The End of the Matter (2 page)

Chapter One

“Your offer,” the withered woman screamed, “is worthy of a kick in the groin!” She lowered her voice only slightly. “However, I am an old, weak woman. You are younger, larger, stronger, healthier, and wealthier.” One hand curled defiantly around the hilt of a crooked blade jutting out from a hole in the dirty brown rag of a skirt. Her other hand held the object under discussion. “So what am I to do?” she finished expectantly.

“Please don’t get so excited,” the young man standing across from her pleaded, making quieting motions at her with his hands as he looked nervously from side to side.

No one in the shifting mob of sidewalk vendors and buyers was paying any attention to the argument. But, being an outworlder, the young man was sensitive to the old lady’s accusations. After all, he and his bride were scheduled to be on Moth for only three days before moving on to New Paris with the rest of the tour. The last thing he wanted was to be thrown in jail, on his honeymoon, for fighting with one of the locals.

“Really,” he explained desperately to her, adjusting his rain-soaked mustard-and-puce weather slicker, “thirty credits is all I can afford. Have some sympathy for me. My wife is back in our hotel. She’s not feeling very well. The daily rain and constant cloud cover is depressing her, I think. I want something to cheer her up. But we have a long way to travel yet. Thirty credits is all I can afford for a trinket.”

The old woman proudly drew herself up to her full height. Her eyes were now level with the young man’s chest. She held the object of contention firmly in one hand as she shook it accusingly at him. The slim, graceful bracelet of some silvery metal was inlaid with fragments of polished wood and stone.

“This wristlet was worked and set by Cojones Cutler himself, infant! Do you have any idea,
any idea,
what that signifies?”

“I’m sorry,” the youth tried to explain, sniffing, “but I’ve been trying to explain all along that I am only a visitor here.”

Clearly the woman restrained herself only by some great inner effort. “Very well,” she said tightly, “never mind the honored name of Cojones Cutler.” She indicated the oval bulges set in the bracelet. “Look at these whirlwood cabochons—forget the topazes for now.” As she turned the bracelet, the naturally hardened, polished sap facing the wood broke the dim daylight into points of azure-and-green fire.

“Hardly a tree in a million has the genetic deficiency necessary to produce such colors, boy. Hardly one in a million, and those grow only in the far north of Moth, where the nomads hunt the Demichin devilope. Why, it takes—”

“Oh, all right.” The young man sighed, exasperated. “Anything to get this over with. Thirty-five credits, then.” He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. His face was soft and earnest. “We’ll just have to stay at a lower-class hotel on New Paris, that’s all.”

The old woman stared up at him and shook her head in disbelief. “You talk of hotels, and me with three starving children and a husband long dead. You can stand there and talk of hotels, brazen child, while offering me thirty-five credits for the finest bracelet I’ve been lucky to get on consignment in twenty years. Twenty years!” Her voice rose to a hoarse shout again. “Make me a decent offer or go room with the devil, I say!” she screeched, loudly enough to turn a few heads in the crowd. “But don’t stand there innocently and insult a poor old woman!”

“For Church’s sake,” the youth pleaded, “lower your voice.”

Sheltered beneath a rain cape of violet-gray charged slickertic, the young man who had been idly observing the noisy byplay of buyer and seller licked the last sweet traces of thisk-cake honey from his fingers. Then he rose and sauntered toward the quarreling pair.

Slightly under average height, with smoothly arcing cheekbones and deeply tanned skin, he did not present a particularly eye-catching figure. A thatch of curly red hair roofed his skull, hair the color of a field of fireweed on the open tundra. It tumbled over his forehead and ears. Only the odd movement of something under the right side of his rain cape indicated anything out of the ordinary, but the object—whatever it was—was too well concealed to be identified.

“. . . and if there’s nothing better you can say,” the old woman was raving on, “then you’d better—”

“Excuse me,” a quiet voice interrupted. “I’d say thirty-five credits for that bracelet is a fair price.”

Mouth agape in puzzlement, the young husband stared, uncomprehending, at the slim youth, and wondered why a native should interfere on his behalf. The old vendor turned a furious gaze on the brazen interloper.

“I don’t know who you are, sir,” she rumbled dangerously, “but if you don’t mind your own business I’ll—” She stopped in mid-sentence, her mouth frozen in an
O
of shock.

“You’ll do what, old woman?” the youngster asked. “Send me to bed without supper?”

Sensing an advantage without knowing its origin, the dazed bracelet-buyer was quick to act. “Thirty-five credits is really a fair price, as he says.”

“Yes . . . I . . .” The old woman, appearing a little stunned herself, hardly seemed to hear the offer. “Thirty-five, then, and be done with it.”

“You’re certain?” The outworlder, now sure of his purchase, was anxious to ingratiate himself with the seller. Since he was a good deal bigger than the new arrival, he took a step forward. “If this boy is intimidating you, I’d be glad to . . .”

Something moved and partially emerged from cape folds. It was leathery, thin, and brightly colored. Without actually recognizing the object, the outworld tourist nonetheless had an immediate impression of serpentine lethality. His hand proffered his credit slip instead of closing into a fist.

“Here’s your money, then.”

Mesmerized by the caped figure, the old woman mechanically processed the credit slip through her cardmeter; she handed it back to the buyer without even troubling to check the reference number.

“The bracelet,” the young visitor urged impatiently.

“Hmmm? Oh, yes.” She handed it over. Flushed with pleasure at his imagined bargain, the tall tourist vanished into the milling crowd of humans and aliens.

Slowly the old woman studied the unimposing figure standing before her. Then she abruptly threw thin but still muscular arms around him and squeezed tightly. “Flinx!” she shouted exuberantly. “Flinx, boy, you’ve come home!” She shook the lanky youth out of sheer joy, for the familiar feel of him. Jostled, Pip the minidrag shifted uncomfortably on Flinx’s shoulder and attempted to tolerate the roughhousing with fine reptilian indifference.

“For a little while, Mother Mastiff,” the youth replied quietly. He grinned and nodded in the direction of the departed outworlder. “I see you’re having as much fun as ever.”

“Fun!” she snorted derisively, making an obscene gesture in the general direction of the marketplace into which her customer had disappeared. “Pathetic, most of them. They suck the enjoyment from trading. Sometimes I wonder how the Commonwealth hangs together, with cement like that.” A triangular head flanked by eyes of fire peeked out from beneath the slickertic. The old woman eyed it with evident distaste. “See you’re still dragging that creature around with you.”

Pip responded with a nasty hiss. There had never been any love lost between Mother Mastiff and the minidrag.

“Many times I think it’s Pip who drags me, Mother,” the youth argued.

“Well, no matter perversions I can’t cure you of, boy. At least you’re here.” She whacked him on the left shoulder in mock anger. “Here you are . . . you good-for-nothing, forgetful, heartless lump of immature meat! Where have you been to? It’s been over a year. A year, paragon of ingrates! Not a tridee tape, not a card, nothing!”

“I am sorry, Mother Mastiff,” he confessed, putting his arm around her bony shoulders. She shrugged angrily, but not hard enough to dislodge his arm. “It wasn’t that I didn’t think of you. But I was far from modern communications.”

“Ah, in trouble again?” She shook her head. “Is that the way I raised you?” He started to reply, but she cut him off hastily. “Never mind that now. Where were you? Come, tell me back at the shop.”

They started down the street. Aromatic scents and the cries of Drallar’s inner marketplace filled the air around them. “Come, boy, tell me, where were you, that you couldn’t let me know if your worthless carcass was still intact?”

Flinx considered his response carefully. He had good reasons for wanting to keep his whereabouts of the past year secret. What Mother Mastiff didn’t know she could never reveal.

“I took a job, sort of,” he finally explained.

She gaped at him. “You . . . a job?”

“I’m not lying,” he argued uncomfortably, unable to meet those disbelieving eyes. “I set my own hours and work pretty much as I want to.”

“Now I just might, just
might
believe you. What kind of job?”

Again he glanced away evasively. “I can’t say exactly. I’m sort of a teacher, a private tutor.”

“A teacher,” she echoed, evidently impressed. “A private tutor, eh?” She let out a snicker. “What is it you teach? Pickpocketing, breaking and entering, or general theft?”

“Now what would I know about such things?” he countered in astonishment. “Is that how you brought me up?” They both chuckled. “No, I’m kind of a general-purpose instructor in basics.”

“I see” was all she said this time, so he was spared the difficulty of explaining what kind of basics he taught, and to whom. Especially to whom; it was not time for Mother Mastiff or anyone else to know about the Ulru-Ujurrians, the race he had adopted and which had adopted him. The race that could turn this corner of creation inside out.

“Never mind me,” he insisted, staring at her. “Here I take money and set you up in one of the fanciest shop districts of Drallar, with top-flight stock, and how do I find you? Like this!” He indicated her ragged clothes, torn skirt and overblouse, the ugly muffin of a hat perched precariously on long, straggly hair. “Out in the street in the rain and damp, clad in scraps.”

Now it was Mother Mastiff’s turn to glance away. They turned up a cobblestone street and entered a less frenetic section of the city.

“I got itchy nervous, boy, sitting in that fancy store all day. I missed the streets, the contacts, the noise—”

“The arguments and shouting,” Flinx finished for her.

“And the gossip,” she went on. “Especially the gossip.” She eyed him defiantly. “At my age it’s one of the few disreputable delights I haven’t grown too old for.”

Flinx indicated the street ahead. “So that’s why we’re not headed for the shop?”

“No, not that stuffy snuffbox, not on a beautiful day like today.” Flinx studied the gray, overcast sky, blinked at the ever-present mist, but said nothing. Actually, it
was
a rather nice day for Drallar. It wasn’t raining. He had been home for two weeks and had yet to see the sun.

“Let’s go to Dramuse’s stall. I’ll treat you to lunch.”

Flinx expressed surprise. “You buy someone else lunch? Still, after the profit you made on that bracelet . . .”

“Pfagh!
I could have gotten that callow stripling up to fifty credits easy. Knew it the second he set eyes on that bracelet. Then you had to come along.”

“One of these days, Mother, you’ll go too far with some knowledgeable offworlder and he’ll turn you in to the King’s police. I broke in because he seemed like a decent man on his mating flight, and I didn’t want to see him cheated too badly.”

“Shows what you know,” she snapped back. “He wasn’t as ignorant as he made
you
think. You weren’t there to see his eyes light up when I mentioned the street my shop is on and told him that’s where it was stolen from. He knew what he was about, all right. Did you see him shout for the police? No, he was cuddling his hot property like any decent good citizen. Here.” She stopped and gestured beyond a gate to tables covered with brightly dyed canopies.

They had entered the last of the concentric rings that formed Drallar’s marketplace. This outermost ring consisted entirely of restaurants and food stalls. They ranged from tiny one-being operations with primitive wood-fired stoves to expensive closed-in establishments in which delicacies imported from the farthest corners of the Commonwealth were served on utensils of faceted veridian. Here the air currents stalled, weaving languorous zephyrs of overpowering potency.

They entered a restaurant that used neither wood nor veridian plates and was somewhere between the opulent and the barely digestible in terms of menu. After taking seats, they ordered food from a creature who looked like a griffin with tentacles instead of legs. Then Mother Mastiff exchanged her gentle accusations for more serious talk.

“Now, boy, I know you went off to look for your natural parents.” It was a sign of her strength that she could voice the subject without stumbling. “You’ve been gone for over a year. You must have learned something.”

Flinx leaned back and was silent for a moment. Pip wiggled out from beneath the cape folds, and Flinx scratched the flying snake under its chin. “As far as I know,” he finally responded tersely, “they’re both long dead.” Pip shifted uneasily, suddenly sensitive to his master’s somber mood. “My mother . . . at least I know who she was. A Lynx, a concubine. I also found a half sister and when I found her, I ended up having to kill her.”

Food arrived, spicy and steaming. They ate quietly for a while. Despite the heavy spices, the food tasted flat to both of them.

“Mother dead, half sister dead,” Mother Mastiff grunted. “No other relatives?” Flinx shook his head curtly. “What about your natural father?”

“Couldn’t find a thing about him worth following up.”

Mother Mastiff wrestled with some private demon, and finally murmured, “You’ve run far and long, boy. But there’s still a possibility.”

He glanced sharply at her. “Where?”

“Here. Yes, even here.”

“Why,” he said quietly, “didn’t you ever tell me?”

Mother Mastiff shrugged once. “I saw no reason to mention it. It’s an obscure chance, boy, a waste of time, an absurd thought.”