Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [150]
In place of a setting sun or the timer on board the Teacher, exhaustion told them when it was time to stop for the day. They made camp (strange, Flinx mused, to think of “making camp” inside a starship) in the middle of a long corridor that in contrast to many they had explored was almost dark. The gently bowed ceiling and floor were as black as space while the opposing walls were shot through with shimmering coppery veins that surged and flowed like animate glycerin. Humming softly to themselves, these supple embedded streaks supplied the only illumination from one end of the otherwise dark corridor to the other. Reaching out to touch one such glistening stripe, Clarity avowed that it felt warm to the touch, like gilded blood.
Duplicating the action, Sylzenzuzex declared she could feel no such thing. To Tse-Mallory's touch each of the pulsating sinuous lines felt as cold as ice. Alternately hot and frigid, ductile and wending their way through the ebony material of the walls, the mesmerizing contours might have been carriers of energy, communications, or scrolling Tar-Aiym script. To the visitors, one supposition was as good as another. Regardless of their true function, the mystery of the radiant stripes served at least one useful purpose: they kept the two scientists occupied as everyone else prepared for sleep.
All they needed was some dry wood with which to build an open fire, Flinx mused, and the incongruity of their situation would be complete.
The hard ceramic floor was not accommodating, but everyone was so tired it didn't matter. While Flinx would rather have gone to bed in his cabin on board the Teacher, at least he had Clarity, Pip, and Scrap for company. Settling on a spot beside one wall, he slid his daypack beneath his head and did his best to convince himself it was a pillow. Laying her head on his chest, Clarity benefited from padding that was considerably softer but less immobile. The two minidrags made out best of all, each curling up atop a soft, warm, familiar human.
“I was just thinking,” Clarity whispered thoughtfully as she closed her eyes against the reddish glow from the enigmatic lines that veined the nearby black wall.
“Dangerous in a place like this,” he riposted in the half dark.
Her closed fist playfully thumped his sternum. Mildly irritated, a disturbed Pip glanced over at her for a brief moment before settling back down within her pink and blue coils.
“I'm serious! What if we can't find one of those operator's platforms, or something else that can be used to make contact with this relic? Calling it here to the outskirts of this system will have been a waste of time. Do we go back to Booster and try to get the Krang to do something?”
“I don't know.” He shrugged underneath her. “I haven't thought that far ahead.”
She knew he was telling the truth. His whole life had been predicated on not thinking too far ahead because every moment of it had been fraught with danger or conflict, uncertainty or confusion. Still, she told herself, there was always a first time.
After all, he had never stopped thinking of her.
“If we can't make contact,” she went on, “and we have to give up and return to New Riviera, what happens then?”
She could feel him shifting beneath her, trying to get comfortable. “You and I get married, move somewhere the Order of Null can't find us, raise a family, have a life, grow old together, and die. Depending on how and if the Great Evil continues to accelerate toward the Milky Way, some time after our death it impacts on the outermost fringes of the galaxy and begins to devour one star system after another. Eventually this galaxy disappears and the entity, in all probability, moves on to the next.”
Lying against him in