Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [184]
“What's our speed?” Flinx asked. “How much faster are we moving?” He continued to stare out the foreport. Had the splotch of purple refulgence grown slightly larger?
“We are not moving faster,” the Teacher replied. “In fact, we are not moving at all. Space, however, is. As to our speed, by my instruments, it is zero.”
“You're not making any sense.” An increasingly irritated Flinx glared at the nearest visual pickup. “If we're accelerating, how can we not be moving?”
He broke off. Additional detailed explication could wait until later. In fact, everything could wait until later. He felt pressure at his waist. Clarity was hugging him, hard. The two humans standing shoulder to shoulder allowed Pip and Scrap, mother and offspring, to push up against one another. Off to their left Bran Tse-Mallory, the Eint Truzenzuzex, and his relative Sylzenzuzex joined the two humans in staring straight ahead.
They did not know what they were seeing. They did not understand what they were seeing. They knew only that they could not turn away from it.
The Teacher's confusing and seemingly contradictory attempt at explanation notwithstanding, it appeared that they had entered some kind of tunnel. A tunnel or corridor composed entirely of energy that was simultaneously volatile and unwavering. It was as if, Flinx reflected in awe, someone had taken an entire galaxy in all its glory, replete with suns and nebulae, pulsars and masers, black holes and X-ray bursters, and attenuated it until it was no greater in diameter than the coruscating tube they were presently speeding through. The curved walls that enclosed them flung successive waves of electric crimson, intense cobalt, and eye-bending yellow at their stunned retinas. Some emerged from astern to overtake and blast past the ship itself. He had the feeling that if the Teacher was to drift to the left or right, up or down, and make the slightest contact with that scintillating, flaring cylinder of encircling energy, the ship and everything within it would evaporate like a cough in a hurricane.
“Some kind of plasma tunnel.” Tse-Mallory had found his voice. He spoke in that tone of barely controlled excitement scientists reserve for those special moments when they realize they have come across something that truly justifies the employment of the word “new.”
“Irrespective of what the ship says, I can't tell if we're moving through it or if it's moving around us.”
“I can tell you this, cri!l!kk.” Truzenzuzex's antennae were quivering like violin strings at the height of a Bartok arpeggio. “We are traveling. Sitashk, we are traveling! What I would not give to be able to pause and step for a moment outside these sculpted walls of dynamic conveyance.”
Occasionally they had glimpses of other loops of force that might have been similar corridors. There were not many, and they were widely dispersed, but they materialized often enough to show that the one that was conveying them was not the only one of its kind. Glimpses of other such tunnels rapidly became fewer and fewer. Before long the occupants of the Teacher found themselves utterly alone, speeding down a channel formed of unfamiliar energies toward an equally unknown destination.
“I guess the Xunca,” Sylzenzuzex observed hours later as they forced themselves to break away from the eye-numbing view out the foreport long enough to eat and drink something, “liked to get around.”
Seated across from her, Clarity was hand-feeding Scrap slightly burnt bread crumbs. The minidrag would rear back and strike from her shoulder, dispatching one piece of toast after another as if he were stalking prey deep in the sweltering jungles of distant Alaspin.
“I wonder where we're going?” she ruminated.
“I think I can hazard a guess.” Tse-Mallory sipped the hot drink the ship had prepared