Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [188]
Careful, he told himself. Concentrate on the knowable. The Teacher. Pip. Clarity. Those were solid things, those were real things. They consisted of actualities he could hang on to. Or were they and himself and everything else he believed to be real nothing more than transitory expressions of the tortuous, convoluted physics and mathematics of some whimsical long-vanished species?
At least what Tse-Mallory had singled out looked real enough.
It was a hemisphere. Translucent red, it was so dark it was almost brown. Flinx was not surprised when the Teacher revealed that it occupied the exact center of the plasma bubble. At his direction, the ship cautiously adjusted its position to move closer—but not too close. That the Teacher could maneuver at all in such an outré environment was in itself surprising—and encouraging. It was with relief that he saw that not every law of nature had been abstracted in this place.
As they drew carefully nearer the hemisphere, which was the color of fine burgundy, they saw that it contained, hovering within it, a lump of some wrinkled maroon material shaped like a kidney bean. Three loops of what appeared to be gold wire but were undoubtedly something else encircled the object lengthwise like slender hovering halos. At no point did they come into contact with the material or each other. The center of the bean shape was occupied by a prominent concavity.
A mesmerized Flinx studied the object intently. If the depression in the center was intended to cradle a living entity, its dimensions suggested that the Xunca had been physically much smaller than the Tar-Aiym, smaller even than humans. Though the long-since-departed master engineers were closer in size to the thranx, he had no doubt who was going to be asked to take up a position within that beckoning indentation. His initial trepidation began to diminish even before the issue was brought up for discussion. After all, wasn't this what he had come all this way for?
Staring absently out the port, he found himself remembering a slightly built redheaded youth who with his pet minidrag had once innocently and without a care haunted the byways and back alleys of bustling, beguiling, aromatic Drallar. A boy who had worried only about staying one step ahead of the authorities, having enough to eat, looking after his elderly adoptive mother, and learning, learning, learning absolutely everything there was to know.
What a long, strange journey it had been.
It was Clarity who voiced what everyone was thinking. “That depression looks like it might be about the right size and shape to accommodate a body, Flinx.” Lips pressed together, she looked over at him. “I don't want you to find out if it is, but I know you have to.”
He nodded slowly and peered past her. Tse-Mallory, Truzenzuzex, Sylzenzuzex—eyes single-lensed and compound stared back at him with equal intensity. No one said anything. No one had to. They were waiting on him.
He hugged Clarity, and that made him not want to go, too. As they gently disengaged he turned back to his mentors, one human, the other not. “I don't know what to do.” He gestured at the object visible through the foreport. “I don't even know if it's designed to do anything and if it is, what it's supposed to do.”
“Remember the first time you lay down on the operator's dais inside the Krang?” Tse-Mallory spoke encouragingly to his young friend. “The same lack of comprehension applied.” He indicated the hovering, motionless hemisphere outside the ship. “I see no sign of anything like a switch, dial, button, headset, or even the overarching domes that allow activation of the Krang. Clearly this is not a Tar-Aiym device. It was made by a race as far in advance of the Tar-Aiym as they were beyond us.” The soldier-sociologist shrugged