Mid-Flinx

Book 6: Adventures of Pip & Flinx

by Alan Dean Foster

Genres: Action & Adventure; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Pip and Flinx meet Midworld!

Where Flinx and his flying minidrag Pip went, trouble always followed—that law had governed their lives through years of unsought danger and galactic intrigue. Now an evil rich man was out to kidnap the minidrag for his personal zoo, and Flinx and Pip were on the run again—this time into uncharted space, on a random course they hoped would foil their pursuers.

They found more than they bargained for when they landed on Midworld, a verdant planet covered by an immense jungle, hosting an incredible variety of plant and animal life—all of it unknown and all of it deadly. And now they were in real trouble. Their hiding place was in danger of discovery, and their only hope lay with this bizarre and untamed planet . . . if it didn't kill them first!

Release date: March 5, 2002

Publisher: Del Rey

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter One
 
 
 
If everyone’s going to chase me, Flinx thought, I should’ve been born with eyes in the back of my head. Of course, in a sense, he had been.
 
He couldn’t see behind himself. Not in the commonly accepted meaning of the term. Not visually. But he could “sense” behind him. Most sentient creatures generated patterns on the emotional level that Flinx could, from time to time, detect, descry, or perceive. Depending on the wildly variable sensitivity of his special talent, he could feel anger, fear, love, sorrow, pain, happiness, or simple contentment in others the way ordinary folk could feel heat or cold, slipperiness or stickiness, that which was sharp and that which was soft.
 
The emotional states of other beings prodded him with little jabs, twitches, icy notions in his brain. Sometimes they arrived on the doorstep of his mind as a gentle knock or comforting greeting, more often as a violent hammering he was unable, despite his most ardent efforts, to ignore.
 
For years he believed that any refining of his talent would be an improvement. He was no longer so sure. Increased sensitivity only exposed him to more and more personal distress and private upsets. He had discovered that the emotional spectrum was a roiling, violent, crowded, generally unpleasant place. When he was especially receptive, it washed over him in remorseless waves, battering and pounding at his own psyche, leaving scant room for feelings of his own. None of this was apparent to others. Years of practice enabled him to keep the turmoil inside his head locked up, hidden away, artfully concealed.
 
Much to his distress, as he matured it became harder instead of easier to maintain the masquerade.
 
Used to be that he could distance himself from the emotional projections of others by putting distance between himself and the rest of humanxkind. Now that he’d grown more sensitive still, that kind of peace came to him only in the depths of interstellar space itself.
 
His situation wasn’t entirely hopeless. With advancing maturity had come the ability to shut out the majority of background low-level emotional emanations. Spousal ire directed silently at mates, the petty-squabbles of children, silent internalized hatreds, secret loves: he’d managed to reduce them all to a kind of perceptual static in the back of his mind. He couldn’t completely relax in the company of others, but neither was his mind in constant turmoil. Where and when possible, he favored town over city, hamlet over town, country over hamlet, and wilderness over all.
 
Still, as his erratic control of his fickle talent improved, his worries only expanded, and he found himself plagued by new fears and uncertainties.
 
As he watched Pip slither silently across the oval glassine tabletop, hunting for fallen crumbs of salt and sugar, Flinx found himself wondering not for the first time where it would all stop. As he grew older and taller he continued to grow more sensitive. Would he someday be privy to the emotional state of insects? Perhaps a couple of distraught bacteria would eventually be all that was necessary to incite one of his recurring headaches.
 
He knew that would never happen. Not because it wasn’t theoretically possible—he was such a genetic anomaly that where his nervous system was concerned, anything was theoretically possible—but because long before he could ever attain that degree of sensitivity he would certainly go mad. If the pain of his headaches didn’t overwhelm him, an excess of knowledge would.
 
He sat alone in the southwest corner of the restaurant, but for all it distanced him from the emotional outpourings of his fellow patrons, he might as well have been sitting square in their midst. His isolation arose not from personal choice but because the other diners preferred it that way. They shunned him, and not the other way around.
 
It had nothing to do with his appearance. Tall, slim but well-proportioned, with his red hair and green eyes he was a pleasant-looking, even attractive young man. Much to his personal relief, he’d also lost nearly all the freckling that had plagued him since his youth.
 
The most likely explanation for his isolation was that the other diners had clustered at the opposite end of the dining room in hopes of avoiding the attentions of the small, pleat-winged, brightly colored flying snake which was presently foraging across her master’s table in search of spice and sustenance. While the combined specific xenozoological knowledge of the other patrons peaked not far above zero, several dutifully recalled that contrasting bright colors in many primitive creatures constituted a warning sign to potential predators. Rather than chance confirmation of this theory, all preferred to order their midday meal as far from the minidrag as possible.
 
Pip’s pointed tongue flicked across the tabletop to evaluate a fragment of turbinado sugar. Delighted by the discovery, she pounced on the energy-rich morsel with a languid thrust of her upper body.
 
Credit was due the restaurant’s host. When Flinx had appeared at the entrance with the flying snake coiled decorously about his left arm and shoulder, the older man had stiffened instinctively while listening to Flinx’s explanation that the minidrag was a longtime pet fully under control who would threaten no one. Accepting the tall young guest at his word, the unflinching host had led him to a small, isolated table which partook fully of the establishment’s excellent view.
 
Samstead was a peaceful world. Its three large continents were veined by many rivers which drained into oceans congenial of coast and clime. Its weather was consistent if not entirely benign, its settlers hardworking and generally content. They raised up light industries and cut down dense forests, planted thousands of fields and drew forth from the seas a copious harvest of savory alien protein. In dehydrated, freeze-dried, and otherwise commercially profitable compacted forms, this bounty found its way packed, labeled, and shipped to less fruitful systems.
 
It was a world of wide-open spaces buttoned together by innumerable small towns and modest, rurally attuned metropolises. While air transport was widely available, citizens preferred where possible to travel by means of the many rivers and connecting canals. Working together, humans and thranx had over the years woven a relatively pleasant fabric of life out of the natural threads supplied by their planet, which lay on the fringes of the Commonwealth. It was a pleasant place to call home.
 
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Samstead was that there was nothing remarkable about it. It had been a long time since Flinx had come across so docile an outpost of civilization. Since his arrival he’d given serious thought to extending his visit beyond his original intent, perhaps even settling down—if such a thing were possible for him.
 
It was a world where a new colonist might be able to lose himself in villatic contentment. A world where even he might no longer need to continually employ those figurative eyes in the back of his head. Flinx wasn’t paranoid, but bitter experience had taught him caution. This was the inevitable consequence of an adolescence that had been, well, something other than normal.
 
For the moment, he was content to travel, to observe, to soak up the gentle, genial, country feel of this place. If its appeal held, he would linger. If not he would, as always, move on.
 
Departure would be effected by means of his remarkable ship, the Teacher, presently drifting in parking orbit over Samstead’s equator in the company of several hundred other KK-drive craft. As far as Samstead Authority was concerned, it was bonded to a Mothian company, which was in fact a fiction for private ownership: a not uncommon practice.
 
As he slipped a forkful of some wonderful grilled fresh fish into his mouth, he drank in the view beyond the sweeping glass wall that fronted the backside of the restaurant. The establishment clung to the edge of a thirty-meter-high bank of the Tumberleon River, one of Samstead’s hundred principal watercourses. Translucent graphite ribs reinforced the wall, becoming soaring arches overhead. These supported a ceiling of photosensitive panels which darkened automatically whenever Samstead’s sun emerged from behind the clouds.
 
At this point, three-quarters of its way to the Kil Sea, the river was some three kilometers wide. All manner of contemporary rivercraft plied the languorous yet muscular stream: sailboats whose ultralight fabrics responded automatically to shifts in wind speed and direction, hovercraft built up out of ultralight composites, MAG barges which utilized the minute differences in electric charge between air and water to lumber along several centimeters above the surface of the water, big power-boats, tiny superfast pleasure craft, and land-based skimmers.
 
There was even a small group of children splashing about in some nearby shallows, looking for all the world like an undisciplined pod of playful amphibians. They seemed to be having a good time without the aid or intervention of any advanced technology whatsoever. Though timeless, it was a tableau less frequently encountered on the more urbanized worlds like Terra or Centauri.
 
Flinx found himself envying that unrestrained innocence. The pace of life on Samstead was much slower. It was a world on which one could live and work and still take time.
 
Flinx had managed to live, but so far his work had consisted of trying to stay alive and unnoticed. As for time, there never seemed to be enough of that intangible yet most precious of commodities.