I took a glance at my battered self. There existed, in the inventory of the Fist, dozens of tiny toys which I might have used to get us out of here. Laser tunnelers, micro lock picks, sonic blasters, mind scramblers, even nano-diggers. My mind hungrily ran over the possibilities like a starving person imagining desserts.
I corrected myself. There were at least a hundred and twenty such tiny toys, any one of which could be held in a palm, many of which could be hidden in a belt buckle.
And I had exactly zero of these marvels of miniaturization. Not a one. I was down to my ripped and battered jumpsuit.
My boots.
And Ned.
Ned. He'd been awfully quiet of late. In fact, I hadn't heard from him during the entire beating and interrogation. He had, I thought, missed a beautiful opportunity to practice his brand of dark humor.
I think this is going to hurt, Court. Smack! Oh, yes, I'm afraid I was right. It did. Not as much as I thought, of course. But I think this next one might. Smack! Ohh, yes!
"Well, Ned, nothing to say?" I subvocalized. “No bitter complaints? No tiresome tirades about our execution? No laborious laments? It's not like you."
Ned appeared. He was dressed in a festive clown suit. His nose was a big red ball. His hair was huge, frizzy, and orange. He was grinning madly as he paced the tiny cell, tapping on stone walls and gazing about as if trying to decide where to place a new sandbox. I realized why he'd been silent so long. He'd lost it. His electron deck was a few quanta short of a full shell. His periodic table was off a few elements. His solar system was lopsided by a few planets. You get the idea.
"Rather grim, eh, Court?" he grinned. His teeth were bright white squares. His huge red shoes flopped merrily along. “Positively dreary. Eh?"
By Venus' hot and steamy ass! My last hours would be spent with a maniac loose inside my head. But I decided to play along. Perhaps Ned had just picked up a minor glitch - easy enough, with the rain of Boffian slaps and blows my head had stopped, any one of which might have shaken loose an electron or two, which might induce the neural implant form of dementia.
"Am I missing something?" I asked with forced calm. “Is there an easy way out of here?"
Ned glanced around in surprise, then with evident glee slapped a stout wall with one hand with the other squeezed his clown nose. Honk. “No, I should think not. Quite inescapable, actually."
I somehow kept my voice and thoughts even. “But perhaps you're aware of a rescue team on the way? The cavalry coming over the hill, and all that?"
"Impossible," Ned said dismissively. He began to pull a hanky from his pocket. Of course, it kept coming and coming and coming. “Won't happen. We're definitely on our own."
It took a greater effort but still I remained calm. “In an escape-proof cell, awaiting imminent execution."
Ned pulled out another few feet of hanky, then gave up on the endless thing. He placed his hands on hips, thrust his big belly forward, and began surveying the upper reaches of our chamber, staring upward as if trying to decide if he had enough room to erect a tall circus tent.
“Hmmmm. What? Oh, yes. Quite right. Escape-proof and imminent execution. Completely accurate." He was smiling again, staring upward at something invisible.
"Then why are you so happy," I asked, dreading the answer. Suicidal tendencies, I figured. Or a frank admission of insanity. He had self-diagnostics; he'd be the first to know. I was plainly the second.
He began pacing across the room as if measuring. Slap slap slap went the floppy shoes.
"Why? For a very simple reason, dear boy," Ned said. His head swiveled as he examined the rock walls. “Hmm."
I wasn't sure I wanted to, but then I decided why not, and asked. “And what would that be?"
He looked up from nearly pressing his nose to the stone. “What would what be?"
"That 'very simple reason.'"
He was still distracted. “Er, you mean the reason I'm smiling?"
"Yes. Exactly, Ned. Why are you smiling?"
He straightened and faced me, with an absurdly serious expression on his painted face.
"Simple. You see, everything is going exactly according to plan."
CHAPTER 15. VANISHINGACT
"Exactly according to plan," I screamed out loud, making Trina jump. “We're in prison. About to be killed. In a Quite. Gruesome. Fashion."
"Precisely," Ned agreed calmly. He paced a few steps, now eyeballing the cell again. Oh, where to put the new bathroom?
"Don't tell me that's the plan," I warned.
"That's the plan."
"That's the plan!" My eyes flicked dangerously towards the walls; I envisioned ramming my head into the rough stones. My skull bursting like a ripe melon. Or maybe punji sticks through the eye sockets. Anything to punish this cranial lunatic of mine.
"Wait wait," Ned said hastily. “There are certain things that we felt it was unwise to tell you about, before."
"Of course there were," I said placidly. “Such unimportant trivia as the plan to get us death sentences in a Boff prison."
"Er, yes. Such as that."
"My last wish will be that you die first, and more painfully than I. I don't know if its technologically possible, but if it is, I'll find a way. I'll take your dying screams to my grave. Even if it's a swampy Boffian grave."
Ned waggled a finger at me. “You haven't asked me what the good news is, Mr. Negativity."
I sighed deeply. The bright side of death was the end of these pointless, agonizing conversations with Ned. “What's the good news," I asked dully.
"I have a way out of here. I think," he said cautiously.
"You just said this cell is escape-proof."
"Oh, it is, for you. I said I can get us out of here. You've got to use language with precision."
He had definitely cracked. “Ned, you're just a figment of my imagination with no physical reality. With our morph-packs gone, you can't do a thing except what you're doing. Which is harassing me."
He shrugged, smugly. “Well, if you say so. But we figured that something like this might happen."
"You figured? I don't suppose you could have thought it out a bit more? Like what do we do now?"
"Actually," Ned said smugly, "we did."
"Pray tell." Might as well play along.
"First take off your right boot."
I shook my head. “You've completely lost it, Ned." Another thought had just occurred to me. Perhaps Ned wasn't malfunctioning - perhaps it was me. I could be imagining the whole thing. Rampant psychosis. Massive hallucinations, perhaps exacerbated by all the micro-meddling the Fist had done with my head.
Ned changed his clown-suit appearance to the space-black tunic of a senior Admiral. Actually, I thought ruefully, that wasn't so different after all. Nevertheless my conditioning urged me to obey; my spite to disobey. “There's not much time. They'll be coming soon. And then it really will be too late. Now take off your right boot."
Why not? I unsnapped the speed closures and watched the straps relax like the tiny muscles they were. The heavy black boot slipped off.
"Now," Ned said. “You see that camera eye up there?" He pointed, and I squinted.
"Right here," he said, and his arm elongated and thinned to touch a point twenty feet away, across the chamber and high on the wall. A tiny speck of crystal. A standard spy-eye.
"Yep," I said.
"You need to hit it with your boot. Hard enough to break it, and on the first try. You probably won't have time for a second throw."
"Why?"
"Just do it, Court." He cocked his head as if listening, and his expression abruptly changed. His tone became exasperated. “And hurry, Court. Hurry."
Hurry. The last time Ned had told me to hurry, he had been keeping to himself, lest it distract me, the news that an Etzan cruiser was closing relentlessly and about to blast us into plasma. I judged the boot's heavy weight and clumsy balance, eyeing the crystal nub of my target. In school I'd been a tosser on the spacebal
l team, so I should have the arm. This was a little different, of course. I carefully thought out the spin to impart, took a running start, and fired the boot. It rotated in a blur, then the heel cracked into the tiny orb. It shattered, emitting a tiny whump and a small white spray of crystal dust.
My boot thocked to the stone floor.
"Now hurry," Ned said, using that word again, "and get your boot back on."
Dimly, through the door, I could hear a commotion. The commotion was definitely vegetable in origin.
"What are you doing?" Trina asked.
I jammed my foot into the boot and hit the auto-tighten; the muscle fibers wrapped themselves around me. Snug in a second, as advertised.
Something was scraping at the door. There were hissing and rattling noises, untranslated. Our guards, no doubt, on the way in. And probably upset about my little prank. Thanks a lot, Ned.
"Now tell Trina to hold perfectly still and be perfectly silent," Ned hissed.
I passed on the word, somehow infected by Ned's urgency, and had just begun to rise from my boot and turn when the door began to scrape open and I froze. I froze stock still, more motionless than a statute, more immobile than a corpse, stiffer than wood. Not because of the door, and not even because of what I knew had to be coming through it, but because of something entirely different.
The incoming Warrior Sprouts meant nothing to me as I flicked my eyes back and forth frantically, searching the tiny rock-walled enclosure. My eyes kept sending the same signals up my optic nerve, one my brain couldn't believe. I demanded confirmation, like a skeptical general who refuses to believe his messengers.
The messengers kept insisting. I kept demanding confirmation.
My eyes insistently insisted on insisting. So I kept seeing the same impossible sight: In a tiny escape-proof cell, in the mere seconds that my back had been turned, Trina had vanished.
CHAPTER 16. OHOH
The steel door kept swinging open; I kept staring at the blank spot of wall where Trina had been. Microseconds passed. Minutes. Weeks. A year. Two years. Five. A decade. A century. Trina was still gone.
"Freeze," Ned whispered, though no one could hear him but me. I was, incidentally, still frozen. Trina was still gone. It was me, I decided, not Ned at all. I had gone round the bend. Zot! Double Zot! What a disappointment! And after being so smugly proud of my own sanity. I suppose it served me right, in some sort of karma-balancing way.
Four Boffs tumbled through the doorway, big, burly, and heavily armed. All four turned to peer behind the steel rectangle, directly at me. Twelve watery yellow eyes.
Then they froze. Apparently it was catching.
They looked behind, in the other direction. Then back at me.
Like Keystone Kops, they did double, triple, and finally quadruple takes, looking back and forth and forth and back again and again, their combat harnesses rattling all the while. They looked straight at me again and again. I felt naked as a nudist.
They looked at each of the walls. They looked up. They looked down.
They chattered and gibbered and aped and rustled.
I kept doing my perfect imitation of a still-life painting. Slowly, slowly, slowly, it sank in. They couldn't see me.
Using my peripheral vision, afraid to move even my eyeballs, I glanced downward. It was worse than I thought.
I couldn't see me. I was gone!
"Ned," I hissed silently. “My body! Where is it!"
"Oh, look at you complaining now," Ned replied archly, appearing in front of me as only an old-fashioned bowler hat floating in space. That rang a dim bell somewhere deep in the cool gray depths of my brain. The invisible man? "I go through this every day of my life. You can't even take it for a few seconds!"
I gritted my teeth. “You worthless pile of biochips! My body! Where is it?"
"It's around," Ned said slyly. The hat dipped rhythmically, as if he were chuckling.
"Not funny! Not funny at all!" I felt myself start to totter with the effort of silently yelling inside my head.
The Boffs were gathered in a huddle.
"Oh, relax - and hold still - your body is right where it belongs. Just rather cunningly camouflaged to match the stones below and behind you." Ned's tone turned serious. “Alright. Get ready to move."
I took a closer, harder look, and at first didn't believe him. But then I saw it was true - I was now a flat, rectangular piece of stone, crumbling mortar and all. Against the wall, especially when viewed by weak Boff eyes, I was invisible. My pattern matched exactly.
I looked hard for Trina, precisely where I knew she had to be.
Nope. Couldn't see her.
"But Ned," I began, "How-"
The Boffs turned and moved out through the door in a mass of hurrying green.
"Out the door," Ned ordered. “Now now now. Go go go. And bring Trina."
I was instantly gliding forward. I think Ned may have jolted my motor center - a strict no no under our particular intra-cranial agreement, but this wasn't the time to debate that point.
"Come on," I whispered to where Trina had to be - she was still invisible - and walked out the door.
The hallway was long, rough-surfaced, high-ceilinged and bleak. The Boffs were hurrying away. But not for long, I was sure.
I stopped, to pick a direction, and glanced behind me.
A Boff guard stood there, its thick green flesh wrinkled in what I took to be a malevolent grin.
I instantly dropped into my fighting stance. Taking on a Boff unarmed was suicidal; but not taking one on could be just as suicidal in certain circumstances. Such as these.
I whirled, beginning the movement that would deliver a high spin-kick to the delicate nerve-ganglion in the Boffian top frazzle.
"Court," said the Boff in Trina's voice. “Stop it."
It was too late to freeze the kick, but I pulled it short, letting my boot fan that hated top tassel. Then I stood stock still. I was starting to feel like a clay actor in an ancient stop-action movie. Stop. Go. Stop. Go.
The Boff was Trina. On impulse I looked down at myself. I was also a Boff - in fact, I was also a Boff prison guard. I felt the faint stirrings of a first-rate identity crisis. For either I had lost all conception of who and what I was, or - far more attractively - we were morphing. But the Boffs had taken our morph-packs. So that was not possible. Unless-
"Exactly," Ned chimed in, watching my thoughts on the vid screen of my mind. “The left boot. That's why you had to throw the right one."
I puzzled over that. Morph-packs were usually fist-sized or bigger. If Ned was using one, it had to be some type of new and experimental miniaturized unit, which could only be hidden in . . . My boot sole. The left one. I recalled Ned's words, that everything was going according to plan.
"By Saturn's many-ringed behind," I muttered.
"Court," Ned began, now a robed magician complete with wand. “I couldn't tell you about it - if they had mind scanned you they would have learned everything. As it happened, they didn't. But all the same. Safety first."
"You-" How to insult the munchkin? How not to? "Fatherless, motherless, parasitic, useless, despicable tangle of Zotless-"
"Court," Ned broke in. “Don't say anything you'll regret."
"I won't regret any of that. Or this." I continued, now verging into a review of the finer anatomical and scatological references, with an occasional pondering digression into Ned's ancestry.
Ned turned himself into a captive, bound and tied to a stake, kindling piled around him. A martyr. “Are you quite through?"
I wanted to go on, but we had just broken out of prison on a hostile planet. Hanging around the cell door would contribute neither to long life nor a nice set of leaves. “No, I'm not through. But let's go anyway. By the way, any idea what we are?" I gestured at our sashes, which bore complex squiggles.
"Of course I know," Ned replied in a disdainful professorial tone, which contrasted with the first licks of flame appearing in the timbers at his feet. �
��You and Trina are now both Senior Captains of the Western Stalk of the Vegetorian Guard, visiting Gastro on an inspection tour."
"Ned," I said with some admiration, despite my lingering bitterness, "that's just about perfect." As visitors, the locals couldn't be expected to know us.
"Just about," Ned agreed. “Which brings us to the next problem."
Ned did a lot of things that I hated, but one of the things I hated most was when he said things like that.
"The next problem?" I parroted.
"We have no idea where the Hall of Marvels, and therefore the Time Oscillator, is," he said. “Only that it is somewhere in this building. Which is a mile high and three wide. That's a lot of ground to cover. Even for an ambulatory vegetable."
"Especially for an ambulatory vegetable," I muttered.
"Court," Trina said, "how are we going to find the Time Oscillator?"
"Funny," I said, meaning funny strange, not funny funny, "Ned and I were just discussing that. So I'll tell you what I was about to tell him."
"Which is?" they chorused nicely.
"We'll have to depend on luck." I picked a random direction and we set off, in the leg-killing Boff crawl.
The Central Security Facility was chaos - Boffs hurrying everywhere, colliding and slapping and racing. It was a living salad gone haywire. All this was caused by our disappearance, and in a nice twist it enabled us to slip out of the prison section of the vast edifice.
On the theory that more distance from prison was better, we rode jetvators high into the building, and wandered from floor to floor to floor. For hours. Finally we were exhausted, and, it seemed, no closer to finding the Hall of Marvels. We stopped in a narrow, tunnel-like hall.
"I have a new plan," I announced.
"I can't wait," rustled Trina. “All your others have been so good."
"Hush, sprout. It's simple. We'll just ask for directions."
Trina's eyes widened. “Ask? Directions? Just ask? Ask who?"
"Them," I said, pointing at a group of Boffs far down the damp stony passage.
"Er, Court, maybe that's a bad idea?" Trina suggested. “There must be protocols, rules, etiquette that we can't even guess at. And since they know we've looked like Boffs before, the slightest inaccuracies might give us away."
The Blue Marble Gambit Page 15
