The Blue Marble Gambit (5 page)

I
recalled, at this point, that not only were the Bofflings notoriously
xenophobic, they reserved a special hatred for mankind. They simply found us intolerably
gross. To them we were an unnatural
shape littered with mucous membranes, incomprehensible openings, and
inappropriate limbs. The Boffs had
sworn that their world would never be - how did they put it? -
defiled
by primate feet. In light of that, one aspect of this was
a bit surprising.

"The
Boffs will let us use their toy?" I asked suspiciously.

The
Admiral raised his hands, palms up. “Of course not. We asked,
but they categorically refused, promising that every sun in the universe would
be dark before any human lays eyes on the Time Oscillator."

There
was a long silence. “Let's come
back to that little tid-bit," I finally said.

The
Admiral looked pleased, a rare thing indeed. “Let's," he agreed.

"Assuming
I find my way, somehow, to this ancient marvel, which is no doubt hidden away
on Boff, what then? Do I just start banging away at the buttons or levers or
whatever it has?"

The
Admiral turned a disappointed glare on me. “Don't be stupid."

I
wasn't being stupid. I was being
sarcastic. Teams of interstellar
scientists had been unable to crack the elaborately complex devices left by the
Oh Ohs.
Especially
the Time Oscillator.

"You,"
the Admiral pointed at me sternly, "aren't going to touch the Time
Oscillator!"

"Then
just who," and here I theatrically raised both arms, "is?" Not
even GovCorp, the official parent of the Fist, could - I hoped fervently - come
up with a plan so cracked that I would go all the way there but not be allowed
to touch the space-blasted thing.

"I
am," answered a voice from behind me.

"She
is," Uncle Admiral agreed.

I
turned to see a young woman, clad in an almost-clear jumpsuit that lay over her
like a second skin. Beneath it she
wore some type of tiger-striped garment, the yellow and black bands hugging her
tightly, curving suggestively here and dipping delicately there. Her hair was a wild blonde mane, framing
a face far too attractive for the sordid halls of the Fist, and featuring a
variety of conservative piercings, plus several not-so-conservative ones.

As
she entered, walking with an athletic bounce, she seemed to exude an aura so
palpable that I wondered if she had custom pheromones or a hidden emotion
projector. But what she was sending
mankind had not yet learned to tap - it was the pure essence of sex.
The stench of
salaciousness.
Eau de wanton lust.
She was absolutely, positively layered in lasciviousness,
steeped
in sensuality, a bright beacon of erotica in a
suddenly dark and dismal universe.

I
was instantly suspicious. It wasn't
like the Admiral to do something nice for me. But this looked like something
nice. Which meant it wasn't. Simple logic.

She
stopped before the Admiral and tossed off a ragged salute. “Trina Nova, reporting for duty,
Sir," she said. Her perfect
throat quivered; her voice lilted and pitched and rose and dove. It was music.

"You
again!" I said. Her hair,
space black before, was now sun yellow. “Duty? I don't understand."

"Of
course you don't," the Admiral agreed, drumming his fingers on the pyrite
of his desk. His fingers were
noticeably muscular. “You so rarely
do. This is your partner. Trina, you've already met Court diz
Astor, my ill-starred nephew."

I
eyed Trina appreciatively. A
thousand thoughts of a perfectly healthy and natural sort flitted through my
head, and close on their heels followed a thousand more, except that these were
unhealthy, unnatural,
even
fiendish. These last were far more entertaining
and engaging, and I spent a moment mulling the permutations and contortions.

And
then, just like that, I was on the floor, looking up at the world. Trina was standing over me, the slight
flare of her nostrils adding a spice of dangerous elegance to her perfect bone
structure. My mind reconstructed
the last few milliseconds, and found that I had been the victim of a nicely
executed standard Interspecies throw, taught to all recruits of The Fist and
effective against almost any creature.

"You're
a mind reader?" I gasped in horror. Even so, hopefully she hadn't been able to pull actual images from my
fermenting brain.

"Don't
be stupid. I didn't have to
be," she snorted.

"Doomed,
doomed, we're all doomed," the
Admiral
groaned, his
head in his hands.

"You
know, all things considered, I think I'd rather work alone," I said from
the floor.

"Shut
up, Court," the Admiral replied. “Time is the one thing we're short of, and if you keep wasting it I'll
have you melted down to slag and your biochemical compounds used to fertilize
an orbital mushroom farm."

I
struggled to my feet, picking lint from my orange hair to avoid looking like a
creamsicle. None of this made any
sense at all.

She
looked at me. “Ready? We better hurry."

I
held up both hands as if trying to block an advancing asteroid tug.

"Now
wait a minute here, Uncle Buckeroo and Trina Pulsar or whatever your-

"Nova,"
the lass put in smoothly.

"Right. Nova. We don't have to hurry. If we're to succeed in your crackpot
scheme, we'll do it using time travel. Which means we have plenty of time. Time enough to plan everything out carefully. Time enough, even, to take a long
vacation. Really think things
through. May I suggest the leisure
world of Eros? Perhaps for a
month?"

"Time,"
Trina said in a voice of cold crystal, "doesn't work that way."

I
stared at her.

"Did
I mention," the Admiral offered, "that Professor Nova has a doctorate
in astrotemporal hyperphysics?"

"Somehow
you forgot to," I muttered.

"My
apologies."

But of course it made perfect sense. She would operate the Time Oscillator,
he'd said.

"There
are two problems," Trina lectured. “First, although we can jump around the time stream - if we get to the
Time Oscillator, and figure it out, that is - the time stream keeps
moving. The present moves along
unstoppably, and is a unique region in the time stream, from the point of view
of this stream. And second, we
can't visit our own timespace twice. Well, you can, but it takes an infinite amount of energy, times
two. So for all practical purposes
you can never visit your own lifetime."

I
swallowed some of this, but one jagged morsel gouged at my cerebral craw. I said, "An infinite amount of
energy?"

"Times
two."

"How
is that possible? Is infinity times two bigger than just plain infinity?"

Trina
smiled a look of grandmotherly compassion at me. “You poor dear," she said. “Yes, of course. And no, of course not."

"You're
with GovCorp!" I shrieked, recognizing the doublespeak.

"Yes. And no," she replied. “But back to your earlier question about
multiplicative infinity. Here. Watch." She moved to the
wall board
, where her slimly pointed fingers began sketching
a temporal equation. It used Greek,
Roman, Arabic, and Chinese symbols, some in a flowery script that looked like
it had been stolen from a wedding invitation, and several I couldn't even begin
to describe. It blossomed, layer
begetting layer and symbol begetting symbol. A whirlpool of arcane symbology
appeared. And grew. Its sucking tendrils reached out for me.

The
Admiral grinned evilly.

"Never
mind," I said.

"I'm
just getting started. These
equations are the theoretical underpinnings to the pseudo-quantum-mechanical
foundation-"

"I
give up."

"Fine,"
she said, dropping her hand. “Anyway, the gist of it is that we have only ten days."

"Ten
days?"

"That,"
the Admiral said patiently, "is when the Etzans will present their claim
to the Galactic Tribunal."

"And
at that point it will be too late," Trina finished. “We'll never be able to go back in time
to the Galactic Tribunal hearing - the recent past is off-limits.
Impossible to reach,
since we're subunits of this timespace, and resonate at its chronic frequency.
The laws of
conservation of temporality.
I just showed you the formu-"

I
jumped in before she could start again with the formulas. Formulae. Whatever. “But even if we wait a month, until
after the hearing, we could still go back to the Claiming Ceremony, thousands
of years ago."

"Ten
thousand six hundred and forty-one," corrected Trina.

The
Admiral was nodding. “True,
Court. And we might even disrupt
it. But that would do this
timeline no good at all. It might
- or might not - spin off another branch of temporality, but it wouldn't help
us. Once the Galactic Tribunal
hearing is past our present, we can't change it. The recent past is immutable. So if you go back in time after ten days
from now, it's worthless to us. This us, that is."

"Exactly
right," Trina agreed. “It
might help a parallel us, but then again it might not. There may not even be a parallel us, but
only an inchoate tempo-bubble. The
mechanics are complicated and inherently imprecise. Chaos permeates. Watch." She flourished a laser pen like a
dagger.

"I'll
take," I muttered in disgust, "your word for it." Then I faced
the Admiral. “I'll be fine on my
own. Just have her brief me. I can figure it out."

The
Admiral was shaking his head in
a
admirable imitation
of patience. This despite the
fact that he didn't have a patient cell
in his body. Even his adipose cells, if he had any,
must have perpetually trembled with activity.

"You
need Trina to operate the Time Oscillator. Don't worry, she can take care of herself - she's on loan to the Fist
from the Cerebral Branch," he added soothingly.

Perhaps
he was hoping to slip that nugget past me but his words set off more warning
bells than his scheme to send me to Boff. The Cerebral Branch!

"No!
Not a Brain!" Brains - the intelligence wonks who often came up with uses
for the Fist - had an evil reputation in the hallowed halls of the Fist. Mere working Fingers like me could
always expect shabby treatment from Brains. Brains would do things like stick
Fingers into fire. Or break
Fingers. After all, there were
always more Fingers.

"Now,
Court-"

"I
can figure it out myself!" I cried.

"I
doubt that very much," Trina said. “From what we've been able to gather, at the very least the Time
Oscillator requires an intimate knowledge of reverse-phase temporal-stability
theory and stasis-shift equations."

"Oh,
those," I shrugged. “Sometimes
I do those at night to help me sleep."

"One
more thing," the Admiral said, now glaring at me. “The Etzans are expecting us to try
something, and have mobilized against us; we've had three agents attacked
recently."

"Four,"
I reminded him, recalling my spacewalk.

"Four,"
he corrected. “If they find you,
they'll strike. So keep your eyes
open. You have to get Trina to the
Time Oscillator. That's your
job." The Admiral glanced at the luminous time-strip implanted in his
forefinger. “OK, it's time to get
you outfitted. You're due in the
biolab
, Court."

I
should have expected that, but I didn't. I must have been distracted.

"No,"
I said, backing away. “Not the
biolab
."

"Somehow
I knew you'd say that," the Admiral replied, gliding forward.

I
knew what to look for and it was there, a glint in his right hand that matched
the gleam in his eye. I faked left
before diving right but he was too quick. Or rather, the security bot that had crept up behind me and snagged me
in the unbreakable carbide grips of restraint talons was too quick. I knew they were unbreakable, but I
struggled anyway.

The
Admiral smiled cruelly, and the solid diamond tooth sparkled evilly, though not
quite as evilly as the silver tool in his hand. I fired a snap kick at his head; that
glinting dome flicked sideways with reptilian efficiency. My boot smote air.

"Deja
vu," he said as he pointed the steely tip of the
spraygun
at my neck. “Why do we always go
through this?"

"Let's
not this time," I suggested, tensing for another kick.

"Too
late," he said, and pulled the trigger. I barely heard the hiss, and almost felt
the sting, before the black curtain fell.

CHAPTER 4
. BRAINGUEST

I
awoke staring up at the bright white octagons of the
biolab
ceiling. Beams of hard light
speared out of the whirring surgical autolamps, leapt across a few meters of
cold air, and drilled mercilessly into my eyes. The painful lights were unnecessary, but
they added to the ambience of agony.

"This
won't hurt a bit,"
lied
Dr. Primer Ought, Chief
Scientist of the Fist. He was
crouched over the top of my head, which like the rest of my body was strapped
to a long padded table. He was still
preparing his equipment, which for some reason required a lot of awful grinding
noises. Even the sound hurt - and
that was nothing, I knew, compared to what was coming.

I
threw myself upward. The thick
straps held.

I
kicked my legs downward. The thick
straps held.

I
thrashed my body sideways. The
thick straps held.

The
clanking noises stopped, leaving in their wake an even louder silence. I knew what that meant.

"Well,
actually," Dr. Ought amended as he shuffled closer, "it might smart
just a little."

There
was good reason he was known in the ranks as Dr. Pain.

"No,"
I gasped, and changed tactics. I
now fought to free only my right arm, putting all my strength into it. I envisioned it ripping free, lunging
through the restraint and wrapping around Dr
. Pain's
neck. Squeezing. Making my biceps jump and twitch,
perhaps a tattooed hula dancer happily hula-ing as Dr. Pain's face purpled.

Still
the straps held. I was
dumb-founded.

"We've
strengthened the restraints since your last visit," Dr. Ought observed in
a practiced tone of boredom.

I
could tell he'd waited a long, long while to say those words. And perhaps justifiably so, in light of
the somewhat grisly events which had passed, so delightfully slowly, the last
time, when I'd broken free and forced him into the chair. It turned out that he didn't enjoy the
other side of pain nearly so much.

He
twisted something, producing a threatening ratcheting sound. He glanced at the glow of a
display. “Oh dear," he said
without a shred of genuine surprise. “I'm afraid I was terribly mistaken. This will sting quite a lot,
actually."

I
struggled magnificently. My body
hardly moved.

There
was nothing else to do. I was down
to my last resort. I screamed.

"That
won't help," he observed coolly. I heard an icy clink as some sort of hard surgical tool left its cold metallic
home. It sounded sharp. “But go ahead if you like," he
offered kindly. It was, I knew,
false kindness.
Dentist's
kindness.

Why,
one might wonder, in an age of interstellar travel, centuries after effective
anesthetics had been developed, would this relatively minor procedure hurt so
much?

For
one very simple reason: Dr. Pain liked pain. He bathed in it like a pig in mud; he reveled
in it, he was a connoisseur of contortions, a gourmet of groans, an archbishop
of agony. If pain
was
painting he'd be Picasso. Officially, he claimed that maintaining
some patient response was critical to the successful outcome of his
procedures.
A
likely cover story.

An
icy pencil cut through the top of my head, chewing through the skull and then
scalloping through what little gray matter I had. It hurt. A lot. It cut deeper and deeper, until I could feel
a cold damp pressure behind my eyeballs. The world blurred as my eyes changed shape.

"Ungggg,"
I said.
It wasn't
just ferociously painful
,
it was ferociously awkward
.

"Here
comes a little prick," Dr
. Ought
warned. I was too
far gone
to make the obvious rejoinder. Another one?

Regardless,
it was no little prick. It was a
flaming cutting torch, carbonizing my brain stem one slow painful molecule at a
time. Or so it felt. It went on for a timeless eternity, and
then perhaps just a bit longer, and all the while there was a delicate background
of tinkling and tugging. Then came
a new sound - a horrible wet crackling. Snakes and rodents roamed about my skull, set up shop, had babies, and
raised
generations of young vermin.

"Almost
finished, Court," Dr. Ought said sadly, much later.

A
final excruciating wrench, as if he was tugging my brain ninety degrees.

"There. All done," he said, and pressed the
silver tip of a spraygun against my neck.

"Night
night," he said.

This
time I awoke with a Galaxy-class headache that I knew was even worse than it
felt. I explored my skull, and
found the oddly slick smoothness of skinseal on my neck and scalp.

"Mercury's
scorched butt," I muttered. It
had been inevitable, and now it was done. Some nameless computer detected my return to consciousness and a bright annunciator
panel glowed to brutally cheerful life in mid-air, informing me that I was due
in Hangar Bay 9. I staggered out
into the hall.

The
Bigger Than Yours
had long curving
passages, reminiscent of the Fist's main headquarters tucked away deep beneath
the surface of Elara, a small moon idly circling Jupiter. The halls were sparsely populated, with
only a few EarthCops in their evil yellow uniforms. They weren't after me; I was safe in my
black Fist jumpsuit. But I couldn't
help glowering at them; after dodging them for years, and belittling and
taunting them at every opportunity, the habit was still with me. It wasn't just for my own amusement that
I had turned myself into one of the most famous outlaws known to man, and
triggered a system-wide
hunt which
failed to find
me.
Although,
frankly, it was very amusing.
But my role as an outlaw had a higher, altruistic purpose: Examples like
me were good for the human spirit. Though I have to admit it was great fun to be a bad example.

I
passed one of the cyber-rec rooms; screams and thumps sounded from within. It was either full-contact combat, or
ultra-vigorous space sex. Then
again, it could have been that new hybrid dreamed up by some entertainment
genius: Sexbat.
Sex
and violence in one handy package.
The ideal human brainfood.
Mass-marketed, with
competitive teams.
Whatever
it was - and who didn't enjoy a good sexbat bout? - I didn't even glance inside. My mood was black as a hole for I was
awaiting an unwelcome visitor. Worse, there was no escaping him. He was inside my head.

The
corridor branched and I followed the coded symbol for the hangar deck.

"Come
on, Ned. Show yourself. No doubt you're even uglier than
before." As we both knew perfectly well this was not only highly unlikely
but
completely impossible, for Ned had no genuine physical
appearance at all.

Nothing. Ned, I knew, would bide his time. Choose his moment. Plan his entrance. I turned a corner and the massive
airlock of the hangar bay loomed just ahead, a giant steel iris. I popped into a head; might as well
offload some last cargo while still in the ship's grav field.

I
was standing at the uricycler when Ned appeared.
A translucent figure,
kingly and bearded, in long robes and wearing a crown, standing beside me
imperiously.

"Figures
you'd show up here," I groused. “Pervert."

"Now
now, Court, I just wanted to confirm that you're as pitifully endowed as
ever." He glanced downward meaningfully.

I
smiled and glanced at Ned's crotch. “I don't think your vaporware is anything to be proud of."

"Oh
no?" Ned replied, now a giant sex organ. Since he controlled the signals feeding
into my brain, he could take on any appearance he wanted. And now he wanted to be a seven-foot
dingle. But that wasn't enough.

Ned
pointed his business end at me. Of
course it couldn't really do anything to me, but I had a hunch that both the
visual imagery and tactile input were about to be extremely disquieting, at
best, and drenchingly disgusting, at worst.

"Here's
a little present for you," Ned warned.

As
I well knew, it is impossible to dodge the inside of your head. So, on sudden impulse, I slammed my
forehead into the smooth steel wall, hard enough to add another sedimentary
layer of pain to my headache. More
importantly, Ned's phallic image snapped and crackled and popped.

"Hey,"
he blurted, the words emanating from one end with imaginative though obscene
anatomical correctness. Those
weren’t lips, but they talked. Then
he vanished.

I
marched out the hatch, trying to ignore the throbbing pain between my eyes.

Ned,
of course, lived in my head. He was
a Neural Emplant Device, a tiny bundle of organosil chips hardwired into my
cerebellum, cerebral cortex, optic and auditory nerves, and other lobes and
flanges I'd never heard of. He was
an on-line advisor with vast databanks and hyper-power processors, but I always
insisted that the insidious little elf be ripped out when I wasn't using him,
which accounted for all my time in the biolab. Even that was better than having a
constant voyeur popping up spontaneously to analyze every move you make. Fist Agents were paired with particular
implants; our personalities were matched. So Ned and I knew each other, and in fact had a long history. But in our case, the matching didn't
seem to have worked, despite the infinite wisdom of the Fist. Simply put, we didn't get along. But we shared my skull. Which is a problem.

My
head was still ringing when I found Trina Nova at the boarding ramp of our
ship.

"The
Blue Bean
," I said, reading the
nameplate. It was a small private
yacht, neither blue nor a bean, but shaped like the jeweled head of a praying
mantis. The idea was that a private
yacht would be better cover than a known Fist ship, and so would give us a
better chance of sneaking onto Boff. I walked around it once, kicking intakes and yanking on appendages,
making sure that everything was attached and most likely would stay attached.

We
climbed into the small but luxurious interior, equipped with two small
staterooms, a galley, and a tired but serviceable cockpit. I took the pilot's chouch, which
depending on ambient g-forces could flex between chair and couch, and motioned
Trina to strap in beside me.

"Welcome
aboard," hummed the ship's computer with enthusiasm. Its voice was slick with
salesmanship. “This is a custom
Starcruiser 9XL, manufactured to the highest specifications on the scenic
planet Blutonia. The 9XL is a
perfect blend of performance and economy, delivered in an attractive steel,
cermet, and titanium-trimmed package. Features include genuine artificial imitation burled agnut decor, a
convertible galley, TL capability, a maximum extended capacity of four human
adults, or seven Zlotyl mid-larvals, or two Oleans, or three pods of-"

I
pressed the mute button. The voice
became choked and strangled; it sounded as if it were talking around a
gag. But still it soldiered
on. “Three - pods -
of
-"

I
stabbed the button again. Silence.

Ned
appeared, and in a slightly bitter voice gave me a more reliable rundown of the
ship's controls and systems. A few
things it did very well. A few
others, I noticed, it did not do at all. For example, the
Blue Bean
was
relatively fast, but no match for a big military vessel.
A trade-off of weight
for speed.

Ned
said, "If you'll give me access, I'll configure the nav computer and drive
elements for the trip to Boff."

I
hated to do it, but we were in a hurry, so I concentrated hard, as if trying to
roll a marble around somewhere behind my eyes. There was a tiny click as if some
unidentifiable muscle in my head had moved some
unspeakably-placed
lever. I insisted on having control
over Ned's on-board integral telelink, much to the disgust of both the Fist and
Ned himself.

"Thank
you," Ned cooed, and lights began to flash on the nav console as he
reached out. Two minutes later he
was done; I spent another ten double-checking his work.

Flawless.

I
called Trina into the cockpit and pointed to the other chouch. “Better strap in."

She
stretched onto the leather like a lazy cat and puffed her hair into a black
cloud.

I
stared. Either at some point in the
recent past I hadn't noticed that I'd suffered serious brain damage, or her
hair had recently changed shades again, this time from blond to black.

She
smiled, and moved a hidden dial - perhaps on a biotooth. Her hair silvered, went through a momentary
rainbow phase, then shone gold.

Chameleon-mods. Nano-camo. Expensive. “Trendy," I said.

"Thank
you."

I
got a quick clearance from a surly controller who, if he wasn't beaten as a
child, should have been. The ship
crackled as the air was pumped out of the lock and deep space wrapped cold
talons around us, then the external hatch irisced open.
Stone-hard pinpricks
of stars shone, free of flicker and distortion.
I thought of all those rays of light,
which had travelled so far from so many places to meet right here. It seemed auspicious, though it wasn’t.