Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [149]
From time to time the walls flanking them were made up of sweeping curves, while in others the corridor contracted into a quilt of sharp angles. Though much of the material of which their surroundings were fashioned reminded her of metal, Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex assured her that it was something else entirely. Carbonate or silicate alloys, perhaps, or ceramics of a kind unknown. A good portion of it appeared more organic than inert. There were tubes and conduits, protrusions and concavities whose function the visitors could only guess at. Flinx was as ignorant of their purpose as his erudite mentors.
They did not have to advance in darkness or by artificial illumination. Light was everywhere, much more than Flinx remembered. Of course, on his earlier visit the gigantic vessel had undergone a return to life after half a million years of relative dormancy. Now that it was once more entirely awake, full functionality had been restored.
Not only was the interior illuminated, it was agitated with constant noise. Squeaks and squirps, buzzing and humming, whistles and crackles and pops accompanied the visitors as they trekked deeper into the ship. Clarity entertained herself trying to match unfamiliar sound to imaginary function. Her inventions owed more to fantasy than physics.
Flinx had no time for such amusements. The story of my life, he reflected as he led the way onward. Despite his concerns he was careful to moderate his pace, aware that his stride was significantly longer than that of any of his companions with the exception of the burly Tse-Mallory. Even as he led the hunt for a point of contact he knew the possibility existed that they could walk for the rest of their lives and explore only the tiniest fragment of the ship's interior without ever coming across one of the sought-after operator's platforms.
Now and then they would find themselves confronted by free-floating congruencies of light. “Ambient lambent,” a buoyant Tse-Mallory called them. These wandering luminosities randomly manifested all colors of the spectrum. Some were so pale as to be little more than blinking wraiths. Others sustained an intensity that verged on the solid. Discussing the nature of the perambulating phenomena, Flinx and the two scientists felt confident that the corridor also enjoyed visits from similar entities that dwelled in the infrared and ultraviolet and were therefore invisible to human or thranx sight. The role of the dynamic drifting lights remained unknown, though for reasons Flinx could not fathom he found himself shying away from the occasional floating sphere of a particular blue hue.
Corridors led to rooms, and rooms to chambers without any sight or sign of the kind of contact dais Flinx had utilized before. One such passageway led to a gigantic cavern that Tse-Mallory characterized as a “circus for domesticated lightning.” Even with face guards or goggles on it was difficult to gaze for more than a minute or two directly at the dazzling display of prodigious electrical discharges that were continuously erupting across a vast open expanse the size of a large city. Even more astounding than the sight itself, all the clashing, flaring energy went about fulfilling its unknown purpose in near-complete silence. Unable to glimpse a safe way through or around the awesome yet mystifying display, they were forced to retreat slightly and turn down another corridor that led in a different direction.
The longer they walked, the deeper they penetrated into the artifact and the farther they found themselves from the immense airlock. Attuned to the location of the shuttlecraft, their equipment kept them from losing their way. The problem, as Truzenzuzex pointed out, was that they had no “way.” They were simply probing and poking, hoping to find a domed platform of the kind Flinx had managed to activate previously. Undoubtedly