The Blue Marble Gambit (4 page)

Earth was dark. Several large areas on the night side of
the razor-sharp terminator were clear of clouds, but not a single city or town
light showed. A quirk of chance,
that all the clear areas lay over unpopulated areas or underground cities.

The
entire screen suffused with a golden glow, which quickly died away to reveal a
bright meteor streaking away, curving downward toward the waiting planet. The ship had launched a recon or landing
pod.

The
next image was from the surface. A
rust-colored wedge-shaped landing craft lay smoking on a grassy plain,
surrounded by a ring of black where the local flora had been combusted by its
arrival.
Barbeque
a la entry vehicle.
Mist
swirled around the periphery. An
odd-shaped hatch slowly cranked open, and a figure in some sort of exposure
suit shivered out of the craft. For
a moment I thought it was yet another hard-shelled insectoid Crunchy, but then
I realized that the six limbs were actually two legs and four arms, never the
twain to meet thanks to a big round
pot-belly
.

"Hmm. An Etzan?" I guessed.

The
Admiral nodded, once, the equivalent of throwing a lowly castle servant a scrap
of meat.
Thank
you, massster.

The
Etzan reached back into the craft and removed a shining cylinder a
half meter
in length, then moved away to the left with a
quick rolling gait. The camera
panned to follow, but lagged. The
alien stopped at the left edge of the field of view and stared back in a way
that managed, despite the species gap, to convey irritation. The cam centered with insolent slowness.

Etzans,
I recalled, were famously argumentative.

The
alien reached downward and picked up something. No, two somethings.
Lumps of dirt or
stone.
One it tossed over a
shoulder; the other it dropped into a small sample canister on its belt. The cam zoomed onto the canister's
label. A dense mottling of Galactic
script appeared. The alien rotated
the cylinder to demonstrate an intact, coded seal.

Next
the creature produced another longer, slimmer cylinder, which it held
vertically. A frozen pause, a puff
of smoke and a flash of light, and the pole was capped by a waving rectangular
image. The critter backed off a few
paces, then raised all four arms and one leg while facing the pole.

This
could have been hard to figure, except that Fist training included broad
exposure to a wide spectrum of wild and weird alien customs, especially those
that could get you killed, of which there were a disconcerting number. It might still have been hard to figure,
for this was not one of those, but Fist training also included a review of
Galactic Law, which dictated a unifying white light of behavior - standard and
agreed-upon culture and customs that gave the jungleverse a transparent and
entirely illusory veneer of civility. Most of these merely provided a legal justification for the
unjustifiable - rather like old-fashioned declarations of war, which pretended
to glorify, sanitize, and legitimize murder.
What I had just seen
fell into this category.

The
last part of the ceremony had been a salute.
To a flag.
The ceremony itself was the Galactic
Claiming Ceremony, used to take title to a planet.

But what planet?
There was no alien claim on Earth. I had plenty of problems with the world
of my birth but notably absent from them was alien governorship. It was a logic gap you could drive a
fair-sized moon through.

The
creature turned and trundled back to its ship, the camera again panning to
follow. But this time, something
else was in the background.
Something large, very hairy, and with tusks.
I scrolled through my memory, for a tiny
slippery blip that dodged and ran and hid. Finally I trapped it in a cool gray corner of those dark depths, and
dragged it, throbbing and wriggling, to the surface. The creature was a - wooly mammoth. Not just a creature extinct for
thousands of years, but an Earth creature extinct for thousands of years.

The
Admiral watched me as if he could hear the slow dry gears painfully meshing.

"Tricky,
isn't it?" he scowled.

"It
appears I just saw an alien creature claim the Earth, thousands of years
ago. But I can't help but point
out, in my typically humble manner, that no aliens have title to Earth. In fact, our own claim was approved fifty
years ago."

In
a new type of fierce grimace, the corners of the Admiral's slash mouth curved
upward but remained absolutely devoid of humor. “There's a bit more to the story,
Court. What I've shown you is just
the warm-up. Here."

With
a flourish, he handed me a small packet, wrapped in the red and gold bunting of
Ultra-Top-Very-Secret. He hesitated
before releasing it into my eager hands - who doesn't love a secret?

"We
lost four good agents getting this out," he said.

"Killed
in the line of duty," I said sadly, thinking of many a heroic spy story.

A
flicker of irritation skipped across the sidewalk of his face. “No," he glowered. “They knew how badly we wanted this, and
charged us so much they were able to retire."

"Ah."
Still I held my hand out, and finally, reluctantly, he handed it to me.
An expensive secret -
even better.

I
gingerly unwrapped the ribbon, then pressed my thumbprint to the explosive
lock, even more gingerly. Happily,
the lock microbrain agreed that I had access privileges and the packet popped
open. I pulled out the first page.

My
eyes made it through the first whereas, twisted around a heretofore, dodged a
verily, barely shook off a res ipsa loquitur, bulled through
a
obligat lexi, hurdled an in media insanium, but were finally floored by a ipso
locus loco. I returned the paper to
the packet, having succumbed in only the Preface to the hundreds of sheets,
stood, and moved towards the door.

"Where
are you going?" my Uncle roared.

I
froze. “Er, to get a lawyer to figure
all this out."

"Sit
down," he whispered.

I
sat. I hated when he did that
roaring-whispering thing. Oddly
enough, the whispers sounded louder.

"You're
a lawyer," he screamed.

I
let him calm for two beats of a slow heart. Not that there was one of those anywhere
nearby.

"No, I have a law degree." Like
geology and star navigation, it was one of many subjects I'd undertaken during
my tour of human academia, while my classmates chased Management and the
History of Bureaus. But I had
realized early on that it is far more honest, and interesting, to shoot someone
or something between the eyes - or whatever visual sensory
organs
that
someone or something has - rather than papering them to death.

The
Admiral was sighing testily. “I'll
summarize. Reduced to its essence,
it says that the Etzans were the first sentient species to make a claim to our
planet - yes, mother Earth - and that they are therefore the rightful
owners.
The vid
you just saw - along with the supporting evidence of their survey - was
collected over ten thousand years ago by an Etzan survey ship
. After leaving Earth, the ship was holed
and depressurized by a stray meteor.
Until recently, it was
a drifting

hulk
.
But only until recently.
The Etzans had just found it and now,
based on a claim made ten thousand, six hundred and forty-one years ago, they
have filed a formal planetary eviction action in the Galactic Court."

I
stared at him. He stared at
me. This went on for a while, as
his words rattled around my head. Planetary. Eviction. Eviction. Planetary.

Planetary eviction
. One of the nastiest arrows in the quiver
of Galactic law and, suddenly, one that offended even my own highly developed
sense of the surreal.

"Planetary
Eviction? Ridiculous!" I
cried. “We evolved on Earth!"

"True,"
the Admiral agreed. “But according
to Galactic Law, only a sentient species can claim a planet. And also according to Galactic Law,
sentience requires a maintained space-faring capability - most of the Old
Galactic Races are so old they can't remember a time when they didn't have
space travel. Our own claim was
accepted fifty years ago, but such a claim can be challenged, and even
overturned."

I
felt a dim pounding in my head. “So
you're saying-"

"According
to our legal experts the Etzans have a solid claim, and will certainly win
before the Galactic Tribunal."

I
would have been sure he was joking, except that as he often said, He Never
Joked. “They'll win?
In court?
Our planet?"

"Yes. Exactly. And then humans will be trespassers on
Earth. Subject to removal or
extermination. Of course, you can
stay and enjoy the terraforming. If
you can breathe sulfur, that is." The middle stage of terraforming, as performed by the Gannon, a race of
pungent abalone, always involved a few centuries as a sulfurous hell, which not
coincidentally was perceived as heaven by those Satan's mollusks. I imagined myself walking through a
picturesque park, accompanied by a large dog and a small woman. Or maybe - no, no, keep it that way. Suddenly, clouds of choking gas spewed
from hidden pipes, a lethal, scalding, deadly brew. Large dog, small woman, and I, in that
order, fall to our knees, gasping,
the
grass beneath
us already withering and browning. A large, dripping, shelled creature dances gaily by, surprisingly
light-footed on its single slithering pseudopod.

The
Admiral was speaking again. I
dragged my attention, kicking and screaming, back. “Our only hope is to disrupt the
Claiming Ceremony."

I
ran a hand through my orange
crew-cut
. It felt like it was standing up in
alarm, although it was always standing up. It just didn't always feel like it was standing up in alarm. The Admiral's words were having that
effect. “You need a lawyer!" I
cried. “There are thousands of
them! Obfuscate! Vacillate! Ruminate! Litigate! Prevaricate!"

"Not
the court ceremony, Court. The
original Claiming Ceremony."

I
detected the tiniest, teensiest flaw in this. It seemed too obvious, so I focused the
laser of my concentration on it, expecting it to snap away like a shadow. It didn't. So I gently raised it.

"Ah,
we're ten thousand years too late, I think," I pointed out.

"One
might think that," he agreed placidly, diamond incisor glinting.

My
orange hair now tried to leap off my head. “You don't mean-"

"I
most certainly do."

A
painful pause as seconds ground past. They felt like sharp glass underfoot.

"But
time travel is impossible!" I finally blurted. Every treatise said so. Every expert said so. Of course, throughout human history, the
road to progress has more often than not been paved directly over the skulls of
naysaying experts, who valiantly refuse to let the crushing weight of the
paving stones silence their skepticism.

The
Admiral shrugged, slowly, languidly, muscularly, as if shrugging were
excruciatingly pleasurable. Excruciating pleasure seemed like an emotion he would have. And enjoy. “Maybe. Or maybe that's just an unfortunate
rumor," he asserted, "that you may dispel. With the Time Oscillator."

I
was a helpless sheep being corralled by a cagy dog. Nips on the left, yaps on the
right. I could go but one
direction. I hate being a sheep.

"The
Time Oscillator?" I said suspiciously. “The Oh Oh device?" The Old Ones,
or Oh Ohs, were an ancient, long-dead race
who
had
left a huge orbital repository filled with mysterious devices in a stable orbit
high above the biliously-green planet Boff. Sometime around when a caveman named
Thog began experimenting with a stone wheel, the Bofflings had found and
retrieved these. The majority of
the devices remained intricate, dangerous, impenetrable mysteries. Even worse were the Bofflings
themselves; they were perfect examples of my hostile-food theory. Their large size and high lethality were
nicely counterpointed by their appearance as muscular, overgrown vegetables.

"Of course, the Oh Oh device," Uncle Admiral confirmed in
an avuncular tone.

"Great
Zot," I muttered, invoking the name of a drinking god popularized by bands
of rowdy miners on Mars.

"Your
mission is simple, Court. To Boff
you go. There, you find the Time
Oscillator. With it, you go back in
time to derail the Claiming Ceremony. There are several fairly arcane legal requirements to validly claim a
planet - you must make sure to disrupt at least one."

I
was saved, I suddenly realized. My
Way Out was clear. “But no one
knows how to work the Oh Oh devices. Not even the Bofflings!" I cried.

The
Admiral shrugged again, an interesting feat given his lack of a neck. This time it looked like he was
scratching his ears with his shoulders. “Not exactly, Court. Even
though most of the Galactics - well, all of them, really - have given up, we
have several new and secret theories that imply the Time Oscillator may
actually be workable."