The door to the tower's central shaft opened as the only other occupant of the room sought escape. Instead of an empty elevator, he found himself confronted by a figure of gargantuan proportions that lifted him squealing from the floor and removed the needler. The new arrival quickly rendered the weapon harmless by crumpling it in a fist that had the force of a mechanical press. Nolly's fingers, which happened to be wrapped around the needler, suffered a similar fate, and a single shriek of pain preceded unconsciousness.
Small Symm ducked to clear the top of the portal, dropping the limp human shape to one side. Simultaneously a long lean -shape settled easily about Flinx's shoulders, and a single damp point flickered familiarly at his ear. Reaching back, Flinx scratched under the minidrag's jaw and felt the long muscular form relax. "Thanks, Pip."
Rising from the chair, he moved around the table- safe and played with the controls on the other side. Before very long he succeeded in lighting the entire room.
Where Nanger had crashed and stumbled, the expensive furnishings lay broken and twisted. His body, already growing stiff with venom-inspired death, lay crumpled across one bent chair. The unmoving form of his companion was slumped to one side of the doorway. A mangled hand oozed blood.
"I was wondering," Flinx informed Symm, "when you'd get here."
"It was difficult," the bartender apologized, his voice echoing up from that bottomless pit of a chest. "Your pet was impatient, disappearing and then reappearing when I fell behind. How did he know how to find you?"
Flinx affectionately eyed the now somnolent scaly head. "He smelled my fear. Life-water knows I was broadcasting it loud enough." He held out manacled wrists. "Can you do something about these? I have to go after Challis."
Symm glanced at the cuffs, a look of mild surprise on his face. "I never thought revenge was part of your makeup, Flinx."
Reaching down with a massive thumb and forefinger, Symm carefully pinched one of the narrow con- fining bands. A moment's pressure caused the metal to snap with an explosive pop. Repeating the action freed Flinx's other hand.
Looking at his right wrist as he rubbed it with his left hand, Flinx could detect no mark—nothing to indicate the intense pain that the device had inflicted.
He debated how to respond to his friend's accusation. How could he hope to explain the importance of Challis' remark to this good-natured hulk? "I think Challis may know something of my real parents. I can't simply forget about it."
The unaccustomed bitterness of Symm's answer startled him. "What are they to you? What have they done for you? They have caused you to be treated like chattel, like a piece of property. If not for the intervention of Mother Mastiff you'd be a personal slave now, perhaps to something like Challis. Your real parents— you owe them nothing, least of all the satisfaction of showing them you've survived!"
"I don't know the circumstances of my abandonment, Symm," Flinx finally countered. "I have to find out. I have to."
The bartender, an orphan himself, shrugged massively. "You're an idealistic misfit, Flinx."
"And you're an even bigger one," the boy shot back, "which is why you're going to help me."
Symm muttered something unintelligible, which might have been a curse. Then again, it might not. "Where did he get out?"
Plinx indicated the hidden doorway, and Symm walked over to the spot and leaned against the metal panel experimentally. The hinging collapsed inward with surprising ease. Beyond, they discovered a short corridor, which led to a small private lift that conveyed them rapidly to the base of the luxarions tower.
"How did you get in, anyway?" Flinx asked his friend.
Symm Switched. "I told the security people I met that I had an appointments pass, the usual procedure in an inurb like this."
"Didn't anyone demand to see it?"
Symm didn't crack a smile. "Would you? Only one guard did, and I think he'll be all right if he gets proper care. Careful now," the giant warned as the lift came to a stop. Crouching to one side, he sprang out as soon as the door slid open sufficiently to let him pass. But there was no ambush awaiting them. Instead, they found themselves in a ground-car garage, which showed ample sign of having been recently vacated.
"Keep your monumental ears open," Flinx advised quietly. "See if you can find out where Challis has fled. I'm going to work my own sources...."
When they left through the open doorway of the-garage, no one challenged their departure, though hidden eyes observed it. But those behind the eyes were grateful to see the pair go.
"You're sure they're not still here?" Symm wondered aloud. "Someone could have taken the car as a diversion."
Flinx replied with the kind of unnerving assurance Symm didn't pretend to understand, but had come to accept. "No, they're no longer in this vicinity."
The pair parted outside the last encircling wall of the inurb. There was no formality, no shaking of hands—nothing of the sort was required between these two. If you learn anything get in touch with me at Mother Mastiff's shop," Flinx instructed the giant. "Whatever happens, I’ll let you know my plans."
As he made his way back through the market's concentric circles, he clutched his cloak tightly about him. The last drops of the morning rain were falling. In the distance an always hopeful sun showed signs of emerging from the low, water-heavy clouds.
Plenty of activity swirled about him. At this commercial hub of the Commonwealth, business operated round the clock.
Flinx knew a great many inhabitants of this world- within-a-world oil sight. Some were wealthy and great, some poor and great. A few were not human and more were less human than others though all claimed membership in the same race.
Passing the stall of the sweets vendor Kiki, he kept his attention resolutely ahead. It was too early and his stomach was too empty for candy. Besides, his innards still rocked slightly from the aftereffects of Challis' seemingly harmless jewelry. So, at Chairman Nils he bought a small loaf of bran bread coated with nut butter.
Nils was a fortyish food vendor with an authoritative manner. Everyone called him the Chairman. He ruled his comer of the marketplace with the air of a dictator, never suspecting that he held this power because his fellow sellers and hawkers found it amusing to humor his gentle madness. There were never any delusions in his baked goods, however. Flinx took a ferocious bite out of the triangular loaf, enjoying the occasional crunch of chopped nuts woven into the brown butter.
A glance at the sky still hinted at the possibility of the sun breaking through, a rare occurrence in usually cloud-shrouded Drallar.
His snack finished, Flinx began moving through a section filled with handsome, permanent shopfronts—a section that was considerably different from the region of makeshift shacks and stores in which he had been raised. When he’d first proposed shifting the ancient stall from the noisome depths of the marketplace
Mother Mastiff had protested vociferously. "I wouldn't know how to act," she had argued. "What do I know about treating with fancy customers and rich folks?"
"Believe me, Mother"—though they both knew she wasn't his real mother, she acted as one to half the homeless in Drallar—"they're the same as your old customers, only now the idiots will come with bigger bankrolls. Besides, what else would I do with all the money Malaika pressed on me?"
Eventually he had been forced to purchase the shop and thus present her with a fait accompli. She railed at him for hours when he told her—until she saw the place. Though she continued muttering dire imprecations about everything he showed her—the high-class inventory, the fancy living quarters upstairs, the automatic cooking devices—her resistance collapsed with unsurprising speed.
But there were two things she still refused to do. One was to change her handmade, homemade attire— as esoteric a collage of beads, bells, and cloth as could be imagined. The other was to use the small elevator that ran between the shop proper and the living quarters above. "The day I can't climb a single flight of stairs," she remonstrated, "is the day you can have me embalmed, stuffed, and put in the window at a curio sale." To demonstrate her determination, she proceeded at once to walk the short stairway on all fours.
No one knew how old Mother Mastiff was and she wasn't telling. Nor would she consent to submit to the extensive cosmetic surgeries Flinx could now afford, or to utilize any other artificial age-reduction device. "I've spent too long and too much effort preparin' for the role of an aged crone, and I'm not about to give up on it now," she told him. "Besides, the more pitiful and decrepit I look, the more polite and sympathetic the suck—the customers are."
Not surprisingly, the shop prospered. For one thing, many of the better craftsmen in Drallar had come from equally humble origins, and they enjoyed selling their better products to her.
As Flinx rounded the comer, he saw she was waiting for him at the rear entrance. "Out all night again. I don't suppose you've been anywhere as healthy as the Pink Palace or Sinnyville. D'you want your throat cut before you make eighteen?" she admonished, wagging a warning finger.
"Not much chance of that. Mother." He brushed past her, but—not to be put off—she followed him into the little storeroom behind the shopfront.
"And that flyin' gargoyle of yours won't save you every time, y' know. Not in a city like this, where everyone has a handshake for you with one palm and a knife for your back in the other. Keep walkin' about at the depths of the night like this, boy, and one day they'll be bringin' you back f me pale and empty of juice. And I warn you," she continued, her voice rising, "it's a cheap funeral you'll be gettin', because I'm not workin' my fingers to the quick to pay for a fancy send-off for a fool!"
A sharp buzz interrupted the tirade. "So I'll tell you for the last time, boy..."
"Didn't you hear the door Mother?" He grinned. "First customer of the morn."
She peered through the beads in the doorway. "Hub. Tourists, by the look of 'em. You should see the tanzanite on the woman's ring." She hesitated, torn between the need to satisfy affection and avarice simultaneously. "But what's a couple of customers when ..." another hesitation, "still, that's twelve carats at least in the one stone. Their clothes mark 'em as Terrans maybe, too." She finally threw up her hands in confusion and disgust. "It's my punishment. You're a visitation for the sins of my youth. Get out of my sight, boy. Upstairs and wash yourself, and mind the disinfectant. You smell of the gutter. Dry yourself well, mind ... you're not too big or old for me to blush your bottom." She slipped through the screen and a radical metamorphosis took place.
"Ah sir, madam," an oily voice cooed soothingly, the voice of everyone's favorite grandmama, "you honor my small shop. I would have been out sooner but I was tending to my poor grandson who is desperately ill and in need of much expensive treatment. The doctors fear that unless the operation is performed soon, he will lose the power of sight, and—"
Her slick spiel was cut off as the elevator door slid shut behind Flinx. Unlike Mother Mastiff, he had no compunction about using modern conveniences—certainly not now, as tired as he was from the experiences of the night before. As he stepped into the upstairs quarters he did wonder how such disparate tones could issue from the same wrinkled throat.
Later, over the evening meal (prepared by him, since Mother Mastiff had been occupied with customers all day), he began to explain what had happened. For a change, she neither harangued nor chastised him, merely listened politely until he had finished
"So you're bound to go after him then, boy," she finally said.
"I have to, Mother."
"Why?"
He looked away. "I'd rather not say."
"All right." She mopped up the last of her gravy with a piece of bread. "I've heard much of the man Challis—plenty of rumors about his tastes in certain matters and none of them good. There's less known about his businesses, though word is the Challis Company has prospered since he became the head." She granted noisily and wiped at her mouth with a corner of her multilayered skirt.
"You sure you got to do this, boy? You've only been off-planet once before, y' know."
"I think I can handle myself, Mother."
"Daresay, daresay," she replied disparagingly. "Though by all the odds you ought to have been dead a dozen times before your fifteenth birthday, and I don't suppose that grinnin' devil could have been responsible for savin' you every time."
She favored a small artificial tree with a poisonous stare. Pip was coiled comfortably around one of its branches. The minidrag did not look up. The relationship between him and Mother Mastiff had always been one of uneasy truce.
"Before you take off, let me make a call," she finished.
While Flinx finished his dessert and fought to pry the last bits of thick gelatin from his back teeth, he listened to her mutter into the pickup of a small communicator at the far end of the room. The machine gave her a mobility she hadn't possessed for decades. It was one of the few conveniences the shop provided that she'd use. It also made her the terror of every city official in any way responsible for the daily operation of the marketplace.
She was back at tableside soon. "Your friend Challis left on the freighliner Auriga this morning with his daughter and a covey of servants." Her expression contorted. "From what I was told, he left in a real hurry. You and that great imbecile Symm must have thrown quite a scare into him, but then the giant's enough by himself to frighten the polish off a mirror."
Flinx did not return her inquiring gaze. Instead he played with one edge of the tablecloth. "What's the Auriga's destination?"
"Hivehom," she told him. "The Challis Company has a lot of investments on the Mediterranea Plateau. I expect that's what he'll head for once he sets down."
"I'd better get ready." Flinx rose and started toward his room.
A strong, crinkled hand caught one of his wrists, and a face like a rift valley stared searchingly into his. "Don't do this, boy," she begged, her voice low.
He shook his bead. "No choice, Mother. I can't tell you what calls, but call it does. I have to go."
The pressure did not ease on his wrist. "I don't know what dealings you have with this bad man, but I can't believe it's this serious." Flinx said nothing and she finally released him. "If it's in you to go, go then." She looked away. "I don't know how your mind works, boy. Never did never. But I do know that when you get somethin' like this into it, only you can put it out. Go then, and my blessin's with you. Even," she concluded tightly, "if you won't tell me the why of it."
Bending over, he kissed the gray bun curled at the lack of the old woman's head. "Blessings on you too, Mother," he said as she squirmed violently at the gesture.
It didn't take him long to pack the few 'possessions he wanted to bring with him. They didn't seem to mean much to him now. As he started to leave the room, he saw that the woman was still sitting alone at the table, a suddenly tiny and frail figure. How could he tell her he had to risk the life she'd coddled in a vain search for the people who had done nothing beyond giving him birth ...?
When he arrived at Drallar Port later that day, he found he was only physically tired. His mind was sharp and alert. Over the years he had gradually discovered that he required less and less sleep. Some days he could get by with as little as half an hour. His mind rested when it wasn't being pushed, which was frequently.
He no longer had to worry about how he would travel, for there were sufficient funds registered on his cardmeter to sustain him for some time yet. Malaika had been generous. Not all the determining factors were financial, however. A glance at those waiting to board the first-class section of the shuttlecraft engendered an acute sense of unease in him, so he registered for standard fare.
Traveling so would be more enlightening anyway, for his first journey on a commercial spacecraft and his second time off Moth. As he followed the line into the shuttle, passing under the mildly aristocratic eye of the steward, he was shocked to discover that his about-to-be-realized childhood dream of traveling off- planet in one of the great KK-drive freightliners no longer held any thrill for him. It worried him as he strapped into his couch.
Mother Mastiff could have explained it to him if she were there. It was called growing up.
Though tolerable, the shuttle journey was rougher than his single previous experience with the little surface-to-orbit vessels. Naturally, he told himself, the pokier commercial craft would be nowhere near as luxurious as the shuttle carried by Malaika's yacht, the Gloryhole. This one was designed solely to get as many beings and as much cargo as possible from the ground into free-fall as economically as possible. There they could be transferred—passengers and cargo alike, with sometimes equivalent handling—into the great globular bulk of the deepspace ship.
Following that transfer Flinx found himself assigned to a small, compactly designed cabin. He barely took the time to inspect it, and he had little to unpack. During the week-long journey he would spend the majority of travel time in the ship's several lounges, meeting fellow travelers—and learning.
The shift from sublight to KK-drive superlight velocity was hardly a surprise. He had already experienced it several times on Malaika's ship.
One part of the liner he especially enjoyed. From a forward observation lounge he could look ahead and see the immense length of the ship's connecting corridor rods stretching outward like a broad narrowing highway to join the back of the colossal curving dish of the KK field projector. It blotted out the stars ahead.
Somewhere in front of that enormous dish, he knew, the drive unit was projecting the gravity well of a small sun. It pulled the ship steadily and, in turn, the drive projector which then projected the field that much further ahead—and so on. Flinx wondered still at the explanation of it and decided that all great inventions were essentially simple.
He was amusing himself in the ship's game lounge' on the third day when a neatly painted thranx in the stark brown, yellow, and green of commerce took the couch opposite. Less than a meter high at the b-thorax, he was small for a male. Both sets of wing cases still gleamed on his back, indicating that the traveler was as yet unmated. Brilliant, faceted eyes regarded Flinx through multiple gemlike lenses. The wonderful natural perfume odor of his kind drifted across the game table.
The creature glanced down at the glowing board, then its valentine-shaped head cocked curiously at the young human operating it.
"You play hibush-hunt? Most humans find it too complicated. You usually prefer two-dimensional games." The insect's symbospeech was precise and textbook-flat, the variety any good business thranx would speak.
"I've heard a little about it and I've watched it played," Flinx told his visitor modestly. "I really don't know how to play myself."
Mandibles clacked m a gesture of interest and understanding, since the insect's inflexible chitonous face allowed for nothing as robbery as a smile. A slight nod of the head was more easily imitated.
Question-response having served for a courteous greeting, the thranx settled himself more firmly on the couch, trulegs doubled up beneath the abdomen, foothands locked to support the thorax and b-thorax, and truhands moving with delicate precision over the board, adjusting the game plan. "My name is Bisondenbit," he declared.
"I'm called Flinx."
"One calling?" The thranx performed an insectoid shrug. "Well, Flinx, if you'd like to learn, I have some small skill at the game. Which is to say I know the rules. I am not a very good player, so I’ll probably make a good first opponent for you." Again the mandible clicking, accompanied this time by a whistling sound—thranx laughter.
Flinx smiled back. "I'd like to learn very much."
"Good, good ... this is a standoffish group and I've been preening antennae till my nerves are beginning to twitch." The head bobbed. "Your biggest mistake," Bisondenbit began in businesslike fashion, "is that you're still neglecting the ability of your pieces to move above ground and downward, as well as through existing tunnels. You've got to keep your antennae to the board and seek to penetrate your opponent's movements."
The thranx touched a silvery figure within the three-dimensional transparent board. "Stay attuned now. This is a Doan fighter and can move only laterally and vertically, though it can never appear on the surface. This divisible piece here . . ."
Flinx got to know Bisondenbit fairly well during the remainder of the trip. The alien kept his actual business veiled in vague circumlocutions, but Flinx got the impression he was an antique dealer. Perhaps there would be a chance to pick up some interesting curios for Mother Mastiff's shop.
Bisondenbit did display in full a trait which had helped endear his kind to humans: the ability to listen attentively no matter how boring the story being told. He seemed to find Flinx's judiciously censored story of his own life up to his present journey fascinating.
"Look," he told Flinx as they shared supper in one of the ship's dining lounges, "you've never been to Hivehom before and you're determined to look up this human what's-his-name—Challis? At least I can help you get oriented. You'll no doubt find him somewhere on the Mediterranea Plateau. That's where most of the human settlers live." The insect quivered. "Though why anyone would choose to set up housekeeping on a chilly tundra like that is beyond my understanding."
Flinx had to smile. The mean temperature on the Mediterranea Plateau, a level area several thousand meters above the steaming, humid swamplands of Hivehom, was a comfortable 22° C. The thranx preferred the high thirties, with humidity as near one hundred percent as possible.
The word colonization was never mentioned in connection with such settlements—on either world. There were several such human regions on Hivehom, of which the Mediterranea Plateau, with apopulation of nearly three million, was by far the largest. The thranx welcomed such exploitation of the inhospitable regions they had always shunned. Besides, there were some four million thranx living in the Amazon basin on Terra alone—which sort of evened things out.
Most of the large human-dominated concerns, Bisondenbit explained, made their headquarters on the southern edge of the Plateau, near the big shuttleport at Chitteranx. This Challis had DO doubt located him-self there, too.
"The human city there has a thranx name—Azerick," Bisondenbit went on, whistling softly. "That's High Thranx for 'frozen waste,' which in this case has a double meaning I won't go into, except to say that it's a good thing you humans have a sense of humor approximating our own. After we land, I'll be happy to take you up there myself, though I won't stay long. I'm not equipped for arctic travel. Furthermore, Azerick is not cheap." He hesitated politely. "You look pretty young for a human out traveling on his own. You have funds?"
"I can scrape by," Flinx admitted cautiously. Probably it was his innate distrust of others, though he had to admit that in the past few days Bisondenbit had been not only helpful but downright friendly.
They boarded the shuttle together. Flinx sat near a glassalloy port, where he would, have a good view of the principal thranx world, one of the Common- wealth's dual capitals. The planet swung lazily below him as the shuttle separated from the freightliner and commenced its descent. Two large moons glowed whitely above the far horizon, one partly hidden by the planet. Wherever the cloud cover broke, Flinx could see hints of blue from Hivehom's small oceans, rich green from its thick jungles.
Suddenly he felt the force of gravity pressing him back in his seat as the shuttle dropped tail first through the clouds....