Smallworld (29 page)

The children wriggled free and stepped back to a safe distance.

“How long will it take to take?” said Be-Not-Near-Unto-Man-in-thy-Time-of-Uncleanness.

“Should happen pretty much instantly,” said Beguiled.

“Beguiled,” said Uncleanness, “I’m afraid.”

“I’m more afraid than you are,” said Beguiled. “It’s
me
in there, and I know how bad I am.” She slipped her hand into her foster-sister’s.

The Devil was turning its hands over, examining them minutely, as if surprised that it was made of metal. The Personality Analogue was now taped firmly to its right shoulder.

“It shouldn’t be surprised,” said Beguiled. “I only made the imprint an hour ago. It knows the plan. It should know exactly what body it’s in.”

The robot’s head jerked upwards. A long clawed finger pointed out Beguiled.

“YOU,” it said. “WHAT LANGUAGE DO YOU SPEAK?” It recoiled. “WHAT LANGUAGE AM
I
SPEAKING? THIS IS NOT GREEK.”

“What’s it saying, Beguiled?” said Uncleanness. “Why is it talking all old?”

“Uh, Beguiled,” said Pitch-Not-Thy-Tent-Towards-Sodom, shuffling through a stack of imprint slivers, “I’ve still got the imprint you made of yourself right here.”

“Ohhh
shit
,” said Beguiled.

“WHERE IS THIS PLACE? IS THIS THE DREAD DOMAIN OF HADES? WHAT AM I BECOME? I, WHO WAS ONCE ACCOUNTED BEAUTIFUL?” The robot, its voice like that of a grown woman, deep and aristocratic, cast about to right and left like a questing hound.

“It must be one of the novelty imprints,” said Beguiled. “One of the fancy ones the man gave us for free. Sodom, you
idiot.”

“They’re not labelled clearly,” whined Sodom. “And yours isn’t labelled at
all.”

“Damn right it ain’t, if Uncle Anchorite gets hold of it I’m one dead niece.” Beguiled thought further on the matter. “We are
all
dead
persons.”

The robot turned and sprinted to the edge of the Pond, leaving scars in the earth where its feet had moved in a blur. It dropped like a falling guillotine blade onto the bank, staring down with whatever senses it possessed into the ripples.

“I HAVE NO REFLECTION,” it mourned. “I AM A SHADE.”

“No,” said Uncleanness, coming up behind it gently. “It’s just that you can only see by radar.”

“Let’s see,” said Beguiled, taking the stack of imprint jiggers from Sodom. “What did he give us for free? Uh, ma’am? Are you Paris?”

The robot turned like a whirlwind. “NO I AM NOT PARIS! AND IF THIS IS HELL, YOU ARE AS DEAD AS I, AND JOKING ILL BECOMES THE DAMNED! HAVE YOU SEEN PARIS? I DEMAND THAT YOU TAKE ME TO HIM!”

Beguiled pulled out a data sliver. “Uh, I have Paris right here, ma’am.”

The robot slammed a claw into the data pack, sending it scattering into the dirt. Beguiled yelped and sucked her finger, in which an inch-long gash had opened. “IDIOT GIRL! I WOULD KILL YOU WERE YOU PROPERLY ALIVE! WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!”

“
We don’t know who your husband is!”
screeched Uncleanness, now in tears. Sodom moved himself in front of his foster-sister. “Ma’am, if you will simply tell us who your husband is, we will gladly attempt to find him for you—”

The claw moved again, too rapidly to react to. Beguiled did not see a wound open in Sodom, but saw him slowly crumple, hugging his chest.

“KNEEL BEFORE ME, EVEN IN HELL!” shrieked the creature. “I AM THE CONSORT OF A KING! I, WHO AM THE GIFT TO MANKIND OF APHRODITE!”

“I’m pretty sure she
is
Paris Hilton,” said Judge-Not-Lest-Thou-Also-Be-Judged. “We covered her in the History of the Moral Collapse.”

“IS TROY THEN FALLEN?” said the creature. “SO BE IT! THEN
I
WILL REIGN IN HELL! FOR HALF THE YEAR HELL HAS NO QUEEN. I WILL SIT BY HADES’ SIDE ALL SUMMER, AND WHEN PERSEPHONE RETURNS IN THE AUTUMN SHE WILL FIND HER KING APT TO OVERLOOK THE ENTIRE POMEGRANATE.” The robot turned its eyeless gaze on Beguiled. “YOU, CHILD! WHERE IS HE WHO REIGNS HERE?”

Beguiled lowered her eyes and curtseyed decorously.

“I will give you accurate directions, Your Majesty. I am sure he will be most glad to see you.”

Mr. Mountbanks was impatient. It had been a long time since he had eaten, drunk or slept. The gentleman who had met him on the road had claimed to have a ship at the field—possibly the small government runabout he’d seen in the parking area when he’d disembarked. The gentleman, wearing a priest’s dog collar, had promised him food, drink and rest in return for what he’d described as ‘the simple pleasure of his company’. Mr. Mountbanks had suspected from the glint in the gentleman’s eye that this simple pleasure might become complicated, but for now food was food, and a bed a bed.

The gentleman’s rover was in reasonable condition, though poorly shielded against fines; the interior smelled like wet rust. The chassis and windows all bore Bureau of Safety shields of approval, so he was safer from cosmic radiation than the barefoot urchins scampering about Third Landing’s handful of streets all about the car. There was even an in-rover entertainment centre which, when Mr. Mountbanks had activated it, had intoned “BREATHE IN; BREATHE OUT. STAY ROOTED AS A TREE. YOU ARE AS A MOUNTAIN, IMMOVABLE. YOUR WILL WILL PREVAIL.” The car’s cargo compartment was packed with what the gentleman had described as ‘Leader Day presents’—miniscule holographic snowstorms of Leader Vos and Leader Vos’s husband, children and elderly labrador waving from Leader Vos’s window. The snowstorms seemed to be mutually interactive; in two of the globes which had accidentally touched glass, the Leader in one globe was explaining her theory of political dialectic to the Leader in the other, who was nodding sagely.

The gentleman had said he had a momentary discussion to pursue with the inhabitants of the house, who might conceivably be the parents of the juvenile delinquent horrors he’d met on the road earlier. So far the momentary discussion had lasted an hour. Mr. Mountbanks wondered if the rover had an onboard urine recycling facility, and if anyone would notice him plugging himself into the dashboard.

With the local sun on his back, not warm in itself, but adding warmth to the already overheated interior of the rover, Mr. Mountbanks dozed.

He was awoken by the horrible death of the gentleman who had met him on the road.

The car’s collision alarm sounded violently, shaking him out of wild dreams of avarice. Something was being slammed repeatedly against the headlight cowling. It was when the wiper blades, factory set to automatic start, began painstakingly removing large amounts of blood from the windscreen that Mr. Mountbanks sat up in alarm. A glittering isoceles blade rose in the air, stabbing repeatedly down at a squirming gurgling figure slumped against the front of the car.

The figure’s face was that of his host.

Mr. Mountbanks sensibly elected to remain in the car. Close to his right hand was a large, obvious control marked LOCKING. He slammed the heel of his palm down on it and heard the welcome clunk of the car’s single airlock dogging shut.

The figure holding the blade towered over the car. Mr. Mountbanks had not believed an unmodified human being could grow so large. Surely, however, even so huge a creature could not easily punch through a Bureau-of-Safety-approved windshield?

It was wearing a red velvet cap trimmed with white fur. The cap did not fit it.

It was also rummaging in the priest’s pockets. As the priest struggled feebly, thinking himself under renewed assault, the attacker irritably finished him off, twisting his neck nonchalantly back on itself. Then, he triumphantly fished out a single octagonal key and turned his attention undividedly on Mr. Mountbanks.

Although Mr. Mountbanks was inside the rover, he realized he did not have a key to start it. Was there a spare inside the vehicle? He searched frantically through the usual obvious places—under the dead man’s handle, on top of the HUD projector pod—but found nothing. And the airlock door was opening.

Mr. Mountbanks scrabbled frantically and belatedly for the release on the four-point safety belt, only to feel dizzy and lightheaded as blood started pouring unaccountably from his neck. The windscreen wipers failed dismally to remove it from the glass; he felt the curious sensation of his own head turning through one hundred and eighty degrees, heard the car’s media system enjoining him to Breathe In, Breathe Out, and Stay Rooted As A Tree, and then he neither heard nor felt anything ever again.

The rover arrowed into the distance at the head of a plume of fines. Testament stood facing his father, mother, and sister and Mr. Suau across two comprehensively dead bodies.

“Well,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, “at least we don’t have to worry about how to celebrate Christmas now.”

“Hernan!” reproved his wife.

“I only meant to say it’s an ill wind. Perhaps he ran into Saint Nicholas.”

“No saint of any god did that,” said Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus, “and I can hardly believe any man did either. The poor men’s necks are snapped completely. The Educational Uniformity Bureau will play merry hell. You
know
how government departments hate it when their men are sent here and die mysteriously.”

“Who is the other one?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “I don’t recognize him. Could there have been another escape from the Penitentiary? It let three of its prisoners out last year, after all.”

“But they all escaped on Mr. Armitage’s ship,” said Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus, as if begging her family to agree with her.

“The Anchorite did for one of them,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “‘Postle told us as much, and the hermit hasn’t denied it.”

“There were three escapees,” said Testament. “The Warden was looking for all three for weeks. And the sort of folk who get lodged in government penitentiaries don’t mix well. The odds against two of them working together to escape are long.”

“You think there’s another still at large,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.

“Someone’s been living in berth four of
Render Unto Caesar
. For quite a while.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” said Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus, shocked.

Testament shrugged. “I figured it was one of the young uns. I caught ‘em in the shuttle not two days ago, playing some damn fool game.” He was retracing dusty footprints across the way—very
large
footprints, leading inexorably out from the churned and blooded soil near where the EVA rover had stood, back to the dipping pen.

“Oh, lord,” he said, standing still in shock. “Oh my.”

“What is it, Testament?”

“Oh, you noddy, you prize-winning plank. I tracked him to the dipping shed here, and thought that just because he’d turned the hose on he’d swilled himself down and run away with half his skin dissolving. I remember thinking at the time no normal human being would ever do such a thing, and I was right, because he didn’t. He just gulled
me
into thinking he had. He must have been hanging there in the dark above me in the dipping shed right there and then. Oh, law, but he’s clever. He’s been in there hidden among us a whole day.”

Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus ate her fist in fright. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus comforted her with a hand.

“But why would any man creep out and start murdering folk again when he knows he’ll just set the law back on him?” said Unity.

Testament shrugged. “A vehicle turned up ripe for stealing.”

“And he isn’t a normal human being anyway,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have been in the Penitentiary in the first place.”

“If he’s a human being at all,” said Shun-Company bitterly. “And not a devil.”

“I do hope not,” said a voice from the dark.

Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus did not even turn.

“Evening, your hermitship.”

The Anchorite was hardly visible against the dark side of the house. Perhaps he had been there all the time. “I have lost contact with my servo unit. It was last in the company of Beguiled, Sodom, Judge-Not, and Uncleanness, since when it does not even respond to positional pinging.”

Shun-Company threw the Anchorite a look that would have killed a lesser man. “My babies! Where are my children?” She pulled up her skirts, produced a field laser, and slapped an argon oxide clip into it.

The Anchorite frowned at the emission end of the weapon, which was currently emitting a dull red target-painting glow, as was the centre of his own chest. There had been a glut of infantry weapons on Ararat since the defeat of the Tax Pirates the previous year; more weapons, it had to be said, than was strictly necessary for arable farming.

“Speaking exactly, madam, I believe Beguiled, Sodom, Judge-Not and Uncleanness are not your children. Have you not noticed that two distinct social subsets seem to be forming in your family? Beguiled
et al
are not your biological children; Day-of-Creation, Measure, Zounds, Apostle, Magus, Testament, and Unity are. The two camps hardly ever seem to interact nowadays.”

“It’s true,” admitted Testament. “Mother, you’re threatening Uncle Anchorite with a loaded weapon.”

“He’s no uncle of yours,” said Shun-Company.

“Nor is Beguiled a daughter of yours,” said the Anchorite gravely, with his hands up high, “though you treat her as such. Are you sure, however, that those feelings are requited? I have noticed some strange behaviour of late.”

The weapon was shaking in Shun-Company’s hands. The beam it projected would make a man’s midriff into a cloud of steam. “If you have harmed any of my children—”

“Put the gun down, Mother,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.

“Madam,” said the Anchorite, “I have only ever intervened to
save
the lives of your children.”

Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus cleared his throat. “Is it possible that the device is malfunctioning in some way?”

“Possible,” nodded the Anchorite, “though it’s almost unheard-of for a servo robot to malfunction by slaughtering children. Usually they walk round in circles, or leak lubricant. I fear that I detect the hand of man at work here. I am sorry I was not on hand to help when Visible Friend was attacked. I was digging in my garden.”

“The garden at the centre of the world,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.