The End of the Matter (14 page)

He started back toward the skimmer. Flinx was gazing with interest at the azure overhang, wondering at its original purpose. A temple at least a hundred meters high towered behind it. The massive blue form had fallen outward, leaving a gaping hole in the temple wall. Beyond he could barely make out a darkened interior lined with shattered masonry, dangling strips of punched metal, shade-loving plants, and the emptiness of abandonment.

“What do we do now?”

Pocomchi grinned at him and shook his head. “You’ve hardly heard a word I’ve said, have you? There’s the remnants of a service trail back here, clear enough for us to follow. Since they felt the need to walk it from this point, I think it’s safe to assume we can’t get the skimmer through. Hopefully your quarry will be at the other end of the trail. Anyway, I’d like to meet anyone foolish enough to think there’s anything worth taking out of Mimmisompo. I hope they’ve got easy trigger fingers and an inviting nature.”

“Let’s get going, then,” ventured Flinx.

“Easy, dragon lord.” He indicated the sun. “Why not wait till we’ve a full day to hike with? No one’s running anyplace, least of all the people we’re hunting. I think they’re pretty deep into the brush.” A hand waved in the direction of jumbled stone and bushes where the trail lay. “There are creatures crawling around in there that I’d rather meet in daytime, if I have to meet them at all. I’ll set up a perimeter, and we’ll sleep by the skimmer tonight.”

A radiant fence was quickly erected in a half circle, with the skimmer inside. Another compartment of the compact craft produced inflatable mattresses and sleeping material. It would have been safer to sleep in the skimmer, but the small cockpit was cramped enough with two men. Two men trying to sleep inside, together with Ab and a pair of minidrags, would have been impossible.

Their temporary habitat was topped by an inflatable dome, which would serve as weather shield in the event of wind or storm. The semipermeable membrane of the dome would permit fresh air to enter and allow waste gases to pass out, but would shunt aside anything as thick as a raindrop.

Outside, the radiant fence would keep curious nightstalkers at bay, while Balthazaar and Pip could be counted on to serve as backup alarms in the event that anything really dangerous showed up. As for arboreal predators, the great majority of them were daylight hunters, according to Pocomchi.

Flinx leaned back on the soft mattress and stared out the dome toward the trail site. He was anxious to be after whoever had made it, impatient to have this search resolved once and for all. But this was Pocomchi’s planet. It would be wise to take his advice.

Besides, he thought with an expansive yawn, he was tired. His head went back. Through the warm tropical night and the thin material of the dome he could count the stars in strange constellations. Off to the east hung a pair of round, gibbous moons, so unlike the craggy outline of Moth’s own rarely glimpsed satellite, Flame.

The single moon of distant Ulru-Ujurr was larger than these two combined, he thought. Memories of his pupils, the innocent ursinoid race which lived on that world, pulled strongly at him. He felt guilty. His place was back there, advising them, instead of gallivanting around the Commonwealth in search of impossible-to-learn origins.

A fetid breeze drifted through the single window, set above and to the side of his bed. Soft crackling noises, like foil crumpling, drifted in to him. In a little while, the alien lullaby had helped him fall sound asleep.

First sunlight woke Flinx. Rolling over, he stretched once and was instantly awake. Pocomchi lay on the mattress next to him, snoring stentorianly for so small a man. He stretched out a hand to wake the Indian, and frowned as he did so. Something was missing, something so familiar that for a long moment he couldn’t figure out what was gone.

He woke Pocomchi, sat up, and thought. The motion of rising brought the absence home to him. All at once, Flinx was moving rapidly, searching behind the mattress, by the skimmer body, on the opposite side of Pocomchi’s bed. Nothing.

Zipping open the doorway, he plunged frantically outside, and almost ran toward the jungle before remembering the radiant fence. Standing by the inside edge of the softly glowing barrier, he put cupped hands to his lips and shouted, “Pip! Where are you, Pip!”

His eyes swept the trees and temple tops, but the searching revealed only silent stone and mocking greenery. Though both must have seen what had become of his pet, all remained frozen with the silence of the inanimate.

Turning, he ran back into the dome and climbed into the skimmer. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he deflated the mattresses, Pocomchi eyed him but said nothing. Better to let the lad find out these things for himself.

Flinx crawled behind the two seats, back into the storage area where Ab had ridden. “Come on out, Pip. The game’s not funny any more. Come out, Pip!”

When he finally gave up and rose, vacant-eyed, from the cockpit, he saw Pocomchi packing away the inflatable dome and taking down the fence. The Indian said nothing, but watched as Flinx moved to the edge of the brush and resumed calling. By the time the youth had shouted himself hoarse, Pocomchi had stowed all their supplies.

One thing remained for Flinx to try. Standing by the shadow of the azure overhang, he closed his eyes and thought furiously. From the skies, he imagined to himself, from the skies, a terrible danger! I need you, Pip, it’s threatening me. Where are you, companion of childhood? Your friend is in danger! Can’t you sense it? It’s coming closer, and there’s nothing I can do about it!

He kept up his performance for long minutes, until sweat began to bead on his forehead and his clenched fingers turned pale. Something touched him on the shoulder, and he jumped. Pocomchi’s sympathetic eyes were staring into his.

“You’re wearing yourself out for no reason, Flinx,” his guide told him. “Calling won’t help.” A hand gestured toward the sweep of dense vegetation. “When something calls the minidrag, it goes. This is their world, you know. Or hadn’t you noticed that Balthazaar is gone too?”

Flinx had been so thoroughly absorbed by Pip’s disappearance that he hadn’t. Sure enough, the old minidrag always curled about Pocomchi’s neck and shoulder was nowhere to be seen.

“Since I found him at the age of five,” he tried to explain to the little man, “Pip and I have never spent a single day completely apart from each other.” His gaze roved over the concealing jungle. “I just can’t believe he’d simply fly off and abandon me. I can’t believe it, Pocomchi!”

The Indian shrugged and spoke softly. “No minidrag is ever completely tamed. You’ve never been on Pip’s home world before, either. Don’t look so brokenhearted. I’ve had Balthazaar fly off and leave me for several days at a time. He always comes back.

“In case you’ve forgotten, we have other things to do here. There’s that trail to follow, and your ring-wearer to find. We won’t be skimming out of Mimmisompo for a while yet. When they want to, both Pip and Balthazaar will find our thoughts.”

Flinx relaxed a little.

“They’re wild things, Flinx,” Pocomchi reminded him, “and this is a wild place. You can’t expect the two not to be attracted by that. Now let’s make up a couple of packs and start the hard part of this trip.”

Moving mechanically, Flinx helped his guide prepare a set of light but well-stocked backpacks. When Pocomchi was helping him on with his own, showing him how the strappings worked, a sudden thought occurred to him.

“What,” he asked worriedly, “if we find what we’ve come for, and then when it’s time for us to leave for Alaspinport Pip hasn’t come back?”

Pocomchi stared straight at him, his eyebrows arching slightly. “There’s no use in speculating on that, Flinx. Balthazaar means as much or more to me as your Pip does to you. We’ve been through a lot together. But a minidrag’s not a dog. It won’t slaver and whimper at your feet. You ought to know that. Mini-drags are independent and free-willed. They remain with you and me because they
want
to, not because they’re in need of us. The decision to return is up to them.” He smiled slightly. “All we can do if we come back and they’re not here is wait a while for them. Then if they don’t show . . .” He hesitated. “Well, it’s their world.” He turned and started off toward the trail.

Flinx took a last look at the sky above. No familiar winged shape came diving out of it toward his shoulder. Setting his jaw and mind, he hefted the backpack to a more comfortable position and strode off after Pocomchi. Soon the skimmer was lost to sight, consumed by stone and intervening vegetation.

Every so often he would turn to make certain that Ab was still trailing behind them. Then he would turn forward again. His view consisted of tightly intertwined bushes and vines and trees, parted regularly by the bobbing back of Pocomchi’s head. The Indian’s black hair swayed as he traced the path through the jungle-encrusted city. Sometimes the growth had recovered and grown back over the path, but under Pocomchi’s skilled guidance they always reemerged onto a clear trail.

Although he knew better, he could think only of his missing pet. Emotions he thought he had long since outgrown swelled inside him. They were ready to overwhelm him when a cold hand touched the right side of his face with surpassing gentleness.

Angrily he glanced back, intending to take out his feelings on the owner of that chill palm. But how could anyone get mad at that face, with its mournful, innocent eyes and its proboscidean mouth where its hair ought to be, tottering after him with the stride of a quadrupedal duck?

“Worry, worry, sorry hurry,” ventured Ab hopefully, “key to quark, key to curry. Black pepper ground find in me mind”—this delivered with such solemnity that Flinx half felt it might actually mean something. While he was pondering the cryptic verse, he tripped over a root and went sprawling. Pocomchi heard him fall and turned. The Indian shook his head, grinned, and resumed walking.

Flinx climbed to his feet and hitched the pack higher on his shoulders. “You’re right, Ab, there’s no point in tearing myself up over it. There’s nothing I can do about it.” His gaze turned heavenward, and he searched the powdery rims of scattered cumulus clouds. “If Pip comes back, he comes back. If not”—his voice dropped to a resigned murmur—“life goes on. A little lonelier, maybe, but it goes on. I’ll still have things to do and people to go back to.”

“Call the key, call the key,” Ab agreed in singsong behind him. “To see it takes two to tango with an animated mango.” He stared expectantly at Flinx.

“Farcical catharsis.” The youth chuckled, smiling now at his ward’s comical twaddle. What a pity, he mused, that the poetically inclined alien didn’t have enough sense to make real use of his talent. But he had become used to tuning out Ab’s ramblings, so he concentrated on the path ahead and ignored the alien’s continued verbalizing.

“Key the key that’s me,” Ab sang lucidly, “I’ll be whatever you want to see. Harkatrix, matrix, how do you run? Slew of currents and a spiced hadron.”

They walked all that day and afternoon. When Pocomchi found a place suitable for night camp, the path still wound off into the jungle ahead. With the experience of an old trailwalker, and maybe a little magic, the Indian somehow managed to concoct a meal from concentrates which was both flavorful and filling.

The fullness in his belly should have put Flinx rapidly to sleep. Instead, he found himself lying awake, listening to Pocomchi’s snores and staring at the sky. The trouble was that the weight in his stomach wasn’t matched by a more familiar weight curled next to his shoulder. Eventually he had to take a dose of cerebroneural depressant in order to fall into an uncomfortable sleep.

Morning came with anxious hope that quickly faded. The minidrags had not returned. Silently they broke camp and marched on.

Pocomchi tried to cheer his companion by pointing out interesting aspects of the flora and fauna they passed. Ordinarily Flinx would have listened raptly. Now he simply nodded or grunted an occasional comment. Even Pocomchi’s description of temple engineering failed to rouse him from his mental lethargy.

They paused for lunch in the center of a series of concentric stone circles. Shade was provided by a five-meter-high metal pilliar in the center of the circles. It was supported by the familiar metal buttresses on four sides. The pillar itself, fluted and encrusted with petrified growths and slime, had corroded badly in places.

“It’s a fountain,” Pocomchi decided while eating lunch. He gestured at the silent tower, then at the gradually descending stone circles surrounding them. “I expect we’re sitting in the middle of a series of sacred pools that were once used for religious and other ceremonies by the populace of this city. If subterranean Mimmisompo stays true to the Alaspinian pattern, then the water for this was piped underground to here, probably through metal pipes by gravity.” One finger traced the spray of ghost water. “It shot out of the fountain top and then fell down these fluted sides before spreading out and overflowing from one pool to the next.” Leaning forward, he took a bite out of a concentrate bar.

“Judging from the slight incline of the pools, I’d guess the drain is right about there.” He pointed. “See the formal, carved bench? That’s where a priest could sit and bless the waters flowing out of the cistern. On the right of the bench there should be a—” Abruptly, he quieted and strained forward.

Flinx felt a mental crackle from his companion and stared in the same direction. “I don’t see anything. What’s the matter?”

Pocomchi rose and gestured. “There, what’s that?” Still Flinx could see nothing.

The Indian walked cautiously toward the cistern outflow, hopping down from one level to the next. When he reached the region of the stone bench, he leaned over the last restraining wall and called back to Flinx. There was a peculiar tightness in his voice.

“Over here,” he said disbelievingly, “is a dead man.”

Chapter Eight

The remains of his concentrate bar dangled forgotten from Flinx’s hand as he peered over the cistern wall. Sprawled next to one another on the right side of the sacred bench were three bodies. Their skullcaps were missing, and their black suits were torn and ragged in places. Two men and a woman, all very dead.

Each body was feathered with twenty-centimeter-long shafts of some highly polished yellow-brown wood. Five tiny fins tipped the back end of each shaft. Flinx guessed that each body sprouted at least sixty or seventy of the small arrows. Or they might have been large darts, depending on the size of their users.

“So, they followed us here,” he muttered.

Pocomchi was searching the surrounding jungle with practiced eyes. “They did more than follow, Flinx—they preceded us. They must have watched us set down, then circled somehow to get ahead of us on the trail.” His gaze dropped to the corpse immediately next to him. Like the other two, it was missing both eyes.

“They knew we’d come through here, so they set up a nice, efficient little ambush.” Water trickled from the lowest cistern into the outflow drain, an anemic remnant of the once-substantial volume which had tumbled through this place ages ago. Pocomchi kicked at it and watched it darken his boot.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened,” Flinx told him. His eyes weren’t as experienced as Pocomchi’s, but he could search the witnessing jungle with his mind. “The Qwarm were ready to ambush Ab and myself back on Moth. Something killed them there, too.”

Pocomchi threw him a surprised look. “Really? I don’t know who was responsible for saving you, then, unless there are Otoids on Moth I haven’t heard about.” Bending over, he wrapped a hand around one of the several hundred shafts, pulled it free, and held it out to Flinx.

The point was fashioned of crudely reworked metal, with five spikes sticking out of it. “This is an Otoid arrow,” Pocomchi explained, turning it over in his hand. “They shoot them out of a
sikambi,
a sort of blowgun affair. Only they use an elastic made from native tree sap instead of their own weak breath to propel these. They’re not too accurate, but”—he gestured meaningfully at the bodies—“what they lack in marksmanship they make up for with firepower.”

“You’re right,” Flinx informed him, “there aren’t any Otoids on Moth. What are they?”

“You’d think I’d have a simple answer for that one, wouldn’t you?” Pocomchi replied, scanning the jungle wall once again. “Well, I don’t. Nobody does, for sure. They’re vaguely humanoid, run to about half your size. Furry all over except for their tails, which are bare. They’re not very bright, but in the absence of the temple builders they’ve become the dominant native race. Manual dexterity helps them. Each of two hands has ten fingers, with three joints to each finger. They can climb pretty well, but the tail’s not prehensile, so they do most of their traveling on the ground.”

“An interaction, disreaction, can’t you see it’s time to be, to activate the ancient key,” Ab murmured. “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pheromones.”

The alien was waddling down the pool levels at high speed. Both men would have laughed at Ab’s absurd locomotion if it weren’t for the three dead humans lying in front of them.

“Ab,” Flinx began, intending to bawl the alien out for disturbing them. Then he heard the rising hoots, the sort of war cry a human baby with an unusually deep voice might make.

Ab was pointing and curiously feeling several objects sticking out of his back. The points had barely penetrated the outer epidermal layer. Plucking one out, he handed it to Flinx and smiled broadly. “Poor boy toy toy,” he commented. “Tickle fickle tickle.”

“Come this way, Ab,” Pocomchi ordered urgently. “No boy toy. You too, Flinx,” he snapped, wrenching at the youth’s pack. Flinx did not move. He was staring at Ab, who appeared to have suffered no ill effects from the dozen or so arrows sticking out of him.

All hint of casualness was missing from Pocomchi’s demeanor now. “Let’s move it. If they get between us and the skimmer, we’re finished. Come on, or I’ll leave you and your idiot to greet them on your own.”

Flinx found himself running back down the trail they had laboriously traced this far. Ab kept pace easily. Cries sounded ahead of them, and Pocomchi came to a gasping halt.

“No good. They’ve got us cut off.” He looked around wildly. “We’ve got to get around them somehow.” Something made a thunking sound as it landed in the dirt barely a quarter meter from Flinx’s feet. An Otoid arrow.

Flinx noted that Ab had acquired another dozen of the feathered shafts. If they bothered the alien, he gave no sign of it. Flinx decided that either the secondary skin was incredibly dense or else some internal mechanism was sealing off each wound as it occurred. Or perhaps both.

Time later to study the alien’s remarkable physiology. Time if they managed to escape.

Pocomchi was on his knees, using his beamer on the nearby trees. He shouted angrily at Flinx, “What are you waiting for, Flinx, an engraved invitation? Or do you want your eyes to end up in an Otoid stewpot?”

Flinx joined Pocomchi in retreating back to a cluster of broken tree trunks and tumbled masonry. Dimly perceived shapes moved from time to time in the trees around them. Whenever he detected such movement, he fired.

Pip did not magically appear to save him.

Arrows glanced with metallic pings off the stone around him, made dull thumping sounds as they stuck in the thick logs. Every so often Flinx risked taking an arrow to reach out and pull Ab down next to him. While the murmuring alien did not seem to be suffering at all from the missiles, Flinx had no idea when his body might suddenly lose its immunity to them. Ab rolled over, pulling the shafts curiously from his skin and rhyming nonstop, utterly indifferent to the battle surrounding him.

“How many do you think there are?” Flinx asked, ducking as a brass-tipped bolt sparked off the rock near his head.

Pocomchi replied in between rising and firing, and ducking back under cover. “No idea. Nobody knows how numerous the Otoid are. Xenoanthropologists aren’t even sure how they breed. And, as you might suspect, they aren’t kindly toward visitors.”

Abruptly he snapped off a lethal burst from his beamer. Flinx peered between rock and log, had a glimpse of a wildly gesticulating form falling through filtered sunlight and branches. He heard a distant crash as the native hit the ground.

While continuing to rain an impressive number of missiles on the three interlopers, the Otoids kept up a steady chatter among themselves. Flinx couldn’t tell whether their conversation consisted of various forms of encouragement or of insults for their enemy.

Not that it mattered. It seemed that hundreds of green eyes, gleaming like peridots among the trees, confronted them. Like most men, he wasn’t going to be able to chose his place and manner of dying.

He wondered what exactly the aborigines did first with dead men’s eyes. As he was wondering, there was a hissing sound in the air. A blue energy beam considerably thicker than the ones put out by their small hand beamers passed over Flinx’s head. It struck with devastating force among the densest concentration of natives. A great yelping and screeching reached them as a monster tree, a cross between an evergreen and a coconut palm, came smashing down among the concealed Otoid. Flinx saw where the blue bolt had sliced cleanly through the trunk.

A second burst of cerulean destruction flashed above them, tearing through leaves, vegetation, and not a few furious natives. To give them credit, the awesome display of modern weaponry didn’t frighten the Otoid away, although the hail of yellow-brown arrows slackened noticeably.

Flinx turned on his side and shouted in the direction from which the shots had originated, “Who is it, who’s there?”

Both he and Pocomchi stared anxiously down the fragment of trail that remained in view. A figure stepped out of the bushes, cradling an energy rifle nearly as tall as Flinx. It was a heavy military model, Flinx noted, and was probably meant to be mounted on a tripod. Somehow its wielder managed not only to lift the weapon, but to operate it. Makeshift slings put most of the weight on the man’s shoulders.

And the man was big as two men. He had a voice to match. “This way!” the figure bellowed at them, in a voice that sounded more amused than worried. Around came the muzzle of the massive rifle, and another thick bolt carbonized trees and natives alike. “Hurry it up, there, you two! They regroup fast.”

Pocomchi was up and running then. Flinx was right behind, darting around rocks and bushes, jumping over fallen logs. Occasionally each man would turn to snap off a shot at the arrow-fingers in the trees. Ab kept pace easily, though Flinx had to make sure some flower or bug didn’t distract the simple-minded creature.

While they ran, the bulky figure ahead of them stood in place atop the slight rise, firing down into the clusters of howling, frustrated Otoid. They had almost reached him. Flinx found himself scrambling up a crumbling masonry wall the last couple of meters. Pocomchi was just ahead and to Flinx’s right. The wall seemed a million miles high.

At its top stood their rescuer. Up close he was even more massive than he had looked from a distance. His white hair curled and fluttered in the warm breeze, and his face was half court jester, half mad prophet. Obsidian eyes, brows like antipersonnel wire, a sharply pointed chin—all were dwarfed by a nose any predatory bird would have been proud of. It rose like a spire from the sea of swirling features which eddied around it.

His trousers, bright mold-green, ran into boots that sealed themselves to the pants legs. Above the waist he wore only the rifle straps and a massive power pack for the weapon, which crossed a chest full of white hair like steel wool and resembled an ancient bandoleer. His arms were covered with a similar grizzled fur. Though those limbs were bigger around than Flinx’s thighs, the man moved with startling agility, like a graceful gorilla.

There was a curse, and Flinx turned to his guide. A small, feathered shaft protruded from the back of Pocomchi’s thigh. The Indian slid downward a little. His fingers dug at the rough rock; he trailed blood on the white stone as he fell.

Reaching out and across, Flinx caught the back of Pocomchi’s shirt just in time to halt his fall.

“Hurry up, dammit!”
the rifle-wielder shouted down at them. “They’re gettin’ over being scared. Now they’re mad, and there’s more of them coming every minute.”

“My friend’s hurt!” Flinx called up to him.

“I can make it,” Pocomchi said through clenched teeth. He and Flinx exchanged glances; then both were again moving up the uneven stone facing.

Somehow cradling the huge rifle in one arm, the giant above them reached down one treelike forearm and got a hand on Pocomchi’s shirt top. The material held as Pocomchi all but flew the last meter to the top of the wall. Flinx scrambled up alongside them.

Pocomchi took one step forward, his face tightening in pain, before he stopped to yank the shaft from his leg.

“We’ve got to get back to the temple,” the big man rumbled, letting loose another recoilless blast from the rifle. He looked squarely at Flinx. “I can’t cover us with this and carry him too.”

For an answer, Flinx slipped his right arm between Pocomchi’s legs and hooked it around the man’s right thigh. Then he took the Indian’s right arm in his left hand, bent, heaved, and swung the swarthy miner onto his shoulders.

“I can manage him,” Flinx assured the bigger man. Both of them ignored Pocomchi’s protests. “Just show me the way.”

Teeth formed a line of enameled foam beneath that incredible nose. “It’s a right good fight you two made of it till I got to you, young feller-me-lad. Maybe we’ll all make it back unskewered.”

With the man’s powerful rifle keeping the pursuing Otoid at a respectful distance, they started down into seemingly impenetrable jungle. Flinx hardly felt the weight on his back.

Just when it appeared that they would run up against an impassible rampart of bushes and vines, the big man would gesture left or right and Flinx would find himself running down a gap only an experienced jungle hand would have noticed. Ab skipped along behind them, apparently enjoying all the excitement.

The sounds of Otoid crashing and racing through the trees alongside them grew louder, more perceptible. While the terrible fire from the heavy military gun cut down any aborigines who ventured too near, it still seemed to Flinx that they were tightening a ring around the fugitives.

Flinx’s concern wasn’t alleviated by the expression on the big man’s face. Sweat was pouring down him now, and he was breathing in long, strained gasps, despite his strength. The tripod blaster was beginning to sap his reserves. It was not meant to be used like a handgun, much less to be carried and fired while on the run.

“I don’t know, young feller-me-lad,” he said blinking the sweat from his eyes and talking as they ran. “They may cut us off yet.”

They ran on, until Flinx’s heart felt like a hammer on his chest and his lungs shrieked in protest. The formerly light Pocomchi now seemed to be made of solid lead.

Then, just when he thought he couldn’t move another step, he heard a shout from his huge companion. Wiping aside perspiration and a few soaked strands of hair, Flinx thought he could see a dark rectangle looming ahead of them. The ancient portal rose a good four meters high and two across. It formed an opening into a creeper-wrapped temple built of sparkling green stone. The temple appeared isolated from any other structures. Its color enabled it to blend inconspicuously into the surrounding forest.

The building was low, compared to many of the imposing edifices Flinx had passed in Mimmisompo proper—not more than two stories aboveground, flat and broken on top from the action of persistent, prying roots.

Apprehensively he studied their apparent destination. “In there? But it’s small, and there’s nowhere to retreat to. Can’t the Otoid . . . ?”

“You can always try to make it back to your skimmer, lad,” his rescuer suggested pleasantly.