The Admiral grinned evilly.
"Never mind," I said.
"I'm just getting started. These equations are the theoretical underpinnings to the pseudo-quantum-mechanical foundation-"
"I give up."
"Fine," she said, dropping her hand. “Anyway, the gist of it is that we have only ten days."
"Ten days?"
"That," the Admiral said patiently, "is when the Etzans will present their claim to the Galactic Tribunal."
"And at that point it will be too late," Trina finished. “We'll never be able to go back in time to the Galactic Tribunal hearing - the recent past is off-limits. Impossible to reach, since we're subunits of this timespace, and resonate at its chronic frequency. The laws of conservation of temporality. I just showed you the formu-"
I jumped in before she could start again with the formulas. Formulae. Whatever. “But even if we wait a month, until after the hearing, we could still go back to the Claiming Ceremony, thousands of years ago."
"Ten thousand six hundred and forty-one," corrected Trina.
The Admiral was nodding. “True, Court. And we might even disrupt it. But that would do this timeline no good at all. It might - or might not - spin off another branch of temporality, but it wouldn't help us. Once the Galactic Tribunal hearing is past our present, we can't change it. The recent past is immutable. So if you go back in time after ten days from now, it's worthless to us. This us, that is."
"Exactly right," Trina agreed. “It might help a parallel us, but then again it might not. There may not even be a parallel us, but only an inchoate tempo-bubble. The mechanics are complicated and inherently imprecise. Chaos permeates. Watch." She flourished a laser pen like a dagger.
"I'll take," I muttered in disgust, "your word for it." Then I faced the Admiral. “I'll be fine on my own. Just have her brief me. I can figure it out."
The Admiral was shaking his head in a admirable imitation of patience. This despite the fact that he didn't have a patient cell in his body. Even his adipose cells, if he had any, must have perpetually trembled with activity.
"You need Trina to operate the Time Oscillator. Don't worry, she can take care of herself - she's on loan to the Fist from the Cerebral Branch," he added soothingly.
Perhaps he was hoping to slip that nugget past me but his words set off more warning bells than his scheme to send me to Boff. The Cerebral Branch!
"No! Not a Brain!" Brains - the intelligence wonks who often came up with uses for the Fist - had an evil reputation in the hallowed halls of the Fist. Mere working Fingers like me could always expect shabby treatment from Brains. Brains would do things like stick Fingers into fire. Or break Fingers. After all, there were always more Fingers.
"Now, Court-"
"I can figure it out myself!" I cried.
"I doubt that very much," Trina said. “From what we've been able to gather, at the very least the Time Oscillator requires an intimate knowledge of reverse-phase temporal-stability theory and stasis-shift equations."
"Oh, those," I shrugged. “Sometimes I do those at night to help me sleep."
"One more thing," the Admiral said, now glaring at me. “The Etzans are expecting us to try something, and have mobilized against us; we've had three agents attacked recently."
"Four," I reminded him, recalling my spacewalk.
"Four," he corrected. “If they find you, they'll strike. So keep your eyes open. You have to get Trina to the Time Oscillator. That's your job." The Admiral glanced at the luminous time-strip implanted in his forefinger. “OK, it's time to get you outfitted. You're due in the biolab, Court."
I should have expected that, but I didn't. I must have been distracted.
"No," I said, backing away. “Not the biolab."
"Somehow I knew you'd say that," the Admiral replied, gliding forward.
I knew what to look for and it was there, a glint in his right hand that matched the gleam in his eye. I faked left before diving right but he was too quick. Or rather, the security bot that had crept up behind me and snagged me in the unbreakable carbide grips of restraint talons was too quick. I knew they were unbreakable, but I struggled anyway.
The Admiral smiled cruelly, and the solid diamond tooth sparkled evilly, though not quite as evilly as the silver tool in his hand. I fired a snap kick at his head; that glinting dome flicked sideways with reptilian efficiency. My boot smote air.
"Deja vu," he said as he pointed the steely tip of the spraygun at my neck. “Why do we always go through this?"
"Let's not this time," I suggested, tensing for another kick.
"Too late," he said, and pulled the trigger. I barely heard the hiss, and almost felt the sting, before the black curtain fell.
CHAPTER 4. BRAINGUEST
I awoke staring up at the bright white octagons of the biolab ceiling. Beams of hard light speared out of the whirring surgical autolamps, leapt across a few meters of cold air, and drilled mercilessly into my eyes. The painful lights were unnecessary, but they added to the ambience of agony.
"This won't hurt a bit," lied Dr. Primer Ought, Chief Scientist of the Fist. He was crouched over the top of my head, which like the rest of my body was strapped to a long padded table. He was still preparing his equipment, which for some reason required a lot of awful grinding noises. Even the sound hurt - and that was nothing, I knew, compared to what was coming.
I threw myself upward. The thick straps held.
I kicked my legs downward. The thick straps held.
I thrashed my body sideways. The thick straps held.
The clanking noises stopped, leaving in their wake an even louder silence. I knew what that meant.
"Well, actually," Dr. Ought amended as he shuffled closer, "it might smart just a little."
There was good reason he was known in the ranks as Dr. Pain.
"No," I gasped, and changed tactics. I now fought to free only my right arm, putting all my strength into it. I envisioned it ripping free, lunging through the restraint and wrapping around Dr. Pain's neck. Squeezing. Making my biceps jump and twitch, perhaps a tattooed hula dancer happily hula-ing as Dr. Pain's face purpled.
Still the straps held. I was dumb-founded.
"We've strengthened the restraints since your last visit," Dr. Ought observed in a practiced tone of boredom.
I could tell he'd waited a long, long while to say those words. And perhaps justifiably so, in light of the somewhat grisly events which had passed, so delightfully slowly, the last time, when I'd broken free and forced him into the chair. It turned out that he didn't enjoy the other side of pain nearly so much.
He twisted something, producing a threatening ratcheting sound. He glanced at the glow of a display. “Oh dear," he said without a shred of genuine surprise. “I'm afraid I was terribly mistaken. This will sting quite a lot, actually."
I struggled magnificently. My body hardly moved.
There was nothing else to do. I was down to my last resort. I screamed.
"That won't help," he observed coolly. I heard an icy clink as some sort of hard surgical tool left its cold metallic home. It sounded sharp. “But go ahead if you like," he offered kindly. It was, I knew, false kindness. Dentist's kindness.
Why, one might wonder, in an age of interstellar travel, centuries after effective anesthetics had been developed, would this relatively minor procedure hurt so much?
For one very simple reason: Dr. Pain liked pain. He bathed in it like a pig in mud; he reveled in it, he was a connoisseur of contortions, a gourmet of groans, an archbishop of agony. If pain was painting he'd be Picasso. Officially, he claimed that maintaining some patient response was critical to the successful outcome of his procedures. A likely cover story.
An icy pencil cut through the top of my head, chewing through the skull and then scalloping through what little gray matter I had. It hurt. A lot. It cut deeper and deeper, until I could feel a cold damp pressure behind my eyeballs. The world blurred as my eyes changed shape.
; "Ungggg," I said. It wasn't just ferociously painful, it was ferociously awkward.
"Here comes a little prick," Dr. Ought warned. I was too far gone to make the obvious rejoinder. Another one?
Regardless, it was no little prick. It was a flaming cutting torch, carbonizing my brain stem one slow painful molecule at a time. Or so it felt. It went on for a timeless eternity, and then perhaps just a bit longer, and all the while there was a delicate background of tinkling and tugging. Then came a new sound - a horrible wet crackling. Snakes and rodents roamed about my skull, set up shop, had babies, and raised generations of young vermin.
"Almost finished, Court," Dr. Ought said sadly, much later.
A final excruciating wrench, as if he was tugging my brain ninety degrees.
"There. All done," he said, and pressed the silver tip of a spraygun against my neck.
"Night night," he said.
This time I awoke with a Galaxy-class headache that I knew was even worse than it felt. I explored my skull, and found the oddly slick smoothness of skinseal on my neck and scalp.
"Mercury's scorched butt," I muttered. It had been inevitable, and now it was done. Some nameless computer detected my return to consciousness and a bright annunciator panel glowed to brutally cheerful life in mid-air, informing me that I was due in Hangar Bay 9. I staggered out into the hall.
The Bigger Than Yours had long curving passages, reminiscent of the Fist's main headquarters tucked away deep beneath the surface of Elara, a small moon idly circling Jupiter. The halls were sparsely populated, with only a few EarthCops in their evil yellow uniforms. They weren't after me; I was safe in my black Fist jumpsuit. But I couldn't help glowering at them; after dodging them for years, and belittling and taunting them at every opportunity, the habit was still with me. It wasn't just for my own amusement that I had turned myself into one of the most famous outlaws known to man, and triggered a system-wide hunt which failed to find me. Although, frankly, it was very amusing. But my role as an outlaw had a higher, altruistic purpose: Examples like me were good for the human spirit. Though I have to admit it was great fun to be a bad example.
I passed one of the cyber-rec rooms; screams and thumps sounded from within. It was either full-contact combat, or ultra-vigorous space sex. Then again, it could have been that new hybrid dreamed up by some entertainment genius: Sexbat. Sex and violence in one handy package. The ideal human brainfood. Mass-marketed, with competitive teams. Whatever it was - and who didn't enjoy a good sexbat bout? - I didn't even glance inside. My mood was black as a hole for I was awaiting an unwelcome visitor. Worse, there was no escaping him. He was inside my head.
The corridor branched and I followed the coded symbol for the hangar deck.
"Come on, Ned. Show yourself. No doubt you're even uglier than before." As we both knew perfectly well this was not only highly unlikely but completely impossible, for Ned had no genuine physical appearance at all.
Nothing. Ned, I knew, would bide his time. Choose his moment. Plan his entrance. I turned a corner and the massive airlock of the hangar bay loomed just ahead, a giant steel iris. I popped into a head; might as well offload some last cargo while still in the ship's grav field.
I was standing at the uricycler when Ned appeared. A translucent figure, kingly and bearded, in long robes and wearing a crown, standing beside me imperiously.
"Figures you'd show up here," I groused. “Pervert."
"Now now, Court, I just wanted to confirm that you're as pitifully endowed as ever." He glanced downward meaningfully.
I smiled and glanced at Ned's crotch. “I don't think your vaporware is anything to be proud of."
"Oh no?" Ned replied, now a giant sex organ. Since he controlled the signals feeding into my brain, he could take on any appearance he wanted. And now he wanted to be a seven-foot dingle. But that wasn't enough.
Ned pointed his business end at me. Of course it couldn't really do anything to me, but I had a hunch that both the visual imagery and tactile input were about to be extremely disquieting, at best, and drenchingly disgusting, at worst.
"Here's a little present for you," Ned warned.
As I well knew, it is impossible to dodge the inside of your head. So, on sudden impulse, I slammed my forehead into the smooth steel wall, hard enough to add another sedimentary layer of pain to my headache. More importantly, Ned's phallic image snapped and crackled and popped.
"Hey," he blurted, the words emanating from one end with imaginative though obscene anatomical correctness. Those weren’t lips, but they talked. Then he vanished.
I marched out the hatch, trying to ignore the throbbing pain between my eyes.
Ned, of course, lived in my head. He was a Neural Emplant Device, a tiny bundle of organosil chips hardwired into my cerebellum, cerebral cortex, optic and auditory nerves, and other lobes and flanges I'd never heard of. He was an on-line advisor with vast databanks and hyper-power processors, but I always insisted that the insidious little elf be ripped out when I wasn't using him, which accounted for all my time in the biolab. Even that was better than having a constant voyeur popping up spontaneously to analyze every move you make. Fist Agents were paired with particular implants; our personalities were matched. So Ned and I knew each other, and in fact had a long history. But in our case, the matching didn't seem to have worked, despite the infinite wisdom of the Fist. Simply put, we didn't get along. But we shared my skull. Which is a problem.
My head was still ringing when I found Trina Nova at the boarding ramp of our ship.
"The Blue Bean," I said, reading the nameplate. It was a small private yacht, neither blue nor a bean, but shaped like the jeweled head of a praying mantis. The idea was that a private yacht would be better cover than a known Fist ship, and so would give us a better chance of sneaking onto Boff. I walked around it once, kicking intakes and yanking on appendages, making sure that everything was attached and most likely would stay attached.
We climbed into the small but luxurious interior, equipped with two small staterooms, a galley, and a tired but serviceable cockpit. I took the pilot's chouch, which depending on ambient g-forces could flex between chair and couch, and motioned Trina to strap in beside me.
"Welcome aboard," hummed the ship's computer with enthusiasm. Its voice was slick with salesmanship. “This is a custom Starcruiser 9XL, manufactured to the highest specifications on the scenic planet Blutonia. The 9XL is a perfect blend of performance and economy, delivered in an attractive steel, cermet, and titanium-trimmed package. Features include genuine artificial imitation burled agnut decor, a convertible galley, TL capability, a maximum extended capacity of four human adults, or seven Zlotyl mid-larvals, or two Oleans, or three pods of-"
I pressed the mute button. The voice became choked and strangled; it sounded as if it were talking around a gag. But still it soldiered on. “Three - pods - of -"
I stabbed the button again. Silence.
Ned appeared, and in a slightly bitter voice gave me a more reliable rundown of the ship's controls and systems. A few things it did very well. A few others, I noticed, it did not do at all. For example, the Blue Bean was relatively fast, but no match for a big military vessel. A trade-off of weight for speed.
Ned said, "If you'll give me access, I'll configure the nav computer and drive elements for the trip to Boff."
I hated to do it, but we were in a hurry, so I concentrated hard, as if trying to roll a marble around somewhere behind my eyes. There was a tiny click as if some unidentifiable muscle in my head had moved some unspeakably-placed lever. I insisted on having control over Ned's on-board integral telelink, much to the disgust of both the Fist and Ned himself.
"Thank you," Ned cooed, and lights began to flash on the nav console as he reached out. Two minutes later he was done; I spent another ten double-checking his work.
Flawless.
I called Trina into the cockpit and pointed to the other chouch. “Better strap in."
She stretched onto the leather like
a lazy cat and puffed her hair into a black cloud.
I stared. Either at some point in the recent past I hadn't noticed that I'd suffered serious brain damage, or her hair had recently changed shades again, this time from blond to black.
She smiled, and moved a hidden dial - perhaps on a biotooth. Her hair silvered, went through a momentary rainbow phase, then shone gold.
Chameleon-mods. Nano-camo. Expensive. “Trendy," I said.
"Thank you."
I got a quick clearance from a surly controller who, if he wasn't beaten as a child, should have been. The ship crackled as the air was pumped out of the lock and deep space wrapped cold talons around us, then the external hatch irisced open. Stone-hard pinpricks of stars shone, free of flicker and distortion. I thought of all those rays of light, which had travelled so far from so many places to meet right here. It seemed auspicious, though it wasn’t.
Blue external lights flashed in warning, then the gravity generators cut off with a hollow thunk. And just like that, we were falling.
"Oop," Trina said as we rose.
Starting up engines in the lock was strictly verboten; we waited while our mooring post tugged us to the edge of the lock and hurled us outward. The engines started up with an almost silent hum.
"Ready?" I asked Trina.
"Time's awasting."
I goosed the throttle, jetting us forward.
The nav screen projected a series of large squares on the viewscreen; all I had to do was aim through these. I steadily advanced the throttle, accelerating. Once we got past .3c I turned it over to the autopilot and told Ned to let me know of anything amiss, then settled back.
Trina turned to me; it was our first quiet moment together. “Would you tell me something?"
"I might."
"It's a little bit personal." Her giant Afro bobbed.
"I might anyway."
"Is your name really Court diz Aster?"
I looked across at her. Tanned and lithe on her leather couch, her now flame-red hair arrayed around her, her space black jumpsuit delightfully snug, except for where it was suggestively loose, I almost wanted to ask if her name was really Trina Nova. But of course it was. “What's wrong with it?"
The Blue Marble Gambit Page 5