Brightsuit MacBear (11 page)

He set his mouth in a hard line intended to control a trembling lower lip, folded his arms across his chest, and turned his back on the lamviin. A longer silence followed this time, during which each being was busy readjusting his thoughts about the other, one, perhaps, less accurate in this than the other.

Pemot was the first to speak. “I believe, my friend—if I may still call you thus—I may have been misled about your civilization. Aren’t all of the most cherished myths of humanity concerned with returning from someplace you didn’t want to be: Ulysses and Ithaca, ruby slippers and Kansas, the Shire, back to the future, all of that?”

Berdan was a while replying. “Would we be cross-stitching the galaxy in thousands of starships, many built to stay out forever? Would our stories have been written at all? Haven’t you noticed they’re all about adventures the hero has while he’s away—adventures which would be impossible at home—and they all end when he gets back?”

Pemot lifted his right hand and scratched his carapace just below the jaw.

“Or she. No, Berdan, despite the fact I’ve been calling myself a xenopraxeologist—a scientific observer of sapient beings—for several years (yours or mine, it doesn’t matter which), I’m ashamed to say I’d never noticed before. And I’ve even been to Kansas, a place which no sane being would ever want—”

“One more thing,” Berdan interrupted, “even if the idea was getting home, in the stories you can never do it until you’ve taken care of whatever it was you left home to do.”

“Hmmm. Sack Troy, get the Scarecrow a brain, destroy the One Ring, fix up Dad and Mum—I see!”

“Sure,” Berdan replied, “it’s a long-standing human tradition: ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’—even if it’s just a fifteen-year-old kid like me.”

“Or a woman or a little girl—it all makes sense now! You aren’t so different from us, after all!
Ku sro Eppdonnad’n Ouongadh
, Berdan, a dissertation lurks here, somewhere, and a tenured professorship for me at the University of Mathas! Imagine: Sodde Lydfe is crawling with humans—I beg your pardon, the usage was figurative—and I come all this distance, to a planet alien to both of us, just to learn a vital fact about your species, Berdan, which—”

“One more thing—”

“What? You said ‘one more thing’ before, Berdan.”

“Sorry, Pemot, this is one
more
one-more-thing. Please don’t call me Berdan.”

“Eh?”

“You heard me…” He raised a clenched fist. “I won’t be related to a crook, not anymore. And I don’t want to hear the name Berdan Geanar ever again.

“From this moment on, just like my father before me, I’m calling myself MacDougall Bear.”

Chapter XI: The Gossamer Bomber

“Very well, then.” Pemot pushed the curtain aside as he and his human companion reentered the hut. “I recognize when I’ve been vanquished, if not, perhaps, by superior logic, then at least by arguments which satisfy my sense of the fitness of things. That being so, we’re obliged to take stock, make plans concerning what we—”

“We?” the boy asked the lamviin. “What’s all this ‘we’ stuff, all of a sudden?”

“And why not, friend Ber—Mac, er, Bear? Am I not also a member, albeit a new one, of the civilization which is threatened by the crime you seek to set to rights? Don’t I also have, if not an obligation, then a right to act toward the same end?”

The boy took his place on the floor, this time in a reclining position. Pemot settled onto a large air cushion, substituting for a traditional lamviin sand bed.

“Well, I—”

Pemot threw all three hands in the air. “Of course I do! How can you even question it? It’s indubitable that you require my assistance. Whilst I, xenopraxeologist that I am, shall learn as much from you, I assure you, as you’ll ever learn from me. Besides, as Uncle Mav’s fond of saying, ‘the game’s afoot!’—you know, I’ve always wondered what that means.”

McDougall Bear yawned. “But what about your taflakological studies?”

“Nearing completion in the first place,” the lamviin answered, familiar enough with a human yawn that his own breathing spiracles dilated, “and in the second, given the task which lies before us, by no means to be discontinued in the foreseeable future.”

The boy blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Why, my dear fellow, just consider our present soddegraphic, er, geographic position.”

“Planetographic.”

“As you will—here upon moss-covered Majesty, human and other colonists live in the one place they can, the place we’re likeliest to find your gran—er, the criminal we seek, where shuttles and Broaches debark at both poles.”

“Okay.” Mac yawned again. “I follow you so far.”

“You do? I see, another figure of speech. Very well, we, worse fortune, don’t happen to be at either of those poles, but at the lowest possible latitude, where the moss is deepest, and even the natives dwell on what one might term artificial islands.”

“Seems simple enough.”

“Yes, so it may, but correcting the situation won’t be quite as simple. Now consider: two nonnative populations have made their separate ways to this planet, and now begin to mingle to a certain degree, the First Wave, pre-Confederate colonists—”

“Yeah—” This time Mac’s yawn was prolonged and furious. “I’d heard about them.”

“How fortuitous—I do wish you’d stop that, it’s quite contagious, you know—and, of course, the much more recent Confederate rediscovery contingent.”

Blinking back tears of fatigue, Mac sat up in his earlier, cross-legged position. “Okay, but what does this have to do with us?”

“Well, the First Wave colonists’ primitive surface transport, still in use, consists of ‘crawlers’ with huge balloon tires, powered by work gangs at keel-length cranks.”

“The way I heard it”—the boy chuckled—“the First Wave colonists were all cranks.”

“Your comedic successes with the taflak have gone to your head, my boy. Where was I? Whereas more modern Confederate hovercraft work quite well on this planet, too.”

“That’s nice. The point?”

“Am I putting you to sleep? The point, my endoskeletonous young friend, one even I hesitate to put forward, is that before we can avail ourselves of any such transportation, we must first contact either the old colonists or the new. And we possess no means of accomplishing that except walking, Shanks’
watun
, to the poles.”

“What?” Mac sat up straight, awake. “You mean in that whole pile of junk of yours, you don’t have any telecom equipment?”

The lamviin’s furry covering undulated, the Sodde Lydfan equivalent of a shrug. “Why should I have required it? I am, to my certain knowledge, the one representative of my species here at present upon Majesty, as much an alien to most Earthians as are the taflak. Rather more so, I daresay. What’s more, I’d planned—and still do, for that matter, thanks to recent events—to be on the move.”

The boy leaned forward. “But what if you needed something, Pemot, like your own kind of food or medical help?”

“I’ve no elaborate requirements. Supplies least of all, having suffered an heroic course of anti-allergic carapacial infusions on Sodde Lydfe before coming—my insides still itch where they can’t be scratched, whenever I think about it—and being able to ingest taflak victuals without ill effect.”

Mac shook his head, wishing he’d taken similar precautions. To this point, he’d been nibbling on Pemot’s civilized supplies and a few things he’d brought from home himself. It might get pretty hungry here on Majesty before this was over.

“At my uncle’s advice,” the lamviin continued, “I replenished my crop with brand-new, oversized stones—corundum, a trifle expensive, but worth it—before coming here, since this, I anticipated, would constitute the greatest difficulty on a vegetation-covered planet. And were I to experience, say, a medical emergency…well, in the first place, no one within several light years knows how to help me. And, in the second, it is, shall we say, in the nature of lamviin anatomy and physiology that injuries sufficient to injure us are, in most instances, fatal.”

“Well,” Mac admitted at last, “it sure looks like I owe you an apology. If you don’t need something, even a ’com, it’s just so much dead weight. In fact, you seem to have thought of everything—unlike a certain party I could name. I guess it’s time I started learning things from you, like you suggested.”

Pemot lifted a hand and placed it on the boy’s shoulder. “Take courage, stout heart, considering the exigencies involved, you seem to have done well enough.”

“Compared to what?”

“Well, you’ve your smartsuit, which will protect you from environmental harm of various kinds and even effect some limited cures, should you happen to fall ill.”

“Yeah,” he answered, “provided it isn’t too old and beat-up to work right.”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. You did think to bring a few things in your kit bag.”

“You can only go so far”—Mac chuckled, thinking about the haste with which he’d left—“on Lion’s Milk bars, Doublejuice gum, and maximum strength Bufferin-9, though.”

“And you’ve your father’s pistol—which ought to be considerable comfort.”

“If I knew how to work it—don’t look at me like that, I never even knew it existed before yesterday.”

“Well—” Pemot was astonished to encounter a human being who didn’t know how to operate a gun. “We’ll see to it, given the first opportunity that presents itself.”

“Yeah, well you can start by telling me how it works—and whether or not it’s loaded.”

“Dear me, I’ll give it my best, by all means. What sort of weapon is it, anyway?”

Mac leaned over to snag the briefcase. He opened it and extracted the weapon.

“It says here, right on the barrel: Borchert & Graham, Ltd., Tempe, Ariz., N.A.C.—M247 Five Megawatt Plasma Pistol Rev. 2.3—Before Using Gun Read Warnings in Instruction Manual. Except I didn’t find any. What’s plasma?”

“Someone, my dear fellow, has neglected your education. Plasma’s a fourth phase of matter, as in: solid, liquid, gas,
plasma
. I caution you, I’m no physicist. And it seems peculiar to be explaining this to someone born into the culture which taught me and mine, but there you are. Subjected to temperature so extreme even the word no longer means what it did, atoms disassociate—molecules are unable to form—and lose their electrons, acquiring a positive charge which is used, like a handle, to concentrate and direct them.

“Do you, er, follow that?”

Mac didn’t answer.

He’d fallen asleep.

Mac pushed the door curtain aside and emerged into the sunlight, where Pemot seemed to be talking to himself.

“Well, that, I believe, does it. I can’t take everything, but I never intended—yes?”

“How are we going to travel with all of that?”

Mac pointed to the pile of possessions, as tall as its owner, heaped up on a transparent plastic ground cloth in front of the taflak dwelling Pemot had occupied.

“All of what?” Pemot protested, sounding hurt. “There isn’t that much of it, is there?”

Some justice could be seen in the complaints of both sides. The lamviin had managed to compress what had seemed an entire hut full of equipment into just a few large bundles. Pemot reached down to the platform, and pulled a ring. With a loud hissing noise, his belongings rose a few inches from the ground, supported by the hollow plastic boat shape which Mac had mistaken for a tarpaulin.

“It’s a sand-sled,” Pemot explained, “the basic design being long in use among my people—although this inflatable version represents a new Confederate wrinkle—and if it works on sand, it ought to work even better on moss, don’t you think?”

Mac was skeptical.

“Have you actually tried it?”

Together, they went back into the hut, where the boy’s bags were still waiting for him and where the lamviin wanted to collect one or two more things, himself.

“Well, no. Thus far it’s been possible to hovercraft from village to village, and—” Pemot looked up from his packing. One of the taflak was at the door, and, even to Mac, who knew next to nothing about the fuzzy creatures, it seemed upset and excited. It chirped and whistled at the lamviin while the human boy waited. Pemot’s fur began to bristle, and Mac knew it was something serious.

Being trilaterally symmetrical and possessing the faculties of vision and speech in a full, three-hundred-sixty-degree circle about his fur-covered body, the lamviin didn’t turn to address Mac, but it was clear his attention had been refocused.

“Something’s coming, something they want us to see.”

Mac nodded and followed the two aliens through the door.

Outside, it seemed the entire village was straining to look upward and toward the horizon. Mac and Pemot, in identical unconscious gestures, shielded their eyes and peered into the distance but saw nothing. It appeared the single ocular of the taflak was superior either to human or Sodde Lydfan vision.

Then—

“
Ku Emfypriisu Pah
, what do you suppose that is?”

Mac squinted until his eyes watered. He was rewarded with the sight of what at first appeared to be a large, slow-moving bird approaching the village. As it neared, the boy changed his mind. The bird’s wings were stationary and transparent, as was its body, once it had come close enough for him to see.

It was an aircraft, silent and transparent.

“It’s a museum piece, Pemot, some of your First Wave colonists, coming to pay a visit.”

“If so, it would be most unprecedented. I gather the first Majestan colonists left Earth, wishing to have as little to do with other ‘races’—insignificant morphological variations within your own species—as possible. Thus they’ve never associated with—I say, what
are
they about in that contrivance?”

Mac shook his head, and began to laugh. “Why, they’re pedaling, Pemot. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it. That’s why we didn’t hear it coming. The plane’s powered like a bicycle.”

Mac was correct. He and the others could see now that the aircraft’s occupants had their feet in stirrups, cranking a long chain which drove a pair of big, transparent, slow-moving propellors at the rear of the machine. As it neared the village, the huge control surfaces tilted, and the aircraft’s altitude diminished from the several hundred feet at which it had first been seen to a few dozen.

“Are they planning to visit us?” the lamviin asked. “Where are they going to land that thing?”

“How should I know? It sure looks fragile.”

In another few moments, it was over the village.

“I say,
not
First Wavers—those are chimpanzees at the pedals, aren’t they? What do you—MacBear!”

Mac shoved Pemot behind the hut. A chill had gone down his spine as he caught a glint of metal.

“Not just at the pedals—they also have guns!”

Mac had just gotten the words out, when the sizzle of plasma pistols filled the air, joined, a fraction of a second later, by the alarmed whistling of hundreds of taflak. This stopped as the aircraft turned and made another pass. This time, in addition to their pistol fire, the pilots dropped flame-topped containers which broke, splashing destruction everywhere. Several of the huts began to burn, along with the platform itself, releasing thick, greasy smoke into the air. The natives were blue streaks, diving off into the concealing Sea of Leaves.

“
Ku sro Fedsudoh Siidyto
, so have we!”

Several ear-shattering reports followed: Pemot had drawn the small weapon he carried, held it with two of his hands against the side of the hut they were hiding behind, and, with the third, fired several times at the muscle-powered aircraft as it made a second turn. Instead of the brilliant balls of plasma the boy had expected, the lamviin was shooting old-fashioned bullets!