Smallworld (9 page)

Gigantic concrete letters soared over his head: MAIN LEVEL TEN. Locals, wandering past in company fatigues, stared as much at Magus’s clothes, with their colour scheme unapproved by Anadyomene company marketing, as at his companion.

“Give you a hundred dubs for that coat, Mister.”

Magus frowned. “I couldn’t possibly. That’s a full hectare.”

The other man—a depilated, delapidated creature—spat. “Give you a week if you’re new; you’ll be in hock to the tune of a continent, just like the rest of us.” The local cast a curious eye at Magus’s travelling companion, as if only now noticing him. “Is he okay?”

“He is in constant distress,” said Magus. “The pain nerves severed in his accident have been extensively audited and shut down, but many still function.”

“He’s still
human
inside there?”

“Please, sir. He can hear you. A heart-rending plasma containment tragedy. Only his spine and brain remain.”

“I used to be a lawyer on New New Earth, my wife a doctor. But we dreamed, like fools, of owning our own plot of land. We heard of Anadyomene and all the wonderful terraforming opportunities.
The land won’t be ready the moment you go in,
they said.
You may have to work in other company concerns onplanet while the land’s being made ready.
I been here five New Years now. I’m still working.”

Magus’s youthful sense of injustice was outraged. “Where do you work?”

“Anadyomene Nanopharmaceutical. It’s the only Other Company Concern here. The missus tells me we’re working under biohazard conditions no worker would be allowed to back on New New. Every now and again some poor duffer gets a defective hazard suit and his scrotum breaks out in polyps and they take him off to the Infirmary and we never see him again. Me, though, I’m not in the labs. I work in Nanopharmaceutical Protection, manufacturing defective hazard suits.” He smiled ruefully.

“And the terraforming?”

“No-one’s ever seen any evidence of any, and Nanopharmaceutical was set up with our land purchase funds. If I could just get back home to New New, I’d land a lawsuit on these bastards heavier than Satan-vs.-God-Kidnapping-False-Imprisonment-and-Brimstone-Injury.” The worker paused carefully to give Magus time to reply.

“
Walk on, Magus,”
cautioned the Anchorite.
“He is trying to inveigle you into an act of altruism.”

Other workers moving past were beginning to notice the fact that Magus and the lawyer were talking. Some were wearing badges marked SUPERVISOR.

“This was not a chance meeting,” said Magus, “was it?”

The Company man’s cool broke. “Okay, you got me, I spend two New Hours in each New Improved Day walking up from the lower levels to here on the off chance a ship’s put in. I would give my own prostate and forebrain to get myself and my Yele off this rock. But I got no money left that don’t have the grinning fizzog of the Anadyomene Corporation Chairman on the face side. Please, please help me.”

“
Do not,”
warned the Anchorite,
“under any circumstances help him.”

“You said you watch the port every day,” said Magus.

“Certainly do.”

“A man came here. A man of slightly less than average build, middle age, tanned complexion, blue eyes, mesomorphic.”

The lawyer shrugged. “Could be anyone.”

“He would have looked obscenely pleased with himself.”

“Oh,” said the lawyer instantly, with the huge disdain of a man not obscenely pleased with himself, “
Him.
”

Men had once joined certain brutal military units to forget. Johannes Maria Von Trapp had, it seemed, had joined the Anadyomene Corporation to be forgotten.

The Sub Level Two administrative centre was a place where, if anything resembling a human soul had existed, it would have been swiftly filed, categorized, assessed and taken out of scope as non-cost-effective. The workers here wore different uniforms, less hardwearing, more uncomfortable, with a fabric noose tied around the neck in a Double Windsor. They sported Personal Head Up Display Assistants clipped to their temples, beaming internal memos directly onto their retinas. Some of the more loyal senior staff had internal PHUDA’s installed in parts of the brain a middle manager had no need to use, principally the frontal lobes; their eyes glittered with internal messaging.

Mr. Von Trapp worked somewhere in a massive cube of powdery acid concrete which housed External Company Payroll. Only a very small number of pedestrian footbridges led in and out.

“
It figures,”
said the Anchorite, even though his predictions regarding vice palaces and unrestrained gratification of the senses had been disproved.
“He wouldn’t be interested in company doubloons.”

“He breezed in a week ago,” said the lawyer, whose name, it transpired, was Iraklis Joannou. “Bought up half the Southern Hemisphere with a single credit implant in his right hand. The credit reader was an old, pre-inflation model. When it read his limit, it broke down with a numeric overflow.”

“
Impossible,”
said the Anchorite huffily.
“Only the Dictator himself was ever that rich.”

Magus relayed the Anchorite’s opinion.

“There were some,” said Joannou, “who suspected he
was
the Dictator. After all, His Excellency is known to be still at large.”

“
Hardly. It’s likely he died when his supporters attempted to spring him from custody at Last Stop,”
opined Reborn-in-Jesus senior.

“In any case,” said Joannou, “given what you’ve told me of his antecedents, I have no doubt that the limit was somehow forged. But it bought him an immediate directorship. He’s on secondment to Payroll until confirmation of transfer of funds from the New Earth Bank.”

“
Which gives him about,”
the Anchorite counted on invisible fingers, “
ten New Days, more or less.”

Joannou, not hearing the voice in Magus’s right ear, said: “The time for interstellar settlement of funds transfers of this size is around ten New Days. A few small colony worlds and financial institutions should be bankrupted in the process, but I doubt our Mr. Von Trapp cares overmuch.”

“
He won’t. Those who shoot you in the head are more honest than Trapp’s sort,”
said the voice in Magus’s right ear.
“If a scam of his puts a hundred thousand people on the street and one hundred of them commit suicide, somehow that doesn’t make him a murderer. But you drop
one
hydrogen bomb on a populated area, just
one—”

“
Do we think,”
said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus,
“that Mr. Von Trapp will shortly be leaving Anadyomene?”

“
As soon as he manages to find a way into the Payroll transfer system,”
said the Anchorite.

“
He won’t wait till he gets his directorship?”
said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, shocked.

“
Three things—firstly, those funds are unlikely to clear. Secondly, now is the time to strike, while the Company imagines he’s being a good boy, waiting for his Directorship. Thirdly, if anyone on this planet has even an inkling of a suspicion that Trapp is the Dictator, then there are Moral Cleansing Bureau ships on their way here right now. The rewards for the Dictator’s recapture would ransom the soul of Judas.”

“YOU THERE. WHAT ARE YOU DOING UP IN PAYROLL?” The voice had come from an unobtrusive Remote Face high on a nearby pillar—a panel with stereo microphones, a single speaker, and twin trackable cameras. This Remote Face was painted to resemble Sweeney, the Anadyomene Company Happy Clown.

Joannou walked over to the Remote Face and raised his voice to a shout. “APOLOGIES, SIR. I WAS SHOWING VISITORS TO THE PLANET UP HERE AT THEIR REQUEST. PROSPECTIVE SHAREHOLDERS,” he added.

The voice in the speaker sounded both incredulous and pained. “THEY’VE SEEN THE PLACE AND THEY STILL WANT TO LIVE HERE?” A drop of acid rain leaking from an upper level splashed into the concrete near the lawyer’s feet, raising a hiss as it dissolved the surface.

Magus raised his voice. “WE BELONG TO A RELIGIOUS ORDER WHICH VALUES PRIVACY.”

“WELL, SHOWING NEW MARKS AROUND IS THE JOB OF THE WELCOMING COMMITTEE. TAKE THESE VALUED GUESTS BACK UP TO MAIN TWO AND RETURN TO YOUR QUARTERS, SHAREHOLDER.”

The lawyer nodded and pointed in the direction of the Up elevator cage.

Sub-levels whirred past in the elevator, each with its own particular unpleasant smell.

“Were they listening to us?”

The lawyer nodded. “Always. They had the gain cranked right up to the max. That’s why the guy sounded like he’d sat on a succulent when I yelled at him. But it also means they probably didn’t have a smaller, less obtrusive microphone closer by. They probably don’t know what we’re up to.”

Another elevator cage passed them, going down. The cage was full of offworlders in variously-coloured shorts and utility vests, standing motionless with streams of HUD flickering over their corneas.

“Who are they?” said Magus, following the elevator with his eyes.

“
Patch me in to the Devil “,
said the Anchorite. Magus fished for a connector on the side of the personality-analogue, raised his travelling companion’s hat, and pushed the connector into the Devil’s temple. Immediately, the Devil raised its head and tracked the receding cage with eyes far better than human.

“
Moral Cleansing Analysts blending in,”
said the Anchorite.
“They will be armed. The weapons will be internal.”

“Moral Cleansing Analysts are going to retrieve Mr. Von Trapp,” said Magus out loud. “They will not discover him to be the Dictator, but as soon as they sample his DNA, they will discover him to be a wanted criminal and rearrest him.”

“What do we do?” said Joannou as the elevator cage began to slow. Magus listened to the voices in his head, as his father had advised him. “We must warn Mr. Von Trapp,” he said. “We will require his public access mail address. And then you must get in touch with your wife,” he said, “and instruct her to pack.”

The lawyer’s eyes shone. He pulled a personal media centre from his coverall and began punching in commands with shaky fingers.

The Departures terminal was one of two long bores of concrete like the barrels of a shotgun, driven into the rock until they intersected with the top of Smith City. It was empty of all but a handful of Company Area Sales Supervisors and legal representatives. Anadyomene middle management, it seemed, travelled on whatever vile firework drifted into the system, rather than on the sleek executive needles Magus had seen parked in orbit for the Board of Directors. This week’s particular vile firework was a type two trader, the
Tears of the Moon
. The air in the terminal smelt of sulphur, and the concrete was stained with acid craters. The middle managers all sported slatted ceramic umbrellas.

Mrs. Joannou was a severe, spare lady who had inspected Magus’s teeth when she had first met him five minutes earlier.

“You’ve overtanned,” she said. “Your skin will age quickly, with increased risk of melanoma. Your employer should provide radiation shielding. You’re a farmer, you say? What have you been doing, tilling the fields by hand?”

Magus had only been able to grin and shrug weakly. Curiously, Mrs. Joannou had approved of his diet of potatoes.

“Potatoes are good,” she said. “Potatoes and milk, the diet of peasants. Peasants eat better than kings, as a rule; their survival strategy is to outbreed the aristocracy, and you can’t breed if you’re not healthy. The only thing better than potatoes and milk is good solid meat, mark my words. Human meat, for preference.”

The Joannous, who had been a doctor and a lawyer on their homeworld, had two Company lunchboxes of baggage. When Mr. Joannou had asked for their tickets for the impending flight, Magus had simply shaken his head and instructed patience.

“There will be tickets before the flight departs,” he said.

A final call was being made for Passenger Zzyzx. Mrs. Joannou’s lips were pursed, and Magus feared the very worst thing in his universe, verbose feminine disapproval.

At length, however, a sweating, panting figure struggled up the escalator into Departures, toting two suitcases bigger than he was, assisted by two Shareholder urchins bearing cases that were even larger.

“Mr. Von Trapp, I presume,” said Magus.

Von Trapp stared warily, a fight-or-flight debate clearly bouncing off the inside of his skull.

“
Plug me into the Master socket on the Devil,”
said the Anchorite. Magus found a new port on the Devil’s head cowling.

“GOOD AFTERNOON, HANSI,” said the Devil in the Anchorite’s voice. Magus had never known it had a speaker. Certainly it had nothing resembling a mouth.

Von Trapp licked his lips. “Who are you? Your voice is familiar.”

The Devil set its hat at a jaunty angle and posed extravagantly. “HOW ABOUT MY FACE?”

“I must say you have lost me there.”

“I AM AWARE OF YOU BY REPUTATION,” said the Devil. “I HAVE SPENT TOO LONG IN SERIES ONES AND TWOS NOT TO KNOW OF HANS TRAPP, THE MAN WHO MAKES SECURITY SYSTEMS SING THEIR PASSWORDS, THE MAN WITH A MILLION GENOMES, THE MAN NO SERIES ONE OR TWO CAN HOLD.”

“And no Series Three,” said Trapp defiantly.

“YOU WERE JUST PLAIN TRAPP WHEN I LAST KNEW OF YOU,” said the Devil. “WHEN DID YOU GET RAISED TO THE PEERAGE? BUT ENOUGH OF SMALL TALK; YOU HAVE PLACES TO GO. WE
ALL
HAVE A PLACE TO GO. WE ARE GOING BACK TO MOUNT ARARAT, HANSI, AND YOU ARE COMING WITH US.”

“Mount Ararat?” An eyebrow flickered curiously. “Is that what the place was called?”

“IT IS. AND THERE IS A GIRL STILL STUCK IN A SERIES THREE FOR THE REST OF YOUR NATURAL LIFE. THERE IS ONLY ONE MAN I KNOW OF WHO CAN GET HER OUT.”

Trapp grimaced. “She will be well fed. She will have all she needs to live a long life. The world she lived on, the people there live like animals, trying to grow crops in poison dust. Working the land by hand out under hard gamma. Lifetime in a warm cell is better for her.”