Flinx's Folly Read online

  Some of the information she scanned made sense but was decidedly lackluster in content. Some was already known.

  Some of it made no sense at all.

  Her device insisted the home address given was false. Yet that had not triggered the store’s security programming. And nearly everything else except the most recent information provided by the man was provably false. It gave her pause.

  Why would such a pleasant, seemingly innocuous young man need to falsify even the most basic and straightforward facts of his background? Only one thing did not ring untrue, and it should have. That was the size of her quarry’s bank account. It was much, much too big. Unless he had acquired a truly impressive inheritance from some major Trading House or great family, no one as young as her quarry should properly have access to such extensive credit. And if he had inherited, then why all the elaborate subterfuge to conceal everything about his background? The two did not add together.

  Then, to her astonishment, wisps of smoke began to rise from her device. Very compact, very efficient, and very expensive, it began to fry before her eyes. Emerging from the back room, the salesman saw what was happening, quickly set the new tray of necklaces aside, and grabbed a small fire extinguisher, whose contents he proceeded to spray onto the smoking machine. She did not object. Clearly, the device was already damaged beyond repair. Nevertheless, she was as careful to pack away the ruined remnants lest its true nature be discovered as she was to thank the salesman and apologize for the incident.

  She left the store hurriedly, her thoughts churning. Her probing had begat an unanticipated response; swift, precise, limited, and thorough. It smacked of a warning. She was brave but not foolhardy, courageous but not stupid. Common sense had ruled her dealings and saved her from more than one unpleasant encounter.

  What was it Ormann had tried to tell her about the two men he had sent after the tall man? Something had happened to them. Something Ormann had been unable to find an explanation for. From within the depths of her purse she could still feel the lingering warmth of the cooked device. No explanation for that, either. She knew only one thing for certain: whatever defensive programming she had triggered was expensive and sophisticated. She and it had something in common, then.

  Every intelligent person realizes it when she falls short of the level of her competition. But only the really smart ones know when to accept that.

  Ormann was so surprised to see Vendra in his office that he forgot to be angry. “What are you doing here?” he asked tightly as he entered and made sure the door sealed tightly behind him. “We’re not supposed to meet here!”

  “Why not?” Vendra was clearly more tense than she had been the last time they had met. “Afraid your fiancée will walk in on us?”

  “What do you want?” His tone changed from upset to one of controlled excitement. “You have something for me? Information?”

  She nodded. “I sure do.” She passed him a folded printout.

  “What’s this?” Taking a seat behind his desk, he looked as puzzled as he sounded.

  “Confirmation of your refund.” Turning, she started back toward the door. “I’m declining your tender.”

  “Wait, wait a minute.” He moved to intercept her. “You can’t do that.”

  “It’s already done.”

  “But—but why?” He was genuinely bemused. Then his expression darkened. “He did something to you, didn’t he? That redheaded bastard did something to you just like he did something to the two guys I sent after him before.”

  She shook her head. “He did nothing to me. I learned a couple of things I didn’t like, that’s all.”

  “So you did manage to find something out about him. Well, tell me, what?”

  “No harm in your knowing.” She sniffed diffidently. “I followed him into a store where he bought something moderately expensive.” She smiled in a way he didn’t like. “You’ll probably find out about that yourself. Anyway, I had time—not much time but enough—to probe the store’s purchasing system. I use a highly customized piece of equipment; very small and very efficient. Never had any trouble with it. It worked long enough for me to learn that your friend has a good deal more credit to his name than would appear at first glance.”

  Ormann’s confusion showed in his reply. “How much more credit?”

  She considered how best to explain it to him. “Not enough to buy your company but more than enough to buy the hotel he’s staying in. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I’m supposing it to be some kind of inheritance.”

  He nodded. That, at least, dovetailed somewhat with what he knew about Lynx. “What else did you learn?”

  “That I don’t want to have anything to do with him. Based on years of experience, my professional advice to a client would be to do the same. But, of course, your interest extends beyond simple curiosity.

  “Something responded to my device’s prying. Not with the usual jamming programming. It actually totally toasted the unit and it’s supposed to be able to shield itself against such attacks. It always has defended itself successfully in the past.” She shook her head warningly. “To the best of my knowledge, only military countermeasures can do what was done to my device.”

  “You think the kid is military?”

  “I think the man is dangerous. What happened to my device tells me that. My instincts tell me that. I don’t know what you think he might have done to the muscle you hired to go after him, but I don’t want to hang around him long enough to find out. And I don’t want him doing anything to me. He’s too quiet. Big, loud, boastful antagonists I can deal with. It’s the silent, self-possessed ones who make me edgy. Keep your money, Mr. Ormann. And don’t call—I won’t answer.” She unsealed the office door and departed, leaving one bewildered and angry executive in her wake.

  What now, Ormann? he asked himself. You hire two of the best to beat Lynx up; they come back all touchy-feely hand in hand without having laid a finger on him. You hire the best investigator in Sphene and she comes back scared. Clarity continues to see and sympathize with him. You can’t touch him yourself because that would immediately cause her to move even closer to him—not to mention that you’d have to deal with that minidrag.

  Wait a minute, he thought. If this kid is crafty or controlling or powerful enough to do what he’s done already, and seemingly without expending an effort, might he have a history of doing such things? If so, there should be some sort of trail. Maybe, Ormann mused silently, he was going about this all wrong. Being subtle, when what was called for was not subtlety but directness. By now he had acquired excellent visual and auditory records of Lynx. It should be a fairly straightforward matter to trace the recent history of his arrival on Nur. Learning how he had arrived and where he had arrived from, however transient, would at least give Ormann something solid to proceed from. Vendra was not the only accomplished investigator on New Riviera. Offering enough money always drew takers, no matter the perceived danger.

  His standing in the business community had enabled him to build up an inventory of multiple contacts. It was time to call in some favors.

  What he was about to learn would at once surprise and please him far more than anything he had discovered about his nemesis thus far.

  “But I don’t know how to dance. I’ve never danced.”

  Clarity found Philip’s embarrassment at his professed lack of terpsichorean skill almost as amusing as his evident physical discomfort from the suit he was wearing. Going with him to buy it had been an adventure in itself. She had prevailed only because she insisted that if he didn’t wear something different she would refuse to see him anymore.

  “Don’t you even own a formal outfit?” she’d challenged him.

  “I have very few personal possessions,” he had replied truthfully. Of course, one of those possessions happened to be a starship, but she already knew that.

  Now he twisted and twitched like someone afflicted with an irritating skin disease. Having long since given up any h
ope of retaining even a semi-stable perch, Pip had retired to the retronouveau supports of the table, where she and Scrap blended so well with the sculpted flow of the multiple legs that anyone standing more than a meter away would have had a difficult time telling the living minidrags from the inorganic, flowering metal.

  He looked good in the suit, she told herself. Light-traced, body-imaged, patterned, cut, and sealed, it had been composited and tailored on one of Sphene’s trendiest shopping promenades in less than an hour. Next week it would be out of fashion, as was the norm. But for one night at least, Flinx looked like something other than a hub-switch repairman. The shimmering maroon material flashed only a minimum sufficiency of highlights. It stood out nicely in contrast to her more subdued forest green, off-the-shoulder casual gown. Sensitized to specific parts of the visible spectrum, significant portions of her attire blinked transparent when encountering anything shifted into the ultraviolet.

  Now she discovered that not only couldn’t he dress properly, but also he couldn’t dance. That did not stop her from rising from her seat, taking one of his hands, and pulling him toward the crowded floor.

  “Anyone can dance, Flinx. I’ve seen you move. You’re agile and flexible. I know you can do it.”

  Feeling like a complete idiot, in which condition he had been preceded by the great majority of the male members of his species, he reluctantly allowed himself to be dragged toward the middle of the softly lit room. The nearer they drew to the dance floor, the more he felt as if his legs were turning completely nonfunctional. The fact that he loomed over nearly everyone else made him feel that much more conspicuous.

  Clarity, on the other hand, reveled in the exposure. “Just follow me,” she instructed him, her voice rising above the thumping yet melodious music. “Let yourself go.”

  “I’ve never been able to let myself go,” he confessed frankly.

  “Then it’s about time you learned.” Backing slightly away from him, she began to move, to twirl, and to rise slightly off the reflective surface as the repellers integrated into her silken shoes reacted to the push-pulse of the energized floor.

  He would have been happy just to watch her, as several other male patrons of the club were already doing. Without question she was the most uninhibited gengineer he had ever met. Struggling with his ingrained inclination to remain unobtrusive, he began, in hesitant fits and jerks, to try and imitate her movements.

  “That’s it!” Shouting encouragingly above the roar of draums and the graduated timbalon, she moved closer, put her hands on his waist, and began to push and pull as if she were kneading a large, bipedal lump of taffy. He felt himself rising as the shoes she had insisted he purchase responded to the power flow from the floor.

  “You smell wonderful,” he told her even as he chided himself for the banality of the comment.

  She accepted the compliment in the spirit in which it was given. Her smile was radiant. When certain flashes of light caught her phototropically streaked dress and rendered sections of it see-through, he caught his breath. Leaning into her, he inhaled deeply.

  “You like the perfume? The test name is Shehwaru. I was one of the principal gengineers on the project.”

  “You made it?” Strange, he thought. The more one engaged in this tradition called dancing, the easier it became. He was certainly light enough on his feet, even without the aid of the repellers. Growing up as a thief had ingrained that in his movements. Lights flashed around them, sometimes becoming sound. Music metamorphosed into light. Above it all was Clarity, the sight and smell and closeness of her.

  “I contributed,” she told him. “The fragrance has oxytocin bound into the molecular structure. You know—the ‘snuggling’ hormone?” She moved away slightly, dervishing gracefully atop ten centimeters of perfumed, tinted air.

  Flinx did not know what she was talking about. Pheromonics were not a particular interest of his. But while he was little familiar with the process, he admitted to taking delight in the results. At least, he did until an all-too-familiar pounding began in his forehead.

  Clarity was immediately concerned when she saw him wince. She moved close to him, eyeing him with sudden alarm.

  “Flinx?” A glance at their table showed the minidrags were moving.

  “It’s all right, Clarity.” Placing the tips of the fingers of one hand against his forehead, he pushed firmly. Sometimes that helped. The throbbing receded a little. “I never know when they’re going to hit. Most of the time it starts up and then just goes away.” He mustered a reassuring smile. “I think I’m getting the hang of this dancing. Show me that last move again.”

  But before she could do so, a bolt of pain razored through his head that made him double over. In an instant, she had one consoling arm around his waist.

  “That’s it; we’re done here. I know you well enough to recognize what’s happening, Flinx. You came to me looking for understanding. Well, understand that we’re leaving. Now.”

  That he offered no objection was proof enough of how unwell he was starting to feel. Twice more he bent double, clutching his head, before they could gather up their pets and leave. Maybe getting him away from the lights and music would help, she found herself thinking as she paid the bill.

  He did feel a little better once they were outside in the cool night air.

  “I don’t care,” she told him. “I’m still taking you back to your hotel.”

  Regret filled his reply. “I don’t want to spoil your evening.”

  “We had a good time.” Her bracelet was flashing, automatically hailing private transport. “There’ll be other evenings. Right now the important thing is to get you to where you can lie down and rest.”

  The empty, cruising transport sidled up to them and politely asked their destination as it processed Clarity’s credcard. Flinx had recovered enough to mouth the name of his hotel. As the transport slid away from the club, humming to itself, he found that Clarity was pressed so tightly against him that Pip and Scrap had to move to opposite sides of their masters to find adequate space in which to perch.

  “I had fun.” Snuggled into his right side, she let one arm slide across his waist. He twitched. Must be the effects of the Shehwaru, he told himself. Pip looked resigned to coiling up between him and the door.

  “When was the last time you had fun, Flinx?”

  A ready reply formed on his lips. Trouble was, it was unsupported by memory. For the life of him, he could not recall the last time. Then the answer came to him. “A few minutes ago,” he whispered to her. “Tonight.”

  “I meant before tonight, silly.” She gave him a gentle punch on the shoulder.

  His neck snapped back, his body arched, and his eyes momentarily gaped wide at the roof of the transport before squeezing tight. Next to him, Pip went rigid. His headache, she knew, had returned with a vengeance.

  “Flinx!” She stared apprehensively at the now motionless body. “Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to . . . ?”

  Her head wrenched backward, her torso convulsed, and a pain the like of which she had rarely experienced shot through her skull like a hot bullet through fresh meat. Alongside her, Scrap spasmed once before becoming as stiff as a blue-and-pink walking cane.

  It is a strange thing to be in a dream and simultaneously be aware that it is a dream. As soon as she became conscious of the unreality in which she found herself, the pain began to go away. It never faded entirely, but it was greatly reduced.

  She was in a black place, floating. Expecting to share Flinx’s perceptions, half anticipating that she would again encounter the horrible dark thing that had touched her, she was bewildered and relieved when nothing hostile manifested itself. There was no awareness of Flinx, no sense of his proximity.

  But there was something else.

  Or maybe multiple something elses; she couldn’t really tell if the presence she perceived was several or singular. It was not overtly hostile but neither was it welcoming. The impressions she was receiving were
more of irritation than anger, as if they found her presence a nuisance. While unable to identify their awarenesses, she was mindful of what Flinx had told her of his own dreams.

  There was the mechanism of which he had spoken—ancient beyond belief yet still functional. There also the greenness, vast yet finite, utterly alien yet curiously maternal. And lastly there was the warmth to which he had alluded; indistinct, indefinable, yet somehow vaguely familiar. These sensations remained indistinct but cohesive, commanding yet accommodating. And in the middle of it all she drifted, astray in a place she did not want to be.

  Sensing the disapproval around her, she heard a hazy fraction of herself whisper, “Why?”

  “Because you are a distraction,” came the reply, “an extraneous diversion from That Which Is Truly Important. You affect his mind. You blur his reasoning. You divert his energies.”

  She did not have to wonder or ask who it/they were referring to. “What do you want with him? You cause him nothing but panic and pain.” The warmth grew slightly more intense around her. Before then, she did not know such a thing could be made visible so that one could not just feel it but see it as well.

  “We mean him no harm. But panic and pain advances on all, and must be countered. It reaches beyond him, and us and everything from white bacteria to red giants. It comes for all and must be resisted by all.”

  Flinx’s nightmares. The blackness that had touched her and left her trembling uncontrollably. “What does such a hostile enormity have to do with poor Flinx?”

  “He is the Key,” it/they responded without hesitation.

  In the nothingness that surrounded her, she felt lost in the multiple, vast presence. She had heard that before, from Flinx. Now she was hearing it again. “How can Flinx be the key to anything? He’s just one frightened, lost, confused human.”

  “He is the Key,” she was told again, more forcefully this time. “How, we do not know. When, we do not know. Where, we do not know. But he is the Key. That we do know.”