Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [169]
He shook his head. Following procrastinating visits to worlds as diverse as Visaria and Jast he had resolved to do whatever he could to try to save the Commonwealth. Someone else might have said “to fulfill his destiny”—except that he did not for an instant believe in such nonsense. It was all so much superstition and silliness.
There was nothing nonsensical about the Great Evil, however. His reluctant, innermost self had been thrust outward to perceive it. It was as real and remorseless and dangerous as his dreams of a normal life were wish fulfillment.
“Flinx? Are you all right?” Clarity was looking at him with concern. Such a simple gesture. Such an essential one.
“I'm unchanged,” he responded carefully. “Whether that makes me all right or not I don't know and I no longer much care. But since you ask—yeah, I feel ‘all right.’” His words relieved her evident alarm.
Alarm.
He thought back. Back to when he had gone to New Riviera to reunite with Clarity. What was it that Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex had told him a small coterie of their fellow researchers had learned about that mysterious apparatus that had been left behind on Horseye by the long-vanished Xunca?
He remembered. Two sources had been recorded. Down through the millennia the incredibly ancient mechanism had been monitoring not one but two locations. One was, of course, the threat represented by the Evil that was coming out of the Great Emptiness. The other was something unknown that was located in a unique region of space known as the Great Attractor. A point in the continuum that all local galaxies were shifting toward. An inexplicable physical anomaly with the energy of ten thousand trillion suns. It was utterly unique in the universe. No known physics or mathematics could account for such an incredible concentration of energy.
Could the Xunca?
Contemplating the anomaly, Flinx and the two scientists had previously speculated on whether the Xunca had actually considered constructing something capable of moving entire galaxies, including their own, out of the path of the oncoming menace. It had remained just that, nothing more than speculation. But what if, he found himself wondering, the Great Attractor, or something at the heart of that fantastic force, was actually designed to do something else? The instrumentality on Horseye not only monitored both sites, it also sporadically sent some kind of signal through a deviation of normal subspace toward an unknown third location. According to Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex the scientists studying the Xunca mechanism had not even been able to determine how the information was being sent, much less what was being transmitted or what might be on the receiving end.
Constant monitoring of the approaching threat he could understand. Constructing and monitoring something capable of moving an entire galaxy, much less several, out of the way of that threat was a physical undertaking that could barely be comprehended by mere organic entities. But why the third signal? What did it consist of, where was it being beamed, and what was it intended to accomplish?
Perhaps nothing, he told himself. Maybe it was an unintentional byproduct of the monitoring/alarm system. Maybe it was only an inadvertent leak of deformed radiation into subspace. Having latched on to the thought and fallen into speculation, he could not let it go. Always, ever, eternally curious, and usually to his detriment, he needed an answer. Where and how to find an answer to a question that some of the Commonwealth's finest scientists had only recently learned to ask? He was stuck on an uninhabited, long-dead alien world in the middle of the sterile Blight, cut off from any planetary information shell, with access only to the library that was part of his ship's mind.
Not quite a dead world, he reminded himself. Something was tugging