The Blue Marble Gambit (13 page)

"But
Testors do not partake," I pointed out.

"They
do not," he slurred suspiciously.

I
plopped back into the pool. “There. You see? I am partaking. Therefore-"

"You
are not Testors!" Toona finished jubilantly. He relaxed, which looked like a sudden
wilt.

I
suddenly felt a very odd sensation. It reminded me of years before, on a smoky planet near Deneb, inhabited
by a variety of unseemly parasites. One of the local nasties was the spray-fly, which lobs aerosol mists of
eggs at any bodily orifices in range. Once inside, the eggs work their way into your brain, where, years
later, they suddenly hatch.

The
sensation of a great number of eggs hatching in the brain is said to be
extremely, well, odd, and for a moment I wondered if this might be
happening. But wouldn't Ned speak
up? I decided that I wasn't feeling the hatching of cranial spray-fly eggs,
though almost. I hadn't even seen a
spray-fly on Deneb. The odd
sensation was actually an idea. And
since it is not in my nature to second-guess or analyze my own ideas, I blurted
it out. Besides, it was a good one.

"Toona,
Coli and I have only just reached sprouthood," I said.

"Congratulations,"
Toona slurred.

"We
are learning the secrets and ways of our culture."

"They
are many and complex," Toona put in seriously.

"Yes,
yes, we know. We have studied
Statistical Proportionality, and-"

"That
is all you need, of course. You
know that it was not always our way?"

"Ah,
yes-" Great Zot, no! Not another lecture!

“Diz,
” Trina
hissed
over the link. “Astor.”

Toona
continued - he seemed to have a memorized spiel all ready to go. “Statistical Proportionality is a
modified system of majority rule, which includes an overlay of certain carefully
drawn protections for the less populous groups. For example, four percent of the
population consists of frizzle tops. By government mandate, frizzle tops occupy four percent of each and
every job category."

I
groaned to myself. “But if there
isn't a qualified frizzle top available?"

"You
are a devil! You seek to trick me, to send me to the butter sauce mines!"
I figured that was Ned having fun with some untranslatable term. “It doesn't matter if there isn't a
qualified frizzle top available! That is not the point! The point is absolute, rigid, mandated
equality! Only in this way can we achieve freedom! Besides, all qualifications are
subjective and illusory!"

"Has
the system always been like this?" I had to get this conversation to the
point. A much different point than
Toona was making. Maybe I could
take this bull by the horns and steer it. Then again, the problem with taking bulls by horns is getting gored.

"No. And it will not always be. Only until we naturally, and inevitably,
achieve absolute proportional participation."

Hmm. It sounded like I could introduce Toona
to a few million Marxists who'd once been left at the altar of communism. “Doesn't that defy the odds?"

"We
won't be stopped! It is too important! "

I
was already tired of this. Toona
was the worst kind of drunk: a boring drunk. Even violent drunks have the saving
grace of being entertaining.

"Have
another?" I inquired politely, splashing into the pit.

Toona
staggered up. “Of course," he
said.

I
guided him to the deep end, and held him there for a long while. Actually, I held him there until his
color began to change. Usually, I'd
noticed, the color changes stayed in the brown-yellow-green end of things. Toona, however, took an exciting chromic
swerve and began to verge on blue. I waited a while, curious to see how far he'd go. I finally quit at a nice aqua
shade. A dead Boff might raise
questions we didn't want to confront. I steered his quivering bulk to the side again.

He
crashed down with an especially loud slap.

Toona's
mind was still spewing out his last sentence. “-
the
natural
pinnacle of eons of evolution! The
culmination of the ages!"

Aha!
An opening! A mere sliver, but an
opening nonetheless!
Enough, perhaps, for a Finger.
“Is it true that the Old Ones once lived
on Boff? That they are part of our
evolution?" The Old
Ones, that
long-vanished race usually referred to as the
"Oh-Ohs," were the actual builders of the Time Oscillator.

"They
lived here," Toona slurred groggily, "but long before the first Boff
crawled from the garden into the swamp. They left a trove of marvelous machines in orbit." That was common knowledge.

"Where
are these machines now?" I asked.

"A
secret place! You will learn that at your initiation ceremony!"

No
we wouldn't, because we wouldn't be having any initiation ceremony. I hoisted Toona back into the
drink. “Have some more."

"Erg
ufg," he said.

I
lifted him up. His bilious yellow
eyes were cloudy. “Where are these
machines now?" I asked.

"Gastro,"
he rustled faintly. Great Zot! We
already knew that!

I
dunked him again, this time until his blue took on the faintest tinge of neon.

"Court!"
Trina sizzled.

I
brought him back up.

"But
where in Gastro, great master Toona?" A little fawning goes a long way
with most sentients. In fact, that
was once seriously proposed as a test of sentiency by one of the Galactic
Institutes: the ability to change one's behavior in response to shameless
fawning, whether it be boot-licking, stalk-sucking, or pseudopod-fondling.

"The
Hall of Marvels, in the Central Armory," he rattled weakly.

I
dropped him with another loud slap and turned to Trina.

"Ahh-HO!"

CHAPTER
11. GASTROGNOMIC

We
left Toona trembling quietly while we worked our way back to the hoverbus,
where the others were already reboarding on thousands of shaky
finger-legs. Orna, I noticed,
looked rather bedraggled, and everyone shared a similar look of decided abuse,
as if at the twisted hands of some evil Master Chef. If you saw any of them on your plate you'd
pass them up and go straight to dessert. They were hardly even food anymore. After a moment's reflection I decided that they weren't excused from the
hostile-food theory, since they would soon enough look like food
again.

In
the company of these sad salad rejects, the rest of the ride lasted nearly
seven hours, which in a neat trick of subjective relativity managed to feel
exactly one hour longer than eternity itself. Maybe, one decides at moments like this
(moments? or just one single taffy-like moment, stretching infinitely?) eternal
life wouldn't be so great.

The
painful creep of time ground to a complete halt when, like some kind of
indescribably rude synchronized swimming team, every Boff on board made that
artless transition from drunk to desperately hungover. They announced their arrival in this new
territory by extruding a wide array of putrid slimes, slimy gels, and
gelatinous foams, from an even wider array of dribbling gaps, gaping pores and pouring
apertures. The appearance alone was
horrifying, and yet was almost pleasant compared to the squelching sounds and
sulphurous odors.

Steaming
yellow gourds; brown runny ropes
;
beige liquid. All running into the deep steel channels
cut into the floorboards.
Canals of horror.
I began to wonder if we should do some fake extruding ourselves, but
that was beyond both our technology and our preparations.
And, frankly, our
interests.
Besides, our own
activities - or lack - were clearly beyond the attentions of the belching,
drooping, leaking, off-color Boffs.

Outside,
we passed more of the same scenery. Or perhaps it was the same scenery over and over.

Green houses, small yards, five-legged pets.

Green houses, small yards, five-legged pets.

Green houses, small yards, five-legged pets.

Maddening. I felt my soul begin to skip gaily down
that nice flower-lined mental path that leads to Insanity. You don't have such a path in your
brain? Running right between the
corpus callosum and the occipital lobe?
Past the parietals, over the cerebellum?
No? Well, then,
good
for you. I do, and in order to avoid taking it, I
stopped looking outside. Of course,
by default I then had to look inside.
At the sick, and sickening, Boffs.
I felt the pull. Come, it whispered. Be crazy. Then none of this will matter. You might even like it.

Trina's
face was so stern with concentration that it looked like she was trying to
mentally calculate pi to the last digit, and might succeed. Whatever she was doing, at least it was
keeping her distracted.
A sound policy.
Since I wasn't in the mood for mental long division I left pi to Trina
and silently called up Ned. I would
try to reign in my careering subconscious by lassoing it and spurring it into
the dignified mental trot of work.

Ned
appeared as a tiny green elf on my shoulder. I didn't even blink at the appearance of
this miniature fanciful creature. Sometimes I worried that after years of routinely accepting such
appearances, I would eventually be so conditioned that I would ignore something
big, obvious, and lethal, under the mistaken assumption that Ned was once again
twisting my neurons for his own amusement.
For example, a huge hovertruck with my name on it.
Might I simply let it hit me, believing
Ned was having his fun? Such concerns alone were good enough reason for having
him ripped out between jobs - but the fact was, I spent a lot of time on
jobs. Even when he was gone, I
wondered about my perceptions. Suppose he wasn't really gone, but was just acting gone?

There
it was again: the undertow tug of madness, trying to drag me out to the Sea of
Insanity.

A
tiny foot tapped impatiently on my shoulder. I could feel all five tiny toes. No, six.
Of course.
Silly me. Elves have six toes.

"What
do we know," I silently asked Ned, "about our destination, the fine
city of Gastro?"

In
a high-pitched
voice which
was, though I hate to
resort to the word, elfin, Ned launched into a short spiel about Gastro. It sounded like it was lifted directly
from some tacky guidebook and was about as helpful. Gastro was a hyper-industrial city, the
largest on Boff and the planetary capital. Our quarry, the Time Oscillator, according to trusty Toona, was in the
Hall of Marvels of the Central Armory, located somewhere in the no-doubt green
heart of the city. Beyond that, we
didn't know much.

"The
Central Armory," I mused. “Sounds like a light-hearted, fun place, full of sunlight, flowers, and
laughing children."

"And
so it is, except that on Boff the sunlight is green, the flowers are
carnivorous, and the children are seeds," Ned sniffed. “By the way, the Central Armory was
designed during the last major Boffian civil war, and is impregnable to most
energy and all kinetic weapons. The
minimum explosive necessary to crack it is estimated to be a Level 3 Egg."

Zot
above, that wasn't very encouraging - not even a planet-buster could touch
it. But not necessarily
discouraging either - we had never had any intention of blasting our way in. Though the fact that it was so solid
implied that it would also be tightly secured. Maybe not, argued a stray slice of my
subconscious. Perhaps, the stray
slice continued, with so few visitors on Boff, the security will be relatively
light.

Possible,
but unlikely, given the Boffs' general nature, agreed the much larger portion
of my subconscious that I identified with. It may seem odd to think of yourself this way, but having someone like
Ned inside your skull works wonders on your perspective.

Ned
ignored the internal debate and continued, though my sub-cranial dialectic
seemed to guide his lecture. “The
Central Armory is protected by the Vegetorian Guard, an outfit of crack Boff
troops."

I
sat back and tried to make myself as comfortable as possible when surrounded by
a sodden mass of reeking, drooping plant creatures. Many of them were now, I saw with
disgust, completing the final turn of that downward spiral from drunkenly
pathetic to pathetically hungover. I focused on Ned as pale foam fizzed from my neighbors.

"The
Vegetorian Guard? Seems I've heard of them."

"Possibly. They are the elite, renowned for their
cruelty, ruthlessness, and special hatred for offworlders."

"Yum. They sound like ideal parents." A
nearby Boff shivered, froze,
then
began to leak yellow
jello.

"Ha
ha. In fact they are. In order to emphasize such traits in the
species, they are allowed to produce extra sprouts. Ironically, your attempt at sarcasm was
unintentionally accurate."

"Pity,"
I muttered, not watching as what looked like but certainly wasn't hydraulic
fluid ran from looked like but certainly wasn't a navel. “Won't let it happen again. So, elf-boy, how do we penetrate this
armory, so that we can marvel at the Marvels?" The Time Oscillator would
be only one of the thousands of ancient machines left by the mysterious Oh Ohs. All the devices were, if not devilishly
complex, at least demonically hard to figure out, and of the thousands, so far
Galactic science had been able to decipher only one.

That one had taken a team of top Galactic
scientists over fifteen years; never before in history had such an amount of
first-rate brainpower been expended on a single problem. The Galaxy had waited with breathless
anticipation until it got tired of holding its breath, and then it simply waited. Years passed, and still the Galaxy waited,
though at least it was no longer blue in the face. When the announcement finally came it
was in unexpectedly subdued tones: "success." Not
"Success!" or "Yippee!" Just "success." This was
explained when the team of top Galactic scientists revealed that they had
deciphered the operation of an almost-but-not-quite-sentient joke telling
machine which, due to its age, could never quite remember the punch lines. Perhaps that was the joke.

The
almost-but-not-quite-sentient joke telling machine was the only machine the
Boffs ever made available for study; the others were kept locked away in the
Hall of Marvels. One of these, the
Galaxy agreed, was a Time Oscillator; a bit of surviving Oh
Oh
script seemed to confirm this. But
no one had the faintest idea how to work it.

Except,
of course, just possibly Trina. Regardless, after the incident with the almost-but-not-quite-sentient
joke machine, the Boffs cut all further access to their trove of Oh Oh
machines. There were two schools of
thought on this, one saying they were horribly mortified at the whole thing,
and the other that they were pleased as punch with the almost-but-not-quite-sentient
joke machine, and couldn't possibly have wanted anything else, an unfinished
joke being like a well-cut bikini and leaving more to the imagination.

But despite the lack of access Trina and
other scientists had been able to study the Time Oscillator remotely, from the
records made available, and Trina thought she had a chance at making it go.

I
realized that Ned had neatly ducked my question. Of course, an elf can easily duck most
questions. In fact, an elf doesn't
even need to duck to duck questions.

I
blew a puff of air at the elf. His
hair - green, by the way - blew around very realistically. “Well, Dopey-"

"Dopey
was a dwarf. I'm an elf."

"Whatever. I'm still waiting, with some
anticipation, for you to tell me how we're going to get into the Hall of
Marvels."

The
elf on my shoulder fidgeted about idly, gazing back and forth. Time passed, and he said nothing. He folded his tiny arms in tiny
contemplation.

I
reached a finger towards him and administered a stern flick. I felt a bony crack and a flat pain in
my finger and the little green figure rocketed across the bus, splatted against
a window, and dropped out of sight like a shot bird.

I
was about to lunge to my feet to search for Ned - my God, had I killed him? -
when
I recalled that the whole thing was a fake. Ned controlled it all, creating the
appropriate images and sensations. Tweaking this to make my finger feel that, lighting a fire there to make
me see this. It's a bit
disquieting, having a mad projectionist running amok inside your head, making
up whatever film clips he wants to subject you to, and all the while you never
know what's real and what isn't.

But
I was pretty sure that elves weren't real. At least, I was pretty sure that this one wasn't.

The
little elf, battered and bedraggled, crawled into view from beneath Orna's pile
of wilted tentacles, passing through a curtain of pulsating purple spaghetti
like an actor entering a stage. The
elf was dragging one leg, like a bird with a broken wing. He reached the base of my aspara-suit
and began climbing, painfully slowly. Hand over tiny hand.
With mewling, pitiful cries.

It
was pathetic to see, and it was meant to evoke sympathy. That made me suspicious. There was only one reason Ned would try
to buy sympathy: if he really needed it. Rather, if he really really needed it.

And
to my way of thinking there was only one reason he would need sympathy so
desperately.

"There
is no plan," I subvocalized. In the haste of throwing this mission together, I had simply assumed
that someone would have thought about this and devised an appropriately
complex, evil, and effective scheme. Why I should have thought this is a complete mystery. In all my years of Fist service no such
thing has ever happened. Once,
after an unpleasant incident involving a planet of flammable
gases
which
, in an explosively ironic twist of fate, was inhabited by tiny match-like
creatures, I had inquired about this of my Uncle, in a gentle scream. He laughed, slapped my back heartily,
and told me that having no plan was exactly the plan. My profile, he said, indicated that I
was a first-rate improviser. To
saddle me with a plan might blind me to better alternatives.

But
this was different. The fate of the
entire planet was riding on this.
The fate of the entire human race.
In such a situation, no one in
their
right mind would simply lob a single Finger into the Fray
and hope for the best. It was
irresponsible. Dangerous. Reckless. Inconceivable. It was probably some other things as
well, and I would have thought of them, but I got interrupted.

"There
is no plan," the elf agreed.

I
nearly stood up and screamed, before remembering that I was supposed to be a
hungover Boff.

"Er,
Court, let me re-phrase that," Ned said hastily, finally cresting my
shoulder. After briefly raising
both hands in triumph, he folded his shattered leg beneath his smudged tunic. “There isn't a plan yet. There just wasn't enough
information. It was thought best to
leave the plan to your, ah, discretion." Ned was using both a conciliatory
tone and my name. That meant he was
expecting me to be outraged. I took
a moment to gather my wits.
Think, Court.
No
disasters, diz Astor.