Brightsuit MacBear by L. Neil Smith Page B

vessels, and so on, from the giant starship down to scouting machines which carried a single passenger.
    It never occurred to Berdan, who’d grown up in the Confederacy, to wonder why a civilization with something like the Thorens Broach needed starships and auxiliaries. While a Broach could reach out from its anchor point in time and space to place people and cargo anywhere within a range of several light years, it was difficult, dangerous, and expensive to do so without a second, receiving station at the destination end. Most of the smaller spaceships were equipped, as their primary function, to carry and install such a receiving station.
    Others did preliminary exploration.
    The driving machinery—no more than a turn of phrase, since it contained not a single moving part—of the Tom Edison Maru herself was to be found on this lowest level, along with everything required to maintain her environment and accomplish her mission: circulation pumps, filtration plants, chemical refineries, and fusion reactors. In this sense, the ship was rather like any of the vast industrial cities of Earth or her better developed colonies.
    This was the one portion of Tom Edison Maru where one was always aware—unless one was a fifteen-year-old boy on a desperate mission of his own—he was aboard a starship, itself a giant machine, pulsing and throbbing with more pent-up energy than humanity had expended during the first ten thousand years of its Earthbound history.
    Berdan, however, and even his less-preoccupied fellow travelers, were given small opportunity to see any of this. Stepping out of the final transport patch his implant had directed him to, he faced what, to an inhabitant of an earlier age, would have seemed like a huge hotel lobby or airport terminal, surrounded at its perimeter by an endless bank of small, glass-sided booths.
    Here and there, people were entering these booths and disappearing. At the opposite end of the terminal, heavy-wheeled containerized loads were being guided into double- and quadruple-sized booths. Elsewhere, a smaller number of individuals were appearing inside certain booths, to all appearances from nowhere, and coming out into the terminal area, most of them with a look of relief on their faces.
    Berdan noticed this much and shuddered, wondering what it must be like down there on the planet Majesty, which Tom Edison Maru was orbiting.
    Along the center of the enormous room, a series of several circular information desks was manned—or, rather, beinged —by living entities of several species, ready to answer questions and solve problems for the Broach company’s customers. It was an old-fashioned touch, but, like Mr. Meep’s insistence on live waiters, one which lent a friendly, personal feeling. It may also have been necessary to encourage nervous first-time Broach passengers.
    Berdan, considering himself one of these, was glad to have someone to consult about it. None of them seemed busy at the moment, and he had his choice.
    He walked up to the nearest desk.
    “May I help you?” The receptionist was a pretty human girl not much older than Berdan himself.
    “I hope so. I want to go planetside, or whatever you say, to Majesty. How do I do it?”
    “Do you have any particular destination in mind? And please don’t just repeat ‘planetside’ or ‘Majesty’—that’s a whole world down there, you know.”
    “Well,” he told her, “it’s like this: my grandfather took one of the shuttles, but…” Berdan hesitated, uncomfortable and aware he was treading on someone’s rights to personal privacy.
    Again.
    The girl, accustomed to some hesitation on the part of certain of her clientele, was patient with Berdan, although she might not have been if she’d known the reason. “Yes?”
    “Er, I thought I’d surprise him, that is if I could find out where he went.”
    The girl looked at Berdan in an odd way, but without, he hoped, too much suspicion. “Your grandfather, you