Smallworld

by Dominic Green

  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:

  MUST LEAVE. URGENT BUSINESS TO ATTEND TO. DON’T TELL REVENUE COLLECTORS I WAS EVER HERE. EAT THIS MESSAGE AND DISPOSE OF THE POOP WHEN IT WORKS ITS WAY THROUGH YOUR SYSTEM.

  Day-of-Creation looked up at Apostle, crestfallen.

  “We are surely sunk,” he said.

  Deputy Lead Revenue Assessor Aidid ran a sensor round the rim of the faecal waste disposal unit, tapped the screen of his detector, and nodded at Mr. Armitage gravely.

  “Imperfectly cleaned,” gloated Mr. Armitage, peering at Mr. Aidid’s screen. “This registers the excreta of seventeen recent users. Every bowel bleeds a little, Ms. Reborn-in-Jesus, and DNA does not lie. Your own account mentions only sixteen permanent planetary inhabitants. Where is number seventeen?”

  “We’re cannibals,” blurted Day-of-Creation suddenly. “We ate number sixteen and pooped him out through our systems.”

  Mr. Armitage turned his fierce face to bear on Day-of-Creation with the slowness of a naval gun turret. Day-of-Creation cringed.

  Inexplicably, Mr. Armitage’s mouth broke into a smile. A smile with its teeth filed into points, it was true, but a smile nevertheless.

  “Is that so? Technically, cannibalism is not a crime in tax law. I may well allow you that one. Failure to disclose possession of an interstellar vehicle, however…” his eyes dropped to para 3, sub-para 37B of the declarations proforma page that lay open on his palmframe, and he tutted, tutted, tutted.

  “But we did declare Prodigal Son,” exclaimed Unity indignantly. “It’s my brother’s freighter which he bought fair and square.”

  “There is also a personal shuttle landed not five kilometres from here,” said Mr. Aidid.

  “Oh, that,” said Day-of-Creation. “That just-just—” he looked around at the rest of his family for a prompt.

  “Just landed here,” said Unity.

  “And its owners just took off again,” said Apostle.

  “Without their ship,” said Day-of-Creation.

  “And we don’t know who they were,” said Beguiled-of-the-Serpent Raffaele.

  Mr. Armitage’s deep frown of disblief might have permitted small objects to be concealed in his forehead. “There is also,” he said, “evidence of a hasty departure by a type three survey vehicle.”

  “Oh, that one just blew up,” said Day-of-Creation.

  “Killing everyone on board,” added Apostle.

  “Terrible, terrible accident,” said Beguiled-of-the-Serpent.

  “And an old D class gun scout,” said Mr. Armitage, “powered down, trailing this gas giant—” he gestured out of the window at the imagined ball of Naphil with his palmframe stylus—”in a Trojan orbit.”

  “We have no idea,” said Unity truthfully, “whose that is.”

  Mr. Armitage fixed the room with eyes that held belief only that all those present were the fiscal equivalent of witches and should be dropped into a gravity well to see if they floated. “I see. Well, in any case,” he concluded, “Mr. Aidid—what is the damage?”

  “It is the unanimous finding of this team,” said Mr. Aidid, ticking off hotspots on his paras and sub-paras, “that the family Reborn-in-Jesus of location 23 Kranii 3X, locally known as ‘Mount Ararat’, owe Central Revenue five hundred and thirty-three thousand, three hundred and fifty-two credits at this date, Kilodia Ten New Era. It insists,” he said, staring down the bridge of his glasses as if squinting down gunsights, “on immediate settlement.”

  Unity, quivering with rage like a tall tree in a gale, went through the motions and said:

  “We haven’t got five hundred thousand credits.”

  “Then we will have to seize physical assets accordingly. Mr. Aidid—what is the current centrally registered value,” said Mr. Armitage, “of a goat?”

  Mr. Aidid entered the word ‘GOAT’ on his palmframe, and read back: “Seventy-five credits.”

  “But we paid a hundred a horn for those!”

  “Seventy-five credits,” repeated Mr. Aidid sternly.

  “That would make, for the entire herd…” said Mr. Armitage, tapping in figures on his own keypad with the precision of a piano-playing polar bear.

  “One thousand six hundred and seventy-two credits,” said Unity without thinking. Mr. Aidid shot her an alarmed look of reappraisal, as if only now considering her to be another human being.

  “We will itemize the goods we propose to requisition,” said Mr. Armitage. “As periods of indentured servitude for payments of revenues owed have recently become acceptable standard practice, we are required to sequester all planetary inhabitants of working age until the
exact terms of the settlement become clear. Is there a strongroom or jailhouse we could lock you and your brothers and sister in?”

  Unity blinked to try and clear her eyes and ears of madness. “Uh, there’s the Panic Cellar, it’s radiation-proof and it gets used as a drunk tank if we need it, though you need a combination to lock and unlock it—”

  “Please be so kind as to remember the combination for us. While you are locked in, Mr. Aidid will discuss the fine detail of our requisition with you here in your own home, in the environment where you feel safest. In the meantime, I have other work to attend to.” He bent into a bow, the end point of which would have connected his lips with Unity’s hand had she allowed it to.

  “I’m not going into no cellar,” objected Apostle ungrammatically.

  “I’m afraid,” said Mr. Armitage, straightening up with a thin smile, “I must insist.”

  “I’m not going into no cellar,” said Apostle, “never.”

  Mr. Armitage smiled and produced a pepperbox laser. He flicked the action to ACQUIRE MULTIPLE TARGETS; the hydra-heads of fibre optics on the laser’s barrel turned and twined until they were lined up on every other living person in the room—including, Unity was intrigued to note, Mr. Aidid.

  “Into the cellar, please,” said Mr. Armitage.

  Apostle glared darkly at the tax assessor, but complied, filing with all other adult family members into the pressure door under the stairs. The gun was waved at Mr. Aidid as peremptorily as at the Reborn-in-Jesuses; he dropped meekly into line. Finally, Unity descended, turning to look serenely out at Mr. Armitage, who grinned back.

  “The Devil,” said Unity, “will punish you for your wickedness if you harm any member of my family.”

  “The combination, please,” said Mr. Armitage, realigning his hydra-heads on Beguiled-of-the-Serpent, who was not yet of working age and hence still outside the cellar.

  Unity gave the combination. The door closed. Very slowly, she could hear fingers changing the combination on the keypad on the other side. After a brief hiatus, the emergency lights came on, red as dying embers, like daylight on Mount Ararat’s surface.

  Mr. Aidid shook his head. “Such poor keyboard speed. Surely you realize such a man could never even make a Grade One in the Revenue Service?”

  Unity scowled. “I beg your pardon?”

  Aidid stared at Unity in disbelief. “You don’t for one minute think those men out there are genuine Central Revenue Agents, do you?”

  “So you are a genuine Central Revenue Agent.”

  Mr. Aidid nodded. “The blood of Saul runs in my veins. I must apologize for the perversion of correct revenue collection processes your family has been subjected to. That ship, alas, is using the transponders from a Central Revenue ship, my ship, the Render Unto Caesar. We dropped back into curvespace a couple of days back in the Verdastelo system, a routine census and assessment mission on a stage three colony, when we received a distress call in the UHF band. A mail courier in difficulty, disabled by a liquid helium cloud in deep space; the vapour had oozed through her hull, so the crew said, and then become gaseous, contaminating the ship’s air and causing multiple hull breaches via dry and wet ice damage. The crewman logging the call certainly spoke with a convincingly squeaky voice. Unfortunately, when we boarded, the ship’s allegedly disabled crew rose up and attacked us, demanding that our captain instruct them as to how to remove and reinstall our transponder on their own vessel, and even that I accompany them here to reinforce their bona-fides as Revenue agents. They plan something here; I have no doubt that it is dreadful.” He shook his head vehemently. “That assessment of your planetary back tax bill was highly inflated. I was acting under duress—”

  Apostle had clapped a hand over Mr. Aidid’s mouth. “We understand. Now, however, we find ourselves locked in a storm refuge underground with pressing need to leave it. Does the equipment officially issued you as a state tax assessor include heavy cutting gear or explosives at all?”

  Mr. Aidid thought for several seconds, and said: “No. No, just the personal palmframe and the official collector’s sash.”

  Apostle punched a nearby wall. The anti-lunatic padding ate the sound of the impact before it even reached the two metres of anti-neutron and anti-gamma laminates beyond it. He pummelled the wall with a farmer’s muscles till his knuckles grew bloody. Discreetly, as Apostle wasted air, the integral CO2 recycler cut in.

  Eventually, Apostle stopped, panting, aware his efforts were coming to nothing.

  “Well,” he said, “at least we know our tax bill won’t be as large as we thought.”

  Beguiled-of-the-Serpent pelted down the front path between rows of wilted poppies. Mother had never been able to convince them to grow on Ararat. Outside, the air was still warm. Goats were wandering about unconcernedly, chewing the cud and watching the newcomers from the tax collector’s ship without concern. Four of them were currently shifting a large cylindrical device they had unloaded from a surface rover to the edge of the Penitentiary, extending cables from it to clip onto the metal. Mr. Armitage, meanwhile, was supervising the unloading of other equipment—a portable fusion torus, cutting tools, explosives.

  Mr. Armitage noticed Beguiled’s presence. “Hi there short stuff. Don’t you worry, we’ll have your brothers and sisters out of there just as soon as we have our own business sorted out.”

  “I’m not short,” said Beguiled. “I am tall for my age. I am five kilodia old. Why are you trying to break into the Penitentiary with a temporal accelerator?”

  Mr. Armitage looked down his totem-pole nose with surprise, and new respect. “Why? Would that be a bad idea in your opinion?”

  “Well, it worked the last time Mr. Trapp tried it. But the Penitentiary learns from its mistakes. It’s programmed to. The same trick probably won’t work twice.”

  Mr. Armitage grinned a massive array of cubic-zirconia-studded teeth. “Mr. Trapp. That would be Hans Trapp, I take it? The cracksman?”

  “He describes himself as a security consultant,” said Beguiled. “Mother says he is not an irretrievably bad man, only a thief.”

  Mr. Armitage’s eyes rolled in his head. “So he’s not in there any more.”

  “Oh, yes. He did escape, but Father made him go back in.”

  The smile broadened and, if this was possible, became even whiter. “Excellent. Now you run along, tall stuff. Some of this gear is dangerous.” He turned and yelled to one of his fellow taxmen. “Ravi, belay the accelerator, it won’t work. We’ll start with the gravity cutter.”

  Ground crunched under Beguiled’s EVA shoes as she scrambled round to the front of the Penitentiary under the palms. Now on a side of the device invisible to the taxman, she lowered her face close to the metal and set to tapping hard with her knuckles.

  M-R-T-R-A-P-P-R-U-T-H-E-R-E-M-R-T-R-A-P-P-R-U-T-H-E-R-E-

  Presently there was an answering series of taps.

  Y-E-S-W-H-O-R-U-STOP

  B-E-G-U-I-L-D, tapped Beguiled. T-H-E-R-E-R-M-E-N-H-E-R-E-2-G-E-T-U-O-U-T-W-I-T-H-A-G-R-A-V-I-T-Y-C-U-T-T-E-R-STOP

  The Penitentiary paused, and then tapped back T-H-A-T-W-O-N-T-W-O-R-K-W-H-O-R-T-H-E-Y-B-A-D-M-E-N-QUERY

  N-O-C-E-N-T-R-A-L-R-E-V-E-N-U-L-E-A-D-E-R-I-S-C-A-L-L-E-D-R-M-I-T-A-G-E-H-E-K-N-O-W-S-U-STOP

  K-N-O-W-N-O-O-N-E-C-A-L-L-E-D-R-M-I-T-A-G-E-W-H-A-T-S-H-E-L-O-O-K-L-I-K-E-QUERY

  S-C-A-R-R-D-F-A-C-E-V-E-R-Y-T-A-L-L-STOP

  There was another long pause. Then the metal tapped back frantically T-H-A-T-I-S-N-O-R-E-V-E-N-U-M-A-N-I-F-H-E-G-E-T-S-M-E-O-U-T-I-A-M-D-E-A-D-A-L-E-R-T-A-U-T-H-O-R-I-T-I-E-S-S-E-N-D-A-N-S-O-S-

  C-A-L-M, tapped Beguiled. E-V-R-Y-O-N-E-L-O-C-K-D-U-P-B-Y-T-A-X-M-E-N-I-D-O-N-T-H-A-V-E-P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D-F-O-R-C-O-M-M-S-S-U-I-T-E-

  Another pause. Then the metal tapped back:

  W-H-E-R-E-T-H-E-Y-L-O-C-K-D-U-P-W-H-A-T-S-O-R-T-O-F-L-O-C-K

  The house was unguarded. The next smallest girls, Measure-of-Barley and Be-Not-Near-Unto-Man-In-Thy-Time-Of-Uncleanness, were sitting
sobbing on the front step. Goats were walking freely through the house. Inside the hall, Day-of-Creation was attempting to convince one to eat a curtain.

  “Stop that,” said Beguiled. “We have to deal with the taxmen.”

  “Pa and Uncle Anchorite and the Devil will deal with them when they get back,” said Day-of-Creation unconcernedly, trying gamely to feed the artificial fibre through the ruminant’s jaws.