Brightsuit MacBear

by L. Neil Smith

  “Yeess!” agreed Middle C.

  Only a few minutes had elapsed before the Sodde Lydfan had his ceramic incense burner smoking, and, on a miniature titanium camp stove not much bigger than the boy’s fist, a cup of water was beginning to bubble. Mac wondered whether the taflak would try the tea, the kood, or somehow shift for himself.

  The lamviin leaned over, closed his eyes, and inhaled the aromatic vapors of his native planet. “How pleasant. There’s nothing quite like a nice stick of kood, I always say. And, as my Uncle Mav’s often wont to observe,” Pemot explained to Mac, “we’ll begin with the obvious, so nothing of possible significance is overlooked.”

  “Makes sense to me,” replied the boy, removing the cup from the burner and dropping some leaves Pemot had recommended into the scalding water. “Go right ahead.”

  “Very well. Majesty’s a lost human colony, one of several hundreds founded during your people’s disaster-ridden First Wave of emigration from Earth, which through a scientific failure, misplaced its victims in time as well as in space.”

  The lamviin began whistling, repeating what he’d just said for the benefit of Middle C.

  Mac stood up to observe the progress of the crankapillar they were waiting for.

  It didn’t seem to have moved.

  Having heard about this famous “scientific failure” before, both in history lessons and in various fictional adventure programs aboard Tom Edison Maru, he was disinclined to be as serious about it when it came from an alien viewpoint, however scholarly. It was interesting, however, to hear Pemot do the extra talking necessary to explain some of the concepts to a warrior-hunter of a primitive tribe.

  When Pemot had finished this second time, the boy tried whistling a tune of his own. Lost colonies—careless of them, wasn’t it?

  The taflak slapped him on the back. Pleased with the boy himself, Pemot let his fur crinkle with a mixture of professorial annoyance and involuntary amusement.

  “I suppose one could look at it like that. On the other hand, I’m not altogether certain they’d have cared about the outcome, even if they’d somehow known it in advance, As I’m given to understand, MacBear, times were changing on your planet, and the original First Wavers would have done anything at all to leave.”

  Mac glanced at the horizon—the crankapillar seemed to have disappeared—realizing it had only dropped into a slight hollow in the gentle, rolling surface. For a long while it almost seemed they had the Sea of Leaves to themselves once again. He watched the machine emerge from the hollow and continue toward them.

  As the lamviin translated for the benefit of Middle C, Mac frowned. He didn’t consider Earth, a foreign place to him, to be “his” planet in any way, having grown up in the depths of space, but he didn’t want to start an argument about that now. Despite himself, Pemot’s version of this story had its interesting points.

  “Okay, I’ll bite: how do you suppose something like that could have happened?”

  “That I can tell you, albeit without any mathematical detail—how am I going to explain it to our Majestan friend, here? Well, there are, as I’m sure you’re aware, MacBear, many alternative universes coexisting side by side, places where, for lack of a better expression, historical events have occurred differently—where, for example, we lamviin were permitted to fight our final war uninterrupted.”

  “Or where,” Mac suggested, peering at the horizon again for a glimpse of the approaching colonial vehicle, “Napoleon Bonaparte won the Battle of Waterloo.”

  “Quite so, and where, in consequence, the language of the Confederacy—provided it sprang into being at all under those circumstances—is French, rather than English.”

  The lamviin paused here, in an attempt to convey by way of chirps and whistles what he’d been saying to Mac—who could tell Pemot was substituting local references for the events in Earthian and Sodde Lydfan history they’d discussed.

  When he’d finished, he turned back to the boy. “Your physicists and mathematicians, naturally enough, suspected this to be the case for rather a long while before it was experimentally confirmed. You see, the existence of alternative universes constitutes a philosophically necessary resolution to certain bothersome contradictions between General Relativity and the quantum theory. I’ve already gone ahead to explain this point to Middle C.”

  Mac grinned. “Yeah, I’ll just bet you have. Did you tell him we’ve even begun to explore a few of those universes? That’s what Thorens invented the Broach for, after all.”

  “Actually,” the lamviin corrected the boy, “she invented it believing she was producing a faster-than-light starship drive, at the behest of one Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet, a porpoise, who was responsible for the theoretical work.

  “By the way, I believe, if you’ll observe now, that our friends in their absurd machine have made some visible progress. They shouldn’t be too much longer.”

  All three strained for a minute to watch the crankapillar. They settled down again around the sled. Mac had gotten another cup of water to the boil. Out of polite reflex and mild curiosity, he offered his second cup to the taflak, who surprised him by accepting it, placing a number of his tendrils in the liquid—the level began to drop—while leaning into the kood smoke to enjoy that as well.

  Mac shook his head. “Pemot, how come it always seems you know the history of my people better than I do?”

  “Perhaps,” the scientist replied, “because I come to it freshly, like any immigrant. In any case, it was neither Thorens nor P’wheet who bungled the First Wave’s departure. That had been predicated upon the existence of one alternate universe in particular, different from our own, in which the Big Bang, which begins the life of most continua, either never came about—I’ve never been clear about this part—or came off considerably less spectacularly.”

  “I’ve heard of that”—the boy nodded—“the Little Bang universe. And the word, Pemot, is ‘fizzled.’”

  The crankapillar had disappeared again, which all three realized meant it was getting nearer.

  “‘Fizzled,’ then—this language never ceases to amaze me. In any case, ducking through it promised that one might get halfway across a given fraction of his own universe, in effect, in less time and without any bothersome Einsteinian problems about the speed of light or Fitzgerald-Lorenz time-dilation.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  The ripple through Pemot’s fur represented the Sodde Lydfan equivalent of a shrug. “It seems to have been some difficulty with astrogation. They made it into the Little Bang universe, as planned—a bit, I suppose like maneuvering their spaceships through a large transport Broach—but somehow lost their bearings relative to this universe. When they popped back out, they discovered they’d arrived just about anywhere—or anywhen (I find that to be the most fascinating aspect of the tragedy)—except where and when they’d intended.”

  Mac shuddered. Put that way, the story sounded too familiar to his own Broach misadventure for comfort.

  “And Middle C,” he asked the lamviin, “is still following you on all of this?”

  A sudden motion in the corner of one eye caught his attention.

  Middle C jumped up, as well.

  The colonial vehicle, only a few thousand yards away now, had just emerged from behind a billow of leaves and was headed straight for their camp.

  “Why, yes,” Pemot continued, unperturbed. “He is. I’m rather surprised, but he seems to have grasped the necessary concepts without much difficulty at all. I confess I’d considerably more trouble with it myself at the Royal College of Mathas.

  “And now, I believe we’d better make some plans…”

  As he and Pemot watched it drawing nearer, Mac’s original long-distance assessment of the crankapillar proved correct in all but three or four particulars.

  Middle C, by previous arrangement, had long since found someplace to hide under the leaves.

  It was comprised, as he’d guessed, of several independent sets of wheels,
four to a subchassis like the railroad cars of costume dramas. The wheels were large—seven or eight feet in diameter—manufactured from some latexlike secretion of the one plant species on the planet, inflated to the resistance of a firm foam pillow. Each open car was linked to the ones before and behind it, completing a long, semirigid structure which could negotiate any terrain.

  One thing Mac had missed was that the contraption was woven out of wickerwork—also from the Sea of Leaves—with only the load-bearing portions fabricated from metal, a substance rare on Majesty, since it had to be mined at the poles.

  He also observed now the inward-facing benches on each car, each occupied by half a dozen bare-skinned men—something like three hundred, altogether—hunched in rows, staring into one another’s sweaty faces, all the while laboring over a long, loose-linked crank, which he guessed was geared to the fat wheels.

  Mac was seeing his first galley slaves—for that matter, his first slaves of any kind.

  He was smelling them, as well, and wishing he weren’t. First and foremost, more than anything else he noticed about the machine and its occupants, was the malodorous fog of human sweat and excrement which lapped for hundreds of yards all around it, regardless of wind direction. It made the boy—and he wondered if it was affecting his companion the same way—want to throw up.

  Instead, he leaned into Pemot’s kood smoke, his inhalations deep—and grateful.

  Behind each bench, between those who cranked and the soft, oversized wheels, a walkway had been constructed, also of wicker, for an ugly-looking overseer who, with his partner across from him, made sure their car pulled its own weight. They were equipped for the task: plenty of sunburned muscle and short, nasty whips, which they used with frequency and enthusiasm. As they leaned in to encourage the slaves, Mac wondered whether they ever hit each other by accident.

  Projecting outboard between each set of wheels, some kind of long-snouted weapons were under control of the overseers. Mac couldn’t tell what sort of weapons they were, but they were made of precious metal, scorched around the muzzles.

  Only the car at the rear of the assembly was different, having an upswept superstructure—a quarter—or poop-deck—a striped canopy, and a pair of shorter, forward-pointed weapons mounted on swivels at the front edge of the deck, perhaps to discourage mutiny among those who cranked the train along. Mac had expected some complicated arrangement for steering, but was disappointed.

  “Stand where you are!” A voice from the rear car was distorted by a megaphone.

  “You’re under the f-flamers of S.N.R. Intimidator, c-commanded by C-captain Tiberius j’Kaimreks of the N-navy of the G-government-in-Exile of the Securitasian National Republic!”

  Chapter XIV: j’Kaimreks and the Baldies

  “You have our p-permission to c-come aboard!”

  With a horrendous squeaking groan, followed by a leaf-scattering crash, a wicker boarding plank was tipped over the side of the rearmost section of the crankapillar, and fell at Mac and Pemot’s feet, coming close to crushing them both.

  Overhead, a mixed flock of transplanted Earthian scavenger birds and their membranous native Majestan competitors swooped and wheeled in hopes the ugly smell wafting from the crankapillar meant something nice and decomposed to pounce on.

  “In fact, we m-must insist! Come, come, hesitation is the same as insubordination!”

  Pemot muttered something in his own language which sounded insubordinate to Mac, hadn’t hesitated about it, and so, the boy guessed, the relationship didn’t work both ways.

  Shrugging, the boy sat down on the edge of the plank, removed the makeshift moss-shoes from his feet, and, fighting his reflexive reaction to the odors around him, preceded his friend up onto the quarterdeck of the machine.

  The only reason the deck wasn’t dirtier was that it had been woven of open wickerwork. Debris tended to drop through, to the benefit of certain creatures who, like the birds and other things overhead, followed the crankapillar about across the Sea of Leaves. Here and there it had become worn or broken, and mended with some black, gluey substance Mac didn’t want to know any more about.

  They were greeted by the same individual who’d been using the megaphone. His filthy canvas trousers, once white long ago, had been ragged off at the knees. His stiff, high-collared tunic needed cleaning, in particular at the frayed cuffs and where it rubbed against his bearded cheeks. His hair, long and thick, was gathered into several out-thrusting fistfuls and tied with greasy ribbons of conflicting colors. His left hand was shoved into the front of his tunic, as was the business end of a large, wooden-handled weapon of some sort.

  Like his vehicle, he could be smelled at some distance.

  His feet were bare.

  “Now, we will just—” He lowered the megaphone and started again. “We will just relieve you of the s-sidearms, if you please—or if you do not please—it is all the same to us. Your existence is justifiable only insofar as you serve.”

  He stretched out an unwholesome-looking right hand and snapped a dirty-nailed finger.

  “My Captain!” replied an overseer. “Hesitation is the same as insubordination!”

  To j’Kaimreks’ left, the man turned one of the swivel-weapons around and trained it on the boy and the lamviin. A small blue flame flickered near its sooty muzzle, and a hose led from the breech of the thing to a large drum a few feet away.

  Even above the myriad of other noxious odors with which the crankapillar seemed to ooze, this martial-looking arrangement reeked of ill-refined and sulfurous kerosene.

  Each time the captain or one of his overseers made too sudden a movement, hordes of tiny creatures leaped from their clothing, skittering across the deck for a crack to hide in. The overseers’ uniforms were much the same as the captain’s, threadbare, bottle-green, and dirty, although it appeared seniority had given the captain the opportunity to accrue a richer, thicker, more elite layer of filth.

  For a long, terrible moment, Mac was certain his queasy stomach would embarrass him.

  “The sidearm,” repeated the captain. “Your existence is justifiable only insofar as—”

  Mac gulped bile, blinked back tears of nausea, and answered between gritted teeth. “I don’t think so.”

  “What?” The man was wide-eyed with astonishment. “Have we not explained to you that you must obey promptly and without question?”

  “Yeah. So I explained to you that I don’t think so. In the Galactic Confederacy, insubordination is one of our most popular leisure activities. These flamethrowers of yours are real impressive in their own small way, but they’d make a tempting target for our starship’s strategic particle beam weapons.” He pointed a thumb upward toward the sky, where Tom Edison Maru might still be orbiting, invisible at present, but a brilliant artificial star from dusk to dawn.

  “Infrared sighting instruments, you know, and all we have to do is think about wanting them.”

  This, of course, was a lie on which Pemot and the boy had agreed while waiting for the crankapillar. Yet, if the unwashed, unshaven, and undeodoranted Captain j’Kaimreks knew anything at all about the Confederacy, he’d believe it.

  “Besides—” Having practiced enough to gain some confidence with the weapon, Mac patted the handle of the Borchert & Graham five megawatt plasma pistol hanging low along his right thigh. “Before I burned to death, I’d make sure I had company. There’s enough power here to reduce this crankapillar of yours, and ten more like it, to a fine white ash. Don’t hurt us, we don’t hurt you. Do we understand each other, Captain?”

  The man with the megaphone looked up at the sky, as if for some visible portent of the Tom Edison Maru. He closed his eyes and shuddered, did a turnabout, and grinned, exposing a mouthful of blackened gaps where several of his teeth should have been. Mac had never seen a man with missing teeth before, and for some peculiar reason had to fight his rebellious stomach again.

  “Of course we d-do, spaceboy. B-be welcome aboard our humble conveyance. I will have
a stool unf-folded if you will honor it with your esteemed fundament. What is that object you have got with you. Is it some kind of mutated spider?”

  “This is my friend, Epots Dinnomm Pemot, a scientist and a member of the sapient species which calls itself the lamviin, from the Empire of Great Foddu on the planet Sodde Lydfe. We’re anxious to depart the Sea of Leaves, and are looking for transportation to Geislinger at the north pole. We’re willing to pay for it.”

  The captain scowled, slamming his bushy, dandruff-laden eyebrows together. “As we will have you to understand, spaceboy, the Intimidator is a vehicle of war, a Securitasian crankapillar-of-the-line, and not some common trading scow. We are not for hire, no, not for any amount of money…how much do you got?”

  Mac grinned, deciding not to tell the man about the gold coins in his gun belt until he had to.

  “Well, Captain j’Kaimreks, it’s like this: we don’t have any money with us, but we have friends expecting us in Geislinger, who can pay you when we get there—”

  “We offer you,” Pemot interrupted, “some of our valuable scientific instruments as security.”

  “It talks!”

  Astonished, the captain held out his free hand, grubby palm upward, and turned to his overseers. “Look you upon this, my boys! It talks! It bargains with us, offering high-tech barter goods! We would not have believed it if we had not heard it ourselves!”

  From a corner of his eye, Mac recognized the impatient stirring in Pemot’s hair. “See here, Captain…er—”

  “j’Kaimreks,” the man supplied, standing as tall as he could manage and shoving his left hand even deeper into his shabby coat. “Captain T-tiberius j’Kaimreks of the S.N.R. Intimidator of the N-navy of the G-government-in-Exile of the Securitasian National Republic. Our authority is metaphysically unquestionable.”