Brightsuit MacBear (13 page)

A lot.

At night, it often rained.

Tropical planet or not, Majesty wasn’t always a warm and steamy place. It never seemed so to the lamviin, hardy as he was. His species had evolved on a desert planet where a cold snap brought the temperature down to 130 degrees in the shade—and where shade was seldom to be found. Only his smartsuit made life bearable on what was to him an arctic planet. Middle C didn’t appear to be bothered by the weather and often hunted at night, leaving the other two alone.

On one cold and miserable night in particular, when they were huddled together for warmth under a plastic shelter half and couldn’t sleep, the Sodde Lydfan scientist, worse off but too proud to admit it, attempted to amuse the human boy by telling him something of what he’d learned among the planet’s natives.

Middle C had just left to go hunting.

“…and so the taflak believe something more than bedrock lies at the bottom of the sea.”

“Oh yeah.” Mac began to yawn—and broke it off to shiver. “Like what?”

“Well,” Pemot replied, “stories seem to vary from village to village, as folktales have a way of doing, but the gist is always of an ancient culture, one which possessed great magical powers of healing, of locomotion, of flight, perhaps of mass-production (judging by legends of abundance in the Elder Days) but which, as always seems to be the case with the mythology of sapient beings, denied, defied, or defiled the gods and afterward paid the price—extinction. Everything they’d built was swallowed up in the Sea of Leaves.”

Mac yawned again, beginning to feel sleepy. One advantage of rooming with a desert-planet sapient: it was as good as carrying central heating with you.

“Hey, pretty neat. Sort of an Atlantis with runaway landscaping instead of ocean water. Do you think any of these legends is worth believing in, Pemot?”

“My dear boy, as I just implied, every race of beings which attains sentience seems, at times, to regret the attainment enough to make up stories like this.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Furthermore, how could they know, either about the past or what lies below? They possess no written language—”

“Yeah, but—”

“And no Majestan native—nor colonist of either wave, for that matter—has ever seen to the bottom of the planet’s biomass, for the obvious reason of its depths and dangers and because of the leaves’ high metallic content, which, while it supplies many necessities of the taflak and constitutes a source of profitable exports for our people, prevents radar and other such penetration.”

Mac was silent.

“Aren’t you,” Pemot inquired, “going to say ‘yeah but’ again? I’d gotten rather used to it.”

Still he received no reply.

Pemot sighed and began wondering why he was having so much trouble sleeping.

He never finished the thought.

When Middle C, having somewhat different physiological requirements and feeling relaxed and fit from the exercise, returned with the rising sun and fresh-killed game, he found his odd companions curled up together sound asleep.

Snoring in seven-part harmony.

Chapter XIII: The Crankapillar

It came from the edge of the world.

When they first saw the thing, far away on the hazy green horizon, it resembled, more than anything, a can-can on wheels. At least fifty pairs of fat, oversized, underinflated wheels were rolling, rim to rim, linked by flexible couplings. The thing slithered toward them, as sinuous as one of Middle C’s tentacles.

That entity, straining to the uttermost tip of his supporting appendage—the equivalent of standing on his toes—became agitated and at first didn’t seem to hear the frantic questions Pemot was asking him. At last he relaxed—although Mac noticed his grip on his spear thrower had tightened, and he’d transferred his ammunition to his other tentacle—stood down, and spoke to the lamviin.

Pemot blinked. “I was afraid of this, although I’d half hoped it would occur as well, a stroke of some sort of luck, although only time will tell whether it’s good or evil.”

Mac had been standing on tiptoe, one hand resting on the handle of his Borchert & Graham. “What is it?”

Pemot rummaged through the contents of his sand-sled, gave his usual exclamation, and pulled out a long, glass-ended metal cylinder which resembled a telescope only until he pulled the front half away from the back, swinging it outward and around until he held a pair of parallel tubes, connected by a sturdy metal bracket. It was a pair of folding binoculars, Sodde Lydfan style, designed for a creature whose eyes (any two out of three) were placed more than a foot apart.

He peered toward the horizon. “It’s an artifact, a vehicle of which I’d heard, and which its First Wave colonial users term a ‘crankapillar.’ Our tentacular comrade’s excited because it’s violated tribal boundaries which have been tacitly agreed to for generations.”

Mac keyed his implant, reran Middle C’s staccato whistling, and was able to make out the names of several unsavory species of Majestan animals, among them, rats. “Okay, then”—he addressed both his companions, wishing he had one of the wrist synthesizers gorillas and chimpanzees used so he could speak to the taflak without help—“what do we do now?”

Middle C must have been paying attention to the conversations between Pemot and Mac, for he didn’t wait for the lamviin to translate but launched into speech.

Pemot blinked, his fur in a whorled, spiky arrangement Mac believed indicated worried tension. He handed the binoculars to Mac, who examined the distance between them with skepticism, then turned them on their side and used one tube as a telescope.

“In the first place,” Pemot replied, supplementing what Middle C had told him with information of his own, “the situation’s rather more complicated than one might suspect.”

“I say,” Mac replied, imitating Pemot’s accent, “that’s simply too marvelously splendiferous to hear, old boy. Would you mind awfully telling me why?”

Pemot gave him an odd look. The lamviin now had his triangular notebook out, opened to the page with the gridded radio map. “Because this is it!”

“What?”

“There are, as you know, two signal sources for the amplitude-modulated broadcasts. This is the location where my lines cross for the stronger of the two. The transmitter’s somewhere within a few square miles of the spot we’re standing upon this minute!”

“Great! And what does Middle C have to say about all this?”

“It would appear, he says, that in finding them we’ve allowed them to find us. They’ll be a long time getting here—if here is where they’re headed. They can’t be going much over five miles per hour, and they’re a long way away.”

Mac resisted an urge to crouch down in the leaves. “Do you think they can see us?”

“My friend, these people left your home planet only sixty years ago, in 223 A.L.—1999 by the old reckoning—and, although they’ve had their cultural ups and downs in the subjective millennia which have passed, for them, since then”—he indicated the instrument in the boy’s hands—“I believe they’re up to the simple optical technology which binoculars and telescopes require.”

It was confusing, Mac thought, even when you understood it. Among other problems, the starship which first brought humans to Majesty had been blown backward a long way in time. Thus, although it seemed paradoxical, the planet was pioneered thousands of years before the very people who did it ever left the Earth. Meanwhile, for the civilization they’d fled, only sixty years or so went by.

He felt a fuzzy tentacle on the back of his hand and passed the lamviin binoculars over to Middle C, who’d become curious about them. The taflak warrior placed both tubes before his single large eye, held them first further away, then closer, made a gesture the boy was certain was a shrug, and passed them back.

Mac laughed. “Did anyone ever tell you, Professor Pemot, that you can be an awful pain sometimes?”

“Why, no,” the lamviin replied, “they haven’t. Why in the world would they want to do that?”

Through the glass, Mac peered again at the crankapillar, which seemed to have come no closer, and remembered reading about the pioneer women, two centuries earlier, living in sod houses on the western plains of North America, who knew in the morning that by nightfall they’d have company for dinner. He tried not to remember that because of the bleak, flat emptiness of the horizon all around them and of the lives they lived, they sometimes killed themselves.

“Okay, so they can see us. You still haven’t answered my question: what do we do?”

“
Wheeall seet oursells, small Ersseean, wheeall rheelass, wheeall dheeseed!
”

Mac swiveled.

He and Pemot both stared at the taflak hunter, who, despite his lack of a face to wear expressions on, somehow managed to look pleased with himself anyway.

Mac muttered, “Well I’ll be disintegrated,” and obeyed, sitting on Pemot’s sand-sled.

“I was going to suggest,” the lamviin scientist offered, following the boy’s example to the degree his anatomy would permit, “that some immediate deliberation’s called for, and that we begin—with some
kood
, or tea in your case—by being very careful.”

“
Yeess!
” agreed Middle C.

Only a few minutes had elapsed before the Sodde Lydfan had his ceramic incense burner smoking, and, on a miniature titanium camp stove not much bigger than the boy’s fist, a cup of water was beginning to bubble. Mac wondered whether the taflak would try the tea, the
kood
, or somehow shift for himself.

The lamviin leaned over, closed his eyes, and inhaled the aromatic vapors of his native planet. “How pleasant. There’s nothing quite like a nice stick of
kood
, I always say. And, as my Uncle Mav’s often wont to observe,” Pemot explained to Mac, “we’ll begin with the obvious, so nothing of possible significance is overlooked.”

“Makes sense to me,” replied the boy, removing the cup from the burner and dropping some leaves Pemot had recommended into the scalding water. “Go right ahead.”

“Very well. Majesty’s a lost human colony, one of several hundreds founded during your people’s disaster-ridden First Wave of emigration from Earth, which through a scientific failure, misplaced its victims in time as well as in space.”

The lamviin began whistling, repeating what he’d just said for the benefit of Middle C.

Mac stood up to observe the progress of the crankapillar they were waiting for.

It didn’t seem to have moved.

Having heard about this famous “scientific failure” before, both in history lessons and in various fictional adventure programs aboard
Tom Edison Maru
, he was disinclined to be as serious about it when it came from an alien viewpoint, however scholarly. It was interesting, however, to hear Pemot do the extra talking necessary to explain some of the concepts to a warrior-hunter of a primitive tribe.

When Pemot had finished this second time, the boy tried whistling a tune of his own.
Lost colonies—careless of them, wasn’t it?

The taflak slapped him on the back. Pleased with the boy himself, Pemot let his fur crinkle with a mixture of professorial annoyance and involuntary amusement.

“I suppose one could look at it like that. On the other hand, I’m not altogether certain they’d have cared about the outcome, even if they’d somehow known it in advance, As I’m given to understand, MacBear, times were changing on your planet, and the original First Wavers would have done anything at all to leave.”

Mac glanced at the horizon—the crankapillar seemed to have disappeared—realizing it had only dropped into a slight hollow in the gentle, rolling surface. For a long while it almost seemed they had the Sea of Leaves to themselves once again. He watched the machine emerge from the hollow and continue toward them.

As the lamviin translated for the benefit of Middle C, Mac frowned. He didn’t consider Earth, a foreign place to him, to be “his” planet in any way, having grown up in the depths of space, but he didn’t want to start an argument about that now. Despite himself, Pemot’s version of this story had its interesting points.

“Okay, I’ll bite: how do you suppose something like that could have happened?”

“That I can tell you, albeit without any mathematical detail—how am I going to explain it to our Majestan friend, here? Well, there are, as I’m sure you’re aware, MacBear, many alternative universes coexisting side by side, places where, for lack of a better expression, historical events have occurred differently—where, for example, we lamviin were permitted to fight our final war uninterrupted.”

“Or where,” Mac suggested, peering at the horizon again for a glimpse of the approaching colonial vehicle, “Napoleon Bonaparte won the Battle of Waterloo.”

“Quite so, and where, in consequence, the language of the Confederacy—provided it sprang into being at all under those circumstances—is French, rather than English.”

The lamviin paused here, in an attempt to convey by way of chirps and whistles what he’d been saying to Mac—who could tell Pemot was substituting local references for the events in Earthian and Sodde Lydfan history they’d discussed.

When he’d finished, he turned back to the boy. “Your physicists and mathematicians, naturally enough, suspected this to be the case for rather a long while before it was experimentally confirmed. You see, the existence of alternative universes constitutes a philosophically necessary resolution to certain bothersome contradictions between General Relativity and the quantum theory. I’ve already gone ahead to explain this point to Middle C.”

Mac grinned. “Yeah, I’ll just bet you have. Did you tell him we’ve even begun to explore a few of those universes? That’s what Thorens invented the Broach for, after all.”

“Actually,” the lamviin corrected the boy, “she invented it believing she was producing a faster-than-light starship drive, at the behest of one Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet, a porpoise, who was responsible for the theoretical work.

“By the way, I believe, if you’ll observe now, that our friends in their absurd machine have made some visible progress. They shouldn’t be too much longer.”

All three strained for a minute to watch the crankapillar. They settled down again around the sled. Mac had gotten another cup of water to the boil. Out of polite reflex and mild curiosity, he offered his second cup to the taflak, who surprised him by accepting it, placing a number of his tendrils in the liquid—the level began to drop—while leaning into the
kood
smoke to enjoy that as well.

Mac shook his head. “Pemot, how come it always seems you know the history of my people better than I do?”

“Perhaps,” the scientist replied, “because I come to it freshly, like any immigrant. In any case, it was neither Thorens nor P’wheet who bungled the First Wave’s departure. That had been predicated upon the existence of one alternate universe in particular, different from our own, in which the Big Bang, which begins the life of most continua, either never came about—I’ve never been clear about this part—or came off considerably less spectacularly.”

“I’ve heard of that”—the boy nodded—“the Little Bang universe. And the word, Pemot, is ‘fizzled.’”

The crankapillar had disappeared again, which all three realized meant it was getting nearer.

“‘Fizzled,’ then—this language never ceases to amaze me. In any case, ducking through it promised that one might get halfway across a given fraction of his own universe, in effect, in less time and without any bothersome Einsteinian problems about the speed of light or Fitzgerald-Lorenz time-dilation.”

“So what went wrong?”

The ripple through Pemot’s fur represented the Sodde Lydfan equivalent of a shrug. “It seems to have been some difficulty with astrogation. They made it into the Little Bang universe, as planned—a bit, I suppose like maneuvering their spaceships through a large transport Broach—but somehow lost their bearings relative to this universe. When they popped back out, they discovered they’d arrived just about anywhere—or anywhen (I find that to be the most fascinating aspect of the tragedy)—except where and when they’d intended.”

Mac shuddered. Put that way, the story sounded too familiar to his own Broach misadventure for comfort.

“And Middle C,” he asked the lamviin, “is still following you on all of this?”