Smallworld (38 page)

Mr. Suau appraised the Warden’s decimetre-thick armour warily. “Your argument is compelling,” he admitted.

The Warden bumped his chassis experimentally against the prone body of the major shareholder of EasyWorld.
“Unfortunately, he is merely tranquillized. I used the assault weapon’s riot control setting on him. He should recover.”

“I doubt,” said the European gentleman, “that he will ever frequent your establishment again. I certainly do not intend to.”

“
This is life on the frontier,”
said the Warden.
“Be thankful that, in your case, it was accompanied by caviar and cappuccino. I believe this world has been subjected to Made war machines, renegade murderers, and tax officers alike in the past kilodia alone.”

The European and the telesatanist looked at one another in shared horror.

“Tax officers?”

“
Whole hordes of them. A Special Revenue Service detachment, one of whom is now engaged to be married to young Miss Reborn-in-Jesus here.”
The Warden indicated Unity with a scarlet indicating laser; she blushed in the same area of the visible spectrum.

The billionaires began muttering among themselves.

“This is a sting,” said one of the terraforming executives.

“How stupid do they think we are,” tutted the telesatanist.

“They might be sizing up our assets right now,” said the European gentleman anxiously. “I’m calling my personal transport.”

“STOP!” Miss Valentin rushed amid the guests like a game terrier attempting to herd elephants. “This is an accident of happenstance which should not be allowed to ruin your stay here—”

“My stay here is
over
.”

“It’s back to the Cure at Lourdes for me.”

“I gave up the Red Lagoon Hyperoxidizing Spa at Olympus Mons for
this?
”

“My lawyers will be in touch.”

“You will never borrow from the Holy See again.”

“A heavy terraforming unit will be in orbit here within thirty dia. This insignificant speck will become a Martian wilderness.”

Mrs. Valentin wheeled on Mr. and Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus.

“Don’t you have anything to SAY? You’re SHAREHOLDERS!”

“People have promised to terraform our world before,” shrugged Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.

“And to crush us under the weight of legal action,” added Shun-Company.

“The murdering,” added Apostle. “There have been many threats of murder.”

“Something always happens,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, “to prevent it.”

“The will of
God
happens,” corrected Shun-Company, and joined hands with her husband.

“We will re-brand,” grinned Apostle, kicking shrapnel out of the floor tiling with his foot. “Instead of relaxing health care in secure surroundings, we will offer an exciting adventure holiday.” He turned to the assembled guests, the assault weapon in his hands. “Mesdames, messieurs, we apologize for the temporary interruption to your schedules. We realize your time is important.
Nothing,”
he said, his grip tightening on his weapon, and his eyes glinting with messianic capitalist fervour, “is more important to us than the time of our guests. If anyone here tonight has wasted your time, say the word, and I will kill them.” His eye travelled pitilessly over the Clinic’s domestic staff, who cringed in alarm. “Even,” he added, “the pretty ones.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, man,” said the European—sounding, however, rather less sure of himself than previously.

“Ridiculous! This is business! Do we joke about business? Why, sir is standing here in a half-demolished reception area when sir should be, should be—what would be sir’s ideal evening?”

Bawtry put up a hand. “Uh, young Mr. Apostle, sir, you have all three of the safeties off on that thing.”

Apostle gestured madly with the weapon. Security guards dived for cover wherever it waved. “
What do I care for safety, when the comfort of my guests is threatened?
His Majesty Mr. Johns Smiths here requires good food, good wine, the company of an attractive boy. Do we have any attractive boys?”

The male domestic staff—even that part of it that was openly homosexual—did its best to look unattractive.

“Then send a packet to the next system for some! Kidnap some if need be. What a guest wants, a guest gets. If Mr. Smiths desires that I set this light armour piercing cannon to my head and pull the trigger—” he strode demonstratively about the serving staff, setting the gun to his head with some difficulty—”then it will be done. Mr. Smiths! Do you wish me to pull the trigger on this weapon and end my miserable life? You have only to say the word.” Apostle crabbed sidelong towards the guest, being careful to keep a direct line between the weapon, his own head, and that of Mr. Smiths.

“Mr. Apostle!” snapped Bawtry. “That weapon is rated to enfilade up to ten men standing in line. It was tested as such on Made prisoners-of-war, and they tend to be more resistant to gunfire than we are.”

“Please put the gun
away
,” cried the shoulder-faced lady.

“I will agree to live,” said Apostle, hugging Mr. Smiths close and gluing his ear firmly to the other man’s, “only if my favourite guest agrees to enjoy my hospitality. Songs around the Christmas tree, a roaring log fire, mulled wine, bawdy sex games and adequate radiation shielding.”

Mr. Smiths’ lips pursed, but also trembled.

“Very well,” he said. “I consent. Just put the gun down.”

Apostle separated from Mr. Smiths, beaming, and set all three safeties on the weapon with one fluid movement.

“My guests,” he said, “are more important to me than life itself.” He clicked his fingers. “Domestics ho! A cake! A cake for His Majesty, in the shape of Latvia!”

“I have never been crowned,” objected Mr. Smiths. “And Latvia is no longer a sovereign nation. It is only the thirty-third Eurasian commissary district nowadays, run by an Emergency Committee. My father made his money from comfortable yet functional thermal feminine underclothing. I am rather afraid he married into the nobility.” He frowned and grudgingly drew out a shape on the floor in the debris from the Anchorite’s robot. “Latvia is that shape.”

Apostle spread his arms wide. “All our guests, be happy! You are under the aegis of the renowned Safety Officer Rajinder Rai, the man who ran to ground the executor of the terrible Christmas murders, and Colonel Fernando Bawtry, the unconquered Grand Master of the Beautopia Robotic Inquisition.” And he turned to the domestic staff and whispered the magic words:
“Double pay till the end of this crisis period.”

No sorceror could have made a closet full of broomsticks jerk to ancillary life more quickly than that simple statement. Chambermaids smoothed their uniforms. Cooks straightened their backs and began thinking of methods and ingredients, and of how they were going to ice that difficult bit around Liepaja. Security staff clicked the safeties quickly on on their weapons, and moved them into positions where they were not quite so obviously aimed at Apostle.

“All is well with the world,” said Apostle. “With this world, at any rate.”

“But not with all the other ones, Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, sir.”

Apostle turned to see Mohammed Ben Israel, the trauma of the past decidia written on his face in premature worry wrinkles. He had entered the reception area behind the Warden, and was breathless with both running and fear.

“I heard a Priority One Alert sounding when I came past the comms room,” he said. “There is a message missile in orbit. It is sending out a broadcast for General Mobilization. Ten of our Early Warning Shell stations have been destroyed without notification of any incoming enemy, and a large formation of unidentified vessels has attacked the Home Systems Fleet in dock at Lagrangia. The
Ottilia Vos,
the
Firm Hand of Government,
and the
Spartacus
are all reported lost. The current status of New Earth is not known. All reservists are being called to muster, and there’s a list of civilian spacecraft being requisitioned for government use—”

The elderly lady dropped her face in shock; its pseudo-musculature screwed itself up against the impact, and when it righted itself on the tiling, looking up at the stairwell lintels with black empty eyesockets, it was scowling.

“How many of you,” said Apostle, turning to the staff and guests alike, “live on New Earth?”

A small grove of hands rose.

Apostle looked at his brother. “Will that Revenue cruiser of yours fly?”

Testament nearly soiled his underwear in shock. “It claims so, brother. But several of its onboard diagnostic systems also claim two hundred per cent thrust efficiency, and I’ve never flown anything but its onboard simulator.”

“That’ll have to do. It’s time for an emergency evacuation. If,” he said, “New Earth is still safe to evacuate to.” He nodded to Miss Valentin. “Madame, if you could organize an orderly withdrawal.”

Miss Valentin stood momentarily disorientated, then ground herself.

“At once, Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. NOW—HOW MANY OF YOU PEOPLE HAVE SPATIAL CREWING EXPERIENCE? I AM APPEALING TO GUESTS AS WELL AS STAFF.”

“But what about that poor gel who went to get a glass of water?” said the smart-faced lady. “Did something happen to her? Is anybody listening to me? Hello?”

It had taken hours, and she was still not sure where she was at any rate. The network of drop-shafts and cross-tunnels that led up from the Anchorite’s domain stretched for kilometres, horizontally and vertically; and she knew that she was injured. Something in the air behind that cold door the Devil had opened far below had poisoned her inside. She could no longer breathe or move as effectively, despite the fact that she had to keep climbing to live. She knew that, whatever happened, she could not follow the Anchorite’s machine upwards. That way lay death. And certainly, now, death lay downward too. Now that the hermit knew she had plotted against him, he would surely snuff her out with no more compunction than a hygienist would a bacterium.

The cramped concrete chamber at the shaft head had seemed hardly believable. She had come to trust that the tunnels went on forever. Yet here was an entrance just like the hermit’s back doors at Dispater Crater and St. Duke’s Cathedral. Could it be possible she might find a way out to the surface?

Yet where to go then?

Would her family take her in again, after she had plotted armed revolt not only against the Anchorite, but against them too? The Clinic, too, would surely turn her away. Might she lurk round the landing field, in the hope of persuading the crew of some supply ship or passing agro trader to take her on board? Would Magus or Perfect take pity on her, and give her passage offworld on
Prodigal Son?

No. The hermit would be expecting her there for certain. It would be better to lie low until she knew for certain, at least, that the Anchorite’s robot had been eliminated. And even without his demonic assistant, the old man’s vengeance might be shrewd and terrible.

She eased herself out of the hatchway onto bare, wet earth—the wetness in itself suggesting that she was either in the maintained farmlands around Third Landing, or in the extensive gardens around the South End Clinic. The trees, massive and brooding, confirmed the second suspicion. Redwoods produced by Mallorn Arborfactor for seeding on semi-terraformed Areotype worlds, they were large enough to carve elf houses into, Faraway Trees from the same mould as the one in the stories Shun-Company had read the family when they were younger. On such a world as this, a sufficiently lofty tree’s top branches might really and truly touch space. The Clinic trees’ tops were, indeed, noticeably dry and leafless in the thin air a hundred metres up.

She was standing not a hundred metres from the Clinic lake, looking across water so filled with stars that a pail might be dipped into it and dredge up constellations that could be separated into individual tiny dwarf stars when pressed under a slide and put under a telescope.

Across the water, she could see the ornamental island. The feathers of fretful McChickens rustled in the night.

Then every blade of grass bowed low, and the wildfowl around the lake began shrieking as one of the brightest lights in the sky flared even brighter and began to descend towards the surface. She had at first taken it for one of the many tiny ice moons that regulated the Naphillian belts, but it was now plain that it was a spacecraft. And instead of the South Saddle Field, it seemed to be approaching here.

A
Varangian
class transport—huge, originally tiger-striped with disruptive patterning, now scored and faded by micrometeoroid and cosmic ray bombardment—was hovering on its manoeuvring thrusters over the lake. There could be only one explanation for its current position—it intended to suck up cheap deuterium from a handy liquid water source. Father—she could not help but continue to think of Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus as her father—would be mad. That water had been hauled here from Naphil’s rings at a cost of a credit a litre.

The ship settled lower, wobbling in the dense gravitational gradient like a decelerating top, so much so that her pilot gave up on hovering and turned the vessel in the air, dropping her gently on her landing struts in the open ground on the far side of the lake from the Clinic. The thrusters kept idling several seconds after the vessel settled, in case the struts bogged down in the wet ground; a circle of burnt grass whooshed outwards to steam in the lake water. Terrified birds thundered overhead like rapturous applause. A team of uniformed men rushed out of the ship’s personnel locks to guide a cargo drone trundling a heavy fuel line behind it down to the water’s edge.

Meanwhile, another group in slightly different uniforms were accompanying another cargo drone out across the burnt turf to the edge of the lake. At the touch of a button the drone unfolded into a shop window display several times the size of the one Mr. Mountbanks had possessed. It projected images of Beguiled standing and smiling at herself as she approached the drone, wearing a smart green uniform decorated with ribbons and buttons and epaulettes. As she watched, her holographic equivalent winked at her and saluted. Other holographic equivalents of her to left and right of the first wore heavy armour and chromatophoric cloaks like coats of starlight and fire.