Smallworld

by Dominic Green

  The medical staff of the Spa, meanwhile, were a mixed bag. There was a token actual doctor, Dr. Ranjalkar, a twentieth-generation Canadian. Balanced against him were Doctors Saphyre, Bamigboye, and Lipizzaner. Dr. Saphyre held a PhD in Kirlian Animography and Crystal Analgesia from the University Of The New Utopia on New New Earth. The University offered no courses in Natural Science, Mathematics or Law; Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had checked. Instead, it seemed to specialize in Sports Science, Life Ordering and Transdimensional Experience. Dr. Bamigboye, meanwhile, believed in the healing power of angels. Indeed, he believed himself to be protected by his own personal guardian angel, Mr. Sphinx, who only he could see. Warrants had been out for his arrest during the period of the Dictatorship, but in these freer times, a more enlightened attitude to alternative medicine had allowed him to acquaint his clientele with their tutelary angelic spirits—for a modest fee—to his heart’s content. Finally, Dr. Lipizzaner, the guiding force of the entire medical staff, was firmly convinced of the curative properties of vibrations—ideally gravitational, but also electromagnetic, ectoplasmic and mundanely mechanical. Dr. Lipizzaner’s patients were commonly subjected to internal and external oscillations at a bewildering variety of frequencies, using devices of his own design, marketed on several planets—the Lipizzaner Vibro-Chair, the Staff of Life Endo-Plug (Personally Customized For Your Own Orifice), and Lipizzaner Gravity Bracelets (Contain Real Neutronium! Generate Healing Gravity Waves While You Clap!).

  Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was very fond of Dr. Ranjalkar, who was prone to statements such as ‘this is probably treatable with antibiotics’, ‘this is common among men of a certain age’, and ‘the sores will probably clear up on their own’. Dr. Ranjalkar’s residence had been situated, not by accident, in the part of the Spa grounds closest to the landing field gate.

  The whole family Reborn-in-Jesus, as well as the small staff of doctors, gardeners, sous-chefs and chambermaids brought in to manage the Spa, applauded enthusiastically. The gates swung open to reveal outlying gardens largely planted with Everbrowns, genetically-modified ornamental flora specifically designed for red-star planets. Making extensive use of carotenoids, rather than chlorophylls, for light absorption, they were a vivid blend of yellows, oranges, and scarlets, not appearing green even under artificial light. Closer to the main spa buildings, a number of genetically canonical terrestrial varieties, hung with UV fibre optics, had been artfully positioned in order to prevent the guests from getting homesick. The Reborn-in-Jesus children had already christened this area the Christmas Garden, though it remained to be seen if it would be allowed to keep that name with the arrival of Pastor Mulchrone, the Truth Definition Specialist from the Educational Uniformity Bureau. Pastor Mulchrone had recently arrived to ensure all children on Mount Ararat were being accorded good and above all proper schooling. He seemed to be down on Christmas.

  The Spa buildings themselves were visible from here through the trees—a set of interconnected pressure vessels ornamentally sheathed in locally-quarried stone. The quarry had been waterproofed and filled in as a lake, with a tiny island occupied by a flock of McChickens. McChickens had been among the very first species on Old Earth to benefit from the wonders of modern genetic technology. While the various governments of the then-divided globe had ummed and aahed over the pros and cons of allowing the production of goods that produced milk laced with insulin and miracle foods for the Third World, a certain food chain had cut to the chase. They had produced a variety of chicken in the colours of their corporate clown spokesman, in order to ensure the name of their product would be placed forever. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was almost certain the name of the corporate spokesman had been something like Lickin McChicken. Garish red and yellow, with scarlet beaks and ungainly banded legs, the creatures produced inedible transfat meat that tasted unaccountably of dill pickle.

  “I’m glad you could be here, Mr. Trapp,” said Unity, wearing her very best mood-sensitive dress, on which a stylized wheelspoke-beamed sun was rolling out from behind a green hill over a field of waving corn. “If we’d never met you, all this would never have gotten paid for.”

  Mr. Trapp applauded with the other members of the crowd. This seemed to be the most fun he had had for some time, though that was perhaps hardly surprising.

  “Why, Mr. Trapp, I do believe you’re crying,” said Beguiled-of-the-Serpent archly.

  Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus turned to Beguiled.

  “Now, you leave Mr. Trapp alone with his personal grief there, daughter.”

  “I ain’t your daughter,” replied Beguiled beatifically.

  Shocked, Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus turned his eyes front.

  “Are you happy with the new place, father?” said Shun-Company at his right side anxiously. “The redwood groves will look better once the trees are grown to maturity. Mrs. Joannou says our great-grandchildren will be able to carve the whole book of love in them.”

  He patted her on the arm. “I am happy.”

  “Did you not want to go to the Opening, Mez?” Testament looked across from his stepladder at his sister, who was hanging a new handmade cardboard saint on the Saint Tree. Measure and Beguiled-of-the-Serpent had started the Saint Tree over a kilodia ago, intending to populate it with at least one new saint a day.

  “I didn’t want to. Beguiled is being mean to me.”

  Testament squinted at the mosaic he was making, trying to make the individual stone blocks depixellate themselves into a recognizable form. “Who is that you’re putting up there now?”

  “Saint Nicholas. Only the Pastor says I can’t because it isn’t Saint Nicholas’s Day any more.”

  Testament pressed the dull black eye of the Devil home with a plastic-gloved thumb. Under UV light, the ore it was made of would glow. “The Pastor is an ass born of an ass’s ass. You’re going to choke Saint Nicholas if you string him up by the neck like that.”

  “I’ve told you before, this isn’t a real Saint Nicholas, he doesn’t feel pain,” said Measure crossly. “You’re as mean as Beguiled.”

  “How’s Beguiled being mean to you?”

  “She says she doesn’t want to make saints any more. She’s spending all day with Only-Begotten, Pitch-Not-Thy-Tent-Towards-Sodom, Judge-Not-Lest-Ye-Also-Be-Judged, and Be-Not-Near-Unto-Man-In-Thy-Time-Of-Uncleanness.”

  Testament found the Devil’s nose in a tray of Devil pieces. The reconstruction of the mosaic on the side of the Penitentiary following its deconstruction in various explosions was a task he hadn’t felt able to face up to at first. Once he had realized this would allow him to recreate the whole tableau differently, however, he had warmed to the project. He had placed the Devil in the centre of the piece this time, though still, out of respect, a finger’s breadth lower than God.

  The sound that alerted Testament was less a yell than a mechanical shriek, a machine alarm like the one the goat feeder made when it became low on goat feed, or the one the tractor gave if its plasma bottle was becoming unstable. His first reaction was to patiently lay down his tray of Devil bits and remove his gloves. It was only when he realized the shrieks were forming human words that he broke into a run.

  “—under attack—housebreaker—violent intruder—”

  The Purple garden, where the shrieks seemed to be coming from, whipped branches in his faces as if meaning to confound him. Under boughs handing heavy with purples, black in red sunlight, he saw blood that he knew would wipe clean and biodegrade within an hour, but blood nonetheless.

  “PIRATES!” he yelled. “SLAVERS! BATTLE STATIONS! UNCLE ANCHORITE!”

  He heard the house’s multiple cunning security systems, engineered by Mr. Trapp, slamming windows shut, turning locks on doors, closing pressure seals, sending armoured shutters across air intakes. He saw a pickaxe handle, lying in the grass, picked it up as a handy weapon, then marvelled at the fact that the head was covered in a sticky orange substance that adhered to his hand and transferred itself from there to his clothing.

  “VISIBLE FRIEND? WHERE ARE YOU
?”

  “—up here. I’m damaged bad, cousin Testament…”

  Keeping a watchful eye on the trees around him, Testament peered up into the branches, which were soaked in the same orange ichor.

  “Visible Friend… is this your blood…?”

  “I think it’s marker dye… I think it’s made to go all over bad folks who cut artificial children up… I bin cut up, Testament. By a mean man.”

  Testament dropped his gaze to ground level, realizing he was standing in the middle of an aureole of luminous dye that stained the grass as bright as liquid sunshine. In one direction, a trail of dye led off through the trees.

  “MEASURE! GET YOURSELF AWAY FROM THE SOUND OF MY VOICE!”

  “I’m leaking fluid, cousin… get away from here, save yourself… feeling cold…”

  He raised the pick and charged off through the branches.

  The trail of dye led over the orchard wall and into Ninety East Street, where Magus and Perfect had their town house. The house, like all houses in Third Landing nowadays, was protected by Mr. Trapp’s security devices. He saw the dye trail pad up the front path, up to the front porch, then spatter round the windows away through the untended undergrowth at the side of the house. Luckily, Magus and Perfect were out of town; their garden ran riot every time they left. The Devil tried to keep it under control, but could only clip it in the dead of night when no outsiders were watching.

  The dye spoor led away through a hole in the picket fence. Testament had to stoop to pass through it; as he did, he felt a terrific impact at the base of his skull, and the world went tranquil.

  He woke up surrounded by concerned family members. His father’s face was talking down out of the ornamental stucco ceiling in the Best Parlour, but no sound was coming out of it. He could hear, however, Doctor Ranjalkar’s voice speaking clearly in his right ear.

  “—in all probability the deafness is temporary. He was not hit very hard. Can you raise your right arm, Testament?”

  Not wishing to appear uncooperative, he raised an arm.

  “See, he responds to my voice if he hears it magnified. I don’t want to overuse the amplifier, though; there is potential for injury of the inner ear. If you have any questions either talk softly or write them down—”

  “I got knocked out,” he heard himself say. “I’m sorry, papa.”

  His father’s face was more lined with worry than he had ever seen it; and his father’s face at the best of times had more cracks than a wet field on a hot day.

  “No-one holds you responsible,” said Doctor Ranjalkar. “He hit you from behind and took you unawares while you were running to the assistance of your sister.” He reconsidered the statement. “Albeit your artificial sister.”

  “I was not,” said Testament, recollection flooding back. “I was running to kill him. Measure,” he remembered suddenly, “is Measure all right?”

  “Measure is fine,” said the doctor. “She ran into the Panic Cellar and hid like a good girl.” Alongside the doctor’s voice, he heard an insubstantial whisper of “an i’ng all wigh’ too, fangs for asking.”

  “Is that you, Visible Friend?”

  “Visible Friend is fine too, though she’ll need major repair,” said the doctor. “Her voice box was affected, along with her Baby-Does-Real-Poop system. You should rest now.”

  “He had a knife,” remembered Testament suddenly. “Must have had. Could have taken it clean out of our kitchen. Couldn’t have done what he did just with the pick alone. He’d cut up Visible Friend bad, gutted her main chassis from underbridge to apple and tied her to a tree in the Purplery with wire. Got sprayed for his pains. I followed the spray, and I—”

  “We know,” said the doctor. “Rest.” He began preparing an injector. “I will give you something to make you rest.”

  “But why didn’t he kill me too? He must have thought he was killing Visible Friend, unless he really hates Baby-I-Grow-Up androids. Maybe he realized she wasn’t properly human, maybe not. Her marker dye shows up reddish in the poor sun we get here. But he should have killed me too—”

  “We don’t know why he didn’t kill you either,” said the doctor sorrowfully, as if the logical untidiness of the fact that Testament hadn’t been killed saddened him. “He did leave one clue as to his intentions.” An injection hissed into Testament’s arm with barely a pinprick of pain.

  “Which was?”

  “He wrote it on the fencing where we found you, in Visible Friend’s marker dye. It said: DAY ONE, ONLY ONE.”

  The world became compulsorily peaceful once again.

  Mr. Mountbanks prided himself on being able to make capital from a crisis.

  Figuratively speaking, he had taken a wrong turn on the road. Imagining Mount Ararat to be Al Lat, the primary component of the Al-Uqqal system, he had agreed to be put down here by the captain of the merchantman he had been travelling on, but had discovered that this entire world was not twenty kilometres across and had an official state census population of one hundred and eight. He had not been allowed to go south through the great wall built across the horizon, having been informed at the gate that this was Private Property. Northwards, a sign had pointed north down a new-laid road in the direction of ‘Third Landing’, with a less than encouraging subscript: ‘Fifteen kilometres’.

  Still, he had both his wares and his wits about him, and the inhabitants of backwoods ranches were notoriously easy to peddle pornographic baubles and The Very Latest Fashions to. Eating vat-grown hydroponic filth and breathing one’s own recycled fart gas all one’s life increased a man’s yearning for the civilization that he’d left behind.

  This, however, did not help the fact that his feet hurt.

  There would not be much need for recycled air here, perhaps; the air had been described to him by the captain as ‘surprisingly breathable’. Still, he had to be taking in a hefty whack of gamma in such a shallow atmosphere, and he had no idea what temperature variations obtained here during the course of the local day and night. Right now, it was warm enough, but what might happen in a decidia’s time?

  After only a few hours’ walk, during which time a worrying lack of vehicles passed him on the road, he began to see evidence of agriculture ahead. It was often difficult to tell a field from a wilderness on a red star world, but as the majority of systems were red star systems, Mr. Mountbanks’ eyes had been forced to adjust over the years. What lay ahead looked like modified varieties of potato, being fed by UV filaments strung on frames across the rows.

  He saw the first marks almost immediately. Perhaps they had been hiding in the crops; they seemed to almost sprout out of the ground. There were four of them, two girls, two boys, dressed in Last Year’s Fashion, The Fashion of Last Year But One, and The Fashion of Three Years Back. Somebody had already been hawking his wares here, and returning at regular intervals.

  These marks were young, though not quite children. They would still be tried as juveniles in a state court if they committed murder, and this thought made Mr. Mountbanks wary. He kept his hand close to the multi-headed cat-o’-nine-tasers in his hip pocket. However, the youngsters seemed amiable enough, and made no attempt to circle round behind him.

  He touched his hat and flipped open his briefcase. On cue, the intelligent window-dresser inside deployed, unfolding fascias, display pedestals, backdrops, and animated cartoon elves that capered among the merchandise. The whole thing was scarcely molecules thick, and would have blown away in even the tranquil air of Ararat, had it not been for the fact that it had suckered itself to the road surface. The display, when finally unfolded, surrounded him like a twinkling shrine to consumer satisfaction, discreetly electrified to discourage pilfering. The merchandise was lightweight, but technologically sophisticated—personality analogues, both blank and pre-recorded, and text readers containing all the best of state-approved condensed literature, each carrying the new ‘Audited for Truth’ seal of governmental approval. One reader might contain an entire library, appropriately cr
oss-referenced and concordanced. Mr. Mountbanks now sold readers that identified Plato, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine as firm believers in centralizing executive power within a tightly-controlled unelected Permanent Revolutionary Committee. He also sold pornography, equally approved and audited, containing acceptable levels of uncontrolled conception and consensual violence.

  Normally, the sight of the display unfolding would provoke indrawn gasps of wonderment among local yokels. The hard-eyed youth of Ararat showed not a flicker of a reaction.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “It’s afternoon here,” said a dark-haired, alabaster-skinned girl. “What do you have for sale?” Mr. Mountbanks, however, a veteran salesman, had seen her eyes flicker toward the personality analogues. For some reason, she was anxious not to appear anxious to buy one. Mr. Mountbanks encountered such behaviour often, though more often with customers who bought pornography.