Smallworld

by Dominic Green

  The robot’s alloy claw clamped down on the fabric between Beguiled’s shoulderblades and wrenched her upright. She could neither speak nor breathe, but could hear the creature yelling in her face: “WAKE UP, IDIOT GIRL! DO AS YOUR QUEEN COMMANDS YOU!”

  …sulphur dioxide. This whole cave is full of sulphur dioxide. How? There are no volcanoes on Ararat…are there? Might there be, this close to a superdense neutronium core?

  This cavern’s lights were fiercer, and the heat oppressive, but it had not always been this way—there had once been greenery here. There were the remains of trees, withered and splintered, dry bark blowing to dust on the pressure-equalization wind. There were living things; colourful splashes of lichen on the rocks and dead tree trunks, and the occasional anaemic weed. But nothing had grown taller than a quarter metre, and the chamber was filled with lines of whitewashed rocks—not smoothly-eroded pebbles, as might be expected on a world with wind and oceans, but porous, rugged siderites. The rocks were arranged across the floor in arcs, as if spreading out from the opposite wall. Each rock had a number clearly marked out on it in black paint.

  Sulphur dioxide is poisonous even on brief exposure…it smells like rotten eggs. It kills by asthmatic paroxysm, pulmonary oedema, systematic acidosis, or reflex respiratory arrest. She was gasping now, trying to breathe air that was not there. The cave had to be filled with SO2—with it or with a combination of it and other gases. Curiously, she could no longer smell rotten eggs.

  Basic LS systems maintenance, Dangerous Evolved Gases—”The rotten egg smell does not persist, because the gas rapidly kills the smell receptors in the nose. When you cease to smell the gas is the time to worry…”

  I’m going to die. One way or another.

  The robot threw her across the room, across the rows of stones arranged by some unknown Zen numerologist. She felt herself collide with them, sensed the pain on an abstract level. On the other side of the room, a massive pressure door, larger than any she had previously seen, actually had chiselled into its lintel the words LASCIATE SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE. The robot, across the cave, stood before two smaller doors, one of which was already glowing with the dull light of the Warden’s lasercutter. Things were going dark. She was not rushing down a tunnel towards the light as yet, but could hear voices in her head, a voice in her head, telling her to remember to come back, to bring a starship, to not forget the breathing apparatus and the heavy cutting gear.

  She felt herself being lifted and slung over a cold shoulder. She heard metal fingers that could spear through a man’s ribcage stabbing commands frustratedly into the keypad for the door. She heard a voice grumbling to itself through speakers—“what was it she did now, it was simple, I must be able to remember it, Gods, I wish I were blessed with intelligence rather than awe-inspiring beauty.” Then the door complained open, and cool air with oxygen in it blew against her cheek. Somehow, her lungs remembered how to work again. Unfortunately, this also involved remembering how to cough, and she hacked and hurled all the way down the back of the robot’s gleaming torso. Still the machine continued on unconcerned, holding her in place firmly but gently, still muttering under its breath: “He is not here, not here, this place is a maze, how am I to get ahead in Hell if I cannot use the one talent the Gods gave me? Give me a manshaped target and I will strike it more surely than any Achilles, any Hector…”

  Behind her, she could hear, again, the hiss of a lasercutter; the Warden’s pursuit was still only one door away. Helen had successfully memorized the sequence of keystrokes necessary to close a door and lock it to a pursuer.

  “HEY! WHORE OF TROY! YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT BELONGS TO ME!”

  Beguiled should have reacted, but could no longer find it in her to do anything other than retch. The voice was Uncle Anchorite’s. The robot let her fall like a sack of Mayan Golds. Earth hit her in the face. She tasted blood, yet anticipated more. Surely victory ought to feel better than this?

  “IMPUDENT SCOUNDREL!” The robot’s claws kicked dust in her face. She rolled over into a semi-prone position, and could see one long dust trail hanging in the air, a sure sign of where the machine had been. Painfully, she hauled herself upright and hobbled along the trail after the robot. Another gigantic steel pressure door stood open in the artificial hillside; a curious sensation filled the air, like the feeling just before the Penitentiary charged its automated defence system to dismember somebody. Mr. Suau had referred to the sensation as ‘particle accelerator intuition’, and said that it was a prerequisite for being an Old Soldier. PA intuition caused the hairs to rise on the backs of the hands and neck.

  The door concealed another ladder caisson. A large amount of machinery seemed to be stored down here as well—a heavy cylindrical device, warm when she put her hand on it. There were other crates and boxes, but no human being hiding behind any of them. The robot would have sensed such a thing, dragged it out, and drawn it as a preamble to quartering. Up above, the robot was climbing rapidly. Uncle Anchorite either moved fast or had a separate exit the machine had failed to notice. In any case, Beguiled had no desire to stay down here with a homicidal hermit. Fear made her apply her fingers to the rungs. The effort made her sick, and more than once she was physically so, doubling up and sending a technicolour volley back down the caisson. But the effort required to push herself upward reduced with time. Below, the Warden finally broke into the base of the caisson with a roar of superfluous weaponry, rose into the air on jets she had not known it had, and soared past, completely ignoring her, but issuing dire threats to the miscreant it believed itself to be following.

  She stopped at what she reckoned to be three hundred metres, panting desperately. There were still kilometres to go.

  The Clinic buildings were in shadow, lit by red ringlight. The swans on the lake glided at the head of roseate v-washes. The Earthly flowers in the small knot garden in the crook of the Clinic walls, meanwhile, blazed in every colour of the visual spectrum; it was still Earth daytime, and the UV units were still active. Despite this, Ararat’s local daycycle was also being respected; the lights in the dormitories were out, and the exceptionally large number of security guards out patrolling the grounds with shoulder-slung light support weapons was the only sign of activity. Messages from the Northern Hemisphere had been garbled and excited; the Clinic security detail was uncertain whether it was expecting a man or a tank.

  Bracketing the long, completely ornamental paved drive, two heavy agro tractors approached, their endless tracks ripping up the green baize grass in a shocking breach of protocol. The Clinic’s FoF system had already recognized the vehicles as belonging to major shareholders—after a brief check by Security to ensure their drivers were on the list of authorised personnel, the tractors laid down a centimetre of mud across the courtyard of the Clinic and inched painfully through the automated doors of the vehicle bay.

  There was a sound of vehicle doors slamming and voices shouting. Then, lights began flicking on all over the structure.

  “Why are your men outside the house? It’s inside that they’re needed. That’s where the hunting ground is.”

  Major Bawtry, Chief Security Officer for the Clinic, was both unused to being addressed so rudely and to being so addressed by a child’s toy. A horribly mutilated child’s toy, it had to be said, the facial musculature and torso badly damaged by what looked like overhand bayonet slashes. The face, before it had been dadaistically remodelled, had been a passable attempt at a five-kilodia-old girl. Right now, however, it was speaking with the voice of a thirteen-kilodia-old man.

  “I’m sorry?” said Major Bawtry. It wouldn’t do to be rude to the creature; it was standing flanked by two major shareholders. At least he was not being told his own job by another human being. That would have been unpardonable.

  Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, the left hand shareholder, spoke up. “Christmas, the escapee, is a cunning and resourceful individual. We have locked down Third Landing; all houses have been searched from solar collector to cellar. By
women,” he added ominously, as if a search carried out by women would locate the smallest of needles in the largest of haystacks. “We now need to lock down the Clinic.”

  Major Bawtry was startled. “But we have over ten credit billionaires in residence. One of the Llewellyn Revilla void toilet heiresses, two terraforming executives, an edible locust estanciero from New New Earth, the legal heir to the throne of Latvia—”

  “Disturbing their sleep is infinitely preferable to cleaning pieces of them off the ceiling with a mop,” observed the horribly disfigured little girl. Major Bawtry noticed that she had a cheap Personality Analogue player taped to her left shoulder, plugged into a jack socket in her neck.

  “Hey, that’s a Baby-I-Grow-Up, Year One Series,” said Major Bawtry, centering on the universe’s one current point of sanity. “They grow up as your child does. My daughter has one.”

  “So does mine.” The little girl looked up at Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Is that what you’ve put me in? Good grief. I thought I wasn’t far off the ground. In any case; we need to round up your billionaires.”

  The main reception hall at the Clinic, walled with faux fluorescent opal, glowed like a sultry galaxy in the UV mood lighting. Above Bawtry and the shareholders, staircases curled away to higher levels, decorated with tasteful bas-reliefs of medical scholars historical and mythological. Hwangdi, Avicenna, Aesculapius, Chiron and Hippocrates stood solemnly shoulder to shoulder on the marble bannisters. A multi-tiered fountain of holographic water—real water being too precious a commodity on Ararat to waste on mere ornamentation—glowed, plashed and babbled authentically in the centre of the hallway.

  By the fountain, a Christmas tree large enough for a troop of baboons to live in glittered preciously, its branches hung with crystal icicles and stellated polyhedra.

  “But Mr. Suau and Dr. Ranjalkar said—”

  “Mr. Suaua and Dr. Ranjalkar are not shareholders,” said the child. “They possibly felt insufficiently confident to order guests from their beds. Where are they?”

  “Mr. Suau is setting up a manhunt algorithm on all our automated systems. Every artificial eye in the building will be searching for Christmas if he is here. Dr. Ranjalkar, meanwhile, is readying a makeshift trauma surgery at my request.”

  “Good. That, at least, is good. And all your men are doubled up.”

  “Following your earlier instructions, uh, sir.”

  “Sir is correct,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “You are addressing Officer Rajinder Rai of the Spender’s Delight Public Safety Office.”

  “A Personality Analogue copy of him at any rate,” said the child. “You say every artificial eye in the building will be assisting in the search.”

  “Certainly. Over one thousand units, counting personal phones and intelligent trouser presses.”

  “He will notice that. He is not stupid. Every vacuum cleaner in the building suddenly on the move. Is there any area of the premises where artificial eyes are not allowed? Is there a personal privacy policy of any sort?”

  “Certainly. The guests’ bedrooms and bathrooms are sacrosanct.”

  “Then that is where he’ll be. It is now ten hours into his next killing cycle. He will be looking for three victims—no more, no less.”

  Major Bawtry was bemused. “I don’t understand how he could possibly be here by now. It’s over thirty kilometres to Third Landing, and all ground vehicles are accounted for.”

  One of Major Bawtry’s security guards appeared at his below. “Sir, we have a report of someone moving about in the dormitory wing. It was phoned in by one of the guests, Ms. Velayudhan. Two of the team are on their way—”

  “Make it four,” said the child-thing. “He won’t make any attack on four. His attack might be successful.”

  “May I ask,” said Bawtry, “what that is?” He indicated the curtain-draped, one-and-a-half-metre mystery item being propped upright by Unity Reborn-in-Jesus.

  “A secret weapon,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “There is also a combat-capable robot on the loose. One of my children seems to have foolishly loaded a marginally sane Personality Analogue into a wild Personal Security Unit.”

  “Combat-capables are illegal,” tutted the Major. “And combat-capables and self-awares still at large in the wild from before the Great Big War are hunted down and junked forcibly. I myself was master of the Beautopia Robo-Hunt for five years. One hundred men, mounted on the very finest robo-horses (which later discovered they, too, were self-aware, escaped, and had to be hunted down with considerably more difficulty on foot). You’d be surprised how fast Johnny Vending Machine can move.”

  “This one,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, “is both combat-capable and self-aware.”

  The colour drained completely from the nets of burst capillaries in Major Bawtry’s cheeks. He wheeled on his subordinates. “Tell the team to regroup here and reform into two squads. Lock all doors and load up the naughty ammunition.”

  “Uh, there is also another combat-capable at large,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, growing embarrassed at being the bearer of such extensive bad tidings. “The Warden from the Penitentiary. We, ah, can only assume it is on the trail of Christmas. I believe firing on it would be unwise. It would only fire back.”

  Bawtry nodded, his eyes still fixed on Reborn-in-Jesus. “Are there any other intelligent tanks or autonomous assassination devices wandering about that you feel the need to tell me about?”

  “None at this juncture.”

  Bawtry bowed curtly. “Well, I suppose I was hired for a reason.”

  “You came highly recommended.”

  “And rightly so.” Bawtry turned to his subordinates. “Tally ho, Miss Nobel.”

  *

  “WHAT IS GOING ON? Do you KNOW who I AM?”

  The security detail, having not signed on to herd billionaires like sheep, wore expressions that suggested they would rather be exchanging gunfire with combat-capable robots. Right now, the dormitory corridor contained an elderly gentleman in a kimono bearing a large and incongruous European coat of arms; an age-ravaged lady surprised in the middle of the night without her Smart Face, which lay dead, flaccid and rosy-cheeked on her shoulder; and a Vatican Bank investment nun and a young telesatanist from New Earth’s Belial Belt, who had been naked together in the same room when surprised by Security. But all these guests’ complaints and failures to cooperate paled by comparison with the awful blonde apparition that now dominated the corridor. The Security detail quailed in fear; they only had light assault weapons. She had a table lamp, and was hefting it with every apparent intention to apply it to their heads in anger.

  “Miss, uh—” the guard called up the guest’s name on his HUD hastily—”Llewellyn Revilla, we have a crisis situation. All the guests are in danger. An armed man, and, uh, two armed robots are on the loose.”

  “ROBOTS CAN’T HARM PEOPLE! Are you INSANE? My FATHER makes smart toilets clever enough to clean and flush themselves! But they are programmed NEVER to open the flush valve into space and suck out a user’s intestines in a cloud of evaporated blood and faeces while they sense a user on them. Such things only ever happen due to mechanical malfunction, and afterwards, the machine requires extensive reconditioning and counselling.”

  “This robot,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, “was built to harm people. It is a wild machine which we believe was marooned on Ararat during the Made War. It has, earlier today,” he said carefully, “already killed one of my own sons.”

  “WHAT DO I CARE WHOSE BRAT IT KILLED? I have had my SLEEP DISTURBED. And I do not intend to be CHAPERONED BY ARMED SIMPLETONS when I SIMPLY WISH to GO TO THE BAR and DEMAND IT BE OPENED TO POUR ME AN ICED WATER.”

  “Easy, mother,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus in a low voice, his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Put the safety back on. She’s only a poxy little toilet manufacturer’s daughter.”

  “The daughter of the manufacturer of every toilet in use on every ship between here and the orbit of Pluto,” muttered Bawtry out of the corne
r of his fixed smile. “If you took a dump on the ship that brought you out here, you did it in one of her father’s appliances. He cornered the market after the Great Self-Aware Toilet Revolt of Year Zero.”

  “I have never heard of that,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.

  “It was not widespread,” said the Major. “But it was disturbing. We had to hunt them down, too, the self-propelled ones. It was pathetic at the end. They all huddled together into a communal mass in Beautopia Fen, the large ones protecting the small.” He ground his teeth together in his skull. “We left none alive.”

  “I AM GOING TO THE BAR,” shrieked the valued honoured guest. “And I am GOING ALONE.” She wheeled on perfectly exfoliated pink heels and stomped off.

  “Should we tranquilize her?” said Bawtry.

  “Do you have tranquilizer bullets?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.

  “We have bullets,” said Bawtry.

  “Let her go,” said Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus, a serene, thoughtful expression on her face. Then, raising her voice, she shrieked: “NO! DON’T GO THAT WAY! STAY WITH THE OTHERS!”