The Blue Marble Gambit (22 page)

Finally,
apparently satisfied, he returned to his stone throne. He smiled happily at me. I smiled back.

"Yours,
I think," he said to me, "will be an especially fine heart."

"About
this being sacrificed-"

The
Chief brightened. "Yes, yes,
quite a messy business."

"I
have a few questions."

"And
I of course will be only too happy to answer them. I always say an informed sacrifice is a
happy sacrifice." He leaned
forward eagerly. "Five strong
warriors will hold you down - maybe six, in your case, though only four should
suffice for the girl -" I smiled inwardly at that thought. I'd bet on Trina against any four of
these stone-tool users. "I myself
will wield the sacred obsidian blade, to saw through your breastbone and split
your ribs, to retrieve your precious heart while still it beats, and to hold it
up for the masses to see. You
probably won't appreciate it, but it is a great deal of work to cut through all
that bone, muscle, and gristle quickly enough. It is not easy." He sighed tiredly, then pantomimed a
vigorous sawing motion, followed by a deep plucking of something that seemed to
dodge and fight before being ripped free.

"Gross,"
Trina blurted.

"Oh,
very," the Chief agreed. "A disgusting process.
Extremely messy and upsetting to the appetite.
Too bad we don't sacrifice fruits and
vegetables like in the old days." There was a trace of wistfulness in his deep voice.

"You
mean you don't like doing the sacrifices? You don't want to?"

The
Chief shrugged apologetically. "No, of course not. If
all things were equal, I wouldn't bother. Blood to the elbows, all that tiresome screaming, hacking away through
bone and muscle. It's become rather
trite, frankly. A cliché in meat.”

I
lit up. A perfect opportunity for
bluster and logic to corral this simple prehistoric mind and stampede it in the
direction of my choosing. "Now, wait. If you
don't want to, and we don't want you to, it's simple. You can just change the rules. Let us go, and everyone is happy. Waste a coconut instead. Carve a mango. Hack a papaya. Pith a grapefruit."

The
Chief smiled as if explaining things to a slow child. "No, I said if all things were
equal. The subjunctive - if you're
so advanced, surely you should have heard of it. Though to you it might be a mere
proto-subjunctive, a thin pallid imitation of its later glory, a mere archaic
wisp, a primitive attempt-
" He
caught himself and gave an
apologetic smile. "I
digress. You see
,
all things are not equal. Sadly, we
have a sacred duty to provide a sacrifice every now and then. To keep the gods appeased." He seemed to find this last funny.

"You
don't really believe that," Trina said. This might have been offensive if he
really did believe it, but as it turned out she had read him perfectly.

The
Chief scratched thoughtfully under each armpit, then closely examined his
fingernails. "Of course I
don't believe it. But it doesn't
matter if I believe it. The
populace believes it. They want
sacrifices, so I must perform them."

"Why?"
I asked. "You're the Chief -
you have all the power. They should
do what you say. Not vice versa."

The
Chief was shaking his head slowly. A servant entered to set down a stone platter heaped with meat and other
unidentifiable items; the Chief selected a ham hock and by way of thanks cuffed
the servant, who scampered away. The Chief took a casual and enormous bite,
then
spoke with a mouth full of gradually ever-more-mangled pink flesh. "A most simplistic view of
government. In theory, yes, the
King - I am actually a King, although I prefer the more folksy term 'Chief' - anyway,
the King does indeed hold the reigns of power. But to torture the analogy until it shrieks
as loudly as you soon will, while holding those reigns the Chief also rides the
back of the populace. The populace
is a large and dangerous jaguar; they can quickly turn. I must keep them happy. That is my one and only goal, and indeed
the one and only goal of every leader."

I
decided to attack with logic, though that gun had been low on bullets of
late. "But look. Don't you occasionally select for your
sacrifices some of the local citizenry?"

He
popped a large black object from the platter into his mouth. It wriggled and fought to escape,
trapped like a prisoner behind the jail-cell bars of his teeth, until he
crunched away. A beetle. "Yes, as a necessity. Unfortunately there are far too few
intrepid visitors such as
yourselves
. Hopefully there will be more." His eyebrows
raised
inquisitively.

"Don't
count on it. But isn't it possible
that some of those who are killed might grow up to be great leaders, or
inventors, or any of a hundred other socially valuable workers?"

The Chief swallowed with difficulty,
twice. "That is not just a
possibility, but a certainty," he replied. "I have often thought the same
thing. It is a great waste."

Aha! "Then end it! You have every reason to do so! For the future of your people."

The
Chief placed his great hands on his royal knees and gazed pitifully at me while
a flock of macaws exploded into squawking flight outside. "You misapprehend my role and my
goal. In fact, you misapprehend the
role of every leader who serves at the will of the people. Humans are tremendously
short-sighted
; only a rare few are interested in future
benefits, far down the stream of time. Even five years is too far for most. Ten is almost incomprehensible. A possible benefit some twenty years
away may as well not exist. My
goal, my function, is to remain in power. Of course I make the appropriate noises about heaping glory on our
kingdom and improving it in every way. Of course those are mere lizard crap. The sacrifices are the perfect
example."

He let out a huge belch, picked what looked
to be a beetle leg from between his teeth, rubbed his big belly, and
continued. "You see
,
the sacrifices are bad for the society. But the people like them. The annual scuttlebutt about who will be
picked next fuels them for months, then there are weeks and weeks of
anticipation for the actual ceremony. So you see, the sacrifices do play a critical role in our society,
though that role has nothing to do with the Gods."

"With
what, then?"

"Entertainment,
the diversion of the masses, and most importantly of all, the maintenance of
power in the established leadership. I might point out that, quite obviously, dissidents have an unfortunate
tendency to get selected."

"So
you keep them going to keep yourself in a job?"

"A
bit more than that, actually.
To keep alive.
As long as I am alive, I am King. The only way for me not to be
King,
is to be
dead. You see my problem."

"Clearly." I wasn't feeling terribly sympathetic,
though.

"Perhaps
another form of government would be more efficient. As in less wasteful," Trina put in.

The
Chief shrugged expressively. "If so we have not been able to find it. We experimented with a Parliamentary
process, and even a pure democracy, but both these forms select not leaders but
politicians, who are creatures singularly good at getting elected but
singularly poor at providing leadership. Such politicians tend to represent only those interests that back their
elections. We also tried true
communism, but that rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature -
greed - and so never progressed beyond a dictatorial stage. We've tried the left, the right,
the
center. At
least a monarchy is simple. Of
course, what we really have is a moderated mob-ocracy in the guise of a
monarchy. But that is true of all
such regimes. And like all such
regimes - and in fact all regimes, period - we have sacrifices, though perhaps
we are unusually honest about it. “

I
was exasperated. "Who started
this absurd belief in sacrifice?"

That look
again, as if I was a mere babe in these ancient
woods. "It is hardly
absurd. It's true purpose is not
what is advertised, that is true. But the function is real and important. Without doubt it has a counterpart in
your own world, if your people are indeed people."

"There
are no sacrifices in our world!" Trina said indignantly. "How barbaric!"

Chief
Rotolo smiled with magnanimous tolerance. "Naturally I do not know the world of your Cycle. But can you truly and honestly say that
your people - perhaps not those such as yourselves, perhaps instead your own
lowest common denominators - do not vicariously enjoy death?
The agonies and
travails of another?
If so,
people have changed greatly. Most
consider it fine sport."

Trina
and I exchanged a look. We were thinking
the same thing: Vids. Books. Plays.
Centuries of human
entertainment.
"Excellency, you are right. Our depictions are somewhat different, with no actual killing, but they
are similar."

"Of
course. Human nature, you see. At some instinctual level, humans think
they become wiser and stronger and less mortal by seeing another flounder and
perish. Why, whenever a tiger mauls
someone, you should see the crowds of rubberneckers trying to get a peek at the
mangled remains, if there are any. It is no different with your people. It cannot be. The sacrifices are a stroke of genius,
and they were devised by the most cunning, devious, and ruthless class of our
society."

"Who?"
Trina said.

"I
just gave you a hint: I said they were 'cunning, devious, and ruthless.'"

“Soldiers?"
guessed Trina.

The
Chief shook his head. "Another
hint: they are also crafty and unforgiving and lethal."

"Lawyers?"
I tried.

The
Chief smiled and shook his head again. "Good guess. But
no."

"Spies? Assassins? Saboteurs?"

"No,
no, no. You are getting
colder."

Outside
the rain tapered off. I was out of
guesses. And patience.

"Fine. We give up."

From
the Chief's look, he had evidently decided that
the future
was populated exclusively by idiots
. “Why, I would have thought the
combination of 'devious' and 'ruthless' would have given it away. The Priesthood, of course."

"The
Priesthood," I muttered.

"Of
course, dear boy. Is everyone from
your land so daft? The Priesthood's
goal is the same as mine, as of all other organizations of men: to create a
system which
propagates itself, which keeps its masters in
power. They struggle to strike a
careful balance between fear, extortion, and reward. Like me, they need the support of the
populace in order to stay in power. The sacrifices were a stroke of genius on their part."

"Does
the priesthood believe in the sacrifices?"

"Don't
be silly. They put on a good show
for our huddled masses, of course, but they're just keeping their jobs. The sacrifices give them a handy aura of
lethal mystery. They too figured
out long ago that dissenters are few when you might wind up on The Slab."

I
didn't need to ask what that was. From her expression, neither did Trina.

I
rubbed my chest, still pleasantly full of heart. "I wish you'd told us that we
really were going to appease the gods. Or at least that you believed so. I'd feel a bit better about that."

"More
have died for political expediency - and entertainment, if those are truly
different - than will ever appease any gods," the Chief said
dismissively. "Your fate has
been shared by many and will, I suspect, be shared by many more in the
future."

I
was stunned, flabbergasted, amazed. A political scholar was running around the jungles of prehistoric
Central America, eating bugs, ripping out hearts, and merrily philosophizing.

The
Chief passed me a hunk of fried liver. "Have some. Good for
the heart," he urged, then eyed me in a way that made me very
uncomfortable. "Although my
intuition tells me that yours does not need it." He gestured with his hands, as if
supporting several pounds of hot, bloody, squirming muscle.

I
said, "I hope you're not disappointed."

"Don't
worry. I can't be. I don't really care, you see."

CHAPTER
19. SKYLINE

We
were taken to our cell. It was a
small and dank chamber, walled by massive stone blocks and lit by a single tiny
window. Yet somehow it seemed
positively homey, given our immediate future. At least it didn't have any sharp edges.

Trina
was in a sulk. Asking her why
turned out to be a mistake. She
told me in elaborate, grisly, painful detail.
My fate, her fate, and
Earth's fate all received in depth and separate treatments, which intertwined
and then began to merge into a seamless depressing whole.

I
finally interrupted. "Let's
look at the bright side: the Chief told us exactly how to get out of
this."

She
glared at me. "Diz, he did no
such thing. I was there the whole
time, and playing rather close attention. I have a habit of doing that when I'm to be killed in bloody prehistoric
rituals."

"Actually,
heThe
cell door scraped open to admit a round-belled jovial man carrying a woven
satchel in one hand.

"Good
evening," he said to us solemnly as the cell door scraped shut.

Trina
and I both stared at him. At first
I was slightly put off by the fact that he had two heads. Then I noticed that one of these was
shrunken, and worn around his neck on a leather thong like a perverse amulet. I watched carefully to be sure that this
head wouldn't speak. It didn't.

"Who
are you?" I asked.

"I'm
your lawyer," the man said breezily.

Our
lawyer.
Of
course.
"How did we get
a lawyer?"

"Everyone
gets one, in your position. It is
our way."

I
nodded benignly. "I see. And what can you do for us?"

He
examined his blackened fingernails and absently patted the head around his
neck. "Oh, there is nothing to
be done."

"Excuse
me?"

"Come
on, now. You are to be
sacrificed. There is nothing I can
do about that, is there?"

"I
don't know. Is there?"

"Of
course not," he said dismissively.

"If
there is nothing to be done, then why do we need you?"

"Because
you must have counsel. It is our
way." He adjusted the second
head, orienting it to gaze at me.

I
fought down the urge to remove his upper head and add it to the festive thong
around his neck. "But wouldn't
it be nice if you could do something?"

He
shrugged. "I suppose so, in
the abstract. But it is enough that
I am here, to safeguard your interests."

Trina
rolled her eyes and turned away. I,
however, do not give up so easily. "What about our interest in not being sacrificed? You could start with that."

"No,
no, no, not that interest."

"What
interests, then?"

"Well,
any others that might crop up."

"Between
now and our sacrifice, you mean."

He
brightened. "Exactly."

"Then
I don't think we're going to have much for you to do."

The
lawyer sighed sadly. "No one
ever does." He looked at his
feet, bare and gnarled, then glanced up hopefully. "Are you sure you don't have any
other interests for me to protect? Even a small one would be fine. I wouldn't mind."

Trina
made a suggestion of stunning anatomical complexity and unlikelihood, and he
harrumphed and slid through the door, which magically ground shut.

Trina
tried to stalk around but bumped into me. "Now there's someone who needs sacrificing," she
remarked. "But no. Instead it's us, stuck here waiting for
the knife."

"Maybe,"
I said slyly.

She
whirled on me. "You said that
the King told us the way out of here."

"Yes,
he did," I agreed.

"Diz,
you've lost it. He did no such
thing."

"He
most certainly did. The sacrifices
are performed because the populace wants them. Therefore, to avoid being sacrificed,
all we have to do is convince the populace that it doesn’t want us to be
sacrificed."

There
was a long, painful silence. "Oh. Is that all? And we just need to accomplish that
minor feat in - what - three days?"

"A
bit less, actually."

"Well
that should be easy enough," she said, dripping sarcasm. "We just re-write their history,
and reprogram their psychology."

"That's
exactly what I was thinking. Ned,
we need to fire up the morph-packs."

Why
hadn't we tried morphing before? Simple. As soon as we did,
the locals would have thought we were gods. Then, naturally, they would have
concluded we were immortal. Immortality being a very interesting state, it would have been only a
matter of time - and precious little of it - before some inquisitive young
scientist decided to empirically test the hypothesis, no doubt by sticking a
poker into me to see how I handled it.

Embarrassingly
enough, I would handle it by promptly expiring.

So
to avoid that embarrassment, we hadn't tried that route. But now we had nothing to lose.

"Ned?"

A long pause.
Finally Ned appeared, a greasy mechanic in slimy coveralls, holding a
blackened wrench. "Hello,
Court. I've been meaning to talk to
you about the morph-packs."

"So
talk."

"No
can do. The morph-packs, I
mean. Not the talking."

"What?"

"No
more morphing, not this trip. Neither pack survived the time jump - I don't know if it was the impact
on landing, or something about the transitional N-zone on the way in. Regardless, the quantum control circuits
are fried."

"Then
fix them!"

"Sure. I'll just need a full microtron shop,
with bio-aug facilities.” There
wasn't one of those - wouldn't be one of those - for millennia. Which meant
we
were truly
Stone Age
- we didn't have a single toy to
use.

"And
another thing," he went on, "the same is true about Trina's
nano-camo. Similar control circuits."

That
explained why her appearance had been so stable of late. It also meant that we could give up on
conjuring up a local god, frightening a few locals either half or all the way
to death, and then explaining that salvation could be achieved only by saving
the sacrificees.

I
closely examined our pit. The walls
were huge stone blocks, neatly fitted together. A single window, a mere foot square,
looked out onto a sunlit plaza and was perpetually filled with curious faces;
we had drawn a crowd. It was an odd
and tragic bit of coincidence that our cell was every bit as escape-proof as
our tank on Boff, light-years and millennia away.

"So
what now, Einstein?" Trina asked caustically.

"Einstein,"
I replied, "was wrong."

"Exactly,"
Trina said.

"There's
always a back-up plan," I said. "Now just let me think of it."

I
spent the next hour huddled with Ned, checking numbers and figures and data
carefully. Three times I asked
Trina if she was absolutely, positively sure of the local date; three times she
said she was. By the fourth time,
she was angry enough to answer only with yet another of her fabulously rude
gestures. It
required
both
hands, her tongue, and one foot.

For
half an hour I rehearsed a short speech in my mind, massaging and re-working
the Ahulan cadences, sharpening certain bits, flattening others. Ned kept popping in, suggesting word
choices or more bombastic phrasing. He kept a translucent write-up of my little shtick glowing before my
eyes. Cue cards no one else could
see. Sometimes having my own
personal interactive hallucination wasn't so bad.

"What
are you doing?" Trina finally demanded, sick of seeing me mumbling to
myself and pointing wildly into the air.

"Watch,"
I said, moving to the window, and as they used to say - or someday would say -
girding my loins. Time was
absolutely critical - for this to have any chance at all I had to hope that the
local grapevine was fairly efficient.

I
crouched below the window,
then
thrust my head up into
the small frame, filling it. Ned
helped by torqueing my eye socket muscles to bulge my eyes maniacally.

"Hear
me!" I shouted.

There was a gasp from those assembled at
the other end - so far, they had caught only the occasional glimpse of us
newcomers. I stared outward fiercely,
letting the
hub-bub
die away until it was replaced by
silence.

Then
I spoke. "You are in great
danger!" I said, booming out each word with slow emphasis. "We cannot be held here! It will bring ruin down upon you!"

I
thought this was pretty good - the narrow tunnel of the deep window gave my
words a pleasing echo effect, my voice was deep and severe, and I was using the
High Tongue, reserved for those of great learning and power. I thought I had struck the right balance
between sheer lunacy and deadly warning.

I
was wrong. Not just a little wrong,
but in an unfortunately descriptive twist of language, dead wrong. Instead of worried exclamations, wails,
or questions, my speech was met with laughter. Not
politely-repressed
chuckles or stifled guffaws, but windy gales, booming howls, and
throw-the-doors-open choruses.
Shrieks and yips and cries.
Even shouts and moans.

I
stood frozen as the comic storm buffeted me. In such situations human nature tempts
one to break into a smile or laugh, but I didn't. Instead I wore a fierce scowl of intense
displeasure, which I didn't have to feign at all. At last the wall of noise calmed and
diminished, and I heard the small piping voice of a boy cut through the peals.

"Mommy,
that's what the last ones said!"

Ah
ha. So they thought these were run
of the mill threats. Apparently it
was a common ploy by those imprisoned - they had little enough to lose. And since they routinely claimed to have
galaxies to save - oh, the hubris!
the
chutzpah! -
it
made sense that they would follow up with predictions of
gloom and doom. Fortunately I had
anticipated a credibility problem, and for just that reason I had spent all
that time picking Ned's brain. My
brain. Our brain. Whatever.

"Arrrrggg!"
I screamed, to draw their attention. It worked as well as anything in their language. "You need not heed my words. Heed instead my warnings! If we are not freed, on the day after
our sacrifice the sun shall not rise again. Nor shall it ever rise again. All shall be darkness, and the Ahulans
and their land shall dry up and blow away and become as to nothing."

This
was met with renewed gales of laughter, and even open looks of skepticism and
derision. They were a very tough
crowd - I could see that not many had ever talked their way out of this
cell. But I wasn't done yet. I pulled out my hole card.

"As
a warning, tomorrow morning I shall scratch a line of fire against the sky
itself. I will rip only a small
hole. If then we are not freed, I
shall complete the task and pull down the very heavens." This time the looks were more
uncertain. Few, I was sure, had
made such verifiable threats.
I only hoped I was right.
From the vid the Admiral had shown me -
would show me - I knew that the Etzan probe was launched a couple days before
the actual claiming ceremony. I was
gambling that I had the day right; if so, the probe's atmospheric passage would
be a bright flashing line of superheated plasma.

"Now
leave us!" I roared, and the crowd scattered.

I
settled down besides Trina and smiled easily. "This is a rare opportunity,"
I said, reaching out for her.

Trina's
mood could shift like the wind, a breeze I enjoyed. She twinkled at me. "To do it before we're born?"

"Exactly."

"You're
on."

We
wrestled about. "Yes, you
definitely are," Trina said, a bit later, and reached for her jumpsuit's
release.

The
cell door chose that moment to scrape open. Our lawyer trundled in, a look of
professional displeasure on his face.

"I
have been informed of the statements you have made," he said, petting the
shrunken head as if consoling it. Its glassy eyes seemed somewhat stunned. "I must counsel against this course
of action."

Trina
and I looked up from our tangle. Things had not yet reached the stage of indiscretion, though I was
hoping to arrive in that oft-visited land momentarily.

"Your
objection has been noted. Anything
else?" I said.

The
lawyer fixed me with a look of condescending impatience. You poor benighted sod, it seemed to
say. It is a great waste of my time
even to talk to you, but since it is my job, I shall. "You do not understand. It may jeopardize your interests. It is most unwise. I must insist that you desist
immediately. For your own
good."