Orphan Star
Page 24
Now he cracked a wan smile. “Why do you think the Ujurrians are building a ship?”
“I don’t know . . . for fun, to explore . . . why?”
“It’s my present from them—Moam’s little surprise. He knows I want to go looking for my father, so they’re doing their best to help me look. I told them they couldn’t construct a KK-drive ship here . . . that it had to be done clear of a planet’s gravity. You know what he said? ‘We fix . . . too much trouble other way.’
“He located an Ujurrian—skinniest one I ever saw—who thinks only in mathematical terms. She’s so weird—her name-translation came out as ‘Integrator’—she can almost understand Maybeso. Moam set her the problem. Two weeks ago she cracked the problem of landing in a gravity well on KK-drive. Commonwealth scientists have been trying to solve that puzzle for a couple of hundred years.”
He sighed. “All to help me find my father. Syl . . . what happens if the Ujurrians don’t find the rest of the cosmos, our civilization, to their liking? What if they decide to ‘play’ with it? What have we unleashed?”
She sat back on trulegs and foothands and pondered. Long minutes passed. The gem-encrusted bug flew away.
“If nothing else,” she told him finally, staring down at the ship, “a way to go home. You worry overmuch, Flinx. I don’t think our civilization will hold much of interest for these creatures. It’s you they’re interested in. Remember what Maybeso said . . . if this new game bores them, they’ll go back to their old one.”
Flinx considered this, appeared to brighten. Then abruptly he rose, brushed the dust from his legs. “I suppose you’re right, Syl. I can’t do any good worrying about it. When they finish the ship, it will be time to go home. I need Mother Mastiff’s acerbity, and I need to lose myself again, for a while.” He glanced up at her oddly. “Will you help?”
Sylzenzuzex turned great, glowing multifaceted eyes on Pip, watched as the minidrag folded pleated wings to dive down a burrow after the retreating mammal. Sounds of scuffling came from below.
“It promises to be intriguing . . . from a purely scientific point of view, of course,” she murmured.
“Of course,” Flinx acknowledged, properly straight-faced.
A narrow reptilian head popped out of the burrow and a pointed tongue flicked rapidly in their direction. Pip stared smugly back at them, a Cheshire cat with scales. . . .
Alan Dean Foster has written in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the Star Wars® novel The Approaching Storm. He is also the author of numerous nonfiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as the novelizations of several films, including Star Wars, the first three Alien films, and Alien Nation. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work to ever do so.
Foster’s love of the faraway and exotic has led him to travel extensively. He’s lived in Tahiti and French Polynesia, traveled to Europe, Asia, and throughout the Pacific, and has explored the back roads of Tanzania and Kenya. He has rappeled into New Mexico’s fabled Lechugilla Cave, eaten panfried pirhana (lots of bones, tastes a lot like trout) in Peru, white-water rafted the length of the Zambezi’s Batoka Gorge, and driven solo the length and breadth of Namibia.
Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, reside in Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from a turn-of-the-century miners’ brothel. He is presently at work on several new novels and media projects.
Visit the author at his Web site at www.alandeanfoster.com.
Books By Alan Dean Foster
The Black Hole
Cachalot
Dark Star
The Metrognome and Other Stories
Midworld
Nor Crystal Tears
Sentenced to Prism
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye
Star Trek® Logs One-Ten
Voyage to the City of the Dead
. . . Who Needs Enemies?
With Friends Like These . . .
Mad Amos
Parallelites
THE ICERIGGER TRILOGY:
Icerigger
Mission to Moulokin
The Deluge Drivers
THE ADVENTURES OF FLINX OF THE COMMONWEALTH:
For Love of Mother-Not
The Tar-Aiym Krang
Orphan Star
The End of the Matter
Bloodhype
Flinx In Flux
Mid-Flinx
Reunion
THE DAMNED
Book One: A Call to Arms
Book Two: The False Mirror
Book Three: The Spoils of War
THE FOUNDING OF THE COMMONWEALTH
Phylogenesis
Dirge
Diuturnity’s Dawn
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A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1977 by Alan Dean Foster
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, Canada.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-30376
eISBN: 978-0-345-45452-2
v3.0