Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [142]
“That's music!” she shouted, trying to make herself heard above the martial alien thunder.
Next to her Tse-Mallory nodded, leaning close to yell into her ear. “Tar-Aiym music. Alien harmony and dissonance. Instrumentation of a scale and scope unequaled anywhere in the Commonwealth.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Contemplate it: mass as Mass.”
She raised an arm toward the dome that was now fully enveloped in opaque, coruscating color. “What about Flinx? Does he hear it?”
On her other side the venerable philosoph turned from shout-whistling at Sylzenzuzex. “Only Flinx knows what he hears! And what he hears, Kssa!!lk, is barred to the rest of us. What we learned on our previous visit, so many years ago, is that this relic of an ancient people is both a musical instrument and a weapon.”
Indicating that she understood, she returned her attention to the color-masked platform. Beneath the two domes occasional glimpses of her beloved flickered within the maelstrom of color and light. She assumed he was still alive and all right. She assumed so because she had to.
Flinx kept waiting for the pain in his head to return. It did not. Instead, he experienced a lucidity of perception he had come into contact with only rarely before. Experimentally, tentatively, he tried reaching out, as he had done when lying on a similar platform beneath a similar structure inside the great space-traversing Tar-Aiym weapons platform itself. There had been no pain then, either. He had communicated successfully, albeit briefly and with notable directness and simplicity. This exchange would be more difficult, more fraught with uncertainty. His intention was not merely to make and maintain contact, but to ignite nothing less than a conversation.
WELCOME BACK.
He was positive that was what he had heard. Or felt, or sensed. The Krang was still alive. He was still alive.
Now he had to make his attempt while keeping it that way.
Above his head a coiled Pip twitched and spasmed, the unthinking Alaspinian minidrag serving as a lens to focus and intensify her master's feelings. As he had on the weapons platform, Flinx tried reaching out. He was but dimly aware of the vast play of light and sound that was going on around him. Would the ancient artifact respond to his mental push with more than just color and harmony and the tintinnabulation of alien percussion?
“You remember me,” he struggled to project. To feel. It was the mental equivalent of expectantly spreading his hands to his sides.
It was sufficient.
Naisma was established.
CLASS-A MIND … I REMEMBER YOU. YOU COME SEEKING HELP TO DEAL WITH THE THREAT THAT APPROACHES FROM BEYOND THE RIM.
Having no time to waste on it, Flinx withheld his astonishment. “You know of it?”
IT DOMINATES. IT LOOMS. IT THREATENS ALL OF EVERYTHING. HOW COULD IT EXIST UNOBSERVED?
Enthralled, he thought back to one singular experience of the past several years—and then to another, and another.
“You've been with me, of me. You pushed me to perceive the Evil.”
ISELF, AND OTHERS.
“What others?” Flinx contorted slightly on the platform.
OTHERS WHO KNOW YOU. OTHERS YOU CAN KNOW BUT I CANNOT. OTHERS WHO ARE AS DIFFERENT FROM ONE ANOTHER AS YOU ARE FROM I. BUT OTHERS WHO ALSO KNOW AND FEAR THAT WHICH THREATENS ALL. SOMEHOW YOU ARE THE KEY TO THE ONLY CHANCE OF STOPPING IT. YOU ARE THE ONLY LINK THAT EXISTS BETWEEN US.
The key. Flinx had heard that before. In dreams both asleep and awake. What was he now? Asleep? Awake? Or drifting in a state of which no physiologist had dreamed and for which there was therefore