste to flee.

Letting it fall to the floor, he aimed his pistol at it and fired once. Emerging from the bedroom behind him, the Aslet started, then relaxed. Once again, its mouth moved and no sound came out. The alien’s attitude, if not its expression, was readily comprehensible even across inter-species boundaries. As Flinx looked on, Pip landed once again on the furry shoulder.

Flinx gazed long and curiously into the elongated alien eyes. The emotions of the three intruding humans had been clear to him as day. But this peculiar creature continued to remain as emotionally blank as a section of insulated wall.

“I think,” he murmured aloud, even though there was no one around to hear him, “we need to find out what you are, besides an agile dancer.” He started back toward his room. Behind him, Pip continued to rest contentedly on the Aslet’s shoulder, allowing it to stroke the lethal coils without interference or objection. Mother Mastiff would be furious at the damage to her home.

Aslet, it turned out when he presented himself and his furry new companion to the relevant local government bureau, was a newly classified world on the fringes of the Commonwealth. In addition to being the abode of the usual extensive panoply of new and intriguing alien life-forms, it was also home to a primitive species of low intelligence and simple culture. Most definitely not related to any known species of monkey, the natives of Aslet lived in caves and utilized the simplest and most basic of primitive tools.

They also, he learned, communicated in high-pitched squeaks and squirps that were above the range of human hearing. The Aslet Flinx had liberated had been trying to talk to him all along. Flinx, along with every other human and thranx, simply did not possess auricular equipment with sufficient range to detect the alien’s verbalizations.

Flinx tried to imagine what it would be like to be constantly screaming your pain, daily pleading for help from a world full of diverse sentient beings, all of whom would appear to be suffering from universal and total deafness.

The Aslet, it was reported, were exceedingly emotional creatures, given to a wide range of displays that evidently supplemented their limited ultrasonic vocabulary. Like their vocalizing, these emotional projections were also beyond anyone’s ability to perceive, including Flinx.

But not, apparently, Pip.

The flying snake had been drawn to them immediately, during the forced performance he and Flinx had witnessed on the streets of Drallar. No wonder that when temporarily set free by its owner, the intelligent Aslet had homed in on Pip, locating the empathic minidrag snake in the midst of the city’s innumerable twists and turnings. The revelation added directly to Flinx’s store of knowledge about himself. Evidently, there were sentient emotional projections that were beyond his ability to perceive. But those were not the final thoughts the experience left him pondering as he bid farewell to the now collarless Aslet, soon to be repatriated by the government to its homeworld.

If no human could sense the very real emotions of something like the Aslet, he found himself wondering again and again, nor even hear, much less understand, their language, might there not be, out there, another species more powerful than any yet encountered that would view humankind in the same unintentionally uninformed light?

Was there even now, on some far-distant world, a collared human being made to dance and perform tricks for a species that could neither understand, nor hear, nor sympathize with the unfortunate captive?

Not for the first time, when he gazed up at the stars, he found himself wondering if there were worlds among that scattered multitude he might not be better off avoiding . . .

A sneak peek at the next
Alan Dean Foster
Commonwealth Novel

DROWNING WORLD

Available wherever books are sold

Jemunu-jah didn’t want to have to take the time to rescue the human. If it was foolish enough to go off into the Viisiiviisii all by itself, then it deserved whatever happened to it. Kenkeru-jah had argued that it was their
mula
to try and save the visitor, even if it was not spawned of the Sakuntala. As ranking chief of the local clan Nuy, his opinion was listened to and respected.

Jemunu-jah suspected that the much-admired High Chief Naneci-tok would also have argued vociferously against the decision to send him, but she was still in transit from an important meeting of fellow Hatas and was not present to countermand the directive. As for the war chief Aniolo-jat, he did not seem to care one way or the other where Jemunu-jah was sent. Not that the cunning Hata-yuiqueru felt anything for the missing human, either. All the war chief wanted, as usual, was to conserve clan energies for killing Deyzara.

Perhaps it was Jemunu-jah’s cheerless expression that caused the two Deyzara passing him on the walkway to edge as far away as they could without tumbling right over the flexible railing. The speaking/breathing trunk that protruded from the top of their ovoidal hairless skulls recoiled back against the edges of their flat-brimmed rain hats, and the secondary eating trunks that hung from the underside, or chin region, of their heads twitched nervously. Their large, protuberant, close-set eyes nervously tracked him from behind their visors. Another time, Jemunu-jah might have found their excessive caution amusing. Not today.

He supposed Kenkeru-jah was right. Chiefs usually were. But for the life of him, he could not understand how the death of a missing human, and a self-demonstrably reckless one at that, could affect the clan’s
mula
. But the chief had made a decision. As a result, he now found himself directed to present himself to the female in charge of the human community on Fluva. Since Lauren Matthias’s status was equivalent to that of a senior Hata, or High Chief of the Sakuntala, Jemunu-jah would be obliged to put his own feelings aside while showing her proper respect. He smoothed his long stride. Actually, he ought to be proud. He had been selected as a representative of his people, the best that Taulau Town had to offer. But if given a choice, he would gladly have declined the honor.

At slightly under two meters tall and a wiry eighty kilos, he was of average height and weight for a mature male Sakuntala. Though smaller than those of a Deyzara, his eyes provided vision that was substantially more acute. From the sides of his head, the base of his flexible, pointed ears extended out sideways for several centimeters before curving sharply upward to end in tufted points. The outer timpanic membrane that kept rain from entering his right ear was in the process of renewing itself, and was slowly being replaced by a new one growing in behind it. As a result, the hearing on his right side was at present slightly diminished. It would stay that way for another day or two, he knew, until the old membrane had completely disintegrated and the new one had asserted itself.

His short, soft fur was light gray with splotches of black and umber. The pattern identified an individual Sakuntala as sharply and distinctly as any of the artificial identity devices the humans carried around with them. In that respect, he felt sorry for the humans. Despite some slight differences in skin color, it was often very difficult to tell one from another.

His cheek sacs bulged; one with the coiled, whiplike tongue that was almost as long as his body, the other with a gobbet of khopo sap he alternately chewed and sucked. Today’s helping was flavored with gesagine and apple, the latter a flavor introduced by the humans that had found much favor among the Sakuntala. He wore old-style strappings around his waist to shield his privates while the bands of dark blue synthetics that crisscrossed his chest were of off-world manufacture. Attached to both sets of straps were a variety of items both traditional and modern, the latter purchased from the town shops with credit he had earned from providing services to various human and Deyzara enterprises.

Now it seemed that despite his reluctance he was about to provide one more such service. Despite the prospect of acquiring
mula
as well as credit, he would just as soon have seen the task given to another. But Kenkeru-jah had been adamant. He was as stuck with the assignment as a kroun that had been crammed into the crook of a drowning sabelbap tree.

Raindrops slid off his transparent eyelids as he glanced upward. Not much precipitation today: barely a digit’s worth. Of course, it had rained very heavily yesterday. Clouds, like individuals, needed time to replenish themselves. The fact that it rained every day on most of Fluva seemed to be a source of some amusement to newly arrived humans. Once they had been stuck on Fluva for about a season, however, Jemunu-jah had observed that the weather rapidly ceased to be a source of humor for the bald visitors.

Well, not entirely bald, he corrected himself. A fair number of humans owned at least a little fur. In that respect they were better than the Deyzara, who were truly and completely hairless.

With an easy jump, he crossed from one suspended walkway to another, saving time as he made his way through town. A few humans could duplicate such acrobatic feats but preferred not to. One spill into the water below, arms and legs flailing wildly, was usually enough to prevent them from trying to imitate the inherent agility of the tall, long-armed Sakuntala. No Deyzara would think of attempting the comparatively undemanding jump. Human children could not be prevented from trying it, though. This was allowed, since the waters beneath the town limits were netted to keep out p’forana, m’ainiki, and other predators who would delight in making a meal of any child unlucky enough to tumble into unprotected waters. That went for Sakuntala children as well as human and Deyzara, he knew. But when
they
jumped, Sakuntala youngsters only rarely missed.

The rain intensified, falling steadily if not forcefully. Making his way through the continuous shower, he passed more Deyzara. Like the humans, the two-trunks wore an assortment of specialized outer attire intended to keep the rain from making contact with their skin. To Jemunu-jah this seemed the height of folly. For a Sakuntala, it was as natural to be wet as dry. As visitors who came and went from Fluva, the humans could be excused for their reticence to move about naked beneath the rain. But the Deyzara, who had been living and working on the world of The Big Wet for hundreds of years, should have adapted better by now. For all the many generations that had passed, they still displayed a marked aversion to the unrelenting precipitation, though they had otherwise adapted well to the climate. The one month out of the year that it did not rain was their period of celebration and joy. In contrast, it was during such times that the Sakuntala tended to stay inside their houses, showering daily and striving to keep moist.

It all seemed very backward to Jemunu-jah, even though he had viewed numerous vits that showed many worlds where it rained only intermittently, and some where water fell from the sky not at all. If forced to live on such a world, he knew he would shrivel up and die like a gulou nut in the cooking fire, or in one of those marvelous portable cooking devices that could be bought from the humans or the Deyzara. Rain was life. There would be no flooded forest, no varzea (as the humans called it), without the rain that fell continuously for ninety percent of the year.

With the water from the many merged rivers of the varzea swirling ten meters below the suspended walkway and the surface of the land itself drowned twenty to thirty meters below that, he lifted himself up onto another crossway. This strilk-braced major avenue was strong enough to support multiple paths, and was hectic with pedestrians. Humans mixed freely with Sakuntala and Deyzara, everyone intent on the business of the day. Nearby, a spinner team was busy repairing a damaged walkway, extruding the strilk that kept the town’s buildings and paths suspended safely above the water. The silvery artificial fiber was attached to huge gray composite pylons that had been driven deep into the bedrock that lay far below the turbid waters and saturated soil. On the outskirts of the sprawling community, a carnival of lesser structures whose owners were unable to afford pylons hung from the largest, strongest trees.

The single-story building in front of him was the administrative headquarters of the Commonwealth presence on Fluva. Jemunu-jah had been there a few times before, on official business for the greater A’Jah clan. That particular business being of lesser importance, it had not given him the opportunity to meet Lauren Matthias. He had heard that she was very good at her work, not unlike Naneci-tok, and could speak fluent S’aku. She would not have to strain her larynx in his presence. His command of terranglo, he had been told, was excellent.

A single human stood guard outside the building. He looked bored, tired, and despite his protective military attire, very, very wet. Visible beneath a flipped-up visor, his face was frozen in that faraway expression many humans acquired after they had spent a year or more on Fluva. He was nearly as tall as a Sakuntala. Drawing himself up to his full height, Jemunu-jah announced himself.

The guard seemed to respond to his presence only with great difficulty. Water ran down his face. It was not rainwater, because both of them were standing under the wide lip of the roof overhang that ran completely around the front and sides of the administration building. Jemunu-jah recognized the facial moisture as a phenomenon humans called “perspiration.” It was a condition unknown to the Sakuntala, although the Deyzara suffered from it as well.

“Limalu di,”
the guard mumbled apathetically. Jemunu-jah was not so far removed from the culture of his kind, nor so educated, that he did not gaze covetously at the long gun that dangled loosely from the human’s left hand. A single swift snatch and he could have it, he knew. Then, a quick leap over the side of the deck into the water below, and he would be gone before the sluggish human barely knew it was missing.

With a sigh, he shifted his gaze away from the highly desirable weapon, away from the ancient calling of his ancestors. He was here on clan business. He was civilized now. “I am called Jemunu-jah. I have an appointment with Administrator Matthias,” he responded in terranglo.

Reaching up to wipe away sweat and grime, the guard blinked uncertainly. “Appointment?”

“Appointment,” the lanky, gray-furred visitor repeated.

Eyeing the Sakuntala with slightly more interest, the guard tilted his head to his left and spoke toward the pickup suspended there. “There’s a Saki here to see Matthias. Says he has an appointment.” Jemunu-jah waited patiently while the human listened to the voice that whispered from the tiny pickup clipped to his left ear.

A moment later the guard bobbed his head, a gesture Jemunu-jah knew signified acceptance among humans. Parting his lips and showing sharp teeth, he stepped past and through the momentarily deactivated electronic barrier that was designed to keep out intruders both large and small. Another door, Jemunu-jah reflected as he entered the building. Humans and Deyzara alike were very fond of doors. The Sakuntala had no use for them.