Mid-Flinx (17 page)

Sensing his discomfort, she reassured him. “Don’t worry, Flinx. Saalahan knows how disiwin affects persons. The furcots will watch over us.” When still he hesitated, her expression fell. “You won’t try it with me?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that I haven’t had a headache since I’ve been here. Not even a twinge.” He studied the colorful concoction. “I’d hate to induce one voluntarily.”

“Headache?” She frowned. “What’s that?”

He touched various places on his head. “Pain, throbbing aches, here and here.”

Her reaction was a mixture of concern and amazement. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Are you telling me that your people don’t get headaches? All humans get headaches.”

She shook her head guilelessly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He steadied himself. “Maybe after I drink some of this stuff you will.” He brought the rim of the bowl to his lips, then lowered it slightly. “How much should I take?”

“Half. There isn’t a lot.”

There really wasn’t. When he’d taken his share he handed the bowl back to her, wiping his lips with the back of one hand. He watched as she slowly, almost ceremoniously, drained the remainder of the bowl’s contents.

He felt no different. Surely a few swallows of berries, juice, and water couldn’t upset his equilibrium
that
much. It wasn’t as if he’d chugged a liter or two of hard liquor.

She patted the wooden surface next to her. “Here, Flinx. Come and lie down beside me.”

Wary of the children’s proximity, he moved to comply. The hard, unyielding wood beneath his spine was reassuring. Overhead, the brilliant mottled green of the hylaea soared another hundred fifty meters to meet the sky.

Without question the most extraordinary world he’d ever visited, he decided. Too extraordinary to have been overlooked and forgotten. Feeling his eyelids growing heavy, he allowed them to close. Something like a living rainbow flashed by on wings of translucent carmine.

A sleep potion, he thought. Nothing more. Or perhaps it affected Teal’s people differently. If so, she was about to be disappointed. He determined that a midday siesta was a fine idea.

He felt Teal take his left hand in her right and squeeze gently. That was the extent of physical contact, allowing him to relax even more.

A bath, he avowed silently. He was floating in a warm bath of carbonated milk, not a muscle tensed in his body. Yellow-green warmth enveloped him completely, permeating his entire being. It blossomed to encompass Teal, the branch they were lying on, and the gigantic tree beneath whose crown they were reposing.

Billions, trillions, of individual growths paraded in grand and leisurely procession at the edge of his awareness. Their fronds reached out to caress him; sometimes tickling, sometimes soothing, at other times healing wounds he hadn’t known he’d had.

How, he found himself wondering in the midst of his bath, did the bases of the great boles keep from rotting? The soil at the surface must be saturated all the time. How deep went the dirt that formed the top of what Teal referred to as the Lower Hell? A few meters, a dozen, a hundred? If the latter, what colossal equivalent of earthworms probed and prodded and turned the unimaginably productive loam? He thought he could see them, blind and pale and wide as whales, working their way over and around roots the size of starships.

He saw the Home-tree with its symbiotic vines-of-own, now modified to accommodate the presence of people. The people of the six tribes were there also, living and loving and, most important of all, surviving in a place where no human was designed to survive. All living things great and small he encountered while floating in the warm bath of himself.

Teal lay next to him, drifting but not distant. The children were nearby, alert and watchful, understanding if not quite comprehending. They weren’t old enough, not yet. A little farther off he sensed the comforting, slightly fuzzy mental meanderings of the furcots, attentive and independent, and something more.

Pervading the entire surging, bloated, deeply interlocked ocean of life was a maternal greenness that made him feel as if he were an infant nestled once again safely against its mother’s bosom. That was remarkable because try as he sometimes did, he’d never been able to remember her.

Here was a different kind of mother; the boundless, globe-girdling forest, matriarch and life-giver to all who dwelled within, be they the monarch of all trees or the smallest peeper clinging to the tip of a bare branch. The furcots were a part of that, perhaps a more important and less enigmatic part than Teal’s people or anyone else suspected.

Her ancestors had bent and twisted themselves to fit into that forest. Those who hadn’t, who had fought against accommodation and assimilation and sought to remain apart, had perished.

A stabbing pain made him wince in his sleep. It had no physical source and it went straight through him. Not a headache, though. It was a touch of the darkness he had experienced not so very long ago, a splinter of that vast, amorphous evil that existed far beyond the range of any human perception.

Except his own. Even that was not entirely valid, he knew, since he was not wholly human, having suffered callous prenatal modifications over which he’d had no control.

As before, it frightened him, just as it frightened the all-pervading greenness that cradled him. Impossible as it seemed, there was a chance it could be dealt with, manipulated, turned aside. Even as the bright spark bloomed in his mind it began to dissipate before he could fully grasp it. Away it fled, into the deepest recesses of his mind. But this time it was not lost.

He was that spark, he realized. Only he could do battle with that incomprehensibly immense evil. Not alone, but with assistance. With the aid of a triangle of great forces.

One flashed instantly to mind, startling him because it had been so long since he’d thought of it. A single machine, an ancient device left behind by a civilization clever enough to build but not to survive. It continued to function, dormant and waiting, on a far-distant world. Just as he knew it, it knew him, for he had once unconsciously utilized it to save friends. It remained resting, and Flinx knew he had not been forgotten.

Second was the greenness, expansive and eager to help, but innocent of much of its power. Anarchic by definition, it required another source to supply focus. Not what he was, Flinx sensed, but what he could become.

Completing the triangle was a mind he felt he knew but did not recognize. Greatly expanding and hugely developed, it dwelled in ignorance of its importance to the triad. If the effort was to have any chance of success, all three components of the triangle had to be brought together, for a two-sided triangle cannot stand.

The triad was a weapon, the most impressive never envisioned. Once brought together in a harmonious whole, all that would be lacking was a single vital component.

It was not what those well-meaning but misguided thinkers who had tinkered with him while he was in the womb had intended when they had vectored his genes, but it was what had resulted.

I am a trigger
, he realized with stunning clarity.

A unique destiny, he realized—if indeed he was thinking. It was probably fortunate he was not, at least not in the commonly accepted sense. The evil he would one day be forced to confront could not be comprehended by a mere human mind, however singularly adjusted.

Terrifying and soul-destroying enough to know that it was preparing to move.

He thought that was the end and saw that it was not. Because there was another device; not a component of the triangle, but one that had been left behind on another world eons ago by a race of daring and resourceful builders. Having sourced the location and strength of the evil and realized they were incapable of resisting it, they had constructed a much larger device to transport themselves to a place where not even it could follow. And not only themselves, but their immediate neighborhood.

Flinx was shown the device, and its still functioning consequentialities, and was left breathless and awed.

Even as this was taking place, a part of him wondered how the greenness had come to know about it, and how it was presently being imprinted on his own mind and soul. His wonderings were swept aside by an overwhelming, imploring urgency.

The triad must perforce be joined, before it was too late.

This was something he would have to do on his own, he saw. For while the greenness was expansive of thought, it was constrained by what it was.

A dream, he mused. A dream of a bath of carbonated warm milk. Nothing more than a product of his imagination, fired by the disiwin Teal had fed him. He smiled in his bath. Disiwin—dizzy wine. Suitable.

With the realization that one is dreaming comes inevitably a reassessment of one’s condition, followed by an urgent desire to Wake Up.

He blinked and sat erect. A smiling, contented Teal lay next to him.

“Did you have good thoughts, Flinx? Do you feel all right?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.” Fully awake, he took in the enveloping hylaea, the glistening arboreals, the brilliant-hued flowers, the vines and lianas and epiphytes and symbiotes. Each flaunting independence, it seemed impossible they could all be tightly interconnected. Yet there was no denying that they were, the whole unimaginably greater than the sum of its parts. It was an analogy that could be extended further, beyond the boundaries of any single world, to encompass entire systems, star clusters, galaxies.

And all of it under threat.

He shook his head. That had been
some
dream. Why should he think of the Krang, in a place like this? Years ago, it had been. The Tar-Aiym weapon was real enough, as was the evil the Ulru-Ujurrians had thrust him toward. What was their place in all this? Were they the third component of the triad? Somehow they didn’t seem to fit, though he could hardly rule them out.

What triad? It was only a dream. He rubbed his palm along the branch, scraping skin on the rough bark. The pain was reassuring, a sharp not-a-dream.

Feeling a tickle on his cheek, he glanced down to see Pip anxiously caressing him with the end of her tongue. Smiling, he ran two fingers down her head and neck, along her spine.

Her triangular head.

Now he was drawing absurdities out of a dream, he admonished himself angrily. He was twenty years old. Absurd to expect him to deal with anything more dangerous than a taloned flier or sharp-toothed climbing carnivore. How could he bring together forces as vast as individual world-minds and the ultimate product of Tar-Aiym civilization? He had trouble enough trying to decide if he wanted to sleep with the woman next to him!

What was the critical third component of the triad?

Damnably
persistent
dream!

How many millennia before the threat made itself dangerously proximate? Or was Time nothing more than an indifferent observer here, to be paid off with cheap visceral reaction and hastily cast aside? When was too late? he wondered.

When he was no longer available to participate?

He’d spend some time with Teal, he told himself. Help her the rest of the way to her home, spend some time with her people, study and enjoy this world, and then depart. Back to Moth, perhaps. A place he could understand, comprehend. Or maybe Terra, or New Riviera, worlds where mind as well as body could find rest. Worlds that wouldn’t torment him with incomprehensible dream scenarios on a cosmic scale, that wouldn’t try to fix him with unwanted, impossible responsibilities.

Gingerly he felt his head. There was no pain, no lingering side effects, no dreaded pounding. As was to be expected if all had been nothing more than an elaborate dream.

If only he could forget some of it, any of it, even a little of it.

Teal’s smile had faded and she was sitting up now, inspecting his face with concern. “Are you sure you’re all right, Flinx? You look—strange.”

“Just a dream.” He forced a smile of his own.

She responded hesitantly but hopefully. “Many dream deep while under the influence of disiwin. Was it a good dream?”

“I don’t know.” He brought his knees up to his chest. “I don’t know if it was a good dream or a bad dream. All I know for sure is that it was a big dream. Food for thought.”

“ ‘Food for thought,’ ” she repeated. Then she nodded knowingly. “Ah! You have had a vision. They are also a consequence of drinking disiwin.”

“I’ve had
something
,” he told her. “I’m just not sure what.”

“A vision is a blessing.”

He looked at her sharply. “Believe me, I’d be more than happy to share this one. Have you had visions, Teal?”

“Oh, yes!” Her expression turned wistful. “Of flying, of fighting a baranop, of other people’s children. What was your vision like?”

“It’s not easy to describe. It concerned something I may—have to do.”

“Have to do? But why?”

He looked away, out over the depression in the forest, at the fliers and gliders and brilliant-winged inhabitants of the canopy. “Because there may not be anyone else able to do it. I don’t particularly want to do this thing, I might very well be able to avoid doing it, but I’m afraid I may have no choice.”

“Having an important vision confers responsibility.” Shifting on the branch, she sat next to him and put her arm around his shoulders. There was nothing sexual about it, nothing even especially friendly. She was just holding him, trying to help even though she didn’t, couldn’t, understand. It made him feel worthy in a way the disiwin dream had not.

He couldn’t linger, he knew. Not because of the dream, but because there was something inside him that was always pulling him on, dragging him to the next world, the next experience, the next place. Irresistible, inexorable, it frequently led him away from comfort and ease into danger and difficulty. It was as much a part of him as any organ, and to him just as real.

Nor could he conceive of taking her with him. Away from her hylaea, her all-encompassing forest, she would be as lonely and helpless and sorrowful as a bird-of-paradise suddenly dropped in the middle of a desert. True tropicals could not make friends with buzzards. The sounds and stinks of a city would be enough to impoverish her soul.