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| Cover art by Darryl K. Sweet |
| THE END OF THE MATTER Alan Dean Foster New York: Del Rey Books, November 1977 | Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-345-25861-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-345-25861-4 | 246pp. | SC | $1.75 | |
Abalamahalamalandra was no trouble; it would do anything it was told to do, within its limited capabilities, and faithfully trotted along wherever Flinx went. The trouble was, Abalamahalamalandra was downright weird — quadrilaterally symmetrical, possessing four legs, four arms with four fingers each, and four limpid eyes evenly spaced around its pear-shaped body. Four holes above the eyes were presumably apertures for sound reception. From the top of its head projected something like an elephant's trunk, which seemed to be its mouth. It was colored sky blue, with four lime green vertical stripes. And it constantly mumbled nonsense like, "Ram-a-lam, flim-flam man, only one sidereal span." The separate words were intelligible, but the message was not. It could do this in Terranglo, symbospeech, and about a hundred other languages, some as unclassifiable as itself, for no one Flinx met had ever seen a similar creature.
Ab's cooperative nature was fortunate, for when the carnival barker ran off and left him in Flinx's unwilling charge, the boy had troubles enough. Deadly Qwarm assassins were apparently tracking him, for what reason he could not fathom. He had to elude them long enough to follow the last leads that might let him identify his father. In the course of doing this, he and his minidrag Pip killed two of them. Now he knew one reason the rest would seek him out: the one thing Qwarm do without being paid is to avenge their own.
Larger events soon occupy his mind. Robot probes have detected a black hole entering the galaxy on a course that will take it through three inhabited systems. Its speed and mass are incredibly high; the planets are doomed within a matter of years, and there's no time to evacuate their billions of inhabitants. The leadership of the Humanx Commonwealth is looking at a triage situation. But two former members of the Council seek a different solution. There are rumors about a long-vanished race called the Hur'rikku — or perhaps they are more than rumors; the Hur'rikku did exist, and their decaying cities still do.1 It is said they dealt with a black hole in a similar situation. The two leaders accept this as fact, and are determined to find out how it was done. They happen to be friends of Flinx, and track him down just in time to help him out of another tough scrape.2
Conveniently, Flinx has his own KK-drive starship, and volunteers it to facilitate the quest for the Hur'rikku secret. Suffice it to say they find it, and Abalamahalamalandra turns out to be the key to the whole thing.
This is not Foster's best work. It's enjoyable enough, but the troubles Flinx and his companions encounter seem contrived, and the long-lost alien bafflegab device that saves the day has been done better. I'll give it a 4.0 rating. It is part of a series, following a novel called Orphan Star, and there are frequent references to events in that novel. Perhaps this one would hang together better if I had read its predecessors first.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.