Brightsuit MacBear

by L. Neil Smith

  “You know, I realize we both took the community joke like real sports and all, but it’s nice of Middle C,” the boy commented to Pemot, “to come see us off this way.”

  The lamviin’s fur crinkled, the equivalent, Mac had begun to learn, of a chuckle. “On the contrary, my young conclusion-jumping friend, the fellow intends to accompany us on our trek. And let me tell you, I, for one, am most grateful.”

  More pleased than surprised, Mac peered from the lamviin to the taflak and back again. “Oh yeah? How come?”

  “You know, MacBear, I seem to be learning a different dialect of English from you than my professors thought to expose me to in Mexico City. His brother—I suppose it must be the closest equivalent, after all—let’s call him B-flat and utter the name with reverence, is dead, most cruelly incinerated while attempting to rescue his, Middle C’s, that is, lifemate and, er, children.”

  With a grim expression on his face, the boy nodded. The moral debt being piled up to his grandfather’s account was beginning to look unmanageable to a young man who believed he was obliged, one way or another, name change or not, to pay it. Now add another handful of lives. What Mac wanted to do, all of a sudden, was cry.

  Instead, he spoke. “And he wants to go with us and get whoever’s responsible for this—this—”

  “It’s most interesting”—Pemot blinked—“how universal such a sentiment turns out to be. I wonder whether revenge, instead of being the moral error so many claim it to be, actually possesses some evolutionary important survival value.”

  As Mac was growing accustomed to seeing him do, the lamviin plunged a hand into a pocket, extracted his triangular notebook, jotted down a few symbols, and replaced it.

  Pemot went on. “In any event, you’re quite correct: while his people repair the fire and other damage—for which, generously, considering how primitive they’re supposed to be, they don’t hold us responsible—Middle C, here, will journey with us, wherever, as he so charmingly puts it, our search for justice takes us.”

  Buried, Mac thought, but not too deep, in a bundle on the lamviin’s sand-sled, was their portable “justice detector”: the simple radio receiver Pemot had built, filtered, and shielded now against accidental emissions, and equipped with a directional loop antenna. They’d strike out for the north pole, they’d decided, hoping to run into a First Wave crawler or a Second Wave hoverbuggy which might save them part of the otherwise epic journey. But, along the way, they’d attempt to triangulate on the enemy’s amplitude-modulated signals.

  “Suits me,” Mac answered, his terseness hiding his feelings. “The more the merrier.”

  Without another thought about the risks involved, he stepped off onto the moss. And onto a road, in a figurative sense, which would take him halfway around the planet.

  “Onto” turned out to be the right word, after all. Mac’s moss-shoes performed even better than he’d expected, although, like the snowshoes they resembled, they were tiring to use at first. They made his ankles and the inside muscles of his legs sore for several days but did their job of distributing his weight over a far greater area, allowing him to stride along right beside his six-footed, eighteen-toed lamviin friend, instead of sinking into the sea.

  If Pemot held back for the boy, he never said so.

  Of course they both understood—and appreciated—that Middle C was crawling along on his figurative hands and knees, compared to his normal rate of travel.

  Early the first day, Middle C advised them both, through Pemot, that they’d be encountering far less dangerous wildlife than might otherwise be the case, just because three of them were traveling together, rather than one or two. The native was too polite, Pemot told Mac, to mention that two of the three were so clumsy on the moss they scared everything away within several square miles.

  “Although, given a chance,” the lamviin wondered aloud to his human friend, “how well would Middle C do in the Neth, the great central desert of my native Foddu?”

  Nevertheless, Middle C scouted ahead, rolling back to his companions when he was certain the territory his friends were about to encounter was safe. Mac thought the taflak might have done that, even in the Majestan equivalent of a city park, just because it must have been boring for him to travel at so slow a march. And, safe or not, he and Pemot kept their own prudent guard up, as well.

  As they walked along, and as Mac’s legs strengthened, the boy took turns pulling the sand-sled. He practiced whenever he could with the massive Borchert & Graham, adding muscle to his arms—both of them—as well as his legs. Practice was easy and cheap, since, as Pemot showed him, the fusion-powered pistol’s fuel was water (once given a full charge from cannisters on the belt, it was much more spectacular in action than it had been against the airplane) and its laser—much better than the crude mechanical sights intended as an emergency backup—told him when he’d hit his target without requiring a shot. After a while, at Pemot’s insistence, Middle C told Mac when and where it was safe to do some real shooting. Mac discharged a few plasma bursts at broken limbs and moldy outgrowths to make sure both he and his pistol functioned.

  Pemot himself wouldn’t shoot, since his supply of slug-and-chemical ammunition was limited.

  From time to time they stopped to rest while Pemot assembled his crude radio gear, turned the loop antenna this way and that, and listened for a signal. Unlike any ’com enthusiast Mac had ever seen before, Pemot wore the earphones just above his knees—or elbows, the two joints being much the same among the lamviin—where his species’ ears were to be found. They didn’t hear the voices again, but on three occasions, Pemot detected what he called a “carrier wave” and made notations on a triangle-gridded map of Majesty.

  Days passed, during which nothing else worth noting seemed to happen, and Mac, almost forgetting why they’d started traveling across Majesty in the first place, grew weary of the sameness of the blue sky above and the green Sea of Leaves below—gray and black respectively when it happened to be raining, which was often. The horizon was as flat as that of any ocean, and as featureless. He began to think a person could go insane if he were exposed to enough of this emptiness.

  Another thing bothering Mac, although he’d never have admitted it to Pemot, was that the cerebrocortical implant he’d grown up using all his life was as good as dead. While it contained plenty of information—not only about Majesty (most of it incorrect, he’d discovered, or not detailed enough to be useful), but everything else he’d ever recorded and hadn’t afterward erased—he hadn’t laid in a stock of movies, books, or music suitable for a long, wearisome trip. Not much of what he did have was entertaining or even interesting. No object he could see around him, not even the lamviin’s hoard of technology (having come from a far less sophisticated culture), would respond to the device. No information channels operated on Majesty to be received.

  Squaring his shoulders, he told himself to be a man. This was just like camping out. Like doing without indoor plumbing (which happened to be the case, although one’s smartsuit took care of such things when it worked right). Maybe he could program his implant to teach him the languages of his new friends. Maybe he could learn a new word of his own language every day, from its internal dictionary. Maybe he could memorize the cube roots through four figures. In any event, he’d either get used to it or put up with it until it was over.

  He spent a good deal of time wishing it was over.

  Every day, Middle C would wheel ahead out of sight on one of his scouting missions and return with some unlikely-looking wild animal which he’d killed for them to eat. Mac admired the taflak’s prowess with the spear thrower and itched to try it out himself, but was too shy to ask. Pemot would prepare the game—anything from slithery nonsapient relatives of the taflak to gigantic insectoids (of which the can-can had been a variety) to Earth birds and small mammals which had found a toehold in the worldwide vegetation—on a metallic-foil fire-resistant section of the surface of his sled.

  In the beginning, M
ac was reluctant to try the local fare. He didn’t enjoy the benefits of allergy treatments such as Pemot had endured. The lamviin assured him his smartsuit, assuming it remained functional, by monitoring his processes and adjusting them, could give him the same protection. When it became necessary to eat—the lamviin’s Sodde Lydfan supplies were running low, he hated to deprive his friend of them and had no reason at all to assume they were any safer than the local food—Mac nibbled small amounts of whatever Middle C brought back, and watched himself. As a consequence, he suffered nothing worse than several serious flare-ups of hypochondria.

  The struggle to survive—for the most part against utter boredom—tested every resource within the boy who’d no longer call himself Berdan Geanar, though he’d strengthened his resolve by rejecting the name he’d grown up with, the name his traitorous grandfather had imposed on him, and had adopted the same name which his father, under similar circumstances, had. Having nothing else to do as he walked along, whenever he and Pemot weren’t talking, he thought about it.

  A lot.

  At night, it often rained.

  Tropical planet or not, Majesty wasn’t always a warm and steamy place. It never seemed so to the lamviin, hardy as he was. His species had evolved on a desert planet where a cold snap brought the temperature down to 130 degrees in the shade—and where shade was seldom to be found. Only his smartsuit made life bearable on what was to him an arctic planet. Middle C didn’t appear to be bothered by the weather and often hunted at night, leaving the other two alone.

  On one cold and miserable night in particular, when they were huddled together for warmth under a plastic shelter half and couldn’t sleep, the Sodde Lydfan scientist, worse off but too proud to admit it, attempted to amuse the human boy by telling him something of what he’d learned among the planet’s natives.

  Middle C had just left to go hunting.

  “…and so the taflak believe something more than bedrock lies at the bottom of the sea.”

  “Oh yeah.” Mac began to yawn—and broke it off to shiver. “Like what?”

  “Well,” Pemot replied, “stories seem to vary from village to village, as folktales have a way of doing, but the gist is always of an ancient culture, one which possessed great magical powers of healing, of locomotion, of flight, perhaps of mass-production (judging by legends of abundance in the Elder Days) but which, as always seems to be the case with the mythology of sapient beings, denied, defied, or defiled the gods and afterward paid the price—extinction. Everything they’d built was swallowed up in the Sea of Leaves.”

  Mac yawned again, beginning to feel sleepy. One advantage of rooming with a desert-planet sapient: it was as good as carrying central heating with you.

  “Hey, pretty neat. Sort of an Atlantis with runaway landscaping instead of ocean water. Do you think any of these legends is worth believing in, Pemot?”

  “My dear boy, as I just implied, every race of beings which attains sentience seems, at times, to regret the attainment enough to make up stories like this.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Furthermore, how could they know, either about the past or what lies below? They possess no written language—”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And no Majestan native—nor colonist of either wave, for that matter—has ever seen to the bottom of the planet’s biomass, for the obvious reason of its depths and dangers and because of the leaves’ high metallic content, which, while it supplies many necessities of the taflak and constitutes a source of profitable exports for our people, prevents radar and other such penetration.”

  Mac was silent.

  “Aren’t you,” Pemot inquired, “going to say ‘yeah but’ again? I’d gotten rather used to it.”

  Still he received no reply.

  Pemot sighed and began wondering why he was having so much trouble sleeping.

  He never finished the thought.

  When Middle C, having somewhat different physiological requirements and feeling relaxed and fit from the exercise, returned with the rising sun and fresh-killed game, he found his odd companions curled up together sound asleep.

  Snoring in seven-part harmony.

  Chapter XIII: The Crankapillar

  It came from the edge of the world.

  When they first saw the thing, far away on the hazy green horizon, it resembled, more than anything, a can-can on wheels. At least fifty pairs of fat, oversized, underinflated wheels were rolling, rim to rim, linked by flexible couplings. The thing slithered toward them, as sinuous as one of Middle C’s tentacles.

  That entity, straining to the uttermost tip of his supporting appendage—the equivalent of standing on his toes—became agitated and at first didn’t seem to hear the frantic questions Pemot was asking him. At last he relaxed—although Mac noticed his grip on his spear thrower had tightened, and he’d transferred his ammunition to his other tentacle—stood down, and spoke to the lamviin.

  Pemot blinked. “I was afraid of this, although I’d half hoped it would occur as well, a stroke of some sort of luck, although only time will tell whether it’s good or evil.”

  Mac had been standing on tiptoe, one hand resting on the handle of his Borchert & Graham. “What is it?”

  Pemot rummaged through the contents of his sand-sled, gave his usual exclamation, and pulled out a long, glass-ended metal cylinder which resembled a telescope only until he pulled the front half away from the back, swinging it outward and around until he held a pair of parallel tubes, connected by a sturdy metal bracket. It was a pair of folding binoculars, Sodde Lydfan style, designed for a creature whose eyes (any two out of three) were placed more than a foot apart.

  He peered toward the horizon. “It’s an artifact, a vehicle of which I’d heard, and which its First Wave colonial users term a ‘crankapillar.’ Our tentacular comrade’s excited because it’s violated tribal boundaries which have been tacitly agreed to for generations.”

  Mac keyed his implant, reran Middle C’s staccato whistling, and was able to make out the names of several unsavory species of Majestan animals, among them, rats. “Okay, then”—he addressed both his companions, wishing he had one of the wrist synthesizers gorillas and chimpanzees used so he could speak to the taflak without help—“what do we do now?”

  Middle C must have been paying attention to the conversations between Pemot and Mac, for he didn’t wait for the lamviin to translate but launched into speech.

  Pemot blinked, his fur in a whorled, spiky arrangement Mac believed indicated worried tension. He handed the binoculars to Mac, who examined the distance between them with skepticism, then turned them on their side and used one tube as a telescope.

  “In the first place,” Pemot replied, supplementing what Middle C had told him with information of his own, “the situation’s rather more complicated than one might suspect.”

  “I say,” Mac replied, imitating Pemot’s accent, “that’s simply too marvelously splendiferous to hear, old boy. Would you mind awfully telling me why?”

  Pemot gave him an odd look. The lamviin now had his triangular notebook out, opened to the page with the gridded radio map. “Because this is it!”

  “What?”

  “There are, as you know, two signal sources for the amplitude-modulated broadcasts. This is the location where my lines cross for the stronger of the two. The transmitter’s somewhere within a few square miles of the spot we’re standing upon this minute!”

  “Great! And what does Middle C have to say about all this?”

  “It would appear, he says, that in finding them we’ve allowed them to find us. They’ll be a long time getting here—if here is where they’re headed. They can’t be going much over five miles per hour, and they’re a long way away.”

  Mac resisted an urge to crouch down in the leaves. “Do you think they can see us?”

  “My friend, these people left your home planet only sixty years ago, in 223 A.L.—1999 by the old reckoning—and, although they’ve had their cultural ups
and downs in the subjective millennia which have passed, for them, since then”—he indicated the instrument in the boy’s hands—“I believe they’re up to the simple optical technology which binoculars and telescopes require.”

  It was confusing, Mac thought, even when you understood it. Among other problems, the starship which first brought humans to Majesty had been blown backward a long way in time. Thus, although it seemed paradoxical, the planet was pioneered thousands of years before the very people who did it ever left the Earth. Meanwhile, for the civilization they’d fled, only sixty years or so went by.

  He felt a fuzzy tentacle on the back of his hand and passed the lamviin binoculars over to Middle C, who’d become curious about them. The taflak warrior placed both tubes before his single large eye, held them first further away, then closer, made a gesture the boy was certain was a shrug, and passed them back.

  Mac laughed. “Did anyone ever tell you, Professor Pemot, that you can be an awful pain sometimes?”

  “Why, no,” the lamviin replied, “they haven’t. Why in the world would they want to do that?”

  Through the glass, Mac peered again at the crankapillar, which seemed to have come no closer, and remembered reading about the pioneer women, two centuries earlier, living in sod houses on the western plains of North America, who knew in the morning that by nightfall they’d have company for dinner. He tried not to remember that because of the bleak, flat emptiness of the horizon all around them and of the lives they lived, they sometimes killed themselves.

  “Okay, so they can see us. You still haven’t answered my question: what do we do?”

  “Wheeall seet oursells, small Ersseean, wheeall rheelass, wheeall dheeseed!”

  Mac swiveled.

  He and Pemot both stared at the taflak hunter, who, despite his lack of a face to wear expressions on, somehow managed to look pleased with himself anyway.

  Mac muttered, “Well I’ll be disintegrated,” and obeyed, sitting on Pemot’s sand-sled.

  “I was going to suggest,” the lamviin scientist offered, following the boy’s example to the degree his anatomy would permit, “that some immediate deliberation’s called for, and that we begin—with some kood, or tea in your case—by being very careful.”