Brightsuit MacBear (20 page)

“And provide him with a better target? No, I believe we should confer with our mutual taflak friend instead.”

Middle C had been waiting, impatient, for the extra-Majestan council of war to conclude. Hearing Pemot’s reference to him, he came closer and asked what was required of him.

“I hesitate,” Pemot told him, “to send you into danger on our account, old fellow, but I should like to know if it’s possible for you to burrow all the way to the hovercraft under the covering of leaves.”

“
I myself burrowed down over fifty body lengths to obtain this, my three-eyed friend, a mere half body length is playtime for children not yet hutbroken
.”

“Very well, we’ll either await your signal to follow on the surface or your return to tell us it’s unsafe.”

“Why not follow him under the leaves?”

“What?”

“
MacBear has a good idea. I burrow, you follow. It should not be more difficult than walking on the surface
.”

“Dear me, I—”

“Claustrophobic, Pemot?”

“Of course not! I’m simply cautions. Very well, for Triarch and Empire, and all that sort of dryrot, let us go forward!”

Middle C began to whirl, not tentacle-over-tentacle as he did when traveling on the surface, but about the axis of the tentacle he was using for a leg. In a twinkling, he sank into the leafy “ground” like a post-hole digger.

Before too many seconds had passed, the taflak had disappeared from sight, leaving a narrow, cylindrical tunnel behind him, perhaps four feet from side to side. For a moment, the noise of his passage—which sounded to Mac something like the ice crusher in Mr. Meep’s kitchens—ceased, followed by several chirps and whistles.

“
Hurry, my friends, before it can grow closed behind me!
”

“He says,” Pemot translated, “we must hurry, or—” Mac firmed his grip on the Borchert & Graham. “I heard him. You go first.”

Giving the Sodde Lydfan fur ripple which was the equivalent of a human shrug, Pemot drew his own weapon and climbed into the hole which Middle C had left behind him.

For both of the offworlders, it was like crawling through a translucent green plastic tube. This close to the surface—they were never more than inches from it—plenty of light found its way between and through the leaves. Pemot picked his way along, placing each of his six feet with exaggerated care, just as he did on the surface.

Mac’s moss-shoes continued to work as they had above. The boy wondered how the vegetation, as green here as above, at this and lower depths got enough light to stay alive.

On occasion he brushed a nervous hand at the unprotected back of his neck or caught Pemot in a similar gesture. Small, gray, many-legged things skittered out of their path before they could quite be seen. Some ran along the ceiling. The leafy walls rustled with the movement of the creatures living within them.

And with something else more sinister.

Mac happened to look back for a moment, and noticed the hole they’d entered by had disappeared—along with several yards of the tunnel they’d just come through.

“Hey! This thing’s closing up behind us!”

Pemot’s rear eye blinked at the boy, and the lamviin replied without slacking his pace. “Indeed. That’s why our trusty guide felt compelled to hurry us. The planet’s vegetation’s incredibly mobile, churning and turning over like a thick soup boiling in a pot, so all the leaves can be in sunlight for some part of their existence.”

He raised a hand to brush at the walls, only to have a rat stick its head out from between the leaves and snap at his fingers, which he was quick to withdraw.

“Ghastly creature.”

Pemot reholstered his reciprocator and drew a large, curved, gleaming knife.

The next rat which tried to bite the lamviin lost its head.

“In any event,” Pemot went on, “for all we know, these leaves around us now may have begun their lives at the bottom of the sea, a full six miles below us, just last year.”

Mac, who didn’t have a large fighting knife and hadn’t yet learned to reduce the power of his father’s plasma gun—if it could be done—used the heavy barrel as a club to kill a rat the size of a small dog which had lunged for his ankle.

Squealing and whistling came from ahead of the lamviin. Middle C was disposing of rats by the tentacle-full, as if they were part of the worldwide hedge he bored through.

“
I have never seen anything like this number of rats
,” whistled the native warrior. “
Something from below must have driven them up out of the leaves
.”

Mac wiped blood and fur from the front sight of his pistol, looked at his hand, and shivered. “What do you think, Pemot? Could it have been the shooting last night, that one wild plasma ball of mine?”

“Or something else,” observed the lamviin. “I don’t believe that ball went deep enough.”

“
Turnover
,” the taflak commented as if he fought for his life every day in this manner, “
goes as deep as where the leaves begin, about thirteen hundred body lengths down. Further below, in the eternal darkness, something which is the essence of ugliness reigns in their place. Perhaps this is what we disturbed, and it disturbed the rats. Be quiet, now, my Stranger friends. It is not ever good to speak of such things, and here and now is a worse place and time than most
.”

Mac looked down between his feet, imagining the black and horror-filled depths below them, and shuddered.

Something warm, furry, and fast-moving dropped onto his smartsuited shoulders.

Heart racing, he seized it and
twisted
, feeling bones crackle before he threw it away.

Sweating all over, Mac ordered his heart to slow. He turned his attention forward, curious about how Middle C was creating the short-lived tunnel they moved through.

The taflak was neither cutting nor boring his way through the vegetation. Instead, as he turned, his forward tentacle insinuated its way between the leaves, stems, and branches, feeling out a path of least resistance, while his pair of trailing tentacles, so quick-moving they blurred into one another, widened the spaces by tucking, almost weaving or braiding, the vegetation away into the walls.

On Earth—and on Sodde Lydfe, the boy guessed—such an arrangement would have been permanent. Here, it took the plants a few minutes to untangle themselves and resume their earlier position, or another which couldn’t be told apart from it.

Even some of the rats Middle C had braided into the vegetation would be able to return to their old, wild ways, as he didn’t take time to kill most of them.

Each in his own peculiar way, Middle C turning like an auger, Pemot tiptoeing on six three-toed feet, Mac shuffling along on his moss-shoes, the three trudged onward.

Dozens of hard-fought yards and hundreds of dead—or, at the least, inconvenienced—rats later, they came at long last to the dark at the end of the tunnel.

They were beneath the shadow of the hovercraft.

Chapter XXI: Well-Chosen Words

Burrowing up through the covering of leaves while Middle C and Mac did their best to keep the rats from bothering him, Pemot raised an arm and thrust a sensitized smartsuit finger up over the bullet-riddled fuselage of the inert machine.

He yanked it back down.

“Here’s where all our rats are coming from, gentlebeings.”

The lamviin whispered, rolling his large eyes upward, toward the hovercraft, as he did so. “They’re flattened against the windows. The thing’s jammed to the scuppers with them!”

In the comical squeak which served his species as a whisper, Middle C wanted to know how Pemot could say that without—apparently—looking. Also, what scuppers were.

Keeping his own voice low, Mac explained the various optical capabilities of smartsuits, which could be programmed to look like weather-beaten jeans or any other kind of clothing. The more accomplished and expensive models could also receive light on any portion of their surfaces and retransmit it to the inside of the hood, which Pemot had pulled up over his eyes before surveying the car.

Mac also confessed he didn’t know what scuppers were, annoyed that an alien should have a better command of the English language than he, a native speaker, had.

“Never mind that,” Pemot insisted. “We’ve got to get those rats cleared out. Any ideas?”

Middle C admitted he had none.

“Unfortunately, I do,” Mac offered, hesitating, “but I sure don’t like it much.”

He told them what it was.

They didn’t like it much, either, but, lacking weapons appropriate for dealing with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of voracious rats—Pemot’s pistol would do until he ran out of ammunition, Mac’s was too powerful, Middle C’s spears were the best they had, but even he admitted they were inadequate—it was the only idea they had.

This time, when Pemot stuck a rubberized finger up through the leaves, it was from beneath the machine. This one, although it was an electrostatic impeller model without fans or other moving parts, was an early example of its kind. It still retained the deep, skirted plenum cavity and wide-mouthed topside intake funnel of a propellor-powered hovercraft, for much the same reason many automobiles continued to look like carriages much longer than they had to.

The cavity was deserted: nothing down here to eat, Pemot theorized, and nothing else to interest the rats. The three companions climbed and burrowed back toward the surface of the leaves, taking care to be as quiet as they could about it.

Sifting in through the translucent hull, the light beneath the disabled machine was dim and filtered, like that of a shaded greenhouse. It was so hot inside—or damp—even the lamviin had trouble breathing. Pointing upward, toward the metallic mesh which would have been a coarse air filter on a propellored hovercraft, but which, in this one, constituted the primary lifting mechanism, Mac got a boost from Pemot, seized the woven wires above his head, and began cutting through them with the lamviin’s saw-backed survival knife, assisted from below—the boy had to be watchful to keep both thumbs—by Middle C, the lamviin, and the taflak’s pair of long-bladed spears.

In a few moments, the mesh had been opened, and they were standing on top of the machine.

“All together now!” Pemot’s voice was no longer soft. “One, two,
three!
”

He and Mac and Middle C began jumping up and down on the battle-scorched body of the car, screaming as loud as they could and banging on it with whatever implements they had. The hovercraft bounced on its resilient skirt, sinking a trifle deeper into the leaves. A dark, furry, squeaking torrent issued from the broken windows, vibrating the machine as the thousands—or, as it seemed to Mac, millions—of rats it was composed of jostled one another where the frame constricted the flow, and leaving a thick, rich, nauseating smell in its wake.

Mac’s eyes watered. He coughed and went on jumping, landing hard on both heels, firing his plasma gun into the air, burst upon burst. Even in full daylight the five megawatt flash was dazzling, and he felt deafened by its sharp-edged roar.

Pemot’s eyes watered. He sneezed through all six nostrils and continued jumping, as well—six feet to Mac’s two—banging on the already dented roof as he did so with the butt end of the spear he’d borrowed from Middle C.

Middle C’s eye turned a slight yellow, but, although he only had one leg to jump with, he followed Pemot’s example, relying on his other spear and the end of his spear thrower to contribute to the terrifying racket they were trying to make.

They went on with the performance until they were all three hoarse and exhausted, the hovercraft had sunk to its scuppers—whatever they might be—in the Sea of Leaves, and what they hoped was the last rat had squeaked with indignation at its tormentors, lashed its pink and naked tail, and abandoned the damaged car.

Mac sat down on the roof of the Trekmaster, elbows on his knees, trying to catch his breath. Refilling its reservoir, he kept his Borchert & Graham handy against the return of the rats, having decided “too much gun” was a contradiction in terms.

Pemot and the taflak rested as well, but as the minutes passed and they regained strength, they recalled more trouble was on the way and their time was limited.

This time it was Middle C who preceded them into harm’s way—they seemed, with no particular design in mind, to be taking turns at it—both razor-edged spears poised. Pemot followed with the taflak’s thrower raised like a club.

Mac followed the lamviin with a pistol in each hand, hoping he wouldn’t have to use either one. “Too much gun” or not, he realized his own would be about as useful in an enclosed space as an atomic flyswatter, and Pemot’s seemed to have been constructed upside down, to fit his peculiar three-fingered hand.

The Sodde Lydfan, having an appendage to spare, turned the recessed metal T-handle in one of the Trekmaster’s gull-wing doors and waited a moment with the panel open a few inches for any lingering rodents to depart. When none took the opportunity, he lifted the door the rest of the way and let Middle C pass by.

The Preble Trekmaster was a fair-sized hovercraft, intended for rough country and bad weather, the Confederate equivalent of an ancient four-wheel Rover or Landcruiser. Between the doors lay a cargo area behind the passenger seats, with a flat floor like one of the antique English taxicabs which sometimes carried tourists around one shopping deck of the
Tom Edison Maru
, or the back of a small truck. Although the taflak and the lamviin weren’t cramped, Mac, the tallest of the three, didn’t have quite enough space to stand up in.

Inside the hovercraft, everything edible—by rat standards, which meant everything softer than aluminum—had been stripped out by the gnawing teeth of the thousands of rodents which they’d driven away. The floor carpet had been eaten down to perforated chrome-magnesium and fiberglass. The wall fabric and headliner had vanished. Even the four seats were no more than skeletons of steel.

And on one of them sat a skeleton of bone.

“MacBear…” Pemot’s voice was as gentle as he could make it. “Was this your grandfather?”

Mac looked across the seat backs at the skeleton.

It was clean and polished. Here and there a tooth-mark showed where the rats had been trying to get to the marrow. No doubt they’d been interrupted by the noise on the roof. Still held together by their drying tendons, the bones looked like a schoolroom demonstration model. Nothing whatever remained to identify them.

“I don’t know.” The boy’s answer wavered, his stomach feeling uncertain. “I—hold on, what’s this?”

He leaned forward and picked up the tattered spine of a hard-backed book. Nothing was left of the pages, but the rats hadn’t cared for the plastic cover.

“
The Confession of Frater Jimmy-Earl
. It’s my grandfather, all right—Dalmeon Geanar.”

Inside himself, Mac wondered, not for the first time, why he couldn’t feel anything: love, hate, sadness, glee. It was as if all of this were happening to someone else, someone—

“Hey! Where’s his smartsuit? Has it been eaten? Do you suppose they got to the Brightsuit?”

In the same instant, Mac felt guilty for thinking about anything but his grandfather, who’d died a horrible death. He shook his head. What else should he have been thinking about? Dalmeon Geanar had been a criminal, at least twice a murderer, and had gotten everything he deserved. He—Mac—had come here to rectify one of the old man’s crimes, and this was all that mattered.

Middle C reached out with a spear butt and tapped the side of a long crate lying between the front and rear seats. Preoccupied with the remains of his grandfather, Mac hadn’t noticed it before. It, too, had been gnawed and nibbled around the corners and along the edges but was otherwise intact. Perhaps it had been impregnated with some repellant or preservative when it had been warehoused by Laporte Paratronics, Ltd., or even at A. Hamilton Spoonbender’s museum.

It was, in absolute fact and without a doubt, the same crate he’d seen the workmen take out of their plant-filled Lindsay Arms apartment aboard the
Tom Edison Maru
.

Padlocked cables had been wrapped around the crate the last time Mac had seen it. They were gone, now, although he doubted the rats had eaten them. The seams of the container looked as though they’d been sonic welded. Mac borrowed one of Middle C’s spears and set to work, trying to pry one end open. He was soon joined by the curious taflak, but Pemot declined when invited to take part.

“If I recall aright, MacBear, the man fancied himself a religious being, did he not?”

Worried more about the Brightsuit and the safety of the immediate neighborhood—those rats wouldn’t stay away forever—than Pemot’s memory, the boy paused and scratched his head, wondering what his lamviin friend was leading up to. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Pemot blinked affirmative. “I thought as much, and it seemed to me simple respect for the beliefs of another sapient being requires that we acknowledge those beliefs in some manner.”

Mac frowned. “Even when those beliefs are stupid?”

Pemot handed Middle C the extra spear he’d been carrying. “I daresay it would be the decent thing, before we go on, at least to utter a few well-chosen words over what the animals have left of him, wouldn’t you agree?”

Mac shook his head. “Whatever Dalmeon Geanar believed, I’m afraid he neglected that section of my upbringing. If any words should be said here, Pemot, you’ll have to do the saying.”

“Nor,
sretiiv Pah
,” the lamviin replied, “did such matters occupy a high priority in my own education. On Sodde Lydfe, particularly in Great Foddu, we’re still involved in some controversy over Ascensionism—what you Earth folk call ‘evolution by natural selection,’ with my family taking the part of the Huxleys.” The lamviin chuckled.

“If only my Uncle Mav could see me now. Nevertheless, I shall give it my best.”

Pemot removed his monocle, polished it with a handkerchief, and replaced it. He clasped all three hands together in a complicated-looking knot, closed his eyes, and spoke. “
Doehodn: Yl uai’bo sevot sro weyt sa siidetniimeso sryn, giidyso fo, vedo al sro wikmynrod—Y gymm noth uai et eisapdewroh mekom sa wis yt sro liidats al uaid kaav.
”

He opened his eyes. “
Na faso ys ko
.”

Mac cleared his throat, grateful he didn’t have to wipe his eyes, as well. There were limits, after all, to how forgiving a person ought to be for his own good.

“Thank you, Pemot. Maybe you’re right. But I’ve been listening to you whenever you spoke Fodduan, building up a translation file in my implant. If you were going to say something religious, how come I didn’t hear you mention Pah?”

“This is intriguing,” mused the lamviin. He indicated the dashboard of the vehicle, where a steel-doored glove compartment with a combination lock had been retrofitted by the rental company for the convenience of their tourist customers and the security of their valuables.

Mac shrugged. It was a common practice in the fleet and all over the Confederate galaxy. The boy asserted as much.

Pemot splayed his hands in a gesture of contradiction. “Notice, however, these wires, leading from the door edge of the compartment into the telecom panel. Have you ever seen anything quite like them?”

Mac shook his head. He hadn’t noticed the wires—a lot was happening he didn’t notice. The insulation had been eaten from them, down to the braided, outer conductor, where the rats had stopped. Against the dashboard of the hovercraft, similarly denuded of paint or any other finish, they’d been almost invisible.

Pemot pried at the glove compartment door until Mac was afraid he was going to break Middle C’s spear point. The lamviin, however, seemed to know the limits of taflak metallurgy. The compartment lock popped and the door fell open.

Inside lay Dalmeon Geanar’s portable radio transceiver, a museum piece with crude alterations to make it run on a compact modern power cell. Beside it, connected to the old-time walkie-talkie with a fine cable which still retained its insulation was a palm-sized bubble recorder, its minuscule pilot lamp still burning.