Smallworld (7 page)

The meal had been awkward. The table was huge, made up of a single piece of construction metal cut into an ellipse. There were places for Mr. and Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus at either end, and no fewer than fifteen places in between for children of a bewildering variety of ages and sizes, the older children grown old early, keeping the younger ones in line with savage slaps to the head whenever they dared reach for the cruet without asking. There were exactly as many chairs as had been necessary for the meal, including Mr. Trapp, who had been seated in what he assumed was a place of honour directly between the gentleman and lady of the house. He had been informed that this was because the extra chair belonged to a gentleman who normally dined with the family on Sundays. Mr. Trapp’s prisonwear was still flashing alarmingly.

“You have so many children,” said Mr. Trapp politely, attempting to smile over a miniscule bowl of what seemed to be potato-flavoured ice cream. The children, who had not received such bowls, craned their necks in his direction, as close to actually drooling as they could be without impoliteness.

“They are not all ours,” mumbled Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus into his dessert bowl.

“Yet they are,” corrected Shun-Company severely.

“Early in the establishment of the colony, Mr. Trapp,” said Unity Reborn-in-Jesus, swan-necked, sylphlike, utterly unaware of the terrible effect she would shortly have on human beings from outside her immediate gene pool, “there were difficulties.”

“Deaths,” corrected Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.

Mr. Trapp’s attention turned toward his dessert respectfully. He essayed a spoonful of it. As he had expected, it was vile rubber food that bounced off the bottom of the gut and shot back up for a second ingestion. He gritted his teeth against gagging, attempting to turn the gesture into a friendly smile at the children. The children, evidently considering this to be a victorious sneer at the fact that he had dessert and they didn’t, looked away in disgust.

“Which ship did you come in on, Mr. Trapp?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, as if the matter were completely inconsequential.

“Uh, she didn’t have a name,” said Trapp. “Rather a number, which escapes me for the moment. A tramp trader I’d unwisely secured a passage on out to Alpha Gladii.”

Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus looked on with a face of murderous disbelief. “You’re a long way from Alpha Gladii, Mr. Trapp. Like one whole constellation. This is the 23 Kranii system. Alpha G. is thirty New Light Years away.”

Mr. Trapp swallowed hard. “So far? Oh my. Oh
my.
” He covered his head with his hands in mock dismay. “I must apologize for any distraction. This is terrible news. The passenger cabins had no windows. By the sound of it I was lucky I slipped out of the ship to stretch my legs. The ship landed near to here, the Captain said to take compressed air and water—”

“
Water?”
Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus was actually scandalized. “Do people think there’s that little water here?”

“I fear,” finished Mr. Trapp, “I might have been aboard a Slaver ship.”

Horrified intakes of breath chorussed all round the table. Since the end of the War Against the Made, human beings no longer created machines as intelligent as themselves to do their bidding. A certain type of rich man, particularly this far out on the frontier, found this injurious to his lifestyle; a trade in human slaves, unthinkable for centuries, had evolved to fill this niche.

“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Trapp, “I must be alone. Did you say I could sleep in the—?”

“Third house along,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, licking the last flecks of dessert off his spoon. “Still has a bed in it that the blood’s been washed out of.”

Mr. Trapp smiled a fragile crystalline smile.

Suddenly, Only-God-Is-Perfect Ogundere, who had been watching Mr. Trapp’s pulsating kitchen fatigues throughout the meal, piped up unbidden.

“Is what you’re wearing the very latest fashion where you come from, Mr. Trapp?”

Trapp had been prepared for this one. “It is indeed, young lady. But it is dancewear, intended only for festivals. We had been holding a party in steerage. I was hot, and had gleaned that we were on a habitable world with a breathable atmosphere, so I left the vessel to cool down.”

“Quite a risk to take,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “
Habitable
covers dioxide monsoons, sulphuric acid rain, and temperatures both above boiling and below freezing.”

“Maybe,” smiled Mr. Trapp, “I suspected subconsciously what was about to happen to me.”

“Maybe,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Third house along,” he repeated.

Mr. Trapp smiled again, nodded curtly, and left in a hurry.

“What do you think?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, as the children were clearing away the dishes.

“I think,” said Shun-Company, “that he is either from inside the Penitentiary or an advance scout for a Slaver ship in his own right. It is just possible a vessel could approach Ararat without our detecting it, but such a thing would have had to have been deliberate. It is not my place to criticize my husband, but you could have been less open about your disbelief in his story. If he
is
an escapee, we have no idea what his criminal specialty might be. He might be a serial killer, or a child murderer, or—heaven forfend!—a serial child murderer.”

Reborn-in-Jesus ground his teeth in his head. “The Devil would not allow him to harm us.”

A metallic green beetle buzzed in lazy figures-of-eight around the room’s modest chandelier. Shun-Company looked up at it. “The Devil is no God Almighty, to be considered capable of solving all our problems. Even God insists men address their own difficulties.”

Reborn-in-Jesus looked up at the beetle. “Do you hear that, Beelzebub? Have your eyes and ears heard all that has gone on in this house today?”

The fly buzzed straight up and down in the air before returning to its eternal figure-of-eight.

“Should we fear this new visitor?”

The fly buzzed up and down again.

“Will you pay a visit to us in the morning?”

Again, the up and down movement.

Shun-Company leaned forward close to the fly. “Is your servant close enough to watch over us at this moment?”

The fly wavered from side to side.

Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus raised a finger. “It is checking the South End for recent signs of a Slaver starship landing, am I right?”

The fly rose up and down in the air once more.

Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded.

“Your concern for our welfare is much appreciated, Hermit,” he said to the fly. “I’ll be pleased to see you in the Ninety East Field at sunup.” He nodded to Shun-Company. “Wife: tell Beguiled-of-the-Serpent she is a good girl who tells truth and shall have a new dress when the next trader so equipped arrives. And tell all the others they are to stay indoors and not admit our visitor without permission. I shall sleep with my back to the door tonight equipped with a suitable agricultural implement.”

The fly bounced up and down in the air, then vanished up into the chandelier in a myriad tinkling, twinkling emerald images.

*

“OPEN UP.”

Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus’s sleep was interrupted by what felt like repeated blows to the head with a dinner gong. However, once he had pulled himself upright and taken stock of the situation, he could see that it was simply the metal alloy door being pummelled fit to rock on its hinges by someone titanically strong on the step outside—someone either too polite or too stupid to acknowledge that the door had no lock. There was also the sound of a siren loud enough to wake the whole South End.

He opened the door, warily. It was not yet sunup.

“OPEN UP,” said the person on the threshold redundantly. It was difficult for Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus to consider it a person, in fact, as it was not only artificial, but also not designed, as many artificial creatures were, to comfortingly resemble a human being in any way. Instead, it looked designed to fulfil its intended function with an efficiency as grim and terrible as possible. It was probably also, being a government automaton, designed to be safely stupid; the government liked to set a good example to its citizenry in this regard.

“IT IS AN OFFENCE TO HARBOUR FUGITIVES,” said the machine—unsettlingly, in the same voice as Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus’s intelligent rotary goat-milking unit. Perhaps the same minor celebrity had allowed his voice to be sampled on two separate occasions. “THESE PREMISES WILL SUBMIT THEMSELVES TO SEARCH.”

The machine was a squat cuboid of metal resting on three broad feet. A variety of ports, probes and weapons ringed the squat turret head that topped it off, giving it the appearance of a device that had been crowned King of Kitchen Appliances.

“Are you a warder from the Penitentiary?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Show me your authorization to search.”

The machine projected a facsimile of a signed paper document lousy with government insignia onto a nearby wall. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded and stood aside. The machine trundled into the house. A probe extended and sampled the air.

“GENETIC MATERIAL OF MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISONER JOHANNES MARIA TRAPP DETECTED,” it announced. “IT IS AN OFFENCE TO HARBOUR FUGITIVES,” it repeated darkly.

“You may take him with my blessing,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, trying to appear as if he just happened to be carrying the digging blade in his left hand by the sheerest coincidence. “He gave his real name to us. He is in the third house down the street.”

“YOUR COOPERATION IS APPRECIATED,” said the machine, and wheeled on the ground effect pads in its feet to leave.

Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus gripped the haft of his digging tool nervously.

“What was Mr. Trapp’s crime?” he asked.

“GRAND FRAUD,” said the machine, “FIVE COUNTS. GENETIC IDENTITY THEFT, NINE COUNTS. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO PRIVATE SYSTEMS, FIFTEEN COUNTS. ESCAPING FROM A GOVERNMENT PENAL ESTABLISHMENT, TWENTY-SEVEN COUNTS.”

“And the number of convictions for crimes of violence, or against children?” said Shun-Company, who had noiselessly materialized behind her husband.

“ZERO,” said the machine, and motored out into the dark, stars mirrored in its brightly polished chassis.

“He is a thief,” comforted Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, patting his wife’s arm.

“That machine is the barely the size of our church,” said Shun-Company. “No mere thief deserves to be confined in such a way.”

At that point, the screams began in the street outside; and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus took up his digging tool unashamedly and ran.

*

Sixty seconds earlier, the stars had been shining from slightly different quarters, and the scarlet shimmering scimitar of Naphil’s A ring had shone a constellation’s width broader overhead as Mount Ararat hurtled towards intersection. The goats were asleep in their shelter; the Penitentiary was as yet quiet, not yet realizing one of its inmates was absent.

The communications tower stood out at one corner of the Third Landing village square, a metal tree of dishes, whip aerials and communications lasers. No tree had been planted near it; cables burrowed down from it into the dirt and resurfaced by the Reborn-in-Jesus residence. Halfway up it, accessible via a maintenance ladder, was a manual access panel, which lay open. Inside, mysterious user-unfriendly readouts and schematics marched across a durable plastic screen.

A voice called from the bottom of the tower. “Are you done yet, Mr. Trapp?”

A voice answered from up by the maintenance panel. “I’ve located a ship insystem. Her captain says he’s braking into your gas giant’s atmosphere to collect helium-3 and slow himself down to meet another trader and swap mail loads in the inner system. Says he can take both of us on to Twenty. Be landing a kilometre from here in an hour’s time.”

“So long as he hurries up,” said the voice from the tower’s base. “If anyone finds me out here, no-one’ll talk to me from now till Christmas. I’ll be on goat-leading duty for certain.”

The panel slammed shut and was screwed home by a man with fastidious attention to detail, who then slid down the maintenance ladder with a spring in his step.

“Do you really think I have it in me to become a top-rate courtesan?”

“My dear, you are the image of Ishtar herself. I have contacts at all the best-regarded agencies on Old Earth, in Bangkok, Teheran, Emporium, Pennsylvania, and many other exotic locations.” Mr. Trapp began untying the tether connecting Carries-the-Saviour to the great shelter.

“I can’t get my legs behind my head. Does that matter?”

The conversation was suddenly interrupted by a klaxon loud enough to kill a man and wake him afterwards. Trapp began working more quickly, feverishly, looking up in the direction of the Series Three like Damocles at his ceiling decoration.

“What is that, Mr. Trapp? What’s that sound?”

A man-sized alcove of light opened in the side of the Penitentiary, and a stubby, three-legged machine emerged, rotated to take in its surroundings, and took off towards the largest house in Main Street. For the first time, Mr. Trapp blessed the fact that he was standing behind a warm dyspeptic ass—Carries-the-Saviour’s extravagant heat signature had masked Trapp’s own.

“It seems,” said Mr. Trapp, “we still have one more detail to take care of. Please be so good as to follow me.”

He raised the Reborn-in-Jesus family kitchen knife that he’d used to open the maintenance panel,, so old and oversharpened that its blade was a mere steel sliver. ‘The A ring reflected from it, red as blood.

Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus skidded round the corner, implement in hand, to be confronted by an empty tranquil pond and a silent, featureless Penitentiary.

The Warden’s tracks returned to the wall of the unit, and went no further. However, they were also accompanied by human footprints,
small
human footprints spaced erratically, as if their creator were being dragged unwillingly. There was blood in the footprints. A great deal of blood. Close by, a set of shod hooves had left town along the hundred-eighty meridian, apparently at the closest an ass could get to a gallop.

Unity Reborn-in-Jesus, who had been following her parents closely, went pale and put her hand over her mouth.

“I’ll call roll,” she said.