Smallworld

by Dominic Green

  “Very well. Then I am afraid I must attempt to destroy your servant.”

  The Devil attempted to squeeze the trigger of the gun. It would not budge. He jerked his forefinger back in panic. The trigger remained jammed. In front of him, the blasphemy blurred and was on him almost before his brain had registered the movement.

  He was almost certain one of his teeth was broken. He could taste blood, his own blood, in his own mouth. There was no air in his lungs, and none would come no matter how he tried to make his ribs expand. He was bent over with his mouth in the earth, with his gun hand twisted round behind his back. This he already knew to be possible; the body he was inhabiting was human and imperfect. It had been hurt before.

  In front of him, the gun dropped to the earth. An emerald insect wriggled in the space behind its trigger, preventing the gun from firing.

  “You will be punished for this,” he said, submitting to being bundled along towards a pressure door hidden in the grass.

  “On the contrary,” said the machine’s speaker, “you will thank me for it. I am not returning you to the Penitentiary.”

  “Where, then, are you taking me? Why must we be enemies? Release me!”

  “I am taking you to more spacious quarters. You will still be a prisoner, but I have a thousand uses for someone of your calibre. My hell has room for more than one devil.”

  “Blasphemy! I knew it! When I get out of this pit of uneternal damnation, I shall so smite you! You are so smitten!”

  “Quite so, I am sure. Duck your head, we are going underground. Please do not fight the unit, it is very bad at field surgery, and any injuries it inflicts on you can only be repaired by it. We have a long climb ahead of us.” He was pushed down a long earth tunnel, then into a concrete chamber containing a ladder going down. Handcuffs snapped tight around his wrists; he was hauled up one-handed and draped around the robot’s neck like a living amulet. Then the machine set a foot on the ladder and began trudging downward. He heard a sound like a speaker powering down. Evidently the Anchorite had tired of taunting him personally, and left his automaton to continue its work alone.

  The Anchorite, who had disappeared into the trees, returned at some speed. Measure, Beguiled and God’s-Wound were splashing each other in the stream, whilst Day-of-Creation was climbing a tree and Apostle was sternly ensuring that nobody touched one of the seven trees the Anchorite had identified as deadly poisonous. Other children were scattered throughout the undergrowth, playing Devils and Prospectors, Devils and Mades, and Devils and Tax Accountants.

  “Come now! We must leave immediately!”

  There was an immediate chorus of disappointment.

  “Why do we have to leave, Uncle Anchorite?”

  “Because a very bad man is on his way down here. Besides, we have another bad man to deal with, one who has an atomic bomb.” The hermit was now carrying a hand laser, which he slotted a gas cartridge into gingerly.

  “Who is the bad man, Uncle Anchorite? I thought you lived on your own.”

  “The first bad man is the one I feared was going to hurt Unity. Don’t worry, he is under control now; the Devil is bringing him here. But the other bad man is not yet under control, and we must deal with him, and you must help me.”

  “Is that Mr. Armitage?” said Measure.

  “It is,” nodded the Anchorite. “Now, come this way, through the trees, through the ornamental arbour. Hurry, we have no time to smell the roses. There is another door at the end of this path, leading to another ladder upward.”

  Measure unwisely looked out at the green horizon. “Aiiee! The floor curves downwards!”

  “Yes it does, which is why so many agribiz crewmen collapse gibbering and refuse to step off the boarding ramp of their ship when they arrive on your planet, ragged urchin. You are now experiencing what they experience. We are closer to the planetary core, so the curvature of our world is far greater.” The hermit parted a curtain of overhanging leaves to reveal another pressure door set in the wall. Apostle’s heart sank. The Anchorite, noticing his expression, said:

  “We must go up. If we do not, not only will whoever remains eventually die, they will also, in what life remains to them, become an unwitting agent of the deaths of their brothers and sisters. So come, up! Climb!” He threw the door open and indicated a ladder.

  Expelled from a very brief taste of paradise, the children disconsolately filed into the ladder chamber.

  “Can we come back?” said Measure, wistfully gazing back into the greenery.

  “If you are very good,” said the Anchorite.

  Regretfully, she laid her hands to the rungs.

  “Ouch! My arms ache! I cannot feel my fingers!”

  The robot hoisted the Devil off its shoulders and dropped him nonchalantly. His heart twisted in his chest as if in an attempt to escape the cage of his ribs, but his fear was not necessary; a concrete floor slammed into him very quickly. Unprepared to meet it, his legs collapsed under him and he rolled, cracking his head on the ladder.

  “Is this the bottom of the last shaft?” said the passenger. “Please say there is not another.” His shoulder ached as if injected with molten lead. The release of tension was welcome, but the anticipation of it possibly returning was unbearable.

  The machine did not reply, but instead opened a pressure door at the base of the shaft and hoisted the Devil up under its arm with a grip stronger than a fallen angel’s. The Devil felt himself, after all, to be in a good position to judge this.

  “You cannot reply,” said the Devil. “Your human master is doing something else, perhaps, and cannot attend to me. He has to let his device handle me itself for a little while. Is that it?”

  The machine patted the Devil on the head in a curiously human gesture, then turned to face the doorway it had opened.

  “Green things,” gasped the Devil, despite himself. “Growing.”

  The machine walked out into the twilight forest with the Devil in hand, and closed the door firmly on the outside world.

  As the Anchorite was climbing, he turned and patted the empty air beside him in a curiously human gesture.

  “Uncle Anchorite, what are you doing?” said Measure behind him. “Are you talking to your invisible friend? I have an invisible friend. He’s called Mr. Beelzebub.”

  The Anchorite’s face was unreadable. “Oh, really? What does Mr. Beelzebub look like?”

  Measure giggled. “Nothing, silly. He’s invisible.”

  The Anchorite nodded and swarmed up the ladder to where Apostle, his face a grim mask of effort, was leading the climb.

  “I’ll take point from here.”

  Apostle nodded, sagging onto the rungs, allowing himself a rest as the hermit swarmed past him in a flurry of beard, up into the small circular room at the shaft head. He heard a pressure door open with a hiss as gentle as a high-born lady farting.

  “All clear,” hissed the Anchorite. “Everybody out, now. Quickly.”

  The family emptied from the shaft into the tiny room, as the Anchorite’s gentle tread crunched almost imperceptibly on a hard surface above.

  Apostle poked his head up through the pressure door, trying hard not to blow like a harpooned whale.

  “Well I’ll be—this is the crypt under the Temple—”

  “SSSH! Crypts have very good acoustics.”

  The crypt had originally been intended to be the final resting place of Mount Ararat’s saints, in particular Arkarch Allion, Pastor of the Faith and guider of his flock from prosperous careers and well-to-do homes on Earth out to a Promised Land on a radiation-riddled asteroid. It had been designed as the crypt of a mighty cathedral greater than any to come before or after. The current church had been intended to be its antechamber. Unfortunately, the construction of the cathedral had been indefinitely postponed owing to the deaths of sixty per cent of its proposed congregation. The crypt, however, had already been laid as part of the foundations, and construction robots had laid down many kilometres of secret catacombs. A
rkarch Allion had been in love with the idea of catacombs, despite being advised at great and despairing length that catacombs were places where clandestine religions furtively buried their dead, and were hence unlikely to radiate from a cathedral.

  The Anchorite’s hand came down on a wall switch, and temporary lighting flooded a huge and empty chamber made to receive a legion of ecclesiarchs. The walls were adorned with machine-sculpted bas-reliefs of saved souls being led by the still waters of Paradise. The children marvelled at the carvings. At one end, Beguiled lingered by a sculpture of the Devil being trodden underfoot by a stern bearded deity.

  “Look at what this man’s doing to the Devil, Uncle Anchorite.”

  “God only punishes both man and devil because He loves them both,” grunted the Anchorite, inspecting the great stone rolled across the entrance of the sepulchre minutely. He pointed absently in the direction of the west wall. “Over there you can see Him punishing Eve and Adam with equal vigour.”

  “How are we going to move this big stone out of the way?” said Measure.

  “We’re not. You’d be amazed where these catacombs lead. For the time being, you are to shut that pressure door and stay put here.”

  “I need to go to the toilet.”

  The Anchorite cast a critical eye across a massive marble sarcophagus ornately carved with cherubim, seraphim, and bizarre creatures of the sculptor’s own creation.

  “Arkarch Allion doesn’t seem to be using his coffin. You may as well make sure it doesn’t go to waste.”

  Magus was crestfallen. “But what do we use to wipe?”

  “The hand you don’t eat with. Apostle, make sure they stay put. I have a micro-nuclear war to prevent.”

  “But UNCLE ANCHORITE—”

  Apostle opened his mouth to protest, but the Anchorite had already vanished into a knife-edge crack between the carvings.

  He looked up at the ancient flickering fixtures in the ceiling, and hoped the lights stayed on.

  The Anchorite’s head poked out of the earth, gingerly.

  The catacombs petered out in a robot-dug riverbed, an ambitious project that had been intended to carry ten times as much water as the entire planetary surface currently held. He was a kilometre from the houses of Third Landing.

  Ararat’s crust was porous, and its water table deep; any water poured into the soil would seep down through kilometres of crust to the world’s very centre. Fields had to be waterproofed, and would leak a certain litreage every year whatever the protection. The complex set of drains and qanats devised by Arkarch Allion had been hopelessly unrealistic. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had so far been unable to afford more than a twenty-five-square-kilometre hard pan underneath his property, with containment dykes at a radius of three kilometres from his house. Dry channels from the Allion era still radiated from the tilled land at intervals, however. The children used them to play Canals of Mars and Trench Warfare.

  This channel was halfway between Third Landing and the South End Saddle. One hundred metres away, Mount Ararat’s main highway, a single-lane gravel track with passing places, divided the visible world in two. On the track, an ATV had stopped, and two men were hastily carrying out modifications to it while a larger group of armed men watched the horizon warily. Mr. Armitage had lost track of Mr. Voight, and was taking no chances.

  On the cargo bed of the ATV was a heavy metal frame containing a spherical device to which control cables were attached. Some of the cables snaked up to a large whip aerial clipped to the device’s top. One of Mr. Armitage’s technicians, a stiff-jointed man in a grey cloak that covered all of him but the eyes, was also carrying a handset with extended aerials and generic remote guidance controls. As the engineers worked, they swatted at swarms of emerald insects which somehow seemed to have singled them out in the middle of the siderite-coloured fastness.

  The Anchorite rolled into cover behind a rock, tapping his eyepiece frantically, switching from one pair of insectoid eyes to another, talking to himself in a sure sign of madness.

  “Firing unit there, I see…no apparent trembler mechanism, timer and firing code keypad, manual key, one key and probably only one firing code only…not military. Home made with minimal security. The most important component will be the fuse that fires all charges simultaneously in on that core, which is probably deuterium or tritium…destroy that fuse and all you have is a very powerful firework, not even radioactive…Number Six, you position yourself inside the casing, just there, precisely under the wire…”

  Armitage’s technicians appeared to have finished with their handiwork, and were closing panels and taping wire spindles securely to frames. One of them then stood back and fiddled with the handset experimentally, causing the rover’s wheels to track in the dirt, spin against brake pressure, and rock it gently back and forth in low gear.

  The man in the grey cloak shuffled awkwardly forward, slid a key into the device’s control panel with exquisite care, turned it, then tapped in a code on the keypad.

  “Code is one-seven-six-five, well done Number Two, that might yet come in handy…time entered is one centidia, long enough to make sure the rover’s out of range…”

  The rover trundled forward, unmanned, under remote control.

  *

  The robot loped through the underbrush with little concern for the fact that it was trawling its human cargo through spiny bushes which buckled on its own metal hide. It was working its way up the scree at the edge of the cave, towards the bright lights and sprinklers of the ceiling, to where a rough Romanesque arch had been carved into the rock, overgrown with creepers through which could be seen a gleam of metal.

  “Another pressure door,” said the Devil as the robot set him down. “Whoever lives down here sure is paranoid, ha ha ha.”

  The robot turned the Devil’s head away and tapped in a code; the two halves of the door churned apart, protesting at having been left unopened for long enough for ivy to have grown over them. The strands of ivy resisted briefly, then fell severed, revealing a tunnel carved into the cave wall, many times higher than a man.

  The robot stood in the entrance. “Air is still good in here. There is another door at the far end; the two doors together form an airlock in which you can be left food. I will get for you anything you need apart from digging or locksmithing tools of any sort, or human or animal companionship. I doubt whether I could trust you with a dog.” It leaned against the cave wall, suddenly human, its claws slapping the metal on either side of its thighs. “Darn! These things never have pockets.”

  “Dogs have simple minds, easily controllable,” said the Devil. “Cats are more difficult. Can I have a cat?”

  “No.”

  “So this place is to be my new hell.”

  “Turn around and walk to the far end.”

  The Devil looked at the robot mistrustfully, then stood up and gingerly ambled out into the yellow false sunlight of the next cave. He blinked, startled; then, he turned round and said to the robot:

  “Thank you.”

  The robot nodded. “If a man must have a prison, it may as well be a well-appointed one.” It rapped on the cave wall with a metal knuckle. “This is siderite, about twenty metres thick. I believe the Telepath Finder General’s office found that pure iron interfered with your abilities. The cells of all incarcerated dangerous telepaths are now lined with it.”

  The Devil smiled silkily. “I’m sure that will be most useful in containing me.”

  “However, as your danger distance has been estimated at a kilometre, I’m taking no chances. The cave we have just walked through will also henceforth be off limits for human beings. I will make sure of this by flooding it with sulphur dioxide, which I consider poetically just.”

  The Devil spat angrily. “Brimstone oxide. You and your racial stereotyping. Why are you even letting me live?”

  “The only reason I ever let anyone live. Because you’re useful to me.”

  “And the family up top? They, too, are useful to you?”


  The robot hesitated. “They are protective colouration, pieces of an innocuous environment I have gathered round me.”

  “And I am a laboratory animal, like a rattlesnake being kept to milk venom.”

  “I assure you,” said the robot, “you’re in no danger of being dissected. You are the single most powerful telepath ever discovered. When you were imprisoned indefinitely, there was an outcry throughout the medical world that such an important specimen should be lost to study.”

  The Devil clicked his fingers. “I knew it! I knew you were one of the Dictator’s men! His secret weapons teams, set up to discover new ways of killing the Made, and to reverse-engineer Made artefacts. Starting out as concerned scientists working to protect their species, and using that to justify experiments on living humans—”