Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [191]
I know that world, he realized with sudden excitement.
“Cachalot,” he thought.
WE ARE ONE WITH YOU TO HELP. WE WILL BE AS A CUSHION FOR YOUR MIND.
AND I WILL HELP TO DIRECT AND GUIDE YOU.
The source of the second presence did not necessitate speculation. He had communicated with it only recently.
The Tar-Aiym Krang.
The triangle, he remembered. In order for him to have a chance of countering the oncoming peril, a cooperative triangle of different minds and means of thinking was required. Though not a part of the triangle itself, he was supposedly the trigger, the key, to something greater still.
What and where was the still missing third part? Of what did it consist and what minds lay behind it? If a Tar-Aiym itself, then there was no hope. Peot, the last living Tar-Aiym, had expired near the world of Repler not long ago. The Xunca? They had gone away. What then the third and last constituent of the triangle, and where to look for it?
Seek and ye shall find, he told himself. He reached out anew, as forcefully as he could, in concert with the two minds that had now joined themselves to his. Reached out—and made contact. With something as unexpected and utterly alien as it was near. It was waiting for him.
There was a relay. On his ship.
As his Talent had grown and matured, Flinx had encountered many minds. Human and thranx, AAnn and Quillp, Sakuntala and Tolian. The ancient machine-mind that was the Krang and now the group-mind of the cetacea of Cachalot. But he had never come across, had never even imagined, the bizarre cognitive processes that now invaded his awake-dreaming awareness. They sprang from a unified consciousness that encompassed an entire world yet could focus as tightly as the mind of a single individual. It was necessary for millions, perhaps billions of individual life-forms to come together to generate this sentience, which was as different from his or from those of any other he had encountered as was his from that of a stone. Except that a stone did not have consciousness.
Yet in spite of all that, in spite of an alienness that was clearly conscious but outside ordinary concepts of cognizance, he recognized it. Like the soothing group-mind of the cetacea, like the straightforward machine-mind of the Krang, it had been with and a part of him once before. In fact, he had walked among it.
The whales of Cachalot came to him with warmth.
The Krang came to him with an icy clarity.
And the untranslatable, inexplicable, globe-girdling greenness of the world-mind of Midworld came to him with—power.
The triangle was complete. How the Xunca would have replicated it he did not know and had no way of knowing, but that did not matter. He felt the energy flowing through him in a torrent. Though he could not see it or sense it, he could perceive through others and especially through the twisting, twitching serpentine shape lying on his chest that something was stirring Outside. Beyond the bubble. Like a shiver on a clear winter morning, something was working its way through the immense fabric of the Great Attractor. Lying there guarded by the combined minds of the cetacea, guided by the Krang, and energized by the verdant world-mind of Midworld, a semiconscious Flinx steeled himself for whatever might come to pass.
With every iota of his being thus preoccupied and mentally walled off and isolated from the rest of the cosmos, it was hardly surprising that he did not notice or sense the arrival of another ship.
Those on board the Teacher, however, did. Or rather, the Teacher detected the emergence of the visitor from the mouth of the plasma tunnel and hastened to notify Flinx's friends.
“Impossible!” Tse-Mallory blurted out as he and Truzenzuzex gaped at the instantly recognizable image that had arrived within range of the Teacher's sensors. “No one else