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Maybe it was right. Maybe what he needed more than anything
was to talk to someone. But who? There was no one he could con-
fide in, no one who would understand the nature and gravity of his
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FLINX S FOLLY
disturbing dreams as well as sympathize with his personal problems
and the emptiness that always traveled with him. There was Mother
Mastiff but she was getting on in years. She could listen but would
not really understand. Empathetic as she was, she did not possess
the necessary intellectual referents to comprehend what was going
on inside of him. Pip could make him feel warm inside but could not
talk. The Teacher, as it had just wisely observed, could provide eru-
dite conversation but not simple humanity.
Furthermore, not only did he need someone he could talk to
about everything that was going on inside him, that person also had
to be trustworthy. Conversation and understanding, he had long
since learned, were far easier to find than trust.
Actually, he realized with a start, there was someone. One
someone. Maybe.
Where to go looking? Obviously, the place where they had
last seen each other. He hesitated. Was he doing the right thing?
The possibility of betrayal was always uppermost in his mind. For
many years it had prevented him from seeking to share intimately
of himself. But the Teacher was right, he knew. He had gone with-
out confiding in another human being for far longer than was
healthy. For better or worse, he had to find a way to unburden
himself to someone who would not only listen but also might
respond with something deeper and more emotive than machine
logic.
Still uncertain he was doing the right thing but unable to decide
what else to do and desperate to do something he raised his
voice to finally supply the Teacher with a destination.
* * *
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ALAN DEAN FOSTER
New Riviera was not just a beautiful, accommodating, and pleasant
world. In all of mankind s more than seven hundred years of explor-
ing and spreading itself through the Orion Arm of the galaxy, it was
still the best place humans had ever found. Some planets were rated
comfortable and others livable. But out of the hundreds that had been
catalogued by humans and thranx alike, only Nur, as it was often
called, was considered even more hospitable than Mother Earth.
It was as if Nature had chosen in a particularly languid, re-
laxed, and contented moment to design a place for human beings
to live. Nur was not paradise. It was, for example, home to hostile
creatures. Just not very many of them. There were endemic diseases.
They just weren t very serious or common. The planet had seasons,
but winter, as humans were used to thinking of it, was confined to
the far north and south poles. Thanks to a remarkably stable orbit and
axis, weather tended to the consistently tropic or temperate over the
majority of the planet s surface. In the absence of dramatic mountain
ranges, rain tended to fall predictably and in moderate amounts ex-
cept in the extreme tropics, where it served as a welcome diversion.
The bulk of Nur s indigenous plant and animal life was attrac-
tive and harmless. With an abundance of easy-to-catch prey, even
the local carnivores were a bit on the lazy side. Imported life-forms
tended to thrive in the planet s exceptionally congenial surround-
ings. Everything from multiwheats imported from Kansastan to tropi-
cal fruits from Humus and Eurmet grew almost without effort.
Instead of vast oceans, the waters of Nur were divided into more
than forty seas of varying size. Dotted with welcoming islands and
archipelagoes, they made for comfortable sailing and cheap water-
based transportation. Thousands of rivers supplied fresh water to
tens of thousands of sparkling lakes.
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FLINX S FOLLY
It was not surprising that immigration to New Riviera was
among the most tightly controlled in the Commonwealth. True, not
everyone wanted to live there. There were those who found it too
static, even too civilized. There was no edge to this paradise, and
many humans and thranx needed an edge to keep them going. But
most of those fortunate enough to be citizens could not conceive of
living anywhere else, and those that could so conceive did not want to.
The choice of landing sites was extensive. There was Soothal, in
the center of one of the eight northern continents, or Nelaxis, on the
sandy shore of the Andrama Sea. The shuttleport outside indolent
Tharalaia, near the equator, was said to be bedecked with an aston-
ishing variety of tropical flowers whose rainbow of colors changed
naturally every week, while Gaudi was the most famous Nurian cen-
ter for the arts.
Thanks to the singular modifications and advances integrated
into its Caplis generator by the Ulru-Ujurrians, the Teacher could
land on a planetary surface without its drive field interacting lethally
with the planet s gravity. Flinx knew it could do so because it had
done so but only on sparsely inhabited or empty worlds. A very
few suspected his ship s unique ability and had been actively trying
to confirm it and track him down.
So whenever he visited a populated world, he descended and re-
turned via shuttlecraft, in the conventional fashion. Seeking as al-
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