Patrimony Page 15

  Watching the young Tlel at play on the cliff edge, Flinx could not help but marvel at how readily the locals had adapted not only to a fad current among young humans, but to one that required special modifications to the necessary equipment. There were only four of them. That was the Tlel way. Other than for traditional exceptions such as a rescue or hunting party, it was best to have no more than four in a group, though he still did not know if the reason for this unswerving, self-imposed limitation was social, psychological, or physical in the sense that it might be somehow related to their ability to perceive flii.

  Though the side street where he was standing was steep, he had no difficulty keeping his balance as he tilted back his head and stared upward. Built to accommodate the cloddish, blocky feet of the Tlel, the street had been deeply incised with horizontal ripples. The footing thus provided even in damp, slippery weather was as advantageous to a human as it was for the villagers.

  Shading his eyes with his right hand he watched as one of the youngsters, unburdened by any complicated apparatus, stepped calmly off the edge of the hundred-meter-high cliff and plunged downward. Immediately, the adolescent’s three friends raced toward him on their lifters, riding air as each sought to be the first to partner with the plummeter. They bounced and spun off one another, jockeying for position.

  Having spread wide her long arms and thick legs, the seemingly suicidal youngster who had initiated the contest fell surfaceward. She was in no danger, Flinx knew. Continuously monitoring the distance between itself and the ground, the fail-safe lifter strapped to her back would engage in time to slow her descent and set her down safely on the pavement. Assuming, of course, that her plunge was not first interrupted by one of the three other youngsters presently competing to do just that.

  Skill at levitating, falling, fighting, and catching combined to award points to the most adroit and successful. Looking on, Flinx had no difficulty understanding the game’s attraction. The part of him that was still an adopted orphan boy freely roaming the bustling streets of distant Drallar, on Moth, wanted to don a lifter of his own so he could participate. He knew he could not. More important, more adult objectives demanded his energy and attention. He was not a kid anymore. Not that he had ever really been one, he mused wryly.

  Someone else was not as constrained, either by past or present. Sunlight glinted off a small winged shape that darted recklessly in and among the competing lifters as well as the targeted plummeter. Gleefully welcomed into their midst by the soaring, maneuvering Tlel youth, Pip’s joyful presence added a new and stimulating element to the game. For a change, the feelings that washed over Flinx as he intermittently connected with his colorful winged companion were entirely free of everything but joy.

  I should get a lifter, he kept telling himself. Show them how it’s done. He stood and watched, pondering, wishing. Approaching from behind, a more multifaceted set of emotions caused him to turn away from the juvenile aerial contest. More multifaceted and more—mature. Ordinarily open and receptive, he found that at that moment he did not especially welcome them. As brief as they had been heart tugging, memories and thoughts of his carefree youth evaporated as quickly as a snowball on the sun.

  His irritation was unfair to Zlezelrenn and Vlashraa, whose feelings were nothing if not kindly disposed in his direction. Having no way of perceiving his melancholy, they could not sympathize. Dragged back to the present by callous reality, Flinx forced himself to greet them politely.

  Raising a long arm, Zlezelrenn indicated the contending youngsters. “Going tu join in?”

  “No,” Flinx told him tersely. “It’s just a kids’ game. I don’t have time for kids’ games.” His translator could only convey the meaning of his words and not the bitterness behind them. He put his disappointment out of his mind. “This is the last place I’d expect to find youngsters of another species playing gravgrave.”

  Satisfaction was evident in the sentiments the Tlel projected, if not in the minimal distortions of his alien visage. Natural physiological constraints prevented the Tlel from being physically expressive. “As yu have been told, ur people were and remain quickquick tu import frum the rest uv the Commonwealth whatever is deemed useful. Cultural influences are as readily welcomewelcomed as technology.”

  “It’s not usual.” Accompanied by the adult Tlel, Flinx started back down the street. Stabilizing ripples in the pavement notwithstanding, he was careful to watch his step on the steep downhill grade. “Especially at first, less technologically developed species tend to resist such influences.”

  “We have alwaysalways been highly adaptable.” Vlashraa indicated their surroundings: the deep valley cut by its unnavigable river, the dense blue and green forest, and the towering peaks beyond. “Ur world demands it. We have always welcomed anything that makes a hard life easier.”

  Flinx glanced down at her. “Is that why you agreed almost immediately after first contact to allow individuals of other Commonwealth species, especially my kind, to settle here? Visitation is one thing, but actual settlement is something else again. The matter of granting permanent residency to large numbers of another species is a question that many other sentient races find very—” He sought for the right Tlelian term. “—touchtouchy.”

  After his escorts exchanged a glance, it was Zlezelrenn who replied. “Stars, river, forest, sky—these things belongbelong tu all. Humans and Tlel—and other intelligences—may be very different physically, but what is necessary tu create happiness among us is not so dissimilar. Silvoun is like a house with many rooms that is owned by small family. Better empty rooms should be used tu make people happy than stay empty.”

  “Besides,” Vlashraa added, “we have always gotten along well-well with yur kind, frum very beginning. Though we not look alike, we likelike many uv same things. Clean air, beautiful mountains, gud food. Human settlement has been gud fur Silvoun and gud fur Tlel. It is much easier tu participate in something vast and nu like interstellar commerce when one is partnered with humans whu are already familiar with its workings. We have made manymany successful and useful enterprises together.”

  “Still,” Flinx argued, “it’s not usual for indigenous people to readily sell property to offworlders. Much less to accompany it with citizenship.”

  The feeding appendages beneath Zlezelrenn’s chin rippled in reaction. “The Tlel have ample land fur all.”

  How long would that attitude last? Flinx wondered. While it was true that for now, at least, Gestalt/Silvoun was hardly overrun by humans, conflict over property rights was an inevitable occurrence on many more developed worlds. He wondered why this should trouble him. Why should he care? In all likelihood he would be long dead before any such conflict arose. Or at the very least an old man on some other world, in another system parsecs distant. Pondering the question, he supposed he cared because he had always cared about such things. Mother Mastiff, on the other hand, would have urged him to rush out and buy land.

  Well, he wasn’t here because he was tempted by the possibilities inherent in local real estate, he reminded himself firmly. Tomorrow he would see about trying to arrange some form of transportation back to distant Tlossene. It looked like he was going to have to organize his journey to visit the shadowy Anayabi all over again.

  Propped up in the semi-vertical sleeping position not only favored by but in fact essential to her kind, Vlashraa was slumbering soundly when she was awakened. By the light he held, she saw that it was Zlezelrenn who had roused her. A simple voice command activated the illumination in her sleeping quarters. She was startled to see that he was accompanied by several others, Healer Fluadann among them. Stepping off the sleeping platform, she confronted her nocturnal visitors. The flutter in their flii told her immediately that something was wrong.

  “It is the guest,” one of the other callers explained in response to her question as she hurriedly donned leggings and transparent work poncho. “He tosses and turns and cries out in his sleep.”

  “This not typi
cal uv human sleep.” Though not a multispecies practitioner, Fluadann knew enough to know when one of the furless bipeds was acting in an abnormal manner. “The guest is clearclearly in considerable distress.”

  Vlashraa was almost ready. “Why not just wake him?”

  “We would,” Zlezelrenn told her, “but the flying creature will not let us near him. Making noise tu wake him might cause more harm than gud.” Reaching out, he let several cilia make contact with the side of her head. “Once all whu have knowledge uv humans, and this particular human especially, have assembled, we will try tu decide how best tu proceed.”

  “Unless of course,” Healer Fluadann declared hopefully, “the guest’s slumber has eased.”

  It had not. Poncho closed tight around her body to ward off the cold night wind, Vlashraa joined the others in traipsing through the darkness until they reached the large cliff dwelling where the guest was being housed. She sensed his disturbed flii even before she started up the sloping walkway, heard his eerie moans and cries before she entered his sleeping area, and saw him tossing and rolling about on the sleeping platform before her view was blocked by the determined, hovering shape of the flying creature that accompanied him everywhere. Claiming the space between the distraught sleeper and the single triangular doorway that was now crowded by Vlashraa and her friends, it left little doubt as to its purpose. So long as it could stay airborne, no one else would be allowed to approach the figure whose rest was so obviously and vehemently unsettled.

  “What are we tu du?” a concerned Zlezelrenn murmured aloud.

  “There is nothing we can du,” Vlashraa responded. “At least, not until and unless the flying thing allows us tu go tu the unsettled one.” Following her words, the figure on the angled bed twisted sharply to his right, simultaneously uttering a long, drawn-out, pained ululation. Well-intentioned but helpless to do anything as long as Pip prevented access to the sleeper, the mindful Tlel could only stand by and watch.

  It was closer now, Flinx saw. Vaster and faster, enveloping and obliterating everything in its path. Organic life-forms that hardly had time to cry out before they were annihilated, cold uninhabited rocky worlds and riotous seething gas giants, suns primeval and suns aborning—all gone as if they had never been; wiped out, eradicated, swept from reality like grains of sand from a shore. The dark evil that had extinguished them surged onward. Mindless but mindful; uncaring, sinister, and unstoppable.

  His galaxy would be next. Millions of stars would vanish together with their companion worlds and nebulae. The Commonwealth and its tentative, burgeoning civilization, the Empire of the avaricious AAnn, species independent and isolated, all would be erased from existence, eradicated as effectively and efficiently as he would delete a file from quantum storage. Ever unsated, the incalculable malevolence would sweep on to the next galaxy, leaving in its immeasurable wake only emptiness where intelligence had once dared to peep outward and contemplate itself.

  Clarity and Mother Mastiff, Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex: everyone who had ever meant anything to him would be gone, gone, gone. In the end of ends it would not matter because he would be gone, too. Nothing could halt the oncoming void. Nothing except perhaps an alien weapons platform deficient in memory and lost in time. Nothing except that, and by a quirk of fate as indifferent and uncaring as the Great Evil itself, one minuscule organic blip. The blip had a name attached to it: Philip Lynx. One who ought not to be alive was expected to try to save billions who should be, who deserved to be.

  He was not entirely alone. There was the trio of inscrutable sentiences that frequently participated in his uneasy dreams and helped to sustain his sleeping sanity: the hard, cold thinking of an ancient artificial intelligence that was intimately related to the weapons platform for which he was supposed to be searching, a feral green life-force that he now felt had something to do with the place called Midworld, and a warm-blooded intelligence that remained unidentified but was definitely nonhuman. Having recently been saved once again by his friends the brilliant but child-like Ulru-Ujurrians, he was now almost certain this last could not be them. One component of the supportive dream triad he knew, one he emfoled and empathized with, and the third remained an enigma. Hardly a reliable army with which to try to oppose peril on a cosmic scale.

  And he the key. The trigger, he had been told. The trigger to what? I am not a gun! he howled at himself and at the eavesdropping cosmos. Nor part of one, he added more calmly in his restless sleep.

  Catalyst, the uncompromising artificiality countered.

  Medium, insisted the persistent emerald city.

  Sad trigger, declared the sympathetic but steadfast passion.

  No! No more…! he screamed.

  And sat up.

  He expected Pip to be eyeing him, watching over him, as she always did when he slept. He did not expect to see the half a dozen or so slightly reflective eyebands of solemn Tlel arrayed nearby. There was no need to blink away sleep. As was frequently the case following such episodes, he woke up already wide awake. The back of his head and neck felt as if a pair of tiny but muscular invisible figures were taking turns using a large sledgehammer to pound steel rods into his skull.

  “How long have you been watching me?” he muttered, simultaneously embarrassed and pleased by the attention. Though the odor of so many Tlel packed into the space just inside the doorway bordered on the overpowering, he determined to ignore it.

  “Long enough.” Healer Fluadann stepped forward. Her master awake, Pip retired to the top of the sleeping platform and settled herself there, as exhausted by her discomfited master’s Morphean anguish as he was. “We speculate on what could inspire such terribleterrible night-dreamings.”

  “We wonder if we can help,” Zlezelrenn put in without waiting for the Healer to finish.

  Flinx rubbed hard at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “There’s nothing you can do,” he replied disconsolately. “There’s nothing anyone can do. It’s my burden. My suffering. I just have to live with it—until I die.”

  While he heard Vlashraa’s response, it was the authenticity of her feelings that caused emotion of a different kind to well up within him. Their heads might be shaped like platters, their hands might terminate in a snarl of glistening filaments, and their body odor might be stomach churning, but these were good people who genuinely wanted to help.

  “There must be something we can du,” she whispered earnestly.

  Others have tried, he was about to say. About to, because he remembered that he did need help, albeit of a kind that had nothing to do with his dreams and nightmares. Perhaps, if they were as concerned as their straightforward feelings seemed to indicate, they might even be able to provide more help than he dared hope for.

  “There…is something that might ease my distress. I hesitate to mention it because it’s a lot to ask. Even if you’d still like to help after hearing the details, you might not have the wherewithal to do so.”

  Emotions among the assembled Tlel grew confused. Zlezelrenn spoke for them all as well as for the community. “We cannot demur until we are asked.”

  Flinx nodded perceptively. Behind him, from the top of the inclined sleeping platform, Pip surveyed with interest the small room that was now flooded with emotion. Open, guileless emotion, Flinx was convinced. For a little while at least, in this good company, he felt confident he could let down his guard a tiny bit. He plunged onward.

  “I’ve come to talk to someone who might or might not be my father. It’s very important to me that I try to meet with this person or I wouldn’t have come all this way.” In the dim light, multiple impenetrable eyebands shone back at him. But the emotions that stirred behind them were as clear and easy to follow as the veins on the back of his hand. “Your village is very close to where this person lives. I can wait until I can get transportation back to Tlossene, hire a new skimmer and escort, and start out again. But if you really want to do something to help me, and we don’t have to go on foot, it would be a lot faster
and easier to go to this place from Tleremot.” He did not add that in that way, whoever had tried to kill him would miss out on the chance to try again in Tlossene.

  The assembled Tlel murmured among themselves. Finally, Vlashraa turned back to him. “Yu du not know if this individual is yur male parent or not?”

  Flinx shook his head. “No. I’ve been looking for that person for a very long time. I was raised by a single nonparent.”

  Further discussion ensued before she spoke again. “Where is the place tu which yu wish tu go?”

  “I know the coordinates that were entered into my skimmer’s navigation system. I’m fairly certain I could also find it on a map.”

  “Maps we have,” Healer Fluadann confirmed.

  The youngest of Flinx’s nocturnal visitors was sent running, to return soon after with a small projection unit in hand. The three-dimensional display it generated showed not only river valleys and mountain ridges but also forests and talus and caves, not to mention the current weather, continuously updated. Observing that Tleremot was the only community in the immediate vicinity of the river, Flinx realized how truly lucky he was to have been found by Zlezelrenn and Vlashraa’s hunting party.

  Drawing upon his excellent memory, he identified a small valley at the confluence of two tributaries. “That’s where I need to go.” According to the map and in accord with his best guess as to where his craft had gone down, it was not far from the village—as the hlusumakai flies. Or the skimmer. Getting there by any other means was certain to take longer than a couple of days. How much longer would depend on what mode of transportation was available to the villagers.