The Blue Marble Gambit (15 page)

"Well,"
Orna wheezed. “Ummm-" he
clattered.

"Is
this the death of the first leaf of the tree of Statistical
Proportionality?"

"No! Heresy!" Orna burbled.

"Then-"

"Wait!"
Orna interjected. His green
leathery brow wrinkled, and his eyes flickered. He was deep in thought. In the pool, he looked like a sentient,
contemplative buoy. I watched him
intently, until something else seized my attention. The something else was, I am sorry to
say, a very human-looking turd floating by in the broth. Trina, fortunately, didn't notice it. Or at least she didn't let on. I recalled the vibration at my back.

"Ned,"
I seethed to my silent partner. “You didn't."

My
little present wafted across the pool, an icebreaker plowing a course through
the pond scum. “You didn't want to
carry that around, did you?" Ned said. “Perfect place to dump it."

Suddenly
Orna's three yellow eyes snapped wide open.

"Great
Pods! You are right! Out of
the of
seedlings! I will do it! Proportionality is in
danger!"

Orna
spied my contribution and his feeding tube slithered at it like a hungry garden
hose. The tip rose from the water,
dilated grotesquely, and then in a single slimy gulp ingested that miniature
minstrel. I was speechless with
horror.

"We've
killed him," I gasped silently.

Ned
appeared.
Loud
aloha shirt, sandals, a pail and shovel, sitting beside the pool, feet dangling
in the pool.
“Not at
all. Chemical composition is close
enough to the rest of the stuff. Heck, it'll probably even be good for him. Fertilizer."

Orna
made a crackling sound that Ned interpreted as smack of the lips. “You really should try some. It is most excellent tonight."

"Your
tube is ready," Ned said, his shirt falling open to reveal a huge pale
belly. “Extruding."

I
had no choice - I didn't even control my own feeding tube.
How evolutionarily
primitive.
“Suddenly I am
hungry," I managed to say. Under Ned's control, my feeding tube pulsed as rudely as anyone's, and
even quivered and throbbed as it hunted down choice morsels. Beside me, Trina was doing the
same. Her face was bright red.

"Join?
The Guard?" she screamed in a quiet whisper. I had never before heard anyone scream
quietly. It was very
interesting. “Are you crazy?"

I
muttered back across the link, "Relax. It's perfect. The Guard job will get us to the Central
Armory, and from there, we nick the Time Oscillator."

"Dead
meat, both of us," Trina lamented. “And Earth too."

Orna's
tube was back in action, plowing a small wake through the heavy fluid as he
searched for the perfect tidbit. “There is something new, and most excellent, tonight, but precious
little of it," he muttered, then once more those big yellows fixed
me. “You are to be commended,"
he said, "for pointing out an important failure of Proportionality."

"Yes,
Orna. Ahh-HO!"

We
slurped away merrily for a time. Ned had done a passable job with our tubes - they sought out likely
chunks of whatever was floating, and then reasonable imitations coursed up
them. I noticed that the faux
chunks vanished about
halfway
up, but Ned hadn't had
a lot of time. Orna's tube darted
and poked in
a frenzy
.

I
took a deep breath, forced down a disgusted swallow, and spoke. “So we're in the Guard?"

One
of Orna's eyes ratcheted towards me, gecko-style, while the other two hungrily
scanned the pool. “Not quite yet,
of course. But I have a plan of
action, to achieve your goals and save the Boffian way. At first light tomorrow we will go to
see the Great Pod Leader himself.
A mere formality, as I will sponsor you myself.
But all Guard applicants must interview
with the Great Pod Leader. The
Vegetorian Guard is elite!" Then he murmured, perhaps a bit sadly, "or
least it used to be."

But
I was focused on something else he had just said.
An unforeseen snaggle
in my plan.
Which could have
the same unpleasant result as the unforeseen noose waiting atop the gallows for
the prisoner who thought stair-climbing good exercise.

"The
Great Pod Leader?" I said blandly.

"The
same," Orna said proudly.

"Of
the pod?" I asked Ned,
then
smoothly asked Orna,
"Will he see us?"

"Of
the planet," Ned replied. “There is only one."

The whole planet?
Security, weapons scanners, high scrutiny?
We were doomed!

"Surely
he is too busy," I backpedaled. If Boffs had legs long enough to see, mine would have been churning.

Orna
made a dismissive gesture. “Don't
be silly. I have known him since
Sprouthood. My office is beside
his."

"Your
office," I said dully. Ned
informed me that the word Orna actually used was closer to
"garden-plot" than "office," but that the latter conveyed
the idea.

"Yes,
even for an old soldier like me, life isn't all combat." He made that
crackling lip-smacking sound again, which was somewhat disquieting since he had
no lips. “The Great Bog truly works
in mysterious ways. For it was the
Great Bog that brought us together."

"Ahh-HO!"
I said.

He
looked at me strangely,
then
his feeding tube vanished
like a very rude magic trick. “Now
I am tired. We shall sleep,"
Orna announced. “You will need your
rest. Tomorrow you meet the Great
Pod Leader himself."

That,
I thought desperately, could not possibly be a good thing. Instead of just trying the Central
Armory, we were going into what would no doubt be the tightest security on the
entire planet of Boff. We were
doomed, doomed, doomed. I was about
to tell Orna that we had changed our minds when I noticed that our green spear
of a host was limply leaning back in the tank. He made an odd rustle, which Ned
identified, sotto voce, as a snore.

He
was sleeping in the tank.

But
it was worse than that. Trina and I
were expected to sleep in the tank. Which, I recalled, had a chemical composition all too similar to -
ug. The tank arrangement made a
certain kind of sense - there was no need for privacy, ever, when your most
intimate acts could be carried out quite calmly in public, with all the pomp
and pageantry of making change.

I
wanted desperately to climb out. But if Orna awoke and found us out of the tank, that might strain even
his ability to excuse our oddities. I whispered to Trina, and she reluctantly agreed.

We
settled in for the night.

CHAPTER
13. MONKEYSTEWED

After
about nine or ten decades soaking in that putrid broth, a dim green light
finally seeped through the dagger door. Apparently the entire cavern was illuminated, to simulate dawn in the
great Boff outdoors.

Orna
rustled and flopped and stirred, then slithered upward and outward, somehow
landing neatly on his thousands of feet. He gazed at us pitifully.

"Come,
come, young spouts. You cannot
sleep your lives away."

"Already?"
I groaned in my best imitation of a teenager facing dawn. “So early."

"You
must become used to this, if you want to make the Guard. Only the toughest, the most fibrous, the
Guard, you know." This was evidently some type of slogan.

I
leapt out of the pool, to demonstrate my eagerness if not the sinewy nature of
my stalk. In doing so I accidentally
slopped a brown splash over the edge. Orna glared at it distastefully.

"Hopefully
we will burden your hospitality for no more than a dozen cycles or so," I
said blandly, "before we join the Guard."

Orna
immediately understood. “Hopefully
much sooner. I should be able to
expedite the process. Now, come
along."

Inside
the disguise generated by the morph-pack, I chewed a mealbar while following
Orna. He led us out of his building
and through Gastro, twisting and turning like a rat that knows its maze. He stopped before a yellow panel in a
red wall, waggled his top tassel, and it slid aside. We went through the doorway, and found a
series of moving walkways, like pedestrian highways. About forty feet wide, the near edge of
the mobile span was moving slowly, while the far edge was flying along. The speed changed gradually along the
width. We stepped onto the slow
portion and followed Orna out to the center section, where we passed the slow
lane but were in turn passed by the fast. A mobile forest of other Boffs accompanied us as we whisked through the
bowels of Gastro.

Occasional
signs pointed directions. “Ah, Ned?
A translation?" I prompted. If
we were ever going to find our own way around, we had to start compiling a map. Already it might be too late; the
passages were twisty as a snake den.

"Working
on it," Ned said distantly. He
flickered into being for a bare moment: a gnarled gnome, bent over and madly
scribbling by candlelight on yellowed parchment with a huge quill pen.

The
walkway curved through a series of low tunnels, each dark but
high-ceilinged
. Loops of cable, or maybe roots, sprouted from the walls. It was dim and dank, and unpleasant
enough, though not as unpleasant as a night in a Boffian hot tub.

Without
a warning or backward glance Orna began moving to the slow edge. We followed, closely. Despite the risks, going through with
our Great Pod Leader scheme was the best way. It was risky, but so was abandoning that
course or ditching Orna. Most
persuasively of all, we had no other plan for finding the Time Oscillator, and
time was running out. There were
only five days left.
Half our time gone.

Orna
pulled off the moving walkway and steamed straight towards another yellow
rectangular section of wall, top tassel waggling furiously. It slid aside and we were outside again,
although at first it was hard to tell. The tapered fangs of the buildings rose several thousand feet and seemed
to bite into the sky, leaving visible only narrow ribbons of dull
red-brown. One particular edifice,
towards which Orna was leading us, was unique in its vibrant green color and
rather dome-like shape. It looked
like an artichoke.

According to my food and aliens theory,
that was a very bad sign. If aliens
that looked like food were bad, a whole building that looked like food had to
be a torture chamber. But every
rule has its exceptions, I told myself hopefully. Perhaps this was one of them.

Two
husky asparagi at the slash-shaped entrance moved away for Orna, with an
obsequiousness that transcended the species gap. It was rather disconcerting to see that
the gullible and slightly buffoonish Orna held a high position. Of course, I reminded myself, he was not
necessarily gullible. The morph
pack-generated aspara-suits were just that good. Another possibility presented itself: he
was that good, and he was onto us.

Orna
led us through long descending corridors and down occasional round, peaked
jetvators. If this building really
was modeled on some sort of plant, we were deep in the roots. We leveled out and entered a large
anteroom; it was devoid of anything like furniture, and held only a
medium-sized noxious green pool. The lone soaking stalk was some form of secretary. Orna discharged a few haughty words, and
we were waved on by a droopy tassel
.

The
next chamber held a larger pool, and Orna's tone was less haughty. And so it was again in the next.
And the next.
Ever bigger pools, and
an ever more polite Orna.
We
were, I realized, ascending the food chain of Boffian bureaucracy.

We
finally came to another chamber, with an entranceway of the brightest, most
nauseous green I had ever seen.

Orna
glanced at us. “The Great Pod
Leader!" he whispered, and led the way through the gap.

This
final chamber had a high domed ceiling of mottled brown, supported by
ornamental stalk-like pillars. The
huge
pool which filled the room
was as chunky as
homemade soup though quite a bit greener. The Great Pod Leader himself had to be the lone tall stalk in the
drink. He seemed to have soaked for
far too long - he appeared positively mushy. A ring of especially large and
heavily-armed
Boffs circled the pond. The Great Pod Leader's personal guard,
no doubt.

Orna
performed a bow, shiver, and twirl of respect, then began a series of trite
platitudes, complimenting the Great Pod Leader's full top tassel and robust
color, though the former was actually rather bedraggled and the latter somewhat
pale. Orna was showing a universal
trait: affection for the boss's excretory organ.

Throughout
it all the Great Pod Leader seemed rather uninterested. Orna moved to business.

"These
two saplings," he said, with the wave of a tentacle, "have just come
of age. They wish to join the
Guard." In retrospect, I had
to grudgingly admit, Ned's decision to make us young Boffs had paid off - it
fit in perfectly with our desire to join the Guard, and it explained our
stupidity, to some degree, since we were not yet initiated.

The
Great Pod Leader seemed to perk up. “My Vegetorian Guard?"

"Quite. The same."

The
Great Pod Leader was a discerning one. “There's more to this, methinks, than meets my three eyes."

"You
are right as always, Great Pod Leader," Orna said. “One is unable to speak. The other is just plain stupid."

The
Leader of All Things Green settled deeper into his stew. “Then they are unqualified."

Orna
shifted from foot to foot to foot - over a thousand times, in fact, as those
busy little appendages stamped away. “Well, yes. So it would seem
at first. But under the laws of
Statistical Proportionality, because our population consists of some stupid
individuals and some non-speakers, we must have the same in the Guard. Otherwise, where will it end? Our very
system may be crumbling before our eyes."

"Perhaps,"
the Great Leader calmly replied. “Or
perhaps Statistical Proportionality itself is simply stupid."

Orna
was stunned into silence at this heresy. Since it was from his leader, he was unsure whether to join it. But could it be a test? A trap? There
was no safe path. I imagined lumpen
cogs grinding together in his lumpen brain.

"Never
mind," the Great Leader said. “If you wish to place them in the Guard, so be it. All the Guard does anyway, between you
and I, old Orna, is protect those ancient chunks of metal left by the Oh
Ohs. Which no one knows how to use
anyway.
As long
as the Master VegePuter agrees that their addition truly would further the
estimable goals of Statistical Proportionality, they may join." He
vanished downward until just the top of his tassel protruded. The fronds shivered and his voice
followed.

"Anything
else?"

"No,
Great Pod Leader."

"Good,"
the Great Pod Leader said,
then
raised his voice. “Master VegePuter, we have two for your
review. They wish to be in The
Guard."

This
was similar to the moment that all Boffs faced upon reaching Sprouthood,
although only applicants to The Guard had to audition before the Great Pod
Leader. Young Boffs weren't tracked
throughout their existence - if so, we would have needed complex fake
identities. Instead, once mature
they were assessed and meticulously categorized, every personal variable neatly
pigeon-holed to fit every Boff into the appropriate group, and from
there
each and every Boff was directed to a
Proportionally-proper career. Ned
thought the categorization wouldn't be a problem - it was rather superficial,
and the morph-packs were very very good.

We
hoped.

Three
green lights glowed to life in the far wall. A mechanical tentacle dipped downward
from the ceiling, its tip bulging with small barbarous sensors. No doubt this was the very implement
that would quickly categorize us, assign us to a class, and decide the
representational needs of that class.

"Hope
that thing's not cold," I joked.

“Probably
just a fist-sized anal probe,” Ned replied.

The
Master VegePuter clicked and buzzed and whirred as the tentacle circled us,
thoughtfully twitching while it moved round and round and up and down. It reminded me of a contemplative
earthworm.

It
made only a single orbit before it began to retract into the ceiling. “Unacceptable. They lack the most essential
qualifications," the Master VegePuter announced.

"Exactly,"
I cried out. “That's why we're
perfect."
In
for a millicredit, in for a starbuck.

The
tentacle froze,
halfway
into the ceiling, as Orna
laid out our position, no doubt motivated by a desire to evict his new
roomies. He did quite an admirable
job of it, too.

"Sounds
stupid, at first," said the Great Pod Leader to the Master VegePuter. “But there is a certain logic to
it."

"Even
so. It is not possible," the
Master VegePuter said with mechanical solemnity, and began to retract again.

"Oh
well. Thanks anyway," I said,
suddenly overwhelmed by a very ominous feeling.

But
Orna shushed me with a rustle. “But
is it not true that none of their puny intellectual caliber are - or ever have
been - in the Guard?" he asked.

"That
is true."

"Is
it not true that none with their paltry physical abilities are - or ever have
been - in the Guard?"

"That
is also true."

Orna's
sheaves twitched. “But then-"

The
Master Vegeputer didn't let him finish. “Because of those deficiencies, they are in fact uniquely
qualified."

Gotcha,
I thought.

"But
they are disqualified by another deficiency."

What?

Uh
oh, Ned said.

"Exactly
what other qualification are they lacking?" asked Orna suspiciously. Somewhere in that thick-skinned green
hide, I would decide in a matter of mere seconds, hid not only razor-sharp
scythes of bone,
but
a razor-sharp mind. He made a subtle gesture, which I also
wouldn't appreciate until moments later, but at which the Boff guards moved in
closer.

"The
most essential one of all," replied the Master VegePuter. “They are not Boffs at all. They are humans."