When he awoke, Flinx found himself lying on the skimmer’s deck. His head was still intact and securely attached to his neck. Extricating herself from the blanket, Pip had worked her way over to lie half on, half off his chest. Thanks to the advanced medications he had found in Anayabi’s abode, the injured wing he had treated already showed signs of knitting. He sat up, rubbing at the back of his head, then screwing his knuckles into his eyes. Visual purple flashed before his pupils, his own private aurora. Around him the skimmer hummed softly, doing its job, taking itself home on autopilot, back to Tlossene. Little could be seen through the plexalloy canopy. It was now night outside and dark, but not as devoid of light and substance as the darkness he was projected to confront.
An alien machine thought he should do so. A green world-mind insisted that he do so. A combined consciousness that was intimately related to him devoutly wished for him to do so. It all fit the pattern of his life.
Even his death, it seemed, was not to be his own.
Machine, green, serene, he mused. Clarity.
Clarity. A galaxy of potential there, if not a literal one. He sighed. It didn’t matter. The triangle of his thoughts would not let him die. The tri-barreled weapon of unknown possibilities would not abjure its trigger. He would live. He would go on not so much because it was his desire to do so but because it was desired by others. His death was not his own and neither, it appeared, was his life. Like it or not, he was an immutable part of something bigger than himself, much bigger. He could not revoke, would not be allowed to revoke, that which minds vaster and more profound than his own had declared irrevocable.
He would continue to search for the gigantic Tar-Aiym weapons platform that disguised itself as a brown dwarf. He would not give up. Never-giving-up, no matter how hopeless things seemed, was something humans did. Only machines analyzed available evidence and, when all appeared hopeless, quietly conceded everything including their own existence. If he went on, if he did not give up, that was at least one indication of humanness he could cling to. No matter how much he had begun to doubt it.
Rising from the deck, he moved forward and settled into the pilot’s seat that had been so recently and hysterically vacated. Ahead lay a few hours’ travel time. Then Tlossene, his shuttle, and waiting patiently in orbit, the Teacher. Waiting for him to tell it what to do, where to go next, which planetfall it needed to plot.
No wonder he always got along so well with the ship-mind. It takes one artificial intelligence, he reflected with bitter irreverence, to know another.
About the Author
ALAN DEAN FOSTER has written more than a hundred books in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: The Approaching Storm and the popular Pip & Flinx novels, as well as novelizations of several films including Transformers, Star Wars, the first three Alien films, and Alien Nation. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work ever to do so. Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, live in Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from an early-twentieth-century miners’ brothel. He is currently at work on several new novels and media projects. For more about the author, go to www.alandeanfoster.com.
BY ALAN DEAN FOSTER
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
The Black Hole
Cachalot
Dark Star
The Metrognome and Other Stories
Midworld
Nor Crystal Tears
Sentenced to Prism
Star Wars®: Splinter of the Mind’s Eye
Star Trek® Logs One–Ten
Voyage to the City of the Dead
…Who Needs Enemies?
With Friends Like These…
Mad Amos
The Howling Stones
Parallelities
Star Wars®: The Approaching Storm
STORIES:
Impossible Places
Exceptions to Reality
THE ICERIGGER TRILOGY:
Icerigger
Mission to Moulokin
The Deluge Drivers
THE ADVENTURES OF FLINX OF THE COMMONWEALTH:
For Love of Mother-Not
The Tar-Aiym Krang
Orphan Star
The End of the Matter
Bloodhype
Mid-Flinx
Reunion
Flinx’s Folly
Sliding Scales
Running from the Deity
Trouble Magnet
Patrimony
THE DAMNED:
Book One: A Call to Arms
Book Two: The False Mirror
Book Three: The Spoils of War
THE FOUNDING OF THE COMMONWEALTH:
Phylogenesis
Dirge
Diuturnity’s Dawn
THE TAKEN TRILOGY:
Lost and Found
The Light-years Beneath My Feet
The Candle of Distant Earth
Patrimony is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Thranx, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Foster, Alan Dean.
Patrimony: a Pip & Flinx adventure / Alan Dean Foster.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-50220-9
1. Humanx Commonwealth (Imaginary organization)—Fiction. 2. Flinx (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Pip (Fictitious character: Foster)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3556.0756P38 2007
813'.54—dc22
2007021494
www.delreybooks.com
v1.0