The Blue Marble Gambit

by Boson, Jupiter

  "It just sounds funny, that's all."

  "No idea what you're talking about," I said, shaking my head.

  She was looking at me curiously, one eye gold and one green. “Court," she purred, "tell me about the Fist."

  I tabbed the view scale down and twisted the compensators to full gain, then asked her why I should tell her about the Fist when she was in it. What was this, a test?

  "Well, actually, since I'm just on loan to the Fist, Admiral Fairchile said I didn't really need the background."

  I stopped in the middle of calibrating a startant. “He did? He said that?"

  "He most certainly did. In fact, it seemed like he didn't want to tell me."

  That alone was reason enough for me, on general principle. Besides, now that I thought about it, certain types of behavior that were standard in a Fist mission might be very upsetting to a more conventionally-minded human. It was time to find out how Trina would react.

  “Alright. The Fist is a small nucleus of highly trained, alpha-innovation agents. You can't apply for it; you have to be tapped. The key membership requirements are individual initiative, analytical abilities, physical skills, and luck."

  "Luck?"

  "Call it what you will - quantum intuition, gap logic, anti-causative analyses, parallel-field deduction, or just plain luck. It's real, and you need it. You also need a healthy skepticism, plus a disregard for most social mores and customs."

  The nav deck beeped for attention; I scanned the readouts and, with Ned's silently nodding concurrence, gave the authorization for the first TL jump. The ship bumped.

  “Suck it, Einstein!" all three of us shouted. The ritual statement of going TL, derived from the flat-earther scientist who paralyzed a century and a half of human scientists with the proclamation that it couldn't be done, until a pair of precocious and unimpressed eighteen-year old Siamese twins who were actually from Siam proved him wrong. For weeks angry mobs of lab-coated physicists had roamed university campuses, tearing down statues and attacking busts.

  "What an odd collection of qualities," Trina mused, her skin flushing a deep metallic purple. “Earth society now emphasizes conformity. There must be very few recruits for the Fist."

  "A tiny number," I agreed. Outside, the stars began to inch and creep, like animated dust motes. All those ancient theories about wormholes and hyperspace and the colored smear of TL flight: all wrong. Translight was just like normal flight, only faster.

  Trina seemed momentarily distracted by the view sliding past. Then a quizzical expression creased her brow. “Wait. A 'disregard for social customs,' you said. It sounds as if you're describing outcasts."

  "You're on the right track," I said as I watched the nav computer adjust our course to sweep around an uncharted binary sun. I imagined those two burning spheres swinging a red cape in a graceful arc, leading us past. Ole! A pase for the Blue Bean!

  Trina's brow furrow deepened and she shook her head. “But you make the Fist sound like a bunch of misfits."

  "Not exactly misfits," I hinted, as we fell sunward. I edged our course closer, just for fun.

  "Not outcasts, not misfits. You're playing games! What then?" Her foot stamped, and her skin flushed a deep and angry red. I wondered if this was real or more cosmetic nano.

  "Somewhere in between?" Speaking of that, could we go between the binary suns? I checked the numbers and saw they were too close together. We'd be the meat in a solar fusion sandwich.

  "You're making me mad," she warned coolly.

  "Oh gosh no. Alright." She was going to find out anyway, eventually. “The Fist is comprised of what you might call, ah, well, criminals."

  She paused, as utterly surprised as a fish finding a tasty treat to be a murderous hook. “Criminals?"

  "Well, ex-criminals, sort of."

  "Reformed criminals, you mean?" she asked. A thin ray of hope shone plaintively through the dark cloud of her words. As if the only good criminal was a reformed criminal. Ha.

  "No, reformed criminals would be as useless as a bicycle in space. I mean caught criminals. A special few whose unique talents are redirected to be more useful to humanity."

  She was still thinking too conventionally; she couldn't help it, as a product of Earth culture. Sheep naturally follow the herd. They never imagine hanging a sharp left at the bluff and striking out to see what lies beyond that hill, unrutted by thousands of hooves.

  Trina asked, "In exchange for freedom?"

  Far ahead an Etzan-type spacedar illuminated, in the search band. We were far outside detection range but I steered a wide berth.

  "No," I said ruefully. “Not at all. In exchange for no jail. Which is a far cry from freedom. At least as I understand the concept."

  Trina leaned back, an odd light in her eyes. Crime was a distant and unpleasant notion for most humans these days; Earth and Mars were safe and sane, carefully insulated, safety-packaged, and sterile. She raced up to the brink of a conclusion and hurled herself off the edge. “So there are murderers and rapists and thieves-"

  I silenced her with a raised hand before she could any further besmirch with negative associations the good names of high-class criminals everywhere. “No no and most of all no. Well, actually, yes to the last. Out of Earth's billions, the Fist is a nucleus of just fifty agents, none of whom were brutal predators. We performed a service for humanity, and now, especially, we still do. We work for humanity."

  "You performed a service for humanity?" she smirked, as if I'd announced hives and boils to be beauty marks. “By robbing and stealing?"

  "An unenlightened, microcosmic viewpoint. We were examples of individuality and independence. Vital for the human collective unconscious. Wolves keeping the caribou sharp. Sharks thinning the school. Without us, the whole species could slide. The gene pool would fill with useless detritus and clog up."

  "Ho ho," she said. “Gene pool cleaners. Very funny. Space the babble, and tell me: why does the Fist save you anachronistic fiends-"

  I flinched, slightly.

  "-from prison?"

  The Etzan spacedar fell astern. So far, so good. That, of course, is what the man who fell off the thousand-story building was heard to say as he passed the five-hundredth floor.

  I smiled and smoothed my orange hair. I'd never gone for the new-wave, hipster shades of blond or brown. Tried and true, old-fashioned, even; that was me. “Because no one else can do what we do."

  "Ridiculous!"

  I shook my head in sadness at seeing that, like most humans, she had been conditioned to consider the criminal mind despicable and deviant. I double-checked the nav display and the prox screens, then turned to her.

  "Not at all. When Earth first made Contact, the planet was almost as stale and authoritarian as it is now. But the universe isn't called the jungleverse for no reason - it's a mad scramble, without ethics or rules or etiquette. Every planet, every race, must safeguard its interests; every planet, every race does. But our first agents were far too imbued with crippling senses of right and wrong and fair play. Before sneaking onto an alien planet, they'd try to get a visa. Stealing technology was impossible - they'd try to get export permits and buy it legally. They were suffocated by their own warped and self-imposed perceptions of the rule of law. You can't survive that way."

  Trina fixed me with her golden eye. Her green eye was on the instrument panel. “So you don't believe in right and wrong?"

  "Let's just say I have a modified sense of those concepts. Being right and dead doesn't do you any good.

  She turned two new eyes on me. Well, the same gold and green eyes, but with a new expression. "How did you get into the Fist?”

  I told her, very briefly, about my experiment with modern piracy. Flitting about in a space kayak. Hiding out in a stray asteroid. Dodging a system-wide hunt by EarthCop.

  She sat back and her skin flicked to a natural golden glow. "That was you? Skybeard? The Space Pirate?? You're not dead!”

  "No. The battle was faked. A public de
mise is another requirement for Fist Agents, sometimes known as Fingers. Earth is too law and order; the populace wouldn't stand for the knowledge that the best and brightest criminal minds of the last century have not only avoided punishment, but have actually been rewarded for their nefarious talents."

  I was watching her carefully for her reaction. Would she scream? Refuse to go along? Demand to file a protest? Start a petition? Found a support group?

  That gold green gaze held me in its sights. Her skin was in a slow swirl; her hair slowly turning a deep red. Her eyes glittered. Piracy was having an effect on her, but not the one I'd feared. I began to think of plunder.

  "How good were you? As a pirate? I read the stories, but I mean how good were you really?"

  "I was . . . Adequate." No need to brag, but I was a shade better than adequate.

  "How'd you get caught?"

  "Why would you think I got caught?"

  "You're here."

  "You don't think I voluntarily came in, for the good of my fellow man?"

  "No."

  "Ah. Fair enough. Well, I didn't get caught, exactly. I was tricked." I explained that by the time I'd hit my third ship, EarthCop was in an uproar; at the time there hadn't been a real criminal in centuries. Soon I had accumulated a series of convictions, all of them happily in absentia. I continued prowling and looting, never once harming a single human while focusing on those ships that advertised themselves as pirate-proof - 'diz Astor proof,' as they called it.

  Trina licked her lips at me. They bore an intriguing zebra pattern.

  "Go on," she whispered.

  I'd been on the vids every night; there was even a children's show based on me. My actions gained attention elsewhere, too, though I didn't know it. The Fist. At first, as a courtesy, they worked with EarthCop to arrange a series of simple traps. These were tests; had I been captured, I would have been left to the Justice system, to the inevitable brain-wipe and reprogramming or imprisonment.

  But I didn't fall into those gradually more sophisticated traps, and finally - unknowingly - passed the tests. The Fist then decided it wanted me, designed better snares, and found to its surprise and chagrin that even with its best efforts it couldn't catch me.

  That was unprecedented, and it made the Fist really want me. So they sent me a message. They could have reached me by a variety of electronic means - although no one knew where my secret base was, or where I was at any given moment, an open transmission would have reached me. But instead they chose a more elegant means, one more in keeping with my anachronistic tendencies.

  They sent me a letter. On real paper.

  Addressed in a flowing calligraphy, I found it in the haul I pulled from the interplanetary liner Armstrong's Article. It was signed by my own dear old uncle Admiral Beaugeste Fairchile, and it started off by congratulating me for my piracy, then proposed a meeting under a flag of truce and guaranteed by his personal honor.

  Honor. Another long-outmoded concept, a hallmark of that lost era I tried so hard to recapture. Two combatants, each saluting the other jauntily. A chance to gloat. How could I resist?

  A few days later I arrived. Just for practice I snuck up on the Admiral's ship; at the time it was the half-mile long Very Impressive. I wafted across the gun-bristling skin to the nav bridge and announced my arrival by rapping on the windows. A startled sentry almost shot me, but soon enough I was in the Admiral's private quarters.

  After the ritual introductory wrestling match, we pulled apart. He was twisting a kink from his neck, and I was rubbing the sore spot on my biceps where he'd bit me, when he hauled down the flag of truce. And stomped on it.

  "Court," he smiled, starlight flickering off that eerie dental diamond, "I'm afraid you're now bound for a life sentence mining the pores of giant slugs in the Orell 2 penal colony."

  "Our truce!" I cried, as I felt the cold stab right in the back. I'd always thought the term 'penal colony,' through some tragically serendipitous lingual twist, to be an unpleasant reflection on a common inmate pastime.

  "Truce, schmuce. You're trapped in another century. I'm doing this for your own good. To save you."

  Oh, please. Throughout human history more trouble has been caused by people trying to save each other than perhaps any other way. It's best just to leave well enough alone.

  "You have a curious notion of saving," I pointed out.

  He smiled and poured us each smoking blue drink from a blastproof clearsteel cylinder.

  I tried it, and understood the need for the container when it began busily dissolving me from the inside out. It was excellent.

  "There might be an alternative," Uncle Admiral hinted.

  "You seem to have my attention."

  "Much more than that, actually." He told me about the Fist, its need for good recruits, the piss-poor selection among Earth citizens, blah blah blah. Ad nauseam, through nauseam, and finally well beyond nauseam.

  "I could probably pull some strings for you," he said, in what I would later learn to be a masterful understatement.

  I pretended to think about it, then shook my head. “I'll take jail," I said, and held my wrists out for the binder cuffs. “I don't go for coercion or trickery. To join you now would only encourage your nefarious games! No! No! And most of all, No! I am ready to pay my debt to society! Woe is me! If only I had been raised differently! More school! Less school! Different schools! It's not my fault! If-"

  "Are you through?" interrupted the Admiral.

  "Just warming up, actually."

  "There's something you should see before you're so quick to, ah, embrace the penile colony lifestyle." I swear he said it that way.

  I pretended to consider. “Well, although I am eager to begin re-paying society, alright." The something took three days to review. It consisted of secret reports and data, a mountain of evidence which supported one conclusion, a conclusion carefully kept from the public: we SpaceChimps were on the interstellar ropes. The Insect Galaxy viewed humanity with the warm affection a Prom Queen for a spider on her toothbrush. The Crunchy bugs were out to get the Squishies, who lacked a decent shell. And even the other Squishies didn't much care for us.

  So far their plans were mostly casual and disorganized. But that could change, and even if it didn't, it might not matter. Even a casual swat from some of the ancient, powerful Old Galactic Races could be devastating to Earth.

  The Home Planet needed its best and brightest; Mother Earth needed those with operational experience to sally forth and do battle with the multi-eyed exoskeletal thingies of the universe. Unfortunately there weren't many with operational experience; GovCorp itself was a majestic experience in hypermanagement. So Admiral Uncle was collecting Fingers for the Fist, calling the sons and daughters of Earth to action.

  Sounds hokey, but it was the kind of cause one couldn't refuse. The Admiral later stressed - accurately, as it turned out - that he was doing me no favor, for as an agent of the Fist I would probably be killed. But, he said, at least it would be more interesting than the pores of giant slugs, and the unhealthy and unhygienic fascinations of the other inmates.

  A series of trainings and jobs followed. Travel, combat, danger, lightened by occasional piracies in spare moments. The Admiral's instincts had been sound: I was good, or at least good enough to earn the notice of a few alien races, who decided I had overstayed my welcome on this plane of existence. And then, while en route to a leave on the fabled fun-planet of Eros, I'd stopped for a quick game of holopoker at the Round-N-Round. Which led me into deep space. And to Trina.

  I turned back to her. She licked her lips. Somehow she managed to do this at me. “A noble heart beats in the savage's breast. How touching."

  "Isn't it? But enough about me. Let's talk about you. How did such a nice lass end up in Astrotemporal physics and the Brain?"

  She smiled coyly. “Fair enough. You showed me yours. I'll show you mine."

  "Then I'm all eyes. Like the Fluxl of Flaxl." That odd creature, which had evolved on a very
dim and flat planet, was a grape-like cluster of eyes dangling over three large and disturbingly human-looking feet.

  "Not much to tell," she said demurely, blinking her eyes into gold and green strobes. “I grew up on Mars, in the Tharsis colony. Went into Astrotemp Physics when I found out I had the Light. Of course I didn't have much choice."

  "Of course." The Light was a mysterious, unteachable, natural ability occurring in only one in fifty million humans. A spark of theoretical genius against the dark universe. If you had it, GovCorp drafted you as a planetary resource and plugged you into a research program. This was because, oddly enough, high-level astrotemp physics couldn't be learned. Some people - those with the Light - were born already knowing it, and for them a minor amount of academic effort could uncover that knowledge, which was inherently indescribable but was said to be almost like taking an edge-on trans-dimensional view of the universe. Anyone could have the gift, from street bums to Presidents, and perhaps not surprisingly it had been more of the former than the latter. But if you didn't already have it, there was no way to acquire it. Several of the best and supposedly brightest at major research institutions had been driven mad after being unable to master equations and paradoxes that were child's play for - children. Children with the Light, that is.

  Trina described what might have been a sheeplike life, except for the unusual muscle in her brain, and the rough and tumble life of Mars.

  Then she did something most un-sheeplike. She shifted in her seat, and the small tattoo of a snake which usually graced her stern suddenly peeked over her collar. It coiled and hissed at me, then smirked and vanished downward.

  I suspected Ned, before I realized it was nano ink. Expensive and fashionable.

  "Like it?" Trina asked.

  The snakehead appeared again, vanished again. There was something beckoning about it. I had the impression that Trina found my criminal past a bit more than intriguing.