The Blue Marble Gambit

by Boson, Jupiter

  This particular theory tended to give me a bad headache, so I tried to avoid it whenever possible.

  As the sun rose higher and higher, my spirits plummeted lower and lower. Our date with the Chief's obsidian blade was drawing all the more certain. The crowd outside apparently agreed - they were growing more boisterous.

  "Hey sacrifices - scratch a line across this!" shouted a voice. I glanced into the window to see a scrawny pair of buttocks rudely thrust there. A vertical smile laughing at our fate.

  I found a loose rock on the floor and fired it down the narrow window tunnel; it thocked nicely into that bony butt, earning a muffled but still pleasing scream. The crowd noise swelled, as others realized our retaliation, I thought.

  Then all was silent, as if the power plug to my ears had come loose. I wondered if Ned was rummaging around in there and had accidentally yanked something. I scuffed my boot on the rough stone and heard the dull scrape, so that wasn't it. I caught Trina's gaze and she shrugged, frowning. By our best calculations, the probe wasn't due yet.

  A heavy silence still flowed into the tiny cell from the great outdoors. Gradually a low gentle wash of whispers and gasps rose up, and then a collective moan.

  Then a scream. "It is true! It is true! We are doomed!"

  I smiled. Apparently our calculations were off, but not fatally so.

  More groans and piteous cries. Trina smiled too, and now I cackled.

  The crowd began to wail, a cacophony of howls. Our cocky, jocular audience had been converted into a crowd of gibbering apes by one little fiery reentry. Technowimps!

  "Hear me now!" I shouted into the window slot. My voice reverberated in a most commanding fashion.

  Silence again ruled.

  "You have but one chance to save yourselves!" I was still a little bit sore about being mocked, so I added: "Of course, we might destroy you anyway. But this is what you must do if you wish to have any chance of survival."

  I paused. They were utterly silent. I waited and waited, until I could hear them squirming. Then I waited some more.

  "Tell us! Tell us! Please!" a reedy voice begged.

  "Alright. I will. For a moment there I changed my mind."

  "No!"

  "You must go immediately to your King, all of you. Everyone who wishes not to be destroyed must go to him. You must tell him that we must be freed immediately. Or else you will destroy him."

  Gasps. "We cannot order the King! We cannot threaten the King! He is the King! We are only the people! "

  "If you cannot rule your King, then you deserve to be destroyed, and so you shall be. Go now. Either go to your King and do as I have said, or go elsewhere and await your painful destruction. Did I mention that it shall take a thousand years of agony? Now be gone!"

  They left, a strangely quiet and subdued crowd.

  Trina walked up and kicked me in the shin.

  "Ow!"

  "Don't you think you could have done a bit more convincing? You left them a choice, idiot!"

  I leaned against a stone wall and rubbed my leg. "I left them no choice, Trina dearest. And if you're about to ask for a quickie, I'm afraid we don't have time. I expect to be out of here shortly."

  "You expect? You might hope, but you can hardly expect. They might not even go to the King! They're terrified of him!"

  "They're probably already there, rousting him out bed."

  "They're probably running for the hills."

  I was still rubbing my shin. Trina, like most rugged Martian women, could pack quite a wallop. "Trina, I left them no choice at all. If they go to the King and do my bidding, he might get upset with them, true. He might even kill some. But if they don't go, they all die, according to the chained gods trapped here in this cell. So really, they have no choice. Human nature. I was just letting them figure it out for themselves. It's stronger that way."

  Trina crossed her arms petulantly. Her gold eye flashed, then her green one, like some odd signaling device. "Well, even so, I don't see what good it's going to do us. It doesn't really matter if we avoid getting sacrificed, if we don't get to the claiming ceremony. We're still a hundred and eighty kilometers away from where we have to be. There are no roads, we don't know the way, the country is almost impassable, and who knows what other obstacles there are. Even if these Ahulans let us go, the next tribe over will probably try to sacrifice us too, and they'll probably do it. We're fresh out of handy sky tricks. The only way to get there is to fly."

  I stared at her for a long moment. He midnight hair was tangled and dirty; her face and body streaked with mud and grime. I walked across the cell and kissed her. She was too surprised to hit me for such effrontery, although she was just the type to do that, despite our occasional intimacies. "Trina, my dear, you truly are a Brain."

  "What?"

  The cell door swung open and three burly guards entered.

  "Ah, see?" I said. "Right on time."

  "Coort dis Asser and Treena Noova," intoned the first as he drew a glinting obsidian blade, "we have orders for your immediate execution."

  CHAPTER 20. HIGHTIME

  Trina and I were still frozen in place when the Chief walked in behind the guard. "Just kidding," he said good-naturedly. "I see you took my lessons to heart, so to speak. A neat trick with the sky. How did you manage that?

  I let out the deep breath I hadn't realized I was holding. "Sorry, O King. Trade secret."

  "I had a feeling you might say that," he sighed, then gestured at us affectionately, as if we were his children. "But in a way I am glad not to sacrifice you. I rather like you both. Although I must admit I am a little disappointed at not getting to see your hearts. You see, whenever I meet people, I can't help but imagine the feel, the look, the heft of their hearts. Professional curiosity, you could call it. But with you two, I couldn't quite get a clear picture." His hand graphically cupped the air as he gazed at us speculatively and for the first time even awkwardly. "Er, I don't suppose-"

  "Definitely not," I said.

  "Ah, well, I thought not. But I had to ask. Take it as a compliment."

  I rubbed my chest. "Thank you, I think, O King. I'll try. Now we have a favor to ask of you."

  He looked surprised, then he chortled. "You are very bold. You feel you deserve more?"

  "In exchange for not telling the populace that unless they remove you immediately we will blot the sun from the sky, yes, I think you could do us a small favor."

  The Chief laughed uneasily. "Ha ha. What is it?"

  I told him what I wanted: All the cloth in the village. All the reeds in the village. All the rope in the village. And the services of all the women. Immediately.

  He fixed us with speculative black eyes. "That is a small favor?”

  “You would prefer a big one?”

  “Ho ho. It is just that your demand is a high one. I am not so sure. After all, the populace might not believe your threat."

  "They might not. But then again, they might. In which case-" I drew a line across my throat.

  The Chief sighed. "Anything else?"

  "Yes, actually. I forgot. The best basket weavers in the village."

  The Chief sighed again, more deeply this time. "And?"

  "That's it."

  "That's it?" He broke out into a low kingly chuckle. "I will grant your request, on one condition."

  "We're keeping our hearts, and all our other pieces."

  He looked disappointed again. "No, that is not the condition. The condition is that you leave immediately."

  "You've got yourself a deal, King-O."

  "Court," Trina said. "What are we doing?"

  "Why, it was your idea, my sweet. We're going to fly."

  Stone Age aviation poses a few problems. For example, the eponymous building material of that era - rock - is not only very heavy, but extremely hard to mold into aerodynamic shapes. And metals and composites are eons away. Yet oddly enough, through much of the Stone Age, mankind had at his hands almost all of the materials that would be
later be fashioned into aircraft: wood and fabric. The first aircraft were little more than big kites; the only thing lacking here in Prehistory was a good engine. Actually, what was lacking was any engine at all.

  Ned couldn't contain his skepticism, and made one of his increasingly-rare appearances. He'd been acting very oddly ever since I first decided that we'd be taking to the air.

  "Court, I've run back over your visual cortex dumps and checked everything we've seen, looking for ores. My best estimate is that it will take at least one month to locate a suitable quantity of aluminum, iron and other ores. Building the facilities for extraction and refining will take at least another two months, and then another month to process the metal. These are best case numbers, of course. We have to make a great number of tools and such."

  We were walking down a broad avenue of dressed stone. "Ned, we have two days."

  "Exactly. Which is why I suggest you abandon this harebrained scheme immediately. It will never work, and besides, we don't have time." Ned sounded almost hysterical.

  "Who said anything about building an engine? I expect to launch at dawn tomorrow."

  "No engine? Not a glider!" Ned's voice ratcheted upwards two notches.

  "No, not a glider."

  We rounded the last corner and entered the main square of the Ahulan's village. A huge lumpen shape lay tangled in its center, a mass of cloth surrounded by bent women and smoking pots of black tar. The village women were sewing madly; to a person they were mystified. They could not conceive why a person would want to sew all this cloth together, and then ruin it with tar. Ned, however, was not so slow.

  "No! No! Not a balloon!" he gasped.

  "Of course a balloon," I replied. The information had been in my head, freely available to Ned; for some reason he had avoided it, like a cat dodging a bath. I moved back and forth, inspecting seams, checking the tar application, counseling the basket makers. I redirected the shape some of the weavers were making - I didn't expect perfection, but the way they were going, our airship would resemble the awkward offspring of a pencil and a tomato. It took a little while, and several diagrams in the dirt, but I finally convinced the basket-makers that I didn't want what they thought I wanted, I wanted what I thought I wanted. Human nature was unchanged; they were sure they knew better than I, though they had no idea what they were doing.

  Through this whole process Ned was silent, but as I turned from the basket makers he suddenly resurfaced from the calm gray depths of my brain where perhaps he'd been enjoying a soothing cerebral sojourn.

  "A balloon!" he screamed in horror, making me wince. He looked like a diplomat - a gray man in a gray suit. "Those haven't been used in centuries! Deathtraps!"

  "I prefer to call them classics," I said. I was disassembling my maser, field stripping it. At its heart lay the antimatter pellet which powered it, a tiny sliver of gray matter suspended in a miniature magnetic vise. Everything looked fine; I clicked it back together.

  I met with the Chief's senior engineer, and again explained the design. He listened carefully, as if his continued possession of his heart depended on it. Of course, the Chief had made abundantly clear that this was precisely the case. The engineer moved into the crowd of busy workers, kicking and slapping. I sat on a stone chair overseeing the labor, occasionally guiding or redirecting, and watching the sun blaze across the sky.

  Twenty hours later I examined the result. Building an aircraft out of sticks and native cotton might at first seem difficult, if not impossible. It becomes much easier if you abandon even the most basic safety measures, and opt for quick and dirty.

  Our crate was a disgrace to the good name of quick and dirty. The surfaces were lumpy and ungainly; the joints crooked; the cotton skin crinkled; the lines bizarre. There's an old adage: if it looks right, it will fly right. I hoped that adage was wrong.

  A huge crowd, for the Ahula of ten thousand b.c., had assembled to see our strange departure. I felt no need to explain what we were doing, at least in part because I had no idea if it would work, and it would be less embarrassing, if it failed, if no one knew what to expect. I supervised the small squad that was arranging the balloon bag and plugging the last gaps with tar. Finally our craft was as ready as it would ever be.

  "I dub thee, diz Astor's Folly," I said, and since no bottles of bubbly would be available for a few millennia, tapped a clay pot of the local vile brew on the pointed nose of the lumpen basket. I was gentle, but that none-too-stalwart proboscis was dented anyway.

  "Uh oh," Trina said.

  I agreed. I uncorked the clay vessel and took a massive slug of Ahulan poison. It burned on the way down, then kept burning. Liquid prehistoric fire. Outstanding. I vowed to bring some of this remarkable brew back with me, where I would have it chemically analyzed, synthesized, and distributed, after which I would quickly grow rich. But first things first. Without a home planet, I would have no customers, and therefore no wealth. A new motivation!

  "Well, my dear, onward and upward."

  Trina climbed into the basket gamely. The reeds flexed and bent and creaked underfoot. She looked at me with rank skepticism. "This has been your plan all along, hasn't it," she said. "To get us killed in an ancient balloon."

  I twisted the focus dial on my maser, tuning it to a wide-angle, low-power setting. "Don't be silly. Perfectly safe!"

  I touched the firing stud and began to fan the maser back and forth across the mouth of the huge collapsed envelope. Ten minutes later it began to stir, as if a large, slumberous, and very lumpy beast were trapped somewhere beneath the folds. The Ahulans murmured.

  Thirty minutes later the balloon bag began to shift upward, though it still lay on the ground. The Ahulans gasped and shrieked in amusement. I had expected fright, but there was none. There were merely amused. These Ahulans were a tough bunch.

  "We're going to die," said a very depressed voice that sounded just like Ned.

  Out of the crowd came a scarecrow figure; his hair was long and disheveled and he wore a sandwich board placarded with THE END IS NEAR. The far side read REPENT. Ned, of course. He was still moaning. "Suicide. Murder. O bitter fate."

  "What is it, Ned?" I subvocalized.

  Ned gazed wildly at the balloon and pointed with the long bony finger of a crazed crony.

  "That thing will only get us high enough off the ground to kill us when it crashes."

  "Nonsense," I said. Possible, I couldn't help but think.

  "I hate flying," Ned reminded me, and I recalled that this was true. Space flight bothered him not at all, but anything in the atmosphere absolutely terrified him. In space, there was no ground beneath one. There was no falling.

  "There's no other way," I pointed out. "The mission, remember?"

  "I'm not going!" he screamed, dropping to the ground. I ignored him and climbed into the basket, watching out of the corner of one eye as Ned rose and, still screaming, wove through the crowd to vanish around a nicely-turned stone pillar. My first impulse was to go get him. But of course he was still where he always was, right between my ears.

  He saw me think this, and peeked back out from around the corner to flash a rude gesture at me. He'd been learning from Trina, I saw.

  The Ahulans pressed closer, sensing that Something was about to happen. One group watched with particular eagerness.

  "Twenty to one they die spectacularly," muttered one, and small bundles were quickly exchanged. Prehistoric bookies.

  I kept using the maser to fire hot air into the leaky bag, which emitted a steady clatter of creaks and groans. After ten minutes of Trina and I trying to impress each other with our levels of preternatural calm, the balloon bag stirred again, a great misshapen lump trapped inside the sack of rough net. It actually rose off the ground, reluctantly at first, but then ascending with more authority, as if getting used to the notion, until the restraining net bag stopped it, hanging above us with all the fairy-like grace of a block of granite. Our wicker basket remained planted on the ground, as the creaking an
d groaning and popping hemp lines tightened and thrummed. The sky above was a swollen blue.

  Another flurry of exchanges from the bookies. I wondered if our odds were getting better or worse.

  I smiled bravely at Trina as an especially loud creaking rasp sounded from one of the ropes, which was shivering like a straining muscle. I kept the maser going.

  The balloon bag seemed to pause as if gathering itself. I waved the signal at the line handlers, and they dropped their ropes instantly. Fear of losing one's heart could be a powerful motivator, I noted, wondering if there might be some way to use it as a motivational technique in my own day. The lines crackled, the basket swayed, the balloon took its first lurching step skyward, and we were off.

  Flying.

  At first we rose slowly, in absolute silence except for the grating hum of my maser and the hiss of air escaping from the leaking balloon bag. But soon all of Ahula was a tiny model, a museum display of prehistoric existence, rough plots of uneven farmland, crudely plowed, and misshapen villages of raw wooden huts. Occasional stone dwellings broke up the monotony.