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As soon as he felt enough of his strength had returned, Flinx sat up. “Damage?” A coldness began to creep up his spine. What had he done? “I don't understand.”

Without lowering their weapons, the twins stepped back. “Look upon the Lord Eiipul, and you will.” The pistol jerked in the brother's hand. “Try to flee and you will die, along with your gaudy pet.”

Still holding tightly to Pip, Flinx locked eyes with the minidrag before depositing her gently onto his right shoulder. Under the circumstances he was having a difficult time sustaining the emotional illusion that all was well and everything was fine. Her gaze kept darting from him to the Eiipul offspring and back again. He struggled to contain her with his feelings even as his own were seriously conflicted.

Lord Eiipul IX lay on a horizontal resting platform nearby, where his offspring and Kiijeem had moved him. The nye was lying on his right side (AAnn did not lie on their backs), eyes wide open, nictating membranes retracted, staring into the distance. Bending toward him under the watchful, seething glares of his progeny, Flinx waved one hand slowly back and forth over his host's face. The eyes did not respond. The AAnn was breathing slowly and steadily, but he did not react to any of Flinx's physical stimuli nor indicate in any other fashion that he was still alive. Though no expert on AAnn physiology, Flinx felt fairly confident in voicing a diagnosis.

“Lord Eiipul is in shock.”

“Truly,” growled his daughter. “Tell uss ssomething we know not. Tell uss how to bring him back.”

“I'd try some energizing medications,” Flinx told her. “Anything organic and benign that's likely to give the nervous system a jolt and …”

“We have already done thuss.” With his free hand Eiipul IXb pointed to a nearby spiral table. A small air injection device rested on the polished stone. Glancing at the attached opaque clip, Flinx had no way of telling whether it was full or empty. “Hiss body twitchess in ressponsse to sspecific sstimulantss, but otherwisse there iss no reaction. Sshouting ssimilarly provokess no ressponsse.”

His mind, Flinx mused. It was his mind. The AAnn's consciousness was adrift. Eiipul had not come back all the way. Clarity had survived the shared experience of a glancing contact with the Great Evil without suffering any permanent physical or mental side effects. Had he misjudged the mature nye's capacity for coping with the same kind of contact? Was the makeup of the AAnn psyche so different that it could not survive a similar encounter?

Once more he looked down at the immobilized nye. Flinx felt he was rapidly running out of time. Traditionally impatient by nature, the younger Eiipuls would not wait forever before shooting to cripple him and then calling for assistance.

If he could not reach the benumbed AAnn physically or through eye contact, Flinx realized, then he would have to try to do so emotively.

Closing his eyes, he reached out. He had done this under pressure before. The present circumstances were no more or less threatening than a number of similar situations he had been forced to cope with.

At first he encountered nothing. Emotionally Lord Eiipul was a blank, an empty vessel devoid of feeling. Probing the alien emotive void, Flinx grew more and more apprehensive. If the paralysis extended this deeply, Lord Eiipul might truly be gone, his mind locked in permanent retreat.

There—something. A hint of awareness, cowering in the distance, enveloped in fear and anxiety. He reached toward it, projecting the most serene and soothing feelings he could muster. What he touched was not human. It was thoroughly AAnn. Certain sentiments, however, or at least variants thereof, are common to the majority of sentient species.

Dread and loathing, for example.

Lord Eiipul IX was the descendant of a long line of noble nye whose ancestry could be traced back to single-planetary origins. He was highly intelligent, a trained fighter, skilled in the arts