Brightsuit MacBear

by L. Neil Smith

  “Yes?” Pemot didn’t seem to get it. Instead, he pulled another triangle-shaped book out of his pocket, flipped it open, jotted down a brief note, and put it away.

  “In any event, these people we’re staying with hadn’t worked the joke before—although they’d gone to enormous lengths just preparing for it—and were anxious to try it out. Taken altogether, it was something that I, as the galaxy’s only taflakologist, felt was something worth taking time to investigate.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, my dear fellow, nobody seems to know where jokes come from in any civilization. They simply pop up one day and—but here was perhaps this planet’s first successful practical joke, being spread far and wide by what we call the ‘folk process’—”

  “I see, sort of a folk joke.”

  “Isn’t that what I—oh. Another attempt to demonstrate that you’ve a humerus?”

  “Why not? It seems to have worked with the taflak. What did you do when they threw you in that gigantic pot?”

  “That was different. In the first place, the climate here is much too cold for me, and I rather enjoyed the unexpected warmth, however damp the experience. My people, as you may be aware, have a considerable aversion to water. Also, it was what I was here to investigate. I pretended to go along, although I confess, it didn’t really strike me as funny until I saw it played on you.”

  Berdan snorted. “Isn’t that the point?”

  “Why, I—” Once again the Sodde Lydfan scholar pulled out his peculiar three-sided notebook and started up furiously scribbling. This time he was at it for a long while. His stick of kood burned out. Berdan finished eating, tidied up—the chore amounted to nothing more than stuffing plastic bags into one another and placing them where they could quietly and safely self-destruct—and pushed aside the hand-loomed curtain which covered the door to peer out into the night.

  If Majesty possessed a moon, it had either set or wasn’t up yet. Outside the hut, village and sea were as dark as Berdan, a city boy, had ever imagined anything could be—like the inside of a closet, he kept thinking, with the door shut tight. His grandfather had punished him that way on more than one occasion: locked him in a closet. It was the stuff many of his nightmares were made of.

  Inside, they had more than enough light. His new friend had come equipped for ten taflakological expeditions, and an item he’d scrimped on least was portable fusion-powered lamps. Four were burning now in a space not much larger than the closet which the outdoors reminded the boy of. In addition to the Sodde Lydfan and the human, the hut was jammed with the remainder of Pemot’s gear, a great deal of it, Berdan observed, electronic in character.

  “You see—” When the lamviin scientist felt he’d written enough, he put his notebook away. “The taflak are a bit more advanced, technologically speaking, than they appear at first blush.”

  “Oh?”

  Still exhausted after his series of ordeals, Berdan wasn’t listening—he’d responded out of politeness—but was giving the inside walls of the hut an idle examination. First impressions were mistaken he decided, it wasn’t a bit like shredded wheat. More like living in a giant cable-knit sweater someone had stretched and ironed. He didn’t have any idea what Pemot was talking about or how they’d gotten to this particular topic. He’d learn that Pemot, preoccupied with his own thoughts and sometimes absent-minded, often started conversations in the middle. An odd sort of efficiency, it saved time and breath, provided the other fellow could keep up with the sudden changes of subject.

  “Quite so. Their potential for development has been limited by their environment.”

  To Berdan, who caught the tail end, this statement sounded suspicious, like one of his grandfather’s many excuses for various personal failures and shortcomings.

  He said as much.

  “Oh, no,” the lamviin protested. “What I meant—well, why do you suppose porpoises, given their undeniable intellectual prowess, never discovered fire on their own?”

  Berdan laughed. “Okay, I get it. Hard to light fires underwater.”

  “You see my point. Our friends the taflak labor under comparable disadvantages, believe me. It’s rather difficult to find chipping flint or to mine copper when the nearest solid ground is six miles underfoot. And yet they manage, by various processes, to extract a number of surprisingly sophisticated materials from specialized portions of the single plant species on the planet.”

  “That’s interesting. Such as?”

  “Such as that rather large pot with which we both share an intimate acquaintance, the pride and joy of the entire village. It’s made from a clay which for some obscure biological purpose the plant life accumulates, and which the taflak concentrate from a certain berry it produces at a certain time of the year.”

  “They also have some metal—spear points and so on. Or do they trade for that?”

  The taflakologist tried to lift his limbs where they joined his body, imitating a human shrug.

  “A spot of both…” His tone changed. “Do you know, my friend, what with that cannibal joke and what happened afterward, your sleeping so long, I just realized I’ve never learned your name.”

  It was true. Pemot had introduced himself, under a rather memorable set of circumstances, but Berdan, being busy at the time, had failed to return the compliment.

  He shook his head. “The name’s probably mud, by now, back aboard T.E.M.—a family name, guilt by association. The taflak won’t have to extract it from berries any more.”

  He stood, stooping in the low hut, and stretched out a hand to the Sodde Lydfan. “Berdan Geanar, late of the Tom Edison Maru by way of good intentions and a malfunctioning Broach: slapstickologist, itinerant incompetent, avoider of the sapient condition, at your service.”

  Pemot laughed his hooting laugh. “I say, Berdan Geanar, well spoken!”

  He extended the middle of his three hands to be shaken.

  “I’m most pleased, sir, in the extreme, to make your esteemed acquaintance. And what, if I may venture to inquire, brings you to this chilly garden planet?”

  Letting go of the other’s three-fingered hand, Berdan hesitated. In so short a time it astonished him, he’d come to like this strange being and was happy not to find himself alone on Majesty. Yet, however badly things had gone so far, he was here for a purpose he intended to fulfill. This meant finding his way back to whatever passed for civilization and not making any more mistakes.

  Not trusting the right person would be a big mistake, but trusting the wrong one would be even bigger. Berdan had already run out of faith in coincidences: not that many Confederates had business yet on the whole planet; it was unlikely, but possible, that Pemot was involved in his grandfather’s scheme. Claiming to be a taflakologist would be a clever way to stay under cover.

  Berdan didn’t know it at the time, but he’d stumbled across the hardest question anybody ever faces—whom to trust—and, in so doing, had taken a major step toward growing up.

  Could he trust the lamviin?

  Should he tell Pemot what had brought him here?

  Could he be certain, in advance, whether telling the lamviin (or not telling him—he could, as he’d noted, go wrong two ways here) was the right thing to do?

  Believing he knew some of the thoughts going through the boy’s mind, Pemot waited.

  In the end, Berdan made his choice—although he couldn’t have said at that time or afterward why he chose the way he did. That kind of deliberate decision-making might come later, after even more growing up. In the meantime, he spent the next half hour telling the sympathetic Sodde Lydfan about his grandfather, about his parents, about A. Hamilton Spoonbender’s Museum of Scientific Curiosities (and Friendly Finance Company), and the fabulous Brightsuit.

  The lamviin’s fur assumed a puzzled texture. “Dear me, I wonder…no, it couldn’t be.”

  “Pemot, what are you talking about?”

  “A random thought. What you’ve said puts me in mind of a small mystery I’
ve encountered, and I was wondering whether there might be a connection. I rather doubt it.”

  The boy raised his eyebrows. “Try me.”

  “Well, you’ll recall my saying the taflak are rather less primitive than they may appear. I’m inclined to identify with them in this regard. My own people, you see, while more advanced (we’d just begun using—and, I fear, misusing—nuclear fission) when your people discovered us, were still rather backward by comparison to the Confederacy, and we’ve had a deal of catching up to do.”

  “And so?”

  Pemot turned a hand over, a human-looking gesture which was Sodde Lydfan, as well. “And so, not too very long ago, as an experiment, I determined to introduce the taflak to the benefits of science and undertook construction of a pair of simple amplitude-modulated radios—transmitter and receiver—such as my people began with. I built the receiver first, so as to have something with which to test the transmitter. Imagine my surprise when I discovered someone here on Majesty was already making use of this almost-forgotten technology.”

  Berdan’s shrug was more successful than the lamviin’s had been. “Well, why shouldn’t they?”

  “Because, my friend, in the first place, no one of Confederate origin has used simple electromagnetics, let alone amplitude modulation, for well over a century. Paratronics, employing the same principles as the Thorens Broach, has too many advantages.”

  “Okay,” Berdan suggested, “if it’s so simple, couldn’t some native genius have invented radio on his own?”

  The pair of eyes Berdan could see (the third being around the circumference of Pemot’s body) blinked, something the boy would learn to interpret as a nod.

  “In the beginning, I suspected as much. But three reasons come to mind to doubt it.”

  With one hand he indicated a finger of another. “First, the inhabitants of near-polar villages in contact with the Confederacy, being primitive but no more stupid than we are, trade for and use paratronics.”

  He indicated a second finger. “Second, those not yet in contact lack materials essential to the invention of radio.”

  Pemot indicated his third and, being a lamviin, his last remaining finger. “Third, the transmissions, while static-filled and difficult to follow—a drawback both of amplitude modulation and this planet’s weather—and couched in what I first thought an unreported native language, proved to be encrypted English.”

  Berdan was startled, “What?”

  Another blink. “Precisely. Given my original mission here, I arrived not only with a deal of sensitive recording equipment, but also with a translation mechanism which made child’s play of decrypting the signals. I remain uncertain of their significance, but your story does seem to shed some light. See whether you don’t agree.”

  The lamviin rose to rummage through the technological clutter filling most of the hut, gave an exclamation of discovery, and held up a small audio recorder.

  “These signals may have come from the other side of the planet, Berdan. I’d no way of determining their places of origin. I regret it was quite impossible to filter out all of the interference or to replace what it obliterated.”

  He flipped a switch on one edge:

  FIRST VOICE: D.G. transmitting to H.S., D.G. transmitting to…hear me?

  SECOND VOICE: This is the Voice of the…Seven. Could We avoid hearing you? Why do you broadcast…and in such an elementary scramble pattern?…realize that anyone…

  FIRST VOICE:…worried about nothing. Not a solitary soul in the Confederacy’s employed these frequencies…this modulation for a hundred years.

  SECOND VOICE: We trust, for your sake, that you are correct in this opinion.

  FIRST VOICE: And I trust, H.S., that you’re not trying to threaten me. After all, I’m here in person at your insistence. I have a place to stay where I can be reached…although why we had to rendezvous on this…mudball, instead of beyond…borders, where you’re in control and it’s safer, I’ll…

  SECOND VOICE: And We are here…as promised to make final arrangements to accept the…in return for the lucrative reward you have negotiated with Us.

  FIRST VOICE: …I wish to speak…again of that ‘lucrative reward’ you…to. H.S., do you…imagine that I planned…years…contrived the sacrifice of my own…and blood, defrauded…altered their…results, made…appear less successful…and dangerous than it was, in fact, merely to accept a…?

  SECOND VOICE: …had a bargain…contract. It…taken you…find a market willing…for what you stole and killed for. You established contact…the Hooded…not We with you, and only as a…when you had…no one else. Think hard, human: everything toward…you have been striving in a series of…coldly…ulated steps—gone—if…allow…greed to bungle it…you now.

  Here, the transmission was overwhelmed by static.

  Pemot switched off the recorder and put it away.

  “I’m ashamed to admit it,” Berdan murmured, “but I’m sure that was my grandfather’s voice.”

  Pemot’s fur drooped, indicating the mood he shared with his human companion.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” inquired the lamviin after a while, “why did you reject the notion of seeking help, if not from the starship’s security people, from your employer, who sounds like a decent person or your new friends at the museum?”

  “Because I couldn’t prove anything. Because it would have been a kid’s word against an adult’s, and, no matter where you come from, you should know how that works—or maybe you don’t. Because nobody would have believed me, Pemot. Anyway, the whole thing was about my family, so I decided it was up to me. Unfortunately, I was just a tad late, and I had the rotten luck to choose a malfunctioning Broach.”

  “I see. Has it occurred to you your grandfather might have taken certain measures to assure he wasn’t pursued, once his act of theft had been discovered?”

  A light dawned in Berdan’s eyes. “What do you mean?”

  Before he spoke again, a deep breath whistled through the lamviin’s half dozen nostrils. “Well, insofar as I understand it, and I assure you that I’m no technician, the Broach itself—a man-made hole in the very fabric of space-time—is a simple device, reliable, difficult to tamper with, and almost invariably functions perfectly.”

  The boy’s chuckle was grim. “Yeah, well if that were true, I wouldn’t be here to give you an argument about it.”

  Pemot blinked. “Indeed. On the other hand, measures sufficient to preclude pursuit might involve something no more complicated than reprogramming an implant-receptive computer, changing a Broach’s paratronic characteristics a microscopic amount—which, of course, would throw its calibration off by thousands of miles.”

  Berdan nodded and blinked at his friend. “I get it—or it got me—and my grandfather used to be a Broach technician.”

  Pemot began to blink, changed his mind and tipped his entire body first down and then up. “Anyone attempting to follow his illicit rendezvous via commercial Broach, would, upon requesting any destination with one Dalmeon Geanar in mind, find himself stranded in the most primitive area of an already primitive world, a hemisphere from where he had intended to be, alone and friendless. With any luck—if your grandfather refrained from interfering with other traffic—a considerable time might pass before the sabotage could be detected.”

  “Which shoots down the idea of rescue. I figured they’d be spraying folks to the wrong destination all over this crummy planet, and a full-scale search would be on.”

  “Not,” replied the lamviin, “if your grandfather was at all clever.”

  “And so here I am. Stuck.”

  “Quite so, my friend, albeit as a highly probable result of your grandfather’s treachery, rather than by bad luck or any incompetence on your own part. I doubt whether he realized he’d be stranding his own grandson. And yet, knowing what you know, you remain the one individual in a position, however hopeless it may be, to interfere with his betrayal of the Confederacy.”

  “What
do you mean?”

  “That ‘the Hooded Seven’ is a name for a conspiracy not entirely unknown among the lamviin.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Er, ‘yeah.’ And that it represents the greatest threat to civilization as we know it.”

  Chapter X: One Lam’s Family

  Pemot’s words failed to produce the full dramatic effect he might have expected on Berdan.

  Instead, the boy arose from where he’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor of the primitive hut, half-muttered some remark about his metabolic processes—which the lamviin being of a species which had evolved in perhaps the driest deserts in the known galaxy couldn’t comprehend altogether in any case and dismissed as peculiar to Earthians—pushed the door curtain aside, and left.

  Outside, it was still as dark as it had been, and the village platform was deserted.

  This suited Berdan. He didn’t want to see anybody, anyway. He knew he must somehow live with what he’d just learned if he were going to grow up at all, but how, he asked the stars twinkling overhead, how do you adjust to the fact your own grandfather’s a criminal, a thief, a murderer, a traitor? How do you accept the fact the man you’d lived with all your life (even if you’d never liked him much) had killed your mother and your father—his own son—for money?

  By increments, his tear-filled eyes adjusted to the starlight and to a faint fluorescent glow emanating from the Sea of Leaves. Between Pemot’s temporary dwelling and the next one in line, he found a shadowed aisle leading to the edge of the village platform. Here he sat down, somewhat stiff, leaning back against the woven wall of the lamviin’s hut, trying to think, but not knowing where to begin.

  Berdan hadn’t learned yet: sometimes it isn’t necessary to begin all at once. Sometimes just sitting in the quiet darkness does as much for someone in pain and confusion as any train of logic or course in therapy. Berdan sat, watching the night, smelling the sea on the soft, alien breeze, feeling things.

  Before long, Pemot was beside him.

  Something else the boy didn’t know: the edge of the village platform could be a dangerous place at night—can-cans were the least of such dangers—which was why the taflak were all tucked safe into their huts, dreaming whatever dreams they dreamed. The lamviin, however, although not much older than Berdan in terms of his own culture, was wise enough not to lecture, but just to keep an eye on the boy and on the sea, his pistol unobtrusive but ready.