Brightsuit MacBear (9 page)

Chapter IX: Marooned

“
…
and the word ‘cannibal,’” Pemot insisted, “wouldn’t have been a correct technical description in any case. Unless you insist upon taking the Pan-sapient position that all intelligent lifeforms are members, ethically, of the same species.”

Somewhat resembling an octopus on a beach ball, with his legs draped all around its circumference, the lamviin rocked back on the inflatable hassock which served his kind as a camping stool. Not far away, in a small ceramic holder with a perforated cover, burned a stick of
kood
, a gentle incense which seemed to energize and relax him, in the same way a cup of tea might for a human being.

“Mmph.” Berdan replied from around a bite of his Sodde Lydfan sandshrimp sandwich, “It’s not a bad way to look at things, is it?”

“No.” Pemot leaned over and inhaled the
kood
smoke. “No, I suppose it isn’t, at that.”

Night had fallen over the Sea of Leaves.

Following the taflaks’ practical joke “ceremony” and a resulting outburst of hysterical laughter which had ended, for Berdan, in a deep and dreamless sleep (the boy had been carried again, this time unconscious, to this hive-shaped hut which the taflak had loaned Pemot), he’d recovered his belongings—his own zippered Kevlar bag and his father’s gun case—and had discovered among the Sodde Lydfan’s rations several items he could stack together into a makeshift meal.

While he ate—at his side where he sat on the floor was a small folding cup from his father’s belt, now filled with rainwater, since lamviin, being evolved from desert creatures, seldom drink liquids—Pemot had been explaining to the boy what he was doing on the planet Majesty.

“These equatorial folk aren’t the first to have thought up the cannibal joke, you see.”

“Some joke!” Berdan munched his sandwich and went on listening, although for a different sort of information than Pemot might have suspected. The boy hadn’t yet decided whether to tell the lamviin what had brought him down to the surface of the planet.

“They seem,” Pemot continued, “to have heard about it from neighboring tribes, who, in their turn, heard about it from others. Invariably these neighbors are further north, as long as we’re talking about the northern hemisphere of Majesty, or further south when we’re talking about the southern hemisphere. The joke therefore seems to have originated somewhere around the poles.”

“Wouldn’t know anything about that.” Berdan grinned. “I’m Bohemian, myself.”

“Yes?” Pemot didn’t seem to get it. Instead, he pulled another triangle-shaped book out of his pocket, flipped it open, jotted down a brief note, and put it away.

“In any event, these people we’re staying with hadn’t worked the joke before—although they’d gone to enormous lengths just preparing for it—and were anxious to try it out. Taken altogether, it was something that I, as the galaxy’s only taflakologist, felt was something worth taking time to investigate.”

“Why?”

“Because, my dear fellow, nobody seems to know where jokes come from in any civilization. They simply pop up one day and—but here was perhaps this planet’s first successful practical joke, being spread far and wide by what we call the ‘folk process’—”

“I see, sort of a folk joke.”

“Isn’t that what I—oh. Another attempt to demonstrate that you’ve a humerus?”

“Why not? It seems to have worked with the taflak. What did you do when they threw you in that gigantic pot?”

“That was different. In the first place, the climate here is much too cold for me, and I rather enjoyed the unexpected warmth, however damp the experience. My people, as you may be aware, have a considerable aversion to water. Also, it was what I was here to investigate. I pretended to go along, although I confess, it didn’t really strike me as funny until I saw it played on you.”

Berdan snorted. “Isn’t that the point?”

“Why, I—” Once again the Sodde Lydfan scholar pulled out his peculiar three-sided notebook and started up furiously scribbling. This time he was at it for a long while. His stick of
kood
burned out. Berdan finished eating, tidied up—the chore amounted to nothing more than stuffing plastic bags into one another and placing them where they could quietly and safely self-destruct—and pushed aside the hand-loomed curtain which covered the door to peer out into the night.

If Majesty possessed a moon, it had either set or wasn’t up yet. Outside the hut, village and sea were as dark as Berdan, a city boy, had ever imagined anything could be—like the inside of a closet, he kept thinking, with the door shut tight. His grandfather had punished him that way on more than one occasion: locked him in a closet. It was the stuff many of his nightmares were made of.

Inside, they had more than enough light. His new friend had come equipped for ten taflakological expeditions, and an item he’d scrimped on least was portable fusion-powered lamps. Four were burning now in a space not much larger than the closet which the outdoors reminded the boy of. In addition to the Sodde Lydfan and the human, the hut was jammed with the remainder of Pemot’s gear, a great deal of it, Berdan observed, electronic in character.

“You see—” When the lamviin scientist felt he’d written enough, he put his notebook away. “The taflak are a bit more advanced, technologically speaking, than they appear at first blush.”

“Oh?”

Still exhausted after his series of ordeals, Berdan wasn’t listening—he’d responded out of politeness—but was giving the inside walls of the hut an idle examination. First impressions were mistaken he decided, it wasn’t a bit like shredded wheat. More like living in a giant cable-knit sweater someone had stretched and ironed. He didn’t have any idea what Pemot was talking about or how they’d gotten to this particular topic. He’d learn that Pemot, preoccupied with his own thoughts and sometimes absent-minded, often started conversations in the middle. An odd sort of efficiency, it saved time and breath, provided the other fellow could keep up with the sudden changes of subject.

“Quite so. Their potential for development has been limited by their environment.”

To Berdan, who caught the tail end, this statement sounded suspicious, like one of his grandfather’s many excuses for various personal failures and shortcomings.

He said as much.

“Oh, no,” the lamviin protested. “What I meant—well, why do you suppose porpoises, given their undeniable intellectual prowess, never discovered fire on their own?”

Berdan laughed. “Okay, I get it. Hard to light fires underwater.”

“You see my point. Our friends the taflak labor under comparable disadvantages, believe me. It’s rather difficult to find chipping flint or to mine copper when the nearest solid ground is six miles underfoot. And yet they manage, by various processes, to extract a number of surprisingly sophisticated materials from specialized portions of the single plant species on the planet.”

“That’s interesting. Such as?”

“Such as that rather large pot with which we both share an intimate acquaintance, the pride and joy of the entire village. It’s made from a clay which for some obscure biological purpose the plant life accumulates, and which the taflak concentrate from a certain berry it produces at a certain time of the year.”

“They also have some metal—spear points and so on. Or do they trade for that?”

The taflakologist tried to lift his limbs where they joined his body, imitating a human shrug.

“A spot of both…” His tone changed. “Do you know, my friend, what with that cannibal joke and what happened afterward, your sleeping so long, I just realized I’ve never learned your name.”

It was true. Pemot had introduced himself, under a rather memorable set of circumstances, but Berdan, being busy at the time, had failed to return the compliment.

He shook his head. “The name’s probably mud, by now, back aboard
T.E.M
.—a family name, guilt by association. The taflak won’t have to extract it from berries any more.”

He stood, stooping in the low hut, and stretched out a hand to the Sodde Lydfan. “Berdan Geanar, late of the
Tom Edison Maru
by way of good intentions and a malfunctioning Broach: slapstickologist, itinerant incompetent, avoider of the sapient condition, at your service.”

Pemot laughed his hooting laugh. “I say, Berdan Geanar, well spoken!”

He extended the middle of his three hands to be shaken.

“I’m most pleased, sir, in the extreme, to make your esteemed acquaintance. And what, if I may venture to inquire, brings you to this chilly garden planet?”

Letting go of the other’s three-fingered hand, Berdan hesitated. In so short a time it astonished him, he’d come to like this strange being and was happy not to find himself alone on Majesty. Yet, however badly things had gone so far, he was here for a purpose he intended to fulfill. This meant finding his way back to whatever passed for civilization and not making any more mistakes.

Not trusting the right person would be a big mistake, but trusting the wrong one would be even bigger. Berdan had already run out of faith in coincidences: not that many Confederates had business yet on the whole planet; it was unlikely, but possible, that Pemot was involved in his grandfather’s scheme. Claiming to be a taflakologist would be a clever way to stay under cover.

Berdan didn’t know it at the time, but he’d stumbled across the hardest question anybody ever faces—whom to trust—and, in so doing, had taken a major step toward growing up.

Could he trust the lamviin?

Should he tell Pemot what had brought him here?

Could he be certain, in advance, whether telling the lamviin (or not telling him—he could, as he’d noted, go wrong
two
ways here) was the right thing to do?

Believing he knew some of the thoughts going through the boy’s mind, Pemot waited.

In the end, Berdan made his choice—although he couldn’t have said at that time or afterward why he chose the way he did. That kind of deliberate decision-making might come later, after even more growing up. In the meantime, he spent the next half hour telling the sympathetic Sodde Lydfan about his grandfather, about his parents, about A. Hamilton Spoonbender’s Museum of Scientific Curiosities (and Friendly Finance Company), and the fabulous Brightsuit.

The lamviin’s fur assumed a puzzled texture. “Dear me, I wonder…no, it couldn’t be.”

“Pemot, what are you talking about?”

“A random thought. What you’ve said puts me in mind of a small mystery I’ve encountered, and I was wondering whether there might be a connection. I rather doubt it.”

The boy raised his eyebrows. “Try me.”

“Well, you’ll recall my saying the taflak are rather less primitive than they may appear. I’m inclined to identify with them in this regard. My own people, you see, while more advanced (we’d just begun using—and, I fear, misusing—nuclear fission) when your people discovered us, were still rather backward by comparison to the Confederacy, and we’ve had a deal of catching up to do.”

“And so?”

Pemot turned a hand over, a human-looking gesture which was Sodde Lydfan, as well. “And so, not too very long ago, as an experiment, I determined to introduce the taflak to the benefits of science and undertook construction of a pair of simple amplitude-modulated radios—transmitter and receiver—such as my people began with. I built the receiver first, so as to have something with which to test the transmitter. Imagine my surprise when I discovered someone here on Majesty was already making use of this almost-forgotten technology.”

Berdan’s shrug was more successful than the lamviin’s had been. “Well, why shouldn’t they?”

“Because, my friend, in the first place, no one of Confederate origin has used simple electromagnetics, let alone amplitude modulation, for well over a century. Paratronics, employing the same principles as the Thorens Broach, has too many advantages.”

“Okay,” Berdan suggested, “if it’s so simple, couldn’t some native genius have invented radio on his own?”

The pair of eyes Berdan could see (the third being around the circumference of Pemot’s body) blinked, something the boy would learn to interpret as a nod.

“In the beginning, I suspected as much. But three reasons come to mind to doubt it.”

With one hand he indicated a finger of another. “First, the inhabitants of near-polar villages in contact with the Confederacy, being primitive but no more stupid than we are, trade for and use paratronics.”

He indicated a second finger. “Second, those not yet in contact lack materials essential to the invention of radio.”

Pemot indicated his third and, being a lamviin, his last remaining finger. “Third, the transmissions, while static-filled and difficult to follow—a drawback both of amplitude modulation and this planet’s weather—and couched in what I first thought an unreported native language, proved to be encrypted English.”

Berdan was startled, “What?”

Another blink. “Precisely. Given my original mission here, I arrived not only with a deal of sensitive recording equipment, but also with a translation mechanism which made child’s play of decrypting the signals. I remain uncertain of their significance, but your story does seem to shed some light. See whether you don’t agree.”