Smallworld (16 page)

“But it would be peaceful,” said the Anchorite. “The underlying tranquillity of the location would be preserved.”

Mr. Yamashita nodded. “No buildings high enough to throw oneself violently from,” he said. “For the benefit of the patients, some of whom might be detoxifying or suffering from mental illness.”

“All of whom,” said the Anchorite firmly, “would be rich.”

“And there would be a wall,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus with some concern, “between us and them.”

“A very
high
wall,” agreed Mr. Yamashita, appraising Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Of your family, you yourself would retain a seventeen per cent interest, with your son Mr. Magus and your, um, associate here—” he nodded at the Anchorite “—also retaining seventeen per cent, and the Anadyomene Fund forty-nine.”

“Sounds reasonable,” said the Anchorite.

“Those are, in fact,” coughed Yamshita-san diplomatically, “exactly the terms you asked for. We argued against them at great length with our clients, yet were overruled.”

“Sounds reasonable,” said the Anchorite.

“Our clients appear to place great trust in you, Mr.—?”

“I have transcended the workaday commonplace of names,” revealed the Anchorite.

A cough sounded from behind Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, who grimaced weakly.

“I wish,” he said, “to split my percentage between myself and my dear wife. I will take nine per cent—”

The cough sounded again.

“—eight per cent, and my darling wife, the end point of my affections, the axis of my universe, will take nine.”

Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus’s drink was topped up from behind. The other guests’ glasses remained half full.

Mr. Yamashita smiled with excellent teeth. The sun dawned on his tie, onto which a heron strode out and began fishing in the former rainwater.

“Well, now that we are concluded, how do we propose to populate the gardens? Mrs. Joannou is very fond of redwood.”

In the tenth kilodia since the founding of the New and Perfect Era, Mount Ararat experienced the firm hand of government. This arrival, however, had been anticipated for several days. Rather than waiting for new stars to appear in the firmament and muddy urchins to skip in trailing pond
muck yelling ‘MA! PA! THERE’S A SPACESHIP IN SUCH AND SUCH A CONSTELLATION!’, the family Reborn-in-Jesus had recently arranged to be warned in advance by the new ultramodern landing facility under construction by Temple House in the southern hemisphere of the planet. This new landing, therefore, was announced by a call on Third Landing’s one and only videophone, a bespoke device cast in genuine ancient bakelite, consisting of a three-dimensional screen and speakers and one single large ivory button which opened a channel to Mount Ararat’s only
other
videophone, at the construction site.

The foreperson, Mr. Feng, sat in a cosy office surrounded by robosupervisor screens, grinning at the camera.
“Good morning! We’re tracking an unauthorized incoming approaching down the uphill ecliptic. Transponders identify it as a government ship. It does not respond to hailing. Are you expecting it?”

Third Landing had a number of adult inhabitants—Mr. and Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus, their eldest daughter Unity, taciturn Testament, voluble Apostle, and wholesomely beautiful God’s-Wound—but uncommonly, only Unity was at home to take the call. Tall, slender, impossibly attractive, but terrified that her sheer size made her look like a man, Unity hunched herself smaller and spoke into the microphone in as high a voice as she could muster. “I don’t believe so, Mr. Feng, but if it’s a government ship I’m sure no harm can come of it.”

Mr. Feng—middle-aged, portly, but possessed of the single undeniable plus point that he was not one of Unity’s immediate gene pool, grinned. “Yes, I’m pretty sure they’re listening to us too. But we have nothing to fear. They’ll find our accounts in order.”

“You think it’s a Revenue ship, Mr. Feng?”

“Almost certainly. The Tax Pirates cruise the outer reaches of human space, looking for isolated, impoverished planets. When they find one they land, make up an enormous back tax bill, present it to the local yokels, and wait for the money and bribes to roll in. It’s just like real piracy, only with fewer spacings and plump-buttocked cabin boys.”

Unity coloured like a ripening fruit. “I’m not sure father would approve of your using such words around me, Mr. Feng.”

“Buttock buttock buttock buttock buttock. Feng out.”

Unity rose to her feet and called out through the house.

“POSTLE! ZOUNDS! THERE’S A GOVERMENT SHIP COMING IN!”

*

It was the end of the day. 23 Kranii was loitering on the C/D ring division with intent to set. Mother and Father, who were not strictly Beguiled-of-the-Serpent’s mother and father, still could not bring themselves to call 23 Kranii ‘the sun’. The goats were already penned in in the High Street, attempting vainly to find scraps of ungrazed green. Some of them were already turning round to sleep in the Goat Shelter.

It was Naphillian perihelion, and the sun did not set properly at this time of year due to Mount Ararat’s axial tilt. However, it did pass behind Naphil’s A, B, and C rings, which dimmed it to a ruddy disco swirl, and for those few hours, the goats could be persuaded to sleep. During Crystal Night, as the children had christened it despite unfathomable objections from their parents, glistering shadows scooted across the fields like schools of supersonic jellyfish, and the sun was a vague patch of glowing coals fixed firmly over the North Pole, still light enough to read by, still warm enough to sleep under.

Beguiled-of-the-Serpent’s favourite goat, Shub-Niggurath, followed her blindly by the still waters of the Town Pond and into the shadow of the palms, where the History of the Entire Universe had been picked out in mosaic on the side of the Government Penitentiary by the combined children of Mount Ararat under Mother’s guidance. The first few square metres of mosaic were in raw, undifferentiated earth colours, home-baked clay baked in Mother’s home clay-baking apparatus, made of wetted Mount Ararat regolith, brown chondritic sand and rubble. In these colours the beginning of all things had been related—the bountiful hand of an indeterminately sexed Creator bestowing being on a roughly-rendered Adam and Eve, who looked to have come into being simultaneously with an identical number of ribs. Later episodes dwelt at length on the creation of Satan and His appearance before God to receive the instruction to torment Job. The trials of Job were depicted in great detail, involving Job’s friends and relatives being burned, buried, blown up and beheaded. Some of those chapters in the story seemed to be picked out in various shades of stained glass. Still later episodes, more gaudily made of metal, ceramic and plastic, showed the recent history of Mount Ararat—an idealized pre-war general purpose transport descending from the sky, bearing and loading precious cargoes. The cargoes, the drive exhaust of the trader, and the panoply of stars that twinkled overhead were made of a mineral mined from the very centre of Mount Ararat; a mineral which Beguiled’s foster-brother Magus was currently attempting to sell on a planet orbiting another star, and which all the children had been warned not to prise out of the mosaic, handle, lick, or eat under any circumstances. During daylight hours, when solar power activated the UV filaments twining over the fields, the normally jet-black stars and starship fluoresced a gorgeous sympathetic purple.

Beguiled sat down with her back against the metal wall of the Penitentiary, took out the cheap plastic encrypted text reader her mother turned a blind eye to, and loaded forbidden book number four,
Paradise Regain”d,
by John Milton. She had not been entirely sure what to make of Mr. Milton’s earlier
Paradise Lost
; it had made the Devil out to be a villain, whereas the book of Job and the Gospel of Matthew clearly showed him to be God’s servant. Perhaps this book would make things clearer.

“
I who e’er while the happy garden sung…”
began the book. Beguiled, who was beginning to toy with spelling her name Beguil’d, worked her way through the ancient language with some difficulty, until she was interrupted by a clear regular sound of knocking, not so much heard as felt, communicated through her shoulderblades resting against the metal. Whatever the sound was, it was coming from the inside of the prison itself.

Born into a society which relied heavily on occasional visits from passing spaceships, Beguiled was well acquainted with Morse Code.
Dotdotdotdot—dot—dotdashdotdot—dotdashdotdot—dashdashdash—H-E-L-L-O.

She turned, and pressed her ear against the metal. Gingerly, not wanting to disturb the constant stream of messaging, she tappedout the same greeting in reply.

The stream of dots and dashes changed instantly. T-H-A-N-K-G-O-D-R-U-O-N-T-H-E-O-U-T-S-I-D-E-T-H-I-S-I-S-J-O-H-A-N-N-E-S-

She interrupted the knocker’s enthusiasm with a curt reply. M-R-T-R-A-P-P-I-S-T-H-A-T-Y-O-U-STOP.

The knocking paused. Then, hesitantly, it replied back:

W-H-O-W-A-N-T-S-2-K-N-O-W-QUERY.

Beguiled tapped back: B-E-G-U-I-L-D-R-A-F-F-A-E-L-E-STOP.

There was another pause. Then came the reply:

B-E-G-U-I-L-E-D-O-F-T-H-E-S-E-R-P-E-N-T-QUERY.

Beguiled tapped back a Y-E-S, then followed with:

Y-O-U-G-O-T-M-E-I-N-2-T-R-O-U-B-L-E-M-R-T-R-A-P-P-STOP.

I-M-S-O-R-R-Y-P-R-E-S-S-U-R-E-S-O-F-E-S-C-A-P-I-N-G-I-M-T-R-Y-I-N-G-2-E-S-C-A-P-E-N-O-W-

She clicked the BOOKMARK AND EXIT spot on the reader’s screen. Even after she unstuck her ear from the wall, she could still hear the rhythm tapping out frantically. Somehow, the tapper seemed to have sensed the fact that she no longer had her head against the metal.

W-A-I-T-P-L-E-A-S-E-I-T-S-T-A-K-E-N-S-O-L-O-N-G-2-G-E-T-T-H-I-S-F-A-R-C-A-N-U-H-E-L-P-M-E-

Beguiled took great pleasure in tapping:

N-O

Chondritic gravel crunched beneath her heels as she turned on them and trudged back in the direction of the house. Shub-Niggurath, bleating softly, rose without question and accompanied her. The landscape crawled and flashed with the purple noise of shadows flitting by faster than film frames.

There was a rumble of rockets, and a bright star descending along the ninety-east meridian towards the new landing field. Someone appeared to have arrived.

“She’s a beauty all right,” said Apostle, with the keen critical eye of a man who was allowed on his brother’s tramp trader if he promised not to spit on the upholstery. Magus was currently away trading transuranics on the metal markets of Celadon, accompanied by his adopted sister Only-God-is-Perfect, and, at his father’s insistence, Mr. and Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus themselves. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was having no close camaraderie in his family.

The government ship was equipped, in the manner of manner of many ships, to shed its FTL drive, long range sensor fit, and interstellar fuel pods while struggling down to a planetary surface, in order to reduce payload. As it was a government vessel, it should have been doubly likely that its occupants would seek to separate their ship to reduce fuel costs. However, this ship had come down intact, despite the absence of a heatshield down the whole length of her hull. This made little difference in Mount Ararat’s kilometre-deep atmosphere, but could hardly have been standard procedure—and standard procedure, after all, was what government departments lived for.

The ship had landed on the fused stone strip that had been burned out in the South End Saddle by the construction company. Gigantic fluorescent orange stevedore robots stood on standby in the robopen, and the edges of the strip were marked out by solar-powered visible-light beacons driven into the regolith like bizarre local flora with square black leaves and lilac flashing heads. Across the strip, a zig-zag trail led up towards gates in the Wall. The Wall separated the aboriginal inhabitants of Mount Ararat from the Gravitational Gradient Spa and Curative Centre of Excellence being constructed by offworld investors in the worldlet’s southern hemisphere. Presently, all humankind—or at least that portion of it that possessed obscene wealth and very poor judgement—would gain access to the healing powers of neutronium, a miniscule chunk of which, torn from a dying star, provided Mount Ararat with its earthlike surface gravity. Right now, all that could be seen were sluggish landslides of nutritious mulch spilling out through deep-buried vitrified foundations.

The Government Men stood on the glassy-smooth apron in front of their vessel, which recently seemed to have undergone a respray. Many government craft in outlying areas, even today, still bore the eyed pyramid of the Dictatorship. No doubt this was what had been recently replaced, on the vessel’s side, by the ring of clasped hands that currently represented the State.

“She’s a Model Three courier,” said Apostle. “I bet she can make two hundred C. Twice as fast as a trader. Strange,” he added in reflection, “for government men to be doing their business in a courier.”

“Good morning,” said the leader of the Government Men, a two-metre man sporting a face fierce with tribal cicatrices. “We are agents of Central Revenue, and
you
are Guilty Until Proven Innocent. My colleague Mr. Aidid and I would like to see the accounts of everybody onplanet.” Mr. Aidid, a smaller, prematurely grey-haired man with an expression of deep gloom, nodded dolefully. Behind Mr. Aidid and his colleague, other men were already unloading oddly heavy equipment onto all terrain baggage trucks.

“We don’t keep accounts,” said Unity frankly.

The Central Revenue agent’s face lit up in delight.

“Oh,
good
,” he said.

“Uncle Anchorite! Uncle Anchorite! Ararat’s been boarded by fiscal buccaneers! They’ve demanded our accounts for the last twenty years—”

The cave was empty.

Apostle, Day-of-Creation, and Pitch-Not-Thy-Tent-Towards-Sodom Ogundere were alone in a large, light, airy space with glistering vitrified walls, free of any civilized accoutrements save a single massive pressure door at the entrance. The Anchorite’s bunk, his ancient, counterpane-patched EVA suit, his mining laser, his copy of Vegetius’s
De Re Militari
, were all gone. In their place was a single scrap of paper in the centre of the main chamber, which read simply: