Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [151]
“Not if you care about the fate of humanxkind, the Commonwealth, and every other sentient creature regardless of shape, size, or culture. Sometimes I wish I didn't care. Wish that I could forget all this and for a change be entirely selfish.” In the diffuse glow he raised his head slightly to look down at her. “I've tried, you know. For a little while I was so disgusted with everything I saw around me that I actually worked at it. At being selfish.”
“You failed,” she told him perceptively.
The rise and fall of his chest gently lifted and lowered her head. Resting against him, she found the steady movement oddly comforting.
“I'm afraid so,” he admitted. “It's what comes of realizing that in the scheme of things, a single individual is utterly unimportant. Your own life is meaningless. What matters is the survival of sentience, of the continuation of conscious thought somewhere in the cosmos.”
Something small, pointed, and slightly damp struck her cheek several times.
“We'd better shut up. Scrap is getting tetchy with me.” In the feeble luminosity cast by the flowing, radiant lines running through the black walls she could just make out Flinx's faint smile.
“Then it's likely Pip will be telling me to be quiet any minute now, too. Good night, or good whatever it is, Clarity.”
“Good night, Flinx.” Reaching up with her right hand, she drew it affectionately down his cheek and then closed her eyes, sighing against him. Lulled by the purring walls and her own exhaustion, she was asleep almost instantly, as were the two minidrags.
As he lay contemplating their impossible surroundings, Flinx felt his own eyes growing heavy. His head did not hurt. It was enough. Very soon he was as sound asleep as his love.
Not long thereafter, a drowsy hard-shelled shape moving on multiple legs bumped up against him. In searching for her avuncular Eighth, Sylzenzuzex had come across a human instead. She was not displeased. Humans radiated more heat than thranx. When Flinx did not stir or push her away, she was more than satisfied to tuck all six legs underneath her abdomen and thorax, entwine her antennae for safe sleeping, and lie down beside him. The press of her body against his caused Flinx to stir restlessly for a few moments before quieting. A thranx was as hard as the floor.
Other than the mellifluously humming walls, it was silent in the lengthy corridor.
Time passed. Tired from hours and hours of hiking and searching, human and thranx did not stir. So they did not notice the tiny lights, each no bigger than a pinprick, that began to emerge from the lambent lines in the surrounding walls. Flashing as many colors as their elongated corridor-traversing brethren, they drifted toward the two groups of sleeping figures like so many sentient dust motes. They were few at first.
Soon there were hundreds.
Slitted eyes flicking open, Pip raised her head. Half a dozen dots of refulgence danced in front of her face. They hovered there, making no noise, occasionally changing color. The minidrag eyed them for a moment. Then she yawned hugely, lowered her head back down against her master, and went back to sleep. Beneath her relaxing coils Flinx stirred but did not wake.
There were now several thousand of the minuscule, intense lights dancing above the sleepers like so many cybernetic fireflies. Every so often several of the phosphorescent pinpoints would meet and merge. On other occasions one would split to become two. They did not linger long. After some ten minutes spent in what might have been silent inspection of the intruders the lights began to drift away. One by one, they fused back with the flowing streams of luminance that striped the opposing walls. Beneath a ceiling blacker than the night sky on any world, the visitors slept on.
The next morning, immediately after breakfast, they found a contact dais.
Located at the far end of a large, but not overpowering, cone-shaped,