Free Brightsuit MacBear by L. Neil Smith Page B

tipper-over of garbage cans, in short, a giant thousand-legged cockroach.
    Time passed.
    The taflak carrying Berdan, while ignoring his attempts to communicate with them (his internal travelogue maintained that many of the Majestan natives spoke intelligible, if somewhat high-pitched, English) loosened their uncomfortable grip on his ankles. One by one their cartwheeling escorts began switching off with them, sharing the burden. As soon as the pins-and-needles tingling went away, he grew so relaxed in this position he surprised himself by dozing off.
    As a result, he didn’t know how much time had passed—he’d been far too busy to ask his implant what time it was when he’d first fallen into the leaves—when the taflak slowed, took up a new, more excited whistling, and were greeted by several dozen more of their own kind, making the same sorts of sounds.
    They’d come to a village.
    Dozens of noisy individuals ran out to greet them, some of the greeters perfect miniatures of the hunters who carried Berdan. These small ones wheeled up to examine their find, or chirped at their fathers and elder brothers until they were given the spears to carry the last few steps—or revolutions, Berdan corrected.
    Everybody, it seemed, loves a parade.
    Having achieved a degree of civilization, the taflak were no longer quite as much at home on the Sea of Leaves—any more than the average human would be in the kind of equatorial jungle where the race evolved—as the can-can. Also, since they employed fire and were obvious toolmakers and users, they required a firmer, more stable base for their activities than the vegetation itself provided.
    Thanks to this reasoning and the information he’d absorbed, Berdan wasn’t surprised to be carried up a long, sloping ramp onto a large raftlike structure, woven from the dried stems and branches of the single species of plant life on the planet. No doubt its invention had been a major milestone in taflak history.
    Atop the woven platform—to Berdan the pattern of its weave resembled some of the checked or shredded cereals he was accustomed to eating for breakfast—from squat beehive-shaped domes of the same material, emerged dozens more of the odd sapients, the taflak equivalent of women, old men, and children, eager, he thought, to see what the hunting party had brought home this time.
    Berdan wasn’t certain he liked being a trophy.
    He was a great deal less happy when, instead of setting him on his feet, now that the security and solidity of the village platform lay beneath them, they paraded him about, pausing at each and every hut so the inhabitants could examine him on their own doorsteps with a giant glassy eye and curious tentacle before his bearers passed on to the next dwelling and the next exhibition. This happened several times before Berdan’s patience was exhausted.
    “Okay, okay! Enough’s enough!”
    This time, he struggled much harder than before, flailing both his arms, jerking at the imprisoning tentacles, kicking his legs. The brochure inside his head had been correct in one respect: the taflak were light of build. Although close to his size, he guessed the largest of them weighed no more than thirty or forty pounds, about the weight of a medium-sized dog. Under different circumstances he’d have been waving them around like laundry on a wash line.
    The implant, however, had understated their strength—more dismaying than surprising to the boy at present—and the fact that, rooted in the tight-woven matting underfoot, the hundreds of slim tendrils sprouting from the ends of their velvety tentacles made them all but immovable when they wanted to be.
    And it appeared, right now, they wanted to be.
    “Let me down, you jerks!”
    The four taflak, who’d carried him to yet another section of the town raft or platform, obliged him this time. The whistling and chirping of their audience rose to an intolerable level. Stopping, they let him go, dropping the squirming boy