Free Brightsuit MacBear by L. Neil Smith Page A

view as a softball-sized black globular organ hanging in the center of the larger, transparent one. He guessed it served as a retina, the place where light was focused and converted into images.
    Berdan remembered he didn’t have to guess. He’d absorbed a brochure about this planet just before stepping into the Broach booth. He concentrated, and…
    The information burst into his mind in words and bright-colored images: the things carrying him were taflak, the intelligent but primitive natives of this world which Confederates called Majesty. They lived on what they called “the Sea of Leaves,” a name for the entire planet in their own curious, whistling tongue. The object at the center of the taflak eye was more than just a retina (although its light-absorbing outer surface served that purpose, too), it was their brain.
    And they were supposed to be friendly.
    “Hey, you guys!” Berdan wriggled a wrist, trying to attract the attention of one of the taflak carrying him. “Hey, put me down a second, will you?”
    The creature ignored him.
    He tried the taflak on the other side with the same result.
    Two more of the odd natives were helping to carry him. Kicking his legs, however, only caused their fuzzy tentacles to tighten about his ankles until both of his feet began to grow cool and numb and fall asleep. He wondered where they intended taking him, how long this peculiar journey would last, and what they’d do with him when they got there—and was sorry he’d thought to ask.
    He also wondered how it was that the taflak, with just three skinny tentacles apiece, somehow managed to keep their heads (a figurative turn of phrase at best) above the weeds, when he himself, with four much broader limbs, had settled toward the center of the planet. The half dozen natives escorting his bearers were even doing cartwheels—revolving limb over limb, while at the same time passing the stubby, long-bladed spears they carried from the tentacle about to hit the “ground” before them to another high above their plump, triangular torsos.
    As soon as he’d asked himself this question, he knew from the information his implant had absorbed back aboard ship that the taflak were of much lighter construction than human beings—it was the same idea he’d had about the many-legged monster. For millions of years they’d evolved in this environment, among this infinity of leaves, and the ends of their tentacles splayed into hundreds of fine-stranded supporting “fingers,” each over a foot long.
    An unassisted human or a simian, without such support, would sink into the denser growth to a depth in the biosphere sufficient to immobilize him, where he’d die of suffocation or starvation (dehydration being inconceivable) if he wasn’t eaten alive first by the voracious wildlife rumored to infest it. Berdan’s smartsuit might have let him survive—at least until things got around to the “eaten alive” part—but it was old, worn, and had never been subjected to a test like this. He’d never even been able to get the hood, which lay limp and useless across his chest, to fasten around his head in the proper manner.
    He could sure use that Brightsuit now, he thought, if he had some ham and eggs.
    More than a hundred foolhardy individuals, his implant told him—Confederate, not native taflak—disappeared without a trace on this planet every year.
    Watch out for the rats.
    His implant also informed him the monstrous beast which had tried to eat him earlier was a “can-can,” so called because its long rows of many legs (three in number, two where one would have expected them to be, and a third where most Earth animals kept their backbones) resembled those of a human chorus line. Berdan’s life had been in real danger. However, compared to other, more hungry and dangerous things lurking deeper in the Sea of Leaves, the can-can was regarded by the colonists who’d written the brochure as a minor pest, a spoiler of picnics, a