Flinx Transcendent (2 page)

“Sspawn of Zithanitese,” the big male hissed at him. The slur was accompanied by a gesture of third-degree contempt. Nothing too serious, Flinx decided as he analyzed the insult. It was too soon to relax, though. He had to respond appropriately and believably while ensuring that the confrontation did not escalate. He explored his considerable vocabulary of AAnn invective, seeking just the right balance between defiance and deference.

“Ssoured in the egg ssoundss ssuch,” he retorted, upthrusting and bringing his simsuit-clad right arm around and down in a sweeping motion indicative of second-degree disrespect. It was an appropriately robust response, but not one so forceful as to invite the drawing of personal weaponry. As he swung his arm he was careful not to activate the sensors that would extend his simsuit's faux claws to the fullest.

Hissing scorn, tail switching from side to side in his excitement, the AAnn edged to his right. The attempt to get behind Flinx was blatant, executed deliberately and with no attempt at subtlety. His adversary wanted to prevail in the confrontation, Flinx saw, but not necessarily by having to pound his fellow citizen into the sand. Not that the AAnn would hesitate to do so if he thought it necessary.

Upon contact with the appropriate control, Flinx's servo-controlled false tail began to metronome in similar fashion, mimicking the back-and-forth swings of his opponent. That was about all the artificial appendage could do. If it came to an actual fight, the synthetic muscles that powered the fake extension were not strong enough to enable it to strike the challenger a serious blow. His antagonist's tail, Flinx knew, was considerably more flexible, and useful.

Parting his jaws, the AAnn flashed sharp teeth. Flinx responded in
kind but could not open his mouth as wide lest its unnatural nature be revealed. Additionally, the limited exposure represented a ritual concession of sorts. His adversary promptly pounced on it.

“Your bite lackss sspirit. With ssuch ssmall biting one would sstarve. It would be a mercy to kill you before you die of hunger.”

Though he badly wanted out of the confrontation, Flinx knew he could not concede so readily. To show such weakness would be to invite even greater insults—or worse, an actual beating. Under those circumstances he knew he would have no choice but to respond physically, though he might have difficulty restraining Pip from working her way clear of the simsuit in her eagerness to defend him.

“Otherss have tried. Otherss have died.”

Bold words. The AAnn did not have to believe them, or try to test the truth of them. It was enough that the slightly awkward taller male sliding sideways across the sand had spoken them. Similar ritualized confrontations occurred by the thousands on the hundreds of identical Middle Paths that threaded their way through Krrassin, its suburbs, and across the length and breadth of Blasusarr. Their purpose was to provide a (usually) nonlethal means of regulating and fine-tuning status among energetic, upwardly mobile individuals, not to generate dozens of unproductive deaths.

Flinx could not fully display the simsuit's orthodontics, but he could at a touch of two sensors fully extend its synthesized claws. He did so now. But even as he revealed the simsuit's offensive bodyware he kept moving to his left and trying to circle around his opponent. How would the AAnn react? What degree of status did he seek to gain from the confrontation?

To Flinx's relief his adversary responded only with more words. Well-chosen words, to be sure, but far less dangerous than the headlong charge or scything hand swipe the simsuited human was preparing himself to counter.

“I do not resspond to sspittle with sslassh.”

“Sso you ssay.” Flinx reacted with acceptable neutrality.

The big male hissed once more and turned away. Without speaking another word he resumed striding down the Middle Path, looking for another fellow city dweller to confront. Flinx sensed his opponent's satisfaction. By being the one to state the initial challenge and subsequently
forcing the other “AAnn” to choose between a fight or evading it, technically the nye had won the encounter. Flinx was more than happy to allow the combative male his triumph. The important thing was that actual combat had been avoided.

Busily making their way north and south along the properly paved flanking walkways, the rest of the pedestrian traffic had completely ignored the whole hissing, spitting, tooth-and-claw-displaying confrontation. As Flinx continued on his way, careful after his earlier unforeseen bump to hug the walls of low-lying buildings and avoid the Middle Path, he himself passed dozens of other, similar, Middle Walkway altercations. On one occasion he saw two females locked arm in arm, leg in leg, and tail in tail on the sand. Blood stained the intricately raked patterns on the ground beneath them. Along with his fellow preoccupied strollers, Flinx ignored the fight, which was far more serious than the one he had been involved in earlier. Such battles were routine.

In many ways this frequent daily physical conflict in search of standing and status was more honest than comparable confrontations among his own kind, he reflected as he strode along beneath the blistering sun. Which was more honest: gossiping and sniping about an enemy behind his back, or trying to rip the skin off said body part? The intended end was the same; only the cultural approach was different. Using both his eyes and his Talent he continued to investigate the AAnn who surrounded him.

Blasusarr. As dangerous a place in the galaxy as a representative of his species could find himself in. What he had already accomplished, by deliberately placing himself among humanxkind's mortal enemies and successfully surviving in their presence, was as far as he knew an unprecedented achievement.

When he had first voiced his intent to the
Teacher
, his ship had been appalled. It had objected strenuously. But it could not, even for what it believed to be his own good, go against its master's orders. So it had disguised itself appropriately, entered Imperial space, slipped into orbit around the AAnn homeworld, and deposited him via masked shuttle at a vast desert park outside the metropolis. Starting from there, the simsuit-clad Flinx had used his knowledge of AAnn language and culture to work his way into the city.

He had set himself the challenge partly because it was something no
one else had ever done, partly because it was such an outrageous notion that no one had ever imagined trying it, and lastly because of what he had learned in the course of his previous sojourn on Gestalt: he no longer much cared what happened to him. If he survived his present enterprise, it was an accomplishment he could pass off with a shrug. If he failed, he would die, and that was no great loss either. Though it tried to argue him out of both the exploit and the depression that underlay it, the
Teacher
did not succeed. Now it drifted in veiled orbit, brooding and worrying about his day-to-day circumstances. It did not worry about itself, of course. Its intelligence was artificial, its worry programmed, its concern a function of a specific set of predetermined code.

Along with the
Teacher's
shipmind, there were also certain active elements of the vessel's décor that worried about his health. They too were powerless to prevent him from embarking on what both their organic and inorganic minds were convinced was nothing less than a reckless jaunt.

Flinx's slide into increasingly irresponsible behavior had been accelerated enormously by what had happened to him and by what he had learned of his origins in the course of his recent visit to the frigid world of Gestalt. His lengthy, determined quest to find his father had ended in the revelation that such an individual did not and, in fact, never had existed. In discovering that half of his biological heritage consisted of nothing more than an impersonal concoction of designer proteins, artificially leveraged by indifferent scientists to produce a zygote that when matured would, they hoped, display certain interesting mental abilities, he had felt something fundamental drain out of him. He had been nothing more than a test, an experiment, one among many.

That the end result had turned out to be at once disappointing and far beyond anything its original Meliorare developers had envisioned was of no consolation to the experiment himself.

The discovery had left him more down on himself and on his species than at any time in his life. Well short of his thirtieth birthday, he had spent the preceding decade desperately trying to learn the truth about himself, only to wish now as he stalked the streets of alien Krrassin that he had never bothered to try. The search had led him to wondrous revelations and astounding adventures, to great friendships and an ever-strengthening love, but also to unsought, uncomfortable realizations
about humankind and to a deepening personal malaise from which he seemed unable to extricate himself.

His unique empathic abilities had placed him in the position of potential savior of the galaxy. They had also rendered that potential savior increasingly indifferent to both his and its fate. Why should he trouble himself, if he was only the product of human experimentation and not humanity itself? He could live out the remainder of his natural life with Clarity Held. So could their children, should they have any. Though the threat to the Commonwealth and its galactic surrounds was advancing at increasing speed, he would be long dead before it began to affect the outermost star systems. Why risk his own life and happiness to save a species to which he belonged only through invention?

Could he even call himself human anymore?

Within the confines of the suit, Pip shifted uneasily in response to her master's troubled thoughts. While ever a comfort to him, her presence was also nonhuman. Empathetic but simplistic. Nor did he expect to find sympathy or understanding here, on the homeworld of the Commonwealth's most powerful adversary. He had come because it was a thing that had never been tried, and because he no longer deeply cared whether he lived or died. The time he had spent among the troubled youth of Visaria had given him a reason to stumble on. That brief flash of hope and inspiration had been more than negated by what he had learned about himself on Gestalt.

As he wound his way slowly up the winding curves of the paved pedestrian walkway, he found it numbing, if not exactly relaxing, to roam among intelligent but nonhuman sentients. When his still unpredictable, erratic Talent was functioning he was able to perceive their emotions. These were more consistently hostile, more inherently combative than those of his own kind. Yet they possessed a confidence and tranquility all their own, due not only to their alienness but to the culture in which they were grounded. Fight, argue, challenge—within this constant conflict lay a serenity that derived from consistency. It also inspired and drove each individual AAnn to always do their best, or else find themselves doomed to mediocrity. Humans possessed a similar drive, but one that was moderated by compassion.

What did it matter? What among either species, or among the thranx, or among any of the other intelligent species whose future was
threatened by the Great Evil that was speeding toward the galaxy was worth the sacrifice of his own brief, transitory happiness? He thought of Clarity and Mother Mastiff, of Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex. Surely those were examples of individuals worth saving. Because they happened to be his friends, or his love? Did anything else recommend them and link them?

Then it struck him.

Intelligence. Regardless of how he thought it was misused, in spite of how those who were fortunate enough to possess it frittered it away on trivial personal pursuits or feckless quarrels, that was the light that could not be allowed to go out. If the Great Evil was not confronted, if he did not do what little he could to help divert or defeat it, then he was ultimately as guilty as the billions he condemned. It had nothing to do with the confused delinquents of Visaria, or the slow-moving thinkers of Jast, or any other particular sentient species, humans included. It had to do with preserving the ability to
understand
. Trillions of stars and billions of years had culminated in a spark of comprehension here, a flash of awareness there. Experiment or not, he felt he was ethically bound, as an ancient Terran poet had once declared, to “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” If that realization could be applied to an individual life, surely it was applicable to sentience as a whole. The shining clarity of his own intelligence, for example, was something that stood apart from the confusion of his origins.

A knife stabbed straight through his head, piercing the frontal lobe and shocking him all the way down to his toes. Subject to and unable to avoid the mental flare, poor Pip contracted spasmodically against his upper thigh.

All his deliberating, the best of his intentions and the worst of his indifference, continued to be held hostage to the horrific headaches that had increasingly plagued him as he grew and matured. Resist though he did the one that had just struck him, he still found himself unable to do little more than stagger into a public voiding slit cut from the inward-slanting jet-black wall of the nearest building. Leaning against the interior halfway between the street and the sanitizing receptor, his chest heaving as he sucked down short, trembling gasps, he fought to stay upright. If he let the agonizing pain overcome him and passed out, whatever
decision he reached about the threat facing the galaxy or about anything else would be rendered moot. The most perfunctory medical check would expose him for the impostor he was and see him sent off under heavy guard to the nearest enforcement center. Fortunately, the voiding slit was unoccupied when he stumbled into it.

It did not remain so for long.

Shorter than a male AAnn but wider of hip, the elegantly clad female who entered behind him started to turn away to allow the individual in front of her to finish his business unobserved. Taking a second look at the slightly slumped male figure, she hesitated. His stance showed he was improperly positioned to properly void. Instead, he appeared to be leaning against the enclosing, curving wall for support. This insight instinctively suggested two possible courses of action. She could attack him while he was physically weakened and potentially gain status. Or she could demonstrate compassion, offer help, and perhaps gain the same. Much depended on how seriously he was incapacitated. If only a little, then a challenge would be worthwhile. If, however, his condition was serious, then an assault on another nye who was not in condition to fight back would cause her to lose merit.