Read Online Patrimony by Alan Dean Foster - Free Book Online Page B

weather and to further insulate passengers from it. A purely utilitarian vehicle, the unstylish craft was intended to convey people and cargo from coordinate A to coordinate B efficiently and without lugging any false pretensions along with it. Squat and unlovely, it would have drawn no admiring gazes on any developed world. Faster, flashier models were also available from the rental company, all of which Flinx spurned. As always, the less attention he drew to himself, the better he liked it.
    Though indigenous escorts were available for hire in Tlossene itself, the agency that had rented him the skimmer suggested he contribute to the human-Tlel economy by engaging one from any of several outlying towns. With nothing to recommend a particular village over another, he logically chose the one that lay along the route his skimmer was going to follow anyway.
    With the rented craft stocked with the limited supplies he would need for the journey, he performed a perfunctory routine check of its functions, made sure its internal vorec was properly keyed to his voice, set a bowl of treats on the floor for an eager Pip, and, with the minidrag munching away, directed the skimmer to lift off from the roof of the rental facility (one of the few nondomed structures in Tlossene) and head northwest to the town of Sluuvaneh. Ten minutes into the flight, assured that the craft was performing efficiently, he allowed himself to relax and spoon his way through one of the self-contained, self-heating meals stocked in the vehicle’s stores.
    The country through which he was soon traveling was as beautiful and pristine as it was alien. Once beyond the last suburb of Tlossene, the semi-urbanized landscape quickly gave way to what a human would have described as unbroken boreal forest—albeit one that was twisted, angular, and all too blue. Gentle hillsides gave way to more rugged slopes cut by streams that were alternately rushing and raging. Gestalt’s denser atmosphere did nothing to inhibit the wild white water below. Given the planet’s modest and widely dispersed population, both human and native, he was not surprised by the absence of roadways. Transport by skimmer and aircraft negated the need for investment in such impractical and expensive infrastructure.
    Ranging from a familiar subdued green to a startling deep azure in hue, some of the tree-like growths whose tops his vehicle skimmed were well over a hundred meters in height. Few branched in Terran fashion. Instead they tended to conserve such efforts until their respective crowns were reached, whereupon each growth exploded outward like the tip of a used firecracker. Below these heights, thickets of lowlier growths fought for soil, space, and access to sunlight. When cruising over more open terrain, Flinx sought in vain for a glimpse of a single flower.
    He did, however, espy some local fauna. Several times, flocks of slender-winged flying creatures with long, straight beaks altered course to avoid crashing into the skimmer or being overtaken by it. In keeping with the somberness of their surroundings, they tended to range in color from gray to black. On the other hand the herd of wackensia, as the skimmer’s limited-knowledge AI identified them, were boldly striped in turquoise and mauve. They fled from the skimmer’s shadow on multiple legs, their flexible cropping mouths flapping with their rippling gait, reminding him of shorter, less aggressive variants on the carnivorous kasollt that had confronted him at the shuttleport.
    As he traveled farther from Tlossene, he gained altitude. Peaks that had been distant from the city drew gradually nearer. The distinctive heliotropic tinge to the snows that covered their crests was unlike anything he had encountered elsewhere. Some unique mineralization, he mused, that ascended with evaporation or transpiration only to precipitate out again as pink snow. With more pressing matters on his mind than local atmospheric chemistry, he did not