Smallworld

by Dominic Green

  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. Mount Ararat’s modest atmospheric envelope had not even had time to raise a healthy glow on its leading edges. It pressed down into the regolith through ten mighty feet, each one the area of Reborn-in-Jesus’s house. It was evidently a cargo flight, as it had no windows apart from the pilot’s landing bubble; however, it bore the many-hands-joined emblem of the Government of Human Space, and was lightly-armed with short-range point defence accelerators and long-range dragnet missiles pulled along in its magnetic field. It had left the missiles in orbit—they circled ominously overhead in a perfect V every ten hours, like migrating geese.

  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,

  continued 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 SIREN WILL SOUND

  (at this point a siren klaxoned so loudly that Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had to clap his hands over his ears).

  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. Mount Ararat is made of two asteroids pressed together in light contact, and have you any idea what that thing must weigh?”

  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 steam-rollering 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. T
he Series Threes are really quite escape-proof.”

  “And I suppose you would know,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, 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 on the wall facing towards the pond by Shun-Company Reborn-in-Jesus and her genetic and adopted daughters. 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, where 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 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 Mount Ararat, Mr. Trapp. We do not require them. And our charity is free of charge.” She called out to an older daughter who was throwing out slops for the goats. “God’s-Wound, lay another place for dinner. I hope you like potato, Mr. Trapp.”

  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.”