“Which I never asked,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “How long have you been drilling in the South End Chasm?”
The Captain had no need to consult a watch; the time came up on her retinal HUD on command. “Around five hours now. Did you get your goat?”
“No. I suspect the Devil has taken her. It will be expensive. I’d only recently had her impregnated.”
“Soon, if you take our offer, you’ll have goats from your front door to the horizon. The world will be paved in goats.” The Captain looked up around the room at the cavorting devils carved into the coving. “So, as well as God, your sect’s teaching encompasses a belief in the Devil.”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus stared back with a dull sullen eye. “No, it does not. But the Devil exists regardless.”
“STOP! WHAT THE DEVIL ARE YOU DOING!?”
The man had appeared from the rocks above as if they’d given birth to him, his head a mass of hair like a bull baboon’s, waving stick-thin arms that looked to consist solely of bone and nerve fibre, wearing only a light-reflective kaftan. He had nothing on his feet at all—the soles of his feet, Planetometrist Wong imagined, were probably tough as goats’ hooves by now.
“This must be the Anchorite,” whispered Social Correctness Officer Asahara. “Evidently he is no Buddhist.”
“Perhaps those of his religion believe cutting a man’s hair takes away his strength,” giggled Junior Gravitographer Shankar from her position at the telemetry station. One kilometre below them, on the end of thirteen linked windings of superfine line, the sampler drone had located itself on a flat plane of rock visible on the station monitors. It was now on its second section of drilling down towards the C of G, which the Forward detectors clearly identified as a concentrated mass well above the density limit of electron-degenerate matter.
The Anchorite tumbled down the rocks like a corpse down a waterfall, pausing only to yell, scream and wave. Finally, he dropped to the ledge where the Sample Team had set up shop with the rover’s prospecting module, winched down from a hundred metres above on the vehicle’s emergency towing cable. He fell onto all fours, more like an animal than a man.
“Stop,” he said. “You have no idea of the danger of what you’re doing. Please desist.”
“You would be Mr. Giovanni Battista, I take it?” said Planetometrist Wong. “Might we exchange public access data?”
The Anchorite shrank back into a wary crouch. “I have no census data,” he said.
“But everyone,” said Planetometrist Wong, “has census data. The chip is implanted in the corpus callosum at birth.”
“Unless,” smirked Correctness Officer Asahara, “the birth is unregistered.” This carried with it an implication of deviant non-compliance with central census legislation or, even worse, of birth beyond the Accepted Frontier, where only fanatics and enemies of right and good authority originated. Perhaps unsurprisingly if he was indeed an illegal, the Anchorite did not rise to the accusation.
“We are engaged in an operation the Tetsushuri Company has great experience of,” assured Planetometrist Wong. “For a man with a pick and shovel, it would indeed be dangerous. But we have tried and tested procedures.”
“Gravitational attraction is increasing steadily,” said Junior Gravitographer Shankar. “As expected. Don’t believe what’s down there to have a super-C EV.” The gravitographer spoke in code to keep vital information from the mudballer; frustratingly, he seemed to understand more than a mudballer should.
“I’m well aware of that,” snapped the Anchorite. “It’s a ball of neutronium no larger than a space hopper. Do you think I don’t know what neutronium is?”
From the telemetry station, Gravitographer Shankar’s tone too grew sharp. “I’m getting some very odd readings here. Density is much lower than expected. Neutron-degenerate towards the core, of course, and electron-degenerate in a shell around that, but between the two—”
Gravitographer Shankar tapped SCO Asahara on the shoulder and directed attention from the figures at the base of the screen to the TV picture at the top of it. The picture glared white.
“Vulcanism!”
Wong shook his head. “Impossible on a world this small.”
“Could such a large nugget cause vulcanism in the rocks around it?”
Wong considered the idea for a microsecond. “We have documentary evidence of over a thousand instances of neutronium-cored planetesimals. It’s never been observed. What’s the recorded temperature?”
Asahara glanced at the screen. “Uh…you could walk around in it. Weird coincidence…gravity’s Earth normal at that depth too.”
“Turn down the gain on the photosensors,” said Wong.
The brightness adjusted downwards.
Wong stared into the screen.
“What the hell is THAT—?”
The picture went out; and no attempts at diagnostics and random juggling of settings by Shankar and Asahara could convince it to come back.
*
“Ma’am, the planetoid is hollow below a depth of three kilometres.”
The surface of Mount Ararat hardly rotated. The ring surface of the unnamed planet above, on which Earth or New Earth might be peeled and hung out to dry numerous times like pattern wallpaper, swept towards Captain Adeti so thick and golden out of so close a horizon that it seemed impossible she could not step up and walk on it.
“You realize, Zhong Zhi, that if this planetoid were any larger, this view would be quite unfeasible.”
Wong nodded. “Tidal forces would drag it apart. Only something this small, with this powerful and localized a gravitational field, can orbit within the rings intact.”
Adeti bent down to the child at her right. The child had walked the thirty kilometres from Third Landing to the prospecting ship out of sheer curiosity. The crew had been feeding it Low Fat Ice Cream Simulant.
“What do you call that planet hereabouts?” she said, pointing up at a third of the visible sky.
“Naphil,” said the child. “You’re sitting on my uncle Forswear-Dalliance’s gravestone,” it added.
“Oh,” said the Captain. “Sorry.”
All around her, headstones lay smacked flat like dominoes. So many, in so short a time…
Wong broke in impatiently. “Ma’am, there is also breathable air down there. Shortly before the drone lost contact, it broadcast successful tests for oxygen, CO2 and nitrogen. The readings for all three gases were even higher than the ones up here on the surface. Uh, ma’am? You’re not wearing your EVA suit, ma’am.”
High above, a set of stars skated overhead in a perfect V-constellation—the components of the prospecting vessel that weren’t required on a planetary surface, the FTL drive, interstellar fuel stages, and deep space navigation fit, temporarily discarded as extra payload.
The Captain looked down from the constellation she commanded and languidly traced a hand across the lettering on the marble, which proclaimed Uncle Forswear-Dalliance to be DEARLY BELOVED. “The locals don’t wear them…so there’s air down there. Stands to reason it would be in greater concentration. The gravity’s higher.”
“Also, ma’am, just before the drone broke off, it drilled through a particularly difficult hundred metre section of vitrified rock. Fused glass, ma’am. And you know as well as I do there’s no vulcanism down there.”
Adeti raised an eyebrow. “You think it’s artificial?”
“Ma’am, there is light down there. Visible spectrum. And water. Fresh water. We clearly saw the drone’s tunnel spoil fall into a liquid surface having that refractive index.”
“You think someone’s living down there?”
Wong paused. Peddling outlandish theories to one’s commanding officer could shorten career growth. “I think this entire world, ma’am, is artificial.”
This got the bemused psychoanalytical look he’d dreaded. “Pardon?”
“Ma’am, we have here a twenty-kilometre world hit by a neutronium fragment at just enough velocity for it to lodg
e in the C of G and provide surface gravity of one half Earth normal, a breathable atmosphere, and liquid water—”
The Captain looked around her at the black dust stretching out like a starless night to an uneven horizon. The dust, she knew, actually proved to be green when taken inside under white light. It was that full of venomous compounds of copper. “You’re suggesting someone would deliberately make a world like this? To live on?”
“Ma’am, the family Reborn-in-Jesus say that when they first arrived, there was already breathable air.”
He had Adeti’s attention now. “No cyanobacteria? No need for terraforming? Didn’t they think that was odd?”
“No, ma’am. Their leader, a man calling himself Duke Allion who registered the mission with the Outworlds Colonization Bureau, New Earth Branch, in Kilodia Zero, took it to be evidence of Intelligent Design. That this world had been made for them.”
Adeti snapped her fingers. “The Anchorite!” She jabbed a finger at the spare, bearded face on the screen. “What does the Anchorite say on the matter?”
“According to Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, he was already here when they arrived. He also,” said Wong meaningfully, “attempted to stop us drilling in the South End Chasm. And he’s either an Uncensored Individual or someone who doesn’t want us to view his personal data.”
“Of course, Mr. Wong,” nodded Adeti sarcastically. “The Recovery Bureau might take away his vast wealth in back taxes. He lives in a cave, I hear.”
“A cave he appears to have chiselled from the rock itself,” said Planetometrist Wong. “Manually. I have been taken there by the children and agree that he has little to fear fiscally.”
A fly green as verdigris was droning irritably around Adeti’s head. Somehow an insect, one of particularly loathsome dimensions, had got on board her vessel. The ship would need decontaminating throughout as soon as they returned to depot. Adeti flicked a lucky penny up in the air, caught it on the back of her hand, and worked it across her fingers. The penny, worth a hundredth of a credit, was no more legal tender than a bushel of wheat or a wife would have been; nowadays, coinage was produced solely for numismatists. Modern state centicredits bore the ring of linked hands on one side, Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on the other. This was an older coin, however. It had a face.
She held the coin between two knuckles. The face was aquiline, crowned with laurels, looking left towards distant vistas.
Senior Planetometrist Wong crooked an eyebrow.
“Something up, skip?”
“Nah,” grumbled Adeti, and palmed the coin again.
“Have we found the sampling rig yet?”
“Yes ma’am. An aerial survey drone was sent down to investigate. The rig is still down there at the chasm bottom, half submerged in a soil emulsion. It’s simply that the telemetry cable has been cut, and the planet—” he waved his hand at the vast bulk of what Adeti now knew was called Naphil, not deigning to call what they were currently standing on a planet—”puts out enough radio in all bands to prevent the drone’s backup systems from communicating.”
“Did the cable snap? I thought they were supposed to be strong!”
“They are, ma’am. It was a clean cut. No falling rock or micrometeoroid did it.” Wong paused for thought. “But the Anchorite was up top with us the whole time.”
“And that’s the only time we’ve ever seen him,” said Adeti. “At the very moment he needs to get himself an alibi. In any case, I believe the readings up to the point of failure have confirmed our claim. We have beneath our feet a lode of neutronium big enough to be hammered into a crown for God Himself. I have drawn up a Compulsory Field Purchase Request, which we are empowered to serve on planetoids of less than two thousand kilometres in diameter and less than ten thousand population. The family will be more than adequately rewarded.” She patted the head of the child beside her.
Wong fidgeted with his suit jet controls. “Ma’am, the two thousand kilometre rule was created on the assumption that no worlds below two thousand kilometres in diameter have atmospheres.”
“Your point being, Mr. Wong?”
“Ma’am, if we call up a mining ship and cut the neutronium core out of this place, we will destroy that atmosphere. We will destroy everything living here. There are islands in the oceans on Old Earth, ma’am, where unique species had evolved over millions of kilodia and were destroyed in one when sailors arrived in need of eggs, meat, firewood, and places to test their Nuclear Weapons.”
“The Devil won’t let you do it,” said the child.
Adeti and Wong looked down. The child was using a surveyor’s french chalk to fill in the DEARLY BELOVED on the toppled headstone. Adeti reflected idly that the same precise cut seemed to have been used to carve the same precise font in all the epitaphs on all the graves. What she had seen of the colony so far had convinced her that the settlers were essentially city people, muddled masses yearning to breathe less oxygen. Their craftsmanship had grown better over time, but was still basic to the point of crudity—poorly dressed stone walls, botched repairs. These gravestones, however, looked so precise as to be almost—
“Who carved these stones?” said Captain Adeti. The child looked up, all innocence.
“The Devil, of course,” she said, and set to drawing a fluorescent orange fiend beneath the DEARLY BELOVED. The fiend was cramming a protesting person into its mouth,a person clearly wearing Tetsushuri Company EVA gear. Adeti suddenly realized that every single epitaph on every grave also said DEARLY BELOVED.
“God’s-Wound,” said the Captain gently, “where does the Devil live?”
“At the centre of the world, of course,” said the child. “Do you have a red? I have to do all the blood the spaceman will be bleeding.”
“Call up saved link 21317.”
The entire wall lit up with densely-written text. Officer Asahara used her personal laser wand to underline several passages in scarlet.
“This is a Post-Modern English translation,” she explained. “The relevant passage is tu passasti ‘l punto al qual si traggon d’ogne parte i pesi. The world—well before Columbus, by the way—is clearly indicated by Dante, in his Inferno, to be round, and the would-be usurper Satan is at the centre of that world, paradoxically in a region of extreme cold rather than heat, blocking the passage of Dante out of Hell and into Purgatory and thereby Heaven. It’s an apt cautionary tale for us, perhaps. It’s not five kilodia since the Satanic forces of the Dictator, many of whom genuinely believed their leader was a god, were defeated by the Army of the People.” She glanced sternly round the Bridge, making sure everyone present touched their hands to their hearts and mouthed the Oath of Allegiance. Only Adeti did not.
“I’m the Captain,” explained Adeti gleefully. “I have no heart.”
The crew collapsed in titters. Asahara reddened and marked down Adeti as an a enemy of the State.
“So you’re saying that those people’s Christian belief has caused them to place a devil at the centre of their world? That this is all dirt digger superstition?”
Asahara nodded.
“Bring in the prisoner,” said Adeti. There was very little room on board a prospecting vessel, and the prisoner had had to wait outside, loosely accompanied by the forty-two-kilo Gravitographer Shankar to remind him that he was a prisoner.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had so far been cooperative to the point of meekness. It had not been necessary to restrain him.
“Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus,” said the Captain, “my SCO here has a theory that your local devil, as you call it, is actually,” she searched for a kind word, “a religious necessity, credence in which is forced upon you by your belief system.”
“If a religious necessity can kill forty people,” grumbled Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, “then so be it.”
Adeti sat back in her seat.
“You didn’t tell us that.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“How did they die?” said SCO Asahara. “Sometimes an illness, a plague, can be characteri
zed as a devil—”
“Plagues,” said Reborn-in-Jesus, “do not remove people’s heads. I am no epidemiologist, but I am almost certain of this fact.” He looked up wearily at the circle of faces. “My father always planned for me to be in advertising, Captain. He advertised products he didn’t understand, understood but didn’t believe in, believed in but knew he would fail, his whole life. He was in advertising because his family were in advertising, as everyone was in Manaus. One day, when I was still quite small, I discovered my distant ancestors had once burned the great forest that had stood on the site of our favela and farmed the land, proud to herd great beef cattle for multinational fast food conglomerates. From that day onward, all I wanted to do was to farm, to till the land. I was lucky enough to enter into the society of Adolfo Hitler Talvares Conciecao Bisneto, who later came to call himself Duke Allion. At first, when we came here, things were not so bad. We had only to believe in God, to believe we were His Chosen People, to regard all His other people as tainted, to conduct sexual activity only in order to create more souls for the Lord. But then our Arkarch decreed that all our wives were also his wife, as he was in fact the Son of God, and announced that all children deemed to be bad in an annual audit by Saint Nicholas would not be educated, but would instead be sent to a workhouse at the edge of our settlement, and so forth. He appointed himself Saint Nicholas, of course. And as he was in possession of this world’s only working handgun, we had little choice but to obey.
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