The Blue Marble Gambit (20 page)

I
rounded a corner, and then another, and found myself facing a dead end. Not your ordinary
dead
end
, though. A huge metal
wall, crafted with odd crystalline panels and violet-colored flux tubes. A smaller suitcase-sized machine stood
before it.

I
didn't like either the reality or the unfortunately suggestive name dead end,
so in a flash I reversed, hugging the wall and hoping against hope that silent
Ned was going to come through for me.
Just this once.
Just for a change.

I
rounded the corner again but this time saw nothing but green.

"There
you are," hissed a deep slithering crackle, the words punctuated by the
hiss and crackle of flexing razor scythes.

I
was already backing away - I had been found, I saw, by one of the good
Commandant's evil helpers. “I
thought you an odd Boffling."

I
considered my options. My first
impulse was to consider them quickly, but I realized that there was no need - I
had no options, therefore I had more than enough time to study them. For I didn't need any time at all. In fact, if I were a theorist, I would
probably say that I had an infinite amount of excess time for the job, since
none was needed. I wouldn't
understand this at all, which is why I am not a theorist.

The
Boff was evidently hot - no doubt it had done the local equivalent of a sprint
to catch up with me. Disgustingly
wide pores winked open to jet streams of foul-colored vapor into the cavern,
which quickly took on a sulphurous stench. If I hadn't already been backing away, these alone would have convinced
me of the wisdom of a retreat.

My
executioner spoke. “I would have
settled for killing a traitor. But
it will be a great honor to kill a human. I will add you to my own personal collection, right between the zakro
and a fine pair of lyrans, I think."

Possibly,
just possibly, this Boff might be a bit slow. Not that I had any indication of that,
but it was possible. And if so,
there was an outside chance I might plant a kick to the top tassel and down
it. Cornered, I waited for the Boff
to edge into range.

The
stalk slithered forward. “You must
know the name of your killer," the Boff said. “I am Krazno."

I
slid back. “Freedno?"

The
Boff edged closer, razor-scythes extending for me, arching forward like the
spines of a fish. “No,
Krazno."

"Uh,
Kellmo?" I said gamely, still backing.

Krazno
stopped, irritated. “Krazno!"

"Kullyfah?"
I tried. I had found, I decided, a
loophole.

"No!
Krazno!

"Krack-Koe?"

"Never
mind! I will kill you anyway!" Krazno was on the move again. So was I.

Then
another leathery stalk slithered up behind Krazno. Damn! Against two, I had no chance. Zakro and lyrans, here I come! Save me a spot! Pinochle for eternity in an alien
menagerie!

Instead
of flanking me, the second Boff moved directly behind the first, no doubt
backing up its attack. An unusual
tactic; I would have expected to be flanked. But whatever waters your roots. It would not matter. Either way, I would be gruesomely
eviscerated. And that would be the
fun part.

The
second Boff sidled up close to Krazno and sprouted thick tentacles, which I
watched with casual disinterest. Until those tentacles did something that caused me to watch with great
interest: they reached out and, with an odd motion and a deeply offensive but
nicely pronounced crunching-vegetable sound, snapped Krazno's head. It didn't come off, but flopped over at
an angle that a Boff would find sickening, yet which I found heartening.

The
first asparagus collapsed to the ground, limp and broken. But now what? Was this a battle over who
would reap the honor of my demise?

"Hi,"
the second stalk said.
In Trina's familiar voice.

"You!"
I gasped.

"How'd
I do?" she said. She looked
just like an asparagus, thanks to her morph-pak. With mine shut down, I couldn't see her
face through the stalk. The optical
filter was inoperative.

"You
just snapped his little head off?" I asked in wonderment.

"It
was easy. I've had a little
training, you know. Mostly jung-ku,
with some haak-to."

Those,
I knew, were two of the most deadly forms of hand-to-hand combat known to
man. Their very existence was a
state secret. These Martian
frontierswomen were tough.

"But-"

"My
tunnel was a quick dead-end," Trina explained, "
so
I came to see how you were doing. Imagine my surprise to find you on stage at the dedication of that
zoo. You looked smashing,
though. Nice pose." She
imitated it, head thrown back, her tentacles flapping in mock terror.

"Gee,
thanks," I said. After having
been saved I could hardly complain, though I told myself that if I hadn't so
ably distracted the Boff Trina could never have downed it with such ease.

Her
stalk turned towards the wall. Her
yellow eyes were realistically watery. “Diz, you found it," she said.

"I
found what?"

"That."
She pointed, and her voice took on a hushed tone. “Zot alive.
The Time Oscillator.
I wasn't sure it existed, deep
down. But there it is."

I
moved to the small console and gave it an experimental heft.
Weighty but
manageable.
I braced myself
to hoist it. “Alright, let's
go."

Trina
was shaking her head, I think - it was hard to tell inside that suit. “Court, stop clowning around. Not that.
That
."
She pulled open the top of her suit, freeing her arms and upper body, and
pointed at the wall of metal behind me.

It
filled the wall - a gigantic machine, a hundred feet high and twice as many
wide. The control panel was an
absurdly small one-meter panel.

I
stared.

"What,"
I asked dully, "is that?"

"The
Time Oscillator," Trina replied, wonder no doubt aglow from her gold and
green eyes. “The reason we've
almost been Boff chow. Magnificent,
isn't it?"

Perhaps,
yes. But there was something else
about it.

"Trina,
dear. There's no way we can fit
that into any ship, even assuming that I'll be able to steal one."

"Of
course not. It's far too big for a
ship.
Even if we
could get it to one.
Which I
doubt very much."

"Right. Even if we could get it to one," I
agreed. “Then we're screwed? Don't
you see? We can only go back in time to the Boff past. I guess we could try to claim it
instead, but I think if that's our choice, maybe I'd rather not have a
homeworld."

Trina
looked at me sympathetically. “You
poor dear. I guess we forgot to
tell you this part of the plan. You
know that space and time are the same thing, yes?"

"Er,
I guess so, according to the theories."

"So
we can use this to go not just anywhen, but anywhere."

I
rocked back on my heels. “Oh.
Of course.
Well, then. Let's go."

"And
quickly," Ned added. “They're
coming." Though we shared a pair of ears, he applied complex processing
algorithms to the signals and so had far better hearing than I.

Then
I heard it too - the rustling swirl of the approaching Boff mob. It was a combination of banging and
slapping and crunching. And it was
definitely moving closer.

"I
would suggest we hurry," Ned said calmly, now dressed as a woodsman,
coonskin cap and Kentucky rifle and all. One ear was on the ground, a look of intense concentration on his
face. Whenever Ned recommended
hurrying, in a calm tone, it meant things were desperate. The calmer the tone, the more he felt
that he shouldn't alarm us, and the worse things were. He said, "We have two and a half
minutes."

"OK,
OK,"
Trina
said nervously. Her eyes flicked about. A line of sweat appeared on her upper
lip as she stared at the control panel.

"By
Pluto's far-flung ass," I groaned. “Don't tell me that after dragging you across half the galaxy and saving
you from certain death over and over and over you don't know how to work
it?"

She
didn't even look up. “Of course
not."

I
screamed. Sometimes you just have
to scream, and this was one of those times.

"Court,"
she muttered, her face intently fixed on the control panel. “No one knows how to work it, or almost
any of these machines. It's an
incredibly complex trick. But I've
studied it, and I can figure it out."

"In
two minutes."

"No,
no, don't be silly. They've
probably left a few lethal little surprises, as jokes. Now let me work."

Ned
turned himself into a giant clock, counting down from two minutes.

"I'm
not being silly. We have two
minutes. Then they'll be
here."

She
glanced over her shoulder at me, perhaps to see if I was joking. I wasn't. Far down the hall a trundling mob of
angry Boffs, looking like a surrealist painting entitled Revenge of the
Vegetables, was closing on us.
Payback for thousands of years of harvests.

"Uh
oh," Trina said. She quickly
hit a series of switches, pulled a couple of levers and pushed some
buttons. It looked frighteningly
random to me. She waited, thought,
then
did it again.

"Oh,
my," she said, and yanked a long lever.

A
booth-sized enclosure appeared, made of shimmering curtains of purple
light. I was impressed. Apparently the Boffs were too, if the
way they showed that was by charging.

"Wow,
it worked,"
Trina
said with more amazement that I
wanted to hear. “In," she said
simply.

In
we went. There was an odd-looking
octagonal control panel here, and Trina stared at it for an uncomfortably long
while. Her finger hovered over an
enticing, round, blinking green button,
then
moved
away.

"No,"
she said.

"No?"

"That
obvious button, blinking 'press-me,' is a trap. A trick. It
would either
kill us, scramble our genes and turn us into insects or eggplants, or send us
to the dawn of time. Oh Oh
humor."

"Very
funny." Now, in their ancient
crosshairs
, I
developed a new attitude about those cosmic pranksters. I watched the Boffs approaching. Kurl, the Great Green Hope, was in the
lead. He plainly was thrilled at
the prospect of adding us to his collection.

"Ah-"
I began.

"Hush,"
Trina muttered. She pulled a
tattered slip of paper from somewhere inside her suit, and stared at it. She seemed puzzled for a moment before
she shrugged and began to slowly input a set of coordinates on the
awkwardly-shaped
panel. It looked like it hadn't been designed for human hands. Of course, it hadn't.

"Twenty-eight
seconds," I said. Ned had
calculated distance and closure rate, and was now giving me a digital
countdown. How depressing.

Still
Trina twisted and tugged and pushed and pulled at big and small switches and
levers. I tried to ignore the
slapping crawl of thousands - no, millions - of tiny Boff feet. The thought of all those little feet
dancing on my grave made me tired.

"Everything
OK?" I asked.

"Fine,
fine," she replied, uncertainly.

The
Boffs began to squeal. It sounded
like a thousand hurricanes pouring across a million bottles.

"I
think we should leave," Ned advised.

Trina
pressed a tiny, almost-hidden, dull-yellow button, and an opaque, pale-green
disk appeared beneath us. She
grabbed my hand and centered us on it.

"Ready?"
she asked brightly.

"Very,"
I admitted.

"Off
we go. Next stop Earth, 10,641
bc
," she said. The nearest Boffs were six tentacle lengths away.

Five.

Trina
pulled a small, recessed, almost hidden purple knob. A deep hum began.

Four.

"It's
gotta be better than here."

Three.

The
curtains of purple light shimmered.

Two and a half.

Two.

Two.

Two.

Two and a half.

CHAPTER
17. CATFOOD

It
almost wasn't any better. In fact, it
was almost worse. To say nothing of
that initial moment of frozen time, when everything ground to a slow halt, then
began to slip backwards, plus the thoroughly unsettling sensation of being
instantaneously squirted across half the galaxy and a handful of millennia, a
transition which took an uncomfortably long time despite the insistence of the
theorists that it required no time at all, at least not in a measurable sense,
since there were no appropriate units of measure, we materialized five feet above
a steep sandy slope and after an unexpectedly hard landing began rolling down
the grade like tires.

But
that wasn't the bad part. The bad
part stemmed from the fact that cats have an irresistible urge to chase things
that move. I wouldn't be in the least
bit surprised to learn that they inherited that interesting trait from
sabertooth tigers, or some common ancestor. The reason I wouldn't be surprised,
naturally, is that sabertooth tigers share that same urge.

This
fascinating tidbit of natural history was something I gleaned only after we
tumbled and spun and rolled and tossed for a while down our prehistoric
hill. Despite our tumbleweed
trajectories, the sky was blue, the grass was green,
the
air stunningly fresh, and the bilious land of Boff was nowhere to be seen. So despite the likelihood that we would soon
be splatted against a rock I was rather content.

Contentment
is something many people seek. I no
longer do. In my life, at least,
contentment should almost invariably serve as a warning sign. For example, it was at that contented
moment that I suddenly spied a great tawny beast closing in on us with huge
loping strides. The polished light
of a preternatural sun glinted off long curved white fangs. Sabers, I thought idly as I
rotated. They really do look like
sabers. And each time I rolled
around, those twin razor glints were much closer. But I was trapped in a helpless tumble,
an appetizer on the roll.

We
thumped against an embankment and crashed to a halt in a heap, the big cat closing. I scrambled madly for a rock. After all, this was the Stone Age. I quickly learned that that term is a
misnomer, for there was not a single rock handy. I decided to settle for a stick, and
found just as quickly why this was never called the Stick Age.

"Aaaaaaah!"
shrieked Ned.

"Nice
kitty," I screamed inanely.

The
cat slowed, perplexed. Perhaps it
was confused about just why it was chasing a tangled mass of human and
vegetable.

A
moment later it decided that it really didn't matter, and gathered its giant
haunches beneath it, teeth bared, killing in its pale eyes.

I
was still fumbling for a weapon. A
handful of sod and dirt was the best I could hope for. I supposed that the term 'the Dirt Age'
lacked the cachet of 'the Stone Age,' but it was certainly more accurate.

Too
late, I saw. Time slowed but
stubbornly refused to stop as the cat launched, a tawny missile of sinew and
muscle and bone and, most of all, those long eponymous fangs. A fate fit for a caveman!

A
long dark furrow of earth erupted just in front of the cat, accompanied by the
piercing wail of an out-of-tune maser. The cat reversed course without seeming to slow and rocketed back the
way it had come, a furry comet streaking across the hillside.

I
hadn't fired, of course. And this
went well beyond the power of positive thinking. Which meant—

Trina. She was lying cool and calm on the
ground in a prone shooter's position, the black plastic wedge of a maser
cradled by the red-lacquered nails of her fine-boned hands.
An asparagus no
longer.

"Perfect,"
she said. "No disruption of
the time stream." She rose,
flipped the tuning knob, and handed me the maser. It was mine.

"Where
did you get this?" I said.

"That?" She said quizzically, and indicated the
maser.

I
shook it. "Of course
this."

She
shrugged innocently and girlishly, which was doubly misleading. "I found it near the Hall of
Marvels. In a small chamber
cluttered with offworlder weapons. Probably from other unwelcome visitors to Boff."

I
gritted my teeth. It was surprising
they weren't worn down to flat nubs by now. "You didn't think to mention it
when all those Boffs were charging us?"

"Didn't
I?"

I
glared at her.

"Well,
there was no time. Besides, getting
into a battle wouldn't have helped us. We had to leave.
Which we did.
And here we are."

That
was true - we had arrived on Earth. Ancient Earth. And there was
something even better.

"We're
humans again," I said. And it
was gloriously true. We were both
bipeds, in full primate glory. The
only remains of Boff-land were the thick clods of rubbery orange-brown mud that
clung tenaciously to our boots, were clotted in our hair, and which be-grunged
our clothes. I ignored these and
gazed at the
attributes which
clearly identified Trina
as a mammal.

"Care
to celebrate the return of the body corporeal?" I asked, stepping slyly
towards the usually willing wench.

She
stepped back. "After we save
the planet."

That
was an excuse you didn't get often.

I
reached down to my boots and picked off an especially large chunk of
brown-orange mud. We were covered
with the stuff - apparently the aspara-suits had leaked a bit, perhaps while
spending all night in Orna's cesspool.

I
glanced at the sky. "Well. Just where in
Zot are we?" I wondered.

Ned
appeared - a grimy old-time sailor holding a rusty sextant - and made a show of
staring up at the sky through the sextant, which he frequently turned back and
forth. Finally he dropped it and
began pointing at the sky with his arms, as if forming sightlines and measuring
angles.

I
groaned.

"We
are," he announced, "in what will be Southern Mexico. Central America." He recited the coordinates.

I
repeated them for Trina's sake. "Is that where we want to be?" I asked.

"Not
quite," they chorused together.

"Just
how far off," I wondered aloud, "are we?"

"Two
hundred and nine kilometers," Ned answered.

"About
two hundred kilometers, I'd guess," Trina said.

I
plopped to the earth. It was rich
and loamy, with a ripe lush odor. Someone more poetic might have imagined it to be the rich scent of a
fertile world soon to bloom with humanity, a race on the cusp of coming of
age. To me, it smelled like a
field. A field far from where I
wanted to be.

"Two
hundred kilometers," I groused. "How could that happen? How? We have three
days. That's almost seventy
kilometers a day. We'll never make
it. At least on Boff, we could take
a bus. There won't even be any
buses here for ten thousand years. We're going to have to run. For three days. And even then-"

"Sorry,
Diz," Trina shrugged. "I
couldn't read one of the numbers on the paper, so I had to do the best I
could. You know, improvise. We were short on time."

"We're
shorter on time now," I carped, before her words sank in and I ground into
a mental reverse gear. "Wait a
sec. You said you improvised? With the coordinates?"

"Diz,
I had to! The data sheet was
damaged when you crashed our lifeboat!"

That
little blame-transference wasn't going to take. "Wait a minute. Back up here just a bit. Your tour guide needs to understand
something. The Time Oscillator
sends us through time and space, right? Obviously so, since we're here."

She
shoved a hand through her hair. It
was the long black arrangement she usually wore.
Her default hair.
"Yes.
Of course.
Same thing." Idiot, her tone said.

"But
you couldn't read one of the coordinates."

"No."

"So
you improvised."

"Yes."
A testy nod.
Aha. I was getting somewhere.

"And
if you were wrong? Might we have
missed the planet? Materialized in
space, sucking vacuum? Plopped into
the sun? Missed the whole
system?"

"Well,
I wasn't wrong by much," she said defensively, looking beyond me. "So I suggest you get over it, and
move on to the next problem."

"Oh. You mean how we're going to travel 200
kilometers in 3 days?"

She
was still gazing over my shoulder. Now she began shaking her head slowly, as if it might come off. Which, I was about to realize, was
exactly the case.

"No. I mean how we're going to keep the local
savages from having us for dinner." Her eyes were focused behind me.

I
turned slowly.
Forty
stone-age warriors, clad in animal skins and clutching obsidian-tipped wooden
spears.

I
felt for my maser.

"Don't,"
Trina hissed. "We can't kill
any humans! The time stream! The continuum!"

The
warriors moved closer, encircling us.

From
the way they pointed and thrust their spears, they obviously didn't have any
such reservations.

If
you've never had the pleasure of being stuffed inside a small wooden cage and
hauled for long hours over bumpy trails, but you've been curious about it, let
me save you some trouble right now. Don't bother. It's painfully
uncomfortable. Tight. Cramped. Awkward. Maddening, even.

Our
hosts, however, were slightly more interesting. In both physical form and mental
capabilities they were fully evolved humans. They just happened to have rather poor
hygiene and to be dressed in animal skins. One in particular, a rather sallow-looking chap, was the spitting image
of a ship captain I'd once robbed. The resemblance was so great that he actually made me nervous - I was
afraid he'd recognize me.

But
of course, I had the perfect defense: no ship existed yet, and the robbery was
over a hundred long centuries in the future. I kept telling myself that, but the ship
captain kept looking at me strangely and fingering the bone knife at his
waist. Did I remind him of someone
too? It seemed a bit too
coincidental. But that's one for
the temporal theorists.
Cyclical tempo-convergences, or something.

I
surveyed the rest of our crowd. I
had always thought of prehistorics as relatively short and squat, but both men
and women were tall and lean, toned and hard, no doubt from the same authentic
primitive privations which later generations would attempt to emulate for the
sake of health. I had also always
thought of prehistorics as relatively clean. Wrong again. All were caked with mud and dirt, and
draped with
poorly-cured
skins and hides. En masse, the group smelled like the
concentrated essence of every swarthy armpit on the entire muggy planet of New
Egypt. It was like a test run for a
new olfactory weapon.

The
only lucky thing was that prehistory was windy. The air ripped and tore and yanked at
us, as we were hauled up one jagged ridge and down another. The land was steep and cruel, endless
switchbacks and interminable climbs. I almost preferred being carried, except for the tiny cage. But perhaps worst of all, we weren't
going towards where we needed to go: the Etzan's landing site. We weren't going away, either, but
perpendicular to the direction we needed. Not that it really mattered, with 200 kilometers to go.

Then,
from far ahead, came a shout, and another group of natives appeared at the far
side of a clearing. A ripple of
excitement ran through our crowd, as the two groups faced off across the
clearing. A deep, swollen silence
filled the air. The wind through
the palm tops seemed to boom. The
pause was so pregnant I expected its water to break.

"Some
native ritual, perhaps," I remarked in a scholarly tone.

"Shut
up, Court," Trina said.

I
asked Ned if he could hear anything, ignoring my resentment at the fact that
his hearing was superior to mine, though he used my ears.

"You
don't want to know," he murmured.

A
loud shriek split the air, and suddenly the two groups burst at each
other. There were a great many of
the newcomers. Our band - at least
that's how I now thought of them, in a demonstration of the human tendency
towards to see the world in terms of us and them - was clearly outnumbered.

I waited expectantly. Warfare?
All-out
pitched battle?
Parley? Party? Orgy?
Supper time
? I had no idea, and watched the two
groups approach each other. They
made a variety of mock-combat gestures as they circled warily, stamping legs
and beating chests in eerie silence, slowly closing. When they finally met, they went through
greeting rituals that reminded me of two dogs meeting on the street. They didn't actually sniff each other's
butts, but it was a near thing. Then they froze. The moment
stretched; the tension was thick. Then at some unseen signal they all abruptly relaxed. A great
hub-bub
ensued, with much shouting and yelling, some screaming, and even laughing. It went on for some time - an impromptu
party in the jungle.
A family reunion of sorts.
Coconuts were cracked; drinking skins
produced. There was a great deal of
vigorous trading; skins and nuts and fruits and seashells were exchanged.
Through it all we were roundly ignored,
our cage parked under a palm. Then,
as suddenly as it had begun, "our" tribe turned and walked off. They didn't look back.