The Blue Marble Gambit (25 page)

I
didn't know an Etzan could blanch. They can, and it is not pretty. Urg blanched and then some. "But Hurg - you did the last one! It's my turn!"

Hurg
crossed his four arms. They made an
impressive mound of elbows. "No, it's my turn because the last one was a gas giant! Why do I always get the gas giants? It's not fair! I never get to do a real planet!"

Urg
was rocking his head in the Etzan expression of disagreement. His neck muscles were strong and
bulging, for Etzans spent much of their existence disagreeing. "Look, we made this deal at the
outset. We alternate. Every other planet! And this one is my turn!"

It's
not going to matter, guys, I thought. You're not getting back to that loathsome orbiting
slimeball
called Etz. You're headed for a
spacewreck.

"My
turn!"

"My
turn!"

"No!"

"Yes!"

"No!"

"Yes!"

This
went on for a while, and I began to get a headache. I turned towards the forest, pointed,
and screamed, eyes wide with unmistakable interspecies horror.

The
Etzans looked at me for only a moment - my terrified expression and
outstretched arm spoke in any language. Then they whirled to see, crossing the valley a few hundred meters away,
what I had just seen.
A wooly mammoth.

The
Etzans' taste for bickering was exceeded only by their lust for
acquisition. Although they couldn't
take the mammoth, they could record and sample it, which would earn them larger
commissions.

"Come
on, Urg!" said Hurg, as he scrambled at the tangler projectors. "Get all the tanglers! That thing's big!"

"But
what about-
" two
hands pointed at us, while two other perched truculently on
the Etzan version of hips.

"Let
them go.
Very uninteresting,
obviously not intelligent.
No commission! But with all
the tanglers, we can catch that thing. And maybe get a megafauna bonus."

"I
agree," said Urg in a shocked tone.

Hurg
froze. "What did you
say," he replied, eyes wide in suspicion. Etzans did not agree. Ever. It simply did not happen.

"Never
mind," said Urg. The tangler
fields pulled off us and the Etzans raced away, tangler projectors cradled in
their four hands. Their spindly
legs churned, their
pot bellies
jiggled. The mammoth waltzed along,
unconcerned.

Trina
and I fought our stiff, sore muscles to rise. "Why do you always act so weird
around aliens," she muttered.

"It
works," I pointed out.

"Only
sort of.
And only
if you call being back to Square One working.
We're here, but there's still not a
thing we can do."

"Not
true at all," I said, watching the Etzans race away. "I have . .
. an
idea."

Trina
did an excellent impression of being shocked. "Diz, dear, where would you get
such a thing?"

"I
got it from . .
. myself
," I answered cryptically but truthfully. I'd thought of it, but the sight of my
future self had helped. After all,
knowing me, I wouldn't have come back in time if there were no point. So there was a solution. And, also knowing me, I would have
cheated and told myself about it, to save the communal us some work. But I hadn't, which could only mean one
thing: No, not that there was no
solution. It could only mean that
the solution was obvious, and that I had told myself about. So it was, and so I had. For it was right before my eyes, and all
over me. The new me had been
filthy, yes, but nevertheless slightly cleaner than this me. And there had been his - my - comment
about getting cleaned up.

"Give
me your boots," I said.

She
flushed. "A foot fetish? Now? Kinky! I like it!
But not here.
Let's go find some privacy."

"No,
not that, at least not now," I said, pulling mine off. "Quickly!" I scraped a mound of bright orange
Boffian soil up from the crevassed sole. Trina suddenly understood - bright gal - and did the same. Suddenly mankind's last hope lay in
dirty boots and muddy laundry. We
collected madly.

She
handed her handful to me, and pulled our filthy jumpsuits from the skin
bag. She quickly peeled and scraped
off more of the noxious orange substance, while I collected more from our hair
and bodies, hunting out the choicest, slimiest, orangest morsels.

"Years
of advanced temporal physics, to play with mud," she mused.

I
finished collecting, and sculpted my horde into a clump while she did the
same. "Ready?"

A
distant shout announced the capture of the mammoth.

"Here." She handed me her glob.

I
set them down next to the two Sacred Clods the Etzans had prepared. One of our new ones was too big, the
other too small. I traded the
Boffian soil around. Then I swapped
our orangey lumps for the Sacred Clods, which I sent on their Sacred Ways far
out into the field.

"Now
what?" Trina asked, looking around the site with a hungry stare. She had the urge for destruction and mayhem. What a gal!

"Now
we beat it," I said.

"Oh
no we don't. We've got a golden
opportunity to create some serious havoc here. Let's take it." Her eyes glittered.

"No."

"You
can't be serious! That little dirt
clod swaperoo isn't our whole plan, is it? That's mighty thin!"

I
was pulling her by the arm. In a
quick flash, she threw me. I gasped
like a fish for a moment,
then
caught my breath. "Trina dearest, thin is more than
we could have hoped for. Now let's
get out of here."

"They're
coming back," Ned said to me.

"Ned
says they're coming back," I repeated. It turned out to be a lie, but it was a
helpful one.

"Oh! You!" Trina groaned, and helped me up.

From
another perch on the ridge - not the one at which we'd been so neatly snared, that
site having too many bad connotations - we watched the Etzans study their
trapped mammoth with gleeful precision, clipping hair and vidding and taking
samples before finally returning to camp.

They
didn't seem to mind that we were gone, or even to notice. They scurried about, making
preparations, then stopped, facing each other with all eight arms gesticulating
wildly. They looked like a single
quadrupedal, bi-cranial octopus.

Ned
asked me to cock my head a little bit, as somewhere in some cluttered auditory
signal control room he struggled to sift signal from noise.

"Hmmpph,"
he finally chortled. "They're
arguing."

"What
a surprise."

"About
who will do the claim, and the layout of the Ritual.
"

I
repeated the news for Trina, and we watched the argument progress.

"How
on earth, pardon the expression," Trina marveled after half an hour,
"did these Etzans ever evolve and survive?"

"There's
hope for humans yet," I agreed.

Finally
Hurg and Urg resolved their differences, or at least came as close to that
impossible goal as they could hope. One of them moved behind the hovercam; the other entered the ship.

The
one behind the camera - it looked like Urg, but Urg looked so much like Hurg
that it could well have been Hurg and not Urg - was using two of his hands to
manipulate a tiny control held in a third hand. The fourth rested on his head.

Smoke
projectors hidden around the site began to vent steamy vapor. A few swipes of a laser pen added a
fresh layer of crispy black to the landing area; all the artifacts of the
campsite had been skillfully removed from the camera's view. I suddenly recognized the site; it was
the spitting image of what I had seen - would see - on a grainy vid in Admiral
Fairchile's quarters. But now I saw
that what looked like an impromptu, unrehearsed claiming ceremony was in fact
meticulously choreographed and planned.
A big fake.
A phony. Special effects.

Steam
roiled; the earth looked freshly scorched. Smoke rose.

The
hatch lowered; Hurg - I think it was Hurg - came down the ramp. I watched with the strangest sense of
deja vu, for technically I had not seen this, but would see it.
Proto vu, maybe.
The unmistakable
sensation that I was going to see this again.

Just
as I recalled, Hurg clumsily feigned surprise and pretended to investigate the
site. Behind the camera Urg was
waving and shouting, no doubt adding his directorial input. Hurg ignored him, and seemed to slow his
pace.

That
explained the clumsy wandering and the insolent camera panning. Spite.

Hurg
reached to the ground and picked up two objects.
The not-so-Sacred
Clods.
One, as the Ceremony
demanded, he ritually threw over his shoulder. The other he carefully placed in the
locked and coded clearsteel sample canister, which he made sure to keep as much
in the camera's eye as his own twisted mug. The vid had to record the identifying
marks, and secured lock, on the canister.

Next
Hurg pulled the flag from beneath his arm. He planted it firmly in the ground; with a bright flash and a puff of
smoke - all wholly unnecessary and done only for dramatic effect - the pole
extended and the Etzan flag unfurled. Two Etzan heads, in profile, butted against each other on a burnt orange
background. The Earth wind tugged
at it, dejected.

In
the background, the mammoth struggled up and ambled across the valley floor,
making no effort to avoid the Etzans, apparently none the wiser for its
experience. No wonder you're
extinct, I muttered under my breath as it crossed the camera's field of view.

Hurg
raised all four arms, and one leg, in the Salute of Claiming, which signified
the close connection between claimer and claimed. Then he turned and walked back towards
the ship.

Urg
tracked him, then lowered the camera, recovered the flag, and followed him up
the ramp. From the way his arms
were swinging and gesturing, he had a few complaints with how the ceremony had
proceeded.

He
too vanished into the ship. Almost
before the hatch had shut, the repellers burst into life and the ship hurtled
upward, leaving a long furrow of explosive rototilling in its wake. Trina and I ducked as dirt and leaves
and debris rained down on us.

The
Etzans vanished into a tiny silver speck and then were nothing at all.

Trina
looked at me skeptically. "I'm
not sure that's going to work."

"Me
neither. How do we get back?"

Trina
eyed the sun. "I'd say my time
estimate was pretty close. The Time
Oscillator transport pod ought to be showing up any time now."

"You
still want to go back?"

She
shrugged. "Why not?"

With
a hollow pop, a shimmeringly translucent blue pod appeared.

"Right
on schedule," Trina said.

You
might think that the second time you get squirted across the millennia it would
be easier. You might think you get
used to it. You might think it
becomes easier, once you have some experience, to bear all those indescribably
awkward sensations.

You
would be wrong. It was actually no
worse than the first time, I'm sure, but since I was expecting it to be better,
when it wasn't it turned out to be a rather unpleasant surprise, and so it
actually seemed worse.

We
suffered timelessly in the purple fuzz while outside the world blurred. Empires rose and fell and were
forgotten. Great battles were
waged. Duels were fought. Great love was sought, and found, and
gotten tired of, and found again in a younger model.

We
appeared in the Admiral's briefing chamber - or rather, it appeared around us,
from our perspective. The Admiral
was there, as was a small contingent of armed Space Marines. Perhaps most important of all was Dr
. Primer
Ought,
the Fist's chief scientist.

The
Admiral didn't seem surprised to see us pop into existence, filthy, dressed in
skins, and stinking.

"Ah,
right on time," he said. "Nice work, Trina."

Nice
work Trina! After all my
efforts! There is no justice!

"So
everything went according to plan?" he asked kindly.

"Plan? We'll talk about your plan later!"
I yelled.

"Now
Court, calm down," Trina said.

"You,"
I pointed a finger at my dear old murderous Uncle, "and you," another
impaling pointer aimed at Dr
. Ought
, "sent us all the way
to Boff when you have your very own Time Oscillator!"

Admiral
Fairchile and Dr
. Ought
traded a weighty glance.

"Er,
no we don't," the
Admiral
said.

I
marched up to him, baring my teeth in a way that nicely complemented my
prehistoric leopard cloak. The
Space Marines tensed and stood ready when I reached under my spotted cover, but
I was only fanning a little eau de dead animal at my Uncle. He grimaced. So did the Marines. In the scrubbed, cleansed, and purified
air of the Bigger Than Yours, my garments were especially ripe. So was I, no doubt, what with the dirt
of two planets crusted on
me.
I was a walking exhibit of ambulatory
sedimentation.