Brightsuit MacBear (12 page)

Mac didn’t wait to see the result, but dived into the lamviin’s hut, one of the majority still intact, and went to his briefcase. Snapping it open, he seized the heavy belt, pulled the Borchert & Graham from it, and ran out back to his friend’s side.

The flames were spreading.

Several of the larger taflak had returned from the moss surrounding the village, broken out spear throwers, and were hurling slim, deadly projectiles with all their might toward the airplane. To their dismay, their spears were falling short.

“I don’t know if this thing’ll work, but—” Mac wrapped both hands around the oversized grip, lifted the heavy, tapered barrel into the sky, brought the front sight up between the ears of the rear, and centered them on the aircraft, as yet undamaged by Pemot’s return fire.

He pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

He turned to the lamviin. “Do you know how to work this thing?”

“I—
yeep! Lad sro mabo al Pah
, point that artillery piece some other direction! Try that lever—no, this one. It looks like a safety to me, or a power switch.”

Mac followed Pemot’s instructions. What he assumed was a pilot lamp under the rear sight gave off a dull glow. A faint hum could be heard from somewhere inside the mechanism.

Several more chemical-powered gun blasts assaulted the boy’s ears. Pemot had at last managed to connect with the aircraft. Small holes had appeared in its forward-mounted control surfaces. Meanwhile, its occupants had stopped shooting, seemed to be having trouble turning or had decided to turn the other way.

Sighting along the barrel, Mac observed, “I’ll bet they didn’t expect us to defend ourselves!”

A ball of plasma, glaring like a miniature sun and impossible to look at, flashed past them and hit the platform, which burst into flame a few feet away.

Pemot ducked—too late, for the shot had missed him by at least six feet. “Do you call this defending ourselves?”

Mac’s hands, wrapped around the pistol, had begun to shake. He took a deep breath—trying not to choke on the smoke which enveloped them—and squeezed the trigger.

A pale beam of reddish light reached out toward the aircraft, followed by a belch. A sickly yellow blob of energy wabbled along the beam and glanced off the plane. Anticlimactic as it was, it was enough. One wing caught fire and began to burn. Its occupants furious at the pedals, the machine turned away from the village, trailing smoke, and sank lower with every few feet of distance it gained.

Both the boy and the lamviin heard it hit the moss with a faint crunch, some distant yelling, and—

“
Yeeeegh!
”

Mac turned to Pemot.

Pemot turned to Mac.

They both spoke at the same time.

“Can-can.”

The boy grinned, and, from the texture of the lamviin’s fur, guessed Pemot was grinning back. All at once, the lamviin’s fur drooped. He examined his pistol and reholstered it.

“Dear me, I’m afraid, in my haste to bring the taflak the benefits of civilization, that I’ve gone rather too far. I’d forgotten that any radio receiver, unless measures are taken to prevent it, is also a radio transmitter.”

Watching Pemot, Mac remembered to switch the Borchert & Graham off. He slid it into its holster—a little surprised to discover he’d brought the entire rig with him—then shrugging, slung the belt around his waist and, with some initial clumsiness, fastened the buckle. He felt as if he’d gained twenty pounds.

“And somebody homed in on it?”

“I believe so.” The lamviin blinked. “And because peace has reigned upon Majesty since the taflak, long ago, demonstrated to the First Wave that they may not be attacked with impunity, somebody who in all probability doesn’t want us to pursue Dalmeon Geanar.”

“Somebody,” Mac offered, “whose name we won’t mention, but whose middle initials are the Hooded Seven?”

Chapter XII: Middle C

The plasma gun and firebomb attack on the taflak village didn’t delay Mac and Pemot long.

They’d already been prepared to go, for the most part, and their belongings were undamaged by the ill-fated and futile aerial assault. Also, they felt the sooner they left, the safer the Majestan friends they left behind would be. Since he understood the language, Pemot took care of the farewells.

These, given the nature of their hosts, were somewhat lengthy. The taflak, like many sapients at a similar point of development, tended to hold ceremonies on any excuse. Mac made good use of the time, however, since, at some point during the battle, his subconscious mind had put his previous experience in the moss together with the sight of Pemot’s sand-sled, and given birth to an idea.

Receiving permission from the lamviin, he spent the hour Pemot was away fussing with sheet plastic and plastic-covered wire. Soon, wearing the “moss-shoes” he’d “invented,” with his father’s pistol heavy about his waist, his bags consolidated and strapped onto his back by the handle straps, Mac preceded the lamviin down the ramp and was about to step off into—or, he hoped, onto—the moss, when a whistle shrilled behind them, and Pemot touched the boy on the arm.

“A moment, if you please, MacBear.”

The abbreviated name seemed to have stuck, at least in the lamviin’s vocabulary. This suited Mac well enough—as did the delay Pemot had requested of him. The boy didn’t altogether trust his invention and wasn’t anxious to try it out. Shrugging, he shuffled his feet around one another until he could see what this latest delay was all about. As he did, a large taflak form came hurtling toward them down the ramp, tentacle-over-tentacle, as usual passing its spear thrower and bundle of spears to itself in a blur of motion.

The taflak screeched to a halt and had a brief ear-splitting conversation with the lamviin.

“This is—well, let’s call him ‘Middle C,’ shall we? Nothing like his real name, of course. He and his, er, brother were the ones who first found you.”

“And rescued me from the can-can.”

Mac shuddered, thinking about the pair of chimpanzees who’d gone down in the muscle-powered airplane. He looked down at his moss-shoes. They seemed ridiculous, and he wished he’d spent the time learning more about the plasma gun.

“Tell him I’m much obliged.”

“Indeed, I shall.”

When Pemot had finished with the translation, Mac stretched out a hand to the taflak. Thanks to the existence of an identical custom he’d learned from the Sodde Lydfan scientist, Middle C transferred the spears he carried to his free tentacle and returned the honor, along with an enthusiastic whistle.

Given the awkward position he’d been carried in, the excitement at the practical-joke boiling pot, followed by his exhausted collapse, last night’s talk with Pemot in the darkness, and the surface-to-air battle this morning, Mac was enjoying his first real chance to inspect one of the aliens—no, he corrected himself, he and Pemot were the aliens here on Majesty—at rest and up close.

“At rest” was the more important of the two considerations, for, left to themselves, the taflak were seldom found in such a state. They were, most often, a blur of motion, and their preferred method of travel was the one Mac had already observed, cartwheeling from tentacle to tentacle, which may have been the only kind of travel that made sense on the surface of the Sea of Leaves and a great way to get around, but made the taflak difficult to examine in any detail.

Just as mankind’s remote ancestors (typified by starfish or sea urchins) had been constructed on a five-sided plan, from which bilaterality had later evolved, these creatures displayed an underlying trilateral symmetry, but had, in recent geological history, begun evolving into something approaching the human arrangement. In this rare, motionless state, they tended to balance on one of their three appendages, each resembling a woolly but close-trimmed splay-tipped elephant’s trunk, with the other two, used for manipulation, stretched out and upward, making the entire creature look something like a round-bellied letter Y.

The great transparent taflak eye, transfixing the entire creature, could see backward, forward, and to all sides at once—a biological necessity on the perilous planet. Being large and symmetrical, Mac had already seen it, although he’d missed the faint lace-work of blood vessels (at least he thought that was what they were), thin nervous and supportive connections visible through its ultra-transparent fluid between the black-surfaced ball floating in the center, constituting pupil, retina, and brain, the velvety surrounding flesh, the three peripheral tentacles, and the vital organs contained in their bases.

Where the high-pitched whistling and chirping talk came from, Mac never did discover.

“You know, I realize we both took the community joke like real sports and all, but it’s nice of Middle C,” the boy commented to Pemot, “to come see us off this way.”

The lamviin’s fur crinkled, the equivalent, Mac had begun to learn, of a chuckle. “On the contrary, my young conclusion-jumping friend, the fellow intends to accompany us on our trek. And let me tell you, I, for one, am most grateful.”

More pleased than surprised, Mac peered from the lamviin to the taflak and back again. “Oh yeah? How come?”

“You know, MacBear, I seem to be learning a different dialect of English from you than my professors thought to expose me to in Mexico City. His brother—I suppose it must be the closest equivalent, after all—let’s call him B-flat and utter the name with reverence, is dead, most cruelly incinerated while attempting to rescue his, Middle C’s, that is, lifemate and, er, children.”

With a grim expression on his face, the boy nodded. The moral debt being piled up to his grandfather’s account was beginning to look unmanageable to a young man who believed he was obliged, one way or another, name change or not, to pay it. Now add another handful of lives. What Mac wanted to do, all of a sudden, was cry.

Instead, he spoke. “And he wants to go with us and get whoever’s responsible for this—this—”

“It’s most interesting”—Pemot blinked—“how universal such a sentiment turns out to be. I wonder whether revenge, instead of being the moral error so many claim it to be, actually possesses some evolutionary important survival value.”

As Mac was growing accustomed to seeing him do, the lamviin plunged a hand into a pocket, extracted his triangular notebook, jotted down a few symbols, and replaced it.

Pemot went on. “In any event, you’re quite correct: while his people repair the fire and other damage—for which, generously, considering how primitive they’re supposed to be, they don’t hold us responsible—Middle C, here, will journey with us, wherever, as he so charmingly puts it, our search for justice takes us.”

Buried, Mac thought, but not too deep, in a bundle on the lamviin’s sand-sled, was their portable “justice detector”: the simple radio receiver Pemot had built, filtered, and shielded now against accidental emissions, and equipped with a directional loop antenna. They’d strike out for the north pole, they’d decided, hoping to run into a First Wave crawler or a Second Wave hoverbuggy which might save them part of the otherwise epic journey. But, along the way, they’d attempt to triangulate on the enemy’s amplitude-modulated signals.

“Suits me,” Mac answered, his terseness hiding his feelings. “The more the merrier.”

Without another thought about the risks involved, he stepped off onto the moss. And onto a road, in a figurative sense, which would take him halfway around the planet.

“Onto” turned out to be the right word, after all. Mac’s moss-shoes performed even better than he’d expected, although, like the snowshoes they resembled, they were tiring to use at first. They made his ankles and the inside muscles of his legs sore for several days but did their job of distributing his weight over a far greater area, allowing him to stride along right beside his six-footed, eighteen-toed lamviin friend, instead of sinking into the sea.

If Pemot held back for the boy, he never said so.

Of course they both understood—and appreciated—that Middle C was crawling along on his figurative hands and knees, compared to his normal rate of travel.

Early the first day, Middle C advised them both, through Pemot, that they’d be encountering far less dangerous wildlife than might otherwise be the case, just because three of them were traveling together, rather than one or two. The native was too polite, Pemot told Mac, to mention that two of the three were so clumsy on the moss they scared everything away within several square miles.

“Although, given a chance,” the lamviin wondered aloud to his human friend, “how well would Middle C do in the Neth, the great central desert of my native Foddu?”

Nevertheless, Middle C scouted ahead, rolling back to his companions when he was certain the territory his friends were about to encounter was safe. Mac thought the taflak might have done that, even in the Majestan equivalent of a city park, just because it must have been boring for him to travel at so slow a march. And, safe or not, he and Pemot kept their own prudent guard up, as well.

As they walked along, and as Mac’s legs strengthened, the boy took turns pulling the sand-sled. He practiced whenever he could with the massive Borchert & Graham, adding muscle to his arms—both of them—as well as his legs. Practice was easy and cheap, since, as Pemot showed him, the fusion-powered pistol’s fuel was water (once given a full charge from cannisters on the belt, it was much more spectacular in action than it had been against the airplane) and its laser—much better than the crude mechanical sights intended as an emergency backup—told him when he’d hit his target without requiring a shot. After a while, at Pemot’s insistence, Middle C told Mac when and where it was safe to do some real shooting. Mac discharged a few plasma bursts at broken limbs and moldy outgrowths to make sure both he and his pistol functioned.

Pemot himself wouldn’t shoot, since his supply of slug-and-chemical ammunition was limited.

From time to time they stopped to rest while Pemot assembled his crude radio gear, turned the loop antenna this way and that, and listened for a signal. Unlike any ’com enthusiast Mac had ever seen before, Pemot wore the earphones just above his knees—or elbows, the two joints being much the same among the lamviin—where his species’ ears were to be found. They didn’t hear the voices again, but on three occasions, Pemot detected what he called a “carrier wave” and made notations on a triangle-gridded map of Majesty.

Days passed, during which nothing else worth noting seemed to happen, and Mac, almost forgetting why they’d started traveling across Majesty in the first place, grew weary of the sameness of the blue sky above and the green Sea of Leaves below—gray and black respectively when it happened to be raining, which was often. The horizon was as flat as that of any ocean, and as featureless. He began to think a person could go insane if he were exposed to enough of this emptiness.

Another thing bothering Mac, although he’d never have admitted it to Pemot, was that the cerebrocortical implant he’d grown up using all his life was as good as dead. While it contained plenty of information—not only about Majesty (most of it incorrect, he’d discovered, or not detailed enough to be useful), but everything else he’d ever recorded and hadn’t afterward erased—he hadn’t laid in a stock of movies, books, or music suitable for a long, wearisome trip. Not much of what he did have was entertaining or even interesting. No object he could see around him, not even the lamviin’s hoard of technology (having come from a far less sophisticated culture), would respond to the device. No information channels operated on Majesty to be received.

Squaring his shoulders, he told himself to be a man. This was just like camping out. Like doing without indoor plumbing (which happened to be the case, although one’s smartsuit took care of such things when it worked right). Maybe he could program his implant to teach him the languages of his new friends. Maybe he could learn a new word of his own language every day, from its internal dictionary. Maybe he could memorize the cube roots through four figures. In any event, he’d either get used to it or put up with it until it was over.

He spent a good deal of time wishing it was over.

Every day, Middle C would wheel ahead out of sight on one of his scouting missions and return with some unlikely-looking wild animal which he’d killed for them to eat. Mac admired the taflak’s prowess with the spear thrower and itched to try it out himself, but was too shy to ask. Pemot would prepare the game—anything from slithery nonsapient relatives of the taflak to gigantic insectoids (of which the can-can had been a variety) to Earth birds and small mammals which had found a toehold in the worldwide vegetation—on a metallic-foil fire-resistant section of the surface of his sled.

In the beginning, Mac was reluctant to try the local fare. He didn’t enjoy the benefits of allergy treatments such as Pemot had endured. The lamviin assured him his smartsuit, assuming it remained functional, by monitoring his processes and adjusting them, could give him the same protection. When it became necessary to eat—the lamviin’s Sodde Lydfan supplies were running low, he hated to deprive his friend of them and had no reason at all to assume they were any safer than the local food—Mac nibbled small amounts of whatever Middle C brought back, and watched himself. As a consequence, he suffered nothing worse than several serious flare-ups of hypochondria.

The struggle to survive—for the most part against utter boredom—tested every resource within the boy who’d no longer call himself Berdan Geanar, though he’d strengthened his resolve by rejecting the name he’d grown up with, the name his traitorous grandfather had imposed on him, and had adopted the same name which his father, under similar circumstances, had. Having nothing else to do as he walked along, whenever he and Pemot weren’t talking, he thought about it.