Smallworld
by
Dominic Green
Contents
1
It was the third morning of dia 2,148 of the New Calendar
when Free Enterprise came to
Thus it was that, some time after three of her house's windows had been put in by the vessel's landing jets, Shun-Company Reborn-in-Jesus saw three heavily pressure-suited figures trudging with difficulty through her vegetable garden, trampling precious sprouts, potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes with their magnetic space boots, up to her back porch. The Garden Devils stared sightlessly from the undergrowth as the intruders passed.
The back door knocker was in the shape of a grinning devil. The EVA team leader did not give this a second thought as he took it in a sausage-fingered fist and rapped hard on the metal. All the doors and windowframes were metal. This was unsurprising; the one tree he had seen through his thick triple-glazed hermetically-sealed helmet had been a single anaemic cherry blossom growing in imported soil in what passed for a village square.
When Shun-Company opened the door, the spacepersons stood suited on her threshold and said nothing. This was because the Tetsushuri Mining Company procedure for EVA on worldlets less than one hundred kilometres in diameter specified vacuum suits were to be worn at all times, and vacuum suits did not have external speakers. Who, by definition, would hear the sound in a vacuum? Communication, the procedure clearly stated, should be either by radio or, in an emergency, by touching helmets. Removing one's EVA suit was unthinkable.
Shun-Company, meanwhile, who communicated by yelling at her seven small children at the top of her voice, and whose house contained neither radio nor thinking machine nor electric vacuum cleaner by edict of the blessed First Arkarch, simply stared obediently at the floor, as was only right and proper with strange heathen male visitors, and said nothing.
Eventually, after the entire Reborn-in-Jesus family had gathered behind Shun-Company, gazing goggle-eyed at the golden-faced newcomers, the team leader plucked up sufficient courage to remove his helmet, revealing a thoroughly anticlimactic human face beneath it.
"Good day", he said. "I represent the Tetsushuri Mining Company, without prejudice." He had no idea what the phrase meant; it was simply in the procedure to say it. He nodded to his team; uncertainly, they removed their own helmets and sniffed the alien air.
Shun-Company curtseyed, an archaism which nonplussed the EVA team, fifty per cent of whom were female and twenty five per cent homosexual in line with demographics.
"Good day", she said. "The master of the house is currently absent. We have real tea. Would you care for some?"
***
Senior Planetometrist Wong sipped his Real Tea
thoughtfully. He had now had every
single junior member of the Reborn-in-Jesus family squirm all over his
meteorite-resistant knees, and was doubtful whether the rickety Genuine Old
World Wood armchair he was sitting in would continue to take the weight of
himself and his suit combined. His
mission on this new world was fact-finding; he had so far learned that
Shun-Company had feared that her first child, Unity, would be her first and
only due to the high level of ionizing radiation on
A gigantic fly, its wings whirring like engines, buzzed in through an open window and lowered itself onto the saucer of Wong's teacup. The fly was shiny and metallic in lustre, green as burning copper. Wong watched it in horror. It was unthinkable for insects to exist in space; Wong could only speculate as to the insanitary condition of the ship that had brought the settlers here. How many diseases might one fly carry? Did flies sting, or was that bees or locusts? He attempted bravely to ignore it.
The Master of the House, he was informed, was out searching
for the family's only goat, which had last been seen perilously close to the
South End Chasm. The EVA party
themselves had travelled here in their rover across what Planetometrist Wong
learned was called the South End Saddle, the only safe way to cross the chasm
and visit the Cemetery. The Chasm
surrounded the South End on three sides, was a kilometre deep, and was
populated only by rock hyraxes and magpies, two of the only species to have
survived First Arkarch Duke's beneficent release of genera when the colony
vessel Utanapishtim had arrived on
Planetometrist Wong expressed great interest in the geology of the Chasm. Was Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus aware that it represented a tectonic boundary between what had once been two entirely separate planetoids loosely cemented together by their own weak gravity? Now that those worlds had been slammed rudely together by a massive and anomalous increase in planetary mass, the Chasm was the only remaining sign that they had once been distinct wordlets. Shun-Company replied that yes, she had heard that this had once been the case. The Anchorite had told her children so. And was Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus aware, continued Planetometrist Wong, of the reason for that sudden mass increase? No, she was not aware. There was no cause for her, as a woman, to be learned in astronomical matters. However, she had heard her husband speak of a Mononeutronic Sphere Which Encompassed the Centre of Gravity And Was Probably Surrounded By A Shell of Electron Degeneracy, which lay buried at the bottom of the Chasm. The Anchorite would of course know more about the subject, having once been an educated man. However, the Anchorite would see nobody, preferring to keep to his cave on the upper slopes of the Chasm, and spoke only to those who confined the length of their conversation to 'Good day, Mr. Anchorite, sir', or who had genuine reason to speak to him. The Anchorite's definition of 'genuine reason' was, she added, set by the Anchorite himself. He would, however, speak at great length to children.
All this information was delivered by Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus with her head respectfully lowered, gazing at the unadorned alloy floor plates. The Planetometrist noticed with minor disquiet that the home-made cup he was drinking out of was decorated with a zoetrope of grinning devils, despite the fact that the parlour was also hung with enough crosses to crucify an entire congregation of very small Christians.
The EVA Team made their excuses and rose to leave. They were growing hot inside their suits with the helmets removed; the suits' environmental controls would not work with the helmet seals unlocked. One of the team, Asahara, had removed her suit entirely. Planetometrist Wong glared at her severely as he gave the order to re-seal helmets and depart.
When the team returned here, he reflected, it would be neighbourly of it to bring back some of PLD38227's own supplies, not least for his own sanity. The Real Tea had been brutal in its reality. He suspected that the family only took it out whenever visitors from space happened to alight on their worldlet, and that visitors from space had not alit for a very long time.
The rover's electric motor cut in, and the wheels ground
coarse-grained regolith that admitted water like a colander. How these people managed to farm such soil,
Planetometrist Wong had no idea. The
team set off back to their ship, which was cramped, crowded, reeking of
anti-odorants, but nevertheless, after an hour spent in the Reborn-in-Jesus
household, home away from home.
***
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was a man who a lifetime of hard
struggle against gravity, radioactivity and a sun that gave off little but heat
had toughened until he resembled an unsmiling, two-metre callus. What passed for fields on Mount Ararat were,
as fields always were on red star planets, strung with lines of cheap UV
lighting filament, powered by solar arrays at the end of each furrow. The furrows were seeded with
genetically-modified crops, usually a variant of the omnicompetent potato,
which cost a farmer a good deal of his annual yield every time he purchased a
new batch from his local Agribiz ship.
The UV filaments were a sop to technological necessity; without them, no
crops could grow here. But from the
rusted iron implements sitting, pocked by cosmic ray trails, in the fields, it
looked as though everything apart from the UV in
Captain Adeti of the Tetsushuri Mining Fleet, Kranion Sector, had once prided herself on being able to run further, faster, than Phidippides. She had been born in gravity; she had been weakened by kilodia of living in free fall. She had sacrificed fine muscles and an Amazonian physique for her career. Currently, despite the fact that the man facing her had been burned out like a spent venturi by the heat of plough-pushing, seed-planting, stone-clearing, and ditch-digging, Captain Adeti was uncomfortably conscious of the fluid still puddled by overlong exposure to microgravity in her once powerful ankles. Her ankles, despite being supported by elastic stockings, were painful now that an unaccustomed six-newton gravitational field was pulling on them. A promotion from field grade would buy her a posting back in gravity, perhaps even back on New Earth, New New Earth, or Earth; but to earn a promotion, she had to make quota. The centre of mineral exploitation and exploration, now that Earth had been mined out, was now New Earth, and exploration therefore proceeded accordingly to the constellations that could be seen in that planet's sky. The constellation Kranion had so far proven to be an unmitigated prospecting disaster. The PLD38227 held nothing in her specimen tanks but gold and diamonds, the former of which could be extracted cheaply from seawater on Earth, the latter of which could be made out of coal by the tonne using the Popol Process. Here on Planetoid 23 Kranii 3X, however, she believed she had discovered a thing which would make her quota ten times over and put her behind a desk within constant spying distance of her untrustworthy husband in Kibera on Earth, for life.
"Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus - figuratively, you have a mine of, uh, substances greater in value than weapons grade uranium beneath your feet."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded politely without anything resembling a mad look of greed seizing his features. He tapped a paperweight, horribly radioactive uraninite ore encased in lead glass, that sat on his writing desk beside the table. "We are aware that there are radioactives on our world. We conducted a survey when we first arrived." He reached behind himself to the lightswitch and dialled the light downwards. The mineral sample in the lead glass fluoresced evilly.
"Uranium oxide", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "But we cannot mine it out. There's only a few cubic kilometres of it, and to remove it would be to unbalance our little world's centre of gravity. Mr. Battista assured us this would happen."
"Mr. Battista?"
"The Anchorite. Lives in the South End Chasm. Keeps himself to himself", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. The Captain was left wondering whether there was an unspoken implication that the Tetsushuri Mining Company should do likewise.
"It's, ah, not the radioactives we're interested in", said the Captain. She set her devil-handled cup down on an occasional table - the house had furniture for every function - and pulled on her business face. "Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, have you never wondered how a planetoid only twenty kilometres across can have an atmosphere?"
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus frowned.
"Well", he said, "old Arkarch Duke always claimed it was
down to the
"The oxygen fires are pretty when the ships get cut", said little Apostle Reborn-in-Jesus, with an acetylene light in his eyes.
"Who is this Arkarch Duke?" said the Captain, nervous that this unremarkable rock was proving to contain far more people than she had anticipated.
"Our leader", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "The man who brung us here to
"What sort of a name is Arkarch?"
"Not a name; a title.
The Arkarch used to claim it was an old Earth title meaning 'master of
the ship', though I suspect he made it up.
He took my family out of a seventy-cubic-metre tenement in the Selvas Favela
in
"A lot of people", said Captain Adeti, "seem to have died four years after landing."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus shrugged. "It was hard adjusting ourselves to the ways of this place."
"Are you not concerned that your crops might fail, that a solar flare might drive background radiation even higher than current levels, that there might be a meteor impact or a flash oxygen imbalance caused by a bacterial mutation? Your family could still all die."
The dirt monkey shook his head. "We have adjusted."
To be true, this appeared to be the case. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was the same colour as the regolith he farmed, like a clay model of a man baked from Ararat sand in a red solar furnace.
"Mr. uh, Reborn-in-Jesus, we believe that the centre of your world could contain a neutronium mote equal to one half-millionth the planetary mass of Old Earth. It might be as big as a beach ball, the largest commercially exploitable neutronium chunk yet discovered. The value of such a find would be incalculable. Neutronium is induplicable on a financially viable scale, and essential in nanomedicine, femtoelectronics, and weapons manufacture. A share of the profits of mote extraction, if you moved your family offworld, would easily pay for a far larger, more fertile plot of land on a developed colony planet -"
"We do not want a developed colony planet", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "God led us here."
Captain Adeti fidgeted in the unfamiliar wooden chair. "Have you considered another
possibility? The collision with, uh, Q
Ball might have been enough to compress certain components of Easy Pink below
their Schwarzschild radius. The mote
inside
"Which I never asked", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "How long have you been drilling in the South End Chasm?"
The Captain had no need to consult a watch; the time came up on her retinal HUD on command. "Around five hours now. Did you get your goat?"
"No. I suspect the Devil has taken her. It will be expensive. I'd only recently had her impregnated."
"Soon, if you take our offer, you'll have goats from your front door to the horizon. The world will be paved in goats." The Captain looked up around the room at the cavorting devils carved into the coving. "So, as well as God, your sect's teaching encompasses a belief in the Devil."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus stared back with a dull sullen eye. "No, it does not. But the Devil exists regardless."
***
"STOP! WHAT THE DEVIL ARE YOU DOING!?"
The man had appeared from the rocks above as if they'd given birth to him, his head a mass of hair like a bull baboon's, waving stick-thin arms that looked to consist solely of bone and nerve fibre, wearing only a light-reflective kaftan. He had nothing on his feet at all - the soles of his feet, Planetometrist Wong imagined, were probably tough as goats' hooves by now.
"This must be the Anchorite", whispered Social Correctness Officer Asahara. "Evidently he is no Buddhist."
"Perhaps those of his religion believe cutting a man's hair takes away his strength", giggled Junior Gravitographer Shankar from her position at the telemetry station. One kilometre below them, on the end of thirteen linked windings of superfine line, the sampler drone had located itself on a flat plane of rock visible on the station monitors. It was now on its second section of drilling down towards the C of G, which the Forward detectors clearly identified as a concentrated mass well above the density limit of electron-degenerate matter.
The Anchorite tumbled down the rocks like a corpse down a waterfall, pausing only to yell, scream and wave. Finally, he dropped to the ledge where the Sample Team had set up shop with the Rover's prospecting module, winched down from a hundred metres above on the vehicle's emergency towing cable. He fell onto all fours, more like an animal than a man.
"Stop", he said. "You have no idea of the danger of what you're doing. Please desist."
"You would be Mr. Giovanni Battista, I take it?" said Planetometrist Wong. "Might we exchange public access data?"
The Anchorite shrank back into a wary crouch. "I have no census data", he said.
"But everyone", said Planetometrist Wong, "has census data. The chip is implanted in the corpus callosum at birth."
"Unless", smirked Correctness Officer Asahara, "the birth is unregistered." This carried with it an implication of deviant non-compliance with central census legislation or, even worse, of birth beyond the Accepted Frontier, where only fanatics and enemies of right and good authority originated. Perhaps unsurprisingly if he was indeed an illegal, the Anchorite did not rise to the accusation.
"We are engaged in an operation the Tetsushuri Company has great experience of", assured Planetometrist Wong. "For a man with a pick and shovel, it would indeed be dangerous. But we have tried and tested procedures."
"Gravitational attraction is increasing steadily", said Junior Gravitographer Shankar. "As expected. Don't believe what's down there to have a super-C EV." The gravitographer spoke in code to keep vital information from the mudballer; frustratingly, he seemed to understand more than a mudballer should.
"I'm well aware of that", snapped the Anchorite. "It's a ball of neutronium no larger than a space hopper. Do you think I don't know what neutronium is?"
From the telemetry station, Gravitographer Shankar's tone too grew sharp. "I'm getting some very odd readings here. Density is much lower than expected. Neutron-degenerate towards the core, of course, and electron-degenerate in a shell around that, but between the two -"
Gravitographer Shankar tapped SCO Asahara on the shoulder and directed attention from the figures at the base of the screen to the TV picture at the top of it. The picture glared white.
"Vulcanism!"
Wong shook his head. "Impossible on a world this small."
"Could such a large nugget cause vulcanism in the rocks around it?"
Wong considered the idea for a microsecond. "We have documentary evidence of over a thousand instances of neutronium-cored planetesimals. It's never been observed. What's the recorded temperature?"
Asahara glanced at the screen. "Uh...you could walk around in it. Weird coincidence...gravity's Earth normal at that depth too."
"Turn down the gain on the photosensors", said Wong.
The brightness adjusted downwards.
Wong stared into the screen.
"What the hell is THAT - ?"
The picture went out; and no attempts at diagnostics and random juggling of settings by Shankar and Asahara could convince it to come back.
***
"Ma'am, the planetoid is hollow below a depth of three kilometres."
The surface of
"You realize, Zhong Zhi, that if this planetoid were any larger, this view would be quite unfeasible."
Wong nodded. "Tidal forces would drag it apart. Only something this small, with this powerful and localized a gravitational field, can orbit within the rings intact."
Adeti bent down to the child at her right. The child had walked the thirty kilometres from Third Landing to the prospecting ship out of sheer curiosity. The crew had been feeding it Low Fat Ice Cream Simulant.
"What do you call that planet hereabouts?" she said, pointing up at a third of the visible sky.
"Naphil", said the child. "You're sitting on my uncle Forswear-Dalliance's gravestone", it added.
"Oh", said the Captain. "Sorry."
All around her, headstones lay smacked flat like dominoes. So many, in so short a time...
Wong broke in impatiently.
"Ma'am, there is also breathable air down there. Shortly before the drone lost contact, it
broadcast successful tests for oxygen, CO2 and nitrogen. The readings for all three gases were even
higher than the ones up here on the surface.
Uh, ma'am? You're not wearing
your EVA suit, ma'am."
High above, a set of stars skated overhead in a perfect V-constellation - the components of the prospecting vessel that weren't required on a planetary surface, the FTL drive, interstellar fuel stages, and deep space navigation fit, temporarily discarded as extra payload.
The Captain looked down from the constellation she commanded and languidly traced a hand across the lettering on the marble, which proclaimed Uncle Forswear-Dalliance to be DEARLY BELOVED. "The locals don't wear them...so there's air down there. Stands to reason it would be in greater concentration. The gravity's higher."
"Also, ma'am, just before the drone broke off, it drilled through a particularly difficult hundred metre section of vitrified rock. Fused glass, ma'am. And you know as well as I do there's no vulcanism down there."
Adeti raised an eyebrow. "You think it's artificial?"
"Ma'am, there is light down there. Visible spectrum. And water. Fresh water. We clearly saw the drone's tunnel spoil fall into a liquid surface having that refractive index."
"You think someone's living down there?"
Wong paused. Peddling outlandish theories to one's commanding officer could shorten career growth. "I think this entire world, ma'am, is artificial."
This got the bemused psychoanalytical look he'd dreaded. "Pardon?"
"Ma'am, we have here a twenty-kilometre world hit by a neutronium fragment at just enough velocity for it to lodge in the C of G and provide surface gravity of one half Earth normal, a breathable atmosphere, and liquid water -"
The Captain looked around her at the black dust stretching out like a starless night to an uneven horizon. The dust, she knew, actually proved to be green when taken inside under white light. It was that full of venomous compounds of copper. "You're suggesting someone would deliberately make a world like this? To live on?"
"Ma'am, the family Reborn-in-Jesus say that when they first arrived, there was already breathable air."
He had Adeti's attention now. "No cyanobacteria? No need for terraforming? Didn't they think that was odd?"
"No, ma'am. Their leader, a man calling himself Duke Allion who registered the mission with the Outworlds Colonization Bureau, New Earth Branch, in Kilodia Zero, took it to be evidence of Intelligent Design. That this world had been made for them."
Adeti snapped her fingers. "The Anchorite!" She jabbed a finger at the spare, bearded face on the screen. "What does the Anchorite say on the matter?"
"According to Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, he was already here when they arrived. He also", said Wong meaningfully, "attempted to stop us drilling in the South End Chasm. And he's either an Uncensored Individual or someone who doesn't want us to view his personal data."
"Of course, Mr. Wong", nodded Adeti sarcastically. "The Recovery Bureau might take away his vast wealth in back taxes. He lives in a cave, I hear."
"A cave he appears to have chiselled from the rock itself", said Planetometrist Wong. "Manually. I have been taken there by the children and agree that he has little to fear fiscally."
A fly green as verdigris was droning irritably around Adeti's head. Somehow an insect, one of particularly loathsome dimensions, had got on board her vessel. The ship would need decontaminating throughout as soon as they returned to depot. Adeti flicked a lucky penny up in the air, caught it on the back of her hand, and worked it across her fingers. The penny, worth a hundredth of a credit, was no more legal tender than a bushel of wheat or a wife would have been; nowadays, coinage was produced solely for numismatists. Modern state centicredits bore the ring of linked hands on one side, Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man on the other. This was an older coin, however. It had a face.
She held the coin between two knuckles. The face was aquiline, crowned with laurels, looking left towards distant vistas.
Senior Planetometrist Wong crooked an eyebrow.
"Something up, skip?"
"Nah", grumbled Adeti, and palmed the coin again.
"Have we found the sampling rig yet?"
"Yes ma'am. An aerial survey drone was sent down to investigate. The rig is still down there at the chasm bottom, half submerged in a soil emulsion. It's simply that the telemetry cable has been cut, and the planet -" he waved his hand at the vast bulk of what Adeti now knew was called Naphil, not deigning to call what they were currently standing on a planet - "puts out enough radio in all bands to prevent the drone's backup systems from communicating."
"Did the cable snap? I thought they were supposed to be strong!"
"They are, ma'am. It was a clean cut. No falling rock or micrometeoroid did it." Wong paused for thought. "But the Anchorite was up top with us the whole time."
"And that's the only time we've ever seen him", said Adeti. "At the very moment he needs to get himself an alibi. In any case, I believe the readings up to the point of failure have confirmed our claim. We have beneath our feet a lode of neutronium big enough to be hammered into a crown for God Himself. I have drawn up a Compulsory Field Purchase Request, which we are empowered to serve on planetoids of less than two thousand kilometres in diameter and less than ten thousand population. The family will be more than adequately rewarded." She patted the head of the child beside her.
Wong fidgeted with his suit jet controls. "Ma'am, the two thousand kilometre rule was created on the assumption that no worlds below two thousand kilometres in diameter have atmospheres."
"Your point being, Mr. Wong?"
"Ma'am, if we call up a mining ship and cut the neutronium core out of this place, we will destroy that atmosphere. We will destroy everything living here. There are islands in the oceans on Old Earth, ma'am, where unique species had evolved over millions of kilodia and were destroyed in one when sailors arrived in need of eggs, meat, firewood, and places to test their Nuclear Weapons."
"The Devil won't let you do it", said the child.
Adeti and Wong looked down. The child was using a surveyor's french chalk to fill in the DEARLY BELOVED on the toppled headstone. Adeti reflected idly that the same precise cut seemed to have been used to carve the same precise font in all the epitaphs on all the graves. What she had seen of the colony so far had convinced her that the settlers were essentially city people, muddled masses yearning to breathe less oxygen. Their craftsmanship had grown better over time, but was still basic to the point of crudity - poorly dressed stone walls, botched repairs. These gravestones, however, looked so precise as to be almost -
"Who carved these stones?" said Captain Adeti. The child looked up, all innocence.
"The Devil, of course", she said, and set to
drawing a fluorescent orange fiend beneath the DEARLY BELOVED. The fiend was cramming a protesting person into
its mouth; a person clearly wearing Tetsushuri Company EVA gear. Adeti suddenly realized that every single
epitaph on every grave also said DEARLY BELOVED.
"God's-Wound", said the Captain gently, "where does the Devil live?"
"At the centre of the world, of course", said the child. "Do you have a red? I have to do all the blood the spaceman will be bleeding."
***
"Call up saved link 21317."
The entire wall lit up with densely-written text. Officer Asahara used her personal laser wand to underline several passages in scarlet.
"This is a Post-Modern English translation", she explained. "The relevant passage is tu passasti 'l punto al qual si traggon d'ogne parte i pesi. The world - well before Columbus, by the way - is clearly indicated by Dante, in his Inferno, to be round, and the would-be usurper Satan is at the centre of that world, paradoxically in a region of extreme cold rather than heat, blocking the passage of Dante out of Hell and into Purgatory and thereby Heaven. It's an apt cautionary tale for us, perhaps. It's not five kilodia since the Satanic forces of the Dictator, many of whom genuinely believed their leader was a god, were defeated by the Army of the People." She glanced sternly round the Bridge, making sure everyone present touched their hands to their hearts and mouthed the Oath of Allegiance. Only Adeti did not.
"I'm the Captain", explained Adeti gleefully. "I have no heart."
The crew collapsed in titters. Asahara reddened and marked down Adeti as an a enemy of the State.
"So you're saying that those people's Christian belief has caused them to place a devil at the centre of their world? That this is all dirt digger superstition?"
Asahara nodded.
"Bring in the prisoner", said Adeti. There was very little room on board a prospecting vessel, and the prisoner had had to wait outside, loosely accompanied by the forty-two-kilo Gravitographer Shankar to remind him that he was a prisoner.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had so far been cooperative to the point of meekness. It had not been necessary to restrain him.
"Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus", said the Captain, "my SCO here has a theory that your local devil, as you call it, is actually", she searched for a kind word, "a religious necessity, credence in which is forced upon you by your belief system."
"If a religious necessity can kill forty people", grumbled Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, "then so be it."
Adeti sat back in her seat.
"You didn't tell us that."
"You didn't ask me."
"How did they die?" said SCO Asahara. "Sometimes an illness, a plague, can be characterized as a devil -"
"Plagues", said Reborn-in-Jesus, "do not
remove people's heads. I am no
epidemiologist, but I am almost certain of this fact." He looked up wearily at the circle of
faces. "My father always planned
for me to be in advertising, Captain. He
advertised products he didn't understand, understood but didn't believed in,
believed in but knew he would fail, his whole life. He was in advertising because his family were
in advertising, as everyone was in
"Then, one morning, we woke up to find the Arkarch and his handgun missing. We searched the settlement, but could find him nowhere. We were arranging a team to drag the basin, when one of the ladies whose child had died in the first month after landing, who was out at the South End paying respects at her little girl's grave, discovered a newer, more professional-looking tombstone standing next to the child's. Feeling rather sheepish, we dug under it, and discovered our Arkarch's head and body, neatly disunited.
"You might imagine this would have led to rejoicing, but human beings are queer creatures. First of all the settlement was up in arms against the Arkarch's murderer, but after we finally worked out everyone had an alibi for the killing, and it was realized there was a malevolent force here in this place besides ourselves, that other force was unanimously agreed to be a devil that had killed our good and holy leader. The Anchorite was our first prime suspect; he fled into the rocks of the South End Chasm, and would not come out. Our leader at that difficult time was a woman named Ogundere, who had taken the name of Cast-Out-The-Devil. Unable to catch the Anchorite, she identified three of our number as complicit in the Arkarch's murder, and had sufficient flammable material collected together to burn them alive. The next morning, a fresh grave was discovered in the South End, containing Ogundere and Ogundere's head. Those who had been accused of witchcraft, cut down from their stakes, immediately made Ogundere a martyr and swore to avenge her. From snippets of evidence laced with supposition, they came to the conclusion that the devil that had caused the deaths lived at the bottom of the South End Chasm, possibly at the very core of our world itself. They resolved to make war on it, without really knowing what weapons they might use, or whether their enemy even existed. Holy water, garlic, home-made explosives, electric fencing, laser tripwires, silver bullets, and even aconite were all used. And every time a party went out into the South Chasm, at least one of them would fail to return."
"So they were correct", said Adeti, "about the enemy's location."
"But the Anchorite also lives in the South Chasm", said Planetometrist Wong. "And he has not been harmed."
"Nor has any child", said Reborn-in-Jesus. "I am convinced the tragic sickness of
little Rejoice-in-the-Name-of-the-Lord Stevens was simply that. Since then no child has died on
"Can you prove to us", said Asahara, "that you did not murder these people?"
"Explain to me how I could have constructed, with the few poor steel tools at my disposal, forty exquisitely-chiselled gravestones, and overcome forty other armed and homicidally paranoid settlers, and I will concede your point."
"This devil of yours. Has it ever been seen?"
"Some of the children have seen it. It will not attack them, you see. If any adult catches sight of it, he or she dies."
"Which means", said Wong, eyes focussed on an invisible logic, "that it cannot afford to be seen by anyone who knows what he or she is looking at."
Adeti nodded curtly in agreement. "Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, you will please arrange for all your children who have caught sight of this creature to report here for questioning. It is my belief that we have here a life form which is intelligent, dangerous, and possibly technologically competent."
"And which draws the line at killing children", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
"Colleagues, I believe", said Adeti, "that we may have encountered an abandoned Made war machine."
Despite the cramped quarters, the temperature in the room appeared to drop. Adeti was aware that this was only blood draining from extremities to hearts to prepare for either fighting or flying, but the illusion was there.
"We should run", said Planetometrist Wong. "We are not a military ship."
"We should not jump to conclusions", said Gravitographer Shankar. "This might be humanity's first contact with an intelligent species we did not make ourselves."
"Or an abandoned Made war machine", repeated Asahara.
"And it's already indicated it's prepared to kill", reminded Wong.
"Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus - will you ask your children to report here?" said Adeti.
Reborn-in-Jesus shrugged. "They will report here for questioning", he said. "I urge you not to attempt to harm them. I don't think the Devil would permit it."
"Mr. Wong, you will arrange for transportation. And while you're about it, get that fly shooed outside the lock. I'm not running a dirty ship."
Wong nodded and remained seated, but at a further glare from Adeti, rose and began to chase the fly round the compartment, clapping his hands together to confuse it.
"I have decided", said Adeti, "to contact our neutronium harvester Sisyphus, which will be in comms range in twelve hours' time, to facilitate the compulsory purchase and exploitation of Planetesimal 23 Kranii 3X. This will of course involve core extraction and subsequent loss of gravity and atmosphere. However, there are usually berths available on board harvester vessels with a minimum of sharing, and jobs can be found for yourselves and your family until the ship next docks at a habitable planet -"
"You will all be dead inside eleven hours", said Reborn-in-Jesus. "This is not a threat, merely a confident prediction. But I will send the children. They will tell you all they know, and who knows? Their presence may protect you."
He nodded curtly, and walked out of the ship.
***
Apostle Reborn-in-Jesus was a pale, thin boy who Doctor Ambrose had diagnosed as suffering from a variety of immune deficiency disorders. He looked round the Bridge's interior nervously. He had evidently never seen the inside of a starship, and had refused to enter unless the wall screen was turned on to show his brothers, sister, and cousins playing a complicated game, which Adeti believed was called 'Devil Take the Spaceman', in the cemetery outside.
"Apostle, do you know what the Made are?" Asahara had been given the task of questioning the children by Adeti. Adeti had implied that this was due to the fact that the children would be more likely to trust a friendly mother figure. Asahara suspected that Adeti actually hoped the Social Correctness Officer's title would terrify the infants.
Apostle nodded. "Abominations against God. Intelligent creatures made by man, not God."
Thank heaven for organized religion. Adeti smiled at Asahara, who said:
"What form do you think the Made take?"
The child thought a moment. "Machines", he said. "Many forms of machines. And people."
Asahara nodded. "People who were not made by Mommies and Daddies."
The boy nodded back. "Artificially gestated, genetically-modified clones, yes."
"Is that what the Devil looks like?"
The boy's eyes dropped to the floor, and his voice grew small. "I only ever saw the Devil once."
"What did it look like?"
"Like a man, but moving so quick it blurred."
"And where did you see it?"
"It come in from the south during an Naphillian Eclipse while I was in the Six O'Clock Field." He squirmed uncomfortably in a chair much larger than he was. "More felt it pass than saw it, point of fact."
"And did it leave a trail?"
"Hellgosh yes. More like a plough furrow. At the town end of that trail, they found a big splash of O Positive where See-The-Hinder-Parts-Of-God Raffaele had bin, and that same day a new headstone with his name come up in the South End Yard -"
"And at the Chasm end?"
The boy looked up at Asahara suspiciously. "Trail didn't end at the Chasm", he said. "Ended at Dispater Crater, one kilometre outside City limits."
***
It was nerve-racking to have to operate the PanScanner. It left her only one hand to operate the carbine, in the use of which she'd only ever had one mandatory lesson. Still, the carbine fired rounds that were guaranteed to stop a charging New Earth mantagator dead in its complete lack of tracks. This was admittedly due to the fact that the only prospector deaths attributable to animal attack had happened in the unfortunate Mantagator Swamp Incident of Year 2230 Old Calendar, but the weapon was comforting nonetheless. Adeti wondered if it would penetrate human flesh.
Some of the team, mostly the men, had stopped wearing EVA suits, wanting to be able to move and react quickly when whatever might charge over the ten-metre horizon at them. Some, mostly the women, had kept their suits on, on the grounds that they might give them some limited protection against whatever.
"The crater was probably produced by a stray ring particle", commented Wong, who still had his suit on. "Probably no more than a speck of ice travelling fast. There's not much atmosphere here, must have blasted clean through and impacted."
"Must have blasted clean through and tunnelled", corrected Adeti. "Ultrasound shows a hollow chamber right under the surface." She kicked gently at the sand underfoot. It shifted to reveal a dull alloy hatch cover, with the legend PEARLYGATE VACUUM DOOR CO, PORT YUM CAX, CERES.
Adeti relaxed with a long outbreath. She had not dared admit even to herself, until this moment, that she had feared she might be facing a genuine devil.
"So we're looking for a human being", said Wong.
"Or a non-human that used what it could get its hands on", said Adeti. "From off the last ship that landed." She moved the ultrasound closer to the hatch. "This is just a fire door, a precautionary measure. The air on the other side's the same pressure as this."
"So are we going through it?" said Shankar nervously, eyeing the hatch.
"No fear! No, we're going to rig a charge to blow if anyone opens the hatch. That's what prospectors are good at, laying charges. Not being tunnel rats."
"We could drop charges down the hole."
"But it - uh, the alleged Devil - might not be in the tunnel when we blow it. And then we'll have let it know what we know, without gaining anything." She nodded to Wong. "Rig the hatch to blow."
"How much? A hundred grammes will take out anything human inside a hundred metres. I have a kilo."
"A kilo sounds good."
Wong looked down from the edge of the crater, rubbing his feet in the dirt. "There are shoe imprints here, chief. Looks like the children come down here to play Devil Take The Spaceman."
Adeti scowled and ground her teeth together. "Rig the hatch to blow."
***
"My Dad says the Devil's going to take all of
you." The boy's eyes were not
aggressive, only unsettlingly certain. My Dad says it, so it must be true.
"How do you feel about that, Magus?"
"Sad. There'll be no-one to play ball with any more."
The wall was full of trees, a beech forest, big-boughed, the sky above it speckled with leaves. Some of the children would not enter the Prospecting ship without a projection of their own world on the wall screen. Magus was fascinated by forests, by worlds that could hold whole square kilometres of trees.
"Does water come from the air where you come from?" said Magus.
Asahara nodded. "A great deal of water. Sometimes too much. Sometimes we call it smog, sometimes fug, sometimes acid rain. You saw the Devil, Magus, didn't you, when it came into the church and took Elder Inherit-The-Wind."
The boy nodded. "I drawed it for you." He pushed a chalk tablet across the table.
"Wow", said Asahara. There were horns. There were wings. There was a tail.
"You missed out the pitchfork", she said.
"Didn't have it", said the boy. "Must have left it at home."
"What was its skin like?" said Asahara. "Did it look like hair, or chitin, or metal?"
"It was blurry most of the time", said the boy. "But it had to slow down to turn corners, like a dog on a wet floor. It had great big feet. It digged its claws in when it turned, and dropped down low to the deck."
"Yes", said Asahara. "It would have to." She looked at the chalk picture again. "These wings are very small."
"They were glowing", said the boy. "It stopped and flapped them after every time it moved fast."
"Well I'll be", said Asahara. "Heat sinks."
"Elder Raffaele said we might be able to track it on something called infrared", said the boy, pronouncing the word 'infraired'. "He said that was the same as heat." He licked his lips, staring at the spigot on the wall. "It's hot in here. Can I have a glass of lemonade? The others say your lemonade in here is cold."
I knew there had to be a reason why they all turned up straight away. Asahara reached for the spigot and poured a clear plastic glass of what the children had been told was lemonade, a carbonated Tetsushuri company vitamin and amino acid delivery system. Then she sat stock still, staring into the liquid.
"There's a rainbow in my drink", said the boy. "If I drink the rainbow, will I have God's promise to never again destroy the Earth inside of me?"
The rainbow fanned out from a narrow point. Trying to correct for refraction, she traced the line of rainbows mentally out of the glass, across the Bridge, and -
- out through the
Bridge landing window.
"It'll be a hollow promise if you do, Magus." Frantically, she fished at her belt for the communicator.
***
"It's been
listening in on our conversations. That
must mean it understands English. The
laser beam aimed in through the landing window bounces off the glass, the glass
vibrates when people talk, the micro-vibrations in the glass echo back and tell
you what they're saying -"
Adeti waited patiently for the talking to stop. "Where did this laser come from?"
"Outside the
ship. I'm shining one of our own
measuring lasers out at the same angle till I hit rock and following it with
image intensifiers. There's not much of
a horizon here, I reckon it would have to be within fifty metres and at least
two metres tall -"
Adeti shouted into the communicator. "Calm down! Calm down, mister! How long ago did this happen?"
"Just now. Not two minutes. I think it's gone now. I can't see it. I think it scooted off over the rocks,
there's some big ones about thirty metres out, I could go out and take a look
-"
Wong and Shankar shook their heads very definitely at Adeti, who confirmed: "Negative. Stay right where you are. There's two ways it could have hidden. It could have scooted off over the rocks, or it could have dropped down low and scooted in closer to the ship."
"Oh god. Did I lock the door? Magus, did I lock the door? No, hang on, hang on, hang on...I'm switching
the intensifiers into the infrared band...YES!" The Correctness Officer's breathing grew
slower in the communicator. "It went away over the rocks! Captain, the Devil leaves a hot trail in
air! It has to dump waste heat! It's not a metaphysical Judaeo-Christian entity,
it's a made thing! And if it's a made
thing, it can be unmade -"
Adeti clicked the communicator off, and frowned.
"Either that", she said, "or it's very hot in Hell."
***
The rover was travelling at the head of a smoking arrow of
its own dust, on autopilot, bound for town.
Driving on
"What are we coming here to do?" said Wong.
Adeti took back control of the rover and brought it to a halt in a ragged plume of dust. "We know what makes it kill", she said.
"We do?"
"We do. And if we know that, we have bait to set a trap."
***
The church had been intended to be far larger. It stood in the centre of a cyclopaean set of
highly ambitious foundations, whose precise dimensions, Adeti had learned, had
been explicitly communicated by God Himself to His Arkarch, combining the
shapes of Heaven as outlined in Revelation,
the Tabernacle of the Covenant as described in Exodus, the Temple of Solomon as described in Kings and Chronicles, the
Great Pyramid of Khufu, and Stonehenge.
Work on the church had been projected to take up half the settlement's
waking time for the next five kilodia, when Messiah Himself would be reborn in
the waiting sarcophagus at the temple's centre.
However, the colony's stonemason units had malfunctioned inexplicably
soon after planetfall, and all that had been built was an antechapel the size
of a small terrestrial cathedral. It had
also been intended that the
There was, however, an altar, machine-carved out of local stone, which would suffice amply. Little Pitch-Not-Thy-Tent-Towards-Sodom Ogundere was playing ball with a ball, also carved out of local stone, on the grand pavement outside when Adeti and her spacemen alighted from their buggy.
"Take him in; he'll do." Shankar gripped the child tightly; having no concept of abduction by malevolent strangers, the boy blinked in bemusement rather than wailing. The church was, of course, unlocked. Saints and angels stared down disapprovingly from the windows, as did a few obscure Old Bad Era media personalities - the late Arkarch had been a fan of all singing, all dancing low gravity spectaculars, it seemed. The windows, designed to admit 23 Kranii-light, were a muddy collage of reds and oranges. Solar collectors on the church's roof powered a dim tracery of golden fibre optics in the eyes and tongues of angels, the fretwork on the columns, the lettering on the altar.
"Put the child on the altar." Shankar nodded and began spreading out the boy's arms and legs.
Wong had still not worked out the Plan. "Why? What are we going to do with him?"
"If you haven't figured that out yet, you don't deserve to be in your job." Adeti fiddled with the safety on her carbine, trying to remember how to put it in the OFF position. "We know that this Devil has killed in the past when wives were taken as chattels and bad children as slaves. We also know it has killed when people were on the verge of being burned alive for witchcraft. And we know it takes special care to avoid killing children. It evidently considers itself just and good, some kind of beneficent protector."
"So?" said Wong, though his face showed that he understood perfectly.
"So all I need to do to call myself up a devil is to kill myself a child, right here, right now."
The boy's eyes widened, and he began to struggle in Shankar's grip with gravity-toned muscles surprisingly strong for his size.
Wong licked his lips. "Uh, this is a bluff, right, Captain?"
Sweat was draining into Adeti's eyes. It was surprising how much it stung. "If it's a bluff, it has to be believable", she said, "right up to the point where I pull the trigger. For that reason", she continued logically, "I have to believe I am going to pull the trigger, to the extent there is a real danger I might do so." She yelled at the church's empty interior. "DO YOU HEAR THAT?"
Wong frantically raised his weapon, but could see no living thing but a large and ponderous fly buzzing lazily in circles, black in the beams of coloured starlight, a sudden vivid emerald in the golden light from the fibre optics.
"Beëlzebub", said Adeti. "Lord of the Flies. You thought that was a great joke, I've no doubt. Thought we'd never get it. But for there to be flies here, they'd have had to be introduced deliberately by the settlers, along with the earthworms and the dead elephants and magpies. And who'd deliberately introduce a disease-carrying organism?" Her hands fond the cocking lever.
"Don't", said the boy on the altar, staring upward at the gun.
The windows blazed suddenly with light - white light, reddened through the saints' faces. Then the shockwave followed, shaking God's faithful in their frames. A few glass eyes, hands and faces punched out of their putty and tinkled down on the floor of God's house. The doors, the very heavy alloy doors, rumbled on their hinges.
Then the air was quiet, with a distant clap of thunder as the shrinking blast wave met itself on the other side of the planet.
"Well I'll be damned for a bastard", aid Adeti, staring out in the direction of Dispater Crater. "We got it coming out its hole."
"We got something", cautioned Shankar, crouched down with her back to the wall.
Wong stared in consternation at a gigantic greenbottle fly, legs wriggling impotently in the air, trying frantically to buzz itself off the ground with wings that were either damaged or impotent now the fly was flipped on its back. Wong increased the magnification on his EVA suit goggles. The insect's back was covered in a regular grid of tiny emerald cells.
"Black in red light", said Wong. "In 23 Kranii-light, a perfect solar collector. 23 has virtually no green in its spectrum."
"First solar-powered insect I ever did see", said Adeti. "Whoever the Devil is, he doesn't need to peek in windows to listen to conversations. Unless I order all my locks shut and keep the flies out of my ship, that is, which I believe I did yesterday. We've been bugged, ha, ha, ha. Reborn-in-Jesus' Devil has been listening to us ever since we landed, one way or another."
"I could have told you that."
The voice came from halfway up the aisle. Reborn-in-Jesus had entered via some unseen door, and walked ten metres across the church toward the altar before Adeti had even noticed him. Adeti attempted to keep a grip on her anger.
"You could have told us the flies were the Devil's?"
"That boy's father has already been killed by the Devil", said Reborn-in-Jesus. To add insult to injury, he appeared to be accompanied by his entire extended family, other members of which were appearing from the dark behind him. His wife came up to stand by his side. "He's suffered enough. Let him go."
"I", said Adeti, "have a quota to fill. Your Devil has, oh, let's say thirty seconds to prevent me from shooting this boy, point blank range, through the head."
"But what if we already killed it, chief?" said Shankar. "What if it can't come, because it's dead?"
"Then we'll just have to expand our killing portfolio to include the whole settlement", said Adeti, "and no-one will be any the wiser. You people could have been a sight more cooperative. To my mind that makes you all murderers worthy of my justice." She looked up in confusion as a bright red object arced across the tracery of broken glass in the wall like a star shell. Prophets' faces crawled across her like holy amoebae.
"Uh, Chief", said Wong, shifting his own weapon into a low port position, "you're bluffing very well."
"Maybe a little too well", said Shankar. Again the red beam scanned across the sky like a coal-fired lighthouse. When saintly silhouettes had stopped sweeping across the floor, Adeti's weapon was up and levelled at Shankar's chest, and Shankar's was up and levelled at Adeti's.
"There's really no need for either of you to do this", said Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus reasonably. "The Devil will do it all for you."
"Maybe I ought to start shooting now", said Adeti, "just to prove how good my hand is."
The light swept across the sky again; once more, wheeling shadows.
Adeti looked outward at the stars.
"What is that thing - ?"
The ceiling shattered. Splinters of eye-stinging red-hot tile showered in all direcitons, leaving burning tracks on the retina. A spinning cannonball of light smashed through the stone vault of the roof, crunched into the flagstones of the transept, uncoiled into a figure roughly the size and shape of a human being, braking itself in the air with wings no human being had. Its head was featureless; presumably it saw in areas of the spectrum human eyes were blind to. Its feet were spade-broad claws. Its hands extruded and retracted talons reflexively. The horns appeared to be radio aerials. What was the tail? A refuelling probe?
The skin was glowing. Parts of it were ticking erratically as it cooled.
"Oh my god", said Wong. "We blew it into low orbit."
"And it ended up exactly back here?" said Adeti. "Please."
She acquired the Devil with the carbine, squeezed the trigger, and sent flashes of brilliance round the chamber. However, when the after-images cleared from her eyes, she could see that she had done little but move the dust around in the church. The creature bore lettering where its face should have been: THE CLEVER DEVIL, CONCEPT MODEL, INSTAR HOMINIS CORPORATION. Some of the writting was illegible where tungsten-cored shells had splattered like shied egg.
"A Made", said Adeti.
"A low self-reliance Made", said Shankar. "Not one of your interstellar Von Neumann jobs who made war on people-kind. Designed to be close to human beings, to look like them. That means it has a master nearby. At the end of the War Against The Made, all such units were destroyed, but some of the despicable rich who couldn't stand a life without smart home help hid them."
The handles on the main church doors rotated slowly in the metal.
The machine was moving up the aisle with the grace and speed of a bride.
"It used its wings to brake itself out of orbit", said Wong. "And to steer itself. We can't kill that. There's no way we can kill that."
The church doors slowly swung open. An EVA-suited figure stood in the entrance, holding a bulky device with a single ruby-red eye burning in the front of it.
The Devil turned. The air down the aisle crackled like bacon frying, sparks twinkled, and the Devil's wings glowed orange, then yellow, then white, as if an invisible torch beam were playing on them. It backed away like a fiend from the sign of the cross, and the figure in the aisle walked closer. Again the crackle and twinkle, and this time the demon fled through the walls, leaving a devil-sized hole in Saint Michael.
The ruby eye winked out, and blowers began scrubbing the air of hydrofluoric acid exhaust, which were already beginning to etch the saints' faces in the transept. The EVA suit helmet popped open.
"Heat sinks", said Asahara. "You can't use your heat sinks for orbital braking without overheating. I just overheated it a little more with a sampling laser. It'll cool down and come back. We should leave."
"What was it?"
"Instar Hominis personal servant. They were quite popular among general staff officers in the last days of the Dictatorship. The Dictator himself was reputed to have several. Programmed to fetch and carry, lay out a chap's uniform, and protect him from assassination. You're right. We probably can't kill it."
"But we can leave and come back with a mining cruiser", said Adeti, clicking her weapon back to standby.
"No we can't ma'am", said Shankar.
Adeti rounded on Shankar. "I beg your pardon, Gravitographer?"
"Ma'am, you were about to kill a child."
"I was bluffing, mister."
"No you weren't, m'am. Ma'am, I'm arresting you for conduct unbecoming a Citizen."
"We", said Wong in a high and reedy voice, "are arresting you."
Adeti's weapon dropped from her hands in shock. She turned to Asahara.
"I am afraid, Captain", said Asahara, "that I must concur."
"I'm your offering", said Adeti. "Your sacrifice for getting off this planet."
"If that's what you want to believe", said Asahara.
Adeti nodded, raised the weapon onto her shoulder, turned, trudged out of the church. Slowly, the others followed her, less like a team following a leader than dogs holding a larger, heavier, animal at bay.
Her knees crunched down into the cupric dust. The weapon in her hands turned round, the muzzle under her chin.
There was a bright, brief fountain of red, white and grey.
Asahara spoke hopefully to the cold air.
"It should be safe to leave now", she said. "As long as we never come back."
***
PLD38227 climbed steadily, though far too quickly for Brevet Captain Asahara's liking in the heavy gravity gradient. Landing on neutronium-cored worlds had been part of flight training, but had been covered in only one single simulation, and that simulation had had no atmosphere. Still, the good thing about this particular atmosphere was that it would be over inside a minute.
She had, she reflected, calculated well. It did not look good, even for a Correctness Officer, to be the sole survivor of a mission, but to return having exposed an enemy of civic morality with the assent of all other team members - that was different. Adeti had been foolish; she had been blinded by the planet-sized prize at the heart of Ararat into jeopardizing her vessel and her crew, valuable state assets all.
Seconds away, the FTL drive unit telemetry was responding to remote guidance. Soon the ship would be locked together fit to go interstellar again. Wong and Shankar sat to either side of her, already asleep in their seats. Adeti's suicide had neatly prevented any unpleasantness with inquests, investigations or moral guidance committees. The mining cruiser was within six hours of hailing now, over ten kilometres long, equipped with all the gear for core extraction and light armoured combat alike. The bluff had been effective.
The atmosphere had thinned sufficiently. She reached forward to the console to fire the ship's single antimatter catalyzer.
***
A bright, brief new star blazed in the heavens. The Anchorite seriously doubted that it heralded the birth of a new Messiah.
The bluff had been effective. Letting them get free of the atmosphere had made them drop their guard, as well as being necessary for an explosion large enough to vapourize the ship without damaging the fragile local ecosystem.
He looked down at the family Reborn-in-Jesus.
"Best not visit the South End for a year or so. I'll inform you when levels have returned to normal."
Shun-Company glanced at Captain Adeti's body, and the Devil walked solemnly over to pick it up, its claws retracted. Children were playing on its back, pulling at its wings.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus looked at the Anchorite. "Who are you?"
The Anchorite stared up at the distant stars. "I was a very, very bad man, which is all you need to know. Nowadays I'm trying to forget it, but it will keep following." He watched as streaks of metal vapour fingerpainted the atmosphere. "A Type 39 prospector doesn't have a comms suite fit to talk to anything it isn't docked with. They sent no messages. Your farm is safe."
Shun-Company nodded. "Thank you."
"Hey, I live here too."
One of the children ran in from the direction of the house. "Papai! A private agro ship saw the bad men's vessel explode! They're asking if we need assistance, they say they have goats and trees and radiation shielding and all sorts of stuff!"
"It's an ill wind", admitted Reborn-in-Jesus. "We could do with a new goat. One of those fancy new ones that gives carcinophagous milk. That'll clean up Day-of-Creation's lymphoma."
The family nodded respectfully to the Anchorite, and the two groups parted, one walking back towards the house and the world's one functioning radio, the other toward the ten-metre horizon.
2
It was Kilodia Seven of the New State Calendar when Justice
arrived on
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, meanwhile, took the community's single ass, Carries-the-Saviour, down to the South End Yard to complain.
He was wearing an EVA suit that didn't quite fit - it had been made for another person, who was now buried in the South End's newest plot. He hadn't seen the grave before; he noted that it was carefully tended, the headstone exquisitely cut of locally-sourced siderite. A radiation-burst in Mount Ararat's southern hemisphere some three New Improved Years ago had made it unwise to even visit the yard until recently; the burst seemed to have triggered a mutation in one of the funeral flowers, which had evolved a spectrum of carotenes and chlorophylls which combined to make both its leaves and petals almost black. The flowers had become a vigorous weed, and were threatening to engulf the gravestones. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus wondered what it was that was pollinating them. Somehow, however, the gravestones were never quite swamped, as if an invisible hand or claw had been trimming them. Certainly Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus would never allow his many children and godchildren to work in the South End Yard, even today.
The ship was massive and unstreamlined, designed for
travelling through atmosphere at a sedate walking pace, taking its time to
reach orbit.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, being tracked by several point defence turrets, alighted from his ass, walked up to the ground-level emergency access hatch, pulled out a spanner, and banged politely on the metal. Oddly, his banging was answered by all manner of rhythmic and arrhythmic percussion from the ship's insides, as if men trapped inside were banging on the inside walls with woodwork tools and dinner cutlery.
Then, a portion of the vessel's aft section, formerly seamless, cracked open soundlessly, and a cube of battered metal the size of a church motored downwards to the ground, leaving a cuboid gap in the rear fuselage which, like a bullet loading into a breech, another metal cube slid out of the vessel to fill. In a matter of seconds, the ship was whole again, and he would never have known an aperture had existed. Then take-off alarms began sounding, unspent fuel burners began sparkling around the ship's underside, and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was forced to take his ass behind a rock half a kilometre away before the chemical engines fired again and the ship lifted skywards on huge wasteful plumes of official government flame.
Coughing and fitting a respirator to his ass, Reborn-in-Jesus approached the landing site again. Horrid compounds were forming on the rocks around him, products of the devilish mixtures take-off-thrusters used as fuel.
The abandoned cuboid of starship-metal had neither door nor window - in fact, no surface features of any kind apart from a small, heavy-duty display screen at head height. As Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus approached, the screen came to life, cycling through a selection of languages, one of which was English.
KRANION SECTOR MORAL RECLAMATION AUTHORITY, KILODIA SEVEN
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
IT HAS UNFORTUNATELY
BEEN NECESSARY TO LOCATE THIS MAXIMUM SECURITY PENITENTIARY INSTALLATION ON
THIS WORLD 23 KRANII 3X. THIS IS DUE TO NON-EXISTENCE OF VESSEL'S ORIGINAL DESTINATION
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded at that. Originally the colony vessel Utanapishtim, which had brought him and his family to the 23 Kranii system, had been contracted to stop at Designated Colony World 70, a worldly paradise lovingly terraformed from a Venusian hell not ten kilodia earlier, possessing fruited plains, purple headed mountains, and for all Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus knew, cigarette trees. Unfortunately, by the time Utanapishtim had reached Colony World 70, a Made war machine had revisited the 32 Kranii system and reproduced the Venusian hell. It had only been by chance that the captain's system scan had also turned up a planetoid in the same system, not twenty kilometres across, whose surface freakishly reflected light in spectra indicating nitrogen, oxygen, and liquid water. How that could be had not concerned him - he had fulfilled his contract by delivering his settlers to their Very Small Promised Land.
THIS MAXIMUM SECURITY UNIT IS SELF-GOVERNING AND UTTERLY
ESCAPE PROOF, continud the viewscreen.
IT WILL DEFEND ITSELF IF DISTURBED AND SHOULD NOT BE INTERFERED
WITH. IN THE TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE EVENT OF
ESCAPE, AGENTS WILL BE DISPATCHED FROM WITHIN TO RETRIEVE ESCAPEES. A
Then the viewscreen blanked out apart from the words:
THANK YOU FOR YOUR MANDATORY COOPERATION
There was an ominous, thunderous rumble down the length of the cuboid, and it shuddered impossibly into the air. Reborn-in-Jesus dropped to his knees and squinted at its underside, and could see legions of heavy, fluted legs powering the structure's immense weight up from the ground. The earth shook as it rose onto a thousand feet and began to march away in the direction of the South End Saddle, Third Landing, and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus' house.
***
"It's not just my house I fear for, it's the integrity
of the planetary core.
The voice that replied from the other end of the radio was that of the Anchorite, sitting at the family Reborn-in-Jesus's planetary communicator suite, which occupied mysterious pride of place in their Best Parlour. The voice intended to calm, but was not having the desired effect. "It should take pains to avoid inhabited structures. It is aware of its weight. It must have a reason for making for town, and we should simply sit tight to see what that reason is."
Carries-the-Saviour had long since tired, and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was walking alongside his animal, watching the trundling behemoth crawl slowly and unstoppably towards the one and only high street of Third Landing. Upon being faced with a line of houses, however, regardless of the fact that ten of the houses were uninhabited, the machine took a sharp detour, skirting around the buildings until a gap allowed it to angle in from the desert again. The open side of the settlement was full of fields of growing crops; these, again, it avoided, prowling the town perimeter until it had convinced itself that penetrating to the centre of town must involve either butting through walls or trampling fields. It came to a rest at the junction of two fields, extruding a variety of sensory tentacles from previously unsuspected openings in its upper hull. Finally, given a choice between steamrollering a field of harvest-ready potatoes and one of newly planted seed, it went for the seed, slowing down as it negotiated the furrows like a mother dinosaur walking among her own eggs. Finally, it fetched up alongside the town reservoir - not close enough to its edge to cause the shoreline structural damage - and extruded from the intelligent metal of its side a massive, clublike proboscis, bedecked with pseudopodia like a starfish's foot, which crawled on those pseudopodia down towards the waterline before disappearing below the surface with a satisfied hiss.
Having seen all this from afar, Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus entered town to be confronted by ten of his children and godchildren, who ran up to him with shouts of "Look out at the big machine, papa! It stuck its peepee in the Pond."
"A heat sink", said the Anchorite knowledgeably as Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus approached. "It's powered by an internal fusion reactor. It needs somewhere to dump its waste heat." He mused a moment. "You see how the water in the Pond is circulating now? You could put a waterwheel on that and generate power. Many colonial traders do quite reasonable kits. You really shouldn't worry about the integrity of the unit, you know. The Series Threes are really quite escape-proof."
"And I suppose you would know", said the Anchorite, throwing a sour glare at the Anchorite, who was known to have a chequered past. The Anchorite blushed guiltily.
"It's circulating and bubbling", said Unity Reborn-in-Jesus in alarm, staring at the surface of the Pond.
"Build a free public health spa", shrugged the Anchorite. "Aquae Araratis Montis, the relief of weary travellers. Look on this as an opportunity." Already, children were paddling and splashing in the warming water, and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had to shout at those who were paddling and splashing close to the clearly boiling area by the penitentiary's heat sink. It would have to be marked out, he thought, with a string of buoys. Did Blom's Interstellar Travelling Emporium do buoys? Whether they did or not, it would probably be politic to ask them in a text message rather than verbally.
His back, feet and head hurting, he led his ass back down the High Street to her stable, which had once been Mr. Raffaele's house before the Devil Plague had taken him. Once again, Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was going to have to adapt to a change in his environment.
***
In the eighth kilodia since the Enlargement of the People, somebody escaped from the Series Three.
The unit had by now become an accepted feature of town. Its walls had been used to train tomatoes and beans in their solar gamma shadows where the plants were less prone to mutation. An ambitious mural of Arcadian landscapes had been started by Shun-Company Reborn-in-Jesus and her genetic and adopted daughters on the wall facing in towards the Pond. The Anchorite's bath house had not materialized, but a bathing stage had been created which visiting tramp trader crews took full advantage of. The area around the pond had been artistically planted with date palms strung with UV fibre like tropical Christmas trees, and real live goats grazed around the water's edge, cropping the black grass.
The goats - Faith, Hope, Charity, and Shub-Niggurath, the last goat having been named by the Anchorite - were led, once a day, out to the green pastures of the Crater of Tares close by the settlement, wherre thorns and thistles grew in mouth-watering profusion. The goats would gaze longingly through the goat-proof fences on either side at the family Reborn-in-Jesus's genetically jury-rigged potato fields. They would, however, be led firmly and inexorably to their feeding grounds at the Crater, into which a little water was allowed to trickle from the Ninety West Drain. At the end of every day, the beasts would be led back to drink and sleep in a reinforced concrete radiation shelter on the meridian shore of the warm waters of the Pond. Leading the goats was a task given to the youngest responsible Reborn-in-Jesus child, and currently allocated to little Beguiled-of-the-Serpent Raffaele. Having concluded the day's goat-leading activities, Beguiled-of-the-Serpent was sitting on the bathing stage indolently dangling her toes in the water when, quite unexpectedly, the outline of a door appeared in the side of the Penitentiary and rapidly became a door in very truth, which then popped out of the side of the unit and dropped into the cactus underneath an unkempt middle-aged man using the door panel as a shield to protect himself from cactus spines. He squirmed free of the succulents, apparently uncaring whether they cut him or not, then, once at a safe distance from the Series Three, turned and whooped and punched the air, yelling "YES! YES! I DID IT! I DID IT!"
Beguiled-of-the-Serpent had led too sheltered a life to be scared. Instead, she looked up at the man and said, round-eyed:
"Are you an Escapee?"
The man sucked out his chest, drew himself up to his full unimpressive height, clapped himself on the breastbone and said:
"I am the Escapee. The only man ever to have escaped from a Series Three government prison, ever. I, Johannes Trapp, the finest of the fine, the flyest of the fly."
Beguiled-of-the-Serpent considered this, and said:
"My god-daddy says another man escaped from a Series Three over in Pyramidis sector. He fears for our safety as a consequence."
The Escapee narrowed his eyes at the little girl.
"Escaped how?" he said.
Beguiled-of-the-Serpent searched her memory. "Daddy said an Atom Bomb was used by the man's Evil Confederates, which lightly scorched the surface of the unit and tripped the Mercy System that allows inmates to be rescued from a unit damaged by war or cataclysm. This deactivated all its relocking facilities and allowed the despicable gang to cut into it in under seven hours. Both escapee and gang died of radiation poisoning several hours later, but it was a technically successful escape."
"HA!" The Escapee leapt about on one leg and kissed the earth, kissed a palm tree, kissed a highly alarmed goat. "In your FACE, technically successful escapee. I damaged nothing, I forced nothing, I cut into nothing. I am as a GOD."
At this point, the Escape was interrupted by Shun-Company Reborn-in-Jesus, who had left the house to pick fresh onions for the evening meal, and was surprised to see a strange man in bright flashing fatigues talking to her step-daughter.
"I'm sorry", said Shun-Company, switching the basket to her left hand and the onion knife to her right, which was the stronger, "I'm afraid I didn't hear your ship land."
The Escapee grinned. "It landed some time ago. I'm very much afraid it took off again without me."
Little Beguiled-of-the-Serpent pursed her lips indignantly. "It did not! He came out of the Series Three! He is a Successful Escapee, and two minutes ago was quite content to tell the universe as much!" She turned to point at the open hole in the side of the machine, only to see clean, smooth hullmetal. The wound had closed itself.
"You are a wicked child", said Shun-Company, cuffing Beguiled-of-the-Serpent lightly round the head, "for telling tales." She nodded to the Escapee. "I am sorry to hear of your predicament, Mr. - ?"
"Trapp. Johannes Trapp. Security expert extraordinaire. I'm afraid I must fall on your mercy until another vessel arrives to remove me. If you have any locks or encrypted communications devices about your home, I would be pleased to greatly improve them as payment for your charity..."
Shun-Company shook her head politely. "There are no locks on
Trapp licked his lips. "I have not tasted potato in, in, oh, a long, long time."
"Good. Every time the Agribiz ship arrives, my husband seems to obtain a new species. We have a potato for every occasion."
***
The meal had been awkward. The table was huge, made up of a single piece of construction metal cut into an ellipse. There were places for Mr. and Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus at either end, and no fewer than fifteen places in between for children of a bewildering variety of ages and sizes, the older children grown old early, keeping the younger ones in line with savage slaps to the head whenever they dared reach for the cruet without asking. There were exactly as many chairs as had been necessary for the meal, including Mr. Trapp, who had been seated in what he assumed was a place of honour directly between the gentleman and lady of the house. He had been informed that this was because the extra chair belonged to a gentleman who normally dined with the family on Sundays. Mr. Trapp's prisonwear was still flashing alarmingly.
"You have so many children", said Mr. Trapp politely, attempting to smile over a miniscule bowl of what seemed to be potato-flavoured ice cream. The children, who had not received such bowls, craned their necks in his direction, as close to actually drooling as they could be without impoliteness.
"They are not all ours", mumbled Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus into his dessert bowl.
"Yet they are", corrected Shun-Company severely.
"Early in the establishment of the colony, Mr. Trapp", said Unity Reborn-in-Jesus, swan-necked, sylphlike, utterly unaware of the terrible effect she would shortly have on human beings from outside her immediate gene pool, "there were difficulties."
"Deaths", corrected Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
Mr. Trapp's attention turned toward his dessert respectfully. He essayed a spoonful of it. As he had expected, it was vile rubber food that bounced off the bottom of the gut and shot back up for a second ingestion. He gritted his teeth against gagging, attempting to turn the gesture into a friendly smile at the children. The children, evidently considering this to be a victorious sneer at the fact that he had dessert and they didn't, looked away in disgust.
"Which ship did you come in on, Mr. Trapp?" said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, as if the matter were completely inconsequential.
"Uh, she didn't have a name", said Trapp. "Rather a number, which escapes me for the moment. A tramp trader I'd unwisely secured a passage on out to Alpha Gladii."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus looked on with a face of murderous disbelief. "You're a long way from Alpha Gladii, Mr. Trapp. Like one whole constellation. This is the 23 Kranii system. Alpha G. is thirty New Light Years away."
Mr. Trapp swallowed hard. "So far? Oh my. Oh my." He covered his head with his hands in mock dismay. "I must apologize for any distraction. This is terrible news. The passenger cabins had no windows. By the sound of it I was lucky I slipped out of the ship to stretch my legs. The ship landed near to here, the Captain said to take compressed air and water -"
"Water?" Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus was actually scandalized. "Do people think there's that little water here?"
"I fear", finished Mr. Trapp, "I might have been aboard a Slaver ship."
Horrified intakes of breath chorussed all round the table. Since the end of the War Against the Made, human beings no longer created machines as intelligent as themselves to do their bidding. A certain type of rich man, particularly this far out on the frontier, found this injurious to his lifestyle; a trade in human slaves, unthinkable for centuries, had evolved to fill this niche.
"I'm sorry", said Mr. Trapp, "I must be alone. Did you say I could sleep in the - ?"
"Third house along", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, licking the last flecks of dessert off his spoon. "Still has a bed in it that the blood's been washed out of."
Mr. Trapp smiled a fragile crystalline smile.
Suddenly, Only-God-Is-Perfect Ogundere, who had been watching Mr. Trapp's pulsating kitchen fatigues throughout the meal, piped up unbidden.
"Is what you're wearing the very latest fashion where you come from, Mr. Trapp?"
Trapp had been prepared for this one. "It is indeed, young lady. But it is dancewear, intended only for festivals. We had been holding a party in steerage. I was hot, and had gleaned that we were on a world with a breathable atmosphere, so I left the vessel to cool down."
"Quite a risk to take", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "Habitable covers dioxide monsoons, sulphuric acid rain, and temperatures both above boiling and below freezing."
"Maybe", smiled Mr. Trapp, "I suspected subconsciously what was about to happen to me."
"Maybe", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "Third house along", he repeated.
Mr. Trapp smiled again, nodded curtly, and left in a hurry.
***
"What do you think?" said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, as the children were clearing away the dishes.
"I think", said Shun-Company, "that he is either from inside the Penitentiary or an advance scout for a Slaver ship in his own right. It is just possible a vessel could approach Ararat without our detecting it, but such a thing would have had to have been deliberate. It is not my place to criticize my husband, but you could have been less open about your disbelief in his story. If he is an escapee, we have no idea what his criminal specialty might be. He might be a murderer, or a child murderer, or - heaven forfend! - a serial child murderer."
Reborn-in-Jesus ground his teeth in his head. "The Devil would not allow him to harm us."
A metallic green beetle buzzed in lazy figures-of-eight around the room's modest chandelier. Shun-Company looked up at it. "The Devil is no God Almight, to be considered capable of solving all our problems. Even God insists men address their own difficulties."
Reborn-in-Jesus looked up at the beetle. "Do you hear that, Beëlzebub? Have your eyes and ears heard all that has gone on in this house today?"
The fly buzzed straight up and down in the air before returning to its eternal figure-of-eight.
"Should we fear this new visitor?"
The fly buzzed up and down again.
"Will you pay a visit to us in the morning?"
Again, the up and down movement.
Shun-Company leaned forward close to the fly. "Is your servant close enough to watch over us at this moment?"
The fly wavered from side to side.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus raised a finger. "It is checking the South End for recent signs of a Slaver starship landing, am I right?"
The fly rose up and down in the air once more.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded.
"Your concern for our welfare is much appreciated, Hermit", he said to the fly. "I'll be pleased to see you in the Ninety East Field at sunup." He nodded to Shun-Company. "Wife: tell Beguiled-of-the-Serpent she is a good girl who tells truth and shall have a new dress when the next trader so equipped arrives. And tell all the others they are to stay indoors and not admit our visitor without permission. I shall sleep with my back to the door tonight equipped with a suitable agricultural implement."
The fly bounced up and down in the air, then vanished up into the chandelier in a myriad tinkling, twinkling emerald images.
***
"OPEN UP."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus's sleep was interrupted by what felt like repeated blows to the head with a dinner gong. However, once he had pulled himself upright and taken stock of the situation, he could see that it was simply the metal alloy door being pummelled fit to rock on its hinges by someone titanically strong on the step outside - someone either too polite or too stupid to acknowledge that the door had no lock. There was also the sound of a siren loud enough to wake the whole South End.
He opened the door, warily. It was not yet sunup.
"OPEN UP", said the person on the threshold redundantly. It was difficult for Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus to consider it a person, in fact, as it was not only artificial, but also not designed, as many artificial creatures were, to comfortingly resemble a human being in any way. Instead, it looked designed to fulfil its intended function with an efficiency as grim and terrible as possible. It was probably also, being a government automaton, designed to be safely stupid; the government liked to set a good example to its citizenry in this regard.
"IT IS AN OFFENCE TO HARBOUR FUGITIVES", said the machine - unsettlingly, in the same voice as Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus's intelligent rotary goat-milking unit. Perhaps the same minor celebrity had allowed his voice to be sampled on two separate occasions. "THESE PREMISES WILL SUBMIT THEMSELVES TO SEARCH."
The machine was a squat cuboid of metal resting on three broad feet. A variety of ports, probes and weapons ringed the squat turret head that topped it off, giving it the appearance of a device that had been crowned King of Kitchen Appliances.
"Are you a warder from the Penitentiary?" said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "Show me your authorization to search."
The machine projected a facsimile of a signed paper document lousy with government insignia onto a nearby wall. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded and stood aside. The machine trundled into the house. A probe extended and sampled the air.
"GENETIC MATERIAL OF MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISONER JOHANNES MARIA TRAPP DETECTED", it announced. "IT IS AN OFFENCE TO HARBOUR FUGITIVES", it repeated darkly.
"You may take him with my blessing", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, trying to appear as if he just happened to be carrying the digging blade in his left hand by the sheerest coincidence. "He gave his real name to us. He is in the third house down the street."
"YOUR COOPERATION IS APPRECIATED", said the machine, and wheeled on the ground effect pads in its feet to leave.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus gripped the haft of his digging tool nervously.
"What was Mr. Trapp's crime?" he asked.
"GRAND FRAUD", said the machine, "FIVE COUNTS. GENETIC IDENTITY THEFT, NINE COUNTS. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO PRIVATE SYSTEMS, FIFTEEN COUNTS. ESCAPING FROM A GOVERNMENT PENAL ESTABLISHMENT, TWENTY-SEVEN COUNTS."
"And the number of convictions for crimes of violence, or against children?" said Shun-Company, who had noiselessly materialized behind her husband.
"ZERO", said the machine, and motored out into the dark, stars mirrored in its brightly polished chassis.
"He is a thief", comforted Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, patting his wife's arm.
"That machine is the barely the size of our church", said Shun-Company. "No mere thief deserves to be confined in such a way."
At that point, the screams began in the street outside; and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus took up his digging tool unashamedly and ran.
***
Sixty seconds earlier, the stars had been shining from
slightly different quarters, and the scarlet shimmering scimitar of Naphil's A
ring had shone a constellation's width broader overhead as
The communications tower stood out at one corner of the Third Landing village square, a metal tree of dishes, whip aerials and communications lasers. No tree had been planted near it; cables burrowed down from it into the dirt and resurfaced by the Reborn-in-Jesus residence. Halfway up it, accessible via a maintenance ladder, was a manual access panel, which lay open. Inside, mysterious user-unfriendly readouts and schematics marched across a durable plastic screen.
A voice called from the bottom of the tower. "Are you done yet, Mr. Trapp?"
A voice answered from up by the maintenance panel. "I've located a ship insystem. Her captain says he's braking into your gas giant's atmosphere to collect helium-3 and slow himself down to meet another trader and swap mail loads in the inner system. Says he can take both of us on to Twenty. Be landing a kilometre from here in an hour's time."
"So long as he hurries up", said the voice from the tower's base. "If anyone finds me out here, no-one'll talk to me from now till Christmas. I'll be on goat-leading duty for certain."
The panel slammed shut and was screwed home by a man with fastidious attention to detail, who then slid down the maintenance ladder with a spring in his step.
"Do you really think I have it in me to become a top-rate courtesan?"
"My dear, you are the image of Ishtar herself. I have contacts at all the best-regarded
agencies on Old Earth, in
"I can't get my legs behind my head. Does that matter?"
The conversation was suddenly interrupted by a klaxon loud enough to kill a man and wake him afterwards. Trapp began working more quickly, feverishly, looking up in the direction of the Series Three like Damocles at his ceiling decoration.
"What is that, Mr. Trapp? What's that sound?"
A mansized alcove of light opened in the side of the
Penitentiary, and a stubby, three-legged machine emerged, rotated to take in
its surroundings, and took off towards the largest house in
"It seems", said Mr. Trapp, "we still have one more detail to take care of. Please be so good as to follow me."
He raised the Reborn-in-Jesus family kitchen knife, so old and oversharpened that its blade was a mere steel sliver, that he'd used to open the maintenance panel. The A ring reflected from it, red as blood.
***
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus skidded round the corner, implement in hand, to be confronted by an empty tranquil pond and a silent, featureless Penitentiary.
The Warden's tracks returned to the wall of the unit, and went no further. However, they were also accompanied by human footprints, small human footprints spaced erratically, as if their creator were being dragged unwillingly. There was blood in the footprints. A great deal of blood. Close by, a set of shod hooves had left town along the hundred-eighty meridian, apparently at the closest an ass could get to a gallop.
Unity Reborn-in-Jesus, who had been following her parents closely, went pale and put her hand over her mouth.
"I'll call roll", she said.
"I do not understand", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. He reversed his digging implement and banged on the penitentiary metal with it. "HEY! WARDEN! YOU IN THERE!"
In synchronicitous answer, a bright star rose from the
Hundred-Eighty Field, burning contrails into the eyes. The star resolved itself into four main lift
jets, blazing fit to roast
"Testament!"
"Here!"
"Gus!"
"Here!"
"Postle!"
"Present!"
"Only-God-is-Perfect...Only-God-is-Perfect? Perfect? PERFECT??"
"The landing beacon's activated", said sharp-eyed Magus, squinting up at the comms tower. "The dish is moving to track a ship. Uh, that ship."
"I think Only-God-is-Perfect's missing", reported Unity.
At that point, Shun-Company screamed. She had found the knife.
***
Out of the sun he came, casting a long shadow. Wearing a beard he had never been known to cut, sandals on his feet, a lightweight gamma-reflective cloak, and underwear donned only out of deference to the presence of children, the Anchorite was the oldest inhabitant of Ararat. No evidence existed to suggest he had not been here when the fiery degenerate-matter meteor had first torn into the heart of the planetoid and given it gravity, when Ararat had been formed by the clashing together of two mutually orbiting mountains. He had been observed to eat, drink, and defecate just like a real person, so it could only be assumed that he was human. The sheer size of the beard and the weatherbeaten nature of his physique, however, prevented accurate speculation as to his age. He lived in a cave out on the edge of the South End Chasm, a hermit without any discernible religion.
When he arrived, Shun-Company was sitting in her skirts in the main street weeping, along with her entire retinue of daughters and god-daughters, and many of the younger boys. Only Unity, Magus, Apostle, and Reborn-in-Jesus senior were standing, looking sternly into the sky where the glowing teardrop of a starship's plasmadrive seemed to have been activated.
"Dear me", said the Anchorite, "what a lot of fuss"; whereupon Shun-Company proceeded to turn on him and subject him to a lengthy vituperative lecture on failure to protect her children, the emptiness of his promise that her children would never be harmed, and the fact that he might as well strike her down as well as harm her little girl who was the fruit of her womb and apple of her eye.
"I don't recall promising not to harm anybody", said the Anchorite pointedly. "I also believe that Only-God-is-Perfect is your god-daughter, and hence has never passed through the parts you mention."
Shun-Company threw a tear-sodden handkerchief at the Anchorite and was led away sobbing by her daughters.
"I must apologize", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, "for the behaviour of my wife; she is distraught."
"I see." The Anchorite was examining the footprints in the dust outside the Penitentiary. "Left in that, I suppose, did he?" He pointed a finger that resembled a dry stalactite up at the sky.
"We imagine so", said Magus. "They must have been confederates of his, called up once he escaped the Penitentiary."
"Or Slavers", said Unity, distraught. "He mentioned Slavers."
"The most notorious slaver of recent years, Arne Skilling, the Terror of Linehead, kidnapped over one hundred families from small towns across the New Earth Prairie", said Day-of-Creation, who had recently been given Leader Vos's Every Watchful Boy's Wanted Criminal Databank by his brothers as an unwise thirteenth birthday present. "He went into hiding and was never caught -"
"Skilling was almost certainly killed by a microparticle hit that cracked the drive shielding on his flagship", said the Anchorite. "He was dispatched on the orders of the Dictator himself, and a thorough job was made of it. Though the flagship escaped by overloading her time distort function, her crew experienced ten years of radioisotope exposure in ten minutes. Almost certainly this would have killed him. No, no, I really don't think the crew of that vessel were confederates or Slavers or anything more sinister than good Samaritans. After all, if a ship is called down down to pick up passengers and a man all covered in his own blood runs over the horizon and insists he's being pursued by folks who'd take his life, what would any conscientious captain do?"
"But he wasn't being pursued by folk who'd take his life", objected Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
The Anchorite cast a disbelieving eye at Reborn-in-Jesus's digging implement. "So? I imagine you're out hoeing a field while the soil's still frozen solid just before dawn, then?"
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus lowered his eyes guiltily, and wrung his hands round the hoe-haft.
"But it wasn't his own blood", said Unity, "it was poor Perfect's."
"I beg to differ." The Anchorite bent to examine the ass tracks. "See here, the blood continues to drip and flow for upwards of twenty metres. That is unlikely, unless he'd taken a bath in the poor girl's O Positive."
Shun-Company, still within earshot, heard this and set to wailing like a siren. The Anchorite ignored her. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but your foster-sister is still very much alive." He jerked a thumb behind him at the Series Three. "In there."
"In there?" Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus pointed at the unforgiving metal dumbly.
"Of course. I'm afraid penitentiary units are really not that bright, and their designers tend to over-rely on the efficiency of DNA testing. If a person has the DNA of a convicted criminal, they reason, why, he or she must be that criminal, regardless of all other physical evidence. So if a criminal escapes and wishes not to be pursued by the penitentiary's warden, why, all he has to do is kidnap some poor girl and cover her in his DNA."
"His own blood", marvelled Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, simultaneously impressed and repulsed.
"Yes. Hence the ass. He probably couldn't have walked to out to the ship unassisted having bled that heavily."
"So", said Reborn-in-Jesus,working through the logic, "all we have to do is get her out of there."
The Anchorite shook his head. "I'm afraid that's not possible. Series Threes are very well constructed. Even if we had anything on Ararat that could cut into it without killing Perfect, it would protect itself, and it can do so both defensively and offensively. It's probably monitoring our conversation at this very moment, checking for phrases such as 'easy with the plastique, Mr. Fingers' and 'hand me that fluorine cutter'. It can also send out a cry for help over up to thirty light years. Any government enforcement vessels in that radius would be duty bound to investigate."
"So what do we do?" said Reborn-in-Jesus. "You can go in there. You understand this manner of thing. I am only a farmer."
"I am not", said the Anchorite defiantly, "going anywhere near that thing's DNA scanners. They might figure out who I'm made of. And that would do us no good in any case. Those devices are virtually escape-proof. I only ever heard of one man who could get out of one."
"And that was?" said Reborn-in-Jesus.
The Anchorite shaded his eyes against plasmaglare and stared up into the sky. "I believe he's just left." He dropped his gaze back to earth. "Which means we have to convince him to come back."
***
Magus Reborn-in-Jesus put his father in his left ear and the Anchorite in his right.
Personality-analogues were handed out wholesale by traders on the wild frontier who knew their clientèle well. Deaths in families were common in the outworlds, whether by disease, malnutrition, poor radiation shielding, or simply forgetting to start a seized tractor in reverse. For that reason, in order to give themselves the ability to pass on valuable advice to their children after they had gone where the puppies went, colonial parents encoded their essences into dinky plastic talismans that could, so the traders assured them, accurately encompass their entire personalities in a handful of HCRAM chips connected to a mono speaker. To which Grandpa Santos's reply had been if that darn jigger contains all of me, why don't it go down the state benefit office, collect my dole, and get me my meds on the way home? The devices, frequently worked into cheap and nasty costume jewellery decorated with hearts and angels, were despised by most, lifelines to some.
Magus Reborn-in-Jesus's father and Uncle Anchorite were not dead. However, they were currently over ten New Light Years away. Reborn-in-Jesus senior had fields to tend and a family of fifteen to feed, and was not about to leave his wife and elder children in charge of such important things as growing potatoes. The Anchorite, meanwhile, had flatly refused to leave Ararat and travel anywhere in Civilization.
For this reason, both men were accompanying Magus as analogues. The old lady on the seat opposite Magus smiled pityingly as their transport dropped through the quicksand-thick clouds of Colony World Twenty, formerly Buttonia, now Anadyomene. The young man was wearing two personality analogues. He had lost both his father and his mother.
"Where are you now?" said his father.
"Approaching the city of
"Population
around a hundred thousand", interjected the Anchorite. "The
only reference I can find to it is in the New Anadyomene Company Savers'
Prospectus, which describes the planet as 'a worldly paradise of opportunity
where green pastures will spring from the barren rock'."
Magus gazed down on kilometres and kilometres and kilometres of barren rock.
"When is the prospectus dated?" he said.
"Last year",
said the Anchorite. "The prices for owning a plot of green
pasture are all in company currency, which is never a good sign. The price quoted is one hundred Company
doubloons per hectare."
The SSTO ferry swept down a long, flashing-light-lined cavity like a sperm cautiously entering a urethra. Giant magnetic arms reached out to grab it. There was a long, long pause while the pressures on either side of the airlock equalized.
"I believe", said Magus, "we have arrived."
***
"That's a Made", said the New Anadyomene Company customs official, unbuttoning his holster as he said so.
"This is my travelling companion", said Magus. "He suffered a horrific steel-pouring accident. I assure you he is not a robot. His organic components now consist only of his central nervous system - which you can understandably not DNA-sample, as it is both delicate and contained well within this armoured exoskeleton. He does, however, carry around a token of his DNA, which I hereby present to you." He handed a flap of skin the size of a smart card through the hole in the bulletproof, bombproof, charged-particle-beam-proof screen. The Devil tipped its travelling hat at the customs man politely.
The border controller looked the skin flap over solemnly and skimmed it into a manual sampler. He looked at his colleague.
"Human", he said. He looked back at Magus.
"Your kid brother, huh? Tough break."
Seconds later, with a fresh and poorly-dressed sample cut
itching on his arm, Magus was loose in the upper corridors of Smith. The entire city, poorly rendered information
screens at the SSTO terminal informed him, was of necessity currently
temporarily underground, protected by antacid coffer dams, overpressure, and a
well-maintained system of alkali sprinklers from the roaring lava-thick,
magma-hot atmosphere outside. Having an
atmosphere one could hurt one's head on meant that the air in the city of
He was hungry. There were prices for what he imagined passed locally for food flashing dully from booths on either side of the terminal escalator. He noticed that a ham-simulant burger cost one thousand company doubloons.
"The trader said he set Trapp down on Anadyomene", said the Anchorite.
"The trader was under some pressure at the time", cautioned Magus.
"The unit was the
soul of gentility", said the Anchorite. "It
barely nicked his flesh."
"It removed all his clothing and body hair", reproved Magus.
"He needed encouragement."
The unit, standing motionless alongside Magus on the moving stairway, stared without eyes into the rows of orbital transfer insurance, vacuum suit overhaul, and personal atmosphere contaminant alarm dealerships that flanked the way into town. Magus was aware that it was looking for threats. He dreaded what it would do if it found any.
"Where do you think he'll go?" asked Magus.
"The next ship
out, and so on and so forth till he's at Space's other end. That's what I'd do. But the very first place he'll go -"
here the analogue paused as if to lick nonexistent lips - "is a bar, delicatessen, naked go-go parlour, ten-hour non-stop
dance-a-rama. He will indulge his
pleasures."
"How can you be so sure?" argued Reborn-in-Jesus senior from Magus's left ear.
"He has been
inside a Series Three for at least a good old-fashioned year, probably
longer. The penitentiary would have fed
him nourishing food, hydrated him adequately, played him piped music, even
extruded orifices from his cell wall to gratify him sexually. But the food would have been recycled faeces,
the water processed urine, the music popular music. And a rubber orifice, no matter how inviting,
does not have the warm allure, the potential for heartbreak and disappointment,
of a real human male-or-female-delete-as-appropriate."
"Your experience seems almost first-hand", essayed Magus, regretting the attempted intrusion into the Anchorite's prior existence even as he said it.
"I was inside a
Series Two", said the Anchorite in his ear sadly. "They
were easier to escape from."
Gigantic concrete letters soared over his head: MAIN LEVEL TEN. Locals, wandering past in company fatigues, stared as much at Magus's clothes, with their colour scheme unapproved by Anadyomene company marketing, as at his companion.
"Give you a hundred dubs for that coat, Mister."
Magus frowned. "I couldn't possibly. That's a full hectare."
The other man - a depilated, delapidated creature - spat. "Give you a week if you're new; you'll be in hock to the tune of a continent, just like the rest of us." The local cast a curious eye at Magus's travelling companion, as if only now noticing him. "Is he okay?"
"He is in constant distress", said Magus. "The pain nerves severed in his accident have been extensively audited and shut down, but many still function."
"He's still human inside there?"
"Please, sir. He
can hear you. A heart-rending plasma
containment tragedy. Only his spine and
brain remain."
"I used to be a lawyer on New New Earth, my wife a doctor. But we dreamed, like fools, of owning our own plot of land. We heard of Anadyomene and all the wonderful terraforming opportunities. The land won't be ready the moment you go in, they said. You may have to work in other company concerns onplanet while the land's being made ready. I been here five New Years now. I'm still working."
Magus's youthful sense of injustice was outraged. "Where do you work?"
"Anadyomene Nanopharmaceutical. It's the only Other Company Concern here. The missus tells me we're working under biohazard conditions no worker would be allowed to back on New New. Every now and again some poor duffer gets a defective hazard suit and his scrotum breaks out in polyps and they take him off to the Infirmary and we never see him again. Me, though, I'm not in the labs. I work in Nanopharmaceutical Protection, manufacturing defective hazard suits." He smiled ruefully.
"And the terraforming?"
"No-one's ever seen any evidence of any, and Nanopharmaceutical was set up with our land purchase funds. If I could just get back home to New New, I'd land a lawsuit on these bastards heavier than Satan-vs.-God-Kidnapping-False-Imprisonment-and-Brimstone-Injury." The worker paused carefully to give Magus time to reply.
"Walk on,
Magus", cautioned the Anchorite.
"He is trying to inveigle you
into an act of altruism."
Other workers moving past were beginning to notice the fact that Magus and the lawyer were talking. Some were wearing badges marked SUPERVISOR.
"This was not a chance meeting", said Magus, "was it?"
The Company man's cool broke. "Okay, you got me, I spend two New Hours in each New Improved Day walking up from the lower levels to here on the off chance a ship's put in. I would give my own prostate and forebrain to get myself and my Yele off this rock. But I got no money left that don't have the grinning fizzog of the Anadyomene Corporation Chairman on the face side. Please, please help me."
"Do not",
warned the Anchorite, "under any
circumstances help him."
"You said you watch the port every day", said Magus.
"Certainly do."
"A man came here. A man of slightly less than average build, middle age, tanned complexion, blue eyes, mesomorphic."
The lawyer shrugged. "Could be anyone."
"He would have looked obscenely pleased with himself."
"Oh", said the lawyer instantly, with the huge disdain of a man not obscenely pleased with himself, "Him."
***
Men had once joined certain brutal military units to forget. Johannes Maria Von Trapp had, it seemed, had joined the Anadyomene Corporation to be forgotten.
The Sub Level Two administrative centre was a place where, if anything resembling a human soul had existed, it would have been swiftly filed, categorized, assessed and taken out of scope as non-cost-effective. The workers here wore different uniforms, less hardwearing, more uncomfortable, with a fabric noose tied around the neck in a Double Windsor. They sported Personal Head Up Display Assistants clipped to their temples, beaming internal memos directly onto their retinas. Some of the more loyal senior staff had internal PHUDA's installed in parts of the brain a middle manager had no need to use, principally the frontal lobes; their eyes glittered with internal messaging.
Mr. Von Trapp worked somewhere in a massive cube of powdery acid concrete which housed External Company Payroll. Only a very small number of pedestrian footbridges led in and out.
"It figures", said the Anchorite, even though his predictions regarding vice palaces and unrestrained gratification of the senses had been disproved. "He wouldn't be interested in company doubloons."
"He breezed in a week ago", said the lawyer, whose name, it transpired, was Iraklis Joannou. "Bought up half the Southern Hemisphere with a single credit implant in his right hand. The credit reader was an old, pre-inflation model. When it read his limit, it broke down with a numeric overflow."
"Impossible",
said the Anchorite huffily. "Only the Dictator himself was ever
that rich."
Magus relayed the Anchorite's opinion.
"There were some", said Joannou, "who suspected he was the Dictator. After all, His Excellency is known to be still at large."
"Hardly. It's likely he died when his supporters attempted to spring him from custody at Last Stop", opined Reborn-in-Jesus senior.
"In any case", said Joannou, "given what you've told me of his antecedents, I have no doubt that the limit was somehow forged. But it bought him an immediate directorship. He's on secondment to Payroll until confirmation of transfer of funds from the New Earth Bank."
"Which gives him about", the Anchorite counted on invisible fingers, "ten New Days, more or less."
Joannou, not hearing the voice in Magus's right ear, said: "The time for interstellar settlement of funds transfers of this size is around ten New Days. A few small colony worlds and financial institutions should be bankrupted in the process, but I doubt our Mr. Von Trapp cares overmuch."
"He won't. Those who shoot you in the head are more honest than Trapp's sort", said the voice in Magus's right ear. "If a scam of his puts a hundred thousand people on the street and one hundred of them commit suicide, somehow that doesn't make him a murderer. But you drop one hydrogen bomb on a populated area, just one -"
"Do we think", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, "that Mr. Von Trapp will shortly be leaving Anadyomene?"
"As soon as he manages to find a way into the Payroll transfer system", said the Anchorite.
"He won't wait till he gets his directorship?" said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, shocked.
"Three things -
firstly, those funds are unlikely to clear.
Secondly, now is the time to strike, while the Company imagines he's
being a good boy, waiting for his Directorship.
Thirdly, if anyone on this planet has even an inkling of a suspicion
that Trapp is the Dictator, then there are Moral Cleansing Bureau ships on
their way here right now. The rewards
for the Dictator's recapture would ransom the soul of Judas."
"YOU THERE. WHAT ARE YOU DOING UP IN PAYROLL?" The voice had come from an unobtrusive Remote Face high on a nearby pillar - a panel with stereo microphones, a single speaker, and twin trackable cameras. This Remote Face was painted to resemble Sweeney, the Anadyomene Company Happy Clown.
Joannou walked over to the Remote Face and raised his voice to a shout. "APOLOGIES, SIR. I WAS SHOWING VISITORS TO THE PLANET UP HERE AT THEIR REQUEST. PROSPECTIVE SHAREHOLDERS", he added.
The voice in the speaker sounded both incredulous and pained. "THEY'VE SEEN THE PLACE AND THEY STILL WANT TO LIVE HERE?" A drop of acid rain leaking from an upper level splashed into the concrete near the lawyer's feet, raising a hiss as it dissolved the surface.
Magus raised his voice. "WE BELONG TO A RELIGIOUS ORDER WHICH VALUES PRIVACY."
"WELL, SHOWING NEW MARKS AROUND IS THE JOB OF THE WELCOMING COMMITTEE. TAKE THESE VALUED GUESTS BACK UP TO MAIN TWO AND RETURN TO YOUR QUARTERS, SHAREHOLDER."
The lawyer nodded and pointed in the direction of the Up elevator cage.
***
Sub-levels whirred past in the elevator, each with its own particular unpleasant smell.
"Were they listening to us?"
The lawyer nodded. "Always. They had the gain cranked right up to the max. That's why the guy sounded like he'd sat on a succulent when I yelled at him. But it also means they probably didn't have a smaller, less obtrusive microphone closer by. They probably don't know what we're up to."
Another elevator cage passed them, going down. The cage was full of offworlders in variously-coloured shorts and utility vests, standing motionless with streams of HUD flickering over their corneas.
"Who are they?" said Magus, following the elevator with his eyes.
"Patch me in to the Devil ", said the Anchorite. Magus fished for a connector on the side of the personality-analogue, raised his travelling companion's hat, and pushed the connector into the Devil's temple. Immediately, the Devil raised its head and tracked the receding cage with eyes far better than human.
"Moral Cleansing Analysts
blending in", said the Anchorite.
"They will be armed. The weapons will be internal."
"Moral Cleansing Analysts are going to retrieve Mr. Von Trapp", said Magus out loud. "They will not discover him to be the Dictator, but as soon as they sample his DNA, they will discover him to be a wanted criminal and rearrest him."
"What do we do?" said Joannou as the elevator cage began to slow. Magus listened to the voices in his head, as his father had advised him. "We must warn Mr. Von Trapp", he said. "We will require his public access mail address. And then you must get in touch with your wife", he said, "and instruct her to pack."
The lawyer's eyes shone. He pulled a personal media centre from his coverall and began punching in commands with shaky fingers.
***
The Departures terminal was one of two long bores of
concrete like the barrels of a shotgun, driven into the rock until they intersected
with the top of
Mrs. Joannou was a severe, spare lady who had inspected Magus's teeth when she had first met him five minutes earlier.
"You've overtanned", she said. "Your skin will age quickly, with increased risk of melanoma. Your employer should provide radiation shielding. You're a farmer, you say? What have you been doing, tilling the fields by hand?"
Magus had only been able to grin and shrug weakly. Curiously, Mrs. Joannou had approved of his diet of potatoes.
"Potatoes are good", she said. "Potatoes and milk, the diet of peasants. Peasants eat better than kings, as a rule; their survival strategy is to outbreed the aristocracy, and you can't breed if you're not healthy. The only thing better than potatoes and milk is good solid meat, mark my words. Human meat, for preference."
The Joannous, who had been a doctor and a lawyer on their homeworld, had two Company lunchboxes of baggage. When Mr. Joannou had asked for their tickets for the impending flight, Magus had simply shaken his head and instructed patience.
"There will be tickets before the flight departs", he said.
A final call was being made for Passenger Zzyzx. Mrs. Joannou's lips were pursed, and Magus feared the very worst thing in his universe, verbose feminine disapproval.
At length, however, a sweating, panting figure struggled up the escalator into Departures, toting two suitcases bigger than he was, assisted by two Shareholder urchins bearing cases that were even larger.
"Mr. Von Trapp, I presume", said Magus.
Von Trapp stared warily, a fight-or-flight debate clearly bouncing off the inside of his skull.
"Plug me into the Master socket on the Devil", said the Anchorite. Magus found a new port on the Devil's head cowling.
"GOOD AFTERNOON, HANSI", said the Devil in the Anchorite's voice. Magus had never known it had a speaker. Certainly it had nothing resembling a mouth.
Von Trapp licked his lips. "Who are you? Your voice is familiar."
The Devil set its hat at a jaunty angle and posed extravagantly. "HOW ABOUT MY FACE?"
"I must say you have lost me there."
"I AM AWARE OF YOU BY REPUTATION", said the Devil. "I HAVE SPENT TOO LONG IN SERIES ONES AND TWOS NOT TO KNOW OF HANS TRAPP, THE MAN WHO MAKES SECURITY SYSTEMS SING THEIR PASSWORDS, THE MAN WITH A MILLION GENOMES, THE MAN NO SERIES ONE OR TWO CAN HOLD."
"And no Series Three", said Trapp defiantly.
"YOU WERE JUST PLAIN TRAPP WHEN I LAST KNEW OF
YOU", said the Devil. "WHEN
DID YOU GET RAISED TO THE PEERAGE? BUT
ENOUGH OF SMALL TALK; YOU HAVE PLACES TO GO.
WE
"
"IT IS. AND THERE IS A GIRL STILL STUCK IN A SERIES THREE FOR THE REST OF YOUR NATURAL LIFE. THERE IS ONLY ONE MAN I KNOW OF WHO CAN GET HER OUT."
Trapp grimaced. "She will be well fed. She will have all she needs to live a long life. The world she lived on, the people there live like animals, trying to grow crops in poison dust. Working the land by hand out under hard gamma. Lifetime in a warm cell is better for her."
Before Magus even moved, the Devil said "DO NOT KILL
HIM, MAGUS, WE NEED HIM ALIVE. GEEHRTER
HERR TRAPP, I AM AFRAID THIS IS NOT A PRESENTATION OF ALTERNATIVES. IT WAS WE WHO SENT THE TEXT WARNING FIFTEEN
MINUTES AGO, PRECIPITATING YOUR HASTY DEPARTURE. THE WARNING, HOWEVER, WAS REAL. THERE ARE
MCB ANALYSTS HERE IN
"Moral Cleansing?" Trapp was incredulous. "I'm no political prisoner!"
"YOU WERE TOO EXTRAVAGANT WITH YOUR MONEY. THEY BELIEVE YOU ARE THE FORMER DICTATOR, HIS EXCELLENCY SUPREME OVERLORD BUTTON HUMPAGE III, AND I CAN ASSURE YOU, THAT SLY SMIRK YOU HAVE ON YOUR FACE WOULD NOT HAVE REMAINED THERE LONG IF HIS EXCELLENCY HAD STILL BEEN IN OFFICE. HUMPAGE IS KNOWN TO BE DANGEROUS, AND MCB ANALYSTS ARE KNOWN TO SHOOT FIRST AND ANALYZE AFTERWARDS. WE HAVE ONLY TO PLACE A CALL THROUGH TO COMPANY SECURITY. QUITE APART FROM THE FACT", said the Devil, extending daggerlike fingernails as if checking them for dirt, "THAT IF YOU DO NOT COME WITH US RIGHT NOW, THIS ONE HUNDRED KILOGRAMME PERSONAL SECURITY UNIT WILL CLOTHE ONE OF THOSE GENTLEMEN OVER YONDER WITH YOUR SKIN AND TAKE HIM IN YOUR STEAD. AS YOU HAVE QUITE ADEQUATELY PROVEN, IT IS ONLY THE DNA WE NEED, NOT THE LIVING BODY."
"But it took me a year to get out of there! A year of hard work that I began planning when I was first sealed in!"
"Then you can get out again", said Magus. "I'll help you get out. Because I'm going back in with you. If you think I'd send you back in alone into possible solitary confinement with my sister, you've another think coming."
"I BEG YOUR PARDON?" said the Devil.
"So I suppose you're volunteering to go back in with him in my stead?" said Magus.
The Devil stood as dumb as a mouthless thing.
"The Series Three learns!" wailed Trapp. "I will not be able to employ the same escape strategy twice."
"When you finally do escape", said Magus, "you will have confederates on the outside ready to arrange passage offworld."
Trapp looked Magus up and down contemptuously. "And how will you pay for such a thing?"
"I will not. You will, Mr. Richer-than-the-Dictator. And while you're about it, you will pay for these two fine people to travel from here to New Earth, and reimburse the debt they owe to the Anadyomene Corporation, at that public transaction terminal over yonder."
Trapp slumped in defeat.
"I concede", he said. He held out his hand for Magus to lead it to the credit reader, and yelled across the departure hall to the flight attendant. "PASSENGER ZZYZX REPORTING, PLUS TWO NEW TICKETS."
"They'll wait", said Prosecutor Joannou confidently. "They have to pay for their fuel for the outgoing trip. They come here with a full passenger roster, but no-one ever leaves. No-one under the rank of manager." He looked over to Magus. "You and your family have done us a great service. When we finally successfully nail Anadyomene in court, we will buy you anything within the value of the compensation."
Magus grinned thinly. He looked at the back of his hand, tanned as a razor strop.
"I believe", he said, "our settlement could do with a tractor. A Terrawatt Altrak Percheron 500, with self-magnetizing fusion torus, lead glass cabin and backhoe attachment. Possibly", he said, "two, one for operational use and one as a cold standby."
"Done", grinned the Prosecutor. "And now I believe the Gate staff are getting impatient. My dear, it is time for us to go where there is sky again."
He squeezed his wife's hand affectionately; she squeezed his in return.
***
The sound of the tramp trader Insert Sweetheart's Name Here lifting off behind them rumbled through the rock and made the sand dance to the height of a man's waist. Magus had already tied his scarf into a turban to keep out the stinging dust, but Trapp was coughing like a consumptive. It was an hour before North End sunrise. There was a chance that the relatively gentle landing and takeoff of a small ship might only make the family roll over in their sleep, but it made sense to approach down the Dry Rille until they were as close to the Penitentiary as possible. The Penitentiary had better eyes and ears.
"This is
insane", complained his father's analogue in his left ear. "You
are committing the most outrageous folly.
I demand that you insert my jack into the Devil's master socket
immediately, so that I may take control of the situation."
"You will leave
the Devil's master socket alone", said the Anchorite. "I
do not approve of this course of action, but I do not want an atomic-powered
bulletproof automaton capable of trimming a man's head from his shoulders in
the hands of a peon."
"I",
said Magus sharply, "am a peon."
The Series Three loomed large, its metal surface glinting in the dawn. Mr. Trapp's hands had begun to shake.
"Easy", said Magus. "I am with you."
"You", said Trapp, "are dead weight. Getting both of us out will be twice as difficult." He took a deep breath and strode up to the wall.
"Where is the entrance?" said Magus.
"Anywhere on the wall it wants one", said Trapp. "It will create one only if it needs one. Unfortunately, it does not feel it needs one right now. It knows it has a full complement of prisoners."
"But my sister does not have your DNA", said Magus.
"She did when she went in. She might not now, but the machine will cleverly realize this is a cunning subterfuge on the part of the prisoner in an attempt to escape. It may possibly be punishing her for this repeated escape attempt even as we speak."
Magus felt a cold blade of adrenalin turn in a wound in his heart. "Punishing her for having incorrect DNA?"
"It's the way it thinks, or rather, doesn't. If I were you, I'd be glad she's being punished. She'll never be that much of a fool again."
"Fool enough to trust you", muttered Magus.
"We get in", announced Trapp, "by convincing the machine that it needs to open up for maintenance. It needs to think it is malfunctioning. It needs to feel in need of a big strong maintenance man inside it." He nodded to the Devil. "Set the first package we bought on Beltane down over there, gently."
"What is it?" said Magus.
"A logical extension of the basic workings of a starship's FTL drive", said Trapp. "Any FTL drive is by definition also a time machine, and hence this wonderful device, the bane of any time lock." He opened the lid of the casket and began to flick switches. "Take the emitter coil over there and clamp it to the hull, if it'll clamp."
Magus shook his head. "Clamp it yourself."
Trapp sighed in disappointment, walked over to the hull with a medusa of superconducting cables, and attached them to the metal.
"Can't say I blame you", he said. "If I'd flicked the switch here while you'd been over there, you'd have aged a year in a minute. You'd have suffocated in under a second, used up all the air in your time bubble. If", he said, raising his finger, "I were a violent man. But I was never in here for being a violent man. I was in here because I'd escaped from everywhere else."
A sphere of air around the nest of cables began to glow like a miniature sun.
"Trapped heat", said Trapp. "The normal oscillation of molecules. Normally it would dissipate, but it can't escape quickly enough across the barrier." He flicked a switch, and the light died. "Now the machine thinks its hull processors are returning a different universal time to its CPU. Messages from the one end to the other can't be routed. It suspects it's being interfered with, that its messages are being intercepted. But it knows it hasn't been cut into. It knows it's still in one piece. So it sends out a maintenance request -"
The top of the machine slid back, extruding a communications array which turned slowly until it found the constellation Tridens in the sky, then pulsed briefly three times, physically shaking with the expenditure of energy. Then the machine reabsorbed its communicator and settled down to wait.
"It requests", continued Trapp, "an authorized engineer. Unfortunately, travel times being what they are, it will take weeks for him to arrive..." Trapp wandered over to the cables, rearranged them to fit on another part of the surface, then walked back to his console "...which he will do around...now." The light flared once again, then died. Trapp pulled out a machine-gun feed of authorization cards from an inside pocket. "Now, let me see - authorized Moral Reclamation Authority engineer -"
He slid a card glittering with smartness into an orifice that opened in the section of hull he'd warped time on as if slit by an invisible knife. A square of hull skin slid aside, revealing a control screen, which Trapp manipulated expertly.
"Let me see - bringing in a second engineer, on training." A metal tentacle snaked out of the hull, swaying from side to side as if seeking an opening.
"Biosampler", said Trapp. "You're supposed to stand still." He pulled back the sleeve on his own left arm; the sampler's binocular eye-turrets swivelled to focus on it, then the machine struck like a serpent. When Magus had finished blinking, Trapp had the sampler in his right hand, held behind its sampling fangs, with a reflective sheet of foil held over its ocular barbettes. Carefully, with his left hand, he took out a miniscule via of red liquid and held it to the fangs, which pierced the top on the vial and drank greedily.
"In case you're wondering", said Trapp, "I took the blood from him while he was sleeping peacefully. This is the blood of one Punchinello Llewellyn-Sforza, grade three RB engineer. And this", he said, producing another vial, "is the blood of Alun Fitzakerly, grade four. The machine will shortly foolishly imagine we are both state-sanctioned and will do it no harm."
After another lunge from the sampling appendage, a mansized section of hull swung back, revealing a narrow corridor leading into the machine. Trapp inhaled deeply and swallowed hard, then stepped back into prison.
Magus followed; the hull closed behind him again with the speed of a camera shutter. It was dark, but his eyes gradually became accustomed to the gloom. All sound from the outside world had been snuffed like a candle flame.
"What do we do now?" said Magus.
"Find out which cell she's in", said Trapp. "There are normally seven cells in one of these things, arranged in a two-by-two-by-two matrix. The empty cell - which we are currently in - allows the other cells to move slowly over time, so slowly that the occupant normally doesn't notice. It gives you a fifty-fifty chance, if you somehow do find a way to tunnel out, of tunnelling further into the structure."
"How did you figure out where you were?" said Magus.
"Have you ever seen one of the really old Earth devices for measuring earthquakes?" said Trapp. "Quite ornate, a circle of brass frogs with balls in their mouths, precisely balanced. When something disturbs the frogs, their balls drop out along an axis directly intersecting with the epicentre. My frogs were similar, made of origami, and you really don't want to know what I made the balls out of, but it was the same principle - aha!"
A touchscreen on the wall lit up with a list of seven names. Magus leaned past Trapp to read them.
TRAPP, JOHANNES MARIA
VLAAMINCK, DR. ANTONINUS
BOLABAS, CITIZEN PADRAIG
DEVIL, THE
CARNEIRO PAVE, CITIZEN YELENA
SPINK, ANESTIS
CHRISTMAS, FATHER
Trapp typed out a few more comments, then swore under his breath.
"What's wrong?"
"The information on the cells' current position is encrypted. I can't figure out which cell is which."
Magus cast a troubled eye at the side wall. "Mr. Trapp, is this wall moving?"
"Yes, it will do that. That's why you never get into the empty cell if you're escaping. It doesn't stay empty for long."
The wall was still moving. "Uh, are we in any danger?"
"I hope not. The machine knows we're in here, after all."
"I mean, it's not moving very quickly, but -"
"Of course, we have screwed around with its innards...tarnation, I hope I don't have to do any real engineering. In any case", he said, bouncing a finger down the list of names, "we have access to the internal command prompt. I can send out messages to various cell addresses, and once we find out which one is your sister -"
"Stepsister", corrected Magus.
"Aha, figured out who you can and can't breed with on this rock already, I see", said Trapp. Magus reddened. "Well, don't worry, we'll have her out in a jiffy...I hope..." he typed out several lines of command syntax, and the screen cleared to a single number in binary:
001
The screen was silent for long seconds, during which the wall crept a full millimetre closer. Then, the prompt scrawled back:
IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?
Jamming his lip into the corner of his mouth, Trapp typed back:
MORAL RECLAM BUREAU MAINT ENGINEER
Magus leaned over Trapp's shoulder. "What are you doing? Just ask her if she's my sister."
Trapp frowned and shook his head. "Six of these cells are filled with people far, far worse than I will ever be. You want to be very, very sure who it is you're letting out."
The screen cleared, and came back:
YOU MUST LET ME OUT. THIS IS A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Trapp sucked in his lips, contemplated, and tapped back:
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
The screen replied instantly:
I'M JUST A LITTLE GIRL
"It must be her", said Magus. "Ask her who her father is."
Trapp shrugged, and tapped the question in.
The screen cleared.
I HAVE NO FATHER
"That's perfectly true", said Magus. "He died in the, uh, plague in the fourth year of colonization.
"True of a lot of little girls", said Trapp. He thought awhile, and keyed:
WHY DO YOU HAVE NO FATHER?
The screen cleared, and came back:
I HAVE NO FATHER BECAUSE HE HURLED ME OUT OF HEAVEN *I* AM THE FATHER THE FATHER OF LIES DESPITE MY INCARCERATION HERE MY LEGIONS WAIT READY TO REND THE FLESH OF MAN DID I SAY HE HURLED I *CHOSE* TO BE HURLED I AM THE STRONGER IN HERE I LURK GNAWING EVER ON THE LIVER OF PROMETHEUS AND THE BONES OF JUDAS I AM ASMODEUS SATAN THE SERPENT IN THE GARDEN APOLLYON AND LEGION
As the reply continued in the same vein, Trapp tapped in another sequence of commands, and the screen cleared to
010
"I think it is safe to assume", said Trapp, "that that was not your sister."
Magus gawped at the screen, his face pale.
"He can't get into her cell at all, can he?"
"Not at all. The cell walls are everything-proof."
"Then how did you get out?"
"Everything-but-me-proof."
HELLO? IS THAT A HOUSEKEEPING PROGRAM, OR ANOTHER HUMAN BEING?
"Doesn't sound like her", said Magus. "Too wordy."
WHO ARE YOU? typed Trapp.
THAT DOES NOT MATTER. WHAT DOES MATTER IS THAT THE SECRET OF ETERNAL LIFE REACHES THE OUTSIDE WORLD. THE SECRET IS -
The screen cleared, and nothing Trapp could do would clear it.
"There must be a watch program on that cell's communications, shutting it down if it types certain phrases."
"No matter, it didn't sound like Perfect", said Magus. "Erm, the wall is getting closer."
"Fear not", said Trapp, and cleared the screen again so that it came up:
011
The screen stayed silent for many, many seconds.
"She could be asleep", said Magus. Trapp shook his head. "An incoming message for the block administrator causes an Appell in the cell. She'll have heard it. Unless she's comatose or dead. Which is really unlikely", he added hastily.
Suddenly, the screen typed back, very slowly:
IS THIS A KEYBOARD?
"That's her", said Magus quickly - but, just to make sure, leaned around Trapp and typed in:
WHO WAS UR FATHER?
The screen cleared and replied with painful, single-fingered slowness:
TAKE-EAT-THIS-IS-MY-BODY OGUNDERE
Frantically, Magus typed back:
WHO HAS EVER SEEN U NEKKID
The screen responded:
IS THAT U GUS?
Tongue in the corner of his mouth, Magus stabbed out furiously:
WE R GETTING U OUT
Trapp stared at the screen fatalistically. "I'd like to know how, exactly."
"What?"
"All the cells are full. I was about to invoke administrator privileges and order a cell-to-cell transfer, but that's not possible. And these cells won't do double occupancy. The inmates are too dangerous. It's hardwired into the design."
Magus eyed the wall, now a full half metre closer, nervously. "Isn't there a LET ALL THE PRISONERS GO command?"
"Thankfully, no. I'm afraid we really have only one option." He pulled out a gun-shaped device from an inside pocket and slotted a gas cannister into its handgrip, then pointed the gun at the outside wall.
"Look away"
"But won't we be suffocated by the exhaust?"
Trapp shook his head. "It's only a noble gas compound laser. It puts out xenon and oxygen. If I ran it for too long you might catch fire. Look away."
The light from the gun filled the chamber, even when Magus looked away.
"But you're cutting into the outside wall! We don't need to cut out, we need to cut further in!"
"We're not cutting out", said Trapp sadly. "Only an idiot would try to cut out of one of these rigs." He looked at the wall screen, which had changed font size and colour and begun to print coded messages at a speed almost too fast for the human eye to follow.
"She's got a spider inside her", grinned Trapp, switching off the gun. "Now, you and I know she swallowed us spiders to catch the fly, but all she sees is spider. She thinks someone's trying to tunnel out of her." He tapped the hot metal with a fingernail. "Ow! But see how the metal's bunching up around the cut, like a bruise round a wound? The wall's getting thicker at twice the rate I'm cutting."
The walls began to hiss around them. "That'll be the gas", said Trapp. "Should take no longer than the end of this sent -"
***
"WAKE UP, GUS! WAKE UP!"
Magus woke up. His head was lying in the lap of someone who stank of potatoes. His brothers and sister were gathered all around him, and they also reeked of potatoes. Their breaths smelt of potatoes when they yelled "HE'S MOVING! HE'S ALIVE!" and "WAKE UP, PERFECT! PERFECT, WAKE UP!" He had not realized his world smelt so badly of tubers before.
He was sitting in the shade of the Penitentiary Unit. No portal or aperture was visible in it anywhere. He could still smell the urine stench of the gas. He felt like vomiting, but did not want to do it in what he realized was God's-Wound's lap.
"SHE'S ALIVE! SHE'S ALIVE!" All around him, step-brothers and step-sisters were dancing. A goat was licking his face with a tongue like a rasp. The goat stank of goat.
The Anchorite, his mother, and his father were looking down at him.
"Are you feeling okay?" said his father.
He nodded groggily.
"Trapp", he said.
The Anchorite shook his head. "Read what's in your top pocket."
He felt in the pocket of his utility vest, and found a neatly-folded square of paper with the heading of the Anadyomene Company, on which were even more neatly printed block capitals.
HAVE CONVINCED MACHINE AM ATTEMPTING TO TUNNEL OUT. MACHINE KNOWS THERE ARE TWO ENGINEERS INSIDE IT. ONCE IT CHECKS OUT MY DNA, SHOULD SPIT BOTH ENGINEERS OUT AND KEEP THE ESCAPEE. WISH IT COULD HAVE GONE ANOTHER WAY; WILL BE OUT AGAIN SHORTLY. KEEP A CANDLE IN THE WINDOW.
X
J.H. TRAPP
Magus stared through the letters as if they weren't there.
"He did the right thing", he said.
"Sure", said Shun-Company contemptuously. "In the end." He yelped suddenly as the Personality Analogue in his pocket became abruptly, unaccountably hot. It was all he could do to rip it from his clothing and dump it in the dust before it collapsed into a hissing cloud of molten plastic and femtocircuitry. He looked up. The Devil was now standing to stiff robotic attention above him. Formerly, it had been slouching like a disgruntled hermit.
"Self destruct", said the Anchorite. "I couldn't have had two of me running around. Especially when the one of me that wasn't me laughed cruelly at gunfire. It could have led to some awful me-on-me violence." He helped Magus unsteadily to his feet.
"I promised Trapp we'd get him offworld when he got out again", said Magus.
Shun-Company regarded her offspring severely. "What a stupid thing to promise. You were in no position to promise such a thing."
"I was in a perfect position to", said Magus. "and I will keep a light in the window." He leaned up against the lamellar bark of a genetically-modified palm. The dates it bore ate cancers. "You didn't check my inside pocket." He pulled out a sheaf of bearer bonds of the largest denominations in circulation, the new imprints bearing geometrical designs where the head of the Secretary General or the Dictator, would formerly have been.
"That is stolen money", said Shun-Company. "You should return it instantly."
"This is compensation for my foster-sister's incarceration", corrected Magus, "and Mr. Trapp paid it to me fair and square out of his directorial salary. It will pay for a number of improvements around here, including a proper working atmosphere conditioner and a thousand tonnes or so more water for the fields. and I intend", he said, swallowing hard, "to go to New New and obtain an interstellar navigator's licence."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus stood stunned. Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus did likewise for only so long as was required to suck in enough air to set to wailing "My baby is leaving home!", pushing her head into her husband's shoulder and pounding ineffectually on his ribcage with her fist. By feminine sympathetic magic, all the girls of the household set to wailing with her. The Anchorite scowled and jammed his fingers in his ears.
"I should be able to afford our own ship with this much money", said Magus. "We rely far too much on corporate agro vessels, father. I've seen the prices at source. If we can buy goods from the independent GM labs, we'd only be paying a fraction of agribiz markup."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus thought for several seconds, then nodded almost imperceptibly. The boys of the household set up a cheer, making the women wail even louder, and Magus was forced to defend himself against a torrent of backslapping.
Meanwhile, propped up against the wall of the Penitentiary, Only-God-is-Perfect was staring up at the dawn.
"It's all real", said the Anchorite, as if it were necessary to make this clear.
Perfect nodded. "It would make stars, the machine, if I asked it to. But I could always reach up and touch the ceiling."
"Reach up", said the Anchorite. "Feel the ceiling."
Only-God-is-Perfect reached up and actually jumped in an attempt to touch the sky. She grinned.
"These stars are harder to reach", she said.
"Though not impossible", boasted Magus, swollen with pride at having been to them.
Perfect's lip began to tremble. "Oh, Uncle Anchorite! It was horrible. The food was bad, the cutlery blunt, and this thing kept coming out of the wall inviting me to bestial congress with it. And it tried to expand my mind with literature. It kept reading me a book by a man called Ivan Denisovich. And another by a doctor called Faustus. You wouldn't believe the horrid things it said about the Devil."
She collapsed, weeping, against the Anchorite's beard-upholstered chest.
"There, there", said the hermit, patting her on the shoulder. "All lies and propaganda. You are home now."
The focus of the community's sympathy now seemed to have shifted to Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus, who was still inconsolable.
"Mother is very upset", said Magus.
"She'll get over it", said the Anchorite. "May I hand you a woman? I can't seem to put a foot out of doors without getting infested with the damned things."
Magus nodded solemnly, and Perfect was passed giggling from the hermit to Magus, allowing the Anchorite to slope off in the company of Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
"Have you really been to the sky for me?" said Perfect.
"To two or three different skies of different colours", said Magus. "One sky that rained corrosive acids. One as blue as copper oxides, with birds with wings the colour of tourmalines. We could ship in air and water and ozone. We have the gravity. We could have a sky like that."
Perfect looked up at the eclipsed A ring of Naphil hanging in space like smoke, backlit by starlight.
"I think I quite like our sky. But I'm open to
persuasion."
***
The Anchorite and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus stood apart, unheard by the others. Only the Devil, standing motionless, heard or saw any evil. It was still wearing its hat.
"If he escapes", said the Anchorite, "or if there is a ship that comes here, or if more people settle -"
"They will come closer to you", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
"I cannot permit that", said the Anchorite.
"We can apply for a colonization licence", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "The whole surface area of this world is not much more than eight hundred square kilometres. There are cattle ranches on New New that are larger. We could apply for a licence for the whole surface. Anyone coming here would have to answer to us."
"They could also turn your application down", said the Anchorite. "And parcel up the land among whichever rich citizens bribed them highest."
Reborn-in-Jesus threw his arms wide. "But who would want the land?" He bent and picked up a handful of copper oxides. "Crops have to have their genomes hammered flat to live in it, we have to bring our own UV to the party, whatever we plant mutates almost as soon as we grow it -" he let the green-black dust trickle out of his hand in disgust.
"You're speaking as a farmer. Remember that a mining company could, and did, apply for a compulsory purchase to ream this world out for its neutronium core. And then", he cast his hand round at the vast sweep of Naphil's rings, "there are sightseers, tour operators, hoteliers. This place is a cosmic oddity. Where else does a place with one-gee gravity orbit inside a gas giant's rings? I chose this place, you know, for the view." He stared up at the brilliant terminator starting to mark out time along the rings.
"No", he said, "to protect ourselves, we need money. Big money. A concentration of money big enough to hold you down under its own gravity."
"And where would we find such money?" said
Reborn-in-Jesus.
"Inward investment", said the Anchorite, licking his lips. "Let me work on it."
He nodded to Reborn-in-Jesus senior and walked away, into the blinding sunrise. The Devil turned to follow him, fluid as mercury. Over by the Series Three, Reborn-in-Jesus junior was already regaling the family with the exact spectrum of the colours he was going to paint his spaceship.
3
The ninth New Year of the New Improved Era was the year of the Great Modern Convenience Plague.
New Ararat had been quiet all through the Fifth Harvest
Festival; the nearby gas giant Naphil put out more heat than it received from
23 Kranii, and Naphil's orbit around its star was very close to circular, so
harvest happened all year round.
Shun-Company had decided on a rotating schedule of Harvest Festivals,
where the children, who had little else to do but sweep floors, herd goats,
weed herb patches, fettle agricultural machinery, tend the comms station in the
Best Parlour, and clear the South Field of meteors, could weave little dolls of
potato leaves that could be pinned to makeshift crosses in the Town Square and
ritually burnt whilst the family danced around semi-nude and gaily painted with
charcoal. The local interpretation of
Christianity on
On this day, however, when little Measure-of-Barley and Beguiled-of-the-Serpent were busy weaving Jesuses out of anaemic brown Maris Piper leaves, the still smaller Day-of-Creation looked up from tormenting a pet hyrax and said:
"A star! A new star, in the East!"
Beguiled's attention snapped up from her Christmaking.
"Single, binary or trinary?"
"Quad, sister! It's Magus! He is back!"
The ship's drives were casting shadows by now as it settled
on gigantic, overpowered manoeuvring jets into
The return of the Son
was a major event, better than Christmas, Easter, Harvest Festival, and Landing
Commemoration Day combined. The entire
family Reborn-in-Jesus flocked to the South End Saddle, that gentle kilometre-deep
undulation marking the spot where
Prodigal Son had originally been designed as a cattle carrier. Bloated and cylindrical, with only a discreet nod to the need for streamlining and atmospheric control, she was built to inexpensively transport six hundred hundred kilogramme dairy ruminants between the stars. Eschewing the new-fangled practice of painting a thin layer of neutronium onto the deck plating for artificial gravity, Son used centrifugal gravity, rotating her bovine passengers inside her at breakneck speeds. She also utilized a helpful byproduct of her FTL drive to cut down the number of feedings and muckings-out required between stars. An FTL drive was by definition also a time machine, and a cow for which time was moving far more slowly than normal engaged in far less digestive throughput than a cow under nominal temporal motion. The cow retardation field extended only through the rotary shed area, the vessel's crew being subject to time that elapsed as normally as time could be said to at one hundred times lightspeed.
Following her use as a cattle tender, the Son had been commandeered for use as a corpse carrier to transport KIA (and occasionally WIA) back from the Front in the War Against the Made. By cranking up the cow-retarder, flesh could be made not to spoil, wounds not to rot, infection not to spread. A fatally-wounded trooper placed right next to the decelerator coil might be frozen in the act of his last heartbeat. Even if his injury remained incurable, hie might at least still exchange tearful farewells with his family and friends back home. The cow stalls had been replaced with coffin racks and body bag hangers resembling a colossal and macabre dry-cleaning machine, and the vessel's hull had been repainted a bright, fearsomely reflective white, with a variety of religious symbols painted on her every level surface.
Finally, following the cessation of hostilities and the expansion of Earth, New Earth, and New New Earth's teeming hordes further out into space, the vessel had been refitted as an army-surplus, bargain-basement personal transport ship. It was not entirely safe for human beings to travel retarded - field gradients could result in biorhythm upset, alien hand syndrome, seizures, even death - but slow ships were still popular among those who could not afford to pay for a month's life support on top of their fares. As a result, Son's coffin racks were now a minimally-appointed radial capsule hotel, often left in less than sanitary condition by their occupants.
The cloud of grit and vitrified rock thrown up by Son's retros flew in the faces of the family, choking, burning and blinding simultaneously. Then there was a billowing orange silence in which the ray-pitted landing windows of the ship, purchased with stolen money, loomed over the tiny human beings waiting patiently outside it.
A massive cargo door thundered down into the regolith with a sound like two ocean liners colliding, and - with surely unnecessary theatrics, as there was a perfectly serviceable, smaller crew airlock further round the fuselage - Magus Reborn-in-Jesus came back from the stars to see his family. There were presents for everybody, of course - for Only-God-Is-Perfect, a programmable scanning mirror that could simulate a thousand hairstyles, lighting conditions and wardrobes without a hair having to be combed; for Beguiled-of-the-Serpent, a battery-powered actual growing baby simulator; for Unity, a mood-sensitive dress that changed colour according to hormonal and neurological cues. Shun-Company, meanwhile, was bought an acupressure massage bed which could be made to exude a wide variety of scents. Currently, it was exuding catnip, and was being inhabited by two wide-eyed Persian kittens, gifts for Measure-of-Barley, who had squealed loudly enough to break quartz when she had seen them.
Reborn-in-Jesus Senior, however, appeared to have nothing. Patiently waiting at the back of the excited gaggle of offspring and step-offspring, he stood shuffling his feet in clear embarrassment until Magus winked and waved at him, beckoning him over to the main cargo ramp.
Inside the cargo bay, which had been largely cleared of body bag hangers, the air stank of cattle, gas gangrene, embalming fluid, wood alcohol, and cat urine in a complex, multi-layered aromatic pallette. The bay contained the usual tractor spares, new strains of potatoes to replace this season's inevitable mutations, bizarre alien food crops Magus had no doubt imprudently picked up at some nowhere world or other's genetic fair, vitamin pills, whole cloth, and stacked foamed slabs of radiation shielding. However, there were also two massive, squat metallic shapes, each bearing a shiny holographic logo.
"Fantastic, aren't they", enthused Magus. "And they'll make us a packet."
"What are they?" said Reborn-in-Jesus père.
"On the left", said Magus, "the HiveMind 1000. The queen unit, which you see here, sits on the surface attended by billions of tiny nanobot workers which can be programmed to search for any substance - iron, copper, radioactives - and bring it back to this hopper here." He tapped a door on the back of the unit.
"Did you say mind?" said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus warily.
"No cleverer than the average hymenopteran group-mind", assured Magus airily. "And over here, meanwhile, we have the GreenQueen ZX9. Similar principle,but sends out little bitsy thruster-propelled work units to locate and bite into small chunks any nearby carbonaceous chondrite moonlets. These are then converted into a nutritious polypeptide mulch and spread all over the surface of the land area controlled by the GreenQueen. And Naphil's rings are full of chondrites. Give this baby a week", twinkled Magus, "and she could cover the entire surface of New Ararat in high-grade fertiliser to a depth of ten metres."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus stared at the machine in undisguised alarm.
A throat cleared behind Magus. He turned to see a middle-aged figure leaning on a stick in the main loading door, twining its beard idly round its finger.
"Do you happen to know, Gus", said the figure, "what a hymenopteran group-mind is, by any chance?"
Magus's smile was unassailable. "These machines are based on a single common chassis optimized in both cases to source particular quantities - in the case of the HM1000, that of transuranic minerals, in the case of the GreenQueen, that of organic molecules. The chassis can be tuned to any end result."
"If you don't know what hymenoptera are", said the Anchorite, "do you at least know what a Von Neumann machine is?"
Magus did. His smile froze.
"That would mean they were Made things", he said. "But they're, they're not Made things."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus's attention alternated between the HiveMind and the GreenQueen as if he had suddenly been crept up on by both Scylla and Charybdis simultaneously. "Von Neumanns? Here?"
"These are army surplus", said Magus, waving his hand to indicate the units. "Reconditioned."
"Not our army", said the Anchorite. "Not our side."
"Why would you care about the War Against The Made?" said Magus. "You're a Religious Ascetic."
"All humanity fought the War Against The Made", said the Anchorite. "Most of them had no choice. It was a question of fight or be supplanted by a superior species. Many superior species, created by us. Thinking more quickly, physically stronger, some of them able to survive in vacuum and liquid helium. Some of them biological, some of them mechanical." He stared at the machines as if trying to dissolve them with pure hatred. "And the Von Neumanns were their front line. We struck the first blow, of course - had to. If they'd figured out we'd planned their destruction, they'd have rolled over us like a tank over a box of eggs. We hit the big AI units in the banks and military C3 centres first, then the human ones sitting behind the desks of big corporations, in front line military units, in athletics teams, in governments...the AI's in starships were more difficult to reach, some of them were out in transit light years from any population centre. We caught most of the military vessels. it was the civilian ones that nearly killed us. The Von Neumann units were way out on the edges of human expansion, preparing worlds for colonization, each one able to tune itself to any end result, arriving on a world, landing, absorbing raw materials from the crust around it, using these materials to make a thousand of itself, then a million, then a billion. Then turning its collective attention to changing the atmosphere, adjusting the global temperature, laying down soil. But all they had to do to defend themselves was stop producing soil and air and water and start producing things that killed people. One of those units, just one, stopped an entire fleet sent out to Polaris. Many of the Made High Command escaped into space - they had been created so cunning, so resourceful, that it wasn't possible to take them all. Even an outnumbered and outgunned Made detachment could tie up a battlegroup. Only the best survived. Only the best. Which is what terrifies, or should terrify, the Government of Human Space."
"Why?" said Magus.
"Because if treated as equal partners to humanity", said the Anchorite with grim humour, "the Made races would have grown soft, like the humans who spawned them. They would have allowed every member of their various species equal right to breed, to weaken the strain. But by almost exterminating them, humanity provided ready-made natural selection. They succeeded only in making things far harder for themselves further down the line. Only total annihilation would have worked - which was what they could never be convinced to understand."
He kicked the front of the Green Queen suddenly with a sandalled foot, and the cheap nameplate broke away to reveal a second badge cast into the carapace of the machine itself:
SORCEROR'S APPRENTICE
MK I
GEN I
Magus searched for argumentative exits. "Maybe they're hobbled", he insisted. "Some Von Neumanns were hobbled. The part of their programming that allowed them to make more like themselves was deleted."
"Don't tell me", said the Anchorite. "The people who sold these things to you just happened to mention it."
"It came up in conversation. They never said these were Von Neumanns -"
"But they put that little seed of security in your
mind, just in case you got to thinking they were. It's illegal,
Magus. It is way past illegal. If the
Moral Cleansing Bureau find out there are Von Neumann devices here, Executive
Order 2219 authorizes a strike on
"Order 2219 was signed by the Dictator", reproved Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
"It's the only order of the Dictator's that was never rescinded", said the Anchorite.
"But these might not be Von Neumann devices any more", said Gus with infinite patience. "They might have been Made Safe."
"By putting new nameplates on them?"
"They made a big deal of telling me their processing capacities had been deliberately downgraded! And they're incapable of self-reproduction!"
"Lobotomized and gelded", said the Anchorite. "Well, I don't know what that would make you, but it'd make me mad."
Magus ignored the provocation. "With the HM1000, we can extract the radioactives we already know lie under the South End. We will be rich beyond the most perfervid dreams of avarice."
"Gus", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus gently, "the
density of the radioactive seams under the South End are what keeps
"It could do worse", said the Anchorite. "It could put the Mote on the
move." He regarded the deck plating
guiltily. "The neutronium mote that
contains this world's gravity does not just sit at rest, entombed in rock. Rather, it is balanced very carefully in a
self-maintaining spherical vacuum chamber operating very much like a
three-dimensional arch. The weight of
"How do you know all this?" said Magus suspiciously.
"I have been there", said the Anchorite. "Not personally, of course - I sent a servant. I am uncertain whether the Arch is a natural formation or an artificial. It appears to be made of nothing more complex than fused rock, which could be a natural consequence of proximity to the Mote."
Magus nodded. His ambition to amass tremendous stacks of wealth had already, in his mind, smashed this minor world-sized obstacle aside. "In any case, I planned for all of this. As the HM1000 mines, the GreenQueen will coat the South End's surface with equivalent quantities of high-yield fertilizer, replacing the lost mass. It will all be done very scientifically."
The Anchorite was incensed.
"There are no other places like
Magus's grin might have been painted on a punchbag. "I did." He fished in a tunic pocket. "And received a reply." He passed an old-fashioned printed-matter envelope to the Anchorite, who opened it feverishly with one long yellow fingernail thick as a paperknife blade.
The Anchorite examined the letter's contents and looked up at Magus.
"Your proposed course of action literally threatens the
balance of the world", he said. "I
have an alternative proposal, an external investor who would put money enough
into
Magus frowned sulkily. "They are not Von Neumann devices", he complained. "But I will delay activation. The machines will be unloaded and left in a standby state."
"That, at least, is something", said the Anchorite. "Thank you."
He nodded at Magus and at Magus's father, and departed.
"Gus", said Gus's father, "you don't want to needle the hermit so."
"What? Uncle Anchorite? He is a fluffy pussy cat of immense proportions."
"That man", said Reborn-in-Jesus senior, "may have been an uncle to you all when you were children; but he came here because he had nowhere else to go, and you are not a child any more. I've no idea what terrible things he did before he came here, but I know he's committed iniquities since. The South End Yard is full of people who came to Mount Ararat thinking they'd run things other than in the way the hermit wanted them. Don't rile him, son. You may think he's domesticated, but mark my words, he'll kill you and every living person on this planet if he once thinks his space is being invaded."
With a final warning stare, Reborn-in-Jesus senior turned on his heel and walked back down the ramp into the middle of his family and a chorus of "WHATCHA GET, DADDY? WHATCHA GET? WHATCHA GET? WHATCHA GET?"
***
In the charcoal glow of Ararat night, with the A Ring hanging on the south horizon, cut off by the terminator in mid-orbit like a sabre blade, and the sky spangled with an embarrassment of stars, the two Von Neumann units stood alien and illegal in the craters they had made in the soil when unloaded.
Suddenly, abruptly, a cowling motored back on the top of the HiveMind1000, and an antenna unfolded quickly enough to spear insects out of the air, spreading itself swiftly into a dandelion clock of sensors that rippled in the radiophonic breeze. A similar opening gaped in the top of the GreenQueen, extruding a laser sampler that span round in dangerous abandon, firing invisible bursts of coherent x-rays up into the A Ring, and observing the resultant twinkles of vapourising rock and ice, classifying them spectrally through a single coaxially-mounted telescope.
Nanobot hoppers opened in the HM1000, and a grey motile
sludge began pouring from its innards, detouring around commercially inviable
rocks, intelligent slime swarming in the direction of the South End. The GreenQueen, meanwhile, disgorged a multiheaded
tube resembling a fungal sporangium, ranged it at the stars, and began coughing
out tiny payloads high into the sky, each one glowing with the speed of its
ascent before it even started to put out the warm
***
"MOM! THERE'S A DEAD GOAT ON THE PORCH!"
Mom, half asleep and cocooned in shawls, stared out bleary-eyed. Goats were expensive, dead goats doubly so.
"Looks like it got et by a Neutroniosaurus", said Day-of-Creation, marvelling. Shun-Company inspected the carcass critically. The Neutroniosaurus was an indeterminately-legged, fallout-breathing smallchildivore created by Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus to dissuade his family from straying out after dark near the South End Chasm. It ate orphans for preference, though it was not above taking a toe or two, or a leg, or sometimes a particularly knobbly knee from children who had mommies and daddies.
"No Neutroniosaurus", said Shun-Company, "did that."
"Why, mommy?" said little Measure, holding on to her mother's leg. "Why? Why? Why?"
"Because of the distinctive jagged bite of a Neutroniosaurus", said Shun-Company. "And because Y has a long tail."
"Why does Y have a long tail, mommy?"
Unity, tall, slender, impossibly long-legged, turned up her nose at the carcass. "That's not magpies nor hyraxes."
"It's the Devil, mommy! The Devil did it!"
Shun-Company shook her head. "It's not Devil-work. The Devil doesn't bother itself with goats, and the Devil cuts clean. This looks almost like the poor bleater was held down while acid was poured over it. Ate right into its rumen, look."
"Can we eat it now it's dead, mommy? We always eat the dead ones. Can we, can we, can we?"
Shun-Company drew her shawl about herself and looked out at a sky that was suddenly, unaccountably raining glistering golden teardrops spiralling round the world into the South End.
"I don't think it's going to be safe to eat this one, precious."
***
"They've turned themselves on." Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus sat at the head of the dining table the family had saved up for, made of real wood from Earth that had got to the 23 Kranii system before the light from the death of Christ.
"They're still self-aware", said the Anchorite, seated at the other end of the table, where Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus usually sat. "Independent thought processing downgraded, maybe, but they can turn themselves on and off. That in itself is a violation of the anti-AI laws. If we're caught in possession of them, we'll be in more shit than they can spread over our South Pole in a lifetime."
"It's not shit", said Magus uncomfortably from halfway down the table. "It's a complex highly nutritious mulch of polypeptides, nitrates and soil salts necessary for a growing plant."
"It's brown and it smells like shit", growled the Anchorite. "It's shit."
"You've been to the South End?" said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "Wasn't that dangerous?"
"Very", said the Anchorite. "The highly nutritious mulch of polypeptides is now so deep out there in places a man can't move in it. I had to take a bath when I got home! A bath!"
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus and his son looked at one another.
"I own a bath", said the Anchorite, in tones daring them to disagree.
Magus cleared his throat awkwardly. "Uh, there's been no C-of-G shift."
"There's a crack in the earth all the way down the Meridian Field already", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "And if you'd troubled to get up early and help your father with the harvesting, you'd know that. If it propagates any further it'll come clean through this room, and then we'll have a hell of a draught in here."
"There have been rockfalls", said the Anchorite, "all the way around the Chasm. Mainly on the South Wall, but doing damage enough on the North, where I need hardly remind you I live. We must shut these machines down."
"What power source do they use?" said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
"Normally fusion", said the Anchorite. "Though they'll take fissionables at a pinch, and they can black their skins to collect solar energy. Anywhere there's deuterium, sunlight or uranium, they can survive and make little copies of themselves. And there's all three here. And", he said, wagging a finger at Magus and his father, "the human body contains an average of two grammes of deuterium."
"These two machines have had their self-replication functions disabled", said Magus hotly.
"Yes, just like they've had their standby functions disabled. But he's right", said the Anchorite. "If they'd been fully functional VN units, they'd have been nose to tail all down the Saddle by now. As it is, there's still just the two of them, plus a big pile of transuranic ingots, neatly sorted by element and labelled. Piled outside your ship ready for loading. Though they haven't touched the ship. Probably didn't taste too good", he said archly.
"So there's less danger, then", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "Than from a working VN unit, I mean."
"In the short term. But whoever decided to frig these things' programming and demote them to upmarket mining machinery forgot that a non-self-reliant machine can't make decisions on its own. They'll continue until every last speck of actinium and californium is eaten out of this planet and replaced with crust which is a kilometre deep, brown, and highly nutritious."
"The mote", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus in panic. "Could they eat down to the mote?"
"No." The Anchorite shook his head. "The mote's made of neutronium overlaid with highly compressed crystalline iron. They'll be neither programmed nor equipped to mine neutronium, and iron won't interest them. Too commonplace."
"The ship", said Magus suddenly.
The Anchorite glared at Magus for daring to interrupt.
"Why haven't they eaten into the ship?" continued Magus. "It's full of transuranics. They're in the circuitry, in the FTL unit, alloyed into the hull, everywhere. And yet the nanos from the HiveMind haven't touched it."
"They have some conscience programming, at least", said the Anchorite. "They wouldn't attack me either. I was stood in the middle of a stream of them. They tickled my ankles. Occasionally, they nip. Testing my DNA, you see. They recognize human genetic material and avoid it. But when machines can make other machines, and if they're clever enough, they can figure out that the conscience factor is holding their creations back, and design it out of them. And even if that HiveMind can't make copies of itself, it can make all the nanominers it wants. There's a big grey river of them stretching from the Saddle right to the walls of the South End Yard, and you can't tell me all of those fit into the box they came in."
"Then how are we going to get rid of them?"
"Why don't I just lift the HiveMind back into the cargo bay?" said Magus innocently.
The Anchorite shook his head. "The system has to be shut down gracefully. If you cut off the queen unit, it still leaves the nanos. Granted, no more nanos will get made, but it also removes the nanos' guiding intelligence. Individually, being the size of a pinhead, they aren't too bright, which means they tend to carry on doing what they were originally told to, and when Ararat runs out of the ores they were first programmed to fetch, they might indeed then switch to a lower-grade metal, like iron." He polished the seat with his backside uncomfortably. "Which the human body contains around half a kilo of. No, young Magus, the best thing you can do is draft a letter to the folks you got these units off, and inform them there will be no payment unless they get a maintenance engineer down here stat. How much did you pay them?"
Magus brightened. "Ah! That's the clever part."
The Anchorite's every hair bristled. "In what way?"
"I paid nothing. I simply accepted their terms of seventy-five per cent of crop yield for the next fifty years."
The Anchorite stared. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus's eyes turned circles in his head.
"You did WHAT?"
"Be reasonable, pops, the GreenQueen is certain to increase yields tenfold, and we'll be richer than a man refused entry to heaven if the HiveMind comes through. I was going to get around to telling you, only -"
"Who were these people?" said the Anchorite.
"Well", said Magus, his smile finally beginning to evaporate under oxyacetylene glares from his two seniors, "just people, I guess."
"Just people, as opposed to reputable licensed taxpaying businessmen", said the Anchorite. "Did they have an office?"
"Yes", said Magus.
"How much plate glass did this office have? Did it have a central atrium and cool tinkling fountains at all? How attractive was the receptionist?"
"Uh, he wasn't very", said Magus. "More heavily-armed than attractive. It was more of a sort of temporary affair, a sort of set of pressurized shacks near the landing field on Farquahar's World. They had these two machines going cheap, remaindered show stock from a receiver's closing down sale, slightly damaged, recently superceded by newer models -"
"Let me stop you there", said the Anchorite. "I believe you have painted a full and colourful picture."
"I doubt very much whether those shacks will still be there", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus gloomily.
The Anchorite shook his head. "I am actually quite certain they will, for the simple reason that our salesmen have no yet been paid. I also imagine that their retaliation for not being paid will not be encumbered by the pedestrian confines of the law. Send your letter; your father and I will deal with these machines in the interim."
"How do you propose", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, "to do that? Those units are designed to work continuously for centuries with one half of them in sunshine fit to melt lead, the other half in shadow fit to freeze mercury. Even your Devil will not raise a scratch on them, I fancy."
"I'm afraid there is only one solution", said the Anchorite grimly. "Nuclear annihilation. We will have to rig up a small nuclear device and detonate it directly between the two units."
"But where would we find such a thing?" said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
"I'm sure I have one about the place somewhere", said the Anchorite. "I apologize in advance for the fallout. There are ways to minimize it. It is bound, however, to have an effect on your crop yields, maybe even the health of your family. I suggest you begin digging a shelter deep, deep underground. Set your boys to it."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded like a living statue. Across the room, the door suddenly CLUNKed as if an ear pressed against it with the force of an octopus sucker had suddenly been released.
At that very moment, Shun-Company entered with a tray of
Real Tea.
"Wife", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, "we have decided to detonate a nuclear weapon at the end of the South Field. Tell Testament and Apostle to get that radiation shielding Gus brought securely welded into place all round the panic cellar, clear the hatches, and tell the children to move their beds below."
Shun-Company nodded.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus looked at his writing desk and frowned. "Where is my paperweight? The sample of pitchblende ore we got from our first survey?"
Shun-Company's eyes remained downcast. "I believe the boys were using it for some scientific purpose."
"Well, as long as they bring it back." He became suddenly suspicious. "What are you all doing in there? I hear you whispering as if at some great secret. Have I forgotten my birthday again?"
"Are you aware, husband", said Shun-Company, "that gorillas eat their own excrement?"
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus's frown deepened. "No", he said.
"But only once", advised Shun-Company.
"I see", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, in a way that made it quite plain that he did not.
"Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus", said the Anchorite gently,
"there are no gorillas on
Shun-Company nodded. "They would be terrible pests, and they are unclean animals. It would be necessary to exterminate them."
With that, she swept from the room, as unobtrusive as a total vacuum. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus exchanged glances with the Anchorite; both men shrugged.
"Now", said the Anchorite, "to the business of nuking your own farmland."
***
The nuclear device was heavy, and required both men to heave it onto the back of Carries-the-Saviour, Ararat's only ass, whose every leg bowed under the load. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus spoke gently to the ass, and reasoned with her, and arrived at a negotiated compromise amenable to both parties whereby Carries-the-Saviour staggered onward under the burden, and Reborn-in-Jesus walked ahead of her holding carrots which, occasionally, he allowed Carries-the-Saviour to catch up to. It had been necessary to use Carries-the-Saviour, despite her advancing years, as the expensive Percheron 500 had broken down, its magnetohydrodynamic motor refusing to fire.
It was a long, dark journey under the stars to the Saddle. Many of the dimmer stars were now perpetually invisible in the firefly glare of incoming GreenQueen workers, constantly headed for their mother unit and the South End. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had not asked the Anchorite how he had come to have a fusion weapon lying about a cave that had hitherto seemed to contain little more than a mattress and a spare pair of sandals. The Anchorite had not volunteered the information.
As they cautiously approached the South End Saddle, however,
the gleaming, constantly functioning Von Neumann units and the brooding bulk of
the Prodigal Son were not the only
man-made componentsof the landscape. In
the dim dawn, as 23 Kranii began to lift its one bleary eye over the chasm
walls eastwards, the lightning-flicker of a welding torch could be seen, and
the stench of rare earth oxides hung on the wind. Petticoated shapes were moving purposefully
in the dark, hefting huge, impossibly valuable ingots of precious stable heavy
elements like house bricks, piling them into
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus stopped, dumbfounded. Petticoats were supposed to whisk around kitchens and vegetable garden. At the very most, they were supposed to be hitched up over pretty ankles when their owner wished to move any faster than a slow walk. And yet here they were, shamelessly and openly welding where all the world could see.
"It would appear", said the Anchorite, "that someone has stolen a march on us."
Shun-Company looked up as the group approached.
"Does your nuclear device contain fissionable material?" she said.
The Anchorite shook his head. "Pure fusion."
Shun-Company nodded. "Then you'll be safe. Please come this way, and try to step over the nanostreams."
Shun-Company, and some of the older girls and boys were
arranging the rare earth bricks into small
"The box contains a quantity of unmined radioactive
ore", said the Anchorite. "One
of the initial samples made during the first survey of
Shun-Company noded. "The nanos swarm in, attracted by the ore - then, when the cairn is full" - a cairn was kicked over further down the slope, and a flat plate made of ingots slapped over both its ends and welded shut - "they are shut inside."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was dumbfounded. "They are mining machines. Why don't they tunnel out?"
"Because gorillas", said Shun-Company, "only eat their own shit once, husband. The nanos mine transuranic ore and return it to the mother processor, which purifies it and outputs it in stackable ingot form. Why do the nanos not then continue to mine the ingots, which contain transuranics by definition?"
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus considered this.
"I have no idea", he said.
"Quite simply, each ingot is status-stamped by the ore processor at the molecular level", said Shun-Company. "Once output, the ingots will never be touched again by the nanominers. They will avoid them; they will not tunnel through them; they can be contained in a container made of them. Magus's ship is also made of ore originally extracted by nanominer; most metal nowadays is. Hence the nanos also left Prodigal Son alone. Had you forgotten, husband, that before you and I joined a damn fool religious order and set out to found a new life in the stars, I completed five years of state training as an agricultural technopollution cleanup engineer?"
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus's past life trickled back into him like
a cold enema. "The Lyceum. The Amazonas
Reclamada project. You were working on clearing out areas of genetically
modified intensive-biome forest.
Invasive, fast-growing, and fire-resistant, created by irresponsible
twenty-first-century ecologists. It
destroyed an area of prime Amazon cattle land the size of
Shun-Company nodded. "And you were working on breeding edible strains of black smoker tubeworm that could be farmed thousands of metres down in the Puerto Rico Trench. We met over soyamphetamine coffee substitute in the Homem Bomba bar. It was very romantic."
The Anchorite kicked at a chunk of regolith. "Do you have a strategy yet for getting rid of the GreenQueen workers?"
"We are working on it." Shun-Company, eyes still downcast, allowed herself the faintest smile. "If you will excuse me, I urgently need to speak to our working group in that area."
She swept away. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus and the Anchorite stood at a loose end with their ass and nuclear weapon.
"I believe", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, "that we have been made to eat our own shit."
"Only once", reproved the Anchorite.
Up above, paired stars stettled on the breeze towards the South Field.
"Two thrusters", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
"Means a personal transport", said the Anchorite. "No freight haulers use that configuration. Too unstable with shifting cargo. Also means", he said, "that whoever is landing cares very little for the state of your windows and your children's health. He's executing landing burn only fourteen kilometres from your house. And he knows that landing in the South End would be bad for him. His treads would sink into the highly nutritious mulch. His venturis would be flooded. Which means", he said, "that I know exactly who this is."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded. "The folks who sold Gus the machines."
"Don't antagonize them. Take them back to the house. I must gather appropriate forces."
The Anchorite motioned to two nearby children to heave the now redundant nuclear weapon down off the ass's back. Carries-the-Saviour's spine bounced triumphantly back up into shape. The hermit nodded a hasty farewell, and ran off into the rocks.
***
"Good morning. Mr. Hernan Cortès Reborn-in-Jesus, I take it?"
There were only two newcomers. Both were humanoid. Both were dressed appropriately for formal legal representation, arrears collection or, Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus reminded himself uncomfortably, gangland assassination. Their business suits were understated, with the mood-sensitive neckties sales representatives often wore to indicate to clients that their motives were utterly sincere. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, whose eldest daughter had recently acquired a dress in the same material, was certain that the ties had been hacked, and were controlled by short-range radio devices about the salesmen's persons.
One of the newcomers sported a tie that was baby blue, and held an image of a dove in flight. The other, however, had a tie that was flat and barren grey. At first, Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had the impression the tie was turned off; then he saw variations shifting within the grey.
"He's artificial", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
The dove-tied newcomer nodded. He was blond-haired, blue-eyed, with a perfect line of glacially white teeth.
"You're artificial too", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
"Yes. He robotic, I genetically engineered human. We are sometimes called Made." The smile widened. "Is that a problem?"
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus frowned. "Weren't we supposed to have fought a war against you? Wipe you out?"
"Indeed." The newcomer shrugged almost apologetically. "And yet here we are. Are you aware of the hire purchase agreement which your son signed on your behalf?"
"I have recently become party to it, yes."
The newcomer bowed gracefully. "We have come to collect our first installment. I am Mr. Columbo; this is Mr. Grausam." Mr. Grausam's face was astonishingly lifelike; his skin was even bothering to sweat in the mid-afternoon heat. In colour, he was a livid mulatto, zombie-coloured, the colour a dangerous man became just before he struck. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus wondered whether this was a deliberate design feature. Neither man, he noticed, appeared armed. This did not encourage him.
"I feel", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, "we had better discuss this at the house. We have encountered operational difficulties with your product."
Mr. Columbo extended a hand. "By all means", he said, "let us discuss."
***
As Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus walked into town leading his ass on a rope, a small metallic green fly buzzed into his ear and spoke to him.
"They have no
interest in your long-term crop yields.
They operate from a temporary office, they turn up immediately to demand
payment, and above all, if the Bureau of State Wellbeing realizes they have
been reconditioning Von Neumann machines for sale on the open market, they will
be removed from circulation to have their commercial acumen surgically
extracted and replaced by more important dribbling and bed-soiling skills
-"
"SO, YOU'RE ARTIFICIAL", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus loudly. "DOES THE LAW APPROVE OF THAT?"
"That is irrelevant to the matter under consideration", said Mr. Columbo. "Why are you speaking so loudly?"
"I have slight deafness", lied Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, "from the machines."
The houses of Third Landing, mostly empty, were looming into sight now, surrounded by swirling propellant slag from Mr. Columbo and Mr. Grausam's engines.
"Easy",
said the fly in Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus's ear.
"There is no radio traffic
going on around Mr. Columbo. That tie
really is that colour. Mr. Columbo was
not genetically engineered for playing well with others. He's most likely ex-military, his brain most
likely not wired the same way yours is.
If he feels like making a point by flaying one of your kids' faces off,
he'll do it. Treat him gently. I'll be there directly."
"We have little in the way of a crop right now", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
"I can see", said Mr. Columbo, running his hand through an anaemic stand of wheat. It had been an experimental batch only, but Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus frowned as the dust-dry stems disintegrated at the Made man's touch.
Luckily, there were few children in
"Daddy! Are these the men Uncle Anchorite's going to kill?"
She realized her error and clapped her hand to her mouth suddenly. By that time, however, Mr. Columbo had dropped to a crouch in the dust, easily, still smiling, making himself smaller, less of a threat to the child. His tie was still blue; it still had a dove on it.
"No, honey", said Mr. Columbo. "Your Uncle Anchorite is a bad man to say such wicked things. Where would Uncle Anchorite be right now?" Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus noticed that Grausam was scanning the empty buildings microscopically, his head turning like an owl's.
Measure-of-Barley looked from Mr. Columbo to her father.
"Don't know", she said in a small voice.
"Are you sure?" said Mr. Columbo; and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus felt a gentle pressure in his leg as Columbo broke his femur with a sly side kick. He collapsed into the dust, amazed at how easy it had been; he felt a gentle pressure on his cheek, smelt real shoeleather.
"Are you sure?" repeated Mr. Columbo.
This only had the effect of making Measure-of-Barley scream, shrilly enough for Mr. Columbo to clap his hands to his ears.
"Their hearing
range is wider than ours", buzzed an informative voice in his
ear. "Maybe
that wasn't an entirely positive thing to engineer into them. Anything that'll make a dog shake his head
will probably make them do it too."
The little girl did not stop screaming. In her current state, she probably represented a minor obstacle to the Made men's aims in town.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus said: "Measure, please stop screaming."
Mercifully, the screaming stopped, to be replaced by simple whimpering.
"Measure", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus through a mouthful of grit, "tell the nice gentlemen where Uncle Anchorite is."
Measure shook her head, sobbing. "Don't know. Don't know." Luckily, she didn't follow this with he went out of town with you.
"I am sorry for the unpleasantness", said Mr. Columbo, "but you only hurt yourself. Yourself", he added, taking hold of Measure-of-Barley's hand, "and the ones you love. You must learn to love yourself." He grabbed Reborn-in-Jesus's collar and dragged him, seventy kilos of dead weight, through the dust up the main street, without apparent effort. This time, Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus screamed as the injury in his leg twisted underneath him.
"Which house should we enter?" said Mr. Columbo.
"Blue door", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus weakly. His leg felt wet. He wondered whether it was blood or urine. The front door of the house was unlocked. His fracture thumped on the threshold. Then his head thumped into the alloy of the ground floor as he was dropped unceremoniously.
"You", said the Made Man's voice in shock.
"I see you recognize me", said what might have been the Anchorite's voice - a more educated version of it than Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was used to. "I imagine it was instilled in your basic programming, in much the same way as human beings instinctively recognize and avoid venomous snakes and spiders."
"I wasn't aware", said Mr. Columbo. Reborn-in-Jesus was certain he recognized abject terror.
"Now you are", said the Anchorite.
"Hello, Uncle Anchorite", said Measure-of-Barley, who knew a shift in the balance of power when she saw it.
"Your associate", said Anchorite, "is circling round the back of the building in hopes to catch me unawares."
There was a sudden soft POP followed by a loud bang, a terrific flash that left silhouettes of all the doors and windows on the insides of Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus' eyelids, and a smell of burnt copper and polymers. Something heavy hit the regolith at the side of the house.
"Watch the birdy", said the Anchorite.
Mr. Columbo moved Measure closer to him as a shield.
"You know that won't do any good", said the Anchorite. "It's been tried before."
Mr. Columbo gently let Measure go.
"What will do any good?" said Mr. Columbo. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, looking up, saw that Mr. Columbo's necktie had turned white, and that his dove had mutated into a swan. The swan, in a tiny fractal animation, appeared to be singing against a snowspattered sky.
"Nothing", said the Anchorite.
Mr. Columbo's hand moved out for the child again, quick as a snake. Before it could make contact, it sizzled off at the wrist in mid-air. Columbo neither yelled nor collapsed, however, but simply converted his forward momentum into a sideways lurch towards the sound of the Anchorite's voice. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had to admire the professionalism of the man. Columbo collapsed, however, onto the carpet, with both legs shot off at the knee. As Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus watched, further awful things happened to Mr. Columbus's body, culminating with several well-placed shots to the spine and head. All through the process, events seemed to be surrounded by a soft white glow. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus wondered whether this was death creeping up his optic nerve.
Then all things were normal again, apart from a guiltily appetizing smell of singed flesh. The Anchorite was standing over him holding a gas laser.
"Sometimes they have spare brains in the lumbar area", said the Anchorite conversationally. "Are you all right, young lady?"
"Very much", said Measure. "I knew you'd kill him, Uncle Anchorite." Measure bent down to Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "Uncle Anchorite is the fastest gun, daddy."
"Well, not really." The hermit hefted a heavy piece of apparatus out of concealment behind the row of EVA suits in the hall. "You remember this piece of gear?"
Reborn-in-Jesus forced his eyes to focus. "It's a converted starship FTL drive", he said. "Trapp used it to open locks. It fools security systems. By definition", he parroted, "an FTL drive is also a time machine."
"Well, sort of", said the Anchorite. "It can speed time up or slow it down. I used it to flick your end of the hallway into slow time. No matter how fast he moved, it wasn't fast enough."
Reborn-in-Jesus struggled himself up against a wall with his daughter's help.
"He seemed to know you."
"He did. Him and everyone like him."
"You fought in the War Against the Made", said Reborn-in-Jesus. "You were one of the commanders on our side."
The Anchorite nodded reluctantly. "I suppose that's true." He rose from his seat, the seventeenth chair in the middle of the dining table that was his and his alone, and began picking up equipment crates spread out over the floor. "Their ship is still here. It could be a Made mind too. I'd better see to it."
Reborn-in-Jesus nodded. He looked at his leg forlornly. "Will I live?"
"Goodness gracious, yes. If that had been a compound fracture severing the femoral, your leg would be the size of a weather balloon by now." He nodded to Measure. "Run, child, and fetch the endorphins. Give your father fifty milligrammes till your mother arrives to splint the break." He kicked the hand laser over to Reborn-in-Jesus. "It's unlikely, but if he moves again, shoot him in all the bad places you can think of."
Weighed down by weaponry, he left the house, whistling for his devil. A grim shadow moved out of an angle of the external walls to accompany him.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus gathered up the weapon into clumsy hands, and finally sank into a dark monster-proof blanket of unconsciousness.
***
"Four landing jets!"
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus frowned. "Could be anything. But run and fetch your Uncle anyway."
Delighted, Measure skipped off squealing to find a green beetle to talk to. Reborn-in-Jesus lifted another child-sized metal locust, its electronic eyes dull and unseeing, its glide planes folded flat against its fuselage, onto the top of the wall, and absent-mindedly slapped another trowel of highly nutritious peptide onto its abdomen end. Building goat-proof fences out of dead Green Queen workers had proved to be the best use that could be made of them. At the base of the wall, a worker he had thought dead started struggling against the mulch holding it in place, eyes focussing and defocussing on its confusing new environment. He drew the hand laser from a vest pocket and blew both its primary and backup brains out.
Polypeptide mulch had proved to be a useful base for mortar, and why not? Animal dung had proven to make effective wattle-and-daub plaster in houses built on Old Earth for thousands of years. Two or three such houses still existed even today.
The landing retros burned down the ninety-east horizon toward the approach beacon Magus had installed at the Saddle. Apostle, shovelling mulch at his father's right hand, said:
"What ship is that?"
"Could be", said Reborn-in-Jesus, "the one we're expecting." His leg still moved uncomfortably in the splint. Standing still slapping mortar on bricks was the greatest mobility he was currently capable of.
"Is that the Investors, papa?"
"Could be", said Reborn-in-Jesus, continuing to slap on mortar.
***
The Investor was a precise little man in an unobtrusive grey suit and a mood-sensitive tie which seldom shifted from an image of raindrops dropping ceaselessly into grey water in slow motion. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, sitting at the other end of the Best Parlour dining table, warmed to him instantly.
"Did you have a pleasant journey in, Mr. Yamashita?" said Shun-Company politely as she served Real Tea topped with sprigs of Real Parsley.
"I was perturbed", said Mr. Yamashita or Yamashita, Yamashita, Yamashita, and Yamashita, "at the amount of space wreckage hereabouts. I and my colleagues passed a junked Skyline-class personal transport on our way here, space in this vicinity is filled with", he regarded the disassembled GreenQueen worker lying legs-up on the table with distaste, "those things, there is a cloud of radioactive metal droplets and FTL components in close circumpolar orbit that strongly suggest a Type Three Prospector was vapourised here in the recent past, there's a wrecked Dictator-era gunship trailing this planetoid's primary in a Trojan orbit, and there is another wreck, a type seven cattle transport, orbiting equatorially -"
"The cattle transport", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus evenly, "is my son's ship. It is currently powered down to conserve fuel. It is not a wreck."
Mr. Yamashita coloured in embarrassment. His mood tie changed images to depict a man swallowing a toad.
"I do apologize", he said. "But you take my point that the approaches to this world seem somewhat heavy with debris, one might even say hazardous."
"That", said the Anchorite, from his chair, "can soon be remedied."
Mr. Yamashita stayed silent for a moment, conversing with Senior Partners. Five generations of Yamashitas had made the family name what it was, and all that accumulated experience could not be allowed to go to waste. Expensive, top-flight personality analogues had been made of all the firm's senior partners before their deaths, and although they had no legal voting rights, their experience was still cherished. Paul Miki Yamashita junior had his relatives' guiding voices implanted directly and clamorously into his head. They could not be switched off. They saw and observed upon his every action, in the bath, in bed with his wife. Yamashita-san suffered from family-imposed techno-schizophrenia. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus found Yamashita-san disturbing, and noticed that the Anchorite, too, kept both hands underneath the dining table where they could not be seen to draw a weapon.
"The senior partners", coughed Yamashita-san junior, "tentatively approved your proposal on behalf of the investors, with minor reservations. The proposed site of the health retreat and neutronium spa would be, we understand, the South Pole of Mount Ararat."
"That's a gravitational gradient spa", corrected the Anchorite. "It's the thick clustering of baryobars hereabouts that gives this location healing properties, particularly for clients suffering from microgravity diseases."
""I would not dare", said Yamashita-san, "to contradict you, sir, and despite the absence of a shred of supporting medical evidence, am sure you are entirely correct. Our investors, Mr. and Mrs. Joannou, trustees of the Anadyomene Development Company Victims Compensation Fund, have past experience of dealing with you and believe your world to possess potential", said Yamashita-san. "They account you worthy of trust. We therefore plan to build a spacious hundred-square-kilometre estate furnished with proper modern landing facilities, a fully-equipped hospital for the treatment of degenerative conditions, luxury radiation-shielded accommodation, a bush baby petting zoo, bioluminescent plankton fountains, a hedge maze, and colour-sorting bowerbird gardens."
"But it would be peaceful", said the Anchorite. "The underlying tranquillity of the location would be preserved."
Mr. Yamashita nodded. "No buildings high enough to throw oneself violently from", he said. "For the benefit of the patients, some of whom might be detoxifying or suffering from mental illness."
"All of whom", said the Anchorite firmly, "would be rich."
"And there would be a wall", said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus with some concern, "between us and them."
"A very high wall", agreed Mr. Yamashita, appraising Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. "Of your family, you yourself would retain a seventeen per cent interest, with your son Mr. Magus and your, um, associate here -" he nodded at the Anchorite " - also retaining seventeen per cent, and the Anadyomene Fund forty-nine."
"Sounds reasonable", said the Anchorite.
"Those are, in fact", coughed Yamshita-san diplomatically, "exactly the terms you asked for. We argued against them at great length with our clients, yet were overruled."
"Sounds reasonable", said the Anchorite.
"Our clients appear to place great trust in you, Mr. - ?"
"I have transcended the workaday commonplace of names", revealed the Anchorite.
A cough sounded from behind Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, who grimaced weakly.
"I wish", he said, "to split my percentage between myself and my dear wife. I will take nine per cent -"
The cough sounded again.
"- eight per cent, and my darling wife, the end point of my affections, the axis of my universe, will take nine."
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus's drink was topped up from behind. The other guests' glasses remained half full.
Mr. Yamashita smiled with excellent teeth. The sun dawned on his tie, onto which a heron strode out and began fishing in the former rainwater.
"Well, now that we are concluded, how do we propose to populate the gardens? Mrs. Joannou is very fond of redwood."
4
In the tenth kilodia since the founding of the New and
Perfect Era,
Rather than waiting for new stars to appear in the firmament and muddy urchins to skip in trailing pond muck yelling 'MA! PA! THERE'S A SPACESHIP IN SUCH AND SUCH A CONSTELLATION!', the family Reborn-in-Jesus had recently arranged to be warned in advance by the new ultramodern landing facility under construction by Temple House in the southern hemisphere of the planet. This new landing, therefore, was announced by a call on Third Landing's one and only videophone, a bespoke device cast in genuine ancient bakelite, consisting of a three-dimensional screen and speakers and one single large ivory button which opened a channel to Mount Ararat's only other videophone, at the construction site.
The foreperson, Mr. Feng, sat in a cosy office surrounded by
robosupervisor screens, grinning at the camera.
"Good morning! We're tracking an unauthorized incoming approaching
down the uphill ecliptic. Transponders
identify it as a government ship. It
does not respond to hailing. Are you
expecting it?"
Third Landing had a number of adult inhabitants - Mr. and Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus, their eldest daughter Unity, taciturn Testament, voluble Apostle, and wholesomely beautiful God's-Wound - but uncommonly, only Unity was at home to take the call. Tall, slender, impossibly attractive, but terrified that her sheer size made her look like a man, Unity hunched herself smaller and spoke into the microphone in as high a voice as she could muster. "I don't believe so, Mr. Feng, but if it's a government ship I'm sure no harm can come of it."
Mr. Feng- middle-aged, portly, but possessed of the single undeniable plus point that he was not one of Unity's immediate gene pool - grinned. "Yes, I'm pretty sure they're listening to us too. But we have nothing to fear. They'll find our accounts in order.
"You think it's a Revenue ship, Mr. Feng?"
"Almost certainly. The Tax Pirates cruise the outer reaches of human space, looking for isolated, impoverished planets. When they find one they land, make up an enormous back tax bill, present it to the local yokels, and wait for the money and bribes to roll in. It's just like real piracy, only with fewer spacings and plump-buttocked cabin boys."
Unity coloured like a ripening fruit. "I'm not sure father would approve of your using such words around me, Mr. Feng."
"Buttock buttock buttock buttock buttock. Feng out."
Unity rose to her feet and called out through the house.
"POSTLE! ZOUNDS! THERE'S A GOVERMENT SHIP COMING IN!"
***
It was the end of the day. 23 Kranii was loitering on the C/D ring division with intent to set. Mother and Father, who were not strictly Beguiled-of-the-Serpent's mother and father, still could not bring themselves to call 23 Kranii 'the sun'. The goats were already penned in in the High Stret, attempting vainly to find scraps of ungrazed green. Some of them were already turning round to sleep in the Goat Shelter.
It was Naphillian perihelion, and the sun did not set
properly at this time of year due to
Beguiled-of-the-Serpent's favourite goat, Shub-Niggurath,
followed her blindly by the still waters of the Town Pond and into the shadow of
the palms, where the History of the Entire Universe had been picked out in
mosaic on the side of the Government Penitentiary by the combined children of
Beguiled sat down with her back against the metal wall of the Penitentiary, took out the cheap plastic encrypted text reader her mother turned a blind eye to, and loaded forbidden book number four, Paradise Regain'd, by John Milton. She had not been entirely sure what to make of Mr. Milton's earlier Paradise Lost; it had made the Devil out to be a villain, whereas the book of Job and the Gospel of Matthew clearly showed him to be God's servant. Perhaps this book would make things clearer.
"I who e'er while the happy garden sung..." began the book. Beguiled, who was beginning to toy with spelling her name Beguil'd, worked her way through the ancient language with some difficulty, until she was interrupted by a clear regular sound of knocking, not so much heard as felt, communicated through her shoulderblades resting against the metal. Whatever the sound was, it was coming from the inside of the prison itself.
Born into a society which relied heavily on occasional visits from passing spaceships, Beguiled was well acquainted with Morse Code. Dotdotdotdot - dot - dotdashdotdot - dotdashdotdot - dashdashdash - H-E-L-L-O.
She turned, and pressed her ear against the metal. Gingerly, not wanting to disturb the constant stream of messaging, she tappedout the same greeting in reply.
The stream of dots and dashes changed instantly. T-H-A-N-K-G-O-D-R-U-O-N-T-H-E-O-U-T-S-I-D-E-T-H-I-S-I-S-J-O-H-A-N-N-E-S-
She interrupted the knocker's enthusiasm with a curt reply. M-R-T-R-A-P-P-I-S-T-H-A-T-Y-O-U-STOP.
The knocking paused. Then, hesitantly, it replied back:
W-H-O-W-A-N-T-S-2-K-N-O-W-QUERY.
Beguiled tapped back: B-E-G-U-I-L-D-R-A-F-F-A-E-L-E-STOP.
There was another pause. Then came the reply:
B-E-G-U-I-L-E-D-O-F-T-H-E-S-E-R-P-E-N-T-QUERY.
Beguiled tapped back a Y-E-S, then followed with:
Y-O-U-G-O-T-M-E-I-N-2-T-R-O-U-B-L-E-M-R-T-R-A-P-P-STOP.
I-M-S-O-R-R-Y-P-R-E-S-S-U-R-E-S-O-F-E-S-C-A-P-I-N-G-I-M-T-R-Y-I-N-G-2-E-S-C-A-P-E-N-O-W-
She clicked the BOOKMARK AND EXIT spot on the reader's screen. Even after she unstuck her ear from the wall, she could still hear the rhythm tapping out frantically. Somehow, the tapper seemed to have sensed the fact that she no longer had her head against the metal.
W-A-I-T-P-L-E-A-S-E-I-T-S-T-A-K-E-N-S-O-L-O-N-G-2-G-E-T-T-H-I-S-F-A-R-C-A-N-U-H-E-L-P-M-E-
Beguiled took great pleasure in tapping:
N-O
Chondritic gravel crunched beneath her heels as she turned on them and trudged back in the direction of the house. Shub-Niggurath, bleating softly, rose without question and accompanied her. The landscape crawled and flashed with the purple noise of shadows flitting by faster than film frames.
There was a rumble of rockets, and a bright star descending
along the ninety-east meridian towards the new landing field. Someone appeared to have arrived.
***
"She's a beauty all right", said Apostle, with the keen critical eye of a man who was allowed on his brother's tramp trader if he promised not to spit on the upholstery. Magus was currently away trading transuranics on the metal markets of Celadon, accompanied by his adopted sister Only-God-is-Perfect, and, at his father's insistence, Mr. and Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus themselves. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was having no close camaraderie in his family.
The government ship was equipped, in the manner of manner of
many ships, to shed its FTL drive, long range sensor fit, and interstellar fuel
pods while struggling down to a planetary surface, in order to reduce
payload. As it was a government vessel,
it should have been doubly likely that its occupants would seek to separate
their ship to reduce fuel costs.
However, this ship had come down intact, despite the absence of a
heatshield down the whole length of her hull.
This made little difference in
The ship had landed on the fused stone strip that had been burned out in the South End Saddle by the construction company. Gigantic fluorescent orange stevedore robots stood on standby in the robopen, and the edges of the strip were marked out by solar-powered visible-light beacons driven into the regolith like bizarre local flora with square black leaves and lilac flashing heads. Across the strip, a zig-zag trail led up towards gates in the Wall. The Wall separated the aboriginal inhabitants of Mount Ararat from the Gravitational Gradient Spa and Curative Centre of Excellence being constructed by offworld investors in the worldlet's southern hemisphere. Presently, all humankind - or at least that portion of it that possessed obscene wealth and very poor judgement - would gain access to the healing powers of neutronium, a miniscule chunk of which, torn from a dying star, provided Mount Ararat with its earthlike surface gravity. Right now, all that could be seen were sluggish landslides of nutritious mulch spilling out through deep-buried vitrified foundations.
The Government Men stood on the glassy-smooth apron in front of their vessel, which recently seemed to have undergone a respray. Many government craft in outlying areas, even today, still bore the eyed pyramid of the Dictatorship. No doubt this was what had been recently replaced, on the vessel's side, by the ring of clasped hands that currently represented the State.
"She's a Model Three courier", said Apostle. "I bet she can make two hundred C. Twice as fast as a trader. Strange", he added in reflection, "for government men to be doing their business in a courier."
"Good morning", said the leader of the Government Men, a two-metre man sporting a face fierce with tribal cicatrices. "We are agents of Central Revenue, and you are Guilty Until Proven Innocent. My colleague Mr. Aidid and I would like to see the accounts of everybody onplanet." Mr. Aidid, a smaller, prematurely grey-haired man with an expression of deep gloom, nodded dolefully. Behind Mr. Aidid and his colleague, other men were already unloading oddly heavy equipment onto all terrain baggage trucks.
"We don't keep accounts", said Unity frankly.
The Central Revenue agent's face lit up in delight.
"Oh, good", he said.
***
"Uncle Anchorite! Uncle Anchorite! Ararat's been boarded by fiscal buccaneers! They've demanded our accounts for the last twenty years -"
The cave was empty.
Apostle, Day-of-Creation, and Pitch-Not-Thy-Tent-Towards-Sodom Ogundere were alone in a large, light, airy space with glistering vitrified walls, free of any civilized accoutrements save a single massive pressure door at the entrance. The Anchorite's bunk, his ancient, counterpane-patched EVA suit, his mining laser, his copy of Vegetius's De Re Militari, were all gone. In their place was a single scrap of paper in the centre of the main chamber, which read simply:
MUST LEAVE. URGENT BUSINESS TO ATTEND TO. DON'T TELL REVENUE COLLECTORS I WAS EVER HERE. EAT THIS MESSAGE AND DISPOSE OF THE POOP WHEN IT WORKS ITS WAY THROUGH YOUR SYSTEM.
Day-of-Creation looked up at Apostle, crestfallen.
"We are surely sunk", he said.
***
Deputy Lead Revenue Assessor Aidid ran a sensor round the rim of the faecal waste disposal unit, tapped the screen of his detector, and nodded at Mr. Armitage gravely.
"Imperfectly cleaned", gloated Mr. Armitage, peering at Mr. Aidid's screen. "This registers the excreta of seventeen recent users. Every bowel bleeds a little, Ms. Reborn-in-Jesus, and DNA does not lie. Your own account mentions only sixteen permanent planetary inhabitants. Where is number seventeen?"
"We're cannibals", blurted Day-of-Creation suddenly. "We ate number sixteen and pooped him out through our systems."
Mr. Armitage turned his fierce face to bear on Day-of-Creation with the slowness of a naval gun turret. Day-of-Creation cringed.
Inexplicably, Mr. Armitage's mouth broke into a smile. A smile with its teeth filed into points, it was true, but a smile nevertheless.
"Is that so? Technically, cannibalism is not a crime in tax law. I may well allow you that one. Failure to disclose possession of an interstellar vehicle, however..." his eyes dropped to para 3, sub-para 37B of the declarations proforma page that lay open on his palmframe, and he tutted, tutted, tutted.
"But we did declare Prodigal Son", exclaimed Unity indignantly. "It's my brother's freighter which he bought fair and square."
"There is also a personal shuttle landed not five kilometres from here", said Mr. Aidid.
"Oh, that", said Day-of-Creation. "That just-just -" he looked around at the rest of his family for a prompt.
"Just landed here", said Unity.
"And its owners just took off again", said Apostle.
"Without their ship", said Day-of-Creation.
"And we don't know who they were", said Beguiled-of-the-Serpent Raffaele.
Mr. Armitage's deep frown of disblief might have permitted small objects to be concealed in his forehead. "There is also", he said, "evidence of a hasty departure by a type three survey vehicle."
"Oh, that one just blew up", said Day-of-Creation.
"Killing everyone on board", added Apostle.
"Terrible, terrible accident", said Beguiled-of-the-Serpent.
"And an old D class gun scout", said Mr. Armitage, "powered down, trailing this gas giant -" he gestured out of the window at the imagined ball of Naphil with his palmframe stylus - "in a Trojan orbit."
"We have no idea", said Unity, completely truthfully, "whose that is."
Mr. Armitage fixed the room with eyes that held belief only that all those present were the fiscal equivalent of witches and should be dropped into a gravity well to see if they floated. "I see. Well, in any case", he concluded, "Mr. Aidid - what is the damage?"
"It is the unanimous finding of this team", said Mr. Aidid, ticking off hotspots on his paras and sub-paras, "that the family Reborn-in-Jesus of location 23 Kranii 3X, locally known as 'Mount Ararat', owe Central Revenue five hundred and thirty-three thousand, three hundred and fifty-two credits at this date, Kilodia Ten New Era. It insists", he said, staring down the bridge of his glasses as if squinting down gunsights, "on immediate settlement."
Unity, quivering with rage like a tall tree in a gale, went through the motions and said:
"We haven't got five hundred thousand credits."
"Then we will have to seize physical assets accordingly. Mr. Aidid - what is the current centrally registered value", said Mr. Armitage, "of a goat?"
Mr. Aidid entered the word 'GOAT' on his palmframe, and read back: "Seventy-five credits."
"But we paid a hundred a horn for those!"
"Seventy-five credits", repeated Mr. Aidid sternly.
"That would make, for the entire herd..." said Mr. Armitage, tapping in figures on his own keypad with the precision of a piano-playing polar bear.
"One thousand six hundred and seventy-two credits", said Unity without thinking. Mr. Aidid shot her an alarmed look of reappraisal, as if only now considering her to be another human being.
"We will itemize the goods we propose to requisition", said Mr. Armitage. "As periods of indentured servitude for payments of revenues owed have recently become acceptable standard practice, we are required to sequester all planetary inhabitants of working age until the exact terms of the settlement become clear. Is there a strongroom or jailhouse we could lock you and your brothers and sister in?"
Unity blinked to try and clear her eyes and ears of madness. "Uh, there's the Panic Cellar, it's radiation-proof and it gets used as a drunk tank if we need it, though you need a combination to lock and unlock it -"
"Please be so kind as to remember the combination for us. While you are locked in, Mr. Aidid will discuss the fine detail of our requisition with you here in your own home, in the environment where you feel safest. In the meantime, I have other work to attend to." He bent into a bow, the end point of which would have connected his lips with Unity's hand had she allowed it to.
"I'm not going into no cellar", objected Apostle ungrammatically.
"I'm afraid", said Mr. Armitage, straightening up with a thin smile, "I must insist."
"I'm not going into no cellar", said Apostle, "never."
Mr. Armitage smiled and produced a pepperbox laser. He flicked the action to ACQUIRE MULTIPLE TARGETS; the hydra-heads of fibre optics on the laser's barrel turned and twined until they were lined up on every other living person in the room - including, Unity was intrigued to note, Mr. Aidid.
"Into the cellar, please", said Mr. Armitage.
Apostle glared darkly at the tax assessor, but complied, filing with all other adult family members into the pressure door under the stairs. The gun was waved at Mr. Aidid as peremptorily as at the Reborn-in-Jesuses; he dropped meekly into line. Finally, Unity descended, turning to look serenely out at Mr. Armitage, who grinned back.
"The Devil", said Unity, "will punish you for your wickedness if you harm any member of my family."
"The combination, please", said Mr. Armitage, realigning his hydra-heads on Beguiled-of-the-Serpent, who was not yet of working age and hence still outside the cellar.
Unity gave the combination.
The door closed. Very slowly, she
could hear fingers changing the combination on the keypad on the other
side. After a brief hiatus, the
emergency lights came on, red as dying embers, like daylight on
Mr. Aidid shook his head. "Such poor keyboard speed. Surely you realize such a man could never even make a Grade One in the Revenue Service?"
Unity scowled. "I beg your pardon?"
Aidid stared at Unity in disbelief. "You don't for one minute think those men out there are genuine Central Revenue Agents, do you?"
***
"So you are a genuine Central Revenue Agent."
Mr. Aidid nodded. "The blood of Saul runs in my veins. I must apologize for the perversion of correct revenue collection processes your family has been subjected to. That ship, alas, is using the transponders from a Central Revenue ship, my ship, the Render Unto Caesar. We dropped back into curvespace a couple of days back in the Verdastelo system, a routine census and assessment mission on a stage three colony, when we received a distress call in the UHF band. A mail courier in difficulty, disabled by a liquid helium cloud in deep space; the vapour had oozed through her hull, so the crew said, and then become gaseous, contaminating the ship's air and causing multiple hull breaches via dry and wet ice damage. The crewman logging the call certainly spoke with a convincingly squeaky voice. Unfortunately, when we boarded, the ship's allegedly disabled crew rose up and attacked us, demanding that our captain instruct them as to how to remove and reinstall our transponder on their own vessel, and even that I accompany them here to reinforce their bona-fides as Revenue agents. They plan something here; I have no doubt that it is dreadful." He shook his head vehemently. "That assessment of your planetary back tax bill was highly inflated. I was acting under duress -"
Apostle had clapped a hand over Mr. Aidid's mouh. "We understand. Now, however, we find ourselves locked in a storm refuge underground with pressing need to leave it. Does the equipment officially issued you as a state tax assessor include heavy cutting gear or explosives at all?"
Mr. Aidid thought for several seconds, and said: "No. No, just the personal palmframe and the official collector's sash."
Apostle punched a nearby wall. The anti-lunatic padding ate the sound of the impact before it even reached the two metres of anti-neutron and anti-gamma laminates beyond it. He pummelled the wall with a farmer's muscles till his knuckles grew bloody. Discreetly, as Apostle wasted air, the integral CO2 recycler cut in.
Eventually, Apostle stopped, panting, aware his efforts were coming to nothing.
"Well", he said, "at least we know our tax bill won't be as large as we thought."
***
Beguiled-of-the-Serpent pelted down the front path between rows of wilted poppies. Mother had never been able to convince them to grow on Ararat. Outside, the air was still warm. Goats were wandering about unconcernedly, chewing the cud and watching the newcomers from the tax collector's ship without concern. Four of them were currently shifting a large cylindrical device they had unloaded from a surface rover to the edge of the Penitentiary, extending cables from it to clip onto the metal. Mr. Armitage, meanwhile, was supervising the unloading of other equipment - a portable fusion torus, cutting tools, explosives.
Mr. Armitage noticed Beguiled's presence. "Hi there short stuff. Don't you worry, we'll have your brothers and sisters out of there just as soon as we have our own business sorted out."
"I'm not short", said Beguiled. "I am tall for my age. I am five kilodia old. Why are you trying to break into the Penitentiary with a temporal accelerator?"
Mr. Armitage looked down his totem-pole nose with surprise, and new respect. "Why? Would that be a bad idea in your opinion?"
"Well, it worked the last time Mr. Trapp tried it. But the Penitentiary learns from its mistakes. It's programmed to. The same trick probably won't work twice."
Mr. Armitage grinned a massive array of cubic-zirconia-studded teeth. "Mr. Trapp. That would be Hans Trapp, I take it? The cracksman?"
"He describes himself as a security consultant", said Beguiled. "Mother says he is not an irretrievably bad man, only a thief."
Mr. Armitage's eyes rolled in his head. "So he's not in there any more."
"Oh, yes. He did escape, but Father made him go back in."
The smile broadened and, if this was possible, became even
whiter. "Excellent. Now you run along, tall stuff. Some of this gear is dangerous." He turned and yelled to one of his fellow
taxmen. "
***
Ground crunched under Beguiled's EVA shoes as she scrambled round to the front of the Penitentiary under the palms. Now on a side of the device invisible to the taxman, lowered her face close to the metal, and set to tapping hard with her knuckles.
M-R-T-R-A-P-P-R-U-T-H-E-R-E-M-R-T-R-A-P-P-R-U-T-H-E-R-E-
Presently there was an answering series of taps.
Y-E-S-W-H-O-R-U-STOP
B-E-G-U-I-L-D, tapped Beguiled. T-H-E-R-E-R-M-E-N-H-E-R-E-2-G-E-T-U-O-U-T-W-I-T-H-A-G-R-A-V-I-T-Y-C-U-T-T-E-R-STOP
The Penitentiary paused, and then tapped back T-H-A-T-W-O-N-T-W-O-R-K-W-H-O-R-T-H-E-Y-B-A-D-M-E-N-QUERY
N-O-C-E-N-T-R-A-L-R-E-V-E-N-U-L-E-A-D-E-R-I-S-C-A-L-L-E-D-R-M-I-T-A-G-E-H-E-K-N-O-W-S-U-STOP
K-N-O-W-N-O-O-N-E-C-A-L-L-E-D-R-M-I-T-A-G-E-W-H-A-T-S-H-E-L-O-O-K-L-I-K-E-QUERY
S-C-A-R-R-D-F-A-C-E-V-E-R-Y-T-A-L-L-STOP
There was another long pause. Then the metal tapped back frantically T-H-A-T-I-S-N-O-R-E-V-E-N-U-M-A-N-I-F-H-E-G-E-T-S-M-E-O-U-T-I-A-M-D-E-A-D-A-L-E-R-T-A-U-T-H-O-R-I-T-I-E-S-S-E-N-D-A-N-S-O-S-
C-A-L-M, tapped Beguiled. E-V-R-Y-O-N-E-L-O-C-K-D-U-P-B-Y-T-A-X-M-E-N-I-D-O-N-T-H-A-V-E-P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D-F-O-R-C-O-M-M-S-S-U-I-T-E-
Another pause. Then the metal tapped back:
W-H-E-R-E-T-H-E-Y-L-O-C-K-D-U-P-W-H-A-T-S-O-R-T-O-F-L-O-C-K
***
The house was unguarded. The next smallest girls, Measure-of-Barley and Be-Not-Near-Unto-Man-In-Thy-Time-Of-Uncleanness, were sitting sobbing on the front step. Goats were walking freely through the house. Inside the hall, Day-of-Creation was attempting to convince one to eat a curtain.
"Stop that", said Beguiled. "We have to deal with the taxmen."
"Pa and Uncle Anchorite and the Devil will deal with them when they get back", said Day-of-Creation unconcernedly, trying gamely to feed the artificial fibre through the ruminant's jaws.
"Not this time", said Beguiled, dropping to her knees in front of the combination lock. "Uncle Anchorite has run away, remember? This time there is no Devil to save us. Only ourselves."
Day-of-Creation scoffed, giving up on the drapes and instead attempting to force a corner of carpet into the uninterested beast. "And how are you going to do that?"
"These model three-twenties", said Beguiled knowledgeably, "have a second secret factory-set combination for engineers to use in case of accidental lock-in."
Day-of-Creation blinked, Beguiled's fingers stabbed at the keyboard, and the lock motored open. The huge cube of a door swung cleanly out of the jamb; behind it, startled faces squinted into the light.
"How did you -?" gasped Day-of-Creation.
"They're not the most secure of doors", shrugged Beguiled airily. "Unity! Apostle! They aren't really taxmen! They came here to get out Mr. Trapp! We haven't much time!"
Unity pushed out into the hall. "We're aware. Shut that front door and get all the little ones indoors before they give us all away. We have to hold a Council of War."
***
Through the net curtains and the gold-plated glass, Armitage's confederates could be seen assembling a massive device resembling a set of basketball hoops gradually reducing in size, levelled at the side of the Penitentiary like a gun. From positions of concealment behind armchairs, dressers, and cabinets, the Reborn-in-Jesus children observed without being observed.
"Prisoners", said Unity, "don't pay tax. They are not interested in Mr. Trapp for his money. As far as they know, he's earned no money since being incarcerated."
Apostle, on the other side of the Best Parlour, was rummaging in the King Charles III Ikea Armoire. "I can't find old man Allion's handgun. I could swear papa kept it in here."
"Keep your nose out of such matters. That piece's not been fired in close on nine kilodia. It'll more like cook up in your hand. Besides, it's only a cavitating-round rail pistol, practically an antique. Armitage's men will have better guns than that, and know how to use them; and they're probably wearing all sorts of armour."
Apostle sulked. "We've only seen one gun."
"Uncle Anchorite says, never assume what you've seen is all your enemy has, and never assume your enemy has what you think you've seen."
Heads around the room all nodded solemnly. Uncle Anchorite was always right.
"So what do you suggest?" Apostle held up a carpet beater sardonically. "I could beat the dustmites out of 'em."
"First off, we've got to get the young uns out of here."
"But we've got to go past their ship to get to the South End Construction -"
"You're not going there. You're going out to Dispater Crater."
"Why is it me doing it? And why there? It's an empty dust bowl."
"Because I trust you to do it. And because it is an empty dust bowl. Mom and Pop never filled in Dispater, though they could have made a hectare field out of it. And the Devil's been seen there. And have we seen any ship leave Ararat in the last five decadia?"
Beguiled's eyes widened. "You think Uncle Anchorite's still here?"
"You know as well as I do he doesn't really live in that damn cave. It's empty nine times out of ten. And there's no back entrance out of it either. It's a decoy to prove his hermit affidavits. I suspect Uncle Anchorite has a large and spacious abode elsewhere on this planet. The surface gravity here on Ararat might be one half Old Earth normal, but only four hundred metres down, it's Old Earth standard. And those prospectors who met with that unhappy accident a couple years back sent a drilling drone down there and reported an oxy/nitro atmosphere."
Day-of-Creation was spellbound. "You think he lives down there?"
"I'm sure of it. It's his planet-sized Panic Cellar. And I'm equally sure there' s a tunnel coming up from there to Dispater. All you have to do is look for it with one of those densitometers the rockhounds left behind in their haste to be elsewhere."
"Whilst you'll be doing what?"
Mr. Aidid answered the question. Though a small, physically unprepossessing man, his jaw was set as determinedly as if he had been disputing a Super Tax rebate. "We will be using your family communications array to launch an emergency message missile to Celadon loaded with a Code Grey."
"What's a Code Grey?"
"An encrypted all-points SOS to all Revenue vessels in the Celadon system", said Aidid. "I have reason to believe there are two, one of which is being operated by the Special Revenue Service."
"I see", said Apostle.
"They could be here", said Aidid, "within days."
"Pardon my lack of enthusiasm", said Apostle. "Also, Armitage's men have cut the link between here and the comms array. Anyone making a call would have to go outside and climb right up the comms tower to do it. How are you going to do that under the eyes of a ship full of armed men?"
"We will have a diversion", said Unity.
"What sort of diversion?"
Unity smiled and produced old man Allion's handgun. All twelve of its barrels were loaded.
***
The weapon, Unity knew, was only accurate up to a hundred metres. The old Arkarch had intended it to be used for crowd control; it could cough out a cloud of ferrous metal swarf thick enough to pick a man's flesh from his bones, but that cloud became random shrapnel beyond whites-of-eyes distance. For this reason, Unity was crawling on her knees and elbows, trying to get as close to the taxmen as possible.
If I took only one out - that would even the odds...if I took
out Armitage, the leader...
Yet she knew in her inmost heart that she might not hit Armitage, even with the nightmarish weapon she was holding, and that even if she did, Armitage might be wearing some manner of protective clothing. And even if she hit and killed Armitage, if they had one armed man left, he would still be the equal of whole of the rest of Third Landing. And how would she get away, considering they had a surface rover, and almost certainly better weapons than hers, that might be able to pick her off at ten times the range her petty little paintstripper was accurate at?
The rover was between her and them, parked up by the goat track gate on six huge wire tyres, metres from the waters of the Pond. The goat gate had been left open. Goats were ambling boldly in and out.
Surface rovers were, unfortunately, made to be resistant to micrometeroids - and hence also to gunfire - in a way that people were not. Even though this one was operating in an atmosphere, the tyres showed it had vacuum capability. The gun might not be able to damage it irreparably.
However, there was one thing a farm girl with gravity-made muscles could do to a piece of equipment designed to be used on airless worlds with surfaces dry as dust. Unseen from the Penitentiary, she rose from concealment, walked up to the back of the Rover, positioned herself under its back bumper and, biceps and quadriceps straining, lifted it clear of the ground. Then, walking her hands slowly up its belly, she gave it one final shove and watched it topple into the deep waters of the Pond with a crash that sounded the way she imagined thunderous divine retribution should. She hoped it hadn't cracked the Pond's waterproof lining.
Then she was gone, running for her life, the handgun forgotten, bellyflopping into the crops. Almost certainly, though, they would be able to see her on infrared. They were very well-equipped. She jumped back up and continued running, ducking behind a tractor. There was a bright flash like a ship going into FTL, and a cloud of metal droplets stung her cheek. They were shooting at her. Looking behind, she zigzagged to keep the tractor between her and them. The Ten-North Drain was only a few metres away; it had thick concrete banks, and would surely mask her IR signature.
And then, in a moment, it was all over. Her frantic stumbling through the potato field had been far slower than the stealthy running of one of Mr. Armitage's men down the Ninety-East track. He also had gravity-made muscles, and he was also carrying a gun. An infantry weapon, of the sort designed to kill people riding inside heavy armoured vehicles. The man had an expression of detached professionalism that gave her little comfort.
Then, suddenly, the man fell over onto the packed earth, his gun not even going off. Unity walked forward, examining the body in wonder; not a mark appeared on it. Surely a wound would have bled? With the professional eye of one who had seen many people who had died by violence, she turned the body over and there, two fingers beneath the nipple, found the tiny wound she'd suspected. It probably went all the way through the chest from front to back. The wound had not bled out because heart shots didn't.
She looked up at the surrounding crops. Incautious laser fire had now set a hectare or more alight. That would play havoc with the world's oxygen resources. Papa would have to buy in more. Still, the smoke and flames, combined with Ararat's ten-metre horizon, would prevent the rest of Armitage's men from shooting at her.
"So", she said in a loud, clear voice, "you are still here after all. Thank you, and please look after my brothers and sisters."
Wind rustled the potato stalks in answer. But of course, there was very little wind on Ararat.
***
Up on the comms tower, Mr. Aidid clung to the maintenance
ladder trying to remain as motionless as a bittern in reeds, feeling as obvious
as an elephant in a sauna. Mr. Armitage's
men were running, shouting, firing far below.
He had to fight both his fear of getting shot if he moved and his fear
of falling from his perch if he got shot.
On Ararat, unfortunately, twenty metres above the ground felt closer to
two hundred; the world's curvature was visible even from ground level, and up
here it seemed like he was perched on the side of the
He had been made to memorize the algorithm for sending out Code Grey as a neophyte Collector; it came back to him easily, though the unfamiliar controls for Ararat's emergency FTL messaging system were more difficult. If only he could remember how to call up the user manual on a separate screen...
He was fairly sure he had disabled sound, and the screen brightness was turned down as far as it could be without the display becoming unreadable. Whatever he did up here would be as unobtrusive as possible. The sound of ionized air crackling far below, the smell of burning vegetation, and the stink of pond-bottom muck bubbling to the surface as the rover sank, all rose up to him. Surely everyone on the ground below was too busy, too concerned with finding places to go and people to shoot, to worry about seeing and shooting him?
Only one more sequence, and the Mayday missile would pop out of its housing and begin to winch itself up the tower to take-off height. They would surely notice that. He had to be off the tower before then; not just for personal safety, but also to make sure Armitage and his crew still thought all the adults on Ararat were still locked in the Panic Cellar. They might not have recognized Unity. She had tied her hair back and put on a pair of her brother's overalls, and many of them had only ever seen her from a distance.
He set up the Mayday missile launch as a one-time job in the tower's schedule, closed the maintenance hatch gingerly, and locked it. Then a voice from the ground below froze him like a low-fee traveller.
"BEY, IS THAT YOU UP THERE ON THE TOWER?"
Mr. Aidid had no choice but to nod and wave.
"WELL, SHINE A LIGHT ON WHOEVER JUST TRASHED OUR ROVER AND TAKE THEM DOWN ONE KNEECAP AT A TIME."
Mr. Aidid nodded and waved again, circled the tower out of sight, and slid down the ladder at a speed that burned his fingers. By the time he heard someone else yell "THAT'S NOT ME UP THE TOWER, BOSS", he was running through the line of buildings and away.
***
No paths led to Dispater Crater. It was surrounded by fiels of two-metre-tall potatoes of a particularly pungent pink skinned Bolivian variety. The crater itself was both larger and deeper than it once had been. Apostle remembered it from his childhood as a classic lenticular meteorite impact crater, surrounded by rays of bright ejecta. Now, it was a shell hole. Something had once come out of that crater, Apostle knew - something that arose whenever external forces threatened the peace of Ararat, which was to say, the Anchorite's peace. Farming families the the hermit could stomach, but when prospectors had come here and threatened to remove the gravitational kernel of the planet, he had sent his Devil out to do damage. The Devil had done battle here with the prospectors, and one or the other party had unleashed forces that had torn this great hole in the earth.
The Devil was nowhere in evidence now. The density scanner, however, when set to differentiate between air and solid matter, showed a set of promisingly regular caves beneath the surface. There was little clue, however, as to how the caves could be reached. Was there some sort of door?
Guessing that anything built of alloys transported across space as payload would be less dense than the surrounding rock, he set the density threshold to two tonnes per cubic metre, and was rewarded with a precise three-dimensional diagram of a door assembly hidden in the grass at the very base of the crater. He bent down to dig in the thin soil with his hand. The marram grass was sharp, and its roots held the earth together like solid rock. He sliced into it with a carving knife he had liberated from the kitchen when Unity had not been looking. The grass came away in clumps, revealing a dull sheen of metal.
"How much longer
we got to stay here?", whispered Measure-of-Barley from a prone
position in the potato. "My nose tickles. I think I got to sneeze."
"I think I got to pee." This raised a snigger, and started a game of bodily function oneupmanship while Apostle excavated all around the circular object which was plainly a pressure door. On the pressure door were the words:
PEARLYGATE VACUUM DOOR CO , PORT YUM CAX, CERES
He suddenly noticed an emerald green beetle buzzing round his head in frantic random hyperbolae.
"Uncle Anchorite?" he said.
"I got to give
birth to the Antichrist -"
The bettle zeroed in on his ear and flew right in. He almost panicked and attempted to fish it out; it crawled around the inside of his otic canal, squeaking in a tickly, buzzing soprano:
"DON'T TOUCH THAT
DOOR! DON'T TOUCH THAT DOOR! DON'T TOUCH IT!"
He leapt back from the door in surprise. The insect stayed with him.
"Uncle Anchorite?"
"GOOD LAD. I ADDED A FEW SURPRISES SINCE THE LAST TIME
SOMEONE TRIED TO BREAK IN. NOW LEAVE THE
DOOR AS IT IS AND CRAWL ON ALL FOURS UP THE TRACTOR TRACK BETWEEN THE ROWS OF
SPUD IN FRONT OF YOU. ON NO ACCOUNT
REMOVE THE BEETLE FROM YOUR EAR."
"I got to do five babies and a Nabortion."
He crawled up the row for several yards before realizing a vital fact.
"This track ain't real. Our tractor don't make these tracks."
"The tracks lead
this way", said a man's voice among the crops. "They
bin trampling the stalks flat."
"I HAVE MY OWN TRACTOR", said the voice in Apostle's ear. The earth at the end of the track suddenly crazed and broke open as the lid of a far smaller hatchway pushed through it. The Anchorite was born into the world like a chick through an eggshell.
"Small footprints. Kids", said the voice from the crops.
The Anchorite had a small metal pod adhering to the flesh of his throat. When he next spoke, Apostle heard him in two voices. "Well, don't just sit there, get in here. Get them all in here. How many of you are there?"
"Don't care if they are kids. There's someone full-grown around here using them as spotters. I want 'em for leverage and questioning." By now, he could hear heavy boots walking through the crops.
The Anchorite sprang out of the head of his tunnel like a trapdoor spider and said softly to nobody in particular:
"You, my dear fellow, have about twenty seconds to live."
He began mouthing softly to himself, and only after several seconds did Apostle realize he was counting down. He scrambled into the hole, followed by his brothers and sisters in alphabetical order.
As soon as the Reborn-in-Jesuses had finished scrambling, the Anchorite leapt into the hole behind them and slammed the hatch, still counting inexorably towards zero.
"Seventeen -
sixteen - fifteen - "
***
A metre above Apostle's head, Mr. Zhukovtsov hefted his laser and reflected that firing into the fields had possibly not been a good idea. They were burning now in a wide circle around the house, making it impossible to see lurking living humans concealed in the crops. Mr. Zhukovtsov liked to be able to see everybody around him, and be aware of their armament and intentions. He was a cautious man.
Right now, he was at the base of a crater, overgrown with potato seedlings, looking down at a metal door set into the earth.
"Found what looks like a second Panic Cellar, boss. I'm going to open it."
He reached down, unlocked the door lever, and pulled hard.
If he experienced anything more, it was either the company of angels or devils.
***
The explosion shook earth from the roof of the tunnel. Potato roots danced weirdly.
"Two can play, you see", said the Anchorite severely, "at the Let Us Wire Explosives To The Front Door trick."
"Was that your front door, Uncle Anchorite?" said Measure.
"I have many front doors", said the Anchorite. "And even more back and side ones. Now let us move further into the earth. There are more of these men, they are well-armed, and I must keep you safe. Onward."
The tunnel - claustrophobic, only the height of a small man crawling - sloped down into a dimly-lit chamber burned out of rock rather than regolith. At the centre of the chamber, a smooth-walled shaft covered by a wire-framed safety cage gaped in the earth; a sound like breath over a bottle moaned from it.
"Merely the wind underground", assured the Anchorite. "Back from the edge now, I'm taking off the cover. Forward to the ladder when I call your names. Now, you must remember that gravity will increase steadily as you climb down. This will be tolerable at first, but will become painful as you go deeper; you must, however, hold on. Your age will be your advantage - power-to-weight ratio, you see." He patted Apostle on the back. "Young man, I'm afraid this will be most unpleasant for you in particular. Keep three points of contact, go down one rung at a time, and stay within the cage."
***
Unity saw the rocket lift off on a tail of flame. The crops were already burning in a circle round the house now. If all the crops burned, there might be a serious lackof oxygen to breathe. Luckily, Armitage's men seemed to be be realizing that inability to breathe might hamper their operations, and rushing to put the fire out.
Over towards Dispater Crater, an explosion had blown a second fire out. That had to be the Anchorite. If that had dealt with more of the fake taxmen, there could surely not be too many left; but those remaining would now be particularly watchful.
She lay in the mud of the arroyo, glad of the fire overhead. Voices were calling for water. That would mean father would have to buy more water. Another comet fragment would have to be diverted from the rings of Anak, the next gas giant out, and towing comets cost credits.
She could hear an electric motor. Evidently they had more than one rover. A meticulous criminal, of course, would have. And more than one gun.
Wire tyres ploughed dust plumes from the regolith as the second rover stopped nearby; frighteningly nearby.
"MR.
ARMITAGE. WHY ARE WE EXPERIENCING
DELAY?"
This new voice carried in itself a casual, immense menace, sounding as if it might threaten death even by issuing a greeting. It was a voice that had been studied, worked on, honed as a tool to bend other human beings to its will. Unity felt she would not at all be surprised if its owner practised in front of mirrors. And yet, the voice sounded laboured, as if fighting to expel air against resistance.
"I'm sorry, sir, there appear to be more locals than previously suspected; as many as three adults. Dangerous ones. One seems to have taken out Janos with some sort of long blade, and if you'll look up I'm afraid you'll see another has gotten off a message rocket."
The Mayday Missile went into FTL drive, a glowing soap bubble of light that then went through every colour of the visible spectrum as a sudden vacuum wind seized it and threw it to the stars.
"THAT'LL ONLY
BRING MERCHANT SHIPPING. MERCHANT
SHIPPING WE CAN DEAL WITH. EVERYONE FEARS THE REVENUE BUREAU. HOW ARE WE DOING WITH THE SERIES THREE?"
"Our work has been interrupted. The gravity cutter is making some headway."
A third voice cut in.
This voice could hardly be recognized as human, and was at first
indistinguishable from static. "The cutter will alert the unit's
offensive security. It should never have
been used. Shut it down."
Armitage's voice sounded irritated. "It's cut up to a millimetre into the epidermis -"
"And it'll kill whatever human contents are inside as soon as it breaks through, or render them sterile. Whoever's doing the cutting, too. The Series Three's outer skin contains a sheet of raw plutonium. I should know." The voice coughed suddenly, a noise that sounded like a clockwork mechanism being wound in the wrong direction.
There was a pause; during the pause, there was a crackle of ionization from the Penitentiary's direction, accompanied by shouts and screams.
"I hate to say I
told you so."
Armitage's voice was quietly murderous. "It would have helped if you'd made yourself available to bestow your vast knowledge on us before, Mr. Skuse."
"I was
unwell. These days, I spend much of my
time unwell."
"I FEEL YOU
SHOULD GET BACK TO THE GAOL, MR. ARMITAGE.
IT APPEARS TO BE DEFENDING ITSELF.
WE SHOULD SALVAGE THE SITUATION AND CONTINUE AT MR. SKUSE'S
DIRECTION. WHAT ARE YOUR SUGGESTIONS,
MR. SKUSE?"
"Heh! Cutting is too unsubtle. We must convince it it has been subjected to
a natural disaster and trigger its mercy algorithms, setting the poor prisoners
free to fend for themselves. I propose
extreme heat. A solar flare, which would
not be uncommon in this milieu -"
"I AM NOT
COUNTENANCING SETTING OFF A NUCLEAR WEAPON, MR. SKUSE. NOT YET.
I DO NOT GET ON WELL WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS, AND NEITHER DO YOU."
"Tush, tush! You break into one gaol with a nuclear
weapon, and you're Nuclear Weapon Skuse for life. Besides, the man lived for several hours, did
he not? Long enough for him to feel your
ire, even where the Moral Purity Bureau's nark protection unit had him
put?"
"YOU FORGET
YOURSELF, MR. SKUSE."
"I forget little
but pain nowadays, sir. No, we do not
need a mushroom cloud at this juncture, pretty though it would have been. We need only to fool a few of the unit's nerve
endings, convince them that hideous stellar pyrotechnics are taking place
outside. I have a detailed enough
understanding of the Series Three's sensory peripherals. You had enough government engineers tortured
to give me it. We will have your box
open in an acceptable number of jiffies, and Jack out of it. Though I doubt he'll be any more capable of
opening your other box than I am."
"JUST GET HIM OUT, MR. SKUSE, AND LEAVE THAT SECOND QUESTION TO HIM." There was a whirr of motors, and the rover hummed away in a cloud of fines.
Her every joint aching from enforced immobility and the cold
of the water, Unity forced herself to rise onto her hands and knees, her hands
and knees disappearing into the mud as quickly as she put weight on them, and
crocodile-walked away down the arroyo.
***
Mr. Aidid fetched up against the wall of the Penitentiary, wanting to gulp in huge lungfuls of air, unable to let any more than a trickle of it down his throat.
"He doubled back
here. I saw him."
"Are you sure you
didn't see Arkadi? No-one found Arkadi's
body. He ain't dead till we find his
body."
"I got news for
you. No-one's ever going to find any bit
of Arkadi's body big enough to put in a DNA sampler. I saw that booby trap go off. Them hicks got this whole place wired
up."
Mr. Aidid could hear other footsteps on the top of the Penitentiary. Someone was walking up there too.
"I should get
danger pay for this. You saw what it did
to Umberto."
"We're on danger
pay already. Skuse says we'll be fine if
we deal with it on its blind side. It's
only got its sensors extruded on the side it burned off all Umberto's flesh
on."
"What if it looks
round?"
"It won't. Skuse is still giving it targets of
opportunity on its eye side."
The feeling of air molecules being pulled apart rang in through Mr. Aidid's ears and played his bones like xylophones as it thrummed through the Penitentiary's skin. The prison was still defending itself. But he could also hear another rhythm in the metal. Someone inside was still knocking to be let out.
Mr. Aidid's basic crewman's training had also involved the rudiments of Morse, and he was already aware that one of the prisoners inside the Series Three was using it to communicate. It was easy for him to distinguish the letters S-O-S, and to tap back, under cover of the din round the gaol's other side, C-A-L-M.
W-H-O-R-U, tapped the metal.
Trying as far as possible to conceal himself between two palm trunks and the Penitentiary wall, Mr. Aidid licked his lips and tapped back:
F-R-E-N-D-O-F-B-E-G-I-L-D-STOP
The prisoner digested this and rapped back:
W-H-A-T-P-R-O-G-R-E-S-C-U-T-I-N-G-I-N-QUERY
"Skuse says he's going to get the box to think there's a solar flare", said a voice helpfully from upstairs.
S-I-M-U-L-A-T-I-N-G-S-O-L-A-R-F-L-A-R-E-STOP, tapped Aidid with difficulty.
C-O-U-L-D-W-O-R-K, replied the metal. M-E-R-C-Y-A-L-G-O-R-I-T-H-M-S-W-I-L-L-O-P-E-N-C-E-L-L-S-STOP
There was a pause.
B-U-T-O-N-L-Y-1-A-T-A-T-I-M-E-T-H-I-S-V-I-M-P-O-R-T-A-N-T-W-H-E-R-E-A-M-I-QUERY
Nervously, Aidid tapped back 2-3-K-R-A-N-I-S-Y-S-T-E-M-STOP
W-H-E-R-E-I-N-M-A-T-R-I-X-QUERY-G-A-O-L-I-S-2-B-Y-2-B-Y-2-C-U-B-E-B-A-S-E-H-O-M-E-C-O-R-N-E-R-O-P-E-N-S-F-I-R-S-T-STOP
W-H-E-R-E-I-S-B-A-S-E-H-O-M-E-C-O-R-N-E-R-QUERY, tapped back
Aidid.
L-O-O-K-4-M-A-K-E-R-S-L-O-G-O-STOP
Mr. Aidid looked, and realized his ear was pressed like an
octopus's sucker against a manufacturer's logo the size of a dinnerplate.
The logo said OUBLIETTE
HUMAN INCARCERATION PRODUCTS: ADAMANTINE
CHAINS AND PENAL FIRE.
F-O-U-N-D-I-T-STOP
B-U-G-E-R, said the metal through his fingertips.
F-R-E-E-S-M-E-1-S-T-H-A-V-E-2-M-A-K-E-A-N-O-B-V-I-O-U-S-E-S-C-A-P-E-A-T-T-E-M-P-T-A-N-D-G-E-T-M-Y-C-E-L-L-M-O-V-D-O-N-STOP
As Mr. Adid lay in cover with his head flat against the
wall, the knocking audibly travelled upwards, growing fainter and fainter.
G-E-T-O-U-T-O-F-H-E-R-E,
it tapped.
Mr. Aidid needed no further encouragement. There was now no-one on his side of the
Penitentiary; they had crossed back behind the buildings, possibly unwilling to
be in line of sight of the unit after What It Did To Umberto.
He crept out under the palms, scuttled into one of the empty
houses, and allowed his natural lack of courage to take over, collapsing in
nervous exhaustion in a dusty living room in which children seemed to have made
a fortress out of some former occupant's best furniture.
***
Mr. Skuse sat next to his employer in the surface rover,
beyond what Mr. Skuse had insisted was the maximum range of the Penitentiary's
offensive arsenal.
"The splices are
all in place now", informed Mr. Skuse through the machine that
nowadays served as his voice box. "The unit should now firmly believe
Ararat to be being irradiated by over a hundred million megatons of fusing
plasma erupting from the surface of this system's sun. The induction pads we've attaced to its skin
at strategic points should confirm this.
Of course, the amount of heat coming through those pads could never cut
its surface; hence there is no reason for the Penitentiary to interpret that
data as a deliberate attack. We're also
firing hits down the fibre optics that used to be connected to its gamma
sensors. It should, however, believe its
prisoners will slowly cook if it doesn't let them out to find a safer refuge on
the surface. It'll open."
"I HOPE SO",
said Mr. Skuse's employer in a low growl.
"I know my
business", said Skuse. "The last time I was at this business,
I lost my face, after all."
"I COULD
REQUISITION YOU A NEW FACE TOMORROW", purred his employer. "PICK
A FACE, ANY FACE YOU SEE ON THE STREET.
I WILL HAVE ITS OWNER ABDUCTED AND THE FACE HARVESTED. SUBJECT TO TISSUE COMPATIBILITY, OF
COURSE."
"It would not be
my face", hissed Skuse. "This face is more honest."
"AS YOU WISH. WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW?"
Skuse smiled liplessly.
A notch on the frame that hung around his honest face emitted a cooling
mist to moisturize his mucous membranes.
"The structure is preparing
to open. The base home corner opens
first."
"WHICH IS THE BASE
HOME CORNER?"
"Look for the
manufacturer's logo."
"...YES. I SEE."
A blunt-cornered square had opened in the structure; a square of light. The dull red daylight on Ararat was dimmer than the Earth-standard illumination in the prison's interior.
A square section of the gaol's side punched out, falling into the mosaic gravel at its base.
A dark shape shouldered its way out of the light. A voice bellowed, impossibly loud, seemingly right inside Mr. Skuse's skull.
"BY MY MOTHER'S SAINTED VIRGINITY", boomed the voice. "I BREATHE AIR I HAVE NOT BREATHED BEFORE. THAT IMPERFECT DEMIURGE WHO IMPRISONED ME COULD NOT MAKE A WALL I COULD NOT BREAK. I DID IT, WITH THE POWER OF MY WILL, I, LEGION, FATHER OF LIES, GIVER OF GOOD AND EVIL. WHERE ARE THOSE WHO ONCE FORCED ME INTO THIS VILE PRISON? THEY SHALL PAY UNTO THE SEVENTH GENERATION -"
"Oh dear", said Mr. Skuse
"DO WE HAVE A
PROBLEM, MR. SKUSE?"
"I fear we may,
sir. Notice how Thorsten is attempting
gamely to resist shooting himself with his own sidearm, and Nicolae is banging
his head repeatedly against the side of a building? I fear we may have set free the wrong person,
to wit a rather dangerous psychotic homicidal telepath -"
"SHALL I PUT THE
ROVER INTO REVERSE?
"I feel that may
be wise. I apologize; I was under the
impression, from our densitometer, that our man was currently in the base home
corner. The cells inside must have
shifted."
The rover's engines cut in almost silently, and the machine hummed back up the track past the single signpost marked SADDLE LANDING, guiding itself on autopilot as Mr. Skuse's employer gave occasional watchful glances into its mirrors.
"DO WE HAVE A
CONTINGENCY PLAN FOR THIS EVENTUALITY?"
Mr. Skuse's repulsively visible facial musculature rippled
in a welter of emotions. "I suspect this man to be highly dangerous;
if my memory serves correctly, he can only be one William Yancy Voight, raised
in a somewhat backward colony of Skanker Christians on Presterjohn, next planet
out from Krell in the Altair system. The
Skankers were slow to realize they had an unidentified telepath in their midst,
and in those days research on the subject was far less advanced. Their response was derived directly from the malleus
maleficarum. Voight's own mother, among others, was tried and sentenced as a
witch. Voight, whose home life had been
troubled, and whose upbringing religious, strict, and unforgiving in the
extreme, genuinely came to believe himself to be the Devil in his neighbours'
midst. His own mother, burned in his
stead, had told him so, screaming abuse at him as the flames consumed
her."
"I AM GLAD, AT
ANY RATE, THAT WE ARE NOT GENUINELY CONFRONTING THE TRUE DEVIL INCARNATE."
"I fear your relief may be misplaced. The community on Presterjohn was backward, but its inhabitants could manufacture primitive firearms. They were capable of defending themselves. Even after they' d identified him as a threat, Voight wiped out every man, woman and child in a hundred-thousand-inhabitant colony.