Table of Contents
Chapter I: Mr. Meep
Chapter II: Tom Edison Maru
Chapter III: The Dead Past
Chapter IV: Happy Birthday, Berdan
Chapter V: Spoonbender’s Museum
Chapter VI: Hot Pursuit
Chapter VII: The Sea of Leaves
Chapter VIII: Pemot
Chapter IX: Marooned
Chapter X: One Lam’s Family
Chapter XI: The Gossamer Bomber
Chapter XII: Middle C
Chapter XIII: The Crankapillar
Chapter XIV: j’Kaimreks and the Baldies
Chapter XV: The Revolt of the Feebs
Chapter XVI: The Screwmaran
Chapter XVII: The Captain-Mother
Chapter XVIII: Is It Safe?
Chapter XIX: An Illuminating Experience
Chapter XX: Tunnel Rats
Chapter XXI: Well-Chosen Words
Chapter XXII: The Confederate Air Force
Chapter XXIII: Ruby Slippers
Brightsuit MacBear
L. Neil Smith
Phoenix Pick
An Imprint of Arc Manor
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Brightsuit MacBear © 1988 by L. Neil Smith. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.
Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Science Fiction Classics, Phoenix Rider, The Stellar Guild Series, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor, LLC, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.
This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.
Digital Edition
ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-61242-163-6
ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-61242-162-9
Published by Phoenix Pick
an imprint of Arc Manor
P. O. Box 10339
Rockville, MD 20849-0339
www.ArcManor.com
This book is for
Margaret L. Hamilton,
the Wicked Witch of the North
Chapter I: Mr. Meep
“I don’t understand,” the boy protested, “why can’t we just spray-paint this chocolate sundae?”
After a morning’s practice at the soda fountain, fifteen-year-old Berdan Geanar was sticky to the elbows with four dozen assorted flavors of ice cream and countless gooey toppings. His fingers were cold, cramped around the old-fashioned scoop. Before him on the stainless countertop were the remains of half a hundred failed “experiments.”
By now, he almost looked forward to busing tables again after the lunch hour.
“Splay-paint sundae alla same!” His employer growled, peering with critical misgivings at Berdan’s latest effort. Hours had dragged by under the restaurant owner’s supervision. Berdan hadn’t yet figured out what accent the old chimpanzee had chosen this morning.
“Mistah Meep food make by hand! Not make sundae all alike!”
The process which they both called spray-painting was the most common manufacturing method in the far-flung Galactic Confederacy. Berdan’s well-worn smartsuit, cut down from adult size, adjusted at the moment to resemble the faded blue denim pattern the boy preferred and streaked below his apron with marshmallow and butterscotch, had been created by this process, along with the few other material possessions he could call his own—everything, of course, but the beaded real leather wallet, which he’d made himself, at camp.
Even the peculiar, supple, shiny clothing Mr. Meep wore beneath his own snow-white apron, over his own smartsuit, had been “spray-painted,” which meant it had been assembled from computer memory, one molecule at a time, layer by layer, in special ionic chambers. So had every fixture in the extensive kitchens of this, the “home” branch of the fabulous Meep Family Restaurants.
All around the odd pair, other, even stranger figures bustled about in the bright-lit, spotless working area.
Many were human.
Other chimpanzees, scores of them, were the beloved children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and what-have-you of the prolific Mr. Meep himself. It was, after all, and as its name asserted, a family business.
Not far away, Berdan’s friend Bongo Newman-John, a blue-black mountain gorilla in oversized apron and mushroom-shaped hat, was preparing a huge table of salads.
At a counter against one wall, a freenie Berdan didn’t know yet, one of the small aliens from Yamaguchi 523, inspected a bank of coffee-making machines.
Gerry Karoh, a short, squat orangutan, and the seven-foot-tall gunjj everyone called “Blue-eyes” (its real name being unpronounceable)—neither of them meat eaters themselves—wrestled a beef carcass from a stasis locker. The gunjj always reminded Berdan of giant sea anemones. If Blue-eyes had thrust its arm-stalks straight upward toward the ceiling, it would have been more like ten feet tall.
At one end of the kitchen, a thick window opened onto a saltwater-filled service area where a Tursiops truncatus—a “bottle-nosed” dolphin—supervised a school of squid with electronic controls, busy cleaning the live lobster pens, empty at present, but awaiting a fresh shipment before evening. The squid served as the dolphin’s “hands”: Berdan could see circuit boxes, each no bigger than a coin and tuned to the mammal’s voice, attached to the mantles of the molluscs.
Of all the intelligent species Berdan knew about, those discovered so far—or who’d discovered the Confederacy themselves—in the explored portion of the galaxy, the only ones not represented in Mr. Meep’s huge kitchen at the moment were killer whales and lamviin. One orca worked on the night shift, the boy knew. The lamviin, most recent of the sapient races to be discovered, were still too few among the frontier planets and giant starships of the Confederacy to be seen often. If half of what he’d heard about their quick intelligence and enthusiasm for space exploration were true, that would be changing soon.
But what mattered—to Mr. Meep, to Berdan, to each occupant of the huge kitchen, and to the paying customers out front—was that everybody here had a unique talent, was good at something different. When someone like Mr. Meep, whose unique talent involved business organization, sorted it all out and put it back together again, as he’d been doing for at least a hundred years, the result was profitable to all participants—and unforgettable to the customers.
This morning Mr. Meep was sorting, and Berdan Geanar, the unfortunate sortee, was resigning himself to the fact that, whatever his unique—but so far undiscovered—talent turned out to consist of, he wasn’t going to be a dessert chef. Just as well, the boy thought. His stomach felt queasy and he was sure his face was green. He didn’t think he could ever look a scoop of strawberry jujube ice cream square in the maraschino cherry ever again as long as he lived.
Nevertheless, he wouldn’t give up without a struggle. “But couldn’t we program every sundae to be diff—”
“Ha!” Mr. Meep sneered. Folding his arms in front of his chest, he tucked his hands into opposing sleeves. “This rest’lant not serve cabbage patch sundaes!”
Cantonese, thought Berdan with the relief which follows remembering something you’ve been
groping at for hours. Mr. Meep’s programmed his wrist synthesizer to simulate a Cantonese accent! Yesterday it had been Armenian, and the day before, Oxford English. It made sense: today’s luncheon special was roast duck.
A demented sort of sense.
When chimpanzees had first learned to talk, the boy knew, they’d been taught “Ameslan,” a language of hand signs invented for humans who, for one reason or another, couldn’t speak. Some time later, the wrist voice synthesizer had been invented, a watch-sized, powerful computer which converted hand-signing motions into sound. Years had passed, synthesizers had improved, and those who used them, human and simian alike, had acquired more and more skill.
Now, all Mr. Meep had to do was think about making signs (or think about speaking, which for him was the same thing). Microscopic movements in the bone and muscles of his hands and wrists, movements so minute no one could see them, movements even Mr. Meep was no longer aware he made, these were enough to operate the device.
Mr. Meep—rather, his synthesizer—was fluent in several hundred languages, not all of which, by any means, had originated on the planet Earth. Speaking English with different accents—and dressing up in the appropriate costume—seemed to be some sort of a hobby with him, just like running this weird and wonderful chain of restaurants (when he might have retired decades ago) which on one day served Mexican food and on the next day French cuisine.
Berdan had heard that, after hours, Mr. Meep was experimenting with freenie, gunjj, and lamviin recipes. The boy didn’t know whether he looked forward to that or not.
Without warning, another voice, a woman’s, efficient-sounding and impersonal, filled the boy’s mind as if the woman had been standing right behind him.
“Berdan Geanar. Berdan Geanar. You’re wanted at home. Berdan Geanar. Berdan Geanar. You’re wanted at home. Berdan Geanar. Berdan Geanar. You’re wanted—”
No one else had heard it.
They weren’t intended to.
Berdan blinked, thinking thoughts which were, for him, the equivalent of picking up a telephone. “Message received.”
He thought the words into the near-microscopic electronic implant which had been placed on the surface of his brain before he had been old enough to walk.
The implant, as powerful a computer as the one Mr. Meep wore on his wrist, relayed his reply to the dispatching service.
“Thank you—I think.”
For a few moments, standing silent, the ice cream scoop still in his hand, he tried, with his mind, to reach his home number. He didn’t get an answer and knew what that meant. It made him angry. He had work he’d promised to do, tables to wait—another personal service the Meep Family Restaurants were famous for—and, despite his embarrassing failure with desserts and the risk of tasting alien food, he liked this job. He needed it and didn’t want to lose it.
As the individual who’d summoned him knew perfectly well.
With great reluctance, he rinsed his hands off in the stainless sink, thrust them through the drying membrane hanging over it, and shrugged out of his apron.
He turned to his employer. “I’ve gotta go home now, Mr. Meep. I’m real sorry. My grandfather’s calling me.”
Mr. Meep, who knew a good deal more about Berdan’s personal problems than the boy realized, nodded permission but said nothing. The Cantonese accent he was using was for fun.
Berdan gathered up the rest of his belongings from where he’d hung them on a peg by the kitchen’s rear entrance, and approached the door. Stretched across it was a cleaning curtain, a translucent membrane much like the one hanging above the sink, which would remove the dismal evidence of this morning’s sundae-making lessons. It also insured that individuals entering the kitchen didn’t bring in anything unwanted—dirt, insects, germs—with them. As he stepped through it into the public corridor beyond, he heard another voice.
“This is the captain speaking. Attention, all personnel. We’ve achieved stable parking orbit around the planet Majesty. Initial shuttlecraft are boarding and will disembark in twenty-three minutes. Down-broaches will be available after…”
The message went on with details about the landing. This time, everybody had received it on their implants and knew the Confederate starship Tom Edison Maru had reached its destination.
Chapter II: Tom Edison Maru
The world was two miles tall and seven—not quite eight—miles in diameter for young Berdan Geanar, growing up aboard one of the giant starships of the expanding Galactic Confederacy.
Those were the dimensions of the Tom Edison Maru, the only world he’d ever known, a gleaming, dome-topped vessel of which Berdan himself, his employer Mr. Meep, and everyone else the boy had ever met, were “residents” or “crew,” depending on who was describing the many humans, porpoises, killer whales, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas aboard—not to mention the numerous alien species which those wandering Earth-born races had made their friends.
Inside, just like one of the layer cakes baked in the Meep Family ovens, the ship was divided into level upon level, some no taller, floor to ceiling, than the kitchen he’d just left, others so high vaulted that clouds sometimes formed within them. Rain—even snow on occasion—fell at times like that, over indoor forests and parklands planted by the ship’s builders. Birds flew through the brilliant artificial skies, startled by weekend kite fliers or the odd passing hang glider.
If Berdan had thought to look up just now—his eyes, in fact, were on his feet—he might have seen a yellow and red hot air balloon rising in the haze-accentuated distance.
On the lowest of these levels but one, a miniature ocean, dozens of fathoms deep in places (“miniature” being a relative expression), and more than forty square miles in extent, served as living space for the porpoises and killer whales among the ship’s inhabitants. Its sandy shores, hot beneath a fusion-powered “sun,” were intended for recreation. Its algae provided most of the ship’s oxygen.
All in all, when the total area of any of the levels within the huge vessel was added to that of all those levels above it and below it, the Tom Edison Maru was larger than many a small nation-state on the human home world, Earth.
None of this was in Berdan’s conscious mind as he made his reluctant exit from the restaurant. The essential facts he lived with every day and had been aware of for as long as he could remember. The actual numbers, down to the last ten-thousandth of a cubic inch, were accessible to him whenever he wished, by thinking the thoughts which would command his cerebrocortical implant to provide them.
Implants served other purposes, as well. As he stepped out, Berdan ignored a “headliner,” an airborne hologram tempting passersby to tune in various news or entertainment channels with tantalizing hints about what they might see.
Most were full of talk about Majesty. The new planet Tom Edison Maru was orbiting appeared to be covered, from pole to pole, with some kind of leafy moss, in some places miles deep. Scientists were fascinated with the planet because, they said, it should have been impossible for one species of plant life to dominate an entire world to the exclusion of all others. Berdan had noticed before how scientists seemed a lot better at explaining why their guesses had gone wrong than at making correct guesses in the first place, a trait they shared in common with investment counsellors and physicians. Just about everything in Berdan’s everyday life, from its technology to its politics and economics, had, at one time or another, been declared “impossible” by some expert.
Other channels buzzed with an unusual scandal, a break-in and theft at a scientific museum. Crime was rare in the fleet: instead of being imprisoned where they could learn from professionals, criminal beginners were expected to work, to pay—in a literal sense—for what they’d done. They never came to think of themselves as crooks but as people who’d made a mistake and made up for it. The widespread custom of carrying personal weapons discouraged crime, as well. Thus the media, enjoying a unique opportunity, were playing it for all it was worth.
Berdan, however, had other things to worry about. Compared with other times and places he might have been born, all the misery the human race had seen and suffered during its long, bloody history, it was a wonderful world he lived in. For the moment, however, the boy was blind to the wonder all about him, oblivious, in fact, to just about everything. His thoughts centered on how terrible he felt.
Mr. Meep’s back entrance let out into a quiet, somewhat twisted corridor behind the restaurant. On this residential level, few of the streets—most fabricated from a springy synthetic substance, easy on the feet and decorated in bright colors—had been constructed in straight lines. They meandered about, wandering past homes and shops and other restaurants (none, in Berdan’s opinion, as good as Mr. Meep’s), following leisurely, scenic routes, with the idea of making the journey, whether by foot, by bicycle (a gorilla on a unicycle passed Berdan as he shambled along), or by small car, as important as the destination. Quicker means of transportation existed for those beings in a hurry.
Just as numerous, and meandering, were the many canals provided for the finny folk of the Confederacy. Here and there the color-paved pathways dipped, so people who followed along them could see into the water through thick transparencies set into decorative walls, and so the porpoises and killer whales could see out. And they, too, if they were in a hurry, had quicker means.
The nearest transport patch was a hundred paces away from Mr. Meep’s back door.
Transport patches might have seemed like magic to someone from an earlier, simpler age. To Berdan, using one was as common and unromantic as getting on a bus—and amounted to the same thing. People approached what appeared to be a solid, carpeted wall, indicated with an unmistakable red and white bull’s-eye pattern, walked right up to it, penetrated it as if it were air or water—the atoms of their bodies mingling with those of the fibrous mat—and disappeared.
Which was what happened, as Berdan watched now without seeing, to the gorilla on the unicycle.