Running from the Deity: A Pip and Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster - Hardcover

At first thought, you'd think it would be easy to find a missing planet. Even a methane dwarf. Except that the missing tenth world of the outlying Imperial AAnn system of Pyrassis was not a world, but an immense automated weapons platform of the long-extinct race who called themselves the Tar-Aiym. Actually, Flinx mused as he held out his arms and let the magnetically charged droplets of water swirl around him and scrub his lanky naked form, one would think it would be even simpler to find a planet-sized weapons platform than a small planet itself. The only problem was that in the absence of standing orders to guide its revived behavior, the monstrous ancient device had gone looking for some. Since to the best of current knowledge the last of those beings who might be capable of issuing such directives had died half a million years earlier, more or less, the prospects of said intelligent weapons platform stumbling across relevant instructions on how it ought to proceed were slight indeed. Flinx suspected that it would do no good, should he somehow actually succeed in tracking down his galactically perambulating quarry, to point out that the species it was built to fight, the Hur'rikku, were as dead and gone as the massive machine's original Tar-Aiym builders. Find it first, he told himself as he did a slow turn beneath the recycled spray from the shower. Semantics follow function. He did not need to pivot for purposes of cleanliness since the water beads automatically enveloped him in their attentive aqueous embrace. They avoided only the special shower mask that shielded his mouth and nose. Without such a mask, someone making use of such a shower conceivably could drown--though it was an easy enough matter simply to step sideways and clear of the open-sided, freestanding facility. "Are you finished yet?" The voice of the Teacher's ship-mind reached him through the stimulating vertical bath. "Almost. Why? Are you going to suggest that after I finish bathing I take another 'vacation'?" "It is interesting how sardonicism tends to shed efficacy over time," the ship-mind replied tartly. Having suggested that Flinx spend a while resting and recuperating on the out-of-the-way world of Jast, only to see him nearly murdered by one of the expatriate AAnn officials residing on that world, the AI was understandably disinclined to discuss the subject. Knowing this, Flinx lost few opportunities to bring it up. "I take your point, by which I assume that you're not going to make such a suggestion. Good." As he stepped out of the shower, the ready and waiting dryer scanned his dripping body. Preprogrammed to his specified level of individual comfort, it set about evaporating from his skin the water and the dirt it had englobed. Standing there, alone in his personal hygienic facilities within the ship, Flinx contemplated his immediate future and regarded it as fraught with uncertainty, danger, and confusion. Not that it had ever been otherwise. Some days he chose to dress while at other times he moved about the Teacher's interior quite naked. As the only human on board, there was no need to concern himself with violating nudity taboos. Pip certainly did not mind. Rising from the resting place where she had dozed in utter indifference to her master's peculiar habit of immersing himself in gravity-defying liquid, she landed on his bare right shoulder and settled down. Her slender serpentine shape was warm against his freshly scoured skin. Pulling on lightweight pants and a feathery comfort shirt, he made his way to the Teacher's bridge. Around him, the product of the Ulru-Ujurrian's creative engineering genius functioned smoothly. It would have been dead silent inside the ship, except that deaFoster, Alan Dean is the author of 'Running from the Deity: A Pip and Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster - Hardcover' with ISBN 9780345461599 and ISBN 0345461592.