Read Online Brightsuit MacBear by L. Neil Smith - Free Book Online Page B

biosphere of Majesty would tolerate no other plant life, but existed in ready symbiosis with countless animal organisms living on or beneath its surface—as if it were the vast, green, living ocean it resembled. Numerous Earth-native species had been transplanted to Majesty, although often with a kind of success that hadn’t always been deliberate. Since the planet’s discovery, many types of Earthian animals had found a home in the worldwide moss, including thousands of species of birds, and, it seemed everybody kept telling him, hordes of large ferocious rats.
    Watch out for the rats.
    By some happy chance, he still held onto both his Kevlar zipper bag and his father’s briefcase. With his arms spread wide, they helped to support his weight.
    Since he couldn’t do much of anything else at the moment, he began deliberate breathing, as slow and deep as he could manage it, feeling his heart beat, willing it to slow, a difficult task in the panic-generating atmosphere of a steambath.
    As he relaxed, his brain began to work again. Some of the shock and surprise wore off. Berdan began to be aware of other things besides the sky, the light, and the odors, among them the soft sighing of a gentle breeze rustling what must have been quintillions of miniature leaves paving the entire planet. Maybe, he found himself thinking, with this much vegetation—and not much of anything else—you might even be able to hear the stuff growing. Maybe this was what he heard, or imagined he heard, now: a sort of odd creaking which—
    Berdan jumped, as much as he was able to, and almost lost hold of his bags. Breathing, despite himself, in rapid, shallow gasps again, he thought he could feel some small, hard-jointed, many-legged crawly thing on the back of his neck. With careful, slow movements, he drew his outspread arms together, held both handles, bag and briefcase, with one hand—their weight on his chest pushed him down further into the leaves—and reached up with the hand he’d managed to free.…
    Nothing.
    Well, whatever it had been, he’d given it all the time in the world to get away—
    —or to squiggle down the back of his suit!
    At this spine-chilling thought, Berdan squirmed, sinking deeper with every movement, until the leaves began closing over his face like living quicksand.
    Panic threatened to seize him.
    He refused to let it.
    Again he forced himself to relax, taking deep breaths (after all, he thought, they might be his last, and he might as well enjoy them), and spread his arms out again.
    It didn’t work.
    This stuff wasn’t water, or even quicksand for that matter. Even when he settled down, stopped sinking, he didn’t float back to the top. It was hopeless. He wouldn’t be able to hold still and would go on sinking, deeper every minute, until—
    “ Screeeeegh! ”
    “ Yaaaaaaagh! ”
    Behind him, something much larger than whatever creepy-crawly he’d worried about earlier bellowed and reared up over his head. Berdan screamed at the same time. A shadow fell over his face. Huge and black, it blotted out the sun.
    The first, most hideous and lasting impression the thing made on Berdan’s mind was of legs , thousands upon thousands of legs. The horror rearing above him seemed to be composed of nothing but restless, wiggling, spike-jointed legs.
    It was at least as wide as Berdan was tall, about the same color as the vegetation, and smelled like a stack of dinner dishes which had been left in the sink for a week. What he could see of it was twice his height. More, perhaps: he realized, in some remote part of his mind, it must be a great deal longer than it appeared to support the portion standing up among the leaves. Either that or it was built like a bird, a great deal lighter than it looked.
    He noticed the jaws, similar in construction to the legs, restless in the same way, three huge, sweeping hooks of shiny, chitinous material, with odd bristly patches and dull-toothed saw edges moist and glistening on