Trouble Magnet (9 page)

Subar blinked. It was not the kind of response one expected from an offworlder. Although, he reflected as he regarded his guest in a new light, for all the strange look in his eyes, this Flinx was not all that much older than himself. Could it be, perhaps, that he was also not all that much different? Or did the tall stranger mean to suggest something else?

“You’d better not be making fun of me,” he muttered warningly.

Flinx smiled. “I wouldn’t dare.” He started toward the door. Subar moved quickly to intercept him.

“Wait! I—I’d like to talk some more.” He forced a smile of his own. “It isn’t every day I’m slipped from the system by an offworlder.”

As Pip hummed over to land on his shoulder, Flinx looked back at his host. “Maybe you do want to talk. But what you really want is to figure out a way to get hold of my service belt and disappear down the nearest alley with it.”

The smile stayed on Subar’s face, but his insides gave a little jump. “Don’t be crazed! You saved me from those thranx, and from the police. Why would I do something like that?”

“To ‘make your own way.’ Hey, don’t look so outraged. When I was your age, I did things to survive that I’m less than proud of today.”

For a moment, Subar considered holding fast to his denial. It would do no good, he saw. His guest was far too—too what? Perceptive? Or something more? “What did you do—read my mind?”

The tall offworlder chuckled. “No. Not even your emotions. Your eyes. Every other second, especially when you thought I wasn’t looking, they were fastened on my gear. Greed is a tantrum of the face. You’d make a poor gamester. You need to look away from your target, not at it.”

Flinx caught himself. What was he doing, giving that kind of advice to a strange youth? For a moment he had reverted to the wily adolescent who had haunted the streets of Drallar, on Moth, always keeping an eye out for an easy dishonest mark or any other advantage that could be turned his way. After everything he had been through over the past ten years, it was something of a shock to find that he could slip so easily back into old ways.

Something of a shock, yes—but not wholly unpleasant.

“I can’t stay,” he told his bemused but energetic young host.

“Why not? Just for a little while longer. Just to answer some questions,” Subar pleaded with him. When his guest shrugged and turned again toward the doorway, the fast-thinking youth raised his voice. “Where do you have to go in such a hurry? You have to save the galaxy, or something?”

Flinx’s hand halted halfway to the door’s jury-rigged activation panel. Subar’s comment was simultaneously stunning in its incongruous perceptiveness and breathtaking in its unknowing innocence. Flinx’s spirit, which for an instant had regressed to a childhood dominated by poverty and carefreeness, was roughly wrenched forward to the present, with all the awesome burden of responsibility and knowledge it incorporated.

For the first time since he had sat up on the mattress, pain returned to the back of his head. It was joined by frustration, laced with a soupçon of anger. Though he said nothing, his expression and the look in his eyes were enough to cause Subar to take several hasty steps backward.

What did I say? the youth wondered. It was as if he had somehow touched more than a nerve. His guest had undergone a sudden transformation from amiable longsong to something much deeper and darker. Something haunted those dark green eyes. Meeting the offworlder’s gaze without flinching, he tried to see if he could find a clue as to what it might be.

It reached out and touched him.

It was unintentional on Flinx’s part. He hadn’t meant to project. Certainly not what he was thinking about. Only a sliver of what he had seen and experienced; of his past decade, of things whose existence very few sentients were even aware of, was projected onto the youth standing before him.

Subar was tough, Subar was self-reliant, Subar had been through a great deal in his young life.

Subar screamed.

“It’s all right, it’s all right!” Reflexively, Flinx moved to comfort the younger man.

Subar had retreated until he was backed up against the old cabinet. One hand clawed blindly for the recog panel that would open at his touch. A gun. He had to get a gun, had to kill this
thing
looming before him.

Something else flowed out of Flinx. Reassurance, a gentling, a calm born of long practice and much meditation undertaken during long passages between the stars. Subar’s fingers relaxed, stopped fumbling at the front of the cabinet. His breathing slowed, returned to normal. The bottomless dark that had filled the longsong’s eyes had gone away, to be replaced by a caring and understanding that arose from other, less traumatic experiences.

“I’m sorry.” Flinx held out both hands to the younger man. “I didn’t mean for that to happen, for you to perceive that. I was upset. Not at you: at something within myself. It was something I couldn’t prevent. It was an accident.”

Swallowing hard, Subar took a wary step away from the cabinet. “What happened? How did you do that? I felt—I felt…” He could not put what he had felt into words, and said so.

Flinx turned away slightly. “Don’t feel a lack. The most venerable philosophs couldn’t put it into words. It’s beyond words. It’s something that’s at once within and outside me.”

For the second time that morning Subar saw his guest in a new light. Only this time, it was not as a potential victim, but as someone to feel sorry for. That was quaint. Him, feeling sorry for this well-off, well-traveled offworlder. If he had only been made privy to a tiny bit of what hid inside this pitiable longsong, then…

He preferred not to pursue that particular line of speculation any farther.

It was an unfamiliar situation. He was used to dividing up the world into friend and foe. The idea that a total stranger, and a most peculiar offworlder at that, could be something else, something different—not friend, but not enemy, either—was totally new.

Could he be, perhaps, somehow useful? Being in the longsong’s company, he decided, was akin to walking around with a large bomb. It gave him something to threaten others with, but at any moment it might also go off in his hand. Was it a chance he dared risk taking? Making his determination a lot more complicated was the fact that the bomb had an agenda of its own.

“I should go.” Flinx turned to do so, the minidrag riding on his left shoulder, her tail coiled around the back of his neck.

“Wait, please…” Again Subar tried to restrain the visitor, only this time with a different purpose in mind. It was no use. Flinx opened the door. As it swung wide, Pip lifted her head and hissed sharply.

The portal was already occupied.

Visitor and newcomers eyed each other appraisingly.
“Tchoul,”
a surprised Chaloni murmured as he looked the offworlder up and down. “Who, or what, is this?” Flanking him, Dirran and Sallow Behdul let their hands slide in the direction of concealed weapons. Flinx regarded the trio calmly.

Subar crowded close behind him, struggling to make himself seen as well as heard. “
Laze,
Chal! He’s pure lucid, he’s a friend.”

The gang leader ignored the younger boy’s hurried assertions. His attention remained fixed on Flinx. “You brought him
here
? To our priv space?”

Still fighting for room in the narrow portal, a deferential Subar pleaded his case. “I told you; he’s lucid. He skyed me clear of the bugs—and away from the police.” Demonstrating a shrewd knowledge of the intricacies of mature diplomacy, he tactfully refrained from reminding Chaloni and the others that they were the ones who had abandoned him to that potential fate. “How’s Zezula—and Missi?”

The gang leader weighed his follower’s words, his voice a soft murmur. If he detected anything more in Subar’s tone than formal concern for Zezula, he didn’t show it. “They’re still at Kolindu’s clinic, getting patched up. Every time Zez feels her nose, she wants to go out and kill the first bug she sees.” His hard gaze rose to meet Flinx’s quiet stare. “How about you, longsong? How you feel about killing bugs?”

Unlike with Subar, Flinx perceived that there was nothing ambivalent about the one the younger boy had called Chal. Had he been the one caught in the grasp of the fighting thranx, Flinx would not have raised a hand to help him. The emotions that flowed forth from him embodied everything Flinx had come to despise in his own kind: greed, selfishness, a nasty delight in the discomfiture of others, a raw craving for power, and more. His two companions were little better, with the larger of the pair possibly being an exception. The bulky youth’s emotions were as flat and dull as the rest of him.

Subar, now—there might be some hope for Subar. And if there was hope for him, perhaps also for the rest of civilization, insofar as Flinx’s further involvement with its uncertain future was concerned.

As one hand slipped into a pocket, Chaloni took a step into the room. “I asked you how you feel about killing bugs, scrawn.”

Flinx had to put up a hand to restrain Pip, whose perception of the gang leader was no less exact than that of her master. “Depends on where they are.”

Chaloni halted, perplexed and trying not to show it. “‘Where’? What do you mean, ‘where’?”

“Whether they’re in my gut, my bed, my food, or my head.”

Dirran laughed. It was more of a sharp expectoration, like spit, than a sincere chuckle. Chaloni hesitated, then found himself smiling. “True, true. Spoken like someone who’s had plenty of experience of both.” A glint of light bounced off the cylindrical device he withdrew from his pocket. Gray and tapered, it was not sharp. It did not have to be.

“You know what this is, scrawn longsong?” Chaloni was clearly enjoying himself.

Flinx nodded slowly. “Sonic stiletto.”

The gang leader pushed out his lower lip, his expression and tone approving. “You
have
had some experience. So you know the wave form it emits will punch through almost anything.” He flicked the tip in the direction of Flinx’s shoulder. “Including that wingthing weighing down your neck, if it tries to bite me.”

“Pip doesn’t bite,” Flinx informed him truthfully. “Neither do I.”

“That remains to be decided, doesn’t it?” Chaloni started forward.

Internally, Subar was a mass of conflicting emotions. If he didn’t react to intercede on behalf of the visitor, Chaloni was surely going to cut him—if only to demonstrate that he could. If he
did
try to talk the bigger, older youth out of the hostile, Chaloni would not forget whose side Subar had taken. Unable to decide what to do, he did nothing. Let the visitor get himself out of it, if he could. Chaloni wasn’t angry—he just wanted to make a point. He probably wouldn’t cut the stranger bad.

Then a strange thing happened. Chaloni stopped. Just stopped, as if he had run into an invisible wall. There was no wall: Subar could tell that much when Sallow Behdul advanced beyond where the gang leader was standing. Then he, too, halted. Both boys started twitching slightly, as if afflicted with sudden chills. They were joined by Dirran a moment later. Mouth agape, Subar leaned forward to glance up at the visitor. Flinx’s eyes were half closed but otherwise fixed on his would-be assailants. He, too, looked paralyzed.

No, not paralyzed, Subar corrected himself. Deep in thought. He considered asking his guest what was going on. Realizing that for the moment he, at least, was
not
twitching, the younger boy wisely decided to keep quiet and out of the way.

Normally, the emotions that filled Flinx to bursting stayed caged within him. Everything that had happened to him from an early age to the present—every experience, every disappointment, every confrontation and conflict to which he had been a participant, every iota of misery and unhappiness, of death and destruction, of malevolence and pure evil—remained put down and locked up in one small section of his mind he had reserved for that purpose. Now he let those emotions out. Just a trickle, the tiniest seep of forlorn despair. Let them out and projected them onto the emotional receptors of the three young men standing before him. He was very careful about how wide he opened the emotive tap. He did not want to kill.

Tears began to leach from the corners of Chaloni’s eyes. His lips trembled like a little girl’s. His fingers went limp and the stiletto fell from his hand. It had not been activated or it would have cut its way through successive floors all the way down to the ground before its built-in safety finally shut it off. Chaloni started to sob. Pressing his clenched fists against his eyes, he began hammering against them as he dropped to his knees. To his right, Dirran was lying on the floor crying, holding himself, and rocking back and forth. On the other side of the gang leader, Sallow Behdul had not made a sound. Instead, he sat down, curled up into a tight fetal ball, and began sucking softly on the knuckles of his huge right hand.

Subar discovered that his throat had gone dry. “What—what did you do to them?”

“Nothing much.” Flinx’s eyes were once more fully open. “Gave them the tiniest taste of dark water.”

Careful to avoid the glaze-eyed, blankly staring Behdul, Subar stepped forward and pivoted to confront his guest. “I didn’t see any water.”

The thinnest of smiles creased Flinx’s face. “I turned it off. Listen, I’m pretty rested. Thanks for showing me your ‘place.’” He started to push past the staring youth, heading for the exit.

Subar’s thoughts moved as fast as they ever had in his life. Somehow this offworlder, this Flinx, had put down the three toughest members of Subar’s acquaintance without laying a finger on any of them. It reminded him of another inexplicable moment; of what the visitor had done to him earlier. Something from within, the stranger had told him. It was, it had to be, some kind of trick. But what kind? And if he was right, could his guest possibly teach it to him? Useful—oh yes, the tall longsong could be useful. If he was going to learn anything, Subar knew he still had to figure out a way to keep Flinx around.

“This isn’t my place,” he announced hurriedly.

Pausing in the portal, Flinx peered back at him. “It’s not?”

“No, no. It’s just our priv space, where we get together to, uh, socialize.”