The Blue Marble Gambit (19 page)

"You
can either stand here with a bunch of corpses, or be one," Ned
advised. “Of course, I wouldn't
rule out both."

"Of
course you wouldn't." And then a moment later I was myself again. Two arms, two legs, one decidedly
monkey-style body.

The
crowd hushed. The curtain started
to rise.

"Oops,"
Ned said.

Great
Zot! It was an unveiling! I decided Ned was right and instantly
became a living statue. Unfortunately I ended up staring into the old man's face, and couldn't
help wondering how he had ended up here. No doubt it had been thoroughly unpleasant, with the singular and rather
unsatisfying irony that the situation had only gotten steadily worse, and then
finally flat-lined at absolute zero, right here.

The
curtain fully retracted, revealing my grim companions and I. The crowd gasped and murmured in
appreciation. Ned pulled in a few
bits of conversation. “Oh, Kurl,
they are wonderful. You really
caught them yourself?" I overheard.

"Oh,
yes, most of them."

"Do
the lansies put up much of fight?"

"Only
at first. But I know how to handle
them. Har har."

"Oh!
So brave! What about the Cygnans?"

"I
kill them by the vat," replied Kurl. He went on about his exploits at painful length; he was apparently the
hunter - the artist, rather - who had constructed this gallery, which to the
Boffs was high art. It was
something like a Japanese rock
garden,
only here you
had to kill the rocks.

My
body began to ache; one of my arms was in the air, before my face, in the
preferred position of horror. My
biceps began to throb. Kurl went on
and on.

"Oh
my," Ned murmured.

"What
is it?" I subvocalized with as much urgency as I could manage. Which actually was quite a lot. I knew that at least a thousand Boffs
were staring at me. That meant
three thousand swamp-yellow Boff eyes.

"It's
worse than I thought. This is going
to take a bit longer."

My
arm burned with fire. “How much
longer?"

"A
while. Try to be patient,
Court."

Oh,
easy for him to say. It wasn't his
arm that was sticking up-

"Do
you want me to take over and lift that arm for you?" he cut in. “I'd be happy to. I could trigger a customized rigor-spasm
that will lock it tight."

"Absolutely
not. You know that's off
limits." That was our deal; nevertheless, Ned always tried to get his mind
on my body. “But what about
Trina?" I lamented. Maybe
splitting up had been a mistake - she was critical to the mission, and now she
would be on her own for far longer than I had intended. We would miss our rendezvous. What would she do? Where would I find her? Would I find her?

"That's
a problem," Ned conceded. “By
the way, I think I might have noticed a back door to this display alcove. We could try that, when no one's
looking."

Ha
ha. As if the whole crowd might
glance away at once. “You think you
saw one?"

"Well,
I wasn't paying very close attention. They're your eyes, you know. If you'll let me, I'll go into your short term visual cortex dump and
pull up the images."

I
hated it when Ned rummaged. But I
groaned, "Go ahead."

Having
someone leaf through the files in your head is an awkward and indescribable
feeling. I felt Ned rummage for a
bit, then seize the right picture and display it on some internal screen
somewhere in my cranium. To Ned, my
skull was a warren of control rooms, monitoring stations, huge databanks, and
who knows what else, all organized according to a mind-numbingly complex
scheme. The way he talked about it,
he sounded like a midget on the loose in a twisted skyscraper.

"There
is a door," he finally said. “Though Zot only knows if it will lead us back to Trina."

"Just
so it gets me out of here, that'll be fine." I didn't like this, not one
bit. After all, the Great Green Hunter
Kurl was somewhere out there. Presumably he would know what he had and hadn't killed. And I was most certainly - so far - a
member of the latter category.
With no interest in joining the former.

Ned
read my mind - a simple task for him, of course, and analyzed the Boff
conversation, using his processing algorithms to pick out again that one
certain conversation from the wall of noise, which sounded like a gigantic pile
of leaves being raked up.

"Humans?"
said Kurl. “Oh yes.
Grimy little pink things,
though they come in a couple of other flavors.
They deserve
all the
killing we can give them. And then
some."

A high-pitched laugh.

"Where
did you get your first human?"

"My
only human, you mean. They're
slippery devils, harder to kill than you'd think. That particular one-"

"Which
one-"

I
groaned.

"I
have only one," Kurl said with a bony edge to his voice. He evidently thought he was being
taunted for his paltry game bag.

"Honored
Kurl, I mean no offense," said the single Boff I would have most liked to
stir-fry at that moment. “But there
are two. Look."

A
pause. I could feel Kurl's tripod
gaze swiveling towards me. Then:
"By the Bog! That is a human! But the bigger one is not a kill -
yet!"

Well,
if that wasn't my cue I don't know what would be. I spun and ran towards the exit Ned had
spotted while behind me chorused an angry vegetable uproar. Apparently some thought that a staged
killing would be the perfect highlight, the artistic pinnacle, of this display.

I
vaulted an odd, shaggy six-legged thing,
then
dove
through the center hole of what looked like a hairy donut, with teeth. It was an exit and I took it at full
speed, bursting into a small high-peaked tunnel. It curved away and I followed it.

The
tunnel curved a bit more, and twisted back and forth while the walls
tightened. I had the uncomfortably
alimentary feeling of traveling through a loop of intestine. The tunnel continued to narrow and twist
and then, as if shot out - and for the sake of decency I will drop the gastrointestinal
metaphor at this point - I was suddenly in an enormous cavern. The walls were pierced by dimly lit
alcoves, in which squatted odd and complex machines, softly backlit to give
them a reverential appearance. Some
of the machines were hand-sized; some were as big as small buildings. The room was filled with a giant hush.

"Now
what?" I wondered under my breath. I glanced around quickly - after all, with thousands of angry Boffs hot
on my heels, too much pausing would only be rewarded by dissection. More rows of machines were arranged
across the center of the cavern; I turned down one of these and kept
moving. At least I was out of sight
of my pursuers, though I could hear an ominous rustle from behind me.
Billions of tiny feet.
All hurrying.

"This
is it," Ned blurted.

I
had never heard Ned blurt before. I
slid to a halt on the smooth metal floor.

"What?"
I said.

"This
is it. Right here." Ned
appeared as a bearded Moses, and swept his staff all around, in a majestic
arc. Behold, mortal, the gesture
said.

"What
is here?" I cried.

"The
Hall of Marvels!" Ned murmured, gathering his hooded white robe. “We actually found it! Let me tell you,
my boy, the odds were mighty long against us sharing this moment
together."

He
put that rather strangely, but then, Ned did that sometimes.
Too much talking with
other machine intellects.

The
rustling roar behind me prodded me into another run. I hardly even minded, since I was
exulting. “Then - the Time
Oscillator is here!"

"Somewhere,
yes," Ned agreed, loping beside me, still as Moses. His robe and beard flapped very
realistically in the wind; his wooden cane tapped the floor rhythmically. That slap slap slap, I realized, came
from his leather sandals.

"What
should we look for?" I asked. “What does it look like?" Hopefully we could find it, grab it, and
work our way back to Trina by circling around behind our pursuers. I cut left and right and left again,
weaving through the rows and rows of odd machines. We passed several that looked like piles
of metal shavings, others that were giant empty metal frameworks.

"I'm
looking." Moses made a show of looking left, right, straight ahead, even
under his legs.

"Yes,
yes. But what are we looking
for?" I wanted to be part of the search. Besides, Moses here was using my eyes.

"Er,
I'm not really sure." Moses shrugged and looked at me blankly.

"You're
not sure?"

"Well,
no."

"It
could be any one of these thousands of machines?" I screamed.

"No,
I can rule out a few. Of course, it
might not even be here at all,"
Moses
said
philosophically.

I
rounded another corner, still running hard. We could have gone right past it. Great Zot - we could have gone right
past it twice. Or maybe we were
about to go past it.

"How
are we supposed-"

"Trina. She's the expert," Ned said. He of course knew what I was going to
say before I said it; he was able to watch my thoughts slowly form, like
swirling dust twisting itself into primordial
galaxies which
eventually take fire. But he wasn't
supposed to interrupt; out of courtesy he was supposed to let me finish my own
thoughts.

A
shrill squeal split the air. I spun
to see a shrunken, wizened, incredibly wrinkly Boff tottering towards me,
tentacles waving and flapping.

"Human!"
It squealed. “Human in the Sacred
Hall! Human!"

The
Boff was not, of course, talking to me. The Boff was summoning help to dispatch me.

By
Mercury's flaming arse - just when things seemed to be getting a little
brighter, they went completely black.

Even
a baby could outrun this particular Boff, who must have been a curator, and I
did just that, losing myself in the complex rows of oddly shaped machines. Some were huge simple seamless silver
spheres, devoid of any dials, switches, or anything else. Others were littered with forests of
intricate switches and knobs so tiny that only an elf could possibly work
them. Still others were festooned
with huge levers and rods that would have thrown out a dinosaur's back.

Very
little was known about the Old Ones; their only remnants were their
artifacts. No one knew why
they
had left a huge canister stuffed with the mysterious,
fantastically complex machines in a high, stable orbit. Some thought it was for some obscure
purpose of their own; others argued that from the way the canister was sealed
and the machines carefully wrapped, it was plainly a time capsule. Why send unknown future races a gift of
technology? That raised an interesting question. Was it a gift? No one knew what most of the machines
did, but many scientists had been killed or transformed while
investigating. Yes, transformed, by
the addition of foreign genetic material. A handful of lobster-like Mainers had been rimmed with pink fuzz and
curly poofy tails. Several Boffs
permanently sported new organs that looked exactly like tiny, festive party
hats.

Some
of the machines, it seemed, were designed to be nothing more than fiendishly
complex, almost indecipherable traps. Those who claim to be able to figure out such things from scraps of
metal and architecture claimed that the Oh Ohs had an extremely whimsical and
dangerous sense of humor; in their view, all these machines were, pure and
simple, an enormous practical joke, a million years in the making.
A celestial bucket of
water over a starry door.
According to these same folks, every transformation resulted in a form
that the Oh Ohs would have considered to be at or near the peak of the pyramid
of comedy.

I
personally tended to agree with these last, perhaps because I liked the
idea. Effrontery on a galactic scale!
A race that would go to all that effort for a joke - oh, to meet them!

I
trekked down aisle after aisle; far behind me I could still hear the faint cry:
"Human! Human in the Sacred
Hall! Human!"

I
experienced the very odd sensation of desperately wanting to be a Boff
again. Oh, to be green and frondy,
laden with chlorophyll, tentacle-equipped.

"Anytime,
now, Ned, would be fine," I urged, feeling especially vulnerable. In my mind's eye the last few grains
were preparing to plummet downward through the sucking funnel of my own
personal hourglass.
Time almost up.
I couldn't dodge and hide forever.

An
attack group of six Boffs appeared ahead; I ducked down a cross-path before
they saw me.

The
machines and displays around me were becoming older and dustier; this seemed a
little-used, almost forgotten corner of the Hall of Marvels.
The Alley of the
Slightly Less Marvelous, perhaps.
I plunged onward
;
dustier and dustier, older
and older. Maybe my pursuers
wouldn't look here.