Brightsuit MacBear

by L. Neil Smith

  Thanks to this reasoning and the information he’d absorbed, Berdan wasn’t surprised to be carried up a long, sloping ramp onto a large raftlike structure, woven from the dried stems and branches of the single species of plant life on the planet. No doubt its invention had been a major milestone in taflak history.

  Atop the woven platform—to Berdan the pattern of its weave resembled some of the checked or shredded cereals he was accustomed to eating for breakfast—from squat beehive-shaped domes of the same material, emerged dozens more of the odd sapients, the taflak equivalent of women, old men, and children, eager, he thought, to see what the hunting party had brought home this time.

  Berdan wasn’t certain he liked being a trophy.

  He was a great deal less happy when, instead of setting him on his feet, now that the security and solidity of the village platform lay beneath them, they paraded him about, pausing at each and every hut so the inhabitants could examine him on their own doorsteps with a giant glassy eye and curious tentacle before his bearers passed on to the next dwelling and the next exhibition. This happened several times before Berdan’s patience was exhausted.

  “Okay, okay! Enough’s enough!”

  This time, he struggled much harder than before, flailing both his arms, jerking at the imprisoning tentacles, kicking his legs. The brochure inside his head had been correct in one respect: the taflak were light of build. Although close to his size, he guessed the largest of them weighed no more than thirty or forty pounds, about the weight of a medium-sized dog. Under different circumstances he’d have been waving them around like laundry on a wash line.

  The implant, however, had understated their strength—more dismaying than surprising to the boy at present—and the fact that, rooted in the tight-woven matting underfoot, the hundreds of slim tendrils sprouting from the ends of their velvety tentacles made them all but immovable when they wanted to be.

  And it appeared, right now, they wanted to be.

  “Let me down, you jerks!”

  The four taflak, who’d carried him to yet another section of the town raft or platform, obliged him this time. The whistling and chirping of their audience rose to an intolerable level. Stopping, they let him go, dropping the squirming boy into a huge fire-hardened clay cauldron of cold water, around the soot-stained base of which small twigs, dried leaves, and many larger branches had been piled.

  While several of the creatures held him in the pot, others formed a spear-bristling ring around it—their spear points directed in, not out—and began to light a fire under it.

  A medium-sized taflak rolled up to his side, passing a broad platter from tentacle to tentacle, which it dumped into the pot. Berdan shivered as he stared down at the chopped up berries and shoots bobbing in the water all around him.

  Somehow, he had a feeling he wasn’t about to take a bath.

  Chapter VIII: Pemot

  Flames crackled.

  The whistling of the natives grew shriller.

  Smoke began rising about the giant cauldron, stinging Berdan’s eyes and making him sneeze and cough, as the taflak holding him in the pot backed away from the fire.

  Maybe they burned easier than humans, thought the boy, his implant offering him no information on the subject. For whatever reason, it appeared they thought their efforts to restrain him were no longer necessary, that he wouldn’t pass over or through the barrier of flame which now surrounded him like a wall. Maybe they’d just never had a dinner impolite enough to get up and walk away.

  Well, if that’s what they think, they’re wrong!

  The circle of spear bearers standing around him showed no inclination to move, one way or another. The choice between frying pan and fire, Berdan thought, was easier to make than he’d ever imagined, and the forks—those pointed spears—weren’t even worth worrying about. Keeping an eye on them nonetheless, and wincing a bit as the fine hair on the backs of his hands began to singe and crisp away, he seized the edge of the pot, put one foot over, and—

  “I say…” These words were followed by a series of whistles, as if the speaker were addressing someone by name.

  “Wouldn’t you agree we’ve all had quite enough amusement at this poor young fellow’s expense?”

  Berdan was angrier than he could ever remember being. Ignoring the voice, even though it spoke perfect English, he hopped over the fire, out of the pot, and began kicking at the burning leaves and branches, stamping on the coals to put the fire out.

  Something touched his shoulder.

  He whirled, teeth gritted, both fists clenched. “Just try it, you—”

  “Epots Dinnomm Pemot,” replied the same voice as before, “late of the sovereign planet Sodde Lydfe, by way of your own green and splendid Earth: taflakologist, itinerant philosopher, observer of the sapient condition, at your service—although, I daresay you thought it more likely to be at your funeral.”

  By now, Berdan didn’t know what he thought. The individual he found standing before him wasn’t one of the primitive—and, it appeared, cannibalistic—taflak, but a nine-limbed lamviin, complete with brand-new smartsuit, canvas shoulder bag, a small pistol strapped to one of its upper legs, and, incredible as it was, a monocle four inches in diameter screwed into one eye.

  All it lacked to complete the outfit of a gentleman jungle adventurer was a pith helmet.

  Berdan had never imagined a being as alien in appearance as one of the lamviin could seem so familiar and welcome to him. Although they were relative newcomers to the Confederacy and a popular subject in the media, he’d met only one other of the species in person, the female sculptor at A. Hamilton Spoonbender’s Museum and Friendly Finance Company. Like her, this one—which might have rescued him, if he hadn’t rescued himself—stood about three and a half feet tall with a carapace shaped in outline like that of a crab.

  An extremely large crab.

  Like crabs, Berdan knew, lamviin wore their skeletons on the outsides of their bodies instead of inside like human beings, porpoises, gorillas, and what-have-you, although, unlike crabs, they wore a thin layer of skin over their exoskeletons.

  The remarkable difference, setting them apart from crabs and every other creature which had evolved on Earth, was that they were trilaterally, instead of bilaterally, symmetrical. Cut a human or a chimp down the centerline (a depressing thought, considering the situation Berdan found himself in now), and each half would be a mirror image of the other, whereas a lamviin would have to be cut into thirds.

  With humans, almost everything was in pairs: two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, and so on. With lamviin, it was trios or triads or whatever they called it: what started out as three stout legs (or arms, with lamviin it was pretty much the same thing) where, crablike, they joined the carapace, wound up as nine smaller appendages by the time they reached the ground, having branched somewhere in the middle, terminating in delicate hands with three opposing fingers.

  Or toes.

  When Berdan’s ancestors had climbed down out of the trees, their next great accomplishment had been getting up off all fours and standing erect. The lamviin feat was walking on just six of their branched limbs, holding the remaining three up in front (“front” being defined as the side on which three limbs were being held up) to use as arms. It didn’t matter which three. They were inclined to swap off now and again. Berdan, always fascinated by extraterrestrials, had read somewhere that showing a habitual preference in this regard was considered to be the lamviin equivalent of bad table manners or sloppy posture.

  Somewhere, some poor little lamviin’s grandfather was hollering about that right now.

  He also knew, beneath the rubbery protection of the smartsuit, which the lamviin (imitating almost every other sapient species in the Confederacy) had adopted, this particular specimen, like all other members of its race, would be covered with coarse, medium-length fur, rather like that of a seal, varying in color from individual to individual, and also from the upper portion of each individual’s body to the
tips of its limbs. All he could see of this one’s fur, above and between the three large, equal-spaced eyes set between the legs just at the rim of the carapace, was a golden toasty color, shading to light brown.

  It was said lamviin displayed emotions through changes in the texture of their fur. If so, Berdan didn’t know how to interpret what this one was feeling. Its fur was straight, flat, and smooth, maybe with a touch of curl at the ends.

  Above its eyes at the top of its body, was a wide, three-jawed mouth of a glossy, hornlike substance not unlike the beak of a squid. Much like a porpoise in this respect, this wasn’t where its voice had come from. Lamviin breathed and spoke through six orifices located, two apiece, at the bases of the legs. Berdan had always wondered—although he was too polite to ask now—whether a lamviin could sing along with itself in six-part harmony.

  The boy opened his mouth to speak, realized he couldn’t think of anything to say, and shut it again.

  “To answer just a few of your unspoken questions,” the lamviin offered, “you aren’t in real peril of your life and never have been, since these hunting johnnies snatched you from the jaws of the can-can. Your possessions are in honest tendrils and will, in due course, be returned to you. You are, at present, in a native village whose name you aren’t equipped to pronounce, situated precisely upon Majesty’s equator. There are an awe-inspiring six metric miles”—here, the lamviin pointed straight down, with a dramatic flourish of one of its fingers—“from where you and I find ourselves standing right now to the bedrock, genuine—if unexplored and tantalizingly unexplorable—surface of the planet.”

  Having nothing to say, Berdan said nothing.

  “Doubtless,” it continued, “you now find yourself speechless, if not at my statistics or with gratitude at my sudden and fortuitous appearance, then certainly in surprise and indignation at this outrage which has been perpetrated upon your person. So was I, when they first did this to me, whereas they—” The traces of curl were gone now from its fur as the lamviin indicated the entire raftlike village around them with all of its inhabitants.

  The image came to Berdan’s mind (not from his implant but from his imagination) of this overcivilized being flailing around, crablike, in the taflak boiling pot, and he had to suppress a snicker. Did lamviin turn red when they were cooked?

  “They all think it’s bloody marvelous, frightening the tourists out of their wits, so they’ll flock back to watch their friends being frightened the next time.”

  “You mean—” Berdan, just becoming aware he was dripping wet, had managed to produce two words. Part of the problem was that all of this was beginning to strike him as funny.

  “Precisely, my dear fellow. It’s their idea of a joke.”

  “Grrr!”

  It hadn’t been a real growl but something halfway between a tooth-chattering shiver and laughter suppressed, not just for the sake of the lamviin’s feelings, but because Berdan was afraid it was the beginning of hysteria.

  “My sentiments”—the lamviin had misunderstood the noise Berdan had made—“exactly.” It sighed.

  “On the other hand, I suppose, these things are culturally relative. Some people are tone-deaf, some are color-blind, and, then again, especially in the view of the taflak, who fancy themselves colossal jokesters, half the universe is humor-numb.”

  “Humor-numb?” Berdan repeated the odd word. If his not-quite-growl were to be counted, it was his fourth so far. “You’re telling me these people think we Confederates don’t have a funnybone?”

  “Funnybone?” It was the same tone Berdan used for “humor-numb.”

  Its fur acquiring a slight spiky texture, which the boy interpreted, correct or not, as a worried look, the lamviin extracted from its pouch a hand-sized object which, although triangular in shape, opened at one corner and had pages which could be leafed through. Berdan suspected it was a language dictionary, something on the order of: English-Lamviin, Lamviin-English, Featuring Over 6000 Handy Phrases, and a Guide to Confederate Weights and Measures.

  “There’s a new one,” the lamviin muttered to itself. “Let me see: ‘funnybone,’ ‘funnybone’…dashed difficult to turn the pages when one’s fingers are stiff with the cold. I wonder if it mightn’t be a cognate to something Latin—ah!”

  It put the phrasebook away.

  “Precisely, my dear fellow, the taflak believe—and of course in my case they’re quite literally correct—that we of the Confederacy lack a humerus.”

  “Well…” Berdan grinned—it was a painful expression under the circumstances—still straining to hold back what he feared might turn out to be insane laughter. As a distraction, he looked around at the taflak who were looking back at him. He was beginning to notice some individual variations among them now, differences in size, plumpness, hair texture, and in their coloring, which ranged from a light slate gray, through various shades of blue, to purple-black. Whether this denoted age or gender or what, he wasn’t prepared to guess.

  “They don’t,” he suggested, “seem to have much in the way of bones of any kind, if you ask me.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Berdan couldn’t be aware that the lamviin was regarding him with a curious expression, nor that, with its eyes arranged they way they were, it didn’t need to move its head—its body—to follow the boy’s gaze around the village. Either this young human was most resilient or the storm had yet to break.

  Berdan shrugged—a cold, wet, squishy gesture—and it was this and a certain amount of relief after twice thinking he’d been about to die a horrible death, rather than the lamviin’s weak puns or quizzical expression, that broke his self-control.

  He chuckled, caught himself with a hand over his mouth, and chuckled again.

  It was like an uncontrollable fit of hiccups. He looked from the dozens of taflak surrounding them, to the lamviin in its odd getup, to the oversized cooking pot behind him, down at himself (grass-stained and soggy), and began to laugh, collapsing against the pot—still cold, since the fire had just lasted a few seconds—until he couldn’t breathe and tears were streaming from his eyes.

  Once opened, the doors to hysteria couldn’t be closed again, and it began to spread. Before he knew it, the lamviin had collapsed beside him, its fur curled tight, its leg-nostrils making peculiar hooting noises and wheezes, independent of one another.

  He’d bet lamviin could sing in harmony with themselves, Berdan thought, and the idea—like everything else at the moment—seemed too hilarious for words. It started him laughing all over again, until he thought he’d suffocate. He put one arm around the creature as they both convulsed with laughter.

  It, too, had tears in its eyes.

  All three of them.

  The taflak, hundreds of them now, closed in around the laughing pair, their whistling louder and higher-pitched than ever. The whole silly thing, Berdan thought, had been some kind of ritual ordeal, a ceremony, a test. They liked somebody who could take a joke, and in all probability ate anybody who couldn’t.

  One of them—one of Berdan’s original rescuers or captors, he thought—slapped him on the back with a fuzzy tentacle. If a slap can be tentative, this one was. The taflak seemed to stand back, waiting to see the boy’s reaction to the gesture.

  For his part, Berdan, more helpless now than he’d ever been out on the Sea of Leaves, seized the tentacle, pulled against the native for support and went on laughing.

  Despite himself—and despite the peculiar and scary circumstances—he was beginning to like this fellow Pemot.

  All right, and the taflak, as well.

  Chapter IX: Marooned

  “…and the word ‘cannibal,’” Pemot insisted, “wouldn’t have been a correct technical description in any case. Unless you insist upon taking the Pan-sapient position that all intelligent lifeforms are members, ethically, of the same species.”

  Somewhat resembling an octopus on a beach ball, with his legs draped all around its circumference, the lamviin rocked back on the inflatable
hassock which served his kind as a camping stool. Not far away, in a small ceramic holder with a perforated cover, burned a stick of kood, a gentle incense which seemed to energize and relax him, in the same way a cup of tea might for a human being.

  “Mmph.” Berdan replied from around a bite of his Sodde Lydfan sandshrimp sandwich, “It’s not a bad way to look at things, is it?”

  “No.” Pemot leaned over and inhaled the kood smoke. “No, I suppose it isn’t, at that.”

  Night had fallen over the Sea of Leaves.

  Following the taflaks’ practical joke “ceremony” and a resulting outburst of hysterical laughter which had ended, for Berdan, in a deep and dreamless sleep (the boy had been carried again, this time unconscious, to this hive-shaped hut which the taflak had loaned Pemot), he’d recovered his belongings—his own zippered Kevlar bag and his father’s gun case—and had discovered among the Sodde Lydfan’s rations several items he could stack together into a makeshift meal.

  While he ate—at his side where he sat on the floor was a small folding cup from his father’s belt, now filled with rainwater, since lamviin, being evolved from desert creatures, seldom drink liquids—Pemot had been explaining to the boy what he was doing on the planet Majesty.

  “These equatorial folk aren’t the first to have thought up the cannibal joke, you see.”

  “Some joke!” Berdan munched his sandwich and went on listening, although for a different sort of information than Pemot might have suspected. The boy hadn’t yet decided whether to tell the lamviin what had brought him down to the surface of the planet.

  “They seem,” Pemot continued, “to have heard about it from neighboring tribes, who, in their turn, heard about it from others. Invariably these neighbors are further north, as long as we’re talking about the northern hemisphere of Majesty, or further south when we’re talking about the southern hemisphere. The joke therefore seems to have originated somewhere around the poles.”

  “Wouldn’t know anything about that.” Berdan grinned. “I’m Bohemian, myself.”