Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [37]
“It's not a matter of comprehension,” he tried to explain. “It's a question of—maturity isn't the right term. All I can tell you is that in order to wholly persuade one of your kind with sufficiently high status to maintain my anonymity while helping me, they have to experience what I know.”
The explanation caught Kiijeem off guard. “How can they do that?”
“The experiencing is part of the explanation.” Uncomfortable at what he found himself confessing, Flinx found himself shifting his position edgily on the warm rock.
“I inssisst on knowing thiss rationale for mysself,” a frustrated Kiijeem persisted. “I demand to know it!” Straightening out of his crouch, he raised both clawed hands defensively in front of him and took a step backward. “Tell me or otherwisse I will divulge your pressence here.”
Flinx sighed heavily. Over the course of the past several years it was debatable whether he had become a greater danger to his enemies or to his friends.
“Let's do this,” he ventured hopefully. “I'll tell you the facts behind the rationale. If you still insist on the actual experience then—we'll see.”
He was offering a compromise. Recognizing it, Kiijeem considered before replying. His tail tip relaxed and slumped groundward. “I am alwayss willing to lissten to the prologue that precedess the play.”
“Good.” In the hope that words alone would be enough to convince his youthful host, Flinx settled down to explain the looming peril that had become the driving force behind not only his life but that of his closest acquaintances. He knew all too well what sharing the full experience could do to a delicate mind. If Clarity Held had been with him, he suspected she could have explained the quandary far more effectively to the uncompromisingly curious young AAnn, and in such a way that he might drop his insistence on sharing it as hurriedly as he would a drop of Pip's poison. Because for better or worse, to both her enlightenment and detriment, Clarity had been obliged to share that experience.
Flinx settled himself a little closer to his alert, bright-eyed young host.
“You may very well not believe much of what I'm about to tell you….”
How many times over the past years had he been forced to relive the multiple terrifying encounters? The memories themselves were foul and fetid, the sour taste of something spoiled lingering on the brain. The information he was about to share with the young nye was infinitely more troubling. How should he proceed? How safely and reassuringly to convey the certain information that extinction on a galactic scale was coming this way—without actually showing it to him?
“I have the ability to—sense certain things, Kiijeem. And what I can't sense, others have shown me.” There, he thought. Even Maybeso could approve of wording that simple and straightforward. “Over the years I've been made aware of an impending threat. A threat that includes not only you and I, but both of our respective civilizations and, in fact, the entire galaxy. Not just cultures and species, but the planets they live on and the stars they circle.”
Kiijeem looked properly staggered, started to fashion a gesture of fourth-degree incredulity, thought better of it, and kept still. His continued silence, Flinx decided, commended him.
“I said that there was much you wouldn't believe.”
The young AAnn's tail was barely moving. “Continue, pssakk. If nothing elsse, you ssurely have my attention. Your verity I can pass judgment on later.”
Flinx nodded, then shifted his attention deliberately skyward. “You don't need to know how I was made aware of this threat. It was first crystallized for me some ten Commonwealth years ago. I've had to live with the knowledge of what it is, and of what I am, ever since.”
Kiijeem pondered the human's words. “What could be a threat to an entire galaxy, except perhapss a colliding galaxy? Unless my ssimple asstronomical sstudiess have been sseverely remiss,