Brightsuit MacBear

by L. Neil Smith

“It seems to me,” Mac whispered, humming through his nose, “that I have heard that song before.”

  Each time the captain repeated one of these phrases, obvious preprogrammed slogans of some kind, Mac noticed how the slaves—and a few of the overseers, perhaps those promoted out of their ranks—flinched, as if the lessons had been applied with liberal doses of the whip or even electric shock.

  Pemot blinked, doing his best to imitate a human nod. The boy noticed the man didn’t offer the lamviin his hand to shake, but he hadn’t offered it to Mac, either. Given local sanitation standards, this arrangement had suited the boy.

  “Pleased to meet you, Captain j’Kaimreks, I’m sure. Now, shall we discuss business?”

  The lamviin pointed a finger forward, toward the naked, malodorous men who’d been cranking the Securitasian machine. At that, they were no doubt fortunate to be without clothing, exposed to wind and sun and rain, since it meant less chance to carry around the miniature zoo each of the overseers, as well as their captain, seemed to have acquired. They sat at rest now, streaming with sweat, their chests heaving. It was clear from the displeased expressions of their overseers this was an unwelcome exception to the normal state of affairs.

  For Mac’s part, he was glad they were all downwind.

  “And,” Pemot added, “I’ve been meaning to ask you who these unlucky individuals might be.”

  Captain j’Kaimreks snorted. “Why, they are merely f-feebs. They are of n-no interest t-to gentle—er, men of your distinction. Their breath and bodies are but a tool of our mind.”

  Mac bent down to the lamviin. “Pemot, I could be wrong about this—I’m pretty concentrated just on not throwing up right now—but have you noticed the same thing I’ve noticed?”

  Looking up at the boy, the lamviin made a thoughtful noise in several of his nostrils, and Mac wondered, not for the first time, whether the smells bothered him, too.

  “Well,” the lamviin replied, “even after all my years on Earth and among human beings, I’d claim no expertise on human physiognomy, but it would appear to me, MacBear, that none of these unfortunate individuals has any hair on his head.”

  Mac nodded. “They’re bald,” the boy stated aloud, his voice rising in volume and pitch as he progressed. “This miserable excuse for a civilization discriminates against bald people! I’ll bet they’re slaves for no better reason than that!”

  “This is not so,” the captain insisted. “S-some of our best f-friends are b-baldies. These are f-f-feebs, spaceboy! Can n-not you see this for yourself?”

  “Excuse the boy, Captain,” Pemot interrupted. “He’s young, and we’re travelers, unaware of all the nuances. What difference exists between baldies and feebs?”

  The captain was almost hysterical. “They are left-handed b-baldies! The dirtiest, most insidious, lazy, no account, untrustworthy, sneaky vermin which ever drew breath! They cannot help it, they are just built that way, and have got to be c-controlled for their own sake! They have no bargain with authority except to expend their lives in service to it.”

  “Astounding!” The lamviin scribbled in his notebook as he spoke. “Having left all of the black, brown, yellow, and red human variants behind on Earth thousands of years ago, these pitiable creatures still suffer a chronic necessity to have someone beneath them at the bottom of the social heap.”

  Mac nodded, “So they found somebody else to pick on.

  “‘Peck’ is the correct word, but you’re right. I’m curious as to how many others—red-haired, green-eyed individuals, those who were too tall or too short, too fat or too thin—they exterminated before they got around to these poor ‘baldies.’”

  “Left-handed baldies,” Mac reminded him, “and probably convicted of excessive bathing.”

  “Indeed,” the Sodde Lydfan xenopraxeologist answered, his tone and fur texture grim. He held one of his arms up. “Personally, I’m middle-handed, myself.”

  “Me, too—” Mac grinned “—and Bohemian.”

  “Indeed.”

  The lamviin addressed the captain. “I fail to understand,” Pemot objected, moral outrage discernible in his voice and in the sharp spikes of his fur, “why any of this inlamviinity is necessary.”

  “That’s ‘inhumanity,’” Mac whispered.

  “Whatever you choose to call it, it’s an unnecessary evil. On my own home planet, Captain j’Kaimreks, until the recent perfection of steam engines, we operated oceangoing vessels which had rotating sails. The invention’s quite ancient. The sails, you see, were geared to a drive shaft connected to propellors.

  “Now, I’ve had occasion to observe many times that there’s more than enough wind out here on the Sea of Leaves to facilitate such a contrivance, so why couldn’t you—”

  Shock written in his widened eyes and in the sudden paleness of his face, the captain held out his hand, palm toward the lamviin in a desperate, defensive gesture. “S-stop, you! We do not want to hear this! We do not want our officers or c-crew to hear this! When your compliance is not required, you will do nothing, do you hear us?

  “Would you come to our world and d-destroy the entire b-basis of our civilization?”

  Chapter XV: The Revolt of the Feebs

  “What?” Mac and Pemot had spoken at the same time.

  “How c-could you b-be so obtuse?” asked the captain. “If we d-did as you suggest, foul alien c-creature, what would our feebs do? There would be no useful emp-p-ployment for the surplusage of them. They would have to be ah-ah-eliminated.”

  He peered down at the lamviin. “Do you call this humane?”

  Mac looked forward, over row upon row of starving, exhausted, sore-covered feebs, and wondered if some fates weren’t in fact worse—and less humane—than death. “Job security,” he muttered.

  “You’re saying—” Pemot ignored Mac and concentrated on the captain. His speech was as deliberate as the boy had ever heard it, slow and distinct. “You’re saying that the foundation on which your entire civilization bases itself is involuntary servitude?”

  “We did not say this.” The captain was a picture of indignant virtue. “On the contrary, extraplanetary indecency, what we have said is that their only reason for being is to do precisely as they are told, whenever they are told.”

  He glanced from side to side to make sure he wasn’t overheard by any of his crew or officers. “Is it not so everywhere?”

  “Not where I come from,” Mac answered, “unless you take my grandfather’s opinions seriously.”

  “Nor, any longer, upon my own native planet,” Pemot added. “Nor was it ever, insofar as careful studies can discern, among the taflak, whose culture I’ve come to know extremely well and with whom I’ve been living for the past several—”

  An expression of utter revulsion swept across the man’s unshaven features. “Taf-what? You mean to say…you mean to look us straight in our face and tell us that you have been living—wallowing—among the snake-eyes? And now, you…you—”

  “Misbegotten monster,” Pemot supplied.

  “Misbegotten monster, now you dirty our deck with your filth-contaminated feet? Why, you miserable, low-living, excremental, belly-crawling, leaf louse-ridden—”

  “My turn,” Mac interrupted. “Slime-sucking scumballs?”

  “Why, I ought to—”

  Pemot turned to his friend. “Well, MacBear, if we’ve accomplished nothing else this morning, at least we’ve managed to provoke him into speaking in the first person singular for the first time.”

  Mac opened his mouth but was interrupted by the now purple-faced Captain j’Kaimreks, who’d taken two slow steps forward and lowered his voice by an octave. “We have got a saying, ugly thing, in Securitas that the only good snake-eyes is a dead snake-eyes. Now, we calculate that this saying applies as well to snake-eyes lovers!”

  For the first time, he pulled his hand from his tunic—and reached for his weapon.

  Mac was faster with the Borchert & Graham.

  This time the plasma
pistol had a full charge. Five million watts, concentrated into a blinding pinpoint of fury, struck the man in the torso, enveloped him briefly in searing blue-white flames, and hurled him backward across the deck where he fell, a smoking wreckage of a human being. Little was left of him from the belt up.

  Meanwhile, Pemot, watching their backs, had drawn and leveled his old-fashioned chemical-powered projectile weapon at the overseer nearest the flamethrower.

  “I’d not advise it, sir.”

  The overseer took one look at the enormous muzzle of the gun—and at the nine-legged monster pointing it at him—and leaped over the rail into the Sea of Leaves.

  The other officers followed his example.

  Weapon still in hand, the Sodde Lydfan strode forward to a crude plank bridge connecting the aftermost section of the idle crankapillar to the next section ahead of it in line. His companion, meanwhile, somewhat surprised by his own actions, had crossed the deck to examine the smoking remains of the late Captain j’Kaimreks, having first put them out with a bucket of water standing beneath the canopy.

  “Some pistol my daddy left me.” As Mac muttered to himself, he wondered why he was unable to feel much of anything else at the moment. At least he didn’t feel sick to his stomach any more. “Hey, Pemot—take a look what I’ve got!”

  When he looked back, the lamviin—who’d lived for a while in the North American west and knew something of its legendary customs—saw, to his horror, that Mac was holding up the captain’s hair as if it were a Comanche trophy.

  “You put that down this minute! I greatly fear what all this violence must be doing to your—”

  “My poor, tender little psyche? But it’s fake, Pemot. It’s made out of dyed moss! And, come to think of it, didn’t you notice? When the captain grabbed for that blunderbuss of his, whatever it was, he did it with his left hand!”

  One set of feet on the plank, Pemot paused. “No, MacBear, as a matter of fact, I hadn’t noticed. However I did notice his decided stutter which, among you human beings, is sometimes thought to be a symptom of suppressed left-handedness. Captain Tiberius j’Kaimreks was a left-handed baldy. In short, a feeb. Now I suggest you come here and let me show you something.”

  The boy crossed a diagonal this time and met his friend at the bridging plank. “Like what?”

  “I beg you to keep your voice down for the moment. I’m not accustomed to examining people as if they were cattle, and this is embarrassing enough as it is.”

  The lamviin assumed what Mac was certain were his most formal lecture-hall intonations. “Observe, first of all, that, despite the racket and destruction, none of the slaves aboard this contraption has so much as turned around to see what happened.”

  Squinting down the line, Mac saw Pemot was correct: not one of the men had moved. “Are they drugged?” he asked.

  “Being human, you’d be a better judge of that than I. But recall: ‘When compliance is not required, you will do nothing.’ That’s exactly what they’re doing. Nothing. Notice also this first one on the right; take a hard look at his scalp.”

  Mac stepped forward and, holding his nose, bent down over the unmoving feeb. He was covered with old scars, bruises, and open wounds from the overseer’s whip, and had an ugly, puckered empty socket where his left eye should have been.

  “Well, I’ll be—his head’s been shaved!”

  “Indeed it has, or chemically depilated, and recently. They won’t wash their slaves, they won’t wash themselves, but they’ll do whatever they must to maintain their illusions. Some feebs, it would appear, are more unequal than others.”

  “I guess so. It’s kind of scary, him sitting there like that, as if we didn’t exist.”

  He addressed the seated figure. “Um, excuse me…”

  Mac’s lame opener produced no visible result. The feeb didn’t seem to be drugged, asleep, or in a trance, but just indifferent. He sat slumped on his bench, facing the crank which had reduced his hands to ground meat, breathing and sweating. His eyes were open, and the look on his face was composed and intelligent.

  Overcoming revulsion, Mac bent further and shook the feeb’s sunburned shoulder.

  Skin peeled away at the boy’s touch.

  The feeb looked up. “You no officer…” The statement almost amounted to a complaint.

  “Meebe you new cap’n? Lost tracka who’s cap’n now. My body is but a tool of your mind.”

  He flinched.

  “I will obey promptly and without question.”

  He flinched again.

  “No!” Mac’s voice was harsh. “I’m not the captain. The captain’s dead. There isn’t any captain, and won’t be, ever again!”

  The feeb assumed a hurt expression, sniffed, and a tear began to form in his one good eye. “No cap’n? Who gonna feed us? Who gonna tell us go an’ stop? You gonna tell us?”

  Once again, he cringed.

  “I have no bargain with authority except to expend my life in its service.”

  “My dear fellow,” Pemot put in. “There’ll be no one to tell you what to do from now on. You’re free, don’t you understand what I’m saying. Free to feed yourself, or starve, or to do anything else within your power that you want to do. You’re free.”

  The feeb didn’t answer, but turned his eye back to the work-polished crank and sat motionless and dejected. Mac noticed, now, in addition to the overseer’s whips and flamethrowers, each car had its own huge, long-handled brake lever.

  “I don’t think you understand.” It was Mac who tried this time, his voice becoming a bit hysterical with the attempt. “Up there in the sky is a great big starship from the Galactic Confederacy. It won’t let Securitas or any other nation-state own your body or tell you what to do, ever again. You’re free—you don’t have to be a slave anymore!”

  “No slave in Securitas,” the feeb protested. “Slavery against law. It is the splendid opportunity of every individual to make of his life a willing gift to authority.”

  He grimaced and fell silent.

  “I do believe,” offered Pemot, “the joy of sudden liberty’s pummeled him into insensibility. After all, recall the accident in the Little Bang universe, the shift backward in time. These people—their ancestors, I mean—have been here on this world for thousands of years. For as long as the rest of human history’s lasted on Earth. The poor fellow’s suffering monumental culture shock.”

  Mac shook his head. “Pemot,” he argued, “something else is going on here. Something worse. You know, when we first saw this machine, I wondered where the steering mechanism was. I just realized it was the captain’s megaphone. This thing’s steered by voice command, answered by differential braking at each of these cars.”

  “Is that somehow relevant,” inquired Pemot, “to the situation we find ourselves in?”

  “Yes. If I’m right about the psychology involved, we won’t be taking any ride to the north pole in this machine. Not unless we want to become feeb drivers.”

  Mac recognized the puzzled expression in Pemot’s fur. Look, you scared off all the spark plugs—the overseers. I shot the steering wheel—Captain j’Kaimreks. And now the motor—this slave—doesn’t seem enthusiastic at all about being allowed to steer himself. He’s a part of the whole machine, Pemot, his existence is justifiable—to him—only insofar as it serves the whole. It’s sickening, but that’s the way it is.”

  He turned back to the feeb. “If nobody tells you what to do, are you just going to sit here in the sun and peel to death?”

  A long pause followed, during which the feeb appeared to be exerting an enormous mental effort. Mac and Pemot waited until his features became normal again.

  “Nah.” The feeb sighed. “Officers don’ come back, feebs hafta ’lect new officers like b’fore. Hurt head. My only reason for being is to do precisely as I am told.”

  He flinched, brightened for a moment and smiled.

  “New officers choose us new cap’n! We go! His authority is metaphysically unquestionable
. My existence is justifiable only insofar as I serve him!”

  A final flinch and he fell silent.

  Mac straightened and turned away, his stomach not behaving well again, regained the quarterdeck aft, and began a slow descent to the ramped boarding plank.

  Following his human friend, Pemot spoke first, his voice subdued and unsteady. “I must say, MacBear, this is a most depressing turn of events. I suppose some social scientist somewhere knows precisely how many times one must repeat a slogan, beginning at what tender age, until it produces a state of voluntary slavery. I daresay even the late Captain j’Kaimreks was, to some extent, a victim of the process.”

  Mac turned. “You’re the only social scientist around here, Pemot. And people worry about physicists!”

  Pemot was horrified at his companion’s accusation but knew enough to control his reaction. “Nonetheless, my friend, some responsibilities exist in the life of a sapient being that no excuse can justify abrogating. It puts me in mind of an old Fodduan saying: ‘Ro gra fins ko vezamoh ytsa mykodsu yn tas gadsru al ys.’”

  Mac looked up from tying on his moss-shoes. “Which means?”

  “Idiomatically, ‘Anyone requiring persuasion to be free doesn’t deserve to be.’”

  The boy stood up. “Oh yeah? Well it reminds me of an old Confederate saying.”

  “Yes?”

  “It sure does: ‘If voting ever threatened to change anything, they’d outlaw it.’”

  “Mmm. Indeed.”

  They’d just reached Pemot’s sand-sled when they saw the screwmaran approaching.

  Chapter XVI: The Screwmaran

  Someone once said “small is beautiful.”

  He was wrong.

  There seemed to be no end, Mac thought, to low-grade technology and labor-intensive wonders out here on the Sea of Leaves. The Antimacassarite screwmaran was swifter than the crankapillar—about seven miles an hour to the Securitasian vessel’s five—and had been somewhat closer to begin with, having approached unobserved while he and Pemot were preoccupied with the late Captain j’Kaimreks.

  The vessel’s name, which his implant supplied along with her nationality, was descriptive. The vehicle resembled the shanks of a pair of stubby, steep-threaded wood screws, counterrotating side by side, connected—to continue the nautical terminology the Securitasians had preferred—at her double bow and stern by what, for want of better words, might have been called a flying forecastle and quarterdeck. She was powered by about the same number of slaves as the Intimidator, not sitting at their backbreaking labors, but marching for eternity around a set of stair steps cut into the angled sides of her threads.