The Blue Marble Gambit

THE BLUE MARBLE GAMBIT

By

Jupiter Boson

CHAPTER 1
. HEADGAME

“Monkey," hissed a green-cabled
serving robot, “
food!
”

Three metal arms shot a silver platter
through blue air. With machine
perfection it
crash landed
in front of me.

The robot ran away on silver legs.

The platter steamed.

I tapped the smoking lid.

Heavy. Armored, even. That was
ominous anywhere, but in a seedy CasinoPlex somewhere on the curdled side of
the Milky Way, in the company of three aliens from hostile species who had
insisted on buying dinner, it made me as a suspicious as a Trojan receiving a
second wooden horse.

"What
is it?" I asked the alien on my right, a large crustaceanoid sheathed in
an ochre carapace and dangling a giant fighting claw. An acrid stench filled my nose.

"A
rare delicacy, just for you," the Mainer replied through his translator
box. Somewhere on distant Earth, I hoped,
his cousins were being lowered into boiling water. Mainers were living proof of the general
rule that bad aliens looked like good food.

"We
spent much time picking it," confided the Orlyx. Acting as dealer, he sat across from me,
a jumble of midnight-blue spider parts topped by three aqua heads bobbing on
snaky pink necks.

"Oh
I hope it's the right thing," murmured the gelatinous blob on my
left. Known as a Meba, he had a
knack for straight flushes, as evidenced both by the large pile of glimmering
holochips stacked before him, and a russet smear on his port quarter shaped
like South America.

“Think of it as an interspecies
gesture. Proceed, so we may return
to the game."

The
game. Holopoker. It was a constant in the seedy,
ammonia-tinged metal cavern that made up the Round-N-Round Orbital CasinoPlex,
an establishment already decrepit when Earth's Pyramids were new.

I had been on the way the leisure world of
Eros for a long-overdue leave when despite the stern prohibitions of a small
pile of human laws, codes, and regulations, two of which mentioned me by name,
I gave in to the weak gravity of the
CasinoPlex
,
dropped in, and found myself once again playing poker with aliens. But with the appearance of the armored
but dented platter this particular game had taken a new twist.

Three
sets of eyes were on me as I whipped off the blastproof cover.

Then
four sets of eyes were on me.

The
fourth was lying on my plate. Purple, wide open, and fixed.
But only for a moment.
Then with a glittering flash the
thing snarled and leapt for my throat, fangs slavering, which is
something
few fangs actually do.

Years
of training snapped into play. First, I screamed. Once this
was out of the way I used the utensils - the fork and knife were fairly
effective, the spoon useless - to fight back. The killbot's razorclaws nicked at my
wrist as I plunged a fork into an armored scale. One tine snapped off and the rest skidded
into the gravtable's surface, adding another rip to the green felt.

The
killbot fired a jet of acid. I
dodged and the yellow arc streaked over my shoulder and through the blue-tinged
air before gouging a steaming crater in the metal deck. A centipede-like repairbot began to
snake over.

"Deft,
for a human," noted the Mainer, now exuding the sharp odor of crustacean
displeasure. Tiny circular saw
blades extended from the killbot's mouth and slime flew as they reached for
me. I stabbed my fork into the
mechanism, breaking off another tine but jamming the whirling knives. Two tines left.

"Perhaps
we should have used the poison," observed the Meba, as plates of chitin
armor shuttled across his rippling surface like drunken icebergs.

A
fire plume burst from the beast and I feinted back, forth, and forth
again. Tiny poison flechettes
zinged past before I found a seam in the armored scales and dug in, seeking the
power conduit. What was left of my
fork held the mechanical assassin down as I sawed like a game show contestant
trying to eat a shoe, glad that I hadn't been using chopsticks. With a final thrust I cut through and
the killbot crackled to a halt, a tiny missile port winking open and then
closed, no power to launch.

The
three aliens at my table rattled forward, proving the old adage that it's hard
to move quietly when you're wearing your skeleton on the outside.

"How
disappointing," said the Mainer, claw clacking in
dismay.
My face stung from tiny bits of chitin
spattering from the serrated edges.

"Pesky,"
sighed one Orlyx head.

"Monkey,"
finished another.

"Poison!
Poison, I said!
But
no.
You Orlyxs always have
to be so dramatic," carped the Meba, suddenly mottled with a violet flush
of dismay.

"No
matter," intoned the Mainer, shifting in a way that demonstrated just how
huge he was.
Three
meters tall, three hundred kilos, and eight feet, in the sense of walking, not
old-style measuring.
“We'll
do it the old-fashioned way. Court
diz Astor, as authorized by the Galactic Code, we are here for your head."

I'd
figured this was coming; although the Galaxy was a rough place and humans were
held in low regard, the serving of lethal meals stretched even the usual
envelope of hostility. It was a
scant few centuries since our first visit to the Moon, and the rest of the
Galactic party had been rolling for longer than mankind had been a
species. As newcomers to the
Galactic scene humans were widely resented and ridiculed. Hardly better than protozoa, according
to most.
Bacteria
with thumbs, according to others.
At least some of this arose from the perception that we hairless chimps
had appropriated - well, misappropriated was how they thought of it - Earth's
sentiency slot, which rightly belonged to more Galactically palatable critters
such as offshoots of ants or bees or roaches. What had been on Earth a long but
temporary prehistoric age of
unpleasantly-huge
creepy
crawlies was still going strong on other worlds. Nature loves a bug, as the saying goes. Thank Zot for asteroid impacts and boots
- as another saying, popular only on Earth, goes.

But
since no handy asteroid with mayhem on its mind was likely to appear here, I
was on my own. The lone exit to the
CasinoPlex was blocked and there was no way I could battle all three massive
aliens, who were not only better armed, but better legged, better tentacled,
and better mandibled.
So much for flight or fight.
Which left humanity's third and most
often-used option, a perpetual favorite of politicians.

"This
must be a mistake," I lied, while sliding forward a holochip to raise the
bet in the almost-forgotten game. “I am not this . . . who? Quark? Quark dill-"

"Court
diz Astor!" spat the Mainer, his razor mandibles crushing the consonants
and eviscerating the vowels. His
compound eyes somehow managed to bulge.

"That's
the chap," I agreed, pausing thoughtfully before dropping a single card in
the vac chute and drawing another from the Orlyx. What a surprise. It was even worse than those I held. I raised my two eyes, simple binocular
vision, no stalks or compound lenses. I knew I looked pathetic to these advanced aliens, from their ancient
and oh-so-evolved races.

“Who is he?" I asked curiously.

"
diz
Astor.
Court diz Astor.
You are Court diz Astor," tittered the Orlyx's middle head.

"Come
again?"

One
of the Orlyx's three beaked heads retracted then bobbed upward like an
unchained buoy to stare at a tiny golden claw which held a tinier ochre
viewscreen.

"What we know of Court diz Astor will
surprise you. Court diz Astor was
once a space pirate, the first among his kind. While still a mere hatchling he raided
human ships, always alone, and never killing."

"Never
killing
them
," interrupted the
Mainer, maroon head-fringes quivering. "He is not so respectful of his Galactic betters!"

"I
am getting to that," agreed the Orlyx. “Court diz Astor left piracy to join
what is known to the monkeys as - the Fist. He gave up committing crimes against
humanity to commit crimes
for
humanity. And against the
Galaxy."

I
took on a look of exaggerated outrage. “The Fist! The Fist is a human myth! Ha ha!" I laughed at the
notion of anyone believing in that supposedly secret and officially disavowed
organization, which was nevertheless the subject of books, vids, and
gossip. Run by a rather evil Uncle
of mine, it took its name from the fact that despite a stomach-churning
plethora of pincers, mouth-spines, tentacles, and psuedopods, precious few
alien species had anything quite like a hand or, more specifically, a
fist. And from the Fist's primary
purpose: whenever necessary, possible, or profitable, to pummel aliens. All for the benefit of Mother Earth. But the Fist's reliance on criminals,
and the identities of those stalwart guardians of the Blue Marble, were its
most closely guarded secrets.

"The
Fist is real enough," the Mainer clattered.

"But
being a member could hardly be a crime!" I suggested.

The Meba swelled globularly. “Court diz Astor has robbed.
And stolen.
And cheated.
And killed. He has violated innumerable sections of
the Galactic Code."

An
overly restrictive body of regulations, I noted silently.

The Mainer cut in, its breath foul with
alien brine, a mix of old cheese, older pickles, and the inside of a dog. "An InterGalactic pest.
A stellar scourge.
His head is wanted on six worlds."

The number was closer to nine but this
didn't seem the place for a correction.

The
skin atop each of the Orlyx's heads wrinkled in a sign of speculative
interest. “He has been uncommonly
effective, considering his many handicaps."

"Handicaps?"

"A
paltry two legs and two arms - no pincers or mandibles at all."

Around
me a sea of pincers and mandibles and cilia and feelers waved, as if each owner
was reassuring themselves that they were not doomed to a horribly naked
existence without such basics.

"This
must be a mistake," I said easily. “I'm not Court diz Astor. I'm
. . .,
uh . . . Erran T. Scansion! Wandering Poet and Space Minstrel!"

"Unlikely,"
pointed out the Mainer.

"Extremely,"
concurred the
Orlyx
, but then his center head did a
passable
double-take
. “But out of curiosity, what form of
poetry do you practice?"

"Er,
haiku," I replied, and for good reason. Anyone could trot out a haiku. In fact, bad haiku is almost an oxymoronic
term - the worse a haiku is, the better it is. Show me a bad haiku and I'll show you a
great haiku.

"Then
share with us, O poet," intoned the Orlyx heads in three-part disharmony
as an unsavory ripple washed up and down the pale-orange cilia that adorned its
cloven thorax.

"Easy
enough. Several come to mind. How about:

Court
diz Astor is

a
name for trouble and pain

just
you look at it.

Damp
ocular pits moistened. Compound
eyes glittered. Wobbly eyestalks
twisted.
Hardly a
standing ovation, although my audience had plenty of legs.
But I was undeterred.

"OK. How about:

Universe
of bugs

Far
too many legs and limbs

Oh
for a big shoe.”

Now
gleaming viewtubes bent, bump-covered vid tasters thrust, and sonic imagers
thrummed until my eyeballs ached. Finally the Orlyx fixed the gaze of two heads on me while the third
looked away and spoke.

"Those
are rather bad haiku."

"Exactly,"
I nodded, not sure which head to address but settling for a spot somewhere
between the left two. “They are a
new art form: Bad Haiku. Quite
avant-garde.
The
cutting-edge of poetry.
The essence of the ultra-modern.
You have very discerning auditory
organs."

There
was the ripping-paper sound of either alien laughter or alien derision. It could have been both.

"We
will add bad poetry to your list of offenses, Court diz Astor."

"What?"
I tried to sound shocked.

"We
neglected to mention that there is one other thing," rattled the Mainer,
"which proves your identity."

“My devastating good looks? Always causing
trouble, those.”

"Your
DNA," crunched the Orlyx, placing a thumb-sized remote scanner on the
shimmering surface of the table. “We have only a partial sample from Court diz Astor; most of the blood
was plasmalated by the energy bolt that nicked him." I could still feel
the sting on my shoulder. “But what
we have . .
. matches
you."

I
glared at that tiny device and its intrusive, multi-wavelength optics, coursing
up and down the hidden ladders of my genetic material, peeking under my
ribosomes, gazing into my cellular nuclei. Some things should be kept private.

The
aliens crackled forward. “It is
such a pleasure to meet you, diz Astor. Your head appears pleasantly portable."

The
situation reminded me of an interesting Galactic parallel, one that suggested
either a fantastic misunderstanding of evolution, or a vast and wholly
unappreciated cosmic sense of humor. For throughout the Galaxy, the more an alien looked like human food, the
nastier the alien. This theory
dictated that Mainers were bad news, and so they were. Orlyxes and Mebas didn't look as much
like food, although the Meba resembled a very bad stew, but they looked bad
enough.

"Well,"
I shrugged, "you
could
just take
my head."

The
Mainer closed in to do just that. The Mainer was the muscle - at this particular larval stage they roamed
the Galaxy, as assassins and mercenaries and killers. The Orlyx would be the brain - three of
them, in fact, linked by a network of quantum tubes that served as nerve
fibers. The Meba I was less sure
about; he clarified the issue by extruding a pair of wet and slimy pincers and
slithering forward while flushing a bright, enthusiastic pink.

"Or?"
prompted the Orlyx.

I
slid a thick holochip across the table, again raising the bet. This time a tiny,
anatomically-correct
image glowed over the chip.

"Or
. .
. You
could play me for it."

A
short pause while strange impulses ricocheted through the dark tangles of three
bobbing brains.

"Game,"
he replied.

"But-"
said the Mainer, still in-bound, several small antennae on his upper carapace
waggling furiously.

"Sit!"
commanded the Orlyx. The Mainer
froze, antennae and all, as did the Meba. I held my breath, even though it was laced with a whiff of putrid brine.

"Sit!"
repeated the Orlyx, emphasizing with some very elaborate motions of its cilia.

The
aliens snapped, crackled and popped into their seats.

The
Orlyx kept one head turned on each of its alien companions, while the middle
orb turned slowly to me. “Now. We play!"

The
game was a form of holopoker, played with a deck of 111 shape-shifting cards
and a set of rules more complex than medieval Japanese court etiquette, all of
which create certain chess-like qualities. The game has tides of battle and even a little fog of war. And certain breeds of aliens loved to
gamble. It was my luck - whether
good or bad remained to be seen - that this particular kill team included as
its leader one of these.

"But
I want his head now," grumbled the Mainer, his claw clacking like a mouth
watering.

"Soon
enough, my red-shelled friend. A
little sport, first," soothed the Orlyx. At this larval stage, Mainers busily worked
to telescope a millennium of violence and aggression into a single short
century, at the end of which they would return to their home planet and
metamorphosis into benthic, sessile, plant-like underwater critters, merrily filter-feeding
while lying to each other about their larval exploits.

The
Orlyx began to deal, spiky limbs blurring out spatters of shiny cards that
glimmered in neat piles before each of us.

As
agreed I slid a thick glimmering holochip to the center of the table. It bore an image of my face, craggy,
scarred, and topped by short orange hair, and now literally on the table. My face gazed back, in palpable disappointment.
Have
fun on your own
, I imagined it hissing at me.
Ichabod
.

Of
course they had to gamble too. The
Mainer used a miniature crimson pincer of unsettling delicacy to slide forward
a glowing holochip adorned with an ice-blue mouth tentacle. The Orlyx put in a frost-colored pusher
spike. The Meba wagered a
nicely-turned
quasi-pod of an ebony hue.

"Hang
on, here," I said, smiling my best alien-insulting smile. “The bet is one head. Not these other, ah, pieces."

"The
bet," corrected the Orlyx, "is one human head."

I
nodded, demonstrating the mobility of the bet.

The
Orlyx pulled a tiny sliver of material from somewhere and set it on the
table. It blossomed into a huge
musty yellow-paged hidebound book whose mass threatened for a moment to capsize
the gravtable, until the ancient and balky repulsors compensated.

Galactic Book Of Corporeal Equivalents
read the title, in all seventeen
Galactically-approved
languages, several of which I could decipher. The Orlyx used ebony spikes to nimbly
flip the pages, which were faintly translucent and layered with multiple layers
of
microscopically-fine
holoprint.

"Feeling
impatient," the Mainer muttered in a low rattle, and began to snap his
fighting claw. It sounded like
bones breaking.

After
a long search the starboard Orlyx head raised to fix its three shimmering black
eyes on me. “As we thought, you
simple live-borne spawn, according to the Galactic Book the parts corresponding
to a primate skull are those we have wagered."

Species-ism
was again rearing its ugly, so to speak, head.

"Don't
close the book," I said, and tossed into the pot my heart and liver, both
accurately depicted by small glowing images. The holo heart was actually beating,
which nicely illustrated the point that sometimes too much cleverness is . . .
too much. The aliens again
consulted the Galactic Book, grumbled and chittered, and finally put in their
heads, and so the stakes were sort of even, except for the three-headed Orlyx,
for whom the loss of a head was but a minor social inconvenience, a petty faux
pas, a temporary embarrassment.

The
Orlyx was obviously cheating. Good.

The
aliens complained as I slid another fat holochip forward. This one held a tiny image of my right
arm. Then I added another, bearing
my left. There were more annoyed
consultations of the Galactic Book, and the aliens put in more holochips. I
raised
again. They came up with pincers,
eyestalks, ocular pits, mandibles, antennae, and more. The miniaturized dismembered bodies that
made up the pot looked like the aftermath of some awful interspecies space
wreck.

More
flashing deals of holocards, more body parts, and finally I tossed in three
toes and my pancreas. Still more
cards flickered out in the intricate ballet and again I drew and discarded and
huffed and grinned, finally adding two sebaceous glands and my aorta to the
pot. I had been carefully tracking
the other player's cards and I knew my own hand to be weak but within striking
range. I laid down three
cards which
, united as the rules allowed, would be able to
attack and capture another player's cards. I waited tensely. This was a
critical juncture for my head and I.

The
table took in my gambit for a long while in silence. I imagined strange pulses sparking
through the dark and misshapen caverns of alien
brain pans
.

Then
with a triumphant clatter the Mainer laid down a set of four cards and swept
mine up. Captured. I could not win.

Perfect,
I said to myself with relief.

"I
don't have a human head," the Mainer remarked conversationally, as a
rubbery red stalk on his frontal lobe swung towards me. The eyeball tacked to its end spun
furiously.

"Yet,"
the Mainer finished.

The
death spiral of the game wound tighter and tighter but the ending was
certain. At least I would have my dissection
previewed when the chips were distributed.

Finally
there were no more moves to make and no more body parts to bet. What was left of me wouldn't fill a
sock. Especially since both feet were
on the table.

"Final
call," intoned the Orlyx.

I
gazed at my shimmering squares. I
didn't want to lose, but I didn't want to win, either. I didn't have the equipment. Only the Mainer did. That big claw, coupled with that nasty
attitude.

I
set down my cards.
Three Rexes of Comets.
Not great, not bad. A
gamble.

The
Orlyx showed two Suns. Weak. The Mainer and the Meba were both
better, but that didn't matter. Low
card was the loser.

"You
lose," I said to the Orlyx. Then I looked at the Mainer. “And you win."

"You
lose, Orlyx," said the Mainer, tensing. An overpowering stench of ancient alien
pond water drifted across the table, as unspeakable muscles prepared and scent
pores dilated.

"Awk!"
said the Orlyx in dismay. “Wait a
chron, monkey-food, let's think-"

A blur from my right.
Snick
went the Mainer's
fighting claw. A single jet of
purple blood jetted upward before a valve clamped shut. The Mainer hadn't waited, hadn't
thought. They never do.

"Urp!"
said the Orlyx's right head, glancing across the sudden
gap
which
now separated it from the left. The left head gazed back forlornly.

The
removed head perched on the gravtable beside the Mainer, gazing sadly at its
former home with glassy eyes. Already a tiny bud was rising on the mesa of the neck, the new head
regrowing. This was the moment I'd
been looking for.

I
stood up. “Pardon me. We humans have to purge our excretory
organs frequently. I'll be right
back."

I
didn't expect it to work and it didn't. The kill team immediately began shuffling, stammering, and oozing to
their various walking appendages. They swung into an encircling scythe of chitin and gristle and armored
jelly and stopped me short. But I
only had to cover two meters.

I did.

"There
is still the matter of the Galactic Code and
your
head," said the Mainer. Apparently heads are like potato
chips. It's hard to take just one.

The
Crunchies crackled as they spread wider to flank me.

And
here, as I'd been unhappily expecting, an interesting aspect of Galactic
history came into play.

This
CasinoPlex, like many others, had been built eons before by a now-extinct race
whose physical form was uncertain, but which some scientists conjectured to
have been something like butane-soaked balsa wood. This novel construction left them
deathly afraid of fire, but not at all bothered by vacuum. It also accounted for some unusual
design features. On their newer
stations automatic detectors would, upon the outbreak of even a minor blaze, instantly
flood all compartments with a thick green foam that instantly smothered any flames
and, almost as instantly, smothered any air-breathers. The builders, of course, didn't breathe.

But
the older stations were somewhat different, having been built before the
perfection of the suffocating foam. These earlier stations used a different and manual system of fire
extinguishing: long orange handles on the bare metal support beams were to be
pulled in case of fire. According
to a small plaque, this would trigger a cool, safe, refreshing shower of water. This was a lie. Pulling the handle would actually blast
open the nearest viewports, dumping all the air, occupants, and contents into
deep
space.
This would quickly extinguish any fire.

In
most circumstances it wasn't a great option.

These
weren't most circumstances.

The
team separated, spreading still wider - a tribute to my reputation - and
crackling closer.

"An interesting game, yes, diz Astor?" said the Orlyx,
now somewhat recovered.