Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [127]
He considered the theory. “If that's the case, then why didn't Tru or Bran react?”
Clarity smiled tightly. “Maybe they were too far away. Maybe having to deal with the Order's attempts on their own lives overrode their sensitivity to anything you might have been sending out. Maybe you have a deeper emotional relationship with this thranx.” She eyed the impassive Sylzenzuzex. “Maybe it was just a fortuitous coincidence. Such things do happen, you know. Are you asking me to try and explain you to you?” When he failed to reply she added, “If you weren't such a wonderful human being and I wasn't so acutely in love with you, I think I'd be scared to death of Philip Lynx.”
He met her gaze somberly. “You know what, Clarity? Sometimes I'm scared to death of me, too.”
While her command of terranglo was very good, Sylzenzuzex found this exchange inordinately puzzling. “Though I understand your words and there is nothing the matter with my hearing, I have the feeling that I'm missing something. Just as there were times when I thought I was missing something, Flinx, when you conversed with the natives on Ulru-Ujurr so many years ago.” She sounded wistful. “I wonder how their tunnel digging is progressing.”
Flinx had to smile at the remembrance. “A few millennia yet to go, I should imagine.”
“‘Ulru-Ujurr’?” Clarity moved over to join them. “‘Tunnel digging’?” She looked up at Flinx. “Maybe you could fill me in on what you two are reminiscing about?”
“Maybe so,” Sylzenzuzex agreed, underscoring the comment with whistling thranx laughter.
More old memories came flooding back to Flinx. As was usual with his remembrances, not all of them were pleasant. “Syl and I have some history together,” he told the curious Clarity. “I suppose I better explain.”
“That would be helpful.” She did not add that, given the obvious depth of feeling that existed between him and a female with whom he had evidently shared a great deal prior to meeting her, it was also helpful that Sylzenzuzex belonged to an entirely different species.
It was a long story replete with details that Flinx decided not to elaborate on until he had a lot more time in which to do so. It was enough that Clarity learned how, in the ongoing search to unravel the secrets of his parentage, he and Sylzenzuzex had found themselves thrown together on the edicted world of Ulru-Ujurr, that they had struck up an enduring friendship with its extraordinary natives in the course of doing battle with unscrupulous exploiters and a distant relative of his, and that upon surviving numerous potentially fatal encounters they had subsequently gone their separate ways.
“It's all part and parcel of my long, strange, jagged journey,” he concluded. As he put a hand on the shoulder that was not occupied by the minidrag Scrap, the sounds of arriving skimmers drifted in to them from outside. “A journey that's led me to some answers, to more questions, to a lot of knowledge and maybe a tiny bit of wisdom, to a partial understanding of the monstrous thing that's approaching our galaxy, and most importantly of all—to you.” Leaning forward, he lightly kissed her upturned lips.
She was smiling when he pulled back. “If that ‘tiny bit of wisdom’ involves knowing how to properly conclude an explanation, I find I'd have to agree.” Pulling his head down toward her, she kissed him again; harder this time.
Sylzenzuzex looked on with the combination of tolerance and quiet amusement her kind reserved for much of what passed for intimate social interaction among their bipedal mammalian allies. As far as the average thranx was concerned this involved the exchange, in varying amounts according to the particular activity involved, of far too much in the way of bodily fluids. A delicate brush of antennae, a truhand caress, struck her as a far more sensible and civilized way to achieve a similarly intimate result.
It was all a matter of contradictory