Brightsuit MacBear

by L. Neil Smith

  In narrow tunnels miles long, billions, trillions, quadrillions of near-microscopic “smart” fibers, inspired by the cilia which protozoan animals use to get around or by the similar hairlike structures which line and clean the human respiratory system, had been engineered at the molecular level to ripple like microscopic fingers, propelling their living cargo throughout the starship’s many levels. The system would accelerate its passengers away, Berdan knew, whisking them faster than the speed of sound, taking them wherever their implants had requested, long before they could attempt to take a breath, become aware of the stifling darkness, or feel a moment of claustrophobia.

  Unaffected by this everyday magic, Berdan passed it by, wanting some time, on the way home, to think. And to be angry. Prompt obedience had never come easy to Berdan, any more (if his grandfather was to be believed) than to his father MacDougall. Bad blood, the old man was fond of saying, an expression on his face which Mr. Meep reserved for rotten eggs or spoiled milk, bad blood had killed MacDougall, and it would no doubt someday kill Berdan.

  Let it, Berdan thought, right now, he didn’t give a—

  “Chickensquat!”

  Berdan’s unhappy ruminations were interrupted by a rude word he’d heard many times before. He looked up from the yellow, rubbery sidewalk on which he’d kept his eyes as he made his way home, and was surprised. His absentminded footsteps had brought him further than he’d intended, past three transport patches, almost home the hard way, to the center of Deejay Thorens Park. Far across its cultivated lawns, a brass band played from a whitewashed gazebo.

  Unlike the people of many previous civilizations, the beings of the Confederacy tended to honor scientists, inventors, and philosophers, rather than soldiers or politicians, erecting statues, naming parks and streets and starships after them, preferring to single out those who were still alive to enjoy the tribute. Some exceptions disproved the rule: two levels above this, another park had been given the same name the starship itself bore, Thomas Alva Edison.

  But this was Thorens Park, and, sure enough, right at the feet of its central feature, a life-sized statue of the galaxy’s greatest (and most beautiful) physicist, the woman who’d discovered the principle which drove this vessel between the stars, sat its other central feature, a rumpled study in gray and black, just as he always seemed to be, on a violet-colored park bench.

  Old Captain Forsyth. Rumors which had almost grown into legends claimed the old fellow had once been a fearsome warrior of great accomplishment. Now he was in his usual place, silent and immovable as the statue itself, reading an old-fashioned hard-copy newspaper. Even from where he stood, Berdan could read headlines about the museum theft and the new planet, Majesty. He’d often wondered whether the ancient chimpanzee ever went home, or whether he even had a home.

  “Slimy loops of DNA!

  “Spell ’em out—whaddo they say?

  “What’s in genes won’t go away!

  “Chickensquat—the family way!”

  But, for the moment, Berdan had more immediate problems. Before him, standing in his way and blocking it, he saw a trio of all too familiar-looking faces.

  Berdan sighed to himself. He knew what was coming next. What always came next. It made his heart pound in his chest like a hollow drum. He swallowed—so they wouldn’t notice how dry his throat had become—and assumed a fed up, weary expression which was affectation only in part. No one knew better than Berdan Geanar how it was possible to be bored and terrified at the same time.

  He spoke first. “Okay, jerks, what do you want now?”

  “Hey, whaddya know, you guys!” replied one of the three, speaking to his cronies and ignoring Berdan. “Chickensquat here answers to his chickensquat name!”

  The particular jerk in question was Olly Kehlson, about the same age as Berdan. Kehlson displayed a kind of belligerent stupidity which bothered Berdan worse than anything else about him, as if he were proud of chanting idiotic doggerel. He and the pair with him, Berdan thought, weren’t your ordinary textbook bullies. Olly was a stringbean of a kid, with bleached-looking skin (what showed between his thousands of freckles), curly orange hair sticking out clownlike over his ears, and bulging blue eyes which watered in “outdoor” light.

  Somewhere, in somebody’s battered old attic trunk or a secondhand store, he’d discovered a pair of celluloid-rimmed spectacles, useless in a time and place where correcting poor eyesight was a surgical procedure. He’d pushed the lenses out, wearing the empty, ugly frames perched down at the pointed end of his skinny nose, where he believed—and never hesitated to assert—they made him look “inelleckshual.” Berdan thought they made him look even dumber than he was.

  In fact, Olly’s nickname, wherever he happened to go, was “Geeky.” Everybody called him that. He seemed, for some strange reason of his own, to accept it.

  The pair either side of Geeky shook with theatrical laughter and began chanting “Chickensquat! Chickensquat!” in a way which kept Berdan from answering, just as they intended, even if he’d thought of something clever to say. He gave up, shrugged, and stepped forward, intending to pass between them and be on his way.

  “Hey, Chickensquat!” Someone grabbed Berdan by the arm.

  The complaint—and the grab—came from Kenjon “Crazy” Zovich, in some ways the worst of the three. He was nicknamed (although no one Berdan knew had ever dared say it to his face) not just for his nasty sense of humor, but because he possessed a violent, unpredictable temper (or it possessed him) when other people didn’t think his jokes were funny or tried to play jokes on him.

  “Hey, Chickensquat, you oughta know by now,” Zovich warned him, holding on to Berdan’s arm, “we ain’t gonna let you off that easy, Chicken-chicken-squat-squat!”

  He danced in place around Berdan, turning him as he went.

  “We ain’t even close to through with you!”

  Berdan seized the offending hand by the fingertips and peeled it off his arm, giving the boy a gentle but definite shove, out of his path. He tried to walk on.

  “Hey!” Zovich shouted at no one and everyone.

  “You saw it! He nishiated force against me!”

  The proper word, of course, was “initiated,” and the charge false—stupid, in fact, since Zovich had grabbed Berdan first. However, Berdan realized with a renewal both of weariness and fear, logic wouldn’t stop trouble from coming now.

  “Youbetcha, Kenjon!” The third boy, Stoney Edders, grinned wide with conspiratorial glee, and Berdan realized the whole thing was a put-up job. This was where they’d been headed all along.

  “We saw it! He nishiated force!”

  Edders’ hand dropped to the faceted pommel of the broad-bladed dagger he was wearing. At the same time, Zovich made a gesture, cocking his thumb, pointing his extended index finger at Berdan’s head. He dropped the thumb with a flourish of imaginary recoil while making a swishing noise through clenched teeth. It was the sound they’d all made when they were younger, running, hiding, playing interplanetary explorer, a sound they’d heard in every telecom adventure they’d ever watched, the sound of a fusion-powered plasma pistol going off.

  Berdan spent a lot of his life dreading moments like this—he’d had to live through a good many—and not just because his grandfather never let him carry a pistol of his own, or even a dagger, to defend himself. Maybe in this instance it was just as well.

  Grandfather said it was wrong to inflict injury or take a life for any reason. Berdan thought he agreed: if a Golden Rule applied in the Confederacy (at least aboard Tom Edison Maru), it was that nobody had a right to start a fight (though sometimes it seemed to Berdan the one way to prevent a fight was to be ready to finish it, regardless of who started it). If that idea, that it was wrong to start a fight, and his grandfather’s, that it was always wrong to kill or injure, weren’t precise equivalents, Berdan hadn’t managed to sort them out yet.

  It bothered him from time to time—times like this in particular—how it seemed safe for those
who wouldn’t obey grandfather’s dictum to threaten those who did.

  As if they were one being, Geeky Kehlson, Crazy Zovich, and Stoney Edders took a step forward, menacing Berdan.

  “Three on one, boys?”

  The voice had come from nowhere. Berdan glanced aside and couldn’t have been more surprised if the statue of Deejay Thorens had spoken. The ancient, immovable Captain Forsyth was on his feet, yards from the bench he’d always seemed rooted to. How he’d accomplished this without attracting attention just deepened the mystery which hung about him like the cloak he now swept off his hip, exposing an enormous old-fashioned projectile pistol belted around his waist.

  “You wanna play grown-up games,” Forsyth continued in the stunned absence of any reaction from the four boys, “you better be ready to pay grown-up prices.”

  “Ah…”

  A nervous Geeky Kehlson glanced from side to side at his companions who’d each taken a step backward. He imitated them, but not before they’d taken yet another. As they all took a third step, they turned and seemed to vanish from the park.

  It was, it seemed to Berdan, a day for miracles. He opened his mouth to speak, to thank the old chimpanzee for his help, but Forsyth held up a palm and shook his head, letting the cape he wore drop back over the handle of his pistol.

  “Get yourself some hardware, son. Somebody like me mightn’t always be around.”

  Forsyth turned. Transformed once again (a final miracle for the day, not quite as wonderful as the previous two) into the fragile, elderly being he’d always seemed before, he hobbled back to his bench, picked up his paper, and sat down.

  Still wordless, Berdan watched Forsyth for a moment. Breathing deep, he continued along the sidewalk and out of the park. He was careful, this time, to watch for anybody who might be waiting, out of the old warrior’s sight, to get even. Pondering the chimpanzee’s practical-sounding advice—as opposed to the philosophy his grandfather forced him to follow—he made his way, more rapidly than before (and with more confusion), toward the nearest transport patch.

  He walked straight into its tingling embrace.

  And disappeared.

  Chapter III: The Dead Past

  Berdan emerged, before he was aware of having traveled a quarter mile, from the bull’s-eye patch nearest the home he shared with his grandfather, Dalmeon Geanar.

  Although they’d lived together for as long as Berdan could remember since the death of the boy’s parents, Erissa and MacDougall Bear, in what Geanar always referred to as “a scientific accident,” for reasons which seemed to perplex them both at times, the old man and the boy had never gotten along.

  Geanar himself almost never left their apartment on the second floor of the modest (some might have said shabby) building across the corner from the transport patch. He was in perfect, vigorous health for his apparent age; but another thing the boy’s grandfather didn’t believe in was medical rejuvenation which could have made him look and feel like a young man, claiming it was the duty of all individuals, once they got old, to die and get out of the way for the next generation. Meanwhile, he preferred to order what he needed on the telecom.

  Compared to most individuals they knew, they were poor, living on the proceeds of modest investments, small shares in the many discoveries and growing fortunes of Tom Edison Maru. Yet Berdan’s grandfather had always discouraged him from taking a job, in theory for the sake of his education. A few weeks ago the old man had reversed himself, allowing Berdan to go to work for Mr. Meep.

  Thus Berdan knew he was in serious trouble of some kind—again—when he saw Geanar, a harsh, preoccupied expression on his big face as always, standing downstairs just outside the doorway membrane, hands on his hips, waiting.

  “There you are!”

  For a brief, comforting moment, Berdan entertained a fantasy: he saw himself turn around and merge into the patch again, letting the transport system take him somewhere, anywhere, as long as it wasn’t here. But he knew this would only postpone what was about to happen. He had no place to go and would only have to come back again. Besides, his grandfather had seen him exit the patch, which, of course, was what he’d had in mind, waiting for him in the doorway.

  “Where’ve you been?” Geanar’s grating voice carried across the narrow street, little more than a wide sidewalk in this neighborhood. “You took your sweet time getting here!”

  Berdan glanced around, self-conscious. At this hour not much traffic moved along the street, but one or two passersby had glanced up at the sound of Geanar’s voice. Worse than anything he could think of, Berdan hated to be hollered at in public—it was embarrassing—but he was helpless to do anything about it. He’d tried talking to his grandfather about it, only to be told to mind his own business. At that, he’d been lucky not to have provoked a more violent reaction.

  He hurried across the street, hoping the old man would lower his voice as he came nearer.

  “Berdan Geanar, the next time I send for you, you’d bloody well better not dawdle!”

  The last thing Dalmeon Geanar might have been called was inconspicuous, even when he wasn’t shouting. He was large, with huge hands and a belly to match hanging over his belt, if he’d been wearing a belt. He wasn’t even wearing pants, but instead, affected a loose-fitting caftan. Berdan had never seen him in a smartsuit, everyday fashion of the most practical kind for a people whose activities might take them from a hundred fathoms underwater to the bitter vacuum of outer space; Geanar never went anywhere, and had no need for such a garment. Geanar’s face was broad, red-jowled, rough-complexioned, the enormous nose in its center almost grotesque, blue-mottled, and covered with a network of fine, broken capillaries. His smallish eyes glittered from beneath a thick, untrained hank of white hair which hung over his forehead.

  They weren’t the eyes of a kind man.

  As Berdan approached, his grandfather reached out with astonishing swiftness and seized the boy by one thin shoulder—the old man’s big thumb dug in, painful between the bones—and half-shoved half-dragged his grandson through the apartment building’s door membrane, following on the boy’s heels. They stopped in the hallway. Geanar’s thumb tightened on Berdan’s shoulder.

  “Now what have you to say for yourself?”

  Berdan knew it was a trap. His grandfather wasn’t interested, and anything he had to say would be used against him. But he couldn’t help trying to defend himself. “I—”

  “There’s no excuse!” The old man roared down at him, shaking the helpless boy back and forth until his head hurt, until Berdan could no longer control his jaw and bit his tongue.

  “Your one business is to do what I say, understand me?”

  Berdan said nothing.

  “Answer me! What were you up to?”

  Having eliminated any possible excuse, why did he now demand one? It was illogical. It was also another trap, Berdan recognized, but one he wouldn’t be permitted to avoid, since any alternative was a good deal more painful to contemplate.

  “I got stopped in Deejay Thorens Park…” He was astonished that, this time, his grandfather hadn’t interrupted him. Hoping against long experience that he’d be allowed to finish for once, he rushed on.

  “Geeky Kehlson and Crazy Zovich and Stoney Edders wouldn’t let me—”

  “Thorens Park?”

  Berdan wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Geanar’s complexion grew even redder. His painful grasp tightened even further on the boy’s tender shoulder.

  “What were you doing in Thorens Park? There are a dozen patches between Meep’s greasy spoon and there! You think I went to all the effort of calling so you could waste your time—and mine—loafing with your no-good friends?”

  Only three such patches existed, in fact, and the “effort” in question consisted of thinking about calling him at Mr. Meep’s. But pointing this out wouldn’t make Berdan’s situation any better. (Nor would trying to wriggle loose from Geanar’s grasp; he’d tried it before, and knew the hard way.) Appea
ling to facts and logic never accomplished anything but making the old man madder.

  Inside Berdan, an unbearable mixture of anger, pain, and contempt boiled over. “I wasn’t loafing, and they’re not my friends!”

  Still holding Berdan’s shoulder between a thick forefinger and a thicker thumb, which felt to the boy like titanium clamps, Geanar bent down and peered into his grandson’s face. He wasn’t shouting anymore. He’d fallen silent. His lips were compressed into a short, straight line. His color had faded in an instant from reddish-purple to white. Berdan knew this was going to be a bad one.

  “Defy all precedent and tell your grandfather the truth, you ill-conceived little barbarian.” Geanar’s roar had diminished to a far more terrifying whisper.

  “You’ve been fighting again, haven’t you?”

  It was clear to Berdan that, without any evidence or justice, the old man had just convicted him of what was considered in their household the ultimate crime. Geanar wouldn’t listen if he tried to deny the charge. Fear of the great knob-knuckled backs of Geanar’s huge hands put a quaver in Berdan’s voice. “No, Grandfather, I haven’t been fighting.”

  Although, he conceded to himself, he’d have fought Geeky and the rest in an instant, if—thanks to Captain Forsyth’s sudden interference—he hadn’t avoided it.

  “And now you’re compounding it with lies and backtalk!”

  With a melodramatic gesture of disgust, Geanar thrust the boy away from him. Helpless against the old man’s strength, Berdan slammed backward against the corridor wall and hurt his head again. One of the other tenants, old Mrs. Kropotkin it was, poked her curler-covered head out through the membrane of her own apartment door.

  “Neighbor”—a warning simmered in her voice—“I’m gonna call Security if you—Dalmeon Geanar, don’t you dast glare at me! Just be grateful I don’t handle you myself!”

  Behind the man, she spied Berdan. Her expression brightened, and with it, her tone, “Howdy there, sonny boy! Always remember: illegitimates non carborundum!”