"Thanks for saving my life," I grumbled.
He stroked his bald dome. “You're welcome. Now, you remember the deal we made when I first recruited you?"
I stopped rubbing and glared at him. “I think it was: the Fist or prison?"
"That’s the one."
"Funny you should mention it. In light of recent events, I'm reconsidering it."
He smiled, revealing a front incisor chiseled from a whole diamond plucked by a robot probe from the heart of a neutron star. It glinted. “Too late for that. I never said the Fist would be safe. I said it would be interesting."
I rolled my head around, working a few kinks from my neck, and picked some lint from my short and conservatively-orange hair. I didn't go for the extreme natural colors now favored by young punks. “I am truly cursed, then. I live in interesting times."
"Don't we all," the Admiral muttered.
I saw through a clear porthole several suited Fist workers using a small space-tug to haul my void kayak into a large cargo bay. It had been at the CasinoPlex.
"How considerate of you," I said.
"Not at all. Evidence for your future trial," the Admiral replied.
I smiled, widely, forgetting for a moment that this wasn't an insult to humans. The Admiral caught my intent and returned an evil, carnivorous grin, while tilting his head enough to be sure that the light would reflect off the huge neutron-star diamond. It sparkled painfully. He knew that it always made me wince.
I winced, so that he would stop.
He stopped.
"She was waiting outside that window," I finally said, gesturing at my savior. “For me to come through it."
He nodded happily.
Both of us were thinking the same thoughts, though from opposite perspectives. I was the fish, he the fisherman, as I pieced together the chain of events that had brought me here. He of course was already well aware of those events, and was enjoying my cascade of chagrin as I fit them together. The only way he would send someone to wait outside that window, invisible against deep space, was if he knew I was inside but likely to come bursting through. And the only way he could know I was likely to come bursting through was if he knew I was with my very own kill team. Which he plainly, therefore, had known about long before I had. Yet instead of a warning or back-up, he sent one single person to wait outside the window. You could take that as either a certain level of confidence in me, or a certain level of disinterest in the outcome.
It was also a novel way to get me aboard ship, since I was technically on leave and had I known he was looking for me would have raced in the opposite direction. We had long ago established that I was better at running than he was at chasing.
"You almost let me get killed," I cried. The kill team, after all, could have just done their job without making sport of it.
"Hardly," harrumphed the Admiral.
"That kill team was good!" I countered. “Three species!" Multiple aliens gave a kill team three times the resources. Different species had different sensory organs, different tactics, different instincts. A multi-species team was one of the hardest to beat. It was mere luck that had enabled me to flush the whole slimy gang into deep space.
He was shaking his great head paternally. “Well, you were the one who decided to socialize with your own assassins."
"Point two: I'm on leave!"
"Leave," he harrumphed. “Cancelled."
Cancelled. I let out a shriek. The fabled leisure world of Eros? The zero G hot tubs? The orbital feather baths? Cancelled? "But why?"
"Playing poker with aliens is against regs. You know that."
It all clicked, with a grinding, ratcheting sound only I could hear.
"You set me up!" Given his own sly way, it was plain as day. He had engineered where I was released on leave, which under his own Fist regs he grudgingly had to allow me, knowing that I would head towards Eros. A path that would take me temptingly close to the Round-N-Round, site of the irresistible CasinoPlex. Naturally I would drop in. I hadn't thought him that devious, but I was still learning. He had a few decades on me. Just as years add rings to trees, they add serpentine twists and turns to a mind as devious and intricate as his.
He was shaking his head. “It's not what you're thinking, Court," he said. He had an uncanny knack for knowing what one was thinking, and for answering unasked questions. I attributed it to our shared blood, but in fact he could do it with most people. He simply understood how the human brain worked, and was a master of reading expression. “If I was going to go to all that trouble, I would have just changed the regs. Or broken them."
True enough, I realized. There was no higher authority than him. But then why had he been here, if not for the sole purpose of snaring me?
He explained it before I could ask. “I need you to save Earth."
"Oh shut up." He always said something like that when assigning me dull, bureaucratic tasks.
He frowned, deeply and magnificently. “No, I really mean it this time."
And he did.
CHAPTER 3. TIMECRUNCH
The Admiral's briefing room was a cavern so huge it seemed that a hole had been carved in space and wrapped with ship. Uncle Admiral, or as I sometimes called him to his equal dismay, Admiral Uncle, eased behind the huge twisted block of raw meteor that made up his desk, exercising his facial muscles in calisthenics that finally settled into a frown.
Just as the eskimos have a hundred words for snow, Admiral Fairchile had a custom glossary of facial expressions. Not just any expressions, but mutant scowls, half-breed sneers, and unpleasant grins. Occasionally, just to keep things interesting, a black moue would mate with a grinding snarl to sire a new species of twisted glower.
The Admiral himself wasn't a particularly large man yet he seemed enormous. This was partly due to his deep-chested build, but even more a result of his ability to, in a single nanosecond, transform himself into a shouting, blathering, sweating demon. Alternatively, with a single icy mutter he might deliver a death sentence. He was worth close attention, blood relative or no, for his mind was sharper than a monomolec blade and twistier than a wormhole, while his sense of family loyalties took a distinct back seat to the needs of the Blue Marble.
"Sit down, diz Astor," the Admiral ordered.
I sat.
"Now pay attention, Court," the Admiral continued. I put on my attentive face, although I was focused on something else. While moving to the briefing room I'd felt the characteristic bump-bump of going TL, and knew that the trans-light drive had kicked in. More bumps. And then still more. The Admiral had one of the fastest ships anywhere, a result of his control over almost unlimited resources. We had to be cracking along. But where?
"Where are we going?" I asked calmly.
The Admiral ignored my question. Nothing unusual there.
"As I indicated, we have a . . . Problem, Court." The way he said problem, with a little pause and a grimace and a capital letter, called an old and familiar unsettled feeling back from wherever it went when it wasn't in the pit of my stomach. It eased in somewhere below my duodenum, a spot as accustomed and comfy for it as an easy chair.
"I'm listening."
"Wrong sense. Watch," Admiral Fairchile said, turning his chair to face the side wall. I turned as well, and watched as the misty translucence of a wall-holo in warm-up mode appeared. It cleared momentarily, and the view was of an enormous black sheet, with one tiny bright hole in the center.
"Recognize it?" asked the Admiral.
I didn't offer the entirely accurate observation that it could be any one of billions of black sheets perforated by a single tiny hole.
"Ah, no, not yet."
"Keep watching, then." He smoothed his regulation-purple Fleet tunic.
The tiny bright spot began to grow, ever so slightly. And looking closer, I could see other bright spots, very tiny, in the background. Stars. And one star in particular. But which?
Well, it was a Type 7 like Sol, yellow like Sol. As yet, I could
n't see any planets. I hunted in the background for constellations, but couldn't make any out.
Then another ingredient was added to the soup. Along the right side of the display, a third of the way down, a glowing symbol appeared in lurid red. It was an odd amalgam of dots and lines, like a combination of ancient Arabic and Chinese hallucinated by a feverish speaker of neither. A similar but different symbol appeared in the top right corner, and then two-thirds of the way down the side. After the next one took the lowermost position, other symbols filled in the gaps until there were none. Then, they all disappeared, and another procession followed, except that this time the symbols appeared to be different, and they filled the various positions in a different order.
On the screen, the camera ship - assuming there was a ship involved - veered away from the central sun and turned toward a smaller, duller light.
A planet.
A blue and white planet.
I decided to venture out onto a limb. Way out. “Looks like Earth, sir." I added the "sir" in case that was a stupid observation; the Admiral's uncharacteristic silence had me on edge.
Uncle agreed with a wry face. Next in the queue, by my calculations, should be a sardonic grin. “Yes, Earth. Mother of the human race. Because there are so few inhabitable planets, Earth is still the only human world on which we can live without artificial environments. Earth is our anchor; without her, our colonies would die. Earth is humanity's linchpin."
I knew all this. Inhabited planets were few and far between; humans had been latecomers to a Galactic land rush that was eons old. Flush with the success of reaching the stars, we suddenly found ourselves to be like aborigines setting out in canoes to colonize Earth in the 21st century: most everything was taken, and no one was the least bit impressed with us, except of course ourselves. And so though we had footholds throughout our own system and on a few distant burnt cinders of planets, Earth remained humanity's past and future. There was no telling why the inscrutable Admiral was sharing this with me - he may have spoken for a simple reason such as setting the stage, or for a more complex reason, or even for no reason at all; it could have been simple misdirection.
On screen, the camera ship slid into Earth orbit. While most ships followed the well-defined corridors along the ecliptic, this one forged a different path, a high polar route. Up and over the brilliant ice-cap - it looked rather big - and down the gray-blue slate of the Atlantic Ocean, frosted by white swirls of clouds. The view rolled over the Atlantic, a dark gray-blue beneath white swirls of clouds. It reminded me of my carefree days before I had been dragooned into The Fist; the origins of my own strange trip were right there on the screen, tiny and blue. The sea. Specifically, the Atlantic of the sixteenth century. Had it not been for Blackbeard and Bluebeard, Long John Silver and Sir Francis Drake, my life would have followed a very different course, perhaps.
For while growing up in the later years of the stultifying twenty-third century I had made two observations. First, Earth was a staggeringly dull place, a wonderland of the carefully-controlled and safety-sealed, all smothered under the gray monolith of GovCorp, which ran everything and everyone. This situation was a natural outgrowth of events that began in the early twenty-first century, when MicroCola, the softdrinkware conglomerate, achieved a corporate coup by acquiring the entire nation of Bolivia as a wholly-owned subsidiary. Just like that, llamas, remote Andean villages, and rocks and stones and glaciers became corporate assets, tiny items of fine print listed on musty ledgers, bits of data buried on accounting spreadsheets.
Not to be outdone, Hewlett-GMitsu picked up Chile on the cheap, in a fire sale after a disastrous accident derailed the newly-elected government's plan to convert the entire economy to Chiclet production. Then, in a neat trick, MicroCola and Hewlett-GMitsu merged, to form the ultra giant Microbitsu. Meanwhile, on a parallel course, the unified North American Government, or NAG, continued its decades-old process of fossilizing and congealing into a single shapeless mass of bureaucracy.
Years passed, with NAG nibbling lazily at the last independent bureaus – the New Key West Lady's Temperance Society was the last to succumb, as I recall - while Microbitsu foraged on other corporations. Both corporations and governments share a common urge to expand, and both ate and ate and ate. Pickings became slimmer and slimmer. Bureaucratic bellies growled, as it became plain that each had fully occupied their respective universes. But each wished to grow! It was their mandate! Their reason for being! Yet further expansion could come only from merging together the disparate Government and Corporate sectors. Many analysts warned that this was a remarkably poor idea, for a remarkably long list of remarkably good reasons. The disparate Government and Corporate sectors thanked the many analysts for their many analyses. And then promptly merged.
Within decades - these things take time - the world's once-fractious array of Government and Corporate bureaus had fused into a single immobile monolithic entity. GovCorp.
Within the planet-spanning, institutional-beige walls of GovCorp - and here, perhaps finally, is where my observation comes in - there was a place for everyone. In fact, there was the same place for everyone, since all the real work was automated. GovCorp was thousands of layers of administration, millions of managers busily managing each other. A universe of Chiefs with not an Indian in sight. Infinite heat and zero light. Endless motion without movement. Tiny cogs rolled out of the schools, slid into the huge machine, busily turned until they wore out, and then were replaced. To me, as a future, it was preferable to being chained to a rock and having a re-generating liver ripped out every day by an eagle. But not by much.
Which was why my second observation came in so handy. This observation was simply that while humanity was plodding along, convinced of our linear progress into the future, history had snuck off, hidden behind a tree, back-tracked, perhaps given off a misleading animal call, and neatly circled around to repeat itself.
For the regular interplanetary liners which plied the routes between the planets and the roid belt were in several critical ways nearly identical to the sailing ships of old. The similarities occurred in deep space, where the liners were: Isolated. Helpless. Wealth-stuffed. And even, at first, Unsuspecting.
As I saw it, my first observation presented the problem; my second, the solution. For history hadn't yet completely repeated itself; while wealth-stuffed liners blundered from planet to planet to asteroid, so far no one had thought to bring to the stars what is truly mankind's oldest institution. No, not that. Crime. In this case, piracy.
That omission was, for me, opportunity. The hidebound, cautious culture of Earth, which grew most people neat as corn stalks in their cruelly disciplined rows, had turned me into a weed. As I finished my schooling and neared graduation my future was grim as the toxic wasteland of an ancient nuke dump. The sole fate available to the lumpen masses - lifetime service in the globe-girdling, globe-strangling GovCorp - awaited me with implacable calm, like a giant anteater patiently awaiting a tasty tiny ant. To the anteater a single ant is but a momentary flash of ant-juice, a flicker of ant-ness on the taste buds, gone and forgotten in a moment. But to the ant, the transaction is far more sinister, the loss immeasurably greater.
This ant decided to dodge that slurping tongue and break a new trail, using the same distance and isolation that brought so much fun and excitement to various peg-legged, eye-patch wearing, parrot-toting adventurers centuries before. It wasn't for the money; my family was well off. In fact, both my parents were paragons of civic virtue, a factor that served only as fertilizer for the seed sprouting within me, a seed which soon bore fruit. Fruit emblazoned with a skull and crossbones.
Piracy. Crime was almost unknown on Earth - the people were sheep, docile and polite, helpless in the grip of the all-knowing, all-seeing GovCorp. It would be taking candy from babies. Big, rich babies. A life of danger, challenge, and adventure, like those of the pirates of centuries before. Like my predecessors, I ignored the bits about scurvy and death and walking the plank.
When I was caught - through the rudest and most traitorous circumstances imaginable - instead of being strung from the yardarm or forced to walk the plank I was consigned to the Fist.
Where I'd been ever since.
The Admiral made a small grunting sound. It was an idiosyncrasy that meant he was extremely agitated. The reason was on screen.
The camera ship continued its orbit. I looked for the large orbital stations, or any of the automated nav beacons, most of which project asteroid-sized holo-ads touting ChemSticks, inhalants, or even, due to yet another wave of nostalgia, old-fashioned imbibants. None appeared, which was odd, because from that position the black of space should have been littered with colorful ads crafted by Earth's best and brightest. This was a uniquely human waste; while other cultures steered their premier intellects into science or research or policy, on Earth, except for a select few, these gifted individuals peddled mouthwash for competing divisions of GovCorp.
I dismissed Heaven and looked to Earth. If I kept that trend up, my next view would be of - never mind.
Earth was dark. Several large areas on the night side of the razor-sharp terminator were clear of clouds, but not a single city or town light showed. A quirk of chance, that all the clear areas lay over unpopulated areas or underground cities.
The entire screen suffused with a golden glow, which quickly died away to reveal a bright meteor streaking away, curving downward toward the waiting planet. The ship had launched a recon or landing pod.
The next image was from the surface. A rust-colored wedge-shaped landing craft lay smoking on a grassy plain, surrounded by a ring of black where the local flora had been combusted by its arrival. Barbeque a la entry vehicle. Mist swirled around the periphery. An odd-shaped hatch slowly cranked open, and a figure in some sort of exposure suit shivered out of the craft. For a moment I thought it was yet another hard-shelled insectoid Crunchy, but then I realized that the six limbs were actually two legs and four arms, never the twain to meet thanks to a big round pot-belly.
The Blue Marble Gambit Page 3