Brightsuit MacBear (10 page)

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.

Time passed. After enough of it, the boy turned to the Sodde Lydfan scientist. “Pemot, are these Hooded Seven guys really a threat to civilization as we know it?”

Inwardly, the lamviin grinned to himself, once again admiring his new young friend’s resilience of character. Outwardly, his fur crinkled, the appropriate overt expression for the emotion, but in the dark this was invisible.

“I thought you’d missed that. Yes, Berdan, some of us lamviin believe so: my family, one member of it in particular. The threat they represent is vague, but, I fear, real. And, somehow, all the more terrible for its vagueness.”

The boy strained to see his companion’s face in the dark, until he realized it didn’t matter. “What do you mean?”

“I…Berdan, I think the best course in the circumstances would be to tell you a story—history, in fact—the full details of which haven’t been known to many individuals and never before, to my knowledge, by a human being.”

It was Berdan who grinned this time. The Lamviin knew humans well enough to hear it in his voice. “Don’t tell me anything you’ll regret, Pemot.”

The scientist raised a hand. “Don’t alarm yourself on that account, my insufficiently-legged friend. Believe me, it’s the circumstances of the telling which are regrettable, not the telling itself.”

Both beings settled themselves, and the lamviin’s voice began to fill the night with pictures.

“My native planet, Sodde Lydfe is, like many another world, primitive or otherwise, divided into numerous nation-states of various sizes and dispositions, the two most powerful and wealthy of which, triarchies both, are the continental Hegemony of Podfet, and my home, the island empire of Great Foddu.

“As one has come to expect with nation-states, Podfet and Great Foddu have, since the dim dust storms of antiquity when the legendary Neoned the Aggressor first discovered and caused the settlement of our island kingdom, perceived themselves to be rivals and potential enemies. Over the centuries, this rivalry’s manifested itself in many forms, from struggles over colonies, raw materials, and commercial advantages, to short-lived and furious skirmishes at arms.

“It hadn’t, until a decade ago, yet come to open warfare.

“Among the last of a long, unbroken line of individuals responsible for this lasting, if uneasy, peace was a great granduncle of mine on my surmother’s side of the family, one Agot Edmoot
Mav
. Although born of an influential and wealthy lineage himself, which might well have afforded him a life of nonproductive leisure, he had, over the course of a longevous and fruitful existence, pursued careers aplenty for any dozen lamviin: soldier, aeronaut, firefighter, inventor, Inquirer Extraordinary for the imperial city of Mathas, our capital. The lifelong bearer of an heroic and terrible wound acquired in the defense of one of our colonial frontiers, he’d even, upon one occasion, been put to court martial—and acquitted, I hasten to add—for mutiny.

“During all this time, however, throughout each of his many and varied adventurings, Uncle Mav had esteemed himself first and foremost as a seeker of scientific truth and general wisdom, in particular within the realm of ethical philosophy. Having begun as an humble, pragmatic, and, in the main, self-taught investigator of life’s mysteries, large and small, in the end he attracted the devotion of many younger lamviin of all three genders whom, in angry tones, he refused to let call themselves his students or, even worse, his followers.

“And at last, when he’d become an old lam indeed, with painful, creaking joints and the fur thinning upon his carapace—at a time when a final, cataclysmic conflict between the rival polities threatened inevitable destruction, not only of everything lamviin regard as civilized, but of all life upon Sodde Lydfe itself—he endeavored to make practical use of everything he’d learned, everything he’d himself created, in order to forestall disaster.

“It had long since occurred to Uncle Mav that the impending catastrophe, like most of the military and diplomatic events preceding it, was an affair, not so much between the peoples of the Empire of Great Foddu and the Podfettian Hegemony, as between their respective rulers. He’d come to believe the pathway toward genuine peace lay not in the direction of negotiations between leaders and mutual disarmament (this being, at the time, the avenue most acclaimed and heralded by those of conventional mentality who, sincere or not, professed to love peace and abhor war—one which, as an individual, let alone a former soldier and policeman, he distrusted), but in the severest possible reduction of the power, the importance and prestige of the rulers themselves.

“For uncountable centuries past, the untrammeled exercise of free expression had been a revered tradition, an unquestionable right, and a virtue altogether unique to the kingdom of Great Foddu. Uncle Mav employed what wealth and influence he possessed in the establishment of a powerful broadcasting station whose principal function was to transmit his ideas to the people of our nation-state, and, translated, to those of the Hegemony of Podfet, as well.

“He was, of course, arrested—the strained political circumstances having at last overridden the last of our traditions, rights, and virtues—and imprisoned in exile upon a bleak and lonely islet in the south of Foddu, far from family and friends and from the city he knew and loved so well. Being the sort of person he was, Uncle Mav amused himself by writing and by converting his guards, the entire corps of them, to his philosophical point of view.

“Still, the winds of war blew unabated. The storm they promised would leave our world a lifeless sand heap. The first battle would be the last: in the Ocean of Romm two great fleets were assembling, thousands of vessels, many the largest ever seen in history, overflown by giant flocks of dirigibles. (At the time, neither side possessed heavier-than-air machines. When I first saw the birds of Earth, I understood how humans had learned to fly so easily. Visit Sodde Lydfe, see ours, and you’ll know why imitating them seemed a hopeless aspiration.)

“Aboard many of the warships on both sides, intended as weapons of final extremity—which, of course, made their use inevitable—explosive charges had been placed which operated upon the principle of atomic fission. These had been jacketed in what was, for us, a commonplace and convenient material, an alloy of cobalt. Although their inventors didn’t know it, and the bombs were rather small ones by comparison with those which cultures upon other planets have constructed, their ignition would create a radioactive poison which would linger in the Sodde Lydfan atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years.

“The final battle had just begun when an astonishing thing happened. High in the air above both fleets, an impossible, gigantic, gleaming hemisphere materialized. Broadcasting on all frequencies, it ordered hostilities to halt, and, when not obeyed, employed powerful, surgically-precise beams of energy to blast holes through certain of the warships—and only the right ones—destroying the nuclear explosives they carried, allowing their crews time to repair or abandon them, and ending Sodde Lydfe’s first and last atomic war.

“Of course your Galactic Confederacy had discovered us. An initial covert survey team had measured the international situation, recorded and translated Uncle Mav’s broadcasts. Not certain what to do about it, if anything, they’d sent for the starship
Tom Paine Maru
, which stopped the war (although debate still rages in certain quarters—Confederate, not Sodde Lydfan—whether it was ethical to interfere at all). Aided by his friends and family, a Confederate commando broke Uncle Mav out of prison. Afterward, as the Confederacy’s liaison with the Fodduan government and royal family, he helped make the peace—this second chance he’d won for us, all unknowing—a thing of permanence.

“Now I’ve not inflicted this long and tedious story upon you without a purpose. During the aftermath, certain parties, neither Earthian in origin nor Sodde Lydfan, approached my Uncle Mav on the quiet with a curious proposition. Warning him of hidden imperialistic intentions on the part of the Galactic Confederacy and pointing out—they were correct in this—his own great popularity among all lamviin everywhere on Sodde Lydfe, they offered to place him in unanswerable power over the entire planet and to help it win free of all external interference.

Being far more interested in seeing his philosophical ideals realized—and, remaining the same inveterate seeker of truth he’d been in his youth, desiring, perhaps, to spend the remainder of his life exploring the universe under the aegis of Confederate technology—Uncle Mav rejected the offer, in one of the rare instances of his life when he
initiated
force against another intelligent being. He kicked their lamviin representative down a long flight of stairs, Broached aboard
Tom Paine Maru
, still hanging in orbit above Sodde Lydfe, applied for a position as a common crewlam, and for immediate biomedical rejuvenation.

“Uncle Mav still visits Great Foddu upon occasion, but is otherwise to be found on even newer planets with his own survey team. The point, as I’m sure you’ve anticipated by now, is that the certain parties who in vain attempted to establish him as their puppet dictator, represented themselves as the Hooded Seven.”

Both beings sat silent for a long while, as darkness reclaimed the night around them.

It was the human who spoke at last. “Some coincidence, isn’t it?”

Pemot’s blink was invisible. “You refer to encountering the Hooded Seven again, here on Majesty? In all truth, Berdan, I confess my greatest fear is that it hasn’t been a coincidence at all.”

“I see,” the boy answered. “You think maybe they have it in for your whole family?”

The lamviin’s tone was a startled one. “My word, such a notion hadn’t occurred to me at all. Not a pleasant thought, that. No, I’m far more concerned with their presence on this planet as an indication of how widespread their influence must be throughout the galaxy.”

Berdan stood up. “Okay, my too-many-legged friend, since you’re telling the stories tonight, what do we do about it?”

Pemot thought. “Our primary consideration, of course, is to discuss getting you back to the fleet. I regret to say, where your interests are concerned, I’m effectively—if voluntarily—marooned upon this planet, having had, when I came to this place, specific scientific goals in mind, rather than a timetable, and having made, on that account, no particular arrangements for my return to a more civilized—”

Berdan’s jaw dropped, and a look of betrayed astonishment swept over his face. All of this was lost on the lamviin in the darkness, but the boy’s tone made up for it.

“Nothing doing! I came here with a specific goal in mind myself—finding a thief and getting some stolen property back—and I’m not leaving until—”

Pemot raised a hand, which he had to place on the boy’s shoulder to interrupt the flow of angry words.

“Come, come, Berdan. Let’s be realistic. Far be it from me to point out the obvious: you’re an immature human—a mere fifteen-year-old boy—pursuing a dangerous and perhaps impossible objective better left to the regular security—”

Berdan shook his head. “Okay, Pemot, if that’s the way you feel, I can do without your help. Go ahead with your scientific goals, and I’ll get on with what I have to do! Just lay off the fifteen-year-old-immature-human stuff and try to stay out of my way, that’s all I ask!”