Smallworld (12 page)

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.

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 Mount Ararat was ecumenical.

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 Mount Ararat’s ten-metre horizon. The vessel, the
Prodigal Son
, had been gaudily daubed with an attempt at rainbow colours using paints begged, borrowed and stolen. Hence there was a NO STEP red, high-reflectivity yellows and oranges, a military-surplus green not strictly suitable for service outside atmosphere, a mauve where there should have been a purple. And only the fierce light of the vessel’s own exhausts betrayed the rainbow; in the unmodified light of 23 Kranii, it was a series of red stripes shading to black.

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 Mount Ararat’s two world-halves joined. The Saddle was no place to put down a starship, being flanked by high ground and plagued by fierce gravitational gradients from the neutronium mote at the planetoid’s core, and it was a mark of Magus Reborn-in-Jesus’s filial devotion that he chose to put down here, after a nerve-wracking approach through the South End Chasm. The alternatives were, after all, a landing either in his father’s potato fields or near the splintered-headstoned, black-flowered graveyard that was the only man-made feature in Mount Ararat’s southern hemisphere.

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, he 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 palette. 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
pere.

“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:

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 Mount Ararat using total conversion warheads.”

“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.”