The End of the Matter

by Alan Dean Foster

  This Qwarm toy was a phonic stiletto. It generated a thin beam of sculpted sound that would put a hole through just about anything. It fit neatly in a man’s palm, generator and all, was easily concealed, and was almost impossible to detect or defend against.

  Flinx rose and looked around worriedly. Having killed two Qwarm recently, he could understand another one with an activated weapon coming toward him. But this Qwarm had run into something else before he had had a chance to ambush Flinx. Or had he really been after Flinx?

  Moving on four stumpy legs, a mumbling Ab walked over and bent to pick, cretinlike, at the clothing of the dead man. Hands and eyes moved, apparently enraptured by the commingling of blood and water in the ditch.

  Had the killer been after Flinx, or were they still pursuing the moronic alien in his charge? He didn’t like to consider the first possibility, because that would mean they now knew he was responsible for the death of two clan members back in the old house fronting the stage. In that case he had to move faster than he had intended. Once an enemy was known to them, the Qwarm clan would never rest until that enemy or every member of the clan was dead. It would help him to know whether they knew.

  Falling mist was rapidly obliterating any hint of a trail, but drops of dissolving blood still showed against the pavement clearly enough for him to trace them around the prow of the huge cargo carrier. They led to the entrance of the warehouse. Careful examination of the personnel door showed that it had been keyed open, and Flinx did not think it had been done by the building’s owner.

  Every instinct, everything in him, warned against entering the blackness inside. That was countered, as usual, by his relentless curiosity. He slipped through the slight opening. A dim light shone in a near corner, near mountainous heaps of extruded plastic casings. Treading softly, with a dim shape fluttering nervously overhead, he moved toward the light.

  Suddenly he could sense unease, even fear. Marshaled against it was a frightening coolness. Both were far from here and moving rapidly away from him. From the lighted region he was approaching he detected nothing. Very slowly, he peered around a last, four-meter-high yellow case.

  Six bodies filled the space his astonished gaze encountered. Six! They lay draped over crates, contorted on the metal floor, and bunched beneath overturned casings. Four were women, two men. All were clad in the by now too-familiar black. Several showed naked skulls, their caps missing. Copious amounts of blood lent murderous highlights to the devastated scene. Several of the smaller crates were shattered. It must have taken some unknown, awesome force to crack those seamless containers.

  In a few hours, Flinx knew, some warehouse supervisor would arrive to open up, and get the shock of his or her life.

  There were only dead Qwarm here, no sign of any other intruders. Flinx couldn’t conceive of anyone or anything that would attack, let alone destroy, such a large number of professional assassins. He stiffened. A hint of a far-off mental scream had touched him, alerted him once more to something that continued to move away from this place. Whatever it was, he considered, it might not continue to move away.

  Once again Flinx looked back at the crumpled, silent bodies, some of which were partially dismembered. Again he noted the cracked plastic casings strewn casually about. Some great force had been at work here, for reasons Flinx could not imagine. That distant mental shriek continued to echo in his mind as he found himself backing away slowly from the nightmarish scene. Darkness closed tight around him once more.

  Something touched his shoulder.

  His sigh of relief when he found it was only Pip, returning to his perch on his shoulder, was enormous. Then he was out of the structure, running steadily toward the main roadway ahead. The mist was no longer a friend but a deceiver, hiding something terrifying and mysterious from sight.

  Moments later he reached the road. From below he heard the bellow of kinkeez and other animal-powered conveyances, mixed with the roar and hum of machines. A short climb, a downward slide and scramble, and Flinx was over the embankment and on the roadway itself. Somehow Ab managed to keep all four of his feet under him as he stumbled on without complaint after his new master.

  The owner of the meepah-rickshaw balked at the sight of Flinx’s quadrupedal companion. Credits overcame his uncertainty, however. Soon the two-legged meepah was racing toward the shuttleport at its maximum stride, Flinx getting the speed he was paying for. Happily, nothing flew out of the rising mist-fog from behind to strike at either owner or rider.

  At the port, Flinx had the misfortune to encounter one of those many bureaucrats whose sole purpose in life seemed to be complicating that of others, from which they obviously derived a false and pitiful feeling of superiority. “Let me see your tunnel pass, boy,” the man demanded condescendingly.

  Flinx turned and glanced anxiously back the way he had come. The moving walkway leading back into the central terminal building was almost empty. Despite the early hour and the absence of any pursuit, he was expecting one or more black-clad specters to appear among the tired businessfolk and travelers. Drallarport operated round the clock, twenty-eight hours a day.

  “I don’t have a tunnel pass, sir,” he responded, forcing himself to modify the sharpness he heard in his voice. “I . . .”

  That was enough to engender a wide leer of satisfaction on the other’s fat face. No, he was not stupid, this one. His mental malady ran deeper than simple ignorance. Malice requires a certain amount of intelligence before its wielder qualifies as truly irritating.

  “No pass, and attempting to enter a private access tunnel,” he snorted through pursed lips. Ostentatiously, he jabbed a button on the callbox at his waist. Two large, no-nonsense humans appeared and glowered threateningly at Flinx. They were soon joined by an out-of-breath, elderly little man. In appearance, he was sufficiently ordinary to make Flinx’s plump tormentor look unique.

  “What is it, Belcom?” he asked the fat one curiously while eyeing Flinx.

  “This child,” Belcom declared, as if he had just learned the identity of a multiple-murderer, “is trying to sneak into this restricted area without a pass.”

  “I wasn’t trying to snea—” Flinx began in exasperation, before the newcomer cut him off.

  “This is a guarded section, boy. No visitors allowed.” While tired, probably from finishing up a night shift, the man was at least polite. “If you want to watch the ships lift, try the cargo landing.”

  “I don’t have a tunnel pass,” Flinx finally succeeded in explaining as he fumbled at a belt pouch beneath his slickertic, “because I’m not boarding as a passenger.” From the pouch he extracted a small, virtually unbreakable slip of polyplexalloy. The information implanted in it was unforgeable.

  Blinking back fatigue, the new arrival studied the card. When he looked up at Flinx it was without lethargy. He turned a vicious gaze on the smug subordinate next to him. That worthy took in his superior’s glare and reacted with the attitude of someone who has just discovered a poisonous insect crawling up his leg yet is afraid to swat at it for fear of being stung.

  “Of course this gentleman doesn’t have a pass, Belcom. Don’t you ever inquire before you make an idiot of yourself?”

  Aware that he couldn’t respond without demeaning himself further, an uncomprehending Belcom simply gaped blankly at the little man. After allowing Belcom’s embarrassment to last to the point of eyestrain, his superior finally continued: “He has no pass, you damn fool, because he’s not a passenger. He’s an owner. Private registry vessel.”

  “I—” Belcom stammered, glancing worriedly at Flinx. “He was so young—I didn’t consider, didn’t think—”

  “Two reasons for not promoting you, and excellent ones at that,” his supervisor snapped venomously. Turning to Flinx, he framed sincere apologies with an officious smile. “Terribly sorry for the inconvenience, sir. If there is anything I can do to redress the insult suffered, anything at all . . .”

  Flinx thought he saw a commotion at the far end
of the moving walkway behind him. “Just let me through,” he said crisply. Both guards moved solemnly aside; they watched as Flinx and his odd charge loped up the corridor. Neither turned to watch or listen as additional execration continued to fall on the unfortunate Belcom.

  Though he had studied hard the past year and a half, Flinx was still no pilot. But most craft were so complex that manual operation was out of the question for all but the most skilled individuals, and the shuttlecraft he settled into was no exception. So it was fully fitted out with automatic controls. Anyone capable of delivering coherent instructions to the ship’s computer could pilot it.

  Firm pressure forced him back into the acceleration couch as the little vessel boomed skyward, lifting cleanly out of the reaction pit. Shortly thereafter he was curving out into free space.

  Nograv relaxed him physically; the fact that now no Qwarm could slip up behind and stick a sonic stiletto or something equally exotic into his neck relaxed him mentally. Behind, Ab whistled and rhymed cheerfully. The alien accepted nograv as readily and good-naturedly as it had the damp atmosphere of Moth.

  Approaching tangency with a particular orbit, Flinx took a moment to belch once while admiring a great swath of glowing gold splashed across the sky. It was one of the two remarkable “wings” that had given Moth its name. Whichever god had designed Flinx’s home world had finished with a flourish of finger-painting. Each fan-shaped wing was composed of highly reflective particulate and gaseous matter, narrow near the surface, fanning out and diffusing as gravity weakened away from it.

  Like a dauber wasp, the shuttlecraft nestled itself snugly into the ellipsoidal fuselage of Flinx’s ship. From that structure projected a long tube which ended in a fan-shape, something like a wineglass: the KKdrive posigravity-field projector.

  Flinx’s ship was a gift from his extraordinarily gifted pupils, the race of ursinoids who inhabited the proscribed world of Ulru-Ujurr. They had used blueprints and scavenged material to construct it. In shape and capabilities it was much like the racing yacht of Flinx’s sometime benefactor, Maxim Malaika. Only the much-less-sybaritic furnishings were significantly different.

  The Ulru-Ujurrians had christened it Teacher.

  Flinx punched in the coordinates of Alaspin, added a maximum cruising speed, and then permitted himself to lie down. With only the most general description to go on, he had to try to find a man who might not ever have been to Alaspin. Added to that was the possibility that the slaver’s memory was open to question—not to mention the fact that the Qwarm were intent on preventing him from locating anything ever again.

  Some comfort came from Ab’s antics. The alien was fascinated by the ship’s workings. Certainly Ab had been on at least one other craft before, but slave quarters left little chance for study. Flinx had to be careful. Automatic and foolproof as interstellar navigation had become, the accidental manipulations of an idiot like Ab could delay his trip seriously.

  As to what he would do if he reached Alaspin and learned nothing, Flinx had no idea. At such moments Flinx wondered why he bothered so much. What, after all, were a mother and father but an accidental combination of humanity, a chance commingling of chromosomes and such which had produced . . . himself.

  Of all the myriad things be was ignorant of, one of the greatest was his own motivations. Beside them, stellar physics was simple child-gaming. Why try to assuage his loneliness? Knowledge of his origin couldn’t do that. But maybe, he mused, when he finally knew, it might keep him from crying quietly so often.

  Traveling almost as fast as a Commonwealth peaceforcer, the Teacher sped through the void, carrying its small cargo of one melancholy human youth, one indifferent flying reptile, and a spritely alien mad poet wrapped in an enigma.

  In his long and busy life, the lanky old man had undergone many security screenings. The one he was forced to endure today had proved as thorough as the most extensive he could recall.

  Once cleared, he was finally admitted to a very dark office. What furniture lay within appeared placed haphazardly, without regard to esthetics or function. Nothing in the way of decoration showed anywhere.

  That extended to the single figure waiting to greet him. Like the room, the thickly hooded shape conveyed a feeling of somber staleness. It stood, rather than sat, behind the single heavy desk. Where a face would have been, darkness and many folds of cloth served instead. They disguised even their wearer’s size and form. There was nothing deceptive about the soft voice that issued from beneath the heavy shrouds, though. It was sibilant in a way the taller man could almost place.

  “Business has been finished?” the shrouded one asked. No casual greeting, no hopeful hello to waste time. No exchange of names.

  From beneath his embroidered skullcap the elder Qwarm responded, “There has been interference.” A finger rubbed at an upper lip and obliterated an itch. Hairless lids blinked once.

  Beneath its many folds the other speaker appeared to twitch violently, though control of its voice remained unbroken. “It cannot be. Neither the Church nor the Commonwealth government realizes . . .!”

  Shaking his head briskly, once, the tall Qwarm leader explained, “There has been no evidence of official interference, or even of interest, insofar as we can discover. Both members of the clan who had been assigned the task were apparently in position and preparing to carry out their work when they were interrupted. Whether they were interrupted on purpose or by accident we have been unable to discover. It does not matter now. Both of the clan are dead.”

  “It matters very much to me,” rumbled the hooded shape.

  “You will be notified as to the identity of the fool who interfered when we gather in his body,” the Qwarm declared coldly. “At present we know no more than you. We thought such knowledge, together with the postponed completion of your assignment to us, was within our grasp. Something . . . happened.” Vast unpleasantness burned back of wise old eyes. “Much outrage was felt within the clan at the death of our brother and sister. Such a thing has not happened in a long time. Punishment was decreed. A large group of clan members, the largest gathered together in one place in some time, was assembled to exact proper revenge.” Now the Qwarm’s anger gave way to confusion.

  “It was believed at first that he who interfered acted alone. Such was apparently not the case. He has powerful and as-yet-unidentified associates or allies. All we know is that none of them appear to be associated with the government. All of the assembled were murdered mysteriously.” Long, deceptively thin fingers opened and closed slowly.

  The hooded figure eyed the movements cautiously. This old man was dangerous, like a well-used weapon—worn and dulled on the outside, but still an efficient killer. It would not do to push him, especially in his present mood.

  “If no official agency of Church or Commonwealth is involved,” the soft voice ventured, “then there is still time for this business to reach a satisfactory conclusion.” Then it added, as an afterthought: “There will be no additional money for the additional time involved, you realize.”

  “That is of no import.”

  “Really?” Now a hint of disdain crept into the whisperer’s voice. “I thought that money was paramount among your kind, businessfolk that you are.”

  “We are a clan, an extended family first,” the Qwarm corrected him, “businessfolk second. Our reputation protects us more than our abilities. That is why anyone who kills a single Qwarm cannot be permitted to live to tell of it. Such a tale would impair our efficiency and place isolated members in danger.”

  “This business of killing is still a business,” the figure rasped from beneath its shrouds.

  “Rest assured,” the Qwarm leader replied. “Whether we regard it as a matter of business or clan morality should not matter to you. You have hired us. We will carry out the terms of our contract satisfactorily for you—even if it carries us to the ends of the galaxy.”

  “I wish not to see you again until you can bring me word of that,” the figure into
ned forcefully, evidently unimpressed by the Qwarm’s speech. “Whether you kill this interferer or his friends is your business. Kill however many you must, but kill foremost the creature called Abalamahalamatandra.”

  “As I have declared, it will be done.” That seemed to end the meeting, except that a touch of human curiosity overcame the Qwarm. His professional poise lapsed briefly to reveal an emotional creature beneath.

  “I would still like to know why you or anyone else is willing—nay, eager—to pay the absurd sum of one million credits for the killing of a single alien being.”

  “I am sure you would,” replied the hooded shape, a hint of amusement in its voice. When nothing more was forthcoming, it was clear that the discussion was over.

  As he turned to leave the room, the Qwarm saw the hooded figure move. Light poured through the open doorway from the hall beyond. Despite the figure’s rapid movement, the shaft of fresh light in the dark chamber seemed to sparkle off a cornea that was not human beneath those enfolding shrouds.

  Then again, the Qwarm elder reflected as he strolled down the hallway of the eighty-second floor, in the brief instant he could have misinterpreted the effect of the light.

  Not that it mattered anyway. The Qwarm clan had often accepted assignments from nonhumans and nonthranx. This present employer’s desire for anonymity was hardly remarkable.

  Rage boiled within him, though he didn’t show it as he left the office tower. So many of the clan dead! People saw his set face and parted to let him pass. This had become much more than a simple job for the clan. It did not matter that no one save a single woman and child—now painlessly if somewhat belatedly—eliminated, had learned of the Qwarm’s failure on the commercial world of Moth. It was enough that the Qwarm themselves knew. It was enough that they had been outraged.

  So it was that law-enforcement officials throughout the Commonwealth noted the unusual activity among black-clad, skullcapped men and women on various worlds and wondered at it. They would have wondered much more if they had known that all the frenzied activity was caused by the actions of a single innocuous-looking young man . . .