Trouble Magnet

by Alan Dean Foster

  “I’m sorry.” Flinx held out both hands to the younger man. “I didn’t mean for that to happen, for you to perceive that. I was upset. Not at you: at something within myself. It was something I couldn’t prevent. It was an accident.”

  Swallowing hard, Subar took a wary step away from the cabinet. “What happened? How did you do that? I felt—I felt…” He could not put what he had felt into words, and said so.

  Flinx turned away slightly. “Don’t feel a lack. The most venerable philosophs couldn’t put it into words. It’s beyond words. It’s something that’s at once within and outside me.”

  For the second time that morning Subar saw his guest in a new light. Only this time, it was not as a potential victim, but as someone to feel sorry for. That was quaint. Him, feeling sorry for this well-off, well-traveled offworlder. If he had only been made privy to a tiny bit of what hid inside this pitiable longsong, then…

  He preferred not to pursue that particular line of speculation any farther.

  It was an unfamiliar situation. He was used to dividing up the world into friend and foe. The idea that a total stranger, and a most peculiar offworlder at that, could be something else, something different—not friend, but not enemy, either—was totally new.

  Could he be, perhaps, somehow useful? Being in the longsong’s company, he decided, was akin to walking around with a large bomb. It gave him something to threaten others with, but at any moment it might also go off in his hand. Was it a chance he dared risk taking? Making his determination a lot more complicated was the fact that the bomb had an agenda of its own.

  “I should go.” Flinx turned to do so, the minidrag riding on his left shoulder, her tail coiled around the back of his neck.

  “Wait, please…” Again Subar tried to restrain the visitor, only this time with a different purpose in mind. It was no use. Flinx opened the door. As it swung wide, Pip lifted her head and hissed sharply.

  The portal was already occupied.

  Visitor and newcomers eyed each other appraisingly. “Tchoul,” a surprised Chaloni murmured as he looked the offworlder up and down. “Who, or what, is this?” Flanking him, Dirran and Sallow Behdul let their hands slide in the direction of concealed weapons. Flinx regarded the trio calmly.

  Subar crowded close behind him, struggling to make himself seen as well as heard. “Laze, Chal! He’s pure lucid, he’s a friend.”

  The gang leader ignored the younger boy’s hurried assertions. His attention remained fixed on Flinx. “You brought him here? To our priv space?”

  Still fighting for room in the narrow portal, a deferential Subar pleaded his case. “I told you; he’s lucid. He skyed me clear of the bugs—and away from the police.” Demonstrating a shrewd knowledge of the intricacies of mature diplomacy, he tactfully refrained from reminding Chaloni and the others that they were the ones who had abandoned him to that potential fate. “How’s Zezula—and Missi?”

  The gang leader weighed his follower’s words, his voice a soft murmur. If he detected anything more in Subar’s tone than formal concern for Zezula, he didn’t show it. “They’re still at Kolindu’s clinic, getting patched up. Every time Zez feels her nose, she wants to go out and kill the first bug she sees.” His hard gaze rose to meet Flinx’s quiet stare. “How about you, longsong? How you feel about killing bugs?”

  Unlike with Subar, Flinx perceived that there was nothing ambivalent about the one the younger boy had called Chal. Had he been the one caught in the grasp of the fighting thranx, Flinx would not have raised a hand to help him. The emotions that flowed forth from him embodied everything Flinx had come to despise in his own kind: greed, selfishness, a nasty delight in the discomfiture of others, a raw craving for power, and more. His two companions were little better, with the larger of the pair possibly being an exception. The bulky youth’s emotions were as flat and dull as the rest of him.

  Subar, now—there might be some hope for Subar. And if there was hope for him, perhaps also for the rest of civilization, insofar as Flinx’s further involvement with its uncertain future was concerned.

  As one hand slipped into a pocket, Chaloni took a step into the room. “I asked you how you feel about killing bugs, scrawn.”

  Flinx had to put up a hand to restrain Pip, whose perception of the gang leader was no less exact than that of her master. “Depends on where they are.”

  Chaloni halted, perplexed and trying not to show it. “‘Where’? What do you mean, ‘where’?”

  “Whether they’re in my gut, my bed, my food, or my head.”

  Dirran laughed. It was more of a sharp expectoration, like spit, than a sincere chuckle. Chaloni hesitated, then found himself smiling. “True, true. Spoken like someone who’s had plenty of experience of both.” A glint of light bounced off the cylindrical device he withdrew from his pocket. Gray and tapered, it was not sharp. It did not have to be.

  “You know what this is, scrawn longsong?” Chaloni was clearly enjoying himself.

  Flinx nodded slowly. “Sonic stiletto.”

  The gang leader pushed out his lower lip, his expression and tone approving. “You have had some experience. So you know the wave form it emits will punch through almost anything.” He flicked the tip in the direction of Flinx’s shoulder. “Including that wingthing weighing down your neck, if it tries to bite me.”

  “Pip doesn’t bite,” Flinx informed him truthfully. “Neither do I.”

  “That remains to be decided, doesn’t it?” Chaloni started forward.

  Internally, Subar was a mass of conflicting emotions. If he didn’t react to intercede on behalf of the visitor, Chaloni was surely going to cut him—if only to demonstrate that he could. If he did try to talk the bigger, older youth out of the hostile, Chaloni would not forget whose side Subar had taken. Unable to decide what to do, he did nothing. Let the visitor get himself out of it, if he could. Chaloni wasn’t angry—he just wanted to make a point. He probably wouldn’t cut the stranger bad.

  Then a strange thing happened. Chaloni stopped. Just stopped, as if he had run into an invisible wall. There was no wall: Subar could tell that much when Sallow Behdul advanced beyond where the gang leader was standing. Then he, too, halted. Both boys started twitching slightly, as if afflicted with sudden chills. They were joined by Dirran a moment later. Mouth agape, Subar leaned forward to glance up at the visitor. Flinx’s eyes were half closed but otherwise fixed on his would-be assailants. He, too, looked paralyzed.

  No, not paralyzed, Subar corrected himself. Deep in thought. He considered asking his guest what was going on. Realizing that for the moment he, at least, was not twitching, the younger boy wisely decided to keep quiet and out of the way.

  Normally, the emotions that filled Flinx to bursting stayed caged within him. Everything that had happened to him from an early age to the present—every experience, every disappointment, every confrontation and conflict to which he had been a participant, every iota of misery and unhappiness, of death and destruction, of malevolence and pure evil—remained put down and locked up in one small section of his mind he had reserved for that purpose. Now he let those emotions out. Just a trickle, the tiniest seep of forlorn despair. Let them out and projected them onto the emotional receptors of the three young men standing before him. He was very careful about how wide he opened the emotive tap. He did not want to kill.

  Tears began to leach from the corners of Chaloni’s eyes. His lips trembled like a little girl’s. His fingers went limp and the stiletto fell from his hand. It had not been activated or it would have cut its way through successive floors all the way down to the ground before its built-in safety finally shut it off. Chaloni started to sob. Pressing his clenched fists against his eyes, he began hammering against them as he dropped to his knees. To his right, Dirran was lying on the floor crying, holding himself, and rocking back and forth. On the other side of the gang leader, Sallow Behdul had not made a sound. Instead, he sat down, curled up into a tight fetal ball, and began sucking softly on the knu
ckles of his huge right hand.

  Subar discovered that his throat had gone dry. “What—what did you do to them?”

  “Nothing much.” Flinx’s eyes were once more fully open. “Gave them the tiniest taste of dark water.”

  Careful to avoid the glaze-eyed, blankly staring Behdul, Subar stepped forward and pivoted to confront his guest. “I didn’t see any water.”

  The thinnest of smiles creased Flinx’s face. “I turned it off. Listen, I’m pretty rested. Thanks for showing me your ‘place.’” He started to push past the staring youth, heading for the exit.

  Subar’s thoughts moved as fast as they ever had in his life. Somehow this offworlder, this Flinx, had put down the three toughest members of Subar’s acquaintance without laying a finger on any of them. It reminded him of another inexplicable moment; of what the visitor had done to him earlier. Something from within, the stranger had told him. It was, it had to be, some kind of trick. But what kind? And if he was right, could his guest possibly teach it to him? Useful—oh yes, the tall longsong could be useful. If he was going to learn anything, Subar knew he still had to figure out a way to keep Flinx around.

  “This isn’t my place,” he announced hurriedly.

  Pausing in the portal, Flinx peered back at him. “It’s not?”

  “No, no. It’s just our priv space, where we get together to, uh, socialize.”

  And plan muggings, and who knew what else. Flinx had been there before. Other times, other worlds. All of them equally disheartening.

  Taking the unknown by the know-nothing, Subar ignored his still-sobbing friends and rushed forward a couple of steps until he was standing in front of Flinx. “C’mon. Let me show you my place. You might find it interesting. It might make some things clearer to you.”

  Flinx hesitated. “I told you—I can’t stay.”

  Steeling himself in case whatever had touched him previously reached across the gap separating him from his visitor to touch him again, Subar entreated as earnestly as he could.

  “I don’t know what it is that you want here, but if I can help, I will. Because you saved me from the police,” he lied.

  Flinx knew the youth was lying. As long as his erratic Talent was functioning, he could always tell when someone was lying. But there was something else there, something more. A hunger that went beyond the simple simian emotions that had boiled blatantly within the minds of Chaloni and his companion hooligans. Was he right about the youth? Was there, after all, some hope for one who reminded him of himself, and by inference for the greater humankind whose final fate he might hold in the balance? If so, it behooved him to find out.

  Besides, he could as easily take the measure of the melancholic inhabitants of Visaria in Subar’s company as he could by his dejected lonesome. What was calling him away so insistently? His nondescript hotel room? Why not spend a little downtime in the youth’s company? If he couldn’t please himself, Flinx mused, he could for a little while at least provide some small measure of gratification to this aimless, befuddled adolescent.

  “Okay,” he heard himself saying. “I’ll stick around a little longer. So you can show me your place.”

  “Tscheks!” an obviously pleased Subar exclaimed. “You can save the galaxy, or whatever it is you have to do, later.”

  “Sure,” Flinx replied agreeably and without elaboration. “No hurry.”

  Subar took a step down the rooftop accessway, then hesitated, looking back at his bawling friends. “What about them?”

  Flinx considered. “Do you really care?”

  Subar’s gaze rose from his mysteriously afflicted companions to his enigmatic new one. Was this a trick question? The offworlder, he was by now convinced, was like a neutron star full of tricks—compressed down and packed tight and ready to explode in his face if he took one wrong step or said one wrong word. He could sense that by trying to think of the “right” reply, he was taking too long to say it.

  “Yes,” he blurted. It must have been the right response. Or at least, not a wrong one.

  “They’ll come out of it sometime tonight,” Flinx assured him, “and they’ll never know what happened to them.”

  Subar was not the only youth present, he reflected as he followed the boy outside the rooftop hideaway and down the accessway, who could lie a little when it suited his purposes.

  CHAPTER

  6

  It was surreptitious contacts that led to Shyvil Theodakris being given his original appointment, and the clandestine manipulation of bits and bytes of history that had allowed him to rise to his present position. That acknowledged, many of those whose participation in his advancement had been crucial were retired, and some were dead.

  Everyone involved, not least Theodakris himself, was gratified by the outcome. Only peace and satisfaction had adhered to the analyst. His work had reflected well on all who had come in contact with him, and his role in advancing stability and progress in Malandere had been recognized by both his immediate superiors and the various city administrations that had come and gone during his successive terms of office. He and his supporters had every reason to be pleased with his contribution.

  If Senior Situations Analyst Shyvil Theodakris had a fault, it was a predilection to personal vanity. The long hair that reached to his shoulders was both unnaturally lush and dark for a man of his advanced age—the result of multiple transplants and artificial enhancements. His attractively dyed eyes, one dark blue and the other bright yellow in the current style, were a consequence of astute chemical manipulation rather than an obscure genetic imbalance. Periodic melding of expensive skin appliqués hid naturally blooming liver spots and other signs of age.

  For all his efforts, there was no mistaking his inherent maturity, though to the untrained eye and unknowing co-worker it was difficult to tell just by looking at him whether he was sixty or a hundred. The disparity was sufficiently great enough to justify his regular visits to an assortment of cosmetic manipulators who might as well have been on regular retainer.

  This morning promised to be a good one. Chaos had reigned less than usual the previous night, resulting in a marked reduction in the number of cases he would be expected to peruse. Unless the details of one struck his fancy, he would give them the usual once-over before passing them on to subordinates for deeper analysis. Underlings would deal with the scutwork of breaking down each antisocial act into its relevant components. Other operatives at Authority Central would take these and employ them in an attempt to locate the perpetrators. Armed with these rapidly compiled individual dossiers, active forces would scan the municipality’s various districts in the never-ending search for criminals and other antisocial elements.

  The system was inherently organic in nature, Theodakris reflected as he settled into the chair facing the familiar blank wall. His body processed air and food. Authority Central processed clues and crimes. Both generated energy and waste products. At AC, these took the form of safer surroundings for law-abiding citizens and incarceration for society’s transgressors.

  It was his task, one at which he had grown extremely proficient over the years, to speed through the history of an entire crime and single out suggestive individual elements that subordinates might usefully pursue. Thanks to his early training as a genonaturalist, he had a talent for predicting how collaborators in crime were likely to act subsequent to the perpetration. This was an invaluable aid to police in the field. On more than one occasion, for example, he had been able to envisage how certain lawbreakers would respond in the aftermath of their actions, thus enabling the police to find them almost immediately. His modest privacy-screened cubicle boasted a wall crowded with awards while his personal civic sybfile was full of official commendations as well as heartfelt expressions of gratitude from ordinary citizens who had been the victims of crime, and whose assailants had been caught and successfully prosecuted thanks to Theodakris’s efforts.

  A few murmured codewords, a quick eyescan, and a pair of tridimensional images form
ed in front of him. The one on the left would unspool those events of the previous day that were deemed significant enough to justify his attention. The projection on the right would provide supplementary analysis, suggestions, opinions, the official reports of the officers involved in the relevant offense, and anything else department researchers thought might be pertinent to the particular case.

  It was not a bad life, he mused as both projections filled the air before him. Leaning back in his lounge, he reflected on his unique good fortune as he absently studied the first images. He was a respected contributor to the success of a rapidly developing culture and an honored pillar of the community. Appreciably different from the fate that had been suffered by the rest of his colleagues, whose brave, youthful enthusiasms had been so violently rejected by an ignorant and immature galactic culture.

  Within his department, a few hyperenergetic juniors had been pushing for him to retire. He saw no reason to do so. Ever active, his mind would only vegetate and wither in retirement. As long as he could contribute to the health of the Visarian culture that had accepted him, he would continue to do so.

  It would help, though, he reflected as the coordinated projections flickered in front of him and he methodically scrutinized one case after another, if more than one wrongdoing every couple of days was of other than passing interest. So many of them replicated little more than the basest impulses of humankind, and were invariably perpetrated with less imagination and inventiveness than might be exhibited by a coterie of trained apes.

  Store break-ins were accomplished with blunt objects and blunter minds. These affronts in search of merchandise invariably left behind cascades of clues, so many that his involvement seemed more a bureaucratic afterthought than an appropriate use of department resources. The solving of crimes of property tended to be as dull and business-like as their execution.