The Blue Marble Gambit (14 page)

The
bus smoothly cornered, all the Boff stalks rocking like wheat in the wind. I had a glorious vision of threshers,
marching in a proud line across a field of meek, passive plants.
Lopped-off stems
flying high in looping, grisly arcs.
If we survived this, I resolved to spend
some time on a farm, merrily harvesting away. Call me sap-thirsty.

Ned
rubbed his tiny hands at his tinier eyes and stared outside. “Look at the bright side, Court. We're close to it, wherever it is."

"Huh?"

He
made a grand sweeping
gesture,
one you wouldn't expect
such a miniature creature to be capable of. “We're here. Welcome to the city of Gastro."

I
jolted and looked outside. Tall
buildings of green, yellow, brown, and pale red reached for the brown sky; the
rectangle was evidently out of fashion, or had never been invented, for the
buildings were pyramidal, conical, wavy sided, cylindrical - everything but
square. It was a smorgasbord of
complex and erratic geometry.
Euclid's worst nightmare, in vegestone and plasticrete and who knew
what.
The avenues were broad
and hedge-lined
;
the vehicles all very odd-looking,
given the odd shape of our stalk-like hosts. It made me think how human history might
have been different if, a hundred millennia ago, some genetic Eve had decided
she preferred, for example,
pointy heads
instead of
round ones.
If
that ancestral nymph had chosen Oog instead Thog.
She might have passed her preference on
to future generations; it could have become a hallmark of human beauty.

Look,
Oola! Such a tall,
pointy head
!

Oh
yes! The pointier the better! Nevermind the difficult births!

All
our doorways would be different. Airplanes would be less aerodynamic. The hat industry would never have evolved,
although, of course, it might simply have been replaced by the head-sleeve
industry.

So
perhaps the lesson, I decided as I grimaced at our monstrous companions, was
this: There but for the grace and good taste of some long-dead forebears go I.

The
hoverbus made a quick turn and I had the sense that we were now deep in the
dark green heart of this urban jungle. The streets seemed to close in; the twisted buildings leaned to overhang
us. A slow right, then a hard left,
and the hoverbus glided into a huge dome-roofed cavern that had to be a
terminal.

If
I had been involved in such research I might have found it interesting to note
that hoverbus terminals on Boff seemed to attract the same general class of
folk that flocked to hoverbus terminals on Earth. A certain percentage of fine upstanding
individuals, of course, but for some reason the coming and going of large
pieces of machinery seems to attract some of the worst elements, and even to
bring out the worst sides of these unfortunates. How else to explain all the weird,
unspeakable, bizarre behavior seen in every form of transit terminal? Do some
people actually have the following
conversation:

"Honey,
I am feeling absolutely wacky today. Crazy, even."

"Off
to the hoverbus
terminal then, are
you?"

"Absolutely. Where else?"

"Have
fun!"

Of
course, I wasn't doing such research, so I didn't find it all that
interesting. I found it only mildly
depressing. Then again, I could
hope, maybe it only looked true here.

Our
hoverbus slid into a wide slot and with a groaning hiss settled to the
gray-green Boffcrete. That's what
it was called, according to Ned. And outside, on that very Boffcrete, bushels of Boffs jostled and
bumped, their sheaves flaring in irritation. The hoverbus passengers growled and
snapped and wheezed as they gathered their items with pink-frosted tentacles
and trundled off the bus. Trina and
I waited until the end, and were the last to go. I watched the others carefully, hoping
to get some idea about which way we should go, or at least, and just as
importantly, which way not to go. It wouldn't do to blunder right through a "No Entry On Pain Of
Being Served As A Side Dish," sign. We had to find the way to the Hall of Marvels, somewhere within the
Central Armory, wherever that was.

But
for all my attentive study I didn't pick up a thing. I was clueless as, well, as a primate in
an aspara-suit.

No matter, though.
One crisis at a time.
For the moment our task was simply to
avoid being exposed. As soon as we
hit the strangely spongy surface I set off briskly. You can't let ignorance stop you. Just think where we'd be if some people,
many of
whom
have achieved high public office, did
that. Well, maybe it would be
better not to think of that.

"This
way," I murmured, pointing us towards a line of tall triangular
doors. We moved along with a large
crowd; it seemed like a safe destination, since everyone else was going
there. Obviously, I had forgotten
the valuable lesson taught by lemmings.

My
legs soon ached from the Boff crawl; the pain reminded me of Trina's sculpted
calves and tightly muscled thighs, covered with the faintest trace of
delightfully-mammalian
white-blonde peach fuzz. Even now those legs were flexing;
perhaps they bore the faintest sheen of sweat. I gazed at her well-concealed figure
with even
better-concealed
lust.

I
began to have a reaction anatomically impossible for, though surprisingly
reminiscent of, a giant asparagus spear. A moment later, to my great and everlasting disgust, I realized that I
was eyeing the wrong Boff. I was
lusting after a real Boff. Though
it made me feel faintly sick, at least our morph-pack disguises were good.

"Stay
focused!" Ned reprimanded, appearing by my side in silk pajamas while
smoking a pipe. “The Armory! The
Time Oscillator! The Mission!"

Suddenly the vegetable herd we were running
with clogged up. I had an image of
the whirling laser-edged blades of a garbage-disposal grinding to halt,
stoppered with a mass of cellulose, and I made sure I was next to Trina - the real
one - as we halted. The Boffs
around us seemed unsettled, which implied that this was something unusual. And which also gave me a tiny twinge of
anticipation, right in the belly. Our descent into Boff's atmosphere might have gone unnoticed - but then
again, it might not have. Even so,
perhaps the Boffs simply assumed we died in the crash - not unreasonable,
really. But then again, they might
have found our conspicuously empty lifeboat.

There
were several new figures in the crowd, each draped with officious-looking
sashes and moving purposefully and methodically through the forest of
stalks.
As if
looking for something.

Or
someone. They were stopping at each
individual, and inspecting something. The faint twinge in my guts turned into a twisting pneumatic wrench-grip
accompanied nicely by the alarm
bells which
began to
ring in my head. I mean that
literally - Ned treated me to a couple of strident whoops. My life was a cartoon.

Be
Calm, Ned urged. Maybe it's a
routine check. No need to worry.

On
general principle, I worried anyway. The sash-wearers moved closer. Ned opined that they were cops. I agreed.

One
appeared before us, a beefy specimen, if that term can be applied to a
vegetable-based green stalk. The
sash, I saw, was pale yellow and covered with small intricate designs. The cop fixed us with a yellow
three-eyed gaze.

"Greetings,
pod-mates," he boomed jovially.

I
returned the greeting and didn't even begin to relax. Good cheer from law-enforcement is
always a bad sign.

"Well?"
our inquisitor said. He seemed to
be waiting for something. Since I
didn't know what, I waited too. This went on for a little while.

"Your
papers? City permits?" the stalk finally asked, in a decidedly less
friendly tone. A fine-tipped
tendril uncoiled from beneath a sheave and extended, weaving pinkly. Below several other sheaves, I glimpsed
the glint of the retracted bone scythes.

Several
things clicked in my head. First,
the stalk was definitely some flavor of cop. Second, when I was a child I heard an
ancient saying about how for want of a nail, a horse was lost, which led to
other calamities - something that never made any sense to me since at the time
horses weren't built with nails. But it seemed to me that a much better saying would be, for want of a
tiny piece of paper, two agents were lost, and for want of two agents, a planet
was lost.

For we didn't have a scrap of Boffian paper.

CHAPTER
12. MONKEYSTEW

Ned? I subvocalized desperately. Ned? We had but a single tiny chance and it
depended on my skullmate.

The
cop shifted from foot to foot to foot a thousand times in a show of alien
impatience. The bone scythes
flexed, like nostrils flaring. I
saw that the sharp tips were hooked, the backsides serrated. The blades themselves gleamed with
yellowish malevolence and dripped
a greenish
ochre.

Ned,
I screamed.

He
appeared, standing right beside the cop. Ironically, he adopted a similar pose of aggravated inconvenience, along
with an ancient Keystone Kop uniform.

"What
do you want from me?" Tap tap tap went the baton in his hand. “We don't have any papers. You know that!"

"But
you control the morph-packs! Just
morph some up! And quick!"

He
was shaking his head like a disappointed Irish cop of old rejecting a lame excuse. “That would take at least an hour - if I
had an example to copy.
Which I don't.
And somehow I don't think we have an hour, anyway."

"Ned!"

Tap
tap tap. “Look, you can't come
crying to me in every situation. You'll have to handle this yourself. And if you can't think of anything, just
try not to take on of those bone knives in the head - my circuitry is far too
valuable. In the chest would be
fine. That should allow us a nice
calm bleeding to a peaceful death. Then, if they return your body, perhaps I can be recovered."

He
stuck his tongue out at me and vanished.

The
Boffling cop rustled dangerously.

"Yes,
yes," I said, fidgeting in the way I saw several others moving. Boffs have a series of internal cavities
in which they carry things, something like built-in pockets, and I made a show
of checking these.

In
reality, of course, I only had one thing. I tightly gripped the firm warmth of my maser inside the morph-pack
suit.

"Ah,
here," I said, aiming from the hip at the cop's center. Hopefully there was something vital in
there
somewhere, but I wasn't sure, and so planned to slew
the weapon. I'd slice him up as
neatly as a buttered asparagus spear being assaulted by a hot razor.

What
happened immediately afterward would be much less pleasant and far less
comical. The maser was a small and
powerful weapon, but it was also loud and messy. And we were surrounded by hundreds of
enemy. Who would no doubt
immediately fall upon
us.
Despite their lumbering appearance,
Boffs could move fast and ferociously. And they were heartless, literally and figuratively.

But
we didn't have a lot of options.

The
cop rustled again. This time
several sets of wet gleaming yellow-white scythes flicked into view, for the
barest millisecond. Others noticed
and moved away, giving us room. My
tardiness, I knew, could be taken as a personal insult.

"You
should know better," the cop rasped, "than to trifle with a Bud of
the Vegetorian Guard."

Interesting,
though not particularly useful - in fact, not useful at all - to learn that
this was one of the dreaded Vegetorian Guards.
In the flesh.
In other circumstances I would have
seized the opportunity to study him. In this circumstance I seized the opportunity to start squeezing the
firing stud.

"You
there," a familiar voice called out indignantly. “It's the Bog! Don't you see? The Bog! They are freshly returned! Leave them be!"

At
those words our inquisitor spun angrily then snapped to the Boff version of
attention. The thick sheaves over
the bone knives, which had been raised, lowered like grotesque fleshy
trellises.

“Stalk Master! Er, the Great Bog! Yes, Stalk Master. Of course!" He turned to us and
rasped, "Why didn't you say so?" then shuffled off, squeaking and
rustling.

I released the firing stud and turned.

"Greetings
again, Young
Sprouts
," crooned Orna. “Still addled by the Magnificence of the
Damp, I see."

"It
was so . .
. Squishy
!" I gushed. I was feeling a bit giddy, I admit, at being alive and unflayed.

"Few
are so profoundly affected. Until
you recover sufficiently from your experience, you will come with me to my
home," Orna announced. “As
podness dictates."

Home?
We were going to stay with a Boff? Podness, I recalled, was what we had earned by cleaning up Orna's
mess. It was some sort of filial
relationship. We were podners.

Ned
appeared as a bow-legged cowboy, complete with Stetson and chaps. He spat a string of brown tobacco juice
into the dust that lay at only his feet. “We're podners, alrightee," he drawled.

Orna
noted our pause. “You have other
arrangements? Curfew comes soon."

Curfew?
There was a curfew? Why did I have the distinct impression that we had no idea
what was going on on Boff?

"We
are honored to accept your hospitality," Ned said for us.

I
couldn't even get mad at Ned. He'd
done the right thing. I shrugged at
Trina as we set off behind Orna, trailing in the positions of subservience.

Orna's
home was high in a cylindrical beige skyscraper. We rose to his level on a jet-lift. Before the doors irisced open, my mind
was filled with speculation. No one
had ever seen the inside of a Boff building, especially living quarters,
before. What would we find? Twisty
passages?
Orderly rows and columns of rooms?
Neat
halls?

Nope.
None of these.
What we found didn't surprise me; it
didn't even disappoint me. It
depressed me. The floor wasn't
divided into hallways, rooms,
apartments
; instead, it
was a huge open cavern. Scattered
along inside it were the same green homes we'd been seeing all day. The Boffian countryside had been
reproduced right here, indoors. Urban rurality.

The
huts made me want to scream.

"How
charming," I said instead, and Orna looked at me oddly. I realized why: when every dwelling is
like every other, such compliments are silly and pointless.

He
ushered us to one of the dwellings - it could have been any of them,
really. They were all the
same. This was not out of any sense
of equality - it was just that no Boff could imagine a finer place to
live. We were, literally, in Boff
heaven. There could be no
improvements.

Orna
led the way through a tall, dagger-shaped doorway, which nicely accommodated
his stalk-shaped body.

The
interior of the round shack consisted of a single large room. At its center was a slightly less large
round pool, a deep and vile green in color. What evil luck! Here we were, shacking
up with a Stalk Master - whatever that rank meant - of our most fearsome enemy,
the Vegetorian Guard. It was enough
to make me wonder if perhaps the Fates were personally angry with me. Was my entire life the elaborate revenge
of some celestial joker?

Orna
entered the pool and gestured with his top-frond. “Please. Honor me," he said. I felt faintly sickened at the realization
that he had voluntary control of that appendage.

Trina
and I slipped into the liquid. What
a surprise: warm and sticky. But,
as I was about to find out, there was something different about this particular
bath from hell.

"After
you," Orna said grandly, and gestured at the tub.

I
stared at him. Plainly he was
expecting something.

"Go
on," Orna said, "don't be shy."

I
wasn't being shy; I had no idea what in the twenty-one blue moons of Pleiades
he was talking about.

"Please,"
Orna implored as I soaked dumbly. “Extrude your feeding tube."

Ug. This pond scum was dinner.

"Diz?"
Trina whispered across the sonic channel.

Orna
waited expectantly, sheaves fluttering in anticipation. “Come now, young saps. This is a fine gruel!"

"Er,
after you," I managed.

Orna
shrugged - an unpleasant ripple. “Very well, then. I shall go
first."

I
was filled with disgust when a glistening pink snake extended from beneath one
of his asparagus sheaves. My
disgust reached new heights when the tube quivered, glinted slimily, and then
dipped into the soupy broth. My
disgust broke altitude records when the tube rudely dilated, sucked up a
morsel, and pulsated like an alfresco strand of intestine. Ironically, I wanted to vomit. That was the exact opposite of what was
happening here.

"Now
will you join me, young sprouts?" Orna rustled in a jolly tone.

I
suddenly had a new kind of awful feeling. “Ned?" I urged. “Feeding tube?" He ran the morph-packs, and would handle the
feeding tubes. But he hadn't quite
been on the job regarding our names.
Or our non-existent papers.

Ned
appeared
,
looking so sheepish I was surprised he
didn't have wool. “You don't have a
feeding tube. We didn't program
anything like that into the morph-packs! Just the general appearance is hard enough!"

"Tell
me you're kidding," I said aloud. This was the worst news possible; we'd never find the Time Oscillator,
if Orna saw through our cloddish disguises.

"What?"
Orna said, confused. Ned hadn't
translated, and hadn't used the sound-suppressors either. English words had just bounced around
Orna's home.

"Not
kidding," Ned said. “I'll work
on it. Meanwhile, think fast. I'll leave one of my basal nodes to
translate while I see what I can do." He vanished, pale and muttering to
himself.

"Honored
Orna," I began, "We are-" What? Sick? Tired? Not hungry? What?
Still Too Addled By The Boggishness of It All? That seemed like going to the
well one too many times.

"Yes?"
Orna prompted quizzically. I
detected the slightest raising of the fleshy pads over his razor scythes. Rather like me moving my hand nearer my
maser. Not overtly hostile, but
just being ready.

"We
are-" I started, still drawing a blank.

"Go
on, Aspara," he hissed.

I
felt an odd sensation. I couldn't
tell if I was experiencing a streak of brilliance or of sheer idiocy. Then again, it might have been that my
morphsuit was leaking green liquid onto my privates. I decided to find out.

"We
are . .
. Too
nervous to eat now," I finished. “For we have a request to make of you. The Great Bog itself has brought us together,
I now see, that we may achieve our common purpose: the Greater Good of
Boff."

Orna
waited silently, expectantly. His
feeding tube was suddenly frozen, a particularly disgusting morsel halfway up
it. Trina was also frozen, as was
Ned. I suddenly and unaccountably
had an irresistible urge to defecate; it may seem impolite to mention, but it
is a fact of life. The suits were
equipped to handle this, so I spontaneously took care of business.

"Yes?"
Orna finally said.

"I
am just getting to it," I stalled.

Orna
made a very odd gesture with two twirling tentacles. “You are without a doubt the strangest
creature I have ever met," he said. “Let me guess. You're not
going to tell me yet." His slimy feeding tube came alive again, and began
to pulse and writhe as it lassoed and inhaled green globs.

"I
am forming my thoughts," I said, considering my plan. It was dangerous. But on the other hand - or should I say
the other tentacle - it was good. Bold. Innovative.
A classic Fist
solution.
Unfortunately, a
great many classic Fist solutions result in classically dead Fist agents.

Orna's
tube pulsed and shivered. Occasionally it would root around in the mix for an especially palatable
treat.

No
choice. No options. I would stick with Plan A.

"Honored
Orna, the matter is both simple and complex, and of such significance that the
future of Boff itself may be at stake."

That
got his attention. His tube stopped
its obscene rooting and his thickset trunk turned to bring all three yellow
eyes to bear on me.

"Speak,
Sprout!"

I
took a deep breath. “We wish to
join the Vegetorian Guard."

Orna's
feeding tube writhed and emitted a single noxious green bubble. I think he actually spit up. “The Guard?"

Too late for retreat.
“Yes. The Vegetorian Guard."

Orna
began to snap, crackle, and pop with Boffian laughter. “Surely in all the seasons there have
never been two less qualified. Quite impossible."

Aha. I had him right where I wanted. “Exactly, honored Orna. Those with our unique abilities and
perceptions have never been represented in the Guard."

"And
that is a good thing," Orna rustled. An orange glop shivered up his tube and no doubt met some even more
horrific fate on the far side.

"But
what of Statistical Proportionality?" I cried. “Our fundamental tenet! Does it not apply?" I felt an odd
vibration at my back, but thought nothing of it.