The Blue Marble Gambit (11 page)

CHAPTER
8. DIGESTIONTACT

It
was just our bad luck that a Blutonian lifeboat happens to look very much like
the ripe egg pod of the Boffian manta, a huge underwater flying-carpet of a creature
the size of a city block. This odd
coincidence was our bad luck for a very simple reason: the ripe egg pod of the
Boffian manta is the favorite food of the Nagung.

And
it was a Nagung, of course, that I had seen heading our way with the joy of a
growth-spurting teenager finding one last potato chip in an otherwise empty
bag. A Nagung is a quarter-mile
tube with a round mouth like the back of cat, except for a lot of curved
slavering fangs. This particular
one had no trouble neatly ingesting us whole. It simply sucked us in, smoothly.
Almost gently.
Happily, it didn't chew.

"Well
this is new," Ned sulked. “Once again you surprise me, Court. How novel. We're going to be
digested."

It
was very dark inside the Nagung, with only a dim red glow from the control
panel. Now and then something
alarmingly slimy would press up against the viewports.

Trina
shot a single black look at me, then crossed her arms and turned away. A protuberance like a giant tongue, but
festooned with tiny waving appendages, slathered across her port. She made a rude gesture at it. It didn't seem to care.

The
lifeboat began to bob and
weave
as the Nagung
accelerated, no doubt in search of fresh victims.

"Yes,
probably," I agreed. In some
ways - in most ways, in fact - it was amazing that we had made it this
far. We had been doomed from the
start, of course - the Etzans were onto us from the beginning, and the loss of
the
Blue Bean
had sealed our fates as
surely as if we had stepped off a cliff. Since then we simply had been waiting for the end.

With
that thought, I reached out for Trina's end. She slapped my hand away; our imminent
digestion was having different effects on us.

"Can't
you do something?" she hissed. “We do have a planet to save!"

Oh,
now she was concerned about dear old Earth, I noted caustically.

"I've
always been concerned. In space, we
had hours. Here, we have only
minutes. At least being digested
won't take long. Although it looks
highly unpleasant."

Minutes?
"What are you talking about?"

"Diz,
dear. Look." She pointed at
the port. It was wavy and etched;
half of it was gone. It was made of
clearsteel, a chemical cousin of the alloy of the hull. And it was being dissolved away like
candy in water. Which meant the
whole hull was quickly melting away.

"Ug,"
I muttered. We had minutes at
best. I rustled through the tiny
package of supplies we had managed to bring: Nothing of any use. I turned once more that now-dry well,
the control panel. You'd think I
was expecting new switches and levers to have sprouted, but I wasn't, and none
had. The same pitiful array
dolefully greeted me. There was
only one button - a deep red octagonal one - that I hadn't pushed. The label had fallen off, so on general
principle I had avoided it. That's usually
sound advice, especially in vehicles made by aliens. But the time for general principle
seemed long past.

I
pressed it. A whirring sounded.

"Now
what are you doing?" Trina asked in a biting tone. The pod made a groaning, crackling
sound.

A
new indicator light glowed on a status panel. Dump, it glimmered, before fading away.

"Dumping,"
I said, wondering what I was dumping. A quick inquiry to the computer revealed that I was dumping -
everything.
Lifeboat
fuel, coolants, waste, toxics, batteries - everything.
Life support, too, I saw. Life support?

The
lifepod went dark. Black.
Really black.
The air instantly became thicker.

"Zot,"
I said. Why oh why would those
pesky Blutonians put such a button - unguarded, with no safety - in a lifeboat? When would you ever want to dump
everything from a lifeboat? Including life support? It
defied all logic. It was as crazy
as, well, nipples for men. Though
Trina had some interesting insights into those.

The
air grew steadily fouler and thicker, and soon Trina and I began to wheeze and
gasp.

"Asphyxiation,"
surmised a luminous Ned, now in lederhosen and purposefully acting as if he was
drawing huge gulps of fresh mountain air. “Clever of you. Really. I never would have guessed. I had us pegged for drowning in Nagung
bile, if it didn't dissolve us first. But once again you have surprised me."

I
imagined myself making a gesture with a building-sized middle finger.

The
air thickened, wrapping around us. Squeezing.

We
began to bob and weave, faster and faster, up and down and up. No doubt our Nagung was closing in on
some other hapless prey. The chase
was long and hard - apparently the next tasty morsel wasn't happy about its
fate. We jerked left, jibed right,
then rose up high and crashed down hard.

"Positively
Jonah-esque," Ned commented archly. “You have an unexpected flair for a literary end with both biblical and
alimentary overtones."

My
head hurt. I wheezed, "Didn't
Jonah survive?"

"Yes,
actually. But he had help from a
source that is plainly not on your side."

"Uh,"
Trina gasped. “If you get us out of
this, I'll let you have me," she grunted.

The
air took on the consistency of hot stinking fetid wool, except that it wasn't
quite that pleasant.

"You'd
do that anyway," I groaned. More dodging and
weaving,
left and right, up
and down, back and forth, to and fro. I wondered, academically, what was about to share the Nagung's intestine
with
us.

"True,"
she rasped.

A
much higher jump
up,
followed by a bone-shaking impact
with something. Dessert? I couldn't
bring myself to glance at the port, and not only because it was too dark. I didn't want to see the new kid in
town.

We
stopped moving back and forth, and instead began slowly bobbing up and down,
rocking as if on some oddly biological conveyor belt. Moving to some other part of the Nagung,
perhaps? To an intestinal loop
reserved for the dissolution of the toughest nuggets?
The Nagung appendix?
A strange Sargasso
sea
filled with the Boffian versions of boots and batteries? More bobbing. We were certainly going somewhere. Green and brown and yellow flesh licked
and sucked and tickled at the viewports;
we
were
a pill sliding through the Nagung bowels
. For a moment I wished I knew more about
Nagung biology. That moment didn't
last, as I quickly decided I was just as happy - happier, even, given the
circumstances - not knowing.

The
air - a term I use loosely - was now a worthless scraping mass. On the bright side, it looked like we'd
asphyxiate before we could be digested. Your future is dark indeed when that counts as a bright side.

Trina
and I flopped about weakly.

"Oog,"
she said.

"Arg,"
I replied.

Then
we fell back, helpless.

It
turns out that there is exactly one situation in which you should dump everything
from a Blutonian lifeboat. That
situation is when
you have been eaten by a giant Nagung
. The mix of noxious chemicals, coolants,
and fuels is, to a giant Nagung, highly unpalatable. Nauseating.
And most importantly
of all, emetic.
It turns out
that much of the up and down and side to side wasn't a hunt at all, but rather
a spaceship-sized
belly ache
.

This
was illustrated to us in a peristaltically graphic manner when, a moment later,
we were vomited onto the surface of Boff.

CHAPTER
9. ROADTRIP

The
sky was dark green. The sand was
dark brown. The bog was somewhere
between the two. It would have
driven any self-respecting homosexual interior designer mad - there wasn't a
tasteful pastel in sight. I forced
myself to stop enjoying the view and kicked the emergency hatch release;
gasping, we tumbled out onto the beach itself. The air wasn't exactly fresh, but had a
warm, swampy odor of decay and mildew and old vegetables. It was delicious.

I
grabbed our emergency packs from the lifeboat, in case our reluctant host
decided that although we weren't so good the first or second time, the third
might be the charm.

The
Nagung lay beside the scorched, burned, battered, and digested lifeboat,
heaving as pathetically as a thousand-foot carnivorous worm can heave. There was, I realized, some fairly
noxious stuff in the lifeboat's system. Even for a Nagung. Its three
grapefruit-sized eyes watched us, suspiciously and dully considering our
edibility. Then, with a giant wet
sigh that dampened us both, it slithered backwards into the swamp, leaving a
huge furrow. Wriggly yellow forms
appeared in the wall of the cavity. Drillers.
Voracious,
but slow, parasites.
I took
Trina's hand and led her away quickly.

"Well,"
I said as brightly as I could. “Welcome to Boff."

Her
eyes flashed. “Go to-" She
looked around, quickly at first, then more slowly. “Nevermind. It seems we've already arrived precisely
there."

"Perhaps. But now that I've gotten us to Boff,
from here on you shall lead and I shall follow. Where to, master? I await your beneficent command."

She
grabbed my cheek and twisted. Hard.

"Ouch!"

"Diz,
dear, I'll handle the Time Oscillator. You are supposed to get us to it. I don't see it anywhere nearby."

"The
Time Oscillator is right over that way." I pointed at the featureless
brown horizon. The lock on my cheek
released.

She
looked but saw nothing but endless brown. Her eyes, when they returned to me, radiated a familiar combination of
suspicion and hostility. “Right
over where?"

"That
way.
Two thousand
kilometers or so.
In the
metropolis of Gastro."

"Two
thousand kilometers?" She giggled, but not out of good humor. “Two thousand kilometers? Two? Thousand?" She took a threatening
step forward.

I
took a hasty step back. “We were
supposed to land nearby there. But
as you know, unforeseen circumstances blah blah blah."

"I
hadn't forgotten. I doubt I ever
will."

"Fear
not. I happen to have an
idea," I lied. Then, suddenly
and unaccountably, one popped into my head. “You see
,
you're forgetting that the Bog of Boff is a major tourist attraction. They come by the bushel just to see
this." I waved my arms at our green and brown swampy surroundings, a
gesture that in other circumstances would have said, Someday, son, all this
will be yours. “Marvelous, isn't
it," I finished.

"I
have no idea what you're talking about."

I
took her arm and ushered her around a low bright brown hillside. As we rounded it we saw, below, a huge
hoverbus huffing to a halt. A herd
of Boffs swarmed off to gaze with awe at the cesspool that was their planet's
greatest natural wonder. They
looked exactly like a herd of mobile giant asparagus: tapering green cones,
eight feet tall and wrapped in overlapping sheaves which hid their various tentacles
and razor-scythes, long wicked sabers grown from the Boff version of bone. They were complete xenophobes, and
reserved a special hatred for humanoids in general and Earthers in particular. Earth agents had standing orders to
engage them only from a distance; hand-to-bonesaber combat was always
disastrous for the primate.

Trina
was instantly prone. Her weapon had
appeared from somewhere, and she was sighting in on the nearest Boff.

I
dove onto her.

"Not
now, Court," she said calmly. “I'm in the mood for killin'."

I
pulled the cute little maser from her cute little hand. “Don't be silly. That's our ride."

Half
an hour later Trina turned to me. “How did you know," she whispered suspiciously as we glided along
in the back of the hoverbus, "that this would take us to Gastro?"

"Color-coding. The beige line runs east and west,
across the entire continent."

She
gave me a withering look.

"It
was a fifty-fifty chance," I hastily explained. “And we were right. This one is going towards Gastro. Not away."

"Sometimes
I'm amazed that you can cross a street."

"Hush. Or else I'll sauté you and serve you up
with a side of béarnaise." I said this in a very low whisper, for there is
perhaps no worse thing you can say to a creature that looks like an
asparagus. And
we
were surrounded by creatures that looked like asparagus
.

Of
course, so did we. Otherwise those
same Boffians would have fallen on us with the razor scythes they hid beneath
their leaf-like sheaves. I'd seen
Boffs fight - they were nasty and fast and ruthless and had absolutely no
respect for the sanctity of non-Boff life. They had only a minor amount of respect for the sanctity of Boff life.

The
few supplies I'd managed to salvage from the Blue Bean had proved invaluable -
which was exactly why, from our small pile of gear, I'd selected them. They were intended only as back-up
emergency devices, but this situation counted. Thanks to the paperback-sized
morph-packs each of us carried, a tactile projection hologram converted our humanoid
shapes into touchable, feelable aliens. Ned, through his tendrils in my brain, even gave me the gift of Boffian
gab, which was a collection of squeaks, grunts, and rustles. Although Trina lacked it - apparently
her brain had been deemed too valuable to risk with such an implant.

Stuff
like that can make you wonder. She'd been a little bit nicer to me ever since she'd figured out that
I'd figured that out. We could
communicate with each other over a narrow-beam sound channel; Ned used sound
suppressors to tailor and narrow the beam. Not perfect, but safer than standard
com
gear. Optical filters let us see
each other's faces, set in the middle of our respective stalks.

A
Boffian just ahead turned slowly and with great solemnity to regard us with all
three of its small pale-yellow eyes. There were no pupils visible, since the whole bilious sphere served as a
pupil.

"Greetings,
brother of the Great Seed Pod," it intoned. “May your sheaves grow straight and
firm!"

This,
I realized, was a ritual greeting. I returned it appropriately, with Ned's grudging help. It felt odd; he used a combination of my
own mouth and a hidden tiny speaker to put my thoughts into the local
lingo. Snort, rustle, wheeze,
belch
.

"I
am Orna," rustled the creature. “This is my forty-fifth journey to the Celebrated Swamp, and perhaps my
last before I return to the Fertile Field From Which All Sprouts."

In
an aside, Ned explained that Orna was so ancient that he was, essentially, on
his last legs.
All
two thousand of them, none longer than two inches.
They swarmed from beneath the bottom of
the stalk like transplanted fingers. Even if you were used to aliens, it was: Gross.

Orna
seemed to be waiting for something. He loomed high, the sheaves ringing his trunk rising and falling one
after another, creating a ripple that rode up and down him.

"Names!"
cried Ned. “He wants our
names!"

"Tell
him, then!" I subvocalized.

"Tell
him what? We didn't prepare
any! I was going to scan the local
transmissions when we were in orbit, but we were never in orbit. Oh, this delay is a breach of
etiquette! Oh!"

No names? Nothing prepared? Great Zot! But no problem - I was a Finger of the Fist. Thinking on my feet, whether two or two
thousand of them, was my specialty. I spoke. The answer was
obvious.

"Honored
Orna, I am Aspara, and this is Gus."

Ned
appeared and grimaced as he translated; our names were hardly changed at all,
with only a slightly modified inflection, and were recognizably rocky chunks of
sound in the waterfall of Boffian speech.

Orna
froze. I felt like a clod of
fertilizer in the gaze of a hungry predatory vegetable. As is the way of clods of fertilizer, I
froze. Orna seemed to reach some
decision, and finally scraped, "Your first visit to the Great Wetness?"

"Yes,"
I crackled.

"An
important rite of passage; now you have achieved Sprouthood and may be privy
to all of the Boffian way. I trust
you enjoyed your visit," shivered Orna.

"Deliciously
damp," I clicked.

Trina
apparently had been waging a battle to restrain herself, a battle she abruptly
lost. The link hummed to life. “Aspara? And Gus? What kind of names are
those? Why not just Idiot and
Moron? Or Dead and Meat? Are you trying to get us killed? Do you want to end up in a shallow grave
here on Boff?"

"Don't
worry," I whispered into the link. “There are no shallow graves here. Everyone is buried in a nice deep swamp."

Orna
said nothing; I again had the distinct sense that he was regarding me
strangely. My response about the
Great Wetness must have been inadequate. And, of course, Trina had been distracting me.

"Supremely
soggy," I tried. “Fabulously
flooded. Wonderfully wet. Almost too sopping, if such a thing is
even possible." I began to feel inspired; I had an urge to wax poetic
about the virtues of bogginess, the sublime serenity of the sopping, maybe even
toss off a haiku or two, but Trina shot an alarmed look at me and I quit.

Orna
now was definitely staring at me. “The Great Bog truly affects us all," he finally said, apparently
deciding that I was drunk on the vision. “Some more than others. Tell
me. Of what clan are you?"

Boffs
were divided into a dozen or so clans, each identified by some characteristic
attribute. “Spotted-Stalk," I
said. Although, to my eyes our
stalks were no more spotted than any other. Somehow, it seemed, Boff eyes worked
differently. We hoped.

Orna
seemed to accept that. “We are
almost related, then. I am of
Neatly-Arrayed-Leaves."

That
sounded like it called for a ritual response, but Ned was silent. I cursed him under my breath. Orna waited. Yes, plainly some response was called
for. I took the plunge.

"How
nice," I offered.

Orna
actually seemed to flinch. “The
Great Bog," he said after a long period of uncomfortable scrutiny,
"has its own swampy ways.

"You
do want to get us killed!" Trina hissed over the link. It was risky but I guess she just
couldn't resist. I ignored her.

"I
haven't been quite myself since the Bog," I admitted to Orna. That was completely true - I'd been a
Boff ever since the bog. It
gladdened my heart to be so honest.

"Quite
so," Orna agreed. “I suppose
you are not the first. Oh my!"
He suddenly shivered, and with a wet glopping sound deposited a pile of runny
yellow gourds onto the floor. They
quivered and steamed and jiggled like nightmare jello.

"By
All
that is Damp and Clammy," Orna said
sadly. “A mess! My defecatory
organs have malfunctioned!"

I
felt a surge of revulsion as I realized what these steaming melons were. I wanted to back away. I wanted to run.
To flee.
To hide.

Instead,
and to my everlasting horror, I heard myself say, "I would be honored to
clean your mess. I have yet to
honor my annual obligation to the public sanitation."

What? What? Not possible! Then I realized that I didn't say
it. Ned said it for me. Great Zot! A masterful dirty trick! I imagined taking a laser drill in hand,
aiming the violet beam at my temple, and excavating away until a tiny troll
leapt from my head, fully formed, and ran away screaming and smoking, before
vanishing in a bright flare as I lasered him. I knew Ned would see my whole little
morality - and mortality - play.

"Oh
stop that and relax," Ned whispered to me. There was no need for him to whisper in
such situations - he didn't produce any actual sound when talking to me, but
dumped his output directly into my brain's auditory center. Nevertheless, whisper he did - for the
effect, I think - as he continued. “Fealty is an important concept in Boff culture. You are a relatively junior member. You are expected to help your
elders. This is a perfect
opportunity to blend in. You can't
blame me for taking it. You should
be thanking me. Such an
ingrate." His tone took on a hint of a sulk.

"Wait
a minute," I said under my breath. “I'm a junior member? Who thought of that? Shouldn't I be a senior,
established, high mucky-muck? Major Green, perhaps?"

Orna
shifted, crinkling his leathery stalk, and gazed dolefully at his steaming dung
heap. It was hard to say if it was
yellowish-green, or greenish-yellow. It was easy to say if it mattered: it didn't.