Smallworld

by Dominic Green

  “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 clientele 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 Smith,” reported Magus.

  “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 Smith had to be maintained at a slightly greater pressure. A ball of particularly dense and moist atmosphere was rolling down the passageway toward him, clearly visible. Breathing was a laborious exercise. Coughing, he imagined, might do damage to his lungs.

  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 d
o. 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.