Flinx in Flux

by Alan Dean Foster

  When the last farewell had been emoted, Heavy assumed the front position, with Thoughtful-grave in the rear. They would progress by touch, Heavy feeling for the right way with Sowelmanu behind, then Clarity and Flinx.

  Scrap fluttered nervously against Clarity’s sidetail, reflecting her fear as they left behind the now familiar section of the Sumacrean cavern. Flinx sensed it also and let his hand slip frequently from her shoulder to her hip. It confused her emotions and thus helped submerge her fear in other thoughts and feelings. She could not turn to slap away his hand since she could not see him and would lose contact with Sowelmanu, so she had to content herself with comments. It took her mind off their difficult situation.

  “I hope these people can feel their way as efficiently as they can their emotions,” Sowelmanu said conversationally. “I would dislike stepping in another of the rain drains which swallowed us all, or into a less friendly hole.”

  “This is their world, Sowel,” Flinx reminded the geologist. “They know where they are and where they’re going. We couldn’t lose ourselves if we wanted to. They’d simply trace our emotional projections through the darkness.”

  “We’re ascending.” There was a hopeful note in Clarity’s voice for the first time in days. “They really do know the way.”

  “We are not there yet, young woman.” It was thranx nature to be cautious. “Restrain your enthusiasm.”

  “The less noise we make, the better.” Flinx kept his own voice to a whisper. “There might be other ears listening that are as sensitive as the Sumacrea’s but whose intentions toward us are less benign.”

  Clarity lowered her voice but was unable to repress her excitement. The higher they climbed, the nearer they were to light and to being able to see once again.

  Mindful of Sowelmanu’s description of the main warehousing location, Flinx tried to explain to their guides that it was necessary to enter the world of the Outer Cave dwellers at a specific place. When he was through, he could not be certain he had gotten the concept across. It was one thing to express how one felt about something, quite another to try to communicate specifics. A location, after all, is not a feeling. One could feel better about being somewhere or unhappy about being someplace else, but to project a feeling of one particular spot was difficult no matter how sophisticated the emotional language.

  After climbing steadily for some time, the path they were following finally leveled off. They kept on until the injured Sowelmanu complained of exhaustion. Five legs or not, he was still not comfortable with his awkward gait.

  They rested for several hours, then resumed climbing. Eventually it was the turn of Heavy to call a halt. Sowelmanu and Clarity, unable to detect his intentions, piled up against him and each other.

  “What now?” she asked Flinx.

  He was straining to feel clearly. “Warning. Uncertainty. Confusion and pain.”

  “You mean he’s hurt himself?”

  “No. It’s an emotional pain. Something nearby is upsetting him. You and Sowel stay put. I’m going up to see what it is.”

  Feeling his way past his companions, he advanced by placing one foot carefully in front of the other. If they were in any immediate danger, Heavy would have warned him to stay back. That did not mean there could not be a sheer thousand-meter drop immediately to his left or right. Sometimes the absence of light could be a blessing instead of a curse. The danger one could not see did not exist.

  He touched Heavy, who stepped aside. Flinx cautiously felt his way forward until his right foot bumped something soft. He halted immediately.

  Using his feet, he felt his way around the body until he had circled it completely. At first he thought it was one very large form. Closer tactile inspection revealed the truth: There were two.

  “What is it?” Clarity inquired from the darkness behind him. Though she was standing less than two meters away, she had no idea what was happening.

  “Humans. Both of them dead. They’ve been cold for a while. Both male, both armed.”

  “The fanatics? Or port Security personnel?”

  “I don’t know.” He bent and continued to use his hands in the absence of vision. “I think one’s wearing a headlight. The other has some kind of lens arrangement strapped across his chest. It might be a light, too.”

  “Well, try them, see if they work!”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” he replied irritably. Moments later he straightened. “No luck. Both unresponsive.”

  “If they perished here,” Sowelmanu said thoughtfully, “they may have done so with their lights on. Perhaps they carried spare cells. I will help you look.”

  “Me, too.” Clarity bumped into Sowelmanu, who muttered a typically gentle thranx curse. Thereafter they forced themselves to work slowly through the pockets of the two corpses.

  “I’ve found something—I think.” Clarity passed the small cylinder across to Flinx.

  “Might be. Might be an old dead cell, too.”

  “Just now I prefer optimism to realism, my friend.” Sowelmanu’s tone was thick with first-degree anticipation. “Try it.”

  “I’ll see if I can fit it in the chest unit. It should be easier to open. And don’t rush me. Be a fine irony if somebody makes me drop it and it rolls into a crevice.”

  It took nearly an hour to accomplish the switch, a task that in normal light would have required a few seconds. He wanted to be sure of position and contact. Only when he was positive that it was securely in place did he take the additional time to unstrap the chest unit from the faceless body.

  “What are you waiting for?” Clarity prompted him. “Try the contact.”

  “I can’t just yet. One more thing I have to do.”

  Concentrating the way he had been instructed to, he imagined a tremendous burst of heat. It produced an image many times the brightness of a photomorph. Excessive, but better not to take any chances. Something as intense as a high-powered incandescent beam might do permanent damage to the feeble light-sensing organs of the Sumacrea. Heavy and Thoughtful-grave understood and made sure they were facing him, their eyes pointed away and well shielded beneath protective fur.

  So concerned was he with protecting their guides that he neglected to warn his companions. He also forgot to prepare himself. The result was that all three of them let out varying screeches of discomfort when the light came on. They had spent so many days in total darkness that the refulgent beam stung them as severely as it might have the Sumacrea. Pip and Scrap were similarly affected.

  Heavy and Thoughtful-grave retreated behind a drape of opaque flowstone, bending their hands up and back to cover their eyes. Enough light still managed to penetrate hands, hair, and stone to cause them pain. Flinx felt the emotional cries as deeply as any scream and quickly shut off the beam.

  “Why did you do that?” Clarity asked loudly. “Why’d you turn it back out? What if it doesn’t come back on? What if . . .”

  “Calm down. There’s nothing wrong with the unit. It just needed the new cell. The light was hurting our friends. It hurts them even when they hide from it. We still need them to lead us to the back side of the warehouse. Just because we can light our way doesn’t mean we’re any closer to finding the right route. When we had the two tubes before, we just went around in circles.”

  “We have to have some light.” Clarity was adamant. “I’m not stumbling around in pitch darkness when we have a perfectly good high-L beam.”

  “A suggestion.” They both turned in the blackness to face Sowelmanu. “Utilize the clothing of these unfortunate humans to muffle and dim the light to a degree the Sumacrea find tolerable. They have observed sliders and photomorphs and their cousins, so they can stand certain minimal illumination. We do not need light to follow them, but it would, as Clarity implies, be refreshing to be able to see where we are placing our own feet.”

  Flinx considered. “Not a bad idea. I’ll try to explain it to Heavy and Thoughtful-grave. Then we’ll give it a try.”

  It was whi
le removing the shirt from the first body that he thought he felt something moving slightly beneath the underlying layer of flexible body armor. The special plastic would stop a needler blast but not a laser. Evidently it had failed to stop something less advanced but more sinister. It reminded him of something .

  “Back!” he shouted as he rose hastily. “Everybody back!”

  “What’s wrong?” He could hear Clarity and Sowelmanu retreat with gratifying speed.

  “I felt something moving.” Pip was coiled tightly around his neck, and he had to physically loosen her coils so that he could speak clearly. “Under the shirt. Under the armor. It felt familiar.”

  “I do not understand,” the worried geologist said.

  “Give me a minute to think.”

  Once more he warned Heavy and Thoughtful-grave to take cover. This time they would do a more thorough job of it since they had some idea of what to expect. Only when he was certain of their safety and of his companions’ preparedness did he switch the high-lumen beam back on.

  Gradually, painfully, their eyes grew accustomed to what was really a very low level of illumination but one that to their light-starved optic nerves seemed like a dozen suns all blazing simultaneously. When they could finally see without crying, Flinx shone the beam on the first dead man.

  His uniform indicated that he was a member of port Security. The other body wore an ill-fitting chameleon suit. None of this had meant anything to the organism that had killed them.

  Both bodies showed signs of hand-to-hand combat. In battling one another they had fallen too near—something. Thin but unbreakable loops of fungal matter were locked tightly around the first man’s arms and the other man’s neck. The second man had been lucky: He had perished of suffocation.

  What Flinx had felt moving slightly beneath the first man’s body armor were bunched strands of haustorium.

  Clarity moved up beside him to study the half-eaten corpses. With the light it was easy to trace the hyphae network to a nearby crevice. It was ten meters long, and half of it was full of glistening fungus.

  “It’s ignoring us because it already has all the food it needs for a while.” She spoke with the enforced calm of a lab technician readying a new tray of samples for inspection.

  “I recognize the haustorium,” Flinx muttered, “but where did those damn loops come from?” He could not take his eyes from the bloated face of the second victim. The man’s hands were still locked around one loop as if trying to tear it free.

  “From the same place as the rest of those filthy tendrils, I would venture to say.” Sowelmanu looked to Clarity for confirmation.

  “Dactyella and Arthobotrys, only on a larger scale. A mycologist could tell us more. They lasso their food. This looks like a giant relative.”

  “We should burn them or something,” Flinx said disgustedly.

  She shrugged. For a change, she was more at home with the local flora than he, able to distance herself from its effects. “In a few days there’ll be nothing left. Not even bones.”

  Flinx stared at the two bodies a moment longer, then remuffled the light. When it was almost too dark to see one’s feet, Heavy and Thoughtful-grave emerged from their hiding place. Their emotions were still unsettled.

  As were Flinx’s own.

  If possible, everyone trod more cautiously than before as they resumed their march. The security man and the fanatic had engaged in a long-running battle through Longtunnel’s upper reaches, because it took another day for the refugees to draw near enough to the port to enable Flinx to detect the first glimmerings of human emotion. Without Pip he would not have been able to sense anything, but when she was near and his Talent was operative, his range was considerable. Painful in a city street, useful here.

  His ability to control and manipulate his Talent was increasing. Some of that he attributed to instruction from the Sumacrea, but his skill had been rising before that encounter had taken place. Maybe it had something to do with him maturing physically as well as mentally.

  “We’re getting close,” he informed his friends.

  “I don’t hear any fighting,” Clarity said as she strained for the slightest sound. “No shouts, no guns going off.”

  “We’re not near enough to overhear verbal shouts, but weapons discharging ought to be audible.”

  “Either there is a lull in the fighting in this vicinity,” Sowelmanu commented, “or we may presume that one side has prevailed and taken control.”

  Clarity suddenly sprinted ahead, heedless of rocks and growths underfoot. “Light! I can see light!”

  Flinx and Sowelmanu followed at a more controlled pace until an emotional burst brought him to a halt. “Heavy and Thoughtful-grave can go no farther. We must make our farewells here. But I will have them wait a while.”

  “What for?” the geologist asked him.

  “In the event the fanatics have won. We may want to retreat this way again.”

  Sowelmanu nodded, a human gesture acquired by the thranx soon after Amalgamation. Together they turned to follow Clarity.

  The light burst through a narrow slit in the wall on their left. Clarity was already peering through.

  “If we don’t come back soon, the Sumacrea will know to return to their home below,” Flinx told the geologist. “I want to come back here someday. There wasn’t nearly enough time to converse, to learn. I may be the only apt human pupil, human companion they’ll ever know. It’s hard to explain, but I feel at home among them. Like being with family.”

  “Have you been dwelling long in darkness, my young friend?”

  Flinx looked startled, then realized the thranx was just employing a comfortable figure of speech. All the bugs fancied themselves philosophers.

  They redistributed what little remained of their supplies. Clarity held the chest light they had salvaged while Flinx hefted the weakly charged needler. Even on low setting it was still capable of incapacitating two or three opponents before it died completely.

  As he turned sideways to face the cleft, Flinx felt Heavy and Thoughtful-grave. Though he could no longer see them, the regret and sorrow they were feeling at his passing was as lucid as any verbal deposition. It was mixed with the sensation of leaving behind a part of himself. They understood him, shared his difficulties and troubles as easily as his friendship, and all without a word having to be spoken.

  A different sort of illumination lay ahead. He inhaled and edged through the limestone slit.

  Beyond lay a vast cavern roofed with low-intensity light tubes. They shone dully on neat rows and shelves of brightly hued plastic crates and cylinders. It was the main warehouse beneath the port facilities that Sowelmanu had described to them earlier.

  “Still no signs of fighting,” the thranx whispered hopefully. “Perhaps Security has at least retained control of this portion of the installation. It would be among the most heavily defended and the last to surrender.”

  “I don’t see any guards.” Clarity followed Flinx through the crack in the limestone wall.

  Nothing moved in the spacious chamber, not even shipping and sorting robots. Except for the heavy whisper of air pushed along by ventilator fans and pumps, there was no noise save what little they made themselves.

  “They would be mounting a successful defense somewhere above,” Sowelmanu speculated. “If they had been driven back this far, the battle would be as good as lost. I believe we can ascend in confidence.”

  “I’d rather ascend in caution,” Flinx muttered as he studied the deserted stairway that flanked the service elevators.

  They kept to the shadows of the largest crates, huge containers full of drilling and excavating equipment. Each package was color coded as to eventual destination. A few were clad in the crimson of the United Church or the aquamarine of the Commonwealth.

  Sowelmanu led the way. Though Clarity had been on Longtunnel longer than the thranx, she had never had occasion to visit the main warehousing facility. Everything was unwrapped, acknowledged, accounte
d for, and delivered by the time it reached her lab.

  The armed man whirled but lowered his rifle as soon as he recognized Sowelmanu. “You’re with the Hivehom geofoods team, aren’t you?”

  “I am indeed. Are the authorities still in control of this portion of the installation?”

  The guard relaxed and slung his weapon over his shoulder. “Sorry about this. Thought you might’ve been some of those veginodes left behind. We’re in control of a lot more than just this portion,” he declaimed with grim satisfaction.

  “You said ‘left behind’?” Flinx was trying to see past him. “What happened? We’ve been in hiding and out of touch.”

  “Then I’ll start from the start, right? The slip-suited bastards came at us out of the walls, like rats. They made a lot of noise and set off a lot of demo charges before we could organize and regroup, but they were lousy shots. Unprofessional, you know?

  “As soon as he realized the outpost was under fullscale attack, Lieutenant Kikoisa pulled a bunch of us together and organized a counterattack. They must’ve had a shuttle some idiot actually managed to set down beyond the strip. As soon as we plowed back into ’em, they broke and took off for it. That’s the rumor, anyways. Haven’t seen any of ’em for a couple of days.”

  “Then everything’s all right?” Clarity asked. “You drove them away?”

  “Not all of ’em. There’s plenty scattered around the corridors they didn’t cave in. But they’re a problem for the burial squad, not me. Who the hell do you suppose they were?”

  “I think I know,” Clarity said.

  “No shit?” The sentry’s eyes widened. “Hell, you better get yourself to the lieutenant or somebody, because everybody’s been asking themselves that ever since they came at us. They didn’t leave any wounded behind, and the dead don’t have any identification on ’em. Not even labels on the chameleon suits they were wearing. Kikoisa’s definitely gonna want to talk to you, Ms. . . .”