Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [4]
He had set himself the challenge partly because it was something no one else had ever done, partly because it was such an outrageous notion that no one had ever imagined trying it, and lastly because of what he had learned in the course of his previous sojourn on Gestalt: he no longer much cared what happened to him. If he survived his present enterprise, it was an accomplishment he could pass off with a shrug. If he failed, he would die, and that was no great loss either. Though it tried to argue him out of both the exploit and the depression that underlay it, the Teacher did not succeed. Now it drifted in veiled orbit, brooding and worrying about his day-to-day circumstances. It did not worry about itself, of course. Its intelligence was artificial, its worry programmed, its concern a function of a specific set of predetermined code.
Along with the Teacher's shipmind, there were also certain active elements of the vessel's décor that worried about his health. They too were powerless to prevent him from embarking on what both their organic and inorganic minds were convinced was nothing less than a reckless jaunt.
Flinx's slide into increasingly irresponsible behavior had been accelerated enormously by what had happened to him and by what he had learned of his origins in the course of his recent visit to the frigid world of Gestalt. His lengthy, determined quest to find his father had ended in the revelation that such an individual did not and, in fact, never had existed. In discovering that half of his biological heritage consisted of nothing more than an impersonal concoction of designer proteins, artificially leveraged by indifferent scientists to produce a zygote that when matured would, they hoped, display certain interesting mental abilities, he had felt something fundamental drain out of him. He had been nothing more than a test, an experiment, one among many.
That the end result had turned out to be at once disappointing and far beyond anything its original Meliorare developers had envisioned was of no consolation to the experiment himself.
The discovery had left him more down on himself and on his species than at any time in his life. Well short of his thirtieth birthday, he had spent the preceding decade desperately trying to learn the truth about himself, only to wish now as he stalked the streets of alien Krrassin that he had never bothered to try. The search had led him to wondrous revelations and astounding adventures, to great friendships and an ever-strengthening love, but also to unsought, uncomfortable realizations about humankind and to a deepening personal malaise from which he seemed unable to extricate himself.
His unique empathic abilities had placed him in the position of potential savior of the galaxy. They had also rendered that potential savior increasingly indifferent to both his and its fate. Why should he trouble himself, if he was only the product of human experimentation and not humanity itself? He could live out the remainder of his natural life with Clarity Held. So could their children, should they have any. Though the threat to the Commonwealth and its galactic surrounds was advancing at increasing speed, he would be long dead before it began to affect the outermost star systems. Why risk his own life and happiness to save a species to which he belonged only through invention?
Could he even call himself human anymore?
Within the confines of the suit, Pip shifted uneasily in response to her master's troubled thoughts. While ever a comfort to him, her presence was also nonhuman. Empathetic but simplistic. Nor did he expect to find