Smallworld (15 page)

“
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 Main Street. He had assumed Shun-Company had put them all down in the panic cellar, but she had evidently set them to work dealing with the nanominers. Only little Measure-of-Barley ran out from the goat shelter.

“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 GreenQueen 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.”