Brightsuit MacBear

by L. Neil Smith

  Time passed. After enough of it, the boy turned to the Sodde Lydfan scientist. “Pemot, are these Hooded Seven guys really a threat to civilization as we know it?”

  Inwardly, the lamviin grinned to himself, once again admiring his new young friend’s resilience of character. Outwardly, his fur crinkled, the appropriate overt expression for the emotion, but in the dark this was invisible.

  “I thought you’d missed that. Yes, Berdan, some of us lamviin believe so: my family, one member of it in particular. The threat they represent is vague, but, I fear, real. And, somehow, all the more terrible for its vagueness.”

  The boy strained to see his companion’s face in the dark, until he realized it didn’t matter. “What do you mean?”

  “I…Berdan, I think the best course in the circumstances would be to tell you a story—history, in fact—the full details of which haven’t been known to many individuals and never before, to my knowledge, by a human being.”

  It was Berdan who grinned this time. The Lamviin knew humans well enough to hear it in his voice. “Don’t tell me anything you’ll regret, Pemot.”

  The scientist raised a hand. “Don’t alarm yourself on that account, my insufficiently-legged friend. Believe me, it’s the circumstances of the telling which are regrettable, not the telling itself.”

  Both beings settled themselves, and the lamviin’s voice began to fill the night with pictures.

  “My native planet, Sodde Lydfe is, like many another world, primitive or otherwise, divided into numerous nation-states of various sizes and dispositions, the two most powerful and wealthy of which, triarchies both, are the continental Hegemony of Podfet, and my home, the island empire of Great Foddu.

  “As one has come to expect with nation-states, Podfet and Great Foddu have, since the dim dust storms of antiquity when the legendary Neoned the Aggressor first discovered and caused the settlement of our island kingdom, perceived themselves to be rivals and potential enemies. Over the centuries, this rivalry’s manifested itself in many forms, from struggles over colonies, raw materials, and commercial advantages, to short-lived and furious skirmishes at arms.

  “It hadn’t, until a decade ago, yet come to open warfare.

  “Among the last of a long, unbroken line of individuals responsible for this lasting, if uneasy, peace was a great granduncle of mine on my surmother’s side of the family, one Agot Edmoot Mav. Although born of an influential and wealthy lineage himself, which might well have afforded him a life of nonproductive leisure, he had, over the course of a longevous and fruitful existence, pursued careers aplenty for any dozen lamviin: soldier, aeronaut, firefighter, inventor, Inquirer Extraordinary for the imperial city of Mathas, our capital. The lifelong bearer of an heroic and terrible wound acquired in the defense of one of our colonial frontiers, he’d even, upon one occasion, been put to court martial—and acquitted, I hasten to add—for mutiny.

  “During all this time, however, throughout each of his many and varied adventurings, Uncle Mav had esteemed himself first and foremost as a seeker of scientific truth and general wisdom, in particular within the realm of ethical philosophy. Having begun as an humble, pragmatic, and, in the main, self-taught investigator of life’s mysteries, large and small, in the end he attracted the devotion of many younger lamviin of all three genders whom, in angry tones, he refused to let call themselves his students or, even worse, his followers.

  “And at last, when he’d become an old lam indeed, with painful, creaking joints and the fur thinning upon his carapace—at a time when a final, cataclysmic conflict between the rival polities threatened inevitable destruction, not only of everything lamviin regard as civilized, but of all life upon Sodde Lydfe itself—he endeavored to make practical use of everything he’d learned, everything he’d himself created, in order to forestall disaster.

  “It had long since occurred to Uncle Mav that the impending catastrophe, like most of the military and diplomatic events preceding it, was an affair, not so much between the peoples of the Empire of Great Foddu and the Podfettian Hegemony, as between their respective rulers. He’d come to believe the pathway toward genuine peace lay not in the direction of negotiations between leaders and mutual disarmament (this being, at the time, the avenue most acclaimed and heralded by those of conventional mentality who, sincere or not, professed to love peace and abhor war—one which, as an individual, let alone a former soldier and policeman, he distrusted), but in the severest possible reduction of the power, the importance and prestige of the rulers themselves.

  “For uncountable centuries past, the untrammeled exercise of free expression had been a revered tradition, an unquestionable right, and a virtue altogether unique to the kingdom of Great Foddu. Uncle Mav employed what wealth and influence he possessed in the establishment of a powerful broadcasting station whose principal function was to transmit his ideas to the people of our nation-state, and, translated, to those of the Hegemony of Podfet, as well.

  “He was, of course, arrested—the strained political circumstances having at last overridden the last of our traditions, rights, and virtues—and imprisoned in exile upon a bleak and lonely islet in the south of Foddu, far from family and friends and from the city he knew and loved so well. Being the sort of person he was, Uncle Mav amused himself by writing and by converting his guards, the entire corps of them, to his philosophical point of view.

  “Still, the winds of war blew unabated. The storm they promised would leave our world a lifeless sand heap. The first battle would be the last: in the Ocean of Romm two great fleets were assembling, thousands of vessels, many the largest ever seen in history, overflown by giant flocks of dirigibles. (At the time, neither side possessed heavier-than-air machines. When I first saw the birds of Earth, I understood how humans had learned to fly so easily. Visit Sodde Lydfe, see ours, and you’ll know why imitating them seemed a hopeless aspiration.)

  “Aboard many of the warships on both sides, intended as weapons of final extremity—which, of course, made their use inevitable—explosive charges had been placed which operated upon the principle of atomic fission. These had been jacketed in what was, for us, a commonplace and convenient material, an alloy of cobalt. Although their inventors didn’t know it, and the bombs were rather small ones by comparison with those which cultures upon other planets have constructed, their ignition would create a radioactive poison which would linger in the Sodde Lydfan atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years.

  “The final battle had just begun when an astonishing thing happened. High in the air above both fleets, an impossible, gigantic, gleaming hemisphere materialized. Broadcasting on all frequencies, it ordered hostilities to halt, and, when not obeyed, employed powerful, surgically-precise beams of energy to blast holes through certain of the warships—and only the right ones—destroying the nuclear explosives they carried, allowing their crews time to repair or abandon them, and ending Sodde Lydfe’s first and last atomic war.

  “Of course your Galactic Confederacy had discovered us. An initial covert survey team had measured the international situation, recorded and translated Uncle Mav’s broadcasts. Not certain what to do about it, if anything, they’d sent for the starship Tom Paine Maru, which stopped the war (although debate still rages in certain quarters—Confederate, not Sodde Lydfan—whether it was ethical to interfere at all). Aided by his friends and family, a Confederate commando broke Uncle Mav out of prison. Afterward, as the Confederacy’s liaison with the Fodduan government and royal family, he helped make the peace—this second chance he’d won for us, all unknowing—a thing of permanence.

  “Now I’ve not inflicted this long and tedious story upon you without a purpose. During the aftermath, certain parties, neither Earthian in origin nor Sodde Lydfan, approached my Uncle Mav on the quiet with a curious proposition. Warning him of hidden imperialistic intentions on the part of the Galactic Confederacy and pointing out—they were correct in this—his own great popularity among all lamviin everywhere on Sodde Lydfe, they off
ered to place him in unanswerable power over the entire planet and to help it win free of all external interference.

  Being far more interested in seeing his philosophical ideals realized—and, remaining the same inveterate seeker of truth he’d been in his youth, desiring, perhaps, to spend the remainder of his life exploring the universe under the aegis of Confederate technology—Uncle Mav rejected the offer, in one of the rare instances of his life when he initiated force against another intelligent being. He kicked their lamviin representative down a long flight of stairs, Broached aboard Tom Paine Maru, still hanging in orbit above Sodde Lydfe, applied for a position as a common crewlam, and for immediate biomedical rejuvenation.

  “Uncle Mav still visits Great Foddu upon occasion, but is otherwise to be found on even newer planets with his own survey team. The point, as I’m sure you’ve anticipated by now, is that the certain parties who in vain attempted to establish him as their puppet dictator, represented themselves as the Hooded Seven.”

  Both beings sat silent for a long while, as darkness reclaimed the night around them.

  It was the human who spoke at last. “Some coincidence, isn’t it?”

  Pemot’s blink was invisible. “You refer to encountering the Hooded Seven again, here on Majesty? In all truth, Berdan, I confess my greatest fear is that it hasn’t been a coincidence at all.”

  “I see,” the boy answered. “You think maybe they have it in for your whole family?”

  The lamviin’s tone was a startled one. “My word, such a notion hadn’t occurred to me at all. Not a pleasant thought, that. No, I’m far more concerned with their presence on this planet as an indication of how widespread their influence must be throughout the galaxy.”

  Berdan stood up. “Okay, my too-many-legged friend, since you’re telling the stories tonight, what do we do about it?”

  Pemot thought. “Our primary consideration, of course, is to discuss getting you back to the fleet. I regret to say, where your interests are concerned, I’m effectively—if voluntarily—marooned upon this planet, having had, when I came to this place, specific scientific goals in mind, rather than a timetable, and having made, on that account, no particular arrangements for my return to a more civilized—”

  Berdan’s jaw dropped, and a look of betrayed astonishment swept over his face. All of this was lost on the lamviin in the darkness, but the boy’s tone made up for it.

  “Nothing doing! I came here with a specific goal in mind myself—finding a thief and getting some stolen property back—and I’m not leaving until—”

  Pemot raised a hand, which he had to place on the boy’s shoulder to interrupt the flow of angry words.

  “Come, come, Berdan. Let’s be realistic. Far be it from me to point out the obvious: you’re an immature human—a mere fifteen-year-old boy—pursuing a dangerous and perhaps impossible objective better left to the regular security—”

  Berdan shook his head. “Okay, Pemot, if that’s the way you feel, I can do without your help. Go ahead with your scientific goals, and I’ll get on with what I have to do! Just lay off the fifteen-year-old-immature-human stuff and try to stay out of my way, that’s all I ask!”

  He set his mouth in a hard line intended to control a trembling lower lip, folded his arms across his chest, and turned his back on the lamviin. A longer silence followed this time, during which each being was busy readjusting his thoughts about the other, one, perhaps, less accurate in this than the other.

  Pemot was the first to speak. “I believe, my friend—if I may still call you thus—I may have been misled about your civilization. Aren’t all of the most cherished myths of humanity concerned with returning from someplace you didn’t want to be: Ulysses and Ithaca, ruby slippers and Kansas, the Shire, back to the future, all of that?”

  Berdan was a while replying. “Would we be cross-stitching the galaxy in thousands of starships, many built to stay out forever? Would our stories have been written at all? Haven’t you noticed they’re all about adventures the hero has while he’s away—adventures which would be impossible at home—and they all end when he gets back?”

  Pemot lifted his right hand and scratched his carapace just below the jaw.

  “Or she. No, Berdan, despite the fact I’ve been calling myself a xenopraxeologist—a scientific observer of sapient beings—for several years (yours or mine, it doesn’t matter which), I’m ashamed to say I’d never noticed before. And I’ve even been to Kansas, a place which no sane being would ever want—”

  “One more thing,” Berdan interrupted, “even if the idea was getting home, in the stories you can never do it until you’ve taken care of whatever it was you left home to do.”

  “Hmmm. Sack Troy, get the Scarecrow a brain, destroy the One Ring, fix up Dad and Mum—I see!”

  “Sure,” Berdan replied, “it’s a long-standing human tradition: ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’—even if it’s just a fifteen-year-old kid like me.”

  “Or a woman or a little girl—it all makes sense now! You aren’t so different from us, after all! Ku sro Eppdonnad’n Ouongadh, Berdan, a dissertation lurks here, somewhere, and a tenured professorship for me at the University of Mathas! Imagine: Sodde Lydfe is crawling with humans—I beg your pardon, the usage was figurative—and I come all this distance, to a planet alien to both of us, just to learn a vital fact about your species, Berdan, which—”

  “One more thing—”

  “What? You said ‘one more thing’ before, Berdan.”

  “Sorry, Pemot, this is one more one-more-thing. Please don’t call me Berdan.”

  “Eh?”

  “You heard me…” He raised a clenched fist. “I won’t be related to a crook, not anymore. And I don’t want to hear the name Berdan Geanar ever again.

  “From this moment on, just like my father before me, I’m calling myself MacDougall Bear.”

  Chapter XI: The Gossamer Bomber

  “Very well, then.” Pemot pushed the curtain aside as he and his human companion reentered the hut. “I recognize when I’ve been vanquished, if not, perhaps, by superior logic, then at least by arguments which satisfy my sense of the fitness of things. That being so, we’re obliged to take stock, make plans concerning what we—”

  “We?” the boy asked the lamviin. “What’s all this ‘we’ stuff, all of a sudden?”

  “And why not, friend Ber—Mac, er, Bear? Am I not also a member, albeit a new one, of the civilization which is threatened by the crime you seek to set to rights? Don’t I also have, if not an obligation, then a right to act toward the same end?”

  The boy took his place on the floor, this time in a reclining position. Pemot settled onto a large air cushion, substituting for a traditional lamviin sand bed.

  “Well, I—”

  Pemot threw all three hands in the air. “Of course I do! How can you even question it? It’s indubitable that you require my assistance. Whilst I, xenopraxeologist that I am, shall learn as much from you, I assure you, as you’ll ever learn from me. Besides, as Uncle Mav’s fond of saying, ‘the game’s afoot!’—you know, I’ve always wondered what that means.”

  McDougall Bear yawned. “But what about your taflakological studies?”

  “Nearing completion in the first place,” the lamviin answered, familiar enough with a human yawn that his own breathing spiracles dilated, “and in the second, given the task which lies before us, by no means to be discontinued in the foreseeable future.”

  The boy blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Why, my dear fellow, just consider our present soddegraphic, er, geographic position.”

  “Planetographic.”

  “As you will—here upon moss-covered Majesty, human and other colonists live in the one place they can, the place we’re likeliest to find your gran—er, the criminal we seek, where shuttles and Broaches debark at both poles.”

  “Okay.” Mac yawned again. “I follow you so far.”

  “You do? I see, another figure of speech.
Very well, we, worse fortune, don’t happen to be at either of those poles, but at the lowest possible latitude, where the moss is deepest, and even the natives dwell on what one might term artificial islands.”

  “Seems simple enough.”

  “Yes, so it may, but correcting the situation won’t be quite as simple. Now consider: two nonnative populations have made their separate ways to this planet, and now begin to mingle to a certain degree, the First Wave, pre-Confederate colonists—”

  “Yeah—” This time Mac’s yawn was prolonged and furious. “I’d heard about them.”

  “How fortuitous—I do wish you’d stop that, it’s quite contagious, you know—and, of course, the much more recent Confederate rediscovery contingent.”

  Blinking back tears of fatigue, Mac sat up in his earlier, cross-legged position. “Okay, but what does this have to do with us?”

  “Well, the First Wave colonists’ primitive surface transport, still in use, consists of ‘crawlers’ with huge balloon tires, powered by work gangs at keel-length cranks.”

  “The way I heard it”—the boy chuckled—“the First Wave colonists were all cranks.”

  “Your comedic successes with the taflak have gone to your head, my boy. Where was I? Whereas more modern Confederate hovercraft work quite well on this planet, too.”

  “That’s nice. The point?”

  “Am I putting you to sleep? The point, my endoskeletonous young friend, one even I hesitate to put forward, is that before we can avail ourselves of any such transportation, we must first contact either the old colonists or the new. And we possess no means of accomplishing that except walking, Shanks’ watun, to the poles.”