The Blue Marble Gambit

by Boson, Jupiter

  My legs soon ached from the Boff crawl; the pain reminded me of Trina's sculpted calves and tightly muscled thighs, covered with the faintest trace of delightfully-mammalian white-blonde peach fuzz. Even now those legs were flexing; perhaps they bore the faintest sheen of sweat. I gazed at her well-concealed figure with even better-concealed lust.

  I began to have a reaction anatomically impossible for, though surprisingly reminiscent of, a giant asparagus spear. A moment later, to my great and everlasting disgust, I realized that I was eyeing the wrong Boff. I was lusting after a real Boff. Though it made me feel faintly sick, at least our morph-pack disguises were good.

  "Stay focused!" Ned reprimanded, appearing by my side in silk pajamas while smoking a pipe. “The Armory! The Time Oscillator! The Mission!"

  Suddenly the vegetable herd we were running with clogged up. I had an image of the whirling laser-edged blades of a garbage-disposal grinding to halt, stoppered with a mass of cellulose, and I made sure I was next to Trina - the real one - as we halted. The Boffs around us seemed unsettled, which implied that this was something unusual. And which also gave me a tiny twinge of anticipation, right in the belly. Our descent into Boff's atmosphere might have gone unnoticed - but then again, it might not have. Even so, perhaps the Boffs simply assumed we died in the crash - not unreasonable, really. But then again, they might have found our conspicuously empty lifeboat.

  There were several new figures in the crowd, each draped with officious-looking sashes and moving purposefully and methodically through the forest of stalks. As if looking for something.

  Or someone. They were stopping at each individual, and inspecting something. The faint twinge in my guts turned into a twisting pneumatic wrench-grip accompanied nicely by the alarm bells which began to ring in my head. I mean that literally - Ned treated me to a couple of strident whoops. My life was a cartoon.

  Be Calm, Ned urged. Maybe it's a routine check. No need to worry.

  On general principle, I worried anyway. The sash-wearers moved closer. Ned opined that they were cops. I agreed.

  One appeared before us, a beefy specimen, if that term can be applied to a vegetable-based green stalk. The sash, I saw, was pale yellow and covered with small intricate designs. The cop fixed us with a yellow three-eyed gaze.

  "Greetings, pod-mates," he boomed jovially.

  I returned the greeting and didn't even begin to relax. Good cheer from law-enforcement is always a bad sign.

  "Well?" our inquisitor said. He seemed to be waiting for something. Since I didn't know what, I waited too. This went on for a little while.

  "Your papers? City permits?" the stalk finally asked, in a decidedly less friendly tone. A fine-tipped tendril uncoiled from beneath a sheave and extended, weaving pinkly. Below several other sheaves, I glimpsed the glint of the retracted bone scythes.

  Several things clicked in my head. First, the stalk was definitely some flavor of cop. Second, when I was a child I heard an ancient saying about how for want of a nail, a horse was lost, which led to other calamities - something that never made any sense to me since at the time horses weren't built with nails. But it seemed to me that a much better saying would be, for want of a tiny piece of paper, two agents were lost, and for want of two agents, a planet was lost.

  For we didn't have a scrap of Boffian paper.

  CHAPTER 12. MONKEYSTEW

  Ned? I subvocalized desperately. Ned? We had but a single tiny chance and it depended on my skullmate.

  The cop shifted from foot to foot to foot a thousand times in a show of alien impatience. The bone scythes flexed, like nostrils flaring. I saw that the sharp tips were hooked, the backsides serrated. The blades themselves gleamed with yellowish malevolence and dripped a greenish ochre.

  Ned, I screamed.

  He appeared, standing right beside the cop. Ironically, he adopted a similar pose of aggravated inconvenience, along with an ancient Keystone Kop uniform.

  "What do you want from me?" Tap tap tap went the baton in his hand. “We don't have any papers. You know that!"

  "But you control the morph-packs! Just morph some up! And quick!"

  He was shaking his head like a disappointed Irish cop of old rejecting a lame excuse. “That would take at least an hour - if I had an example to copy. Which I don't. And somehow I don't think we have an hour, anyway."

  "Ned!"

  Tap tap tap. “Look, you can't come crying to me in every situation. You'll have to handle this yourself. And if you can't think of anything, just try not to take on of those bone knives in the head - my circuitry is far too valuable. In the chest would be fine. That should allow us a nice calm bleeding to a peaceful death. Then, if they return your body, perhaps I can be recovered."

  He stuck his tongue out at me and vanished.

  The Boffling cop rustled dangerously.

  "Yes, yes," I said, fidgeting in the way I saw several others moving. Boffs have a series of internal cavities in which they carry things, something like built-in pockets, and I made a show of checking these.

  In reality, of course, I only had one thing. I tightly gripped the firm warmth of my maser inside the morph-pack suit.

  "Ah, here," I said, aiming from the hip at the cop's center. Hopefully there was something vital in there somewhere, but I wasn't sure, and so planned to slew the weapon. I'd slice him up as neatly as a buttered asparagus spear being assaulted by a hot razor.

  What happened immediately afterward would be much less pleasant and far less comical. The maser was a small and powerful weapon, but it was also loud and messy. And we were surrounded by hundreds of enemy. Who would no doubt immediately fall upon us. Despite their lumbering appearance, Boffs could move fast and ferociously. And they were heartless, literally and figuratively.

  But we didn't have a lot of options.

  The cop rustled again. This time several sets of wet gleaming yellow-white scythes flicked into view, for the barest millisecond. Others noticed and moved away, giving us room. My tardiness, I knew, could be taken as a personal insult.

  "You should know better," the cop rasped, "than to trifle with a Bud of the Vegetorian Guard."

  Interesting, though not particularly useful - in fact, not useful at all - to learn that this was one of the dreaded Vegetorian Guards. In the flesh. In other circumstances I would have seized the opportunity to study him. In this circumstance I seized the opportunity to start squeezing the firing stud.

  "You there," a familiar voice called out indignantly. “It's the Bog! Don't you see? The Bog! They are freshly returned! Leave them be!"

  At those words our inquisitor spun angrily then snapped to the Boff version of attention. The thick sheaves over the bone knives, which had been raised, lowered like grotesque fleshy trellises.

  “Stalk Master! Er, the Great Bog! Yes, Stalk Master. Of course!" He turned to us and rasped, "Why didn't you say so?" then shuffled off, squeaking and rustling.

  I released the firing stud and turned.

  "Greetings again, Young Sprouts," crooned Orna. “Still addled by the Magnificence of the Damp, I see."

  "It was so . . . Squishy!" I gushed. I was feeling a bit giddy, I admit, at being alive and unflayed.

  "Few are so profoundly affected. Until you recover sufficiently from your experience, you will come with me to my home," Orna announced. “As podness dictates."

  Home? We were going to stay with a Boff? Podness, I recalled, was what we had earned by cleaning up Orna's mess. It was some sort of filial relationship. We were podners.

  Ned appeared as a bow-legged cowboy, complete with Stetson and chaps. He spat a string of brown tobacco juice into the dust that lay at only his feet. “We're podners, alrightee," he drawled.

  Orna noted our pause. “You have other arrangements? Curfew comes soon."

  Curfew? There was a curfew? Why did I have the distinct impression that we had no idea what was going on on Boff?

  "We are honored to accept your hospitality," Ned said for us.

 
I couldn't even get mad at Ned. He'd done the right thing. I shrugged at Trina as we set off behind Orna, trailing in the positions of subservience.

  Orna's home was high in a cylindrical beige skyscraper. We rose to his level on a jet-lift. Before the doors irisced open, my mind was filled with speculation. No one had ever seen the inside of a Boff building, especially living quarters, before. What would we find? Twisty passages? Orderly rows and columns of rooms? Neat halls?

  Nope. None of these. What we found didn't surprise me; it didn't even disappoint me. It depressed me. The floor wasn't divided into hallways, rooms, apartments; instead, it was a huge open cavern. Scattered along inside it were the same green homes we'd been seeing all day. The Boffian countryside had been reproduced right here, indoors. Urban rurality.

  The huts made me want to scream.

  "How charming," I said instead, and Orna looked at me oddly. I realized why: when every dwelling is like every other, such compliments are silly and pointless.

  He ushered us to one of the dwellings - it could have been any of them, really. They were all the same. This was not out of any sense of equality - it was just that no Boff could imagine a finer place to live. We were, literally, in Boff heaven. There could be no improvements.

  Orna led the way through a tall, dagger-shaped doorway, which nicely accommodated his stalk-shaped body.

  The interior of the round shack consisted of a single large room. At its center was a slightly less large round pool, a deep and vile green in color. What evil luck! Here we were, shacking up with a Stalk Master - whatever that rank meant - of our most fearsome enemy, the Vegetorian Guard. It was enough to make me wonder if perhaps the Fates were personally angry with me. Was my entire life the elaborate revenge of some celestial joker?

  Orna entered the pool and gestured with his top-frond. “Please. Honor me," he said. I felt faintly sickened at the realization that he had voluntary control of that appendage.

  Trina and I slipped into the liquid. What a surprise: warm and sticky. But, as I was about to find out, there was something different about this particular bath from hell.

  "After you," Orna said grandly, and gestured at the tub.

  I stared at him. Plainly he was expecting something.

  "Go on," Orna said, "don't be shy."

  I wasn't being shy; I had no idea what in the twenty-one blue moons of Pleiades he was talking about.

  "Please," Orna implored as I soaked dumbly. “Extrude your feeding tube."

  Ug. This pond scum was dinner.

  "Diz?" Trina whispered across the sonic channel.

  Orna waited expectantly, sheaves fluttering in anticipation. “Come now, young saps. This is a fine gruel!"

  "Er, after you," I managed.

  Orna shrugged - an unpleasant ripple. “Very well, then. I shall go first."

  I was filled with disgust when a glistening pink snake extended from beneath one of his asparagus sheaves. My disgust reached new heights when the tube quivered, glinted slimily, and then dipped into the soupy broth. My disgust broke altitude records when the tube rudely dilated, sucked up a morsel, and pulsated like an alfresco strand of intestine. Ironically, I wanted to vomit. That was the exact opposite of what was happening here.

  "Now will you join me, young sprouts?" Orna rustled in a jolly tone.

  I suddenly had a new kind of awful feeling. “Ned?" I urged. “Feeding tube?" He ran the morph-packs, and would handle the feeding tubes. But he hadn't quite been on the job regarding our names. Or our non-existent papers.

  Ned appeared, looking so sheepish I was surprised he didn't have wool. “You don't have a feeding tube. We didn't program anything like that into the morph-packs! Just the general appearance is hard enough!"

  "Tell me you're kidding," I said aloud. This was the worst news possible; we'd never find the Time Oscillator, if Orna saw through our cloddish disguises.

  "What?" Orna said, confused. Ned hadn't translated, and hadn't used the sound-suppressors either. English words had just bounced around Orna's home.

  "Not kidding," Ned said. “I'll work on it. Meanwhile, think fast. I'll leave one of my basal nodes to translate while I see what I can do." He vanished, pale and muttering to himself.

  "Honored Orna," I began, "We are-" What? Sick? Tired? Not hungry? What? Still Too Addled By The Boggishness of It All? That seemed like going to the well one too many times.

  "Yes?" Orna prompted quizzically. I detected the slightest raising of the fleshy pads over his razor scythes. Rather like me moving my hand nearer my maser. Not overtly hostile, but just being ready.

  "We are-" I started, still drawing a blank.

  "Go on, Aspara," he hissed.

  I felt an odd sensation. I couldn't tell if I was experiencing a streak of brilliance or of sheer idiocy. Then again, it might have been that my morphsuit was leaking green liquid onto my privates. I decided to find out.

  "We are . . . Too nervous to eat now," I finished. “For we have a request to make of you. The Great Bog itself has brought us together, I now see, that we may achieve our common purpose: the Greater Good of Boff."

  Orna waited silently, expectantly. His feeding tube was suddenly frozen, a particularly disgusting morsel halfway up it. Trina was also frozen, as was Ned. I suddenly and unaccountably had an irresistible urge to defecate; it may seem impolite to mention, but it is a fact of life. The suits were equipped to handle this, so I spontaneously took care of business.

  "Yes?" Orna finally said.

  "I am just getting to it," I stalled.

  Orna made a very odd gesture with two twirling tentacles. “You are without a doubt the strangest creature I have ever met," he said. “Let me guess. You're not going to tell me yet." His slimy feeding tube came alive again, and began to pulse and writhe as it lassoed and inhaled green globs.

  "I am forming my thoughts," I said, considering my plan. It was dangerous. But on the other hand - or should I say the other tentacle - it was good. Bold. Innovative. A classic Fist solution. Unfortunately, a great many classic Fist solutions result in classically dead Fist agents.

  Orna's tube pulsed and shivered. Occasionally it would root around in the mix for an especially palatable treat.

  No choice. No options. I would stick with Plan A.

  "Honored Orna, the matter is both simple and complex, and of such significance that the future of Boff itself may be at stake."

  That got his attention. His tube stopped its obscene rooting and his thickset trunk turned to bring all three yellow eyes to bear on me.

  "Speak, Sprout!"

  I took a deep breath. “We wish to join the Vegetorian Guard."

  Orna's feeding tube writhed and emitted a single noxious green bubble. I think he actually spit up. “The Guard?"

  Too late for retreat. “Yes. The Vegetorian Guard."

  Orna began to snap, crackle, and pop with Boffian laughter. “Surely in all the seasons there have never been two less qualified. Quite impossible."

  Aha. I had him right where I wanted. “Exactly, honored Orna. Those with our unique abilities and perceptions have never been represented in the Guard."

  "And that is a good thing," Orna rustled. An orange glop shivered up his tube and no doubt met some even more horrific fate on the far side.

  "But what of Statistical Proportionality?" I cried. “Our fundamental tenet! Does it not apply?" I felt an odd vibration at my back, but thought nothing of it.

  "Well," Orna wheezed. “Ummm-" he clattered.

  "Is this the death of the first leaf of the tree of Statistical Proportionality?"

  "No! Heresy!" Orna burbled.

  "Then-"

  "Wait!" Orna interjected. His green leathery brow wrinkled, and his eyes flickered. He was deep in thought. In the pool, he looked like a sentient, contemplative buoy. I watched him intently, until something else seized my attention. The something else was, I am sorry to say, a very human-looking turd floating by in the broth. Trina, fortunately, didn't notice it. Or at least she
didn't let on. I recalled the vibration at my back.

  "Ned," I seethed to my silent partner. “You didn't."

  My little present wafted across the pool, an icebreaker plowing a course through the pond scum. “You didn't want to carry that around, did you?" Ned said. “Perfect place to dump it."

  Suddenly Orna's three yellow eyes snapped wide open.

  "Great Pods! You are right! Out of the of seedlings! I will do it! Proportionality is in danger!"

  Orna spied my contribution and his feeding tube slithered at it like a hungry garden hose. The tip rose from the water, dilated grotesquely, and then in a single slimy gulp ingested that miniature minstrel. I was speechless with horror.

  "We've killed him," I gasped silently.

  Ned appeared. Loud aloha shirt, sandals, a pail and shovel, sitting beside the pool, feet dangling in the pool. “Not at all. Chemical composition is close enough to the rest of the stuff. Heck, it'll probably even be good for him. Fertilizer."

  Orna made a crackling sound that Ned interpreted as smack of the lips. “You really should try some. It is most excellent tonight."

  "Your tube is ready," Ned said, his shirt falling open to reveal a huge pale belly. “Extruding."

  I had no choice - I didn't even control my own feeding tube. How evolutionarily primitive. “Suddenly I am hungry," I managed to say. Under Ned's control, my feeding tube pulsed as rudely as anyone's, and even quivered and throbbed as it hunted down choice morsels. Beside me, Trina was doing the same. Her face was bright red.

  "Join? The Guard?" she screamed in a quiet whisper. I had never before heard anyone scream quietly. It was very interesting. “Are you crazy?"

  I muttered back across the link, "Relax. It's perfect. The Guard job will get us to the Central Armory, and from there, we nick the Time Oscillator."

  "Dead meat, both of us," Trina lamented. “And Earth too."

  Orna's tube was back in action, plowing a small wake through the heavy fluid as he searched for the perfect tidbit. “There is something new, and most excellent, tonight, but precious little of it," he muttered, then once more those big yellows fixed me. “You are to be commended," he said, "for pointing out an important failure of Proportionality."