The End of the Matter

by Alan Dean Foster

  “So, silly, before I see their world freeze over and turn into a round grave frosted with frozen gases, I’ll take a chance to save it.” He gazed jovially at Tse-Mallory. “Best thing this undertaking has going for it, near as I can see, is that the Commonwealth doesn’t think it’s worth trying. That’s a good-enough recommendation for me.” She turned away from him huffily, and he rose and turned her. She struggled, but couldn’t move those massive arms.

  “Isili, all accumulated wealth does is make you worry about the tax collector, and it’s getting harder and harder to fool the computers. Plenty of time yet to acquire the stigma of wealth. Or, in your case, of fame.”

  “Do you really think that’s it, Skua?” She gave him a pitying look. “That I’m desperate to get back to my pet project so I can have my fax in all the tridee tapes?”

  “Not entirely,” he admitted. “You’re a little too devoted to science for that. But then, you’re not wholly immune to it, either. You’re human, Isili. It’s a curse we all have to bear.”

  “Speak for yourself.” The smooth interjection came from near the console.

  September let Hasboga leave his grasp and looked that way. “I stand corrected, Your Bugship.”

  “Nothing personal.” Truzenzuzex’s reply was couched as mild amusement coupled with gratification. “Look at it this way, Hasboga.” She kept her gaze resolutely elsewhere. “You’ve been unlucky enough to fall in with a couple of old fools, and you know what the old human saying says about them. So you might as well try to help instead of hinder us. There’s nothing you can do about it anyway. We can be as fanatical about saving lives as you can be about exhuming their remains.”

  She whirled. “You’re all crazy, every one of you!” She stalked out of the cockpit, heading for the lounge.

  September ought to have been upset. He wasn’t, Flinx noted. The giant accepted everything with an equanimity which hinted at great mental as well as physical assurance.

  Abruptly, Flinx decided he liked the enormous human, whether or not the man was his true father. No, he would not try to coerce further information on that subject from September. He was beginning to realize that such knowledge would flow from September in his own time, and that patience would gain far more information than arguing.

  Rising from the chair, September moved to follow his employer. He winked at Flinx. “Alcohol has a way of dissolving anger the way acid does plastic, feller-me-lad. Isili won’t be really happy until she’s digging up ancient junk again. But I think I can keep her fury at a level where she won’t drive us all insane before this voyage is over.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Long days passed as the Teacher chased its own field through emptiness. Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex employed a substantial part of the ship’s computer in probing Ab, trying to make sense of rhymes which sometimes employed terms and words from six different languages at once, some of them no longer spoken anywhere, some using words that were fourthhand translations from the original. It was exhausting, frustrating work, made no easier by Ab’s good-natured desire to make everything sound like Terranglo.

  “We have formed a hypothesis,” Truzenzuzex was saying to Flinx one day as they sat in the lounge listening to Ab burble endlessly nearby. “Bran and I have decided that not only is Ab not speaking nonsense, but that everything he says makes sense. We simply haven’t the time or equipment to track down everything he is saying, to translate it properly. Half of our translations are largely intuitive, and the rest at least partially s o.”

  Flinx’s gaze went upward, to where Pip was darting lazily among the three-dimensional false clouds in the simulated late-afternoon sky projected by instrumentation in the walls. “Everything seems to make sense to Ab, but then, everything a madman says makes sense to himself.” He glanced at Ab. “I don’t know how you’ll ever find the world you want from him.”

  Ab abruptly turned two blue eyes on Flinx. “Cannachanna, banarana, lemon pie and apple vana. What ticks inside the helical mix?”

  “There, you see?” Flinx said. “It’s the same as . . .” He stopped and stared at the philosoph. Tru was sitting on the thranx loungeseat, gazing blankly into the distance. “Tru?”

  Truzenzuzex stared a moment longer, then turned to Flinx. “That’s it.”

  Flinx felt groggy. “What’s it?”

  “The world . . . maybe.” The philosoph was muttering to himself as he raced on four legs and foothands for the lounge computer terminal. Still dazed, Flinx followed.

  “It is an old Visarian name for a main sequence star inside the Blight. The star is RNGC 1632 on Commonwealth charts.” He was shouting commands to the computer while trying to talk into the intercom at the same time.

  Tse-Mallory appeared in the room in response to the more coherent instructions. The tall scientist was only partially dressed, still wet from an unfinished shower, and quite indifferent to his near nudity. “What’s happened, ship-brother? Something at last?”

  “Cannachanna, Bran.”

  While Truzenzuzex worked with incredible speed at the terminal, Tse-Mallory walked over to sit next to Ab. Water glistened on his body under the bright artificial light as he regarded the alien, who was playing with his fingers.

  “Cannachanna, remember. Remember Abalamahalamatandra.” He was gazing unblinkingly into one blue eye, doing things with his eyes and voice and hands. “What about Cannachanna?”

  Ab winked all four eyes in sequence and sang pleasantly, “Go, go, go, fast, fast, fast. Needle-pie death from underwear past. Kalcanthea tree for I am . . .” and on and on, as usual.

  But that was enough; it was a confirmation. Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex came as close to kicking up their heels as Flinx had ever seen them.

  “The computer,” Truzenzuzex said, when he got his breath back and finally responded to Flinx’s questions, “has accepted the reference, given a transposition, and plotted a course. We are on our way, at last. Praise to the Hive!”

  The most astonishing transformation the information produced occurred not in the two scientists, but in Isili Hasboga.

  “You mean the Hur’rikku actually existed?” she asked Tse-Mallory, her eyes shining in disbelief and wonder.

  “So it would seem. We’re heading for a Hur’rikku world right now. It’s located in the proper position for such a world, on the far center-side of the Blight. That’s where the Hur’rikku expansion would have reached to when they encountered the Tar-Aiym. It’s also the logical place to establish a threat, to mount a major weapons system.”

  “I can’t believe it,” she said, “I can’t believe it. Such things don’t happen in real life.”

  “The incredible always happens in real life,” Tse-Mallory chided her. “It’s the expected which makes up most fiction.”

  “A Hur’rikku world,” she was murmuring. “A Hur’rikku world.” She looked up with such naked desire that Flinx was embarrassed. “We’ll be the first humanx to see it. Do you . . . do you think I might have a chance to do some fieldwork?”

  Tse-Mallory smiled; his voice was full of assurance: “Hasboga, we’re all going to be doing a great deal of fieldwork. Or do you think we’re simply going to orbit the world the Hur’rikku inhabited, find a continent-sized sign in symbospeech saying ‘Ultimate Weapon—Follow the Arrow,’ and walk right up to it?”

  She was so excited at the prospect of being the first archeologist to set foot on a legendary world of a mythical race that she hardly heard Tse-Mallory’s stern sarcasm.

  Flinx had been through the Blight once before. It looked no different from any other section of normal space, save for having a slightly higher population of stars than the Arm in which the Commonwealth lay. It still gave him the shivers. Once these myriad worlds had been home to dozens of intelligent races. Now only lower forms lived there, all higher varieties having been exterminated in the ravening plague unwittingly unleashed by the panicked Tar-Aiym half a million years ago.

  Even those two usually aloof beings, Tse-Mallory and
Truzenzuzex, were affected. They kept themselves busy with Ab and stayed out of the control cabin, stayed away from its wide port and its panorama of stars. Instead, they discussed abstruse philosophies in arcane languages, or played games of such complexity with the ship’s computer than an onlooker could not even figure out who eventually won, much less how the game was played.

  Three weeks passed when they announced that Ab possessed an approximate vocabulary of twenty-eight trillion words, in three million, four hundred sixty thousand languages, of which at least two million were no longer used and two hundred four thousand were purely mathematical.

  These figures did not indicate the mind of an idiot.

  Isili Hasboga, now expectant and happy, reveled in the comparative luxury of the Teacher. It was her first time on a private craft, since position and finances had always relegated her to economy-class transports whenever travel between worlds had been necessary.

  What Hasboga found impressive merely amused September. His interest was in the practical workings of the ship. There were times when the giant worried Flinx, such as when he found September staring intently at some aspect of the Teacher’s construction. Eventually he relaxed, telling himself that if the giant discovered anything unusual about the ship, he would probably ascribe it to some vagary or peculiarity of the firm which had constructed it. Which would be true. Just so long as no one guessed at how peculiar the Teacher’s manufacturers were.

  Flinx found he was left pretty much to himself. The ship ran without help. Checking and rechecking its smooth operation took little time. He had to find other excuses not to stare out the ports. What made him and the two scientists truly uncomfortable was not the emptiness of the inhabitable planets around them, but the inescapable deep-down fear that somewhere on one of those worlds a viable remnant of the Tar-Aiym’s unstoppable plague still lurked, waiting to infect some unsuspecting explorer with an age-old malignancy.

  The system of Cannachanna looked no different from many others Flinx had seen schematized on the ship’s screen. There were only three planets circling the hot K-type sun. And unless the Hur’rikku were suited to extraordinary extremes of temperature and pressure, they could not have lived either on the massive, frozen gas giant circling farthest out or on the sun-blistered globe that skimmed scorchingly close to the primary. That left only the middle planet of the three. Though farther from its sun than Earth was from Sol it would still be a hot world. But at least it possessed an atmosphere humanx could breathe. It could support life. It was the only possibility.

  “Of course,” Tse-Mallory reminded everyone as they started surfaceward in the shuttle, “we have no evidence to show that the Hur’rikku were anything like ourselves, or even that they were a carbon-based form.”

  But then, they had little evidence of any kind concerning the Hur’rikku.

  That this world had been inhabited by some race was amply confirmed by the Teacher’s scanners. All four major continents were dotted with ruins. They were extensive enough to indicate that at one time in the distant past the world circling Cannachanna had supported a sizable population.

  With nothing else to go on, Truzenzuzex and Tse-Mallory opted for touchdown near the largest city they could find. It was located near the west coast of the northern hemisphere’s largest continent. The shuttle landed softly under Tse-Mallory’s skilled direction, as Flinx stared out at a sky the color of molten iron. The star Cannachanna shone through the pulsing redness like an engorged blood vessel.

  Pure white sand shushed under the shuttlecraft’s skis as they touched down. Only a slight crosswind made the landing other than ordinary. Instrumentation indicated that the vast, mountainless plain they had set down on was hot. It was after midday, and the outside temperature registered nearly 45°C in the fresh shade of the shuttle.

  The little group stepped down the ramp onto the white sand. Flinx and Hasboga were sufficiently dark-skinned not to require protection from the sun beating down relentlessly through crimson-hued clouds. Truzenzuzex was practically comfortable, except for the dryness of the air. He was the one who recommended and produced proper creams and sprays from the ship’s dispensary to protect the more delicate skins of Tse-Mallory and September.

  While the others stood in the shade of the shuttle wing, Truzenzuzex led Ab out onto the surface. Ab immediately kneeled and rhymed as he traced incomprehensible designs in the sand.

  They listened intently as the philosoph addressed them: “Ab cannot be hypnotized, though the Tunnels know Bran and I have tried. But through various techniques I think I can gain his attention more closely than one could using normal speech. Doing so somehow depends on the pitch of one’s voice.

  “These last few days prior to our arrival Bran and I have been querying Ab constantly about the weapon. Since he has not provided us with any directions, we feel we might just as well start here and move from city to city, in the hope that something will trigger Ab to provide the proper response.”

  “Do we have to stay here?” Hasboga was staring yearningly at the distant city. Towers of well-preserved metal and unknown materials loomed tantalizingly over gypsum dunes.

  “Hasboga, we are not here for simple exploration. My own curiosity presses me toward the city; common sense and a more desperate need hold me back from it.” Truzenzuzex looked sad. “It must be this way, at least until we find what we have come for.”

  Hasboga was not appeased. “First you drag Skua and me all this way and then you tell me I can’t so much as have a close look at one of the greatest discoveries in the history of humanx science. Here we are on the world of a race no one really believed even existed.” She kicked angrily at the sand, sending a powdery white spray downwind.

  They were standing on a world of hot ice, Flinx thought.

  Tse-Mallory eyed her reprovingly. “This world will always be here, Isili Hasboga. Whereas Carmague-Collangatta and Twosky Bright will not be, unless we can find the weapon and make it work.”

  “Even if the thing is here, it probably isn’t functional. You realize that, of course.” September’s gaze shifted from Truzenzuzex to Tse-Mallory.

  The tall scientist smiled back at him and shrugged slightly. “We’re nothing if not optimists, September. It’s in the nature of humanxkind to defy the odds.”

  “That’s the difference between us,” September said, turning his attention also to the distant, archaic metropolis. “It’s in the nature of Septemberkind to ride with the odds. That’s how I’ve lived as long as—” He saw Flinx gesturing for attention. “Something happening, young feller-me-lad?”

  Flinx was pointing at Ab. “He’s going to do something.”

  Tse-Mallory’s reply to September was forgotten. Even Hasboga’s interest was distracted from the city.

  Ab turned in place as if searching intently for something no one else could see. Finding a direction, he waddled off toward the southwest. When he got roughly ten meters from the shuttle, he stopped and hunted around his feet. After concluding a careful survey of the sand he was standing on, he sat down with a thump, reached out with three arms, and commenced etching a fresh slew of abstract patterns while singing to himself. He was as happy as any three-year-old in a sandbox.

  “Wonderful.” Hasboga threw her hair back and ran both hands over it. “The end of the noble quest. What do we do now?”

  Though obviously disappointed, Truzenzuzex didn’t show it in his reply. “We could not reasonably expect that the alien would immediately lead us to the weapon. Now we must begin our search in earnest.” Hasboga’s expression brightened, and the philosoph hastened to add, “From the air.”

  “Why the air?” she wanted to know, downcast.

  “Before we commence the laborious task of examining these cities on foot, there is a chance Ab may recognize or be stimulated by some larger pattern.”

  Gathering up Ab, who as always came along without a fuss, they returned to the shuttle. The ramp was sucked in behind the last boarder, the engines engaged, and the lit
tle vessel turned to rise into the wind.

  Behind, a few human and thranx footprints remained in the sand. Gentle wind began patiently to erase them.

  Beginning with the largest on each continent, they went at high speed from city to city. Soon they were traveling over far smaller urban centers than the one they had set down next to. At each new city Truzenzuzex and Tse-Mallory would glance hopefully over at Ab. Each time Ab would stare delightedly at the new landscape beneath the shuttle, would rhyme ceaselessly, and then Truzenzuzex would read the computer interpretation of what Ab had said and the shuttle would change course once again.

  Several days of such searching convinced Tse-Mallory that they might be on the planet a long, long time. Hearing this, Hasboga grew nearly as hot as the air they were flying through. She insisted on being set down in some city, any city, to pursue her work.

  Unable to refute her arguments, Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex finally agreed. She might discover something useful to them, and it would be quieter on board the shuttle without her.

  September opted to join her, as much because the aerial search was beginning to bore him as for any other reason. They disembarked on the outskirts of the first city they had visited, taking along ample supplies and sufficient weaponry to defend themselves, although there had been no sign of hostile life.

  Indeed, this world boasted little in the way of animal life and not much in the way of vegetation. Most of Cannachanna II’s surface ran to desert, some low, some high. The largest living thing they had found so far was a sort of nervous-looking pink cactuslike plant which soared fifteen meters or more into the angry sky and was several meters around at the base. Its root system, Tse-Mallory observed, must be astonishing.