"Hmm. An Etzan?" I guessed.
The Admiral nodded, once, the equivalent of throwing a lowly castle servant a scrap of meat. Thank you, massster.
The Etzan reached back into the craft and removed a shining cylinder a half meter in length, then moved away to the left with a quick rolling gait. The camera panned to follow, but lagged. The alien stopped at the left edge of the field of view and stared back in a way that managed, despite the species gap, to convey irritation. The cam centered with insolent slowness.
Etzans, I recalled, were famously argumentative.
The alien reached downward and picked up something. No, two somethings. Lumps of dirt or stone. One it tossed over a shoulder; the other it dropped into a small sample canister on its belt. The cam zoomed onto the canister's label. A dense mottling of Galactic script appeared. The alien rotated the cylinder to demonstrate an intact, coded seal.
Next the creature produced another longer, slimmer cylinder, which it held vertically. A frozen pause, a puff of smoke and a flash of light, and the pole was capped by a waving rectangular image. The critter backed off a few paces, then raised all four arms and one leg while facing the pole.
This could have been hard to figure, except that Fist training included broad exposure to a wide spectrum of wild and weird alien customs, especially those that could get you killed, of which there were a disconcerting number. It might still have been hard to figure, for this was not one of those, but Fist training also included a review of Galactic Law, which dictated a unifying white light of behavior - standard and agreed-upon culture and customs that gave the jungleverse a transparent and entirely illusory veneer of civility. Most of these merely provided a legal justification for the unjustifiable - rather like old-fashioned declarations of war, which pretended to glorify, sanitize, and legitimize murder. What I had just seen fell into this category.
The last part of the ceremony had been a salute. To a flag. The ceremony itself was the Galactic Claiming Ceremony, used to take title to a planet.
But what planet? There was no alien claim on Earth. I had plenty of problems with the world of my birth but notably absent from them was alien governorship. It was a logic gap you could drive a fair-sized moon through.
The creature turned and trundled back to its ship, the camera again panning to follow. But this time, something else was in the background. Something large, very hairy, and with tusks. I scrolled through my memory, for a tiny slippery blip that dodged and ran and hid. Finally I trapped it in a cool gray corner of those dark depths, and dragged it, throbbing and wriggling, to the surface. The creature was a - wooly mammoth. Not just a creature extinct for thousands of years, but an Earth creature extinct for thousands of years.
The Admiral watched me as if he could hear the slow dry gears painfully meshing.
"Tricky, isn't it?" he scowled.
"It appears I just saw an alien creature claim the Earth, thousands of years ago. But I can't help but point out, in my typically humble manner, that no aliens have title to Earth. In fact, our own claim was approved fifty years ago."
In a new type of fierce grimace, the corners of the Admiral's slash mouth curved upward but remained absolutely devoid of humor. “There's a bit more to the story, Court. What I've shown you is just the warm-up. Here."
With a flourish, he handed me a small packet, wrapped in the red and gold bunting of Ultra-Top-Very-Secret. He hesitated before releasing it into my eager hands - who doesn't love a secret?
"We lost four good agents getting this out," he said.
"Killed in the line of duty," I said sadly, thinking of many a heroic spy story.
A flicker of irritation skipped across the sidewalk of his face. “No," he glowered. “They knew how badly we wanted this, and charged us so much they were able to retire."
"Ah." Still I held my hand out, and finally, reluctantly, he handed it to me. An expensive secret - even better.
I gingerly unwrapped the ribbon, then pressed my thumbprint to the explosive lock, even more gingerly. Happily, the lock microbrain agreed that I had access privileges and the packet popped open. I pulled out the first page.
My eyes made it through the first whereas, twisted around a heretofore, dodged a verily, barely shook off a res ipsa loquitur, bulled through a obligat lexi, hurdled an in media insanium, but were finally floored by a ipso locus loco. I returned the paper to the packet, having succumbed in only the Preface to the hundreds of sheets, stood, and moved towards the door.
"Where are you going?" my Uncle roared.
I froze. “Er, to get a lawyer to figure all this out."
"Sit down," he whispered.
I sat. I hated when he did that roaring-whispering thing. Oddly enough, the whispers sounded louder.
"You're a lawyer," he screamed.
I let him calm for two beats of a slow heart. Not that there was one of those anywhere nearby.
"No, I have a law degree." Like geology and star navigation, it was one of many subjects I'd undertaken during my tour of human academia, while my classmates chased Management and the History of Bureaus. But I had realized early on that it is far more honest, and interesting, to shoot someone or something between the eyes - or whatever visual sensory organs that someone or something has - rather than papering them to death.
The Admiral was sighing testily. “I'll summarize. Reduced to its essence, it says that the Etzans were the first sentient species to make a claim to our planet - yes, mother Earth - and that they are therefore the rightful owners. The vid you just saw - along with the supporting evidence of their survey - was collected over ten thousand years ago by an Etzan survey ship. After leaving Earth, the ship was holed and depressurized by a stray meteor. Until recently, it was a drifting
hulk. But only until recently. The Etzans had just found it and now, based on a claim made ten thousand, six hundred and forty-one years ago, they have filed a formal planetary eviction action in the Galactic Court."
I stared at him. He stared at me. This went on for a while, as his words rattled around my head. Planetary. Eviction. Eviction. Planetary.
Planetary eviction. One of the nastiest arrows in the quiver of Galactic law and, suddenly, one that offended even my own highly developed sense of the surreal.
"Planetary Eviction? Ridiculous!" I cried. “We evolved on Earth!"
"True," the Admiral agreed. “But according to Galactic Law, only a sentient species can claim a planet. And also according to Galactic Law, sentience requires a maintained space-faring capability - most of the Old Galactic Races are so old they can't remember a time when they didn't have space travel. Our own claim was accepted fifty years ago, but such a claim can be challenged, and even overturned."
I felt a dim pounding in my head. “So you're saying-"
"According to our legal experts the Etzans have a solid claim, and will certainly win before the Galactic Tribunal."
I would have been sure he was joking, except that as he often said, He Never Joked. “They'll win? In court? Our planet?"
"Yes. Exactly. And then humans will be trespassers on Earth. Subject to removal or extermination. Of course, you can stay and enjoy the terraforming. If you can breathe sulfur, that is." The middle stage of terraforming, as performed by the Gannon, a race of pungent abalone, always involved a few centuries as a sulfurous hell, which not coincidentally was perceived as heaven by those Satan's mollusks. I imagined myself walking through a picturesque park, accompanied by a large dog and a small woman. Or maybe - no, no, keep it that way. Suddenly, clouds of choking gas spewed from hidden pipes, a lethal, scalding, deadly brew. Large dog, small woman, and I, in that order, fall to our knees, gasping, the grass beneath us already withering and browning. A large, dripping, shelled creature dances gaily by, surprisingly light-footed on its single slithering pseudopod.
The Admiral was speaking again. I dragged my attention, kicking and screaming, back. “Our only hope is to disrupt the Claiming Ceremony."
I ran a hand through my o
range crew-cut. It felt like it was standing up in alarm, although it was always standing up. It just didn't always feel like it was standing up in alarm. The Admiral's words were having that effect. “You need a lawyer!" I cried. “There are thousands of them! Obfuscate! Vacillate! Ruminate! Litigate! Prevaricate!"
"Not the court ceremony, Court. The original Claiming Ceremony."
I detected the tiniest, teensiest flaw in this. It seemed too obvious, so I focused the laser of my concentration on it, expecting it to snap away like a shadow. It didn't. So I gently raised it.
"Ah, we're ten thousand years too late, I think," I pointed out.
"One might think that," he agreed placidly, diamond incisor glinting.
My orange hair now tried to leap off my head. “You don't mean-"
"I most certainly do."
A painful pause as seconds ground past. They felt like sharp glass underfoot.
"But time travel is impossible!" I finally blurted. Every treatise said so. Every expert said so. Of course, throughout human history, the road to progress has more often than not been paved directly over the skulls of naysaying experts, who valiantly refuse to let the crushing weight of the paving stones silence their skepticism.
The Admiral shrugged, slowly, languidly, muscularly, as if shrugging were excruciatingly pleasurable. Excruciating pleasure seemed like an emotion he would have. And enjoy. “Maybe. Or maybe that's just an unfortunate rumor," he asserted, "that you may dispel. With the Time Oscillator."
I was a helpless sheep being corralled by a cagy dog. Nips on the left, yaps on the right. I could go but one direction. I hate being a sheep.
"The Time Oscillator?" I said suspiciously. “The Oh Oh device?" The Old Ones, or Oh Ohs, were an ancient, long-dead race who had left a huge orbital repository filled with mysterious devices in a stable orbit high above the biliously-green planet Boff. Sometime around when a caveman named Thog began experimenting with a stone wheel, the Bofflings had found and retrieved these. The majority of the devices remained intricate, dangerous, impenetrable mysteries. Even worse were the Bofflings themselves; they were perfect examples of my hostile-food theory. Their large size and high lethality were nicely counterpointed by their appearance as muscular, overgrown vegetables.
"Of course, the Oh Oh device," Uncle Admiral confirmed in an avuncular tone.
"Great Zot," I muttered, invoking the name of a drinking god popularized by bands of rowdy miners on Mars.
"Your mission is simple, Court. To Boff you go. There, you find the Time Oscillator. With it, you go back in time to derail the Claiming Ceremony. There are several fairly arcane legal requirements to validly claim a planet - you must make sure to disrupt at least one."
I was saved, I suddenly realized. My Way Out was clear. “But no one knows how to work the Oh Oh devices. Not even the Bofflings!" I cried.
The Admiral shrugged again, an interesting feat given his lack of a neck. This time it looked like he was scratching his ears with his shoulders. “Not exactly, Court. Even though most of the Galactics - well, all of them, really - have given up, we have several new and secret theories that imply the Time Oscillator may actually be workable."
I recalled, at this point, that not only were the Bofflings notoriously xenophobic, they reserved a special hatred for mankind. They simply found us intolerably gross. To them we were an unnatural shape littered with mucous membranes, incomprehensible openings, and inappropriate limbs. The Boffs had sworn that their world would never be - how did they put it? - defiled by primate feet. In light of that, one aspect of this was a bit surprising.
"The Boffs will let us use their toy?" I asked suspiciously.
The Admiral raised his hands, palms up. “Of course not. We asked, but they categorically refused, promising that every sun in the universe would be dark before any human lays eyes on the Time Oscillator."
There was a long silence. “Let's come back to that little tid-bit," I finally said.
The Admiral looked pleased, a rare thing indeed. “Let's," he agreed.
"Assuming I find my way, somehow, to this ancient marvel, which is no doubt hidden away on Boff, what then? Do I just start banging away at the buttons or levers or whatever it has?"
The Admiral turned a disappointed glare on me. “Don't be stupid."
I wasn't being stupid. I was being sarcastic. Teams of interstellar scientists had been unable to crack the elaborately complex devices left by the Oh Ohs. Especially the Time Oscillator.
"You," the Admiral pointed at me sternly, "aren't going to touch the Time Oscillator!"
"Then just who," and here I theatrically raised both arms, "is?" Not even GovCorp, the official parent of the Fist, could - I hoped fervently - come up with a plan so cracked that I would go all the way there but not be allowed to touch the space-blasted thing.
"I am," answered a voice from behind me.
"She is," Uncle Admiral agreed.
I turned to see a young woman, clad in an almost-clear jumpsuit that lay over her like a second skin. Beneath it she wore some type of tiger-striped garment, the yellow and black bands hugging her tightly, curving suggestively here and dipping delicately there. Her hair was a wild blonde mane, framing a face far too attractive for the sordid halls of the Fist, and featuring a variety of conservative piercings, plus several not-so-conservative ones.
As she entered, walking with an athletic bounce, she seemed to exude an aura so palpable that I wondered if she had custom pheromones or a hidden emotion projector. But what she was sending mankind had not yet learned to tap - it was the pure essence of sex. The stench of salaciousness. Eau de wanton lust. She was absolutely, positively layered in lasciviousness, steeped in sensuality, a bright beacon of erotica in a suddenly dark and dismal universe.
I was instantly suspicious. It wasn't like the Admiral to do something nice for me. But this looked like something nice. Which meant it wasn't. Simple logic.
She stopped before the Admiral and tossed off a ragged salute. “Trina Nova, reporting for duty, Sir," she said. Her perfect throat quivered; her voice lilted and pitched and rose and dove. It was music.
"You again!" I said. Her hair, space black before, was now sun yellow. “Duty? I don't understand."
"Of course you don't," the Admiral agreed, drumming his fingers on the pyrite of his desk. His fingers were noticeably muscular. “You so rarely do. This is your partner. Trina, you've already met Court diz Astor, my ill-starred nephew."
I eyed Trina appreciatively. A thousand thoughts of a perfectly healthy and natural sort flitted through my head, and close on their heels followed a thousand more, except that these were unhealthy, unnatural, even fiendish. These last were far more entertaining and engaging, and I spent a moment mulling the permutations and contortions.
And then, just like that, I was on the floor, looking up at the world. Trina was standing over me, the slight flare of her nostrils adding a spice of dangerous elegance to her perfect bone structure. My mind reconstructed the last few milliseconds, and found that I had been the victim of a nicely executed standard Interspecies throw, taught to all recruits of The Fist and effective against almost any creature.
"You're a mind reader?" I gasped in horror. Even so, hopefully she hadn't been able to pull actual images from my fermenting brain.
"Don't be stupid. I didn't have to be," she snorted.
"Doomed, doomed, we're all doomed," the Admiral groaned, his head in his hands.
"You know, all things considered, I think I'd rather work alone," I said from the floor.
"Shut up, Court," the Admiral replied. “Time is the one thing we're short of, and if you keep wasting it I'll have you melted down to slag and your biochemical compounds used to fertilize an orbital mushroom farm."
I struggled to my feet, picking lint from my orange hair to avoid looking like a creamsicle. None of this made any sense at all.
She looked at me. “Ready? We better hurry."
I held up both hands as if trying to block an adv
ancing asteroid tug.
"Now wait a minute here, Uncle Buckeroo and Trina Pulsar or whatever your-
"Nova," the lass put in smoothly.
"Right. Nova. We don't have to hurry. If we're to succeed in your crackpot scheme, we'll do it using time travel. Which means we have plenty of time. Time enough to plan everything out carefully. Time enough, even, to take a long vacation. Really think things through. May I suggest the leisure world of Eros? Perhaps for a month?"
"Time," Trina said in a voice of cold crystal, "doesn't work that way."
I stared at her.
"Did I mention," the Admiral offered, "that Professor Nova has a doctorate in astrotemporal hyperphysics?"
"Somehow you forgot to," I muttered.
"My apologies."
But of course it made perfect sense. She would operate the Time Oscillator, he'd said.
"There are two problems," Trina lectured. “First, although we can jump around the time stream - if we get to the Time Oscillator, and figure it out, that is - the time stream keeps moving. The present moves along unstoppably, and is a unique region in the time stream, from the point of view of this stream. And second, we can't visit our own timespace twice. Well, you can, but it takes an infinite amount of energy, times two. So for all practical purposes you can never visit your own lifetime."
I swallowed some of this, but one jagged morsel gouged at my cerebral craw. I said, "An infinite amount of energy?"
"Times two."
"How is that possible? Is infinity times two bigger than just plain infinity?"
Trina smiled a look of grandmotherly compassion at me. “You poor dear," she said. “Yes, of course. And no, of course not."
"You're with GovCorp!" I shrieked, recognizing the doublespeak.
"Yes. And no," she replied. “But back to your earlier question about multiplicative infinity. Here. Watch." She moved to the wall board, where her slimly pointed fingers began sketching a temporal equation. It used Greek, Roman, Arabic, and Chinese symbols, some in a flowery script that looked like it had been stolen from a wedding invitation, and several I couldn't even begin to describe. It blossomed, layer begetting layer and symbol begetting symbol. A whirlpool of arcane symbology appeared. And grew. Its sucking tendrils reached out for me.
The Blue Marble Gambit Page 4
