Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 11 - Running from the Deity

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Running
RUNNING FROM THE DEITY
Pip and Flinx Book 11
c
Alan Dean Foster
Published by Ballantine Books
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The Black Hole
Cachalot
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
The Howling Stones
Parallelities
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
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The End of the Matter
Bloodhype
Flinx in Flux
Mid-Flinx
Flinx’s Folly
Sliding Scales
Running from the Deity
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
THE TAKEN TRILOGY
Lost and Found
The Light-years Beneath My Feet
A DF Books NERDs Release
Running from the Deity
Copyright © 2005 by Thranx, Inc.
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All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
DELREYis a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophons a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Foster, Alan Dean
Running from the deity / Alan Dean Foster.
p. cm.
“A Pip and Flinx Adventure.”
eISBN 0-345-46160-6
1. Humanx Commonwealth (Imaginary organization)—Fiction. 2. Flinx (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3556.O756R85 2005
813'.54—dc22 2005041324
v1.0
For my nephew, Shawn Lee Stumbo
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
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Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
About the Author
Other books by Alan Dean Foster
Copyright Page
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 New York Times bestseller Star Wars: The
Approaching Storm, 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 ever to do so. Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, live in
Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from an early-twentieth-century miners’ brothel. He is
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currently at work on several new novels and media projects.
1
At first thought, you’d think it would be easy to find a missing planet. Even a methane dwarf. Except
that the missing tenth world of the outlying Imperial AAnn system of Pyrassis was not a world, but an
immense automated weapons platform of the long-extinct race who called themselves the Tar-Aiym.
Actually, Flinx mused as he held out his arms and let the magnetically charged droplets of water swirl
around him and scrub his lanky naked form, one would think it would be even simpler to find a planet-
sized weapons platform than a small planet itself. The only problem was that in the absence of standing
orders to guide its revived behavior, the monstrous ancient device had gone looking for some. Since to
the best of current knowledge the last of those beings who might be capable of issuing such directives
had died half a million years earlier, more or less, the prospects of said intelligent weapons platform
stumbling across relevant instructions on how it ought to proceed were slight indeed. Flinx suspected
that it would do no good, should he somehow actually succeed in tracking down his galactically
perambulating quarry, to point out that the species it was built to fight, the Hur’rikku, were as dead and
gone as the massive machine’s original Tar-Aiym builders.
Find it first, he told himself as he did a slow turn beneath the recycled spray from the shower. Semantics
follow function.
He did not need to pivot for purposes of cleanliness since the water beads automatically enveloped him
in their attentive aqueous embrace. They avoided only the special shower mask that shielded his mouth
and nose. Without such a mask, someone making use of such a shower conceivably could drown—
though it was an easy enough matter simply to step sideways and clear of the open-sided, freestanding
facility.
“Are you finished yet?” The voice of the Teacher ’s ship-mind reached him through the stimulating
vertical bath.
“Almost. Why? Are you going to suggest that after I finish bathing I take another ‘vacation’?”
“It is interesting how sardonicism tends to shed efficacy over time,” the ship-mind replied tartly. Having
suggested that Flinx spend a while resting and recuperating on the out-of-the-way world of Jast, only to
see him nearly murdered by one of the expatriate AAnn officials residing on that world, the AI was
understandably disinclined to discuss the subject. Knowing this, Flinx lost few opportunities to bring it
up.
“I take your point, by which I assume that you’re not going to make such a suggestion. Good.”
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As he stepped out of the shower, the ready and waiting dryer scanned his dripping body.
Preprogrammed to his specified level of individual comfort, it set about evaporating from his skin the
water and the dirt it had englobed. Standing there, alone in his personal hygienic facilities within the
ship, Flinx contemplated his immediate future and regarded it as fraught with uncertainty, danger, and
confusion.
Not that it had ever been otherwise.
Some days he chose to dress while at other times he moved about the Teacher ’s interior quite naked. As
the only human on board, there was no need to concern himself with violating nudity taboos. Pip
certainly did not mind. Rising from the resting place where she had dozed in utter indifference to her
master’s peculiar habit of immersing himself in gravity-defying liquid, she landed on his bare right
shoulder and settled down. Her slender serpentine shape was warm against his freshly scoured skin.
Pulling on lightweight pants and a feathery comfort shirt, he made his way to the Teacher ’s bridge.
Around him, the product of the Ulru-Ujurrian’s creative engineering genius functioned smoothly. It
would have been dead silent inside the ship, except that dead silence smacked too much of death itself.
So at present, and in response to his latest request, the hush was broken by the soft sounds of a Sek-
takenabdel cantata. Like many of his kind, Flinx was quite fond of the often atonal yet oddly soothing
traditional thranx music, which in this particular composition sounded like nothing less than lullabies
sung by angry, but muted, electrified cimbaloms.
As the ship sped at unnatural velocity through the nebulosity of higher mathematics colloquially known
as space-plus, Flinx settled into the single command chair to gaze moodily through the sweeping, curved
forward port. Though shifted over into the ultraviolet by the ship’s KK-drive posigravity field, the view
of the distorted universe surrounding him was, as always, still spectacularly beautiful. Pulsars and novae
illuminated nebulae while distant galaxies vied for prominence with nearby suns.
Meanwhile, out beyond it all, in the direction of the constellation Boötes, something unimaginably vast
and malevolent was coming out of a region known as the Great Emptiness, threatening not merely the
Commonwealth and civilization, but everything within his field of view. His mental field of view, he
reminded himself. Hence the need, however hopeless the notion of fighting something so immense and
alien, to find allies. Such as, just possibly, the primeval weapons platform that had for millennia
masqueraded as the tenth planet of the system known as Pyrassis.
Thinking of it made him want to go stand and soak beneath another shower.
A reaction as ineffectual as it was childish, he knew. He could no more wash away the distinct memory
of the evil he knew was out there than he could that of his troubled childhood, his subsequent erratic
maturation, and the pressure to succeed that had been placed on him by his good friends and mentors
Bran Tse-Mallory and the Eint Truzenzuzex. Just as with his unstable, if escalating and potentially fatal
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Talent, he could not wish such things away.
He stared out at the universe and the universe stared right back, indifferent. Exactly how was he
supposed to go about finding the wandering planet-sized Tar-Aiym device? The brilliant Truzenzuzex
and the insightful Tse-Mallory had been unable to give him much advice. Since he was the only one who
had experienced (or suffered, he corrected himself) mental contact with the machine, it was hoped that if
he deliberately went looking for it he might make such contact with it again. Strike up a casual
conversation with an all-powerful alien artifact, it was supposed.
And, he mused, in the unlikely event that he did? How to convince such a relic to participate in the
defense of the galaxy. Nothing of overweening importance—just your average galaxy, in which he, and
everyone he knew, happened to live. Reposing in the chair, he shook his head dolefully though there
were none present to note the gesture save Pip and ship.
“I don’t see how I can do what Bran and Tru asked,” he muttered aloud. He did not need to explain
himself. Ship-mind knew.
“If you cannot, then no one can,” it replied unhelpfully. As befitted its programming, it was doing its
best to be supportive.
“A distinct and even likely possibility,” he murmured to no one and nothing in particular. He glanced in
the direction of the main readout. “We’re still on course—if you can call heading in a general direction
hundreds of parsecs in extent a ‘course.’”
As usual, the Teacher sounded more relaxed when responding to specifics of ship operation than it did
when trying to understand the often unfathomable complexities of human thought and behavior.
“We have re-entered the Commonwealth on intent to cross vector three-five-four, accelerating in space-
plus on course to leave Commonwealth boundaries beyond Almaggee space, subsequent to entering the
Sagittarius Arm and the region collectively known as the Blight.”
The Blight, Flinx thought. Home to long-vanished species among whom were the ancient Tar-Aiym and
Hur’rikku. The Blight: an immense swath of space once flourishing with inhabited worlds much of
which had been rendered dead and sterile by the photonic plague unleashed by the Tar-Aiym on their
ancient Hur’rikku enemies half a million years ago. Like those who had hastily and unwisely
propounded it, the all-destroying plague had long since consumed itself, leaving in its wake only empty
skies gazing forlornly down on dead worlds. Here and there, in a few spatial corners miraculously
passed over by the plague, life had survived. Life, and memories of the all-consuming horror that had
inexplicably skipped over them. No wonder the inhabitants of such isolated yet fortunate systems gazed
up at the night sky with fear instead of expectation, and clung tightly to their isolated home systems.
Somewhere within that immense and largely vacant chunk of cosmos, the re-energized Tar-Aiym
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weapons platform had gone searching for instructions. Hunting for those who had made it. That there
were none such to be found anywhere any longer was not sufficient to discourage it from looking. Such
was the way of the machine mind. A mind he somehow had to make contact with once again. A mind he
had somehow to persuade.
A hard task it was going to be, if he continued to have trouble convincing himself that the enterprise he
was engaged in had not even the remotest chance of success.
When applied to most people, the expression have an open mind was merely rhetorical. Not so with
Flinx. In fact, for much of his life he had prayed for the ability to have one that was closed.
Intermittently and uncontrollably exposed to the emotions of any and every sentient around him, he
threatened to drown in a sea of sentiment and sensation whenever he visited a developed world. Feelings
flooded in on him in endless waves of exhilaration, despair, hope, remorse, anger, love, and everything
in between. With each passing year he seemed to become more sensitive, more alert to those inner
expressions of thinking beings. Not long ago, he had unexpectedly acquired the ability to project as well
as receive emotions. This capability had proven useful in his search for the truth of his origins as well as
in escaping those who intended him harm.
Yet for all his escalating skills, he had yet to learn how to master them. Defined by their erraticism, he
had long ago decided that they might forever be beyond his control. That did not keep him from trying.
Not only because a Talent that was wild was of far less usefulness than one that could be managed, but
because the severe headaches he had suffered from since adolescence continued to grow more frequent,
and more intense. His ability might be his savior—as well as that of billions of other sentient beings. It
might also kill him. He had no choice but to continue wrestling with it, and with what he was, because
he was special.
He would have given up everything just to be normal.
Sensing her master’s melancholy, Pip rose from her resting place on his shoulder, the deep-throated
humming of her wings louder than the ambient music that was being played by the Teacher . Circling
him twice, she settled down on his other shoulder, wings furled tightly against her slim, brightly colored
body. Wrapping herself around the back of his neck, she squeezed gently and affectionately, trying to
reassure him. Reaching up with his left hand, he absently stroked the back of her head. Small slitted eyes
closed in contentment. Alaspinian minidrags did not purr, but the strength of the empathetic bond
between him and his scaly companion managed to convey something like the emotional equivalent.
Leaning back in the command chair, Flinx closed his own eyes and tried to open his unique mind
further, to reach outward in all directions. Though he could readily identify the target he sought, he
could not have defined with precision the exact nature of what it was that he was searching for. But, like
the caressing hand of a beautiful woman, he would know it when he felt it. Out, out, away from the ship,
away from himself, he searched. His field of perception was an expanding balloon. But no matter how
much he relaxed, even with Pip’s aid he sensed nothing. Only emptiness.
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Occasionally, as the Teacher drove onward through the outer reaches of the Commonwealth, his Talent
was tickled by sparks of sentience. A flash of feeling from distant Tipendemos and, later, stronger bursts
of emotion out of Almaggee. Then, more nothingness as he left the region of developed systems and
sped through space-plus toward the Blight.
There were worlds in that vast section of the Sagittarius Arm that had once been inhabited, and worlds
that were habitable still. No doubt someday, as the human and thranx population continued to expand in
every direction, those worlds would once again resound to the voices of sentience. But not for a while
yet. The Commonwealth itself encompassed an enormous section of space replete with hundreds of
worlds yet to be settled or even explored by robotic probes. However enticing, the ancient worlds of the
Blight would have to wait.
In its search for those who had built it, the wandering Tar-Aiym weapons platform would have hundreds
of square parsecs in which to roam without encountering intelligent life of any kind. Making contact
with anything in so vast a place seemed impossible. What swayed Flinx to try was the imploring of those
wiser than himself. That, and the fact that on more than one occasion in his short life he had already
achieved the impossible.
Having more or less resolved in his own mind to at least attempt the search, the last thing he expected as
he entered the Blight was to have his resolution temporarily countermanded by his own ship.
He was taking his ease, as he so often did, in the central lounge. With its malleable waterfalls and pond,
its fountain that sent heavy water trickling down and light water floating upward as decorative bubbles,
it was far and away the most relaxing part of the unique vessel. Hailing from many worlds, the lush
greenery that now packed every corner of the carefully maintained chamber filled it with wondrous
scents and extra oxygen. Of course, he could have achieved a similar effect by simply directing the ship-
mind to alter the composition of the internal atmosphere. But artificially regenerated oxygen lacked the
subtle smells that accompanied air exhaled by growing things. Merely reclining among the running
water and miniature forest helped him to unwind, and allowed his mind to roam free of anxiety and
headaches. Green, he reflected, was good for the soul.
Nearby, Pip was pursuing something through the underbrush. It was harmless, or it would not be on
board the ship. It was also confined to the lounge area. Chasing such harmless bits of decorative
ambulatory life gave her something to do.
Unlike me, he thought.
“There is a problem.”
Reluctantly, he bestirred himself from daydreaming of warm beaches on a recently visited world, and
the passionate company he had kept there. “If you’re trying to astonish me with revelation, you need to
choose a less recurrent subject.”
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