"That's a problem," Ned conceded. “By the way, I think I might have noticed a back door to this display alcove. We could try that, when no one's looking."
Ha ha. As if the whole crowd might glance away at once. “You think you saw one?"
"Well, I wasn't paying very close attention. They're your eyes, you know. If you'll let me, I'll go into your short term visual cortex dump and pull up the images."
I hated it when Ned rummaged. But I groaned, "Go ahead."
Having someone leaf through the files in your head is an awkward and indescribable feeling. I felt Ned rummage for a bit, then seize the right picture and display it on some internal screen somewhere in my cranium. To Ned, my skull was a warren of control rooms, monitoring stations, huge databanks, and who knows what else, all organized according to a mind-numbingly complex scheme. The way he talked about it, he sounded like a midget on the loose in a twisted skyscraper.
"There is a door," he finally said. “Though Zot only knows if it will lead us back to Trina."
"Just so it gets me out of here, that'll be fine." I didn't like this, not one bit. After all, the Great Green Hunter Kurl was somewhere out there. Presumably he would know what he had and hadn't killed. And I was most certainly - so far - a member of the latter category. With no interest in joining the former.
Ned read my mind - a simple task for him, of course, and analyzed the Boff conversation, using his processing algorithms to pick out again that one certain conversation from the wall of noise, which sounded like a gigantic pile of leaves being raked up.
"Humans?" said Kurl. “Oh yes. Grimy little pink things, though they come in a couple of other flavors. They deserve all the killing we can give them. And then some."
A high-pitched laugh.
"Where did you get your first human?"
"My only human, you mean. They're slippery devils, harder to kill than you'd think. That particular one-"
"Which one-"
I groaned.
"I have only one," Kurl said with a bony edge to his voice. He evidently thought he was being taunted for his paltry game bag.
"Honored Kurl, I mean no offense," said the single Boff I would have most liked to stir-fry at that moment. “But there are two. Look."
A pause. I could feel Kurl's tripod gaze swiveling towards me. Then: "By the Bog! That is a human! But the bigger one is not a kill - yet!"
Well, if that wasn't my cue I don't know what would be. I spun and ran towards the exit Ned had spotted while behind me chorused an angry vegetable uproar. Apparently some thought that a staged killing would be the perfect highlight, the artistic pinnacle, of this display.
I vaulted an odd, shaggy six-legged thing, then dove through the center hole of what looked like a hairy donut, with teeth. It was an exit and I took it at full speed, bursting into a small high-peaked tunnel. It curved away and I followed it.
The tunnel curved a bit more, and twisted back and forth while the walls tightened. I had the uncomfortably alimentary feeling of traveling through a loop of intestine. The tunnel continued to narrow and twist and then, as if shot out - and for the sake of decency I will drop the gastrointestinal metaphor at this point - I was suddenly in an enormous cavern. The walls were pierced by dimly lit alcoves, in which squatted odd and complex machines, softly backlit to give them a reverential appearance. Some of the machines were hand-sized; some were as big as small buildings. The room was filled with a giant hush.
"Now what?" I wondered under my breath. I glanced around quickly - after all, with thousands of angry Boffs hot on my heels, too much pausing would only be rewarded by dissection. More rows of machines were arranged across the center of the cavern; I turned down one of these and kept moving. At least I was out of sight of my pursuers, though I could hear an ominous rustle from behind me. Billions of tiny feet. All hurrying.
"This is it," Ned blurted.
I had never heard Ned blurt before. I slid to a halt on the smooth metal floor.
"What?" I said.
"This is it. Right here." Ned appeared as a bearded Moses, and swept his staff all around, in a majestic arc. Behold, mortal, the gesture said.
"What is here?" I cried.
"The Hall of Marvels!" Ned murmured, gathering his hooded white robe. “We actually found it! Let me tell you, my boy, the odds were mighty long against us sharing this moment together."
He put that rather strangely, but then, Ned did that sometimes. Too much talking with other machine intellects.
The rustling roar behind me prodded me into another run. I hardly even minded, since I was exulting. “Then - the Time Oscillator is here!"
"Somewhere, yes," Ned agreed, loping beside me, still as Moses. His robe and beard flapped very realistically in the wind; his wooden cane tapped the floor rhythmically. That slap slap slap, I realized, came from his leather sandals.
"What should we look for?" I asked. “What does it look like?" Hopefully we could find it, grab it, and work our way back to Trina by circling around behind our pursuers. I cut left and right and left again, weaving through the rows and rows of odd machines. We passed several that looked like piles of metal shavings, others that were giant empty metal frameworks.
"I'm looking." Moses made a show of looking left, right, straight ahead, even under his legs.
"Yes, yes. But what are we looking for?" I wanted to be part of the search. Besides, Moses here was using my eyes.
"Er, I'm not really sure." Moses shrugged and looked at me blankly.
"You're not sure?"
"Well, no."
"It could be any one of these thousands of machines?" I screamed.
"No, I can rule out a few. Of course, it might not even be here at all," Moses said philosophically.
I rounded another corner, still running hard. We could have gone right past it. Great Zot - we could have gone right past it twice. Or maybe we were about to go past it.
"How are we supposed-"
"Trina. She's the expert," Ned said. He of course knew what I was going to say before I said it; he was able to watch my thoughts slowly form, like swirling dust twisting itself into primordial galaxies which eventually take fire. But he wasn't supposed to interrupt; out of courtesy he was supposed to let me finish my own thoughts.
A shrill squeal split the air. I spun to see a shrunken, wizened, incredibly wrinkly Boff tottering towards me, tentacles waving and flapping.
"Human!" It squealed. “Human in the Sacred Hall! Human!"
The Boff was not, of course, talking to me. The Boff was summoning help to dispatch me.
By Mercury's flaming arse - just when things seemed to be getting a little brighter, they went completely black.
Even a baby could outrun this particular Boff, who must have been a curator, and I did just that, losing myself in the complex rows of oddly shaped machines. Some were huge simple seamless silver spheres, devoid of any dials, switches, or anything else. Others were littered with forests of intricate switches and knobs so tiny that only an elf could possibly work them. Still others were festooned with huge levers and rods that would have thrown out a dinosaur's back.
Very little was known about the Old Ones; their only remnants were their artifacts. No one knew why they had left a huge canister stuffed with the mysterious, fantastically complex machines in a high, stable orbit. Some thought it was for some obscure purpose of their own; others argued that from the way the canister was sealed and the machines carefully wrapped, it was plainly a time capsule. Why send unknown future races a gift of technology? That raised an interesting question. Was it a gift? No one knew what most of the machines did, but many scientists had been killed or transformed while investigating. Yes, transformed, by the addition of foreign genetic material. A handful of lobster-like Mainers had been rimmed with pink fuzz and curly poofy tails. Several Boffs permanently sported new organs that looked exactly like tiny, festive party hats.
Some of the machines, it seemed, were designed to be nothing more than fiendishly compl
ex, almost indecipherable traps. Those who claim to be able to figure out such things from scraps of metal and architecture claimed that the Oh Ohs had an extremely whimsical and dangerous sense of humor; in their view, all these machines were, pure and simple, an enormous practical joke, a million years in the making. A celestial bucket of water over a starry door. According to these same folks, every transformation resulted in a form that the Oh Ohs would have considered to be at or near the peak of the pyramid of comedy.
I personally tended to agree with these last, perhaps because I liked the idea. Effrontery on a galactic scale! A race that would go to all that effort for a joke - oh, to meet them!
I trekked down aisle after aisle; far behind me I could still hear the faint cry: "Human! Human in the Sacred Hall! Human!"
I experienced the very odd sensation of desperately wanting to be a Boff again. Oh, to be green and frondy, laden with chlorophyll, tentacle-equipped.
"Anytime, now, Ned, would be fine," I urged, feeling especially vulnerable. In my mind's eye the last few grains were preparing to plummet downward through the sucking funnel of my own personal hourglass. Time almost up. I couldn't dodge and hide forever.
An attack group of six Boffs appeared ahead; I ducked down a cross-path before they saw me.
The machines and displays around me were becoming older and dustier; this seemed a little-used, almost forgotten corner of the Hall of Marvels. The Alley of the Slightly Less Marvelous, perhaps. I plunged onward; dustier and dustier, older and older. Maybe my pursuers wouldn't look here.
I rounded a corner, and then another, and found myself facing a dead end. Not your ordinary dead end, though. A huge metal wall, crafted with odd crystalline panels and violet-colored flux tubes. A smaller suitcase-sized machine stood before it.
I didn't like either the reality or the unfortunately suggestive name dead end, so in a flash I reversed, hugging the wall and hoping against hope that silent Ned was going to come through for me. Just this once. Just for a change.
I rounded the corner again but this time saw nothing but green.
"There you are," hissed a deep slithering crackle, the words punctuated by the hiss and crackle of flexing razor scythes.
I was already backing away - I had been found, I saw, by one of the good Commandant's evil helpers. “I thought you an odd Boffling."
I considered my options. My first impulse was to consider them quickly, but I realized that there was no need - I had no options, therefore I had more than enough time to study them. For I didn't need any time at all. In fact, if I were a theorist, I would probably say that I had an infinite amount of excess time for the job, since none was needed. I wouldn't understand this at all, which is why I am not a theorist.
The Boff was evidently hot - no doubt it had done the local equivalent of a sprint to catch up with me. Disgustingly wide pores winked open to jet streams of foul-colored vapor into the cavern, which quickly took on a sulphurous stench. If I hadn't already been backing away, these alone would have convinced me of the wisdom of a retreat.
My executioner spoke. “I would have settled for killing a traitor. But it will be a great honor to kill a human. I will add you to my own personal collection, right between the zakro and a fine pair of lyrans, I think."
Possibly, just possibly, this Boff might be a bit slow. Not that I had any indication of that, but it was possible. And if so, there was an outside chance I might plant a kick to the top tassel and down it. Cornered, I waited for the Boff to edge into range.
The stalk slithered forward. “You must know the name of your killer," the Boff said. “I am Krazno."
I slid back. “Freedno?"
The Boff edged closer, razor-scythes extending for me, arching forward like the spines of a fish. “No, Krazno."
"Uh, Kellmo?" I said gamely, still backing.
Krazno stopped, irritated. “Krazno!"
"Kullyfah?" I tried. I had found, I decided, a loophole.
"No! Krazno!
"Krack-Koe?"
"Never mind! I will kill you anyway!" Krazno was on the move again. So was I.
Then another leathery stalk slithered up behind Krazno. Damn! Against two, I had no chance. Zakro and lyrans, here I come! Save me a spot! Pinochle for eternity in an alien menagerie!
Instead of flanking me, the second Boff moved directly behind the first, no doubt backing up its attack. An unusual tactic; I would have expected to be flanked. But whatever waters your roots. It would not matter. Either way, I would be gruesomely eviscerated. And that would be the fun part.
The second Boff sidled up close to Krazno and sprouted thick tentacles, which I watched with casual disinterest. Until those tentacles did something that caused me to watch with great interest: they reached out and, with an odd motion and a deeply offensive but nicely pronounced crunching-vegetable sound, snapped Krazno's head. It didn't come off, but flopped over at an angle that a Boff would find sickening, yet which I found heartening.
The first asparagus collapsed to the ground, limp and broken. But now what? Was this a battle over who would reap the honor of my demise?
"Hi," the second stalk said. In Trina's familiar voice.
"You!" I gasped.
"How'd I do?" she said. She looked just like an asparagus, thanks to her morph-pak. With mine shut down, I couldn't see her face through the stalk. The optical filter was inoperative.
"You just snapped his little head off?" I asked in wonderment.
"It was easy. I've had a little training, you know. Mostly jung-ku, with some haak-to."
Those, I knew, were two of the most deadly forms of hand-to-hand combat known to man. Their very existence was a state secret. These Martian frontierswomen were tough.
"But-"
"My tunnel was a quick dead-end," Trina explained, "so I came to see how you were doing. Imagine my surprise to find you on stage at the dedication of that zoo. You looked smashing, though. Nice pose." She imitated it, head thrown back, her tentacles flapping in mock terror.
"Gee, thanks," I said. After having been saved I could hardly complain, though I told myself that if I hadn't so ably distracted the Boff Trina could never have downed it with such ease.
Her stalk turned towards the wall. Her yellow eyes were realistically watery. “Diz, you found it," she said.
"I found what?"
"That." She pointed, and her voice took on a hushed tone. “Zot alive. The Time Oscillator. I wasn't sure it existed, deep down. But there it is."
I moved to the small console and gave it an experimental heft. Weighty but manageable. I braced myself to hoist it. “Alright, let's go."
Trina was shaking her head, I think - it was hard to tell inside that suit. “Court, stop clowning around. Not that. That." She pulled open the top of her suit, freeing her arms and upper body, and pointed at the wall of metal behind me.
It filled the wall - a gigantic machine, a hundred feet high and twice as many wide. The control panel was an absurdly small one-meter panel.
I stared.
"What," I asked dully, "is that?"
"The Time Oscillator," Trina replied, wonder no doubt aglow from her gold and green eyes. “The reason we've almost been Boff chow. Magnificent, isn't it?"
Perhaps, yes. But there was something else about it.
"Trina, dear. There's no way we can fit that into any ship, even assuming that I'll be able to steal one."
"Of course not. It's far too big for a ship. Even if we could get it to one. Which I doubt very much."
"Right. Even if we could get it to one," I agreed. “Then we're screwed? Don't you see? We can only go back in time to the Boff past. I guess we could try to claim it instead, but I think if that's our choice, maybe I'd rather not have a homeworld."
Trina looked at me sympathetically. “You poor dear. I guess we forgot to tell you this part of the plan. You know that space and time are the same thing, yes?"
"Er, I guess so, according to the theories."
"So we can use this
to go not just anywhen, but anywhere."
I rocked back on my heels. “Oh. Of course. Well, then. Let's go."
"And quickly," Ned added. “They're coming." Though we shared a pair of ears, he applied complex processing algorithms to the signals and so had far better hearing than I.
Then I heard it too - the rustling swirl of the approaching Boff mob. It was a combination of banging and slapping and crunching. And it was definitely moving closer.
"I would suggest we hurry," Ned said calmly, now dressed as a woodsman, coonskin cap and Kentucky rifle and all. One ear was on the ground, a look of intense concentration on his face. Whenever Ned recommended hurrying, in a calm tone, it meant things were desperate. The calmer the tone, the more he felt that he shouldn't alarm us, and the worse things were. He said, "We have two and a half minutes."
"OK, OK," Trina said nervously. Her eyes flicked about. A line of sweat appeared on her upper lip as she stared at the control panel.
"By Pluto's far-flung ass," I groaned. “Don't tell me that after dragging you across half the galaxy and saving you from certain death over and over and over you don't know how to work it?"
She didn't even look up. “Of course not."
I screamed. Sometimes you just have to scream, and this was one of those times.
"Court," she muttered, her face intently fixed on the control panel. “No one knows how to work it, or almost any of these machines. It's an incredibly complex trick. But I've studied it, and I can figure it out."
"In two minutes."
"No, no, don't be silly. They've probably left a few lethal little surprises, as jokes. Now let me work."
Ned turned himself into a giant clock, counting down from two minutes.
"I'm not being silly. We have two minutes. Then they'll be here."
She glanced over her shoulder at me, perhaps to see if I was joking. I wasn't. Far down the hall a trundling mob of angry Boffs, looking like a surrealist painting entitled Revenge of the Vegetables, was closing on us. Payback for thousands of years of harvests.
The Blue Marble Gambit Page 17
