The Blue Marble Gambit (16 page)

CHAPTER
14. CLOWNBOY

The
most amazing thing, to me, about the Boff prison was that we survived long
enough to get there.

As
soon as the Master VegePuter made its solemn and woefully accurate
pronouncement, the Boff guards fell upon us in full vegetable fury. Which, by the way, bears precious little
resemblance to your normal conception of vegetable anger. In fact, in their enthusiasm for
violence the Boffs were quite animal. Through the whipping tentacles and flashing blades I dimly noticed that
Orna had positioned himself well out of the way. He, at least, had seen what was coming.

Several
of the Boffs couldn't restrain their zest and the wet yellowish bone scythes
flicked and snicked, cutting our morphsuits to shreds. It wasn't long before they hauled us
both out of our flayed green skins.

I
felt completely naked standing there in my black Fist jumpsuit; after days of
immersion, my eyes actually took some offense at the human form. Trina looked . .
. Alien
, and I was shocked to find
myself actually looking at my former skin fondly.
It looked smaller and
thinner than I would have supposed, this now-shed second skin.
And suddenly it seemed that we'd had
happy times together, it and I. Oh,
the fun of cleaning up Orna's mess on the hoverbus. The rambunctious thrills of the Boff
drinking binge.
The
slumber party at Orna's.
Those were the days!

Or
so they seemed, compared to the present. After long, uncomfortable, and downright painful interrogations, Trina
and I found ourselves stripped of our weapons and morph-packs and locked in a
large and windowless stone vault somewhere deep in the bowels of the Boffian
Central Security Facility. Which
happened to lie deep beneath the Central Armory and its fabled Hall of Marvels.

The
irony was neck-deep, or better. For
this was, of course, that same building that held the closely-guarded Time
Oscillator, somewhere within the Hall of Marvels, the museum of the ancient and
the alien. On a percentage basis,
and considering the light-years we'd travelled, we had come at least 99.999 percent
of the distance. With our captor's
unwitting help, we were closer than ever.

Of
course, that last 0.001 percent was the key.

And now unachievable.
I limped to the door - a huge steel slab that weighed a kiloton if a
gram - and tried it. I might as
well try to tow a starship by a strap in my teeth. The infinitely branching paths that make
up any person's future had, in our case, abruptly been pruned back. Our possibilities were all alike: each
was nasty, brutish, and short. Even
gnarled. Only one uncertainty
remained for us: how the Boffs would execute us.

That
topic was even now being debated hotly and with great relish. Under the Boffian code, it all depended
on what we were guilty of. Espionage would earn us the right to be flayed alive by the populace at
large. Trespassing would offer us
the chance to be ground into fertilizer for new recruits in the Boffian
army. Lacking the proper papers
allowed us to be boiled alive; impersonating a Boff carried the odd but still
unpleasant penalty of being broiled alive. Illegal planetary entry would get us dropped from space. And there were others. Many others.

I
was trying to decide which of those outcomes to root for; surely I must have a
favorite. But somehow I couldn't
develop any enthusiasm for any.

I
moved along the rough stones of the wall. Each was a huge, immovable block. Nevertheless, I listlessly tried each, searching for loose joints. Missing mortar. Gaps. Cracks. Defects. Something. Anything. Court diz Astor does not give up, no
matter the odds, no matter the outlook.

I
gave up. No windows, no secret
passages, no nothing. The only way
out was through that thick steel door, and the only way we'd be going out that
way would be feet first.

I
took a glance at my battered self. There existed, in the inventory of the Fist, dozens of tiny
toys which
I might have used to get us out of here. Laser
tunnelers
,
micro lock picks, sonic blasters,
mind
scramblers,
even nano-diggers. My mind hungrily
ran over the possibilities like a starving person imagining desserts.

I
corrected myself. There were at
least a hundred and twenty such tiny toys, any one of which could be held in a
palm, many of which could be hidden in a belt buckle.

And
I had exactly zero of these marvels of miniaturization. Not a one. I was down to my ripped and battered
jumpsuit.

My
boots.

And
Ned.

Ned. He'd been awfully quiet of late. In fact, I hadn't heard from him during
the entire beating and interrogation. He had, I thought, missed a beautiful opportunity to practice his brand
of dark humor.

I
think this is going to hurt, Court. Smack! Oh, yes, I'm afraid I
was right. It did. Not as much as I thought, of
course. But I think this next one
might. Smack! Ohh, yes!

"Well,
Ned, nothing to say?" I subvocalized. “No bitter complaints? No tiresome tirades about our execution? No laborious laments? It's not like you."

Ned
appeared. He was dressed in a
festive clown suit. His nose was a
big red ball. His hair was huge,
frizzy, and orange. He was grinning
madly as he paced the tiny cell, tapping on
stone walls
and gazing about as if trying to decide where to place a new sandbox. I realized why he'd been silent so
long. He'd lost it. His electron deck was a few quanta short
of a full shell. His periodic table
was off a few elements. His solar
system was lopsided by a few planets. You get the idea.

"Rather
grim, eh, Court?" he grinned. His teeth were bright white squares. His huge red shoes flopped merrily
along. “Positively dreary. Eh?"

By
Venus' hot and steamy ass! My last hours would be spent with a maniac loose
inside my head. But I decided to
play along. Perhaps Ned had just
picked up a minor glitch - easy enough, with the rain of Boffian slaps and
blows my head had stopped, any one of which might have shaken loose an electron
or two, which might induce the neural implant form of dementia.

"Am
I missing something?" I asked with forced calm. “Is there an easy way out of here?"

Ned
glanced around in surprise,
then
with evident glee
slapped a stout wall with one hand with the other squeezed his clown nose. Honk. “No, I should think not. Quite inescapable, actually."

I
somehow kept my voice and thoughts even. “But perhaps you're aware of a rescue team on the way? The cavalry
coming over the hill, and all that?"

"Impossible,"
Ned said dismissively. He began to
pull a hanky from his pocket. Of
course, it kept coming and coming and coming. “Won't happen. We're definitely on our own."

It
took a greater effort but still I remained calm. “In an escape-proof cell, awaiting
imminent execution."

Ned
pulled out another few feet of hanky,
then
gave up on
the endless thing. He placed his
hands on hips, thrust his big belly forward, and began surveying the upper
reaches of our chamber, staring upward as if trying to decide if he had enough
room to erect a tall circus tent.

“Hmmmm. What? Oh, yes. Quite right.
Escape-proof and
imminent execution.
Completely accurate." He was smiling again, staring upward at
something invisible.

"Then
why are you so happy," I asked, dreading the answer. Suicidal tendencies, I figured.
Or a frank admission
of insanity.
He had
self-diagnostics; he'd be the first to know. I was plainly the second.

He
began pacing across the room as if measuring. Slap slap slap went the floppy shoes.

"Why?
For a very simple reason, dear boy," Ned said. His head swiveled as he examined the
rock walls. “Hmm."

I
wasn't sure I wanted to, but then I decided why not, and asked. “And what would that be?"

He
looked up from nearly pressing his nose to the stone. “What would what be?"

"That
'very simple reason.'"

He
was still distracted. “Er, you mean
the reason I'm smiling?"

"Yes.
Exactly, Ned.
Why are you smiling?"

He
straightened and faced me, with an absurdly serious expression on his painted
face.

"Simple. You see
,
everything is going exactly according to plan."

CHAPTER
15. VANISHINGACT

"Exactly
according to plan," I screamed out loud, making Trina jump. “We're in prison. About to be killed.
In a Quite.
Gruesome. Fashion."

"Precisely,"
Ned agreed calmly. He paced a few
steps, now eyeballing the cell again. Oh, where to put the new bathroom?

"Don't
tell me that's the plan," I warned.

"That's
the plan."

"That's
the plan!" My eyes flicked dangerously towards the walls; I envisioned
ramming my head into the rough stones. My skull bursting
like
a ripe melon.
Or maybe punji sticks
through the eye sockets.
Anything to punish this cranial lunatic of mine.

"Wait
wait," Ned said hastily. “There are certain things that we felt it was unwise to tell you about,
before."

"Of
course there were," I said placidly. “Such unimportant trivia as the plan to get us death sentences in a Boff
prison."

"Er,
yes. Such as that."

"My
last wish will be that you die first, and more painfully than I. I don't know if
its
technologically possible, but if it is, I'll find a way. I'll take your dying screams to my
grave. Even if it's a swampy
Boffian grave."

Ned
waggled a finger at me. “You
haven't asked me what the good news is, Mr. Negativity."

I
sighed deeply. The bright side of
death was the end of these pointless, agonizing conversations with Ned. “What's the good news," I asked
dully.

"I
have a way out of here. I
think," he said cautiously.

"You
just said this cell is escape-proof."

"Oh,
it is, for you. I said
I
can
get us
out of here. You've got to use
language with precision."

He
had definitely cracked. “Ned,
you're just a figment of my imagination with no physical reality. With our morph-packs gone, you can't do
a thing except what you're doing. Which is harassing me."

He
shrugged, smugly. “Well, if you say
so. But we figured that something
like this might happen."

"You
figured? I don't suppose you could have thought it out a bit more? Like what do we do now?"

"Actually,"
Ned said smugly, "we did."

"Pray
tell." Might as well play along.

"First
take off your right boot."

I
shook my head. “You've completely
lost it, Ned." Another thought had just occurred to me. Perhaps Ned wasn't malfunctioning -
perhaps it was
me
. I could be imagining the whole
thing. Rampant psychosis. Massive hallucinations, perhaps
exacerbated by all the
micro-meddling
the Fist had
done with my head.

Ned
changed his clown-suit appearance to the space-black tunic of a senior
Admiral. Actually, I thought
ruefully, that wasn't so different after all. Nevertheless my conditioning urged me to
obey
;
my spite to disobey. “There's not much time. They'll be coming soon. And then it really will be too late. Now take off your right boot."

Why
not? I unsnapped the speed closures and watched the straps relax like the tiny
muscles they were. The heavy black
boot slipped off.

"Now,"
Ned said. “You see that camera eye
up there?" He pointed, and I squinted.

"Right
here," he said, and his arm elongated and thinned to touch a point twenty
feet away, across the chamber and high on the wall.
A tiny speck of
crystal.
A
standard spy-eye.

"Yep,"
I said.

"You
need to hit it with your boot. Hard
enough to break it, and on the first try. You probably won't have time for a second throw."

"Why?"

"Just
do it, Court." He cocked his head as if listening, and his expression
abruptly changed. His tone became
exasperated. “And hurry, Court. Hurry."

Hurry. The last time Ned had told me to hurry,
he had been keeping to himself, lest it distract me, the news that an Etzan
cruiser was closing relentlessly and about to blast us into plasma. I judged the boot's heavy weight and
clumsy balance, eyeing the crystal nub of my target. In school I'd been a tosser on the
spaceball team, so I should have the arm. This was a little different, of course. I carefully thought out the spin to
impart, took a running start, and fired the boot. It rotated in a blur, then the heel
cracked into the tiny orb. It
shattered, emitting a tiny whump and a small white spray of crystal dust.

My boot thocked to the stone floor.

"Now
hurry," Ned said, using that word again, "and get your boot back
on."

Dimly,
through the door, I could hear a commotion. The commotion was definitely
vegetable
in origin.

"What
are you doing?" Trina asked.

I
jammed my foot into the boot and hit the auto-tighten; the muscle fibers
wrapped themselves around me. Snug
in a second, as advertised.

Something
was scraping at the door. There
were hissing and rattling noises, untranslated.
Our guards, no doubt,
on the way in.
And probably
upset about my little prank. Thanks
a lot, Ned.

"Now
tell Trina to hold perfectly still and be perfectly silent," Ned hissed.

I
passed on the word, somehow infected by Ned's urgency, and had just begun to
rise from my boot and turn when the door began to scrape open and I froze. I froze
stock still
,
more motionless than a statute, more immobile than a corpse, stiffer than
wood. Not because of the door, and
not even because of what I knew had to be coming through it, but because of
something entirely different.

The
incoming Warrior Sprouts meant nothing to me as I flicked my eyes back and
forth frantically, searching the tiny rock-walled enclosure. My eyes kept sending the same signals up
my optic nerve, one my brain couldn't believe. I demanded confirmation, like a
skeptical general who refuses to believe his messengers.

The
messengers kept insisting. I kept
demanding confirmation.

My
eyes insistently insisted on insisting. So I kept seeing the same impossible sight: In a tiny escape-proof cell,
in the mere seconds that my back had been turned, Trina had vanished.