Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [5]
As he wound his way slowly up the winding curves of the paved pedestrian walkway, he found it numbing, if not exactly relaxing, to roam among intelligent but nonhuman sentients. When his still unpredictable, erratic Talent was functioning he was able to perceive their emotions. These were more consistently hostile, more inherently combative than those of his own kind. Yet they possessed a confidence and tranquility all their own, due not only to their alienness but to the culture in which they were grounded. Fight, argue, challenge—within this constant conflict lay a serenity that derived from consistency. It also inspired and drove each individual AAnn to always do their best, or else find themselves doomed to mediocrity. Humans possessed a similar drive, but one that was moderated by compassion.
What did it matter? What among either species, or among the thranx, or among any of the other intelligent species whose future was threatened by the Great Evil that was speeding toward the galaxy was worth the sacrifice of his own brief, transitory happiness? He thought of Clarity and Mother Mastiff, of Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex. Surely those were examples of individuals worth saving. Because they happened to be his friends, or his love? Did anything else recommend them and link them?
Then it struck him.
Intelligence. Regardless of how he thought it was misused, in spite of how those who were fortunate enough to possess it frittered it away on trivial personal pursuits or feckless quarrels, that was the light that could not be allowed to go out. If the Great Evil was not confronted, if he did not do what little he could to help divert or defeat it, then he was ultimately as guilty as the billions he condemned. It had nothing to do with the confused delinquents of Visaria, or the slow-moving thinkers of Jast, or any other particular sentient species, humans included. It had to do with preserving the ability to understand. Trillions of stars and billions of years had culminated in a spark of comprehension here, a flash of awareness there. Experiment or not, he felt he was ethically bound, as an ancient Terran poet had once declared, to “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” If that realization could be applied to an individual life, surely it was applicable to sentience as a whole. The shining clarity of his own intelligence, for example, was something that stood apart from the confusion of his origins.
A knife stabbed straight through his head, piercing the frontal lobe and shocking him all the way down to his toes. Subject to and unable to avoid the mental flare, poor Pip contracted spasmodically against his upper thigh.
All his deliberating, the best of his intentions and the worst of his indifference, continued to be held hostage to the horrific headaches that had increasingly plagued him as he grew and matured. Resist though he did the one that had just struck him, he still found himself unable to do little more than stagger into a public voiding slit cut from the inward-slanting jet-black wall of the nearest building. Leaning against the interior halfway between the street and the sanitizing receptor, his chest heaving as he sucked down short, trembling gasps, he fought to stay upright. If he let the agonizing pain overcome him and passed out, whatever decision he reached about the threat facing the galaxy or about anything else would be rendered moot. The most perfunctory medical check would expose him for the impostor he was and see him sent off under heavy guard to the nearest enforcement center. Fortunately, the voiding slit was unoccupied when he stumbled into it.
It did