Smallworld

by Dominic Green

  “You okay, boy?”

  He nodded his head weakly, understanding now where the hermit got his energy. “Is there more?”

  “No. This was the last section. We’re a full four kilometres down. What you can feel on you now is one full Earth gravity. Be careful, now—your heart’s never had to pump this hard a load before. It’s a good thing you’re a farmboy. Any lesser adult would be dead already.”

  The door in the side of the shaft read VALVA DOORCO, PRESSURE DOORS FOR ALL OCCASIONS, BANGALORE, EARTH.

  “You’re from Earth?” said Apostle.

  “Many people are,” said the Anchorite. He tapped the transparent lens at his right temple; it flared into life, beaming red light onto his retina. He tapped it again, several times; with each tap, the light in his eye changed colour, texture, and intensity.

  “The greenbottles,” said Apostle. “You’re seeing through their eyes.”

  The Anchorite looked round, a perfect image of Apostle’s home drawn on his lens in reverse. “Is that what you call them?”

  “The metal insects? Yes.”

  “Hmmph,” said the Anchorite. “They look nothing like real greenbottles, you know.”

  Day-of-Creation, who, humiliatingly, had not been as badly affected by the climb as Apostle, was already peering through the door, a strange white shadowless light on his face.

  “Wow! ‘Postle! You’ve got to see this.”

  *

  Unity won through to the back gate of the house, stepping over the body of one of Armitage’s lieutenants as she did so. The man appeared to have strangled himself, a feat Unity would previously not have thought technically possible.

  The back garden was filled with blood orange trees, a one-off promotional GM batch purchased by Magus on New Tibshelf some years back; both the skin and the flesh of the fruit were not orange but purple. Marketed as ‘Tyrian Purples’, they had never caught on due to an acquired taste of salt. The trees clustered thickly round the back of the house, hiding the back door and kitchen window.

  The Devil was standing the centre of the lawn, surrounded by statues of himself. Although he looked nothing like the Devil Unity had grown up with—in fact, resembling nothing so much as a naked man in prime physical condition—she somehow knew he preferred to be referred to by that name.

  “I like these,” he said, casting a hand round at the leaping, capering Satans, all home-made, arranged around the lawn and vegetable garden. He smiled. Unity knew he had not smiled in a long time.

  “You were in the Penitentiary,” said Unity, wide-eyed.

  He nodded. He used his mouth to speak, though Unity was aware that this was only through politeness. “You have made pictures of me.”

  “Are you the real Devil?” said Unity warily, aware the Penitentiary had contained one prisoner of the name DEVIL, THE.

  He nodded, grinning. “People have tried to assign labels to me—telepath, sociopath, survival of a pre-Judaistic Phoenician fertility deity—but one man’s deva is another man’s devil. I am touched that here at least, my name is remembered. I sense that you have always seen me as your protector.

  Unity nodded slowly, intensely confused. “I have read Beguiled’s book. In Crowley’s preface, he makes it clear that Milton uses you as an allegory for Cromwell, the rebel against the British king. He sees in your rebellion a kind of nobility, a fierce resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.”

  The Devil nodded. “The book is fiction, of course, and terrible flattery, but I am fond of it. I was allowed no religious works in prison. I note you and your family have not subscribed to the populist view of me as an evil bogeyman bent on subverting mankind.”

  Unity stammered her objection. “Oh no, sir! The book of Job makes it plain that you operate on the instruction of God himself.”

  The Devil considered this a moment. “Could that be so? Perhaps. Not on the instruction of the ineffectual godling who created this imperfect world, but at the bidding of a higher power.”

  “Does that not mean, however,” said Unity, regretting the attack of logic almost as it forced her mouth open, “that you are simply pushing the problem of the creation of an imperfect world back one remove, since that higher power would have to have created an imperfect creator?”

  The Devil’s eyes opened in genuine surprise. “An interesting viewpoint,” he said.

  Unity hesitated a moment before nodding. “The last time I saw you, you were different. I’m afraid we may have been operating under the assumption you were a fictional character exploited by one of our planetary inhabitants.”

  The Devil nodded. “Yes, I see. Your ‘Anchorite’. You suspect him to have once been a notorious criminal. No matter. There is neither hatred nor disgust in you. Some fear, it is true, but fear is only appropriate in a worshipper.” He nodded curtly. “I must meet this ‘Uncle Anchorite’ who has been taking my name in vain, but I see no way to find him in you. You sent your dearest siblings out to find him, only to see them perish in an explosion at a crater named after myself.” The Devil sucked in a richly oxygenated breath. “I like it here! I believe that I shall stay. I find it convenient, however, for the time being, that you do not see me.”

  With that, he clicked his fingers theatrically, and vanished. Unity drew in a small startled breath of shock.

  “There is a man,” said the Devil’s voice, “in a house down the street, hiding under a Wang-period sofa, almost dying of fear. In his own way, he is quite heroic, as he has risked his life recently to do what he believes is good and right and true. He regards you highly, and considers you beautiful. He also greatly admires your mental capabilities, though he does not consider himself tall enough to impress you physically. The two of you might make an effective couple.”

  With that parting gift, he was gone, at least as far as Unity knew. Suddenly realizing her heart was pounding in her chest, she walked to the back door and set her hand on the knob to open it.

  Then, reconsidering, she walked back over the lawn, turned unafraid out of the garden, and moved toward the only house she knew to have a Wang-period sofa. Behind her, unregarded, a small emerald insect buzzed from a branch and struck out, weaving erratic but not entirely random spirals through the air, in a completely different direction.

  All of a sudden, there was a BANG loud as a rotten tin exploding, followed by a clatter of debris. Unity turned to see the mangled component parts of a small emerald insect, scattered over the earth by the back gate. Beside the silvery solid non-organic shrapnel in the leaf litter lay Armitage’s dead lieutenant’s handgun, some distance from Armitage’s dead lieutenant, its accelerator coils still ticking gently.

  Unity chose to take no further notice, and turned to walk into the house.

  “These chambers,” said the Anchorite, “existed prior to my arrival. I have set up home in them, but did not dare disturb anything technological.”

  Apostle stepped, slack-jawed, into the cave.

  “There’s daylight,” he said.

  “That’s not daylight,” complained Day-of-Creation, hanging back in the entrance. “It hurts my eyes.”

  “That’s because it’s real daylight,” said Apostle, entranced.

  “Not exactly. It’s the right mix of wavelengths. The light comes out of about a zillion germinator units in the ceiling.”

  Apostle blinked in disbelief. “That many? How did you—?”

  “Had an old captured Made Von Neumann machine,” said the Anchorite. “Got it to make all this stuff for me.”

  “A Made war machine?” Apostle looked around in fear, and added: “Where is it now?” in much the same way a concerned parent might say so, where’s the tarantula now, little Jimmy?

  “Easy. I put it down. Single shot to the CPU. It’s down here somewhere.”

  “Don’t some of them have backup CPU’s?” said Apostle.

  The Anchorite huffed. “No.” He looked round the shadows nervously. “I’m almost certain of it. Where did you hear that?”

&nb
sp; “Must have read it somewhere.” Apostle continued into the Anchorite’s garden, but more gingerly now. “This place is a jungle.”

  “A tropical rainforest shrub layer, to be precise,” said the Anchorite. “I don’t have enough light to make anything else. These plants thrive on ambient light. They’re built to live off sunlight scraps from rich trees’ tables, so they’re perfect for here. No other crop would grow.”

  All about them, the world was as green as if seen through eyes of emerald. The fields of Ararat far above were scarlet and black as a backgammon table; 23 Kranii radiated no other colours. Only a torch taken out into the crop, like a diver’s light shone on a growth of coral, would show that flowers could be white, or blue, or orange. Bees could not live on Ararat. Father had tried them; they couldn’t see the UV cues laid out on the flowers, and simply buzzed confused around every leaf and stalk.

  God’s-Wound’s voice screamed with delight from over a rise. “Water! There’s running water here!”

  The Anchorite smiled. “There’s plenty of water underground on Ararat. Always has been.”

  Apostle crested the rise—although he could still leap up and slap the cave roof, he was standing on the edge of a bubbling waterfall, trickling out of holes in the rocks down ten metres into a clear green pool in which God’s-Wound was paddling her feet.

  “Uh, there are no animals here, are there?” he said, eyeing the water nervously.

  “None whatsoever. All the plant life was grown from emergency supplies. For that reason, most of it’s also useful. I have hemp, rubber, plantain, sage, tapioca, and sundry more species, all of which grow all year round.”

  “What do you use for power?” said Apostle. “The power for all of this has to come from somewhere.” He reached out to lean on the back of a nearby tree, only to find the hermit’s hand clamped round his wrist like a vice.

  “West Indian lilac,” said the Anchorite. “Every serviceman’s emergency kit used to have a set of seeds for it. It makes a very useful barrier against hungry animal life. It can kill even by contact. Like Adam’s garden, not every tree here is safe. Touch only what I touch. And I will show you,” he said, “what I use for power. You will be very interested—”

  He tapped the lens over his right eye suddenly. “I’m afraid Unity may be in danger.”

  Apostle felt his muscles coiling into angry knots, despite himself. “Then you have to do something. We have to do something.”

  The Anchorite continued to stare into his lens for some time.

  “Have the tax pirates got her?” said Beguiled.

  “No,” said the Anchorite, without deactivating his lens. “Someone potentially worse. I think we should all stay down here in the basement for a little while. Um, even me.”

  “That’s coward talk,” said Apostle.

  “Believe me,” said the Anchorite nervously, “if you were up there, it would do neither you nor Unity any good at all.”

  “Send the Devil, then,” said God’s-Wound. “Send it to protect her.”

  “I find myself unable to divert the Devil. Down by the South End Saddle, someone is planning to detonate an atomic bomb. I am afraid I am faced with an embarrassment of targets.” His expression changed to one of suspicion. “Most extraordinary. Unity is still alive.”

  “Hooray!” cheered Beguiled.

  The eyepiece flared white suddenly, then went black. The Anchorite jerked his head back involuntarily and blinked.

  “What just happened?” said Apostle.

  “I’m afraid,” said the Anchorite, beginning to breathe again, “that our man is aware of our surveillance system.”

  “It’s a man, then,” said Apostle.

  The Anchorite frowned sourly. “A subspecies of homo sapiens,” he agreed. “He could probably breed with humans. As I recall, it was a matter of some argument, at his trial, whether he could still be called a man. Certain relatives of his victims hired tame anthropologists to argue he constituted a new species and should be judged by the same yardstick as the Made, exterminated as a dangerous animal.”

  “He’s not breeding with Unity, is he?” said Beguiled in a mixture of horror and fascination.

  “Thankfully not,” said the Anchorite. “Right now he thinks he’s headed here. But he won’t find the way we came in. That entrance is buried under several tonnes of debris right now. I wonder if he can read our minds from here?” He tapped the lens again; it flared into life. He cycled through several images. “Raise your hand, Mr. Voight, if you can read my mind from here.” He examined the lens intently, then concluded:

  “Well, of course, he could be bluffing.”

  “Aha, I have him again on unit three. If I tail him at a greater distance…Unity still appears to be safe. He’s still moving away from her.”

  “You must send the Devil to help her,” urged Measure pleadingly.

  The hermit stood staring at horrors only he could see, diminished only by the fact that he was only seeing them through his right eye.

  “Hmm. Nuclear weapon, Voight, Voight, nuclear weapon. Which is the greater evil?”

  He came to a decision.

  “We will deal with Mr. Voight first. I will so direct the Devil.”

  *

  Asteroid gravel crunched beneath the Devil’s feet as he walked through the smouldering crops toward the spot the girl Unity had been convinced led to his enemy. Somewhere at the point this tractor track ended, at the feature called Dispater Crater, was the Anchorite’s back door. Frustratingly, she had not known what form the back door took, or how to get into it. She believed the Anchorite lived at the centre of this world. All well and good; the world was asteroid-sized. The centre could not be too far away.

  The Anchorite intrigued the Devil. He intrigued him because he intrigued Unity, and Unity’s mind was as quick and sharp as she thought herself big and cumbersome. The Devil was of the opinion that he knew who the Anchorite was, and wished to confirm his suspicions before killing him.

  The crops he was now moving through had been squashed flat, as if a giant animal had turned round and round on top of them before settling down to sleep. The sides of the stalks facing towards the end of the road were also blackened and blast-charred. As he walked further, the stalks had simply been ripped clean from the earth as if by a white-hot scythe. At the very end of the road itself, he found the crater. It was not either of the two craters Unity remembered—neither a shallow, disk-shaped depression, nor a rather larger ragged shell-hole. Instead, it was now an amphitheatre-sized gouge in the earth with walls where rock and soil had fused to glass. The majority of the energy of the blast seemed to have been expended in a massive, instantaneous localized burst of heat. The Devil wondered what manner of explosive could have produced such an effect. The Anchorite became more interesting by the second.

  There was, of course, nothing resembling an entrance in the crater, and nothing resembling an intelligent mind scurrying in the rock and soil beneath it. There might well be a way in here, but he could find no clue to it at present.

  He heard a rustle in the bushes behind him, and did not bother to turn round.

  “Aha, blasphemy; I wondered how long it would be before your master sent you.”

  An imperfectly rendered facsimile of a human voice spoke behind him. “This is no blasphemy. The men who designed this unit believed in nothing but the superior chassis strength nine millimetre whisker reinforced titanium laminate can provide. They did not believe in devils, and for the record neither do I.”

  “Then you are forgiven; I am gracious. If you do not believe in me, however, why do you still continue to address me?”

  “Because you are no devil, but a very powerful man, as I was once. I know the feeling. But a man who believes himself to be a god is setting himself up for a fall. I know that feeling too.”

  The Devil smiled, turned, and raised the pistol he had been holding behind his back. “I found this on a dead man. It is one of the quaint devices men use to kill each other. I am
not personally familiar with it, but I believe it will turn your head into a cloud of vapour.”

  “It will have no effect on this unit, which is designed on a heavy assault chassis. A small volcano could go off underneath it without scuffing the finish.”

  The pistol did not waver from the centre of the Anchorite’s Devil’s featureless face as it stood before him on the edge of the burned corn. “It is odd to talk by making cords vibrate in my throat like an animal, and to have to listen back for the same. It is like talking to that accursed machine I was recently set free of. It used to talk to me at great length in an attempt to convince me to become a useful member of society. I would prefer to talk to you face to, uh, face.”

  “You and I both know that isn’t going to happen.”