The Blue Marble Gambit (23 page)

I
said, "I must insist that you leave."

"We
must discuss this! Your
interests!"

"We
are interested in you leaving."

"You
are putting yourselves in great jeopardy!"

Trina
poked me. Hurry up, the gesture
said.

"It
seems to be catching," I said.

"Huh?"

I
rose, flexing one fist, then the other. "Jeopardy. I detect its
unmistakable stink on you."

"Most
unwise!" the lawyer said, backing away.

I
closed steadily. "In my
culture we sacrifice lawyers," I said, showing my teeth.

The
glassy eyes of the shrunken head now seemed wide with alarm. Our lawyer scratched frantically at the
door; slowly it opened. "Prudence dictates that I depart," he pipped, and vanished.

"Come
back to my altar," Trina said, patting the stonework. "Let me show you another way to
sacrifice an organ."

The
next morning dawned clear and cold; I'd been having nightmares about fog and
clouds. But the sun rose, high and
hot and white. A large crowd
gathered outside our window, and as the morning passed they grew steadily more
restless. I paced back and forth;
Trina tried to do the same but we kept bumping into each other and finally she
just sat down. Ned kept to himself.

From
our window we couldn't see the sky at all - we'd have to wait on the crowd to
gasp or scream - or laugh - to indicate when our prophecy came true.
If it came true.
I admitted only to myself that I wasn't
completely certain. Time works in
mysterious ways - chaos permeates everything. You could go back in time to the exact
historically-recorded moment of the Wright brother's famous first flight, yet
find yourself a day early because it unexpectedly rained. According the omnisimultaneity theory,
all time existed at once, simultaneously and in constant flux. The notions of the past, present, and
future were mere conveniences invented by the limited human brain. Event-fluxes rippled up and down the
timelines like waves in a hose, with nothing ever certain and no one ever
realizing the ever-changing nature, since the most anyone could ever know was
the particular historical reality that governed that particular
millisecond. The next millisecond,
everything
might be
completely different, and perhaps dinosaurs still ruled the
earth or maybe you now walked with a limp from a bike accident you'd almost had
as a kid. So the Etzan ship might
have plunged into a black hole; or the probe might need repair; or the Etzan in
charge might simply have a hangover and wait until later to launch the
lander. An infinite number of tiny
things could go wrong - so many, it seemed, that while the odds of any
particular one occurring were tiny, the odds of at least one of them occurring
seemed almost certain.

This
particular theory tended to give me a bad headache, so I tried to avoid it
whenever possible.

As
the sun rose higher and higher, my spirits plummeted lower and lower. Our date with the Chief's obsidian blade
was drawing all the more certain. The crowd outside apparently agreed - they were growing more boisterous.

"Hey
sacrifices - scratch a line across this!" shouted a voice. I glanced into the window to see a
scrawny pair of buttocks rudely thrust there.
A vertical smile
laughing at our fate.

I found a loose rock on the floor and
fired it down the narrow window tunnel
;
it thocked
nicely into that bony butt, earning a muffled but still pleasing scream. The crowd noise swelled, as others
realized our retaliation, I thought.

Then
all was silent, as if the power plug to my ears had come loose. I wondered if Ned was rummaging around
in there and had accidentally yanked something. I scuffed my boot on the rough stone and
heard the dull scrape, so that wasn't it. I caught Trina's gaze and she shrugged, frowning. By our best calculations, the probe
wasn't due yet.

A
heavy silence still flowed into the tiny cell from the great outdoors. Gradually a low gentle wash of whispers
and gasps rose up, and then a collective moan.

Then a scream.
"It is true! It is
true! We are doomed!"

I
smiled. Apparently our calculations
were off, but not fatally so.

More groans and piteous cries.
Trina smiled too, and now I cackled.

The
crowd began to wail, a cacophony of howls. Our cocky, jocular audience had been converted into a crowd of gibbering
apes by one little fiery reentry. Technowimps!

"Hear
me now!" I shouted into the window slot. My voice reverberated in a most
commanding fashion.

Silence
again ruled.

"You
have but one chance to save yourselves!" I was still a little bit sore about
being mocked, so I added: "Of course, we might destroy you anyway. But this is what you must do if you wish
to have any chance of survival."

I
paused. They were utterly
silent. I waited and waited, until
I could hear them squirming. Then I
waited some more.

"Tell
us! Tell us! Please!" a reedy voice begged.

"Alright. I will. For a moment there I changed my
mind."

"No!"

"You
must go immediately to your King, all of you. Everyone who wishes not to be destroyed
must go to him. You must tell him
that we must be freed immediately. Or else you will destroy him."

Gasps. "We cannot order the King! We cannot threaten the King! He is the King! We are only the people! "

"If
you cannot rule your King, then you deserve to be destroyed, and so you shall
be. Go now. Either
go
to
your King and do as I have said, or go elsewhere and await your painful
destruction. Did I mention that it
shall
take a thousand years of agony? Now be gone!"

They
left, a strangely quiet and subdued crowd.

Trina
walked up and kicked me in the shin.

"Ow!"

"Don't
you think you could have done a bit more convincing? You left them a choice, idiot!"

I
leaned against a
stone wall
and rubbed my leg. "I left them no choice, Trina
dearest. And if you're about to ask
for a quickie, I'm afraid we don't have time. I expect to be out of here
shortly."

"You
expect? You might hope, but you can
hardly expect. They might not even
go to the King! They're terrified
of him!"

"They're
probably already there, rousting him out bed."

"They're
probably running for the hills."

I
was still rubbing my shin. Trina,
like most rugged Martian women, could pack quite a wallop. "Trina, I left them no choice at
all. If they go to the King and do
my bidding, he might get upset with them, true. He might even kill some. But if they don't go, they all die,
according to the chained gods trapped here in this cell. So really, they have no choice. Human nature. I was just letting them figure it out
for themselves. It's stronger that
way."

Trina
crossed her arms petulantly. Her
gold eye flashed, then her green one, like some odd signaling device. "Well, even so, I don't see what
good it's going to do us. It
doesn't really matter if we avoid getting sacrificed, if we don't get to the
claiming ceremony. We're still a
hundred and eighty kilometers away from where we have to be. There are no roads, we don't know the
way, the country is almost impassable, and who knows what other obstacles there
are. Even if these Ahulans let us
go, the next tribe over will probably try to sacrifice us too, and they'll
probably do it. We're fresh out of
handy sky tricks. The only way to
get there is to fly."

I
stared at her for a long moment. He
midnight hair was tangled and dirty; her face and body streaked with mud and
grime. I walked across the cell and
kissed her. She was too surprised
to hit me for such effrontery, although she was just the type to do that,
despite our occasional intimacies. "Trina, my dear, you truly are a Brain."

"What?"

The
cell door swung open and three burly guards entered.

"Ah,
see?" I said. "Right on
time."

"Coort
dis Asser and Treena Noova," intoned the first as he drew a glinting
obsidian blade, "we have orders for your immediate execution."

CHAPTER
20. HIGHTIME

Trina
and I were still frozen in place when the Chief walked in behind the
guard. "Just kidding," he
said good-naturedly. "I see
you took my lessons to heart, so to speak.
A neat trick with the sky.
How did you manage that?

I
let out the deep breath I hadn't realized I was holding. "Sorry, O King. Trade secret."

"I
had a feeling you might say that," he sighed,
then
gestured at us affectionately, as if we were his children. "But in a way I am glad not to
sacrifice you. I rather like you
both. Although I must admit I am a
little disappointed at not getting to see your hearts. You see, whenever I meet people, I can't
help but imagine the feel, the look,
the
heft of their
hearts. Professional curiosity, you
could call it. But with you two, I
couldn't quite get a clear picture." His hand graphically cupped the air as he gazed at us speculatively and
for the first time even awkwardly. "Er, I don't suppose-"

"Definitely
not," I said.

"Ah,
well, I thought not. But I had to
ask. Take it as a compliment."

I
rubbed my chest. "Thank you, I
think, O King. I'll try. Now we have a favor to ask of you."

He
looked surprised,
then
he chortled. "You are very bold. You feel you deserve more?"

"In
exchange for not telling the populace that unless they remove you immediately
we will blot the sun from the sky, yes, I think you could do us a small
favor."

The
Chief laughed uneasily. "Ha
ha. What is it?"

I
told him what I wanted: All the
cloth in the village.
All the reeds in the village.
All the rope in the
village.
And
the services of all the women.
Immediately.

He
fixed us with speculative black eyes. "That is a small favor?”

“You
would prefer a big one?”

“Ho
ho. It is just that your demand is
a high one. I am not so sure. After all, the populace might not
believe your threat."

"They
might not. But then again, they
might. In which case-
" I
drew a
line across my throat.

The
Chief sighed. "Anything
else?"

"Yes,
actually. I forgot. The best basket weavers in the
village."

The
Chief sighed again, more deeply this time. "And?"

"That's
it."

"That's
it?" He broke out into a low
kingly chuckle. "I will grant
your request, on one condition."

"We're
keeping our hearts, and all our other pieces."

He
looked disappointed again. "No, that is not the condition. The condition is that you leave
immediately."

"You've
got yourself a deal, King-O."

"Court,"
Trina said. "What are we
doing?"

"Why,
it was your idea, my sweet. We're
going to fly."

Stone
Age aviation poses a few problems. For example, the eponymous building material of that era - rock - is not
only very heavy,
but
extremely hard to mold into aerodynamic
shapes. And metals and composites
are eons away. Yet oddly enough,
through much of the Stone Age, mankind had at his hands almost all of the
materials that would be later be fashioned into aircraft: wood and fabric. The first aircraft were little more than
big kites; the only thing lacking here in Prehistory was a good engine. Actually, what was lacking was any
engine at all.

Ned
couldn't contain his skepticism, and made one of his
increasingly-rare
appearances. He'd been acting very
oddly ever since I first decided that we'd be taking to the air.

"Court,
I've run back over your visual cortex dumps and checked everything we've seen,
looking for ores. My best estimate
is that it will take at least one month to locate a suitable quantity of
aluminum, iron and other ores. Building the facilities for extraction and refining will take at least
another two months, and then another month to process the metal. These are
best case
numbers, of course. We have to make
a great number of tools and such."

We
were walking down a broad avenue of dressed stone. "Ned, we have two days."

"Exactly. Which is why I suggest you abandon this
harebrained scheme immediately. It
will never work, and besides, we don't have time." Ned sounded almost hysterical.

"Who
said anything about building an engine? I expect to launch at dawn tomorrow."

"No
engine? Not a glider!" Ned's voice ratcheted upwards two
notches.

"No,
not a glider."

We
rounded the last corner and entered the main square of the Ahulan's village. A huge lumpen shape lay tangled in its
center, a mass of cloth surrounded by bent women and smoking pots of black
tar. The village women were sewing
madly; to a person they were mystified. They could not conceive why a person would want to sew all this cloth
together, and then ruin it with tar. Ned, however, was not so slow.

"No! No! Not a balloon!" he gasped.

"Of
course a balloon," I replied. The information had been in my head, freely available to Ned; for some
reason he had avoided it, like a cat dodging a bath. I moved back and forth, inspecting
seams, checking the tar application, counseling the basket makers. I redirected the shape some of the weavers
were making - I didn't expect perfection, but the way they were going, our
airship would resemble the awkward offspring of a pencil and a tomato. It took a little while, and several
diagrams in the dirt, but I finally convinced the
basket-makers
that I didn't want what they thought I wanted, I wanted what I thought I
wanted. Human nature was unchanged;
they were sure they knew better than I, though they had no idea what they were
doing.

Through
this whole process Ned was silent, but as I turned from the basket makers he
suddenly resurfaced from the calm gray depths of my brain where perhaps he'd
been enjoying a soothing cerebral sojourn.

"A
balloon!" he screamed in horror, making me wince. He looked like a diplomat - a gray man
in a gray suit. "Those haven't
been used in centuries! Deathtraps!"

"I
prefer to call them classics," I said. I was disassembling my maser, field
stripping it. At its heart lay the
antimatter
pellet which
powered it, a tiny sliver of
gray matter suspended in a miniature magnetic vise. Everything looked fine; I clicked it
back together.

I
met with the Chief's senior engineer, and again explained the design. He listened carefully, as if his
continued possession of his heart depended on it. Of course, the Chief had made abundantly
clear that this was precisely the case. The engineer moved into the crowd of busy workers, kicking and
slapping. I sat on a stone chair
overseeing the labor, occasionally guiding or redirecting, and watching the sun
blaze across the sky.

Twenty
hours later I examined the result. Building an aircraft out of sticks and native cotton might at first seem
difficult, if not impossible. It
becomes much easier if you abandon even the most basic safety measures, and opt
for quick and dirty.

Our
crate was a disgrace to the good name of quick and dirty. The surfaces were lumpy and ungainly;
the joints crooked; the cotton skin crinkled
;
the
lines bizarre. There's an old
adage: if it looks right, it will fly right. I hoped that adage was wrong.

A
huge crowd, for the Ahula of ten thousand
b.c.
, had
assembled to see our strange departure. I felt no need to explain what we were doing, at least in part because I
had no idea if it would work, and it would be less embarrassing, if it failed,
if no one knew what to expect. I
supervised the small squad that was arranging the balloon bag and plugging the
last gaps with tar. Finally our
craft was as ready as it would ever be.

"I
dub thee, diz Astor's Folly," I said, and since no bottles of bubbly would
be available for a few millennia, tapped a clay pot of the local vile brew on
the pointed nose of the lumpen basket. I was gentle, but that none-too-stalwart proboscis was dented anyway.

"Uh
oh," Trina said.

I
agreed. I uncorked the clay vessel
and took a massive slug of Ahulan poison. It burned on the way down,
then
kept
burning.
Liquid
prehistoric fire.
Outstanding. I vowed to
bring some of this remarkable brew back with me, where I would have it
chemically analyzed, synthesized, and distributed, after which I would quickly
grow rich.
But
first things first.
Without
a home planet, I would have no customers, and therefore no wealth. A new motivation!

"Well,
my dear, onward and upward."

Trina
climbed into the basket gamely. The
reeds flexed and bent and creaked underfoot. She looked at me with rank
skepticism. "This has been
your plan all along, hasn't it," she said. "To get us killed in an ancient
balloon."

I
twisted the focus dial on my maser, tuning it to a wide-angle, low-power
setting. "Don't be silly. Perfectly safe!"

I
touched the firing stud and began to fan the maser back and forth across the
mouth of the huge collapsed envelope. Ten minutes later it began to stir, as if a large, slumberous, and very
lumpy beast were trapped somewhere beneath the folds. The Ahulans murmured.

Thirty
minutes later the balloon bag began to shift upward, though it still lay on the
ground. The Ahulans gasped and
shrieked in amusement. I had
expected fright, but there was none. There were merely amused. These Ahulans were a tough bunch.

"We're
going to die," said a very depressed voice that sounded just like
Ned.

Out
of the crowd came a scarecrow figure; his hair was long and disheveled and he
wore a sandwich board placarded with THE END IS NEAR. The far side read REPENT.
Ned, of course.
He was still moaning. "Suicide. Murder. O bitter fate."

"What
is it, Ned?" I subvocalized.

Ned
gazed wildly at the balloon and pointed with the long bony finger of a crazed
crony.

"That
thing will only get us high enough off the ground to kill us when it
crashes."

"Nonsense,"
I said. Possible, I couldn't help
but think.

"I
hate flying," Ned reminded me, and I recalled that this was true. Space flight bothered him not at all,
but anything in the atmosphere absolutely terrified him. In space, there was no ground beneath
one. There was no falling.

"There's
no other way," I pointed out. "The mission, remember?"

"I'm
not going!" he screamed, dropping to the ground. I ignored him and climbed into the
basket, watching out of the corner of one eye as Ned rose and, still screaming,
wove through the crowd to vanish around a
nicely-turned
stone pillar. My first impulse was
to go get him. But of course he was
still where he always was, right between my ears.

He
saw me think this, and peeked back out from around the corner to flash a rude
gesture at me. He'd been learning
from Trina, I saw.

The
Ahulans pressed closer, sensing that
Something
was
about to happen. One group watched
with particular eagerness.

"Twenty
to one they die spectacularly," muttered one, and small bundles were
quickly exchanged. Prehistoric
bookies.

I
kept using the maser to fire hot air into the leaky bag, which emitted a steady
clatter of creaks and groans. After
ten minutes of Trina and I trying to impress each other with our levels of
preternatural calm, the balloon bag stirred again, a great misshapen lump
trapped inside the sack of rough net. It actually rose off the ground, reluctantly at first, but then
ascending with more authority, as if getting used to the notion, until the
restraining net bag stopped it, hanging above us with all the fairy-like grace
of a block of granite. Our wicker
basket remained planted on the ground, as the creaking and groaning and popping
hemp lines tightened and thrummed. The sky above was a swollen blue.

Another flurry of exchanges from the bookies.
I wondered if our odds were getting
better or worse.

I
smiled bravely at Trina as an especially loud creaking rasp sounded from one of
the ropes, which was shivering like a straining muscle. I kept the maser going.

The
balloon bag seemed to pause as if gathering itself. I waved the signal at the line handlers,
and they dropped their ropes instantly. Fear of losing one's heart could be a powerful motivator, I noted,
wondering if there might be some way to use it as a motivational technique in
my own day. The lines crackled, the
basket swayed, the balloon took its first lurching step skyward, and we were
off.

Flying.

At
first we rose slowly, in absolute silence except for the grating hum of my
maser and the hiss of air escaping from the leaking balloon bag. But soon all of Ahula was a tiny model,
a museum display of prehistoric existence,
rough
plots
of uneven farmland, crudely plowed, and misshapen villages of raw wooden
huts. Occasional stone dwellings
broke up the monotony.