Tse-Mallory glanced at his companion, then back at Flinx. “Tru and I still wield some influence in certain quarters. We can probably get you released before the local authorities realize what’s going on.”
“I’m not taking that chance,” Flinx replied. “It doesn’t matter if the Commonwealth wants to examine me or my ship. We’re both leaving. And you’re going to stay with Clarity and make sure she gets proper treatment, the best.”
Truzenzuzex tried to remonstrate with him. “But, Flinx, scc!lk, we were going to search for the Tar-Aiym weapons platform together. What about the education and training we promised you?”
“There’ll be time for that. Meanwhile, you know nothing of the platform. The only relevant information is on the Teacher, locked in her memory. It can be used just as effectively whether you’re present or not.”
“And if we insist on going with you?” Tse-Mallory prodded him thoughtfully.
Flinx shrugged. “I’m not leaving Clarity with strangers, no matter what they do to me. If you won’t agree to stay and watch over her, then I’ll have to.”
Tse-Mallory nodded. “Such a difficult thing to quantify—love,” he murmured. “You’ll contact us as soon as you find anything?” He held out his com unit. Flinx nodded and drew his own. It took only a moment for the two units to exchange appropriate contact information and security codes.
“What about your headaches, Flinx?” Truzenzuzex put a comforting truhand on his arm.
Flinx shrugged. “I’ll deal with them. Just as I always have. Or I’ll die.”
The thranx’s head bobbed regretfully. “Try to avoid the latter, will you?”
Flinx had to smile. “I always have.” Something whanged loudly in the corridor as it took a chunk out of the far wall. “It sounds like this is starting to wind down. I’d better get going.” He eyed Tse-Mallory. “You’re sure you two can handle the peaceforcers?”
Tse-Mallory nodded. “As soon as they stop shooting at us, yes.” He brought his com unit to his lips. “Once you’re through that hatch, I’ll start berating them for their inefficiency and poor aim. That always commands attention.”
With truhand and foothand, Truzenzuzex enfolded Flinx’s left hand. “Remember, Flinx: the instant you’ve found the weapons platform, or learned anything else of note regarding the menace that lies beyond the Great Emptiness, you’ll make contact with us.”
“I will,” he promised. “Within the week I’ll find a way to contact you via space-minus to check on Clarity.” Leaning forward, he kissed the unconscious woman tenderly on her forehead. He wanted to squeeze her tightly, to hold her as hard as he could, but dared not. Instead, he had to let her slump into Tse-Mallory’s waiting arms. Scrap rose and glided to Clarity’s shoulder.
Flinx looked down at her for one last moment that seemed to stretch into eternity and was simultaneously all too short. She was unable to look back. But Scrap did. Sensing the imminence of parting, Pip flew down from Flinx’s shoulder. The two minidrags entwined tongues several times. Flinx had already turned toward the open hatchway and started up the ladder when Pip joined him.
“Up the Universe, boy,” Tse-Mallory called out.
“The Great Hive go with you,” Truzenzuzex added in both terranglo and High Thranx.
Flinx did not reply.
CHAPTER
17
Bitter and detached, weighed down by the feeling that no matter what he did he was doomed to loneliness, Flinx spotted his shuttle and began running toward it. Pip took to the air immediately, scouting the ground in front of him. A couple of maintenance vehicles and one supply skimmer were busy on the tarmac. None of their operators, human or mechanical, bothered to glance in his direction.
Then he was alongside the familiar transfer craft racing beneath the fully extended port delta wing. Craft security recognized and admitted him. If the peaceforcers had come in search of him, he reflected as he settled into the pilot’s seat, it was surprising they hadn’t thought to impound his shuttlecraft or at least station a guard or two alongside. But then, he decided, they had no reason to suppose they would be unable to apprehend him before he tried to board.
As if in response to this thought, even as the shuttle’s engine was whining to life, the craft’s external sensors detected a pair of police skimmers clearing a distant gate and crossing out onto the tarmac. He did not wait for them to get any closer or for the clearance from port control. Acceleration slammed him back into the flight harness as the shuttle lifted without authorization. The shots fired from the two police skimmers fell woefully short of the rapidly climbing shuttle.
Within moments his body, if not his thoughts, experienced weightlessness. Clarity, Clarity, why did you have to go and get yourself shot? Why, when everything had been decided, when all had been resolved? He missed her already. Her smile, her no-nonsense advice, the way the light gilded her hair and glinted in her eyes. Having had no one to miss for so many years, it was astounding how quickly he now missed her. Pip did her best to console him. Despondent, he reached down to stroke the back of the minidrag’s head and neck.
“You’re a good gal, Pip. You can even hug back. No offense, but talking with you just isn’t the same as it is with Clarity.”
Not understanding, but wanting to, the flying snake stared back at him out of small, bright eyes.
The shuttle’s command console indicated that he was being hailed on multiple frequencies. No doubt port control was trying frantically to get in touch with the shuttle that had taken off without clearance. Flinx tried to remember if, when assuming orbit around New Riviera, he had seen any warships. None leaped to mind, which did not mean they were not present. There might be one on the other side of the planet or one might have entered Nurian space after he had. But he didn’t think it likely. New Riviera was celebrated for many things, but not as a military outpost.
There would be policing craft in orbit, and he would do well not to linger. Ahead, he could see the expanding shape of the Teacher, with its teardrop-shaped living quarters at one end and the Caplis generator at the other. Soon he would be back in familiar surroundings. Familiar, he reflected, and lonely.
Clarity would live. Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex would see to it, if only for his sake. She would live, and he would come back. As to the object of his forthcoming search, was the Tar-Aiym weapons platform powerful enough to do anything against the oncoming evil? That it possessed immense destructive potential he knew. But the looming threat was on a cosmic scale.
First he would have to find it again, he knew. And before that, he had to quickly depart the Nurian system.
The shuttle slipped silently and smoothly into the open bay in the underside of the Teacher. As soon as pressure outside had been equalized and the internal posigravity field had drawn him down into his seat, he emerged into the ship. The air of the only real home he had known for many years smelled especially sweet, he decided. Fully automated and self-contained, the Teacher welcomed him back.
His thoughts still full of the woman he had been forced to leave behind, Pip riding comfortably on his shoulder, he headed for the control room. Considering what he had just been through and what lay ahead, he found he was feeling remarkably good.
He never sensed the presence of the other two humans on board until the hypo struck him in the lower back. Feeling wonderfully happy and warm, he sat down on the deck and remained there, smiling into the distance. Pip immediately launched from his shoulder and fluttered to and fro in the control room. That there were two other humans present she saw right away. But since only feelings of contentment and satisfaction emanated from Flinx, she was not driven to attack the strangers.
A short, middle-aged woman with dark hair and eyes smiled up at the flying snake. Confused and wary, Pip settled down on the command console and relaxed as best she could. At the slightest hint of alarm from Flinx she would instantly leap to the attack.
The woman’s small and wiry companion walked over to Flinx and caught him as he be
gan to slump. “Easy there, Philip Lynx. You’re going to be fine. Let me help you.”
Through what seemed to be a rose-scented haze, Flinx peered up. “Thank you. Thas very nice of you.” The man was much stronger than he appeared. With the woman’s assistance, they managed to walk Flinx to his living quarters. A wary Pip followed, still more confused than concerned.
Once in the room, the visitors eased Flinx down onto his bed. He smiled languidly up at them as they tied him down. “I feel—wonderful,” he mumbled torpidly. “Who—who are you people, and how did you get onto my ship?”
“Our names are not important.” The cheerful woman was grinning from ear to ear as she secured one of the straps she had brought with her around his ankle. “We are members of the Order of Null.”
Flinx chuckled softly. “The Order of Nothing. That’s funny! Tell me another funny.” Something was wrong, he knew. Very wrong. But he was feeling too good to worry. It was far more important to relax and enjoy life. Even the knowledge that they were tying him down was somehow amusing. It shouldn’t be. He was aware enough to know that much.
“The Order of Null,” the jolly man securing his upper body explained, “was brought into being only recently, yet has already gained many devoted adherents. It knows that the cosmos, or at least this portion of it, is soon to undergo a vast change. An immense cleansing. All the wickedness and corruption that has accumulated over the eons is to be wiped away to make way for a clean, new beginning.”
“Thas wonderful,” Flinx heard himself murmur. A tiny part of his mind was screaming to get out so it could deal appropriately with this tsunami of bogus happiness. But it was trapped in a sea of narcotized satisfaction.
Let it go, his thoughts told him. Let everything slip-slide away. Relax, be at ease. All is well. All is right with the universe. What had he been so troubled about, anyway? He fought to think, to remember, but like the soft, fresh-smelling blankets his visitors were placing on him, the air inside the Teacher seemed to press down insistently. The air, a part of him realized. The air. Desperately, a part of him tried to remember, and found neither Clarity nor clarity.
Able only to recall the most recent thoughts, he inquired contentedly, “What’s going to do all this wiping away?”
It was the woman who replied. “Why, you know that better than anyone, Philip Lynx. A handful of people know of it as a potentially interesting cosmological phenomenon. Still fewer think of it as dangerous. Only you and you alone know of it as something conscious and perceptive. Regrettably, you see it as a great evil, whereas we of the Order know it for what it is: the coming of a great purification.”
So these people knew about the phenomenon that lay behind the Great Emptiness. But how? Could there be others besides him capable of such perception? He giggled. The air, the air, he gasped. Somehow these people had fooled the Teacher’s AI sufficiently to slip aboard. Since he had seen no other shuttle in the bay, they had probably entered via environment suits. Then they had introduced something into the ship’s atmosphere. Something that made anyone who inhaled it feel good, at ease, unthreatened. Then they had enhanced the effect even further by injecting him with something.
Why didn’t Pip defend him, attack them? Because he felt no apprehension, no fear. He felt wonderful. Did they intend him harm? For just an instant, a flicker of anxiety crossed his mind. From her small bed across the room, Pip looked up. The spark of unease that had briefly troubled her master flickered out. She closed her eyes and went to sleep.
“How do you know about what’s coming?” he heard himself ask.
Leaning over him, the man smiled. They were breathing the same recycled atmosphere, Flinx knew. It made them feel unaccountably happy also. But they had come prepared for the consequences and had probably dosed themselves with something that would mitigate the effect and allow them to continue to function.
“Why, because of you, Philip Lynx! There would be no Order of Null without you. In a sense, you are our founder.”
Anger marched now with his contentment. He was the founder of this bizarre and confused Order? He was responsible for the existence of these blissful worshipers of nothingness?
“Confused,” he gurgled softly. “Better explain.”
“We would be happy to.”
Of course she would, Flinx thought. Everyone and everything on the Teacher was happy now. Except perhaps the AI. It had clearly been neutralized, if not entirely shut down.
“The individual, praise be his perceptiveness, who started the Order was a researcher named Pyet Prorudde who worked in Commonwealth Science Central on Earth. He encountered a singular report from one Padre Bateleur on Samstead. Curious, he monitored all departmental addenda to this report that revealed the presence of nothingness in a certain section of space lying in the direction of the constellation Boötes. So intrigued was he that he engaged others to research it further with him.
“What they found was emptiness. Nothingness. A place where everything had been wiped away. No sin, no vice, no immorality. No war, no slaughtering of innocents. A place where immorality, both humanx and alien, had been erased. A place where life, where the very stuff of creation itself, could begin afresh.”
“No.” Flinx’s protest was feeble, weighed down by the malicious bliss that was smothering him. “There’s not nothing there.” Was he even making sense? he wondered. “There’s something else. An immense evil. A foulness that destroys. It’s not cleansing. It’s pure destruction. And where it passes, nothing is left, so there’s nothing from which new life, new creation, can emerge. There’s only—void.”
Favoring him with a confident, knowing smile, the woman patted him reassuringly on his shoulder. She wore the contented look of the self-assured fanatic.
“We believe that we know better, Philip Lynx.”
Realization struck home, penetrating even the fog of false happiness that enveloped him. “You’re the people who tried to kill me on Goldin Four.”
“Not us,” the woman protested, “but others of the Order. Something happened to them. There are wise individuals among us who realized that what affected them might somehow have been tied to you. So we delved deeper into what little is known about you and learned enough to determine how best you might be deceived.” She gestured to her right.
“It was felt that waylaying you on your way to your shuttle might not work. Therefore a backup plan was devised. So here we are now, on your wonderful ship, together.”
He smiled up at her and giggled again. Inside, a part of him that was restrained by something less tangible than straps was screaming to be let loose. Across the room Pip dozed on, empathetically awash in her master’s radiant happiness.
“You wouldn’t kill your founder, would you?”
“Everything must perforce be wiped away. No hint, not the tiniest nanofragment of corruption from this reality, must be allowed to remain to contaminate the new dawn that is to come. We of the Order welcome the cleansing that is coming.” She smiled maternally; a death’s-head smile. “We all die, Philip Lynx. Some sooner, some later. In the immensity of time, our individual lives mean nothing.”
“I disagree,” he mumbled liquidly.
“As will others. But by then the purifying force that presses forward behind the Great Emptiness will be here, and it will not matter.”
“Then why bother with me?” he asked.
Looking down at him, the man wore a somber expression. Exultant, but somber. “Because it has been determined, because of what you know and because of your ability to perceive what lies beyond, that you are the one individual who might make a difference. That cannot be allowed. So you have to die.” He smiled. “We will die with you. Now or later, it does not matter.”
“What are you going to do?” Flinx managed to snigger.
“Your ship’s controlling AI has been placed in a rest mode. We cannot manage changeover to space-plus. Only advanced electronics can handle such calculations. But it is not necessary for us to enter space-plus. W
e will activate the KK-drive manually and set a course for Nur’s sun. Even at sub-changeover speeds, final purification will take place in a few days. Until then, Philip Lynx, you might as well relax and dream happy dreams.” He turned to the woman. “Make sure the atmospheric concentration of added endorphin modifiers stays at the appropriate level and that he gets another booster in four hours.” She nodded.
They left. Flinx struggled indifferently against his bonds. What did it matter if he was tied up? What could be better than lying there, with nothing to do, feeling contented and happy? Why struggle? The visiting members of the Order were right, of course. In the end we are all dead. What difference did it make if it was today or tomorrow? The end was the same. As it would be for everyone and everything when whatever lay behind the Great Emptiness began to affect the galaxy. Why worry about it?
Clarity, he thought. Clarity would die, too. Without knowing what had happened to him, without seeing him again, without his seeing her, without his being able to hold her, to feel her body against his, his arms wrapped around her, his lips against hers. He started to weep. As he cried, he laughed, his system saturated with pleasure-inducing chemicals.
In the darkness of space, a glow formed at the front of the Teacher’s Caplis generator. Ignoring preliminary queries from orbital control, the ship began to move. Those directing her did not mind the warnings. If a government vessel capable of threatening them appeared, they would use the Teacher’s weaponry to shoot back. Whether they fell into the sun or were blown apart made no difference.
On his bed Flinx drifted in and out of consciousness. From time to time one of the visitors came and injected him with something soothing. Then his unease faded away and the angst that had begun to build inside him popped like a soap bubble. Nearby, Pip snoozed unconcerned. She knew that his emotions were only of peace and contentment.
The Teacher accelerated, moving deeper into the Nurian system. The yellow-orange main sequence dwarf star at its heart grew larger in the curved foreport of the control room. While Flinx lay in unnatural slumber his visitors ate and slept and gazed at the universe they were soon to depart.
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