The End of the Matter Read online

  The problem lay with Isili, he felt. While not openly antagonistic, she was cautious to the point of paranoia. He tried to reach out mentally to her and received an impression of enormous emotion barely held in check. Surprisingly little of it was directed toward him or September. It was all wrapped tightly inside her. She was like the coil of an old-time generator: On the surface all was calm, but overload it slightly and wires would fly in all directions.

  Taking a seat on a block of trimmed green stone, he explained about his search for his true parents. He censored those details which might upset or prejudice his hosts, avoided mention of Ulru-Ujurr and his flight from the Qwarm. His mere presence was unnerving enough to Hasboga. No need to make it worse.

  He finished with his search for a big man, one with a gold earring and a small minidrag, who had tried to buy him over a dozen years ago.

  “Twelve years, standard time,” he said, staring hard at the watching September. “I was five years old. Do you remember it?”

  Isili’s eyes widened, and she stared accusingly at September. “A five-year-old child, Skua. Well, well.” She gave Flinx a knowing look when the giant failed to respond. “He remembers something, for sure. This is the first time I’ve ever seen him speechless.”

  “Yes. Yes, I remember, lad,” September finally admitted, looking and sounding like a man reliving a dream he had forgotten. “I did have a small minidrag with me.”

  “Did you leave Moth with it?” inquired a tense Flinx.

  “No.” Something trembled inside Flinx. He felt like a person with amnesia slowly regaining memory of lost events. “It finally left me in a bar. I was drunk. Minidrags can be temperamental. It probably decided I wasn’t fit to associate with any more.”

  “I know how temperamental they can be,” Flinx assured him. He forbade mentioning that Pip might have been the same minidrag September had lost. “I . . . used to have one myself.”

  “Then you do know. And you also probably know, lad, that on Moth it’s a severe crime to import venomous creatures. So I couldn’t very well march myself up to the nearest gendarmerie and ask for help. Not without being thrown in jail for letting a toxic alien loose on the planet. Sure, but I remember the slave auction.” His memory of the incident appeared to grow stronger the longer he thought about it. “I bid on you. I was bidding on several in the same consignment.”

  “Several others with me?” Flinx frowned. This didn’t fit. “What others?”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to tell you that just yet, young feller-me-lad,” the big man announced softly. For some reason he appeared almost afraid of Flinx, as if the youth were a bomb who might explode at any second. Flinx could not understand. The dialogue was not following the scenario he had constructed in his imagination as to how this momentous talk would proceed.

  One way or the other, his last trail seemed to be drawing inexorably to a dead end. Already, one possible link was broken. His meeting with Pip when he was six years old appeared to have been accidental. A coincidence only.

  “For yourself?” he asked uncertainly.

  September snorted. “I wouldn’t know what to do with a slave. No, lad, I was bidding for an organization.”

  The trail abruptly revealed a fresh length of itself. Perhaps the giant wasn’t the end after all.

  “What organization?” he pressed the big man. “Does it still exist? Could it be traced if it’s disbanded, traced to its responsible individuals?”

  “Easy down, lad,” September advised him, making calming motions with both hands. “You’ve already told us you found out about your natural mother last year.”

  “Yes. She’s dead. She died before I was sold.” Silently he strained his erratic abilities, trying to see if the information sparked any response in September’s mind. He was disappointed. The big man exhibited no reaction he could detect, mental or otherwise.

  “As to my natural father, I know nothing,” he continued, “I do know that my father wasn’t the man my natural mother was married to. I’d hoped that by tracing whoever was trying to buy me, I might discover some new information leading to him.”

  “That makes sense, feller-me-lad,” agreed an approving September.

  “Nothing makes sense,” growled Isili, who had listened to about as much of Flinx’s problems as she could stand. “What about us, Skua?” She was stalking magnificently back and forth, her ebony mane flying, her amber eyes glowing. “Nothing makes sense if all the work we’ve put in here goes for nothing, and it will if the Otoid persist after us.” She stopped abruptly and whirled on him. “Months of planning, years of research, and we come up with nothing!” She wrung her hands in frustration. “I don’t know why I tear myself up about it. I’m probably all wrong about this temple. We’ve been excavating for nearly two months and we haven’t found anything beyond those.” She indicated the exquisite carvings lining the chamber’s interior. “And we didn’t have to move a pebble to find them. Hieroglyphs, stories . . . what a waste.”

  “They seem unusually well preserved to me” was Flinx’s comment. He found her attitude peculiarly unscientific.

  She startled him by trying to read his mind. The force of her desire shocked him a little, although he knew she had no talents of any kind. She possessed a powerful mind, did Isili Hasboga, but it was not a mind of Talent.

  “So you think the historical and scientific aspects of our grub should interest me more, do you?” she eventually inquired. “My real work is back home, on Comagrave. There’s a site in the Mountains of the Mourners that’s never been dug. No foundation or museum or university thinks it’s worth excavating.” Her eyes blazed. “I know better! They’re wrong, all of them!”

  Fanaticism in pursuit of knowledge, Flinx reflected, was still fanaticism.

  “I know what’s there,” she rambled on, “under the garb mounds. And I’ll find it, even though I have to mount and finance my own expedition. But for that I need credits. All of us need credits.” She drew herself up haughtily. “That’s why we’re all on Alaspin. As you are neither a scientist nor a researcher,” she concluded with a twinge of bitterness, “I don’t suppose I can expect you to understand that.”

  “Maybe I understand more than you think” was his quiet reply. “I have a good friend, a young thranx who was once a student archeologist in the Church, who would have sympathized completely with your attitude at one time. She’s since found other things to do.” He wondered how Sylzenzuzex was managing without him in teaching the ursinoids back on Ulru-Ujurr.

  “It’s all for nothing anyway, now.” She slumped. “Damn all unreasonable, xenophobic aborigines! Damn this world and its endless temples!” She sucked in a resigned breath. “Nothing now but to try to get out and try somewhere else, Skua. Maybe they’ll leave us alone if we move to the other side of the city. But it’s got to be somewhere in Mimmisompo. It’s got to be!”

  Flinx had no idea what “it” might be. It wouldn’t have been discreet to inquire. Such a question would serve only to heighten Hasboga’s suspicion of him.

  But, having found the man with the earring, he could not let him go. Not till every question was satisfied. The internal portables brightened, compensating for the vanishing illumination outside.

  “If you’re finished with your grubbing,” he told September, “I’ll hire you.”

  “You, hire me?” The giant smiled condescendingly at him. “What’ll you pay me with, lad? Stories, and entertainment provided by your poor ward?” He indicated the gallivanting Ab.

  Flinx took no offense. He had come to expect such disbelief. “Whatever your cost, if it’s in reason, I can pay it. How much?”

  “That sounds like a sincere proposal,” September confessed. Flinx thought the giant threw a mischievous glance at Hasboga. “I suppose if we are going to give up here . . .”

  “Then both of you can go to hell!” Hasboga exploded, the barely suppressed anger finally erupting. She stormed over to glare down at Flinx.

  “First y
ou bring the Otoid down on us and now you want to steal Skua. Well, my skinny stripling, you’re in no position to buy. Only to give. You owe me. We saved your miserable, barely begun life because on Alaspin help is rendered without question to those who need it. Don’t you forget that.” She turned away from him to confront an amused September. “And, mercenary that you are, Skua, don’t forget that you and I have a contract. Of course, if you want to buy out from under me . . .”

  “What, from under you?” Bushy brows lifted in mock astonishment. Flinx got the impression that maybe the relationship between these two was something other than wholly professional. He winced at the slap she gave the giant, but September only rubbed at the reddening place on his face and grinned more widely, almost approvingly.

  Stalking away from them both, she threw herself down on the huge inflated mattress and buried her attention in a small, self-contained reader screen. For Flinx, there followed several moments of embarrassed silence.

  “For a scientist she can behave awfully irrationally at times, feller-me-lad,” September confided to him. He added, somewhat reassuringly: “These spells don’t last much longer than they take. Watch.” He winked.

  Strolling over to the mattress, he sat down next to her. She ignored him. He pretended to peer over her shoulder at the screen.

  “Now, Isili, it’s not nice to act petulant before the lad.”

  “Get lost!” she snapped. “I’m busy.”

  “I can see that,” admitted a seemingly startled September, his eyes bulging as he focused on the tiny screen. “I can tell what the man and the woman are doing, but the two tendril cats are—”

  With an exasperated sigh, she looked up at him and spoke in a tone one would use with a child. “This is a perfectly plain theoretical tract, as you can easily see.”

  “Oh yes, I can see it, all right.” Sitting back, he whistled solemnly at the ceiling. Flinx marveled at the man’s élan, considering that they might all be dead the next night.

  Rolling over, Hasboga sat up straight, put her hands on her hips, and glared at the giant. “Are you implying that I’m watching pornography?”

  “Oh no,” September started. “No, no, no, no. It’s just that, in front of one so young . . .” He gestured toward Flinx. “And tendril cats, too.” He clucked disapprovingly.

  “Listen, you outrageous parody of a human being, if you think you can embarrass—” She stopped. September was grinning down at her. She fought to remember what she was about to say, but for the life of her couldn’t get a grip on her half-disintegrated thought. Her mouth twisted and gradually broke into an almost shy smile.

  The moment she realized what she was doing, her lips immediately clicked primly back to a firm set. “It’s important work,” she muttered lamely. She gestured weakly toward Flinx. “Go bother our visitor for a while and leave me alone.”

  Turning away, she went back to the viewer, but Flinx could sense that the dark cloud of fury which had been hovering over her had evaporated.

  September obligingly walked back to flop down heavily in front of Flinx. “See? Silly’s not such a bad sort. In fact, she’s rather a good sort. Pity there aren’t more like her.” Commentary came from the vicinity of the viewer, but it was garbled and indistinct and not really angry any more.

  “It’s you that interests me right now, feller-me-lad. You’ve come a great way and a hard way to find me. You want to know about that day a dozen years ago, on Moth. I’ll try to tell you what I can. That way, maybe I can learn a little too.” He sighed. “I suppose you know who sold you, if you found out about your natural mother.”

  “I do.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I think so.”

  September shook his head. “I don’t think you do. Not all of it. I can’t tell you the rest, not yet. There are ethical questions involved.”

  Flinx’s laugh was so harsh that he wondered at it himself. “You’re talking to someone torn from his parents before he can remember, and sold like a piece of meat on a world not of his birthing.”

  “All right,” September shifted agreeably, “call it a business confidence, then. I probably will tell you, in time. But I need to think on it. Remember, I didn’t have to tell you I knew anything.”

  “We’ll let it pass for now,” replied Flinx magnanimously, since be couldn’t coerce the giant anyway. His next question he had to consider carefully. For a large part of his adult life he had framed it, rephrased it, turned it over and over in his mind, considered how he would present it to various people. He had developed and discarded a hundred different approaches. Now the moment to ask had come. This might be the last moment in a search that had taken him across half the Commonwealth and through stranger adventures than most people could imagine.

  He forgot all preconceptions, leaned forward, and asked with unsophisticated innocence: “Are you my father?”

  September took the question well. Maddeningly, he didn’t venture an immediate reply. Indecision was the last thing Flinx had expected from the big man. September looked at the floor, using a landing-skid-sized foot to move rubble in meaningless patterns.

  Flinx strained in the silence with all his desire, tried to bring his infrequent, awesome talent to focus on the man before him. The falseness or truth of September’s eventual answer could be the most important thing in his young life. But, as so often happened, when he most wanted his abilities to function, they mocked him. Some days they could operate with the precision of a tridee beam, could pierce the nothingness between worlds. Now, even his own thoughts were unreadable.

  When September looked up, he wore an expression of almost overwhelming earnestness. All thoughts of prevarication left Flinx. This man was not going to lie to him. He stared so long and hard that for a second Flinx wondered uncomfortably if the giant didn’t possess unsuspected mental talents of his own. But while his gaze was intense, it was only from concentration.

  “Young feller-me-lad, Flinx, believe me when I say I wish I knew.”

  Stunned, Flinx could only gape back at him. A yes he could have coped with. That was an answer he had been prepared to deal with a hundred thousand times in his imagination. A no would have been harder to handle, but he would have been ready for that, too. But “I wish I knew”?

  So unexpected was the indeterminate answer that the youth who had organized the Ulru-Ujurrians, who had outwitted the Church and baffled Conda Challis, could only say lamely: “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “Don’t you think I wish I did?” September half pleaded. “I am uncertain. I am indecisive, I can’t say for sure because I don’t know for sure. Positiveness of either possibility escapes me. I can’t shade it yes or darken it no. There’s no room for maybes, feller-me-lad. It’s what I said plain, which means . . . I could be.”

  “Let’s not play,” Flinx said slowly, coldly. “Did you ever sleep with my mother, who was a Lynx of Allahabad, India Province, Terra?”

  September shook his head, looking at Flinx as if for the first time. “What an unusual young man you are. You’ve got brains and guts, Flinx-lad. You’re not by chance extremely wealthy, are you?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Good,” September commented with satisfaction, “because if you were, and I said I was your father, you’d have the natural suspicion of the wealthy and not believe me.”

  “How do you know I’d have any intention of sharing any wealth with you?” countered Flinx. “Maybe I’m looking for my father out of feelings of anger. Maybe I’d want just to blow your brains out.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you,” replied September. “But I never slept with your mother, of that I am certain. Nor have I ever been to India Province, let alone the city you mentioned. I’ve no idea who your mother was, and I doubt if I’d recognize her face or name if you confronted me with her this instant.”

  “No chance of that,” Flinx assured him. “I told you, she’s been dead since before I was sold.”

  “I’m sorry for
that,” September said, expressing genuine-sounding sorrow for someone he had just claimed never to have known.

  Flinx’s thoughts were full of speculation and garbage. “I don’t understand this, I don’t understand.”

  “Who does?” mused the giant philosophically.

  “If you never even met my natural mother, let alone slept with her, then how could you possibly be my father?”

  “Like most circles, it all ties together, feller-me-lad.” September put both hands behind his shaggy head and leaned back. “Why do you think I was there on Moth that day, trying to buy you, and why do you think I didn’t?”

  “You didn’t have the money to bid against Mother Mastiff,” suggested Flinx. “The old woman who finally bought me.” Then something else the slaver had mentioned came back to him. “You left the auction in a hurry, and there were a large number of police in the crowd.”

  “Very good, your sources have good memories,” commented September. “I had the money to buy you, and the others. But I was a wanted man. Somehow the police knew I was on Moth. Since the reward for me was considerable, they came a-hunting. I had to leave fast. Purchasing you was one assignment I was never able to carry out. One of the few I’ve never been able to carry out. By the by, how much is it worth to you to find out if I really am your natural father?”

  Flinx had never considered having to pay for the final word. “I don’t know. I have to think on that one myself.”

  “Okay,” agreed the giant, “so do I.” He rolled over, pebbles scraping the floor beneath him. “We’ll talk more tomorrow. Right now I’m feeling done in. Saving your life was an exhausting business.”

  Father or not, Flinx would cheerfully have strangled the big man over the delay. But there was nothing to do, and he did not want to risk antagonizing September. He was not a man to be pushed. Besides, he told himself, he had waited this long, another evening would not make any difference. And he was completely worn out himself. Anyhow, he doubted that his hands would fit around September’s enormous neck.

  As it turned out, morning prevented any resumption of their conversation. Automatic scanners performed their function. So did the alarms they were connected to. The three sane occupants of the ancient temple chamber came awake to a clamorous howling.