Brightsuit MacBear (5 page)

* * *

Dear Son,

You can’t know, of course, why I pressed your baby thumb into a briefcase lock this morning before leaving for the lab and will never remember I did it. It’s probably a silly, unnecessary precaution, but there’s some amount of risk in everything worthwhile, and the suit design still has a couple of hoops to jump through.

Anyway, just to make sure, I’ll strap on my second-best until the final testing’s over with, and leave this with your grandfather. If anything unexpected happens—not likely at this point—he can hold onto it until you’re old enough to learn to use it wisely. Your mother and I have made other provisions, financial ones so you’ll never have to worry, but this is personal.

We both love you.

Your father,

Mac

The tissue-plastic crinkled, loud in the empty room, covering up other noises Berdan wouldn’t have wanted anyone to hear. After a while he wiped his eyes on a sleeve and began unwrapping whatever his father’s briefcase contained.

Inside the thin plastic lay, rolled up upon itself, a wide, heavy belt of the same color and texture as the case. Along its length were flap-lidded pockets, at least a dozen of them, containing one unfamiliar artifact after another. Berdan recognized an inertial compass and a big, unpowered folding knife.

The belt hadn’t been cut straight, however, and it supported more than just a series of utility pockets. From the right-hand side, where the leather had been formed into a gentle, low-hanging curve, an open-topped holster had been suspended.

And in the holster, dark-finished and deadly-looking, rested the bulk, inert at present, of an enormous fusion-powered Borchert & Graham five megawatt plasma pistol.

Chapter V: Spoonbender’s Museum

The place did look more like a pawnshop than a museum as Berdan paced the sidewalk just outside the door, trying to make up his mind. In one hand he held a small zippered Kevlar bag containing everything he owned and cared about. From the other hung the leather-covered briefcase containing his father’s Borchert & Graham.

No closer to a decision, he pushed through the membrane, hearing the annunciator—music, he supposed someone might insist on calling it—burst forth with Wagner’s
Valkyrie
played on a row of bicycle horns, in all probability by a trained seal, accompanied by an entire orchestra of bagpipes.

A few feet in front of him stood a partition with two doors, one at either end of the small room the partition formed, and a single, barred, arch-topped ticket window. The wall itself was a riot of color and motion, ablaze with giant holograms.

Spoonbender’s Museum of Scientific Curiosities

—And Friendly Finance Company—

Checks Cashed—Loans Arranged

Music Systems Installed—Computers Repaired

Fine Art While-U-Wait

We Also Walk Dogs

* * *

The advertisement was repeated many times in several dozen different languages, not all of which were human in origin or which Berdan recognized. From behind the small counter at the window, a wrinkled, ropy, carrot-colored periscope with a black faceted lens the size of Berdan’s fist, peered out at the boy. “
Sorry, we’re closed today—deliveries at the rear!
”

Berdan dropped his overnight bag and the briefcase and slapped both palms over his ears. It felt as though someone had stabbed his eardrums with a pair of icepicks.

“Oh, I’m
extremely
sorry!”

What had been an excruciating high-pitched squeal now became a normal-sounding human baritone, almost a bass. The orange periscope rose with a series of jiggling motions until Berdan could see it was rooted in what looked like an old-fashioned army helmet, painted fluorescent pink. From beneath its bottom edge a fringe of rubbery gray-green protuberances undulated as the freenie they belonged to, and whom they served as feet and hands, climbed up the ramp built for it behind the counter, crossed the surface to the window bars, and stuck its periscope neck and glittering eye out from between them.

“Please forgive me sir or madam, I was just speaking to my mother on the ’com and forgot to downshift frequencies. I hope I haven’t caused you too much discomfort.”

Sir or madam indeed
. Berdan was indignant. Any member of a species boasting seventeen sexes—he wondered which of its parents the creature counted as its mother—ought to be able to tell the difference between a mere two.

“That’s all right,” Berdan answered the freenie. “I, uh…I’d like to speak to Mr. Spoonbender.”

“Wait there a minute,” the freenie suggested. “We really are closed today—burglarized last night and taking inventory for insurance—but I’ll see if the boss is busy.”

The alien trundled toward the ramp, stopped, and looked back at Berdan, its voice now a whisper. “Actually, he’s hardly ever busy. The rest of us do all the work around here.”

“Tell him it may be about your burglary.”

The freenie nodded its periscope at Berdan and disappeared down the ramp. The boy was left alone with his thoughts and the colorful holographic signs. Something more than a minute later, the door on the right dilated and a tall man in distinctive clothing whom Berdan recognized from the Infopeek stillpix emerged.

“A. Hamilton Spoonbender?” Berdan asked.

Tall, with wavy brown hair, short beard, and a fantastic, curled moustache, the man wore a work shirt, frock coat, real Levis—not just an illusory suit pattern—a battered top hat, and, on the end of his nose, rimless spectacles which Berdan suspected were, unlike Geeky Kehlson’s, more than an affectation. Above the lenses, his eyes gleamed in a manner the boy would have described as benignly crazed. In his hand he held a smoking meerschaum carved in his own likeness. The lobby was soon filled with a heavy tobacco aroma.

“
The
Hamilton Spoonbender,” he replied, “than whom there is no other. At your service, sir. Walk this way and we’ll talk business while I try to sort out a sorry mess.”

If the outside of the museum looked like a pawnshop, the inside was like a junkyard, and had doubtless looked this way long before the burglary. Paratronic components spilling out of their cabinets in bewildering tangles stood side by side with painted carousel horses and wonderful, carved musical instruments. A pottery kiln and some kind of metal-melting pot competed for space with a band saw, drill press, table saw, horizontal and vertical mill, and a lathe.

To Berdan, it was like examining the working area of a flint knapper, as if molecular fabrication—spray-painting—had never been invented. A flock of stuffed bats hung from the rafters. In a corner, the remains of a taxidermized Vespuccian sandgator were locked in permanent death-struggle with those of a Sodde Lydfan rotorbird. Scattered about the huge room Berdan could make out at least a hundred semifinished projects, tools and parts lying on bench tops amidst plastic sawdust, metal shavings, and scraps of other materials.

Even above the odor of Spoonbender’s meerschaum, Berdan could smell the streaked and grimy coffee machine which stood in the corner with the sandgator and the rotorbird. Here and there, at one bench or another across the vast, disorganized, and cluttered shop, looking less like workers and more like tornado victims searching the rubble for their belongings, Berdan saw half a dozen beings of assorted species. Everywhere he looked, coffee cups stood in various conditions, some full, some empty, some in between. Several were full of peculiar, fuzzy orange mold.

“This delightful creature…” When they’d made their way to the middle of the workshop, Berdan’s host removed the pipe from his mouth and took the gauntleted arm of a short, plump, cheerful-looking woman with a welding mask pushed back onto the top of her head. “…is my lady wife, Vulnavia Spoonbender.”

“
The
Vulnavia Spoonbender?” Berdan inquired, taking the small hand she offered and shaking it.

“
Touché
—one point for the kid. And, speaking of kids, these young ruffians…” Raising his voice to a shout, Spoonbender pointed to a pair of boys a year or two younger than Berdan, busy carving a fifteen-foot totem pole with chain saws. “…are my sons, Shemp and Curley.”

The chain saws stopped.

As one, the boys protested, “Aw, c’mon, Dad!”

“Very well, as you like it: N.O. Spoonbender and N.T. Spoonbender, esquires. May I also present my esteemed associates, Miss Nredmoto
Ommot
Uaitiip, Mr. Rob-Allen Mustache, and Mr. Hum Kenn, whose acquaintance you’ve already made.”

Berdan was somehow certain “N.O.” and “N.T.” stood for “Number One” and “Number Two” sons, respectively. Ommot was a lamviin, female judging by the stress Spoonbender had placed on her middle name, the first individual of the species Berdan had ever seen in person. She was just putting the finishing touches on a wax sculpture of Sherlock Holmes. Mustache was a chimpanzee; where had he ever gotten a name like that? Hum Kenn was the freenie who’d almost deafened him.

His coffee cup was spotless, filled to the brim, and steaming.

“And you, sir, are—”

Spoonbender’s eye fell on the leather case Berdan had put on a counter in order to shake hands all around.

“But I can see, you’re
the
MacDougall Bear.” A puzzled expression passed over the man’s features. He shook his head, accepted the cup of coffee his wife had brought him, and sipped at it in an absent manner, dismissing whatever thought had caused his confusion. He set the cup on a bench.

“Delighted to meet you, sir. How may we be of service?”

Berdan, however, failed to hear the question because, not far away, where it hadn’t caught his eye in all the confusion, standing in its tall glass case, just as he’d seen it on the Infopeek program, he spied the chromium glass of the experimental smartsuit he’d thought his grandfather had stolen.

“Put your jaw back in place, Earthling,” Ommot told Berdan. “It’s only a replica.”

“She’s right,” Rob-Allen Mustache agreed, “one I cast from pewter a few weeks ago.”

His synthesizer emitted a sigh. “Wish we had the real thing back.”

“Indeed,” Spoonbender added, “and I wish it could do everything it was supposed to have—”

“And if we had some ham,” Hum Kenn interrupted in a sarcastic, nasal tone, “we could have some ham and eggs—if we had some eggs.”

“My dear Kenn,” Spoonbender suggested, “why don’t you—Great Albert’s Ghost!
That’s
where I heard the name!
The
MacDougall Bear—and you’d be his son?”

Berdan hadn’t had a chance yet to straighten them all out about his name. On the other hand, what did it matter? He was MacDougall Bear’s son, after all.

He nodded. “That’s right, Mr. Spoonbender. I heard about the burglary and thought I’d come and see…” He wasn’t sure what he’d come here to do. He didn’t want to accuse his grandfather outright, not to a third party.

One small idea in the back of his mind had pushed him through the door: selling his father’s pistol, so he could pursue the old man and discover the truth. But he’d never done anything like this before. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to or not. The pistol was the one thing his father had managed to leave him.

He spoke. “I was raised by my grandfather, Mr. Spoonbender, and never knew much about my father and mother. I came to find out more, especially about how they died.”

Mrs. Spoonbender frowned, as if she were thinking about her own sons growing up without mother or father. With an abrupt movement, she flipped the dark-visored helmet into place and went back to her welding. Berdan heard her sniff back a tear behind the mask.

In the embarrassed silence that followed, Ommot offered Berdan a cup of coffee—it seemed to be the tribal custom in this place—which, being as polite as he could about it, he refused.

“The Brightsuits…” Spoonbender mused, appearing to be speaking more to himself than to anybody in the room. “It’s said three of them were created to begin with, prototypes, years in the making. Two of them were destroyed, and the last, which I bought as surplus, had been built as an emergency backup. They all possessed certain features which, at least in theory, would have allowed instantaneous transport through space—”

“—without,” Ommot interrupted, “benefit of a spaceship—”

Spoonbender ignored the lamviin.

“—using its own inertialess tachyon drive system.”

“An extremely
compact
inertialess tachyon drive system,” Hum Kenn offered.

“Which, of course,” Rob-Allen Mustache tossed in, “could also be used as a weapon—”

“Rendering the suit’s wearer virtually omnipotent!” Spoonbender concluded.

“Except,” Vulnavia Spoonbender—her nose red and her cheeks streaked with tears—flipped her welding visor back, “when it killed the wearer, instead.”

“Quite so.” A. Hamilton Spoonbender sighed. “I suppose, under the circumstances, the boy’s entitled to hear the entire story. Where’s my coffee cup?”

“Right on the bench in front of you!” said everybody except Berdan at the same time.

Even now, the details weren’t clear.

Covered with near-microscopic propulsive tachyon laser cells and generating a field which cancelled its inertia, the Brightsuit, as Spooner had called it, ought to have succeeded, accelerating its wearer to velocities exceeding that of light. The principle was well-established and simple—it was what drove the
Tom Edison Maru
through the galaxy—although more miniaturized than ever before. It was unfortunate that well-established, simple principles sometimes produce differing results in differing circumstances.

During a routine final test, two of the suits, MacDougall’s and Erissa’s, had been destroyed in a cataclysmic explosion, leaving not one atom clinging to another. Unable, after two years of investigation, to determine what had caused the tragedy, Laporte Paratronics had abandoned further experiments, salvaged the third suit’s ’com gear (the only portion not integral with the new design—Spoonbender claimed they’d been afraid to try further dismantling), and sold the suit for scrap prices, demanding a waiver of liability from the purchaser.

Spoonbender had bought it for exhibit in the museum he maintained—and which Berdan hadn’t yet seen—next door to his workshop. The boy also suspected the man harbored dreams of trying to solve the technical riddle it presented—or had, before the inexplicable theft of the otherwise worthless artifact.

“Somehow,” Berdan told Spoonbender when the story—what there had been of it—was finished, I’m going to recover that suit, for personal reasons. That’s why I’m here.”

Berdan felt bad, not telling his new friends about his grandfather but thought it just as well. He was beginning to believe the old man must have been desperate to make some kind of mark in a universe where he felt he was regarded with contempt, and, whatever else he might think about it, it was private family business. Let them think his reasons had only to do with his mother and father.