Patrimony (17 page)

“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 typical 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.

Vlashraa gestured at the location Flinx had indicated. “There is some difficult terrain between. It would require a number of days tu reach the place yu have specified.” She looked over at him. “There are also possible dangers.”

“On the positive side, there will also be opportunities fur hunting,” Zlezelrenn pointed out encouragingly. “There is nothing along the obvious route that gaitgos cannot negotiate.”

“Gaitgos?”
Flinx inquired. No one answered him. The Tlel were too busy chattering among themselves.

“This is a venture fur volunteering.” Healer Fluadann studied the human. “Having treated youths whu have lost parents, I believe I understand better than most the importance of this tu yu. I will go.”

Zlezelrenn and Vlashraa added their assent almost before Fluadann had finished speaking. By the time word had spread through the rest of Tleremot, the proposed expedition was oversubscribed with volunteers.

The Tlel might have skinny arms and funny-shaped heads, an overcome Flinx reflected somberly, but there was no disputing the size of their hearts.

A gaitgo’s function was immediately apparent even to an outsider such as himself. Each of the motorized walking devices would accommodate a single Tlel comfortably. Behind the padded, slanted seat there was storage for supplies. Though open to the weather, the extremely lightweight frame formed a protective cage around the driver. Designed for travel in Gestalt’s rugged backcountry, the individualized transports boasted eight legs. Or maybe, Flinx thought as he studied the line of waiting vehicles, eight arms. Since the mechanical limbs were attached to both the bottom and the top of the transports, he was not sure how to label them.

Vlashraa explained the design. “Yu have seen enough uv ur mountains tu know that it is as important tu be able tu climb and descend as it is tu travel in a straight line. The gaitgo has the ability tu du both. It can even travel sideways across a vertical wall. That is not the problem we face right now.” She studied the tall, lanky human. “The problem lies in finding one tu fit yu.”

In the end, it was decided not to try to supply their guest with a transport of his own. That suited Flinx just as well. Time that would have been spent instructing him in the use of Tlelian controls and instrumentation was time better spent crossing open country. His dignity would not suffer from having to make the journey as freight. As for Pip, as soon as they settled into the modified open cargo bay in the back of Zlezelrenn’s gaitgo, she rose and found herself a perch atop one of the protective composite honeycomb beams that came together above the Tlel’s head. The multiplicity of openings in the material offered dozens of gaps into which she could insert her coils. If her presence riding directly above him in any way unsettled Zlezelrenn, he did not comment on it.

There were a dozen gaitgos in the expedition. All were the same size, all individually piloted. Comparable scaled-up devices could be used for transporting cargo and multiple passengers, but for those purposes imported skimmers were more practical. Able to ascend precipices, crawl through narrow tunnels, ford rivers, and even climb trees, the one-Tlel gaitgos were the favored means of mechanized local transportation among the inhabitants of Gestalt’s innumerable smaller communities. And unlike skimmers, they were manufactured right on Gestalt, in its other major city of Tlearandra.