Brightsuit MacBear Read Free Page A

proud of chanting idiotic doggerel. He and the pair with him, Berdan thought, weren’t your ordinary textbook bullies. Olly was a stringbean of a kid, with bleached-looking skin (what showed between his thousands of freckles), curly orange hair sticking out clownlike over his ears, and bulging blue eyes which watered in “outdoor” light.
    Somewhere, in somebody’s battered old attic trunk or a secondhand store, he’d discovered a pair of celluloid-rimmed spectacles, useless in a time and place where correcting poor eyesight was a surgical procedure. He’d pushed the lenses out, wearing the empty, ugly frames perched down at the pointed end of his skinny nose, where he believed—and never hesitated to assert—they made him look “inelleckshual.” Berdan thought they made him look even dumber than he was.
    In fact, Olly’s nickname, wherever he happened to go, was “Geeky.” Everybody called him that. He seemed, for some strange reason of his own, to accept it.
    The pair either side of Geeky shook with theatrical laughter and began chanting “ Chickensquat! Chickensquat! ” in a way which kept Berdan from answering, just as they intended, even if he’d thought of something clever to say. He gave up, shrugged, and stepped forward, intending to pass between them and be on his way.
    “ Hey, Chickensquat! ” Someone grabbed Berdan by the arm.
    The complaint—and the grab—came from Kenjon “Crazy” Zovich, in some ways the worst of the three. He was nicknamed (although no one Berdan knew had ever dared say it to his face) not just for his nasty sense of humor, but because he possessed a violent, unpredictable temper (or it possessed him) when other people didn’t think his jokes were funny or tried to play jokes on him.
    “Hey, Chickensquat, you oughta know by now,” Zovich warned him, holding on to Berdan’s arm, “we ain’t gonna let you off that easy, Chicken-chicken-squat-squat!”
    He danced in place around Berdan, turning him as he went.
    “We ain’t even close to through with you!”
    Berdan seized the offending hand by the fingertips and peeled it off his arm, giving the boy a gentle but definite shove, out of his path. He tried to walk on.
    “Hey!” Zovich shouted at no one and everyone.
    “You saw it! He nishiated force against me!”
    The proper word, of course, was “initiated,” and the charge false—stupid, in fact, since Zovich had grabbed Berdan first. However, Berdan realized with a renewal both of weariness and fear, logic wouldn’t stop trouble from coming now.
    “Youbetcha, Kenjon!” The third boy, Stoney Edders, grinned wide with conspiratorial glee, and Berdan realized the whole thing was a put-up job. This was where they’d been headed all along.
    “We saw it! He nishiated force!”
    Edders’ hand dropped to the faceted pommel of the broad-bladed dagger he was wearing. At the same time, Zovich made a gesture, cocking his thumb, pointing his extended index finger at Berdan’s head. He dropped the thumb with a flourish of imaginary recoil while making a swishing noise through clenched teeth. It was the sound they’d all made when they were younger, running, hiding, playing interplanetary explorer, a sound they’d heard in every telecom adventure they’d ever watched, the sound of a fusion-powered plasma pistol going off.
    Berdan spent a lot of his life dreading moments like this—he’d had to live through a good many—and not just because his grandfather never let him carry a pistol of his own, or even a dagger, to defend himself. Maybe in this instance it was just as well.
    Grandfather said it was wrong to inflict injury or take a life for any reason. Berdan thought he agreed: if a Golden Rule applied in the Confederacy (at least aboard Tom Edison Maru ), it was that nobody had a right to start a fight (though sometimes it seemed to Berdan the one way to prevent a fight was to be ready to finish it, regardless of who started it). If that idea, that it was wrong