Brightsuit MacBear (14 page)

A sudden motion in the corner of one eye caught his attention.

Middle C jumped up, as well.

The colonial vehicle, only a few thousand yards away now, had just emerged from behind a billow of leaves and was headed straight for their camp.

“Why, yes,” Pemot continued, unperturbed. “He is. I’m rather surprised, but he seems to have grasped the necessary concepts without much difficulty at all. I confess I’d considerably more trouble with it myself at the Royal College of Mathas.

“And now, I believe we’d better make some plans…”

As he and Pemot watched it drawing nearer, Mac’s original long-distance assessment of the crankapillar proved correct in all but three or four particulars.

Middle C, by previous arrangement, had long since found someplace to hide under the leaves.

It was comprised, as he’d guessed, of several independent sets of wheels, four to a subchassis like the railroad cars of costume dramas. The wheels were large—seven or eight feet in diameter—manufactured from some latexlike secretion of the one plant species on the planet, inflated to the resistance of a firm foam pillow. Each open car was linked to the ones before and behind it, completing a long, semirigid structure which could negotiate any terrain.

One thing Mac had missed was that the contraption was woven out of wickerwork—also from the Sea of Leaves—with only the load-bearing portions fabricated from metal, a substance rare on Majesty, since it had to be mined at the poles.

He also observed now the inward-facing benches on each car, each occupied by half a dozen bare-skinned men—something like three hundred, altogether—hunched in rows, staring into one another’s sweaty faces, all the while laboring over a long, loose-linked crank, which he guessed was geared to the fat wheels.

Mac was seeing his first galley slaves—for that matter, his first slaves of any kind.

He was smelling them, as well, and wishing he weren’t. First and foremost, more than anything else he noticed about the machine and its occupants, was the malodorous fog of human sweat and excrement which lapped for hundreds of yards all around it, regardless of wind direction. It made the boy—and he wondered if it was affecting his companion the same way—want to throw up.

Instead, he leaned into Pemot’s
kood
smoke, his inhalations deep—and grateful.

Behind each bench, between those who cranked and the soft, oversized wheels, a walkway had been constructed, also of wicker, for an ugly-looking overseer who, with his partner across from him, made sure their car pulled its own weight. They were equipped for the task: plenty of sunburned muscle and short, nasty whips, which they used with frequency and enthusiasm. As they leaned in to encourage the slaves, Mac wondered whether they ever hit each other by accident.

Projecting outboard between each set of wheels, some kind of long-snouted weapons were under control of the overseers. Mac couldn’t tell what sort of weapons they were, but they were made of precious metal, scorched around the muzzles.

Only the car at the rear of the assembly was different, having an upswept superstructure—a quarter—or poop-deck—a striped canopy, and a pair of shorter, forward-pointed weapons mounted on swivels at the front edge of the deck, perhaps to discourage mutiny among those who cranked the train along. Mac had expected some complicated arrangement for steering, but was disappointed.

“
Stand where you are!
” A voice from the rear car was distorted by a megaphone.

“
You’re under the f-flamers of S.N.R
. Intimidator,
c-commanded by C-captain Tiberius j’Kaimreks of the N-navy of the G-government-in-Exile of the Securitasian National Republic!
”

Chapter XIV: j’Kaimreks and the Baldies

“Y
ou have our p-permission to c-come aboard!
”

With a horrendous squeaking groan, followed by a leaf-scattering crash, a wicker boarding plank was tipped over the side of the rearmost section of the crankapillar, and fell at Mac and Pemot’s feet, coming close to crushing them both.

Overhead, a mixed flock of transplanted Earthian scavenger birds and their membranous native Majestan competitors swooped and wheeled in hopes the ugly smell wafting from the crankapillar meant something nice and decomposed to pounce on.

“
In fact, we m-must insist! Come, come, hesitation is the same as insubordination!
”

Pemot muttered something in his own language which sounded insubordinate to Mac, hadn’t hesitated about it, and so, the boy guessed, the relationship didn’t work both ways.

Shrugging, the boy sat down on the edge of the plank, removed the makeshift moss-shoes from his feet, and, fighting his reflexive reaction to the odors around him, preceded his friend up onto the quarterdeck of the machine.

The only reason the deck wasn’t dirtier was that it had been woven of open wickerwork. Debris tended to drop through, to the benefit of certain creatures who, like the birds and other things overhead, followed the crankapillar about across the Sea of Leaves. Here and there it had become worn or broken, and mended with some black, gluey substance Mac didn’t want to know any more about.

They were greeted by the same individual who’d been using the megaphone. His filthy canvas trousers, once white long ago, had been ragged off at the knees. His stiff, high-collared tunic needed cleaning, in particular at the frayed cuffs and where it rubbed against his bearded cheeks. His hair, long and thick, was gathered into several out-thrusting fistfuls and tied with greasy ribbons of conflicting colors. His left hand was shoved into the front of his tunic, as was the business end of a large, wooden-handled weapon of some sort.

Like his vehicle, he could be smelled at some distance.

His feet were bare.

“
Now, we will just
—” He lowered the megaphone and started again. “We will just relieve you of the s-sidearms, if you please—or if you do not please—it is all the same to us. Your existence is justifiable only insofar as you serve.”

He stretched out an unwholesome-looking right hand and snapped a dirty-nailed finger.

“My Captain!” replied an overseer. “Hesitation is the same as insubordination!”

To j’Kaimreks’ left, the man turned one of the swivel-weapons around and trained it on the boy and the lamviin. A small blue flame flickered near its sooty muzzle, and a hose led from the breech of the thing to a large drum a few feet away.

Even above the myriad of other noxious odors with which the crankapillar seemed to ooze, this martial-looking arrangement reeked of ill-refined and sulfurous kerosene.

Each time the captain or one of his overseers made too sudden a movement, hordes of tiny creatures leaped from their clothing, skittering across the deck for a crack to hide in. The overseers’ uniforms were much the same as the captain’s, threadbare, bottle-green, and dirty, although it appeared seniority had given the captain the opportunity to accrue a richer, thicker, more elite layer of filth.

For a long, terrible moment, Mac was certain his queasy stomach would embarrass him.

“The sidearm,” repeated the captain. “Your existence is justifiable only insofar as—”

Mac gulped bile, blinked back tears of nausea, and answered between gritted teeth. “I don’t think so.”

“
What?
” The man was wide-eyed with astonishment. “Have we not explained to you that you must obey promptly and without question?”

“Yeah. So I explained to you that I don’t think so. In the Galactic Confederacy, insubordination is one of our most popular leisure activities. These flamethrowers of yours are real impressive in their own small way, but they’d make a tempting target for our starship’s strategic particle beam weapons.” He pointed a thumb upward toward the sky, where
Tom Edison Maru
might still be orbiting, invisible at present, but a brilliant artificial star from dusk to dawn.

“Infrared sighting instruments, you know, and all we have to do is think about wanting them.”

This, of course, was a lie on which Pemot and the boy had agreed while waiting for the crankapillar. Yet, if the unwashed, unshaven, and undeodoranted Captain j’Kaimreks knew anything at all about the Confederacy, he’d believe it.

“Besides—” Having practiced enough to gain some confidence with the weapon, Mac patted the handle of the Borchert & Graham five megawatt plasma pistol hanging low along his right thigh. “Before I burned to death, I’d make sure I had company. There’s enough power here to reduce this crankapillar of yours, and ten more like it, to a fine white ash. Don’t hurt us, we don’t hurt you. Do we understand each other, Captain?”

The man with the megaphone looked up at the sky, as if for some visible portent of the
Tom Edison Maru
. He closed his eyes and shuddered, did a turnabout, and grinned, exposing a mouthful of blackened gaps where several of his teeth should have been. Mac had never seen a man with missing teeth before, and for some peculiar reason had to fight his rebellious stomach again.

“Of course we d-do, spaceboy. B-be welcome aboard our humble conveyance. I will have a stool unf-folded if you will honor it with your esteemed fundament. What is that object you have got with you. Is it some kind of mutated spider?”

“This is my friend, Epots Dinnomm
Pemot
, a scientist and a member of the sapient species which calls itself the lamviin, from the Empire of Great Foddu on the planet Sodde Lydfe. We’re anxious to depart the Sea of Leaves, and are looking for transportation to Geislinger at the north pole. We’re willing to pay for it.”

The captain scowled, slamming his bushy, dandruff-laden eyebrows together. “As we will have you to understand, spaceboy, the
Intimidator
is a vehicle of war, a Securitasian crankapillar-of-the-line, and not some common trading scow. We are not for hire, no, not for any amount of money…how much do you got?”

Mac grinned, deciding not to tell the man about the gold coins in his gun belt until he had to.

“Well, Captain j’Kaimreks, it’s like this: we don’t have any money with us, but we have friends expecting us in Geislinger, who can pay you when we get there—”

“We offer you,” Pemot interrupted, “some of our valuable scientific instruments as security.”

“
It talks!
”

Astonished, the captain held out his free hand, grubby palm upward, and turned to his overseers. “Look you upon this, my boys! It talks! It bargains with us, offering high-tech barter goods! We would not have believed it if we had not heard it ourselves!”

From a corner of his eye, Mac recognized the impatient stirring in Pemot’s hair. “See here, Captain…er—”

“j’Kaimreks,” the man supplied, standing as tall as he could manage and shoving his left hand even deeper into his shabby coat. “Captain T-tiberius j’Kaimreks of the S.N.R.
Intimidator
of the N-navy of the G-government-in-Exile of the Securitasian National Republic. Our authority is metaphysically unquestionable.”

“It seems to me,” Mac whispered, humming through his nose, “that I have heard that song before.”

Each time the captain repeated one of these phrases, obvious preprogrammed slogans of some kind, Mac noticed how the slaves—and a few of the overseers, perhaps those promoted out of their ranks—flinched, as if the lessons had been applied with liberal doses of the whip or even electric shock.

Pemot blinked, doing his best to imitate a human nod. The boy noticed the man didn’t offer the lamviin his hand to shake, but he hadn’t offered it to Mac, either. Given local sanitation standards, this arrangement had suited the boy.

“Pleased to meet you, Captain j’Kaimreks, I’m sure. Now, shall we discuss business?”

The lamviin pointed a finger forward, toward the naked, malodorous men who’d been cranking the Securitasian machine. At that, they were no doubt fortunate to be without clothing, exposed to wind and sun and rain, since it meant less chance to carry around the miniature zoo each of the overseers, as well as their captain, seemed to have acquired. They sat at rest now, streaming with sweat, their chests heaving. It was clear from the displeased expressions of their overseers this was an unwelcome exception to the normal state of affairs.

For Mac’s part, he was glad they were all downwind.

“And,” Pemot added, “I’ve been meaning to ask you who these unlucky individuals might be.”

Captain j’Kaimreks snorted. “Why, they are merely
f-feebs
. They are of n-no interest t-to gentle—er, men of your distinction. Their breath and bodies are but a tool of our mind.”

Mac bent down to the lamviin. “Pemot, I could be wrong about this—I’m pretty concentrated just on not throwing up right now—but have you noticed the same thing I’ve noticed?”

Looking up at the boy, the lamviin made a thoughtful noise in several of his nostrils, and Mac wondered, not for the first time, whether the smells bothered him, too.

“Well,” the lamviin replied, “even after all my years on Earth and among human beings, I’d claim no expertise on human physiognomy, but it would appear to me, MacBear, that none of these unfortunate individuals has any hair on his head.”

Mac nodded. “They’re bald,” the boy stated aloud, his voice rising in volume and pitch as he progressed. “This miserable excuse for a civilization discriminates against bald people! I’ll bet they’re slaves for no better reason than that!”

“This is not so,” the captain insisted. “S-some of our best f-friends are b-baldies. These are
f-f-feebs
, spaceboy! Can n-not you see this for yourself?”

“Excuse the boy, Captain,” Pemot interrupted. “He’s young, and we’re travelers, unaware of all the nuances. What difference exists between baldies and feebs?”

The captain was almost hysterical. “They are
left-handed
b-baldies! The dirtiest, most insidious, lazy, no account, untrustworthy, sneaky vermin which ever drew breath! They cannot help it, they are just built that way, and have got to be c-controlled for their own sake! They have no bargain with authority except to expend their lives in service to it.”

“Astounding!” The lamviin scribbled in his notebook as he spoke. “Having left all of the black, brown, yellow, and red human variants behind on Earth thousands of years ago, these pitiable creatures still suffer a chronic necessity to have someone beneath them at the bottom of the social heap.”

Mac nodded, “So they found somebody else to pick on.

“‘Peck’ is the correct word, but you’re right. I’m curious as to how many others—red-haired, green-eyed individuals, those who were too tall or too short, too fat or too thin—they exterminated before they got around to these poor ‘baldies.’”

“
Left-handed
baldies,” Mac reminded him, “and probably convicted of excessive bathing.”

“Indeed,” the Sodde Lydfan xenopraxeologist answered, his tone and fur texture grim. He held one of his arms up. “Personally, I’m middle-handed, myself.”

“Me, too—” Mac grinned “—
and
Bohemian.”

“Indeed.”

The lamviin addressed the captain. “I fail to understand,” Pemot objected, moral outrage discernible in his voice and in the sharp spikes of his fur, “why any of this inlamviinity is necessary.”

“That’s ‘inhumanity,’” Mac whispered.

“Whatever you choose to call it, it’s an unnecessary evil. On my own home planet, Captain j’Kaimreks, until the recent perfection of steam engines, we operated oceangoing vessels which had rotating sails. The invention’s quite ancient. The sails, you see, were geared to a drive shaft connected to propellors.

“Now, I’ve had occasion to observe many times that there’s more than enough wind out here on the Sea of Leaves to facilitate such a contrivance, so why couldn’t you—”

Shock written in his widened eyes and in the sudden paleness of his face, the captain held out his hand, palm toward the lamviin in a desperate, defensive gesture. “S-stop, you! We do not want to hear this! We do not want our officers or c-crew to hear this! When your compliance is not required, you will do nothing, do you hear us?

“Would you come to our world and d-destroy the entire b-basis of our civilization?”