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months and showed no sign of slowing. He had gone abruptly from slightly below average male height to slightly above it. Height changed one’s perspective on life as well as the way others perceived one.
    The drawback was that it became harder to remain inconspicuous. It made him feel less of a boy and more of a man, though when a boy became a man, wasn’t he supposed to be certain about things? Flinx found he was more confused now than he had been at sixteen, and not only about women.
    If anyone had a right to feel confused, it was Philip Lynx, né Flinx. His was not a normal mind in a normal body. Better to be confused all the time than frightened. He managed to keep the fear in the background, out of the way, locked in the dark cul-de-sacs of his mind. It did not occur to him that it was his fear and confusion that prevented him from making further contact with members of the opposite sex. He knew only that he was wary.
    If only Bran Tse-Mallory or Truzenzuzex were around to advise him. He missed them deeply, wondered where they were and what they might be up to, what mysteries they might be probing with their singularly penetrating minds. For all he knew, he realized with a cold chill, they might be dead.
    No, impossible. Those two were immortal. Monuments both of them, spirit and intelligence molded in material everlasting, both parts combining to form a much greater whole. They had their own lives to live, he told himself for the thousandth time, their own destinies to fulfill. They could not be expected to spare the time to tutor one odd young man, no matter how interesting he might be.
    Having always managed on his own as a boy, he could certainly do so as an adult. He would damn well have to find out things for himself instead of expecting another to do it for him. Why shouldn’t he manage? He could do certain things that so far as he knew no one else could do.
    They designed me well, he thought bitterly. My prenatal physicians. The rogue men and women who had employed his DNA for their plaything. What had they really hoped to achieve with him and his fellow fetal experimentees? Would they be proud of him today or disappointed, as they had apparently been in all the others? Or would they simply be curious, utterly distant and uninvolved? It could be no more than a matter for speculation, since all of them were dead or mindwiped.
    Well, their subject was preparing to build a life of his own, independent and unobserved. Already he had crisscrossed a fair portion of the Commonwealth trying to locate his natural parents, only to discover that his mother was dead and his father’s identity a mystery lost in the mists and rumors that were his heritage.
    That desire to know had driven him for several years. Now he was beyond that. If he was ever to learn the truth of his genealogy, he would have to pry it out of some computer storage chip hidden somewhere beneath human ken. Time to put history behind him and look to his future, which would probably prove as complicated as his past.
    Still, he considered himself fortunate. While his unpredictable talents had often placed him in trouble, they had also helped to extricate him from it. He’d had the chance to meet some unique individuals: Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex, Lauren Walder, and others not nearly so pleasant. And then there were the Ujurrians. He found himself wondering how their tunnel digging was progressing. The AAnn, too, of course, scheming and plotting against humanxkind, always searching for a weakness, probing for an opening, watching and waiting to expand whenever the Commonwealth seemed weak or indecisive.
    His thoughts were rambling, but he could not help himself. The crawler largely drove itself, and now that he had done what he had come to do, he was relaxed and at ease. He could easily see himself becoming a reclusive mystic, the old hermit of the trade vectors, cruising back and forth through the Commonwealth and even skirting its outermost