SMALLWORLD
By DOMINIC GREEN
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LONDON
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Copyright © Dominic Green, 2010
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If you like Smallworld, try Littlestar . . .
Smallworld has been phenomenally successful – and there’s a sequel!
Littlestar by Dominic Green – available now in ebook format, and in paperback from early 2012.
https://genres.fingerpress.co.uk/littlestar.html
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CONTENTS
white man steal my gravity
the bust out
the made guys
unity and the tax pirates
santa claus versus the devil
I a partridge in a pear tree
II two turtle doves
III three french hens
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white man steal my gravity
It was the third morning of dia 2,148 of the New Calendar when Free Enterprise came to Mount Ararat. The ship, an ugly, functional workhorse of a model whose examples tended to have serial numbers rather than names, touched down with typical Tetsushuri concern for local sensibilities in the South End cemetery, knocking forty gravestones flat with the blast. Had the crew of the good ship PLD38227 thought of anything beyond ticking their way down the list of prescribed actions for landing on a prospect, they might have wondered why such a large graveyard existed on a colony listed in navigational records as only three kilodia old and only one hundred people in size. Indeed, the cemetery filled a sizeable percentage of the southern hemisphere of the planet, if the words ‘hemisphere’ and ‘planet’ could be said to apply. The South End of Mount Ararat was considerably smaller than the North, containing rich veins of radioactives which poisoned the soil for any crop other than corpses and made EVA without protective clothing hazardous. In earlier ages, a crew of prospectors might have been greatly interested in striking such a lode, but the Tetsushuri Microgravity Mining Company did not concern itself with seams of any mineral of any size less than a cubic kilometre. What PLD38227’s crew were searching for was something far more profitable.
Thus it was that, some time after three of her house’s windows had been put in by the vessel’s landing jets, Shun-Company Reborn-in-Jesus saw three heavily pressure-suited figures trudging with difficulty through her vegetable garden up to her front porch, trampling precious sprouts, potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes with their magnetic space boots. The Garden Devils stared sightlessly from the undergrowth as the intruders passed.
The back door knocker was in the shape of a grinning devil. The EVA team leader did not give this a second thought as he took it in a sausage-fingered fist and rapped hard on the metal. All the doors and window frames were metal. This was unsurprising: the one tree he had seen through his thick triple-glazed hermetically-sealed helmet had been a single anaemic cherry blossom growing in imported soil in what passed for a village square.
When Shun-Company opened the door, the spacepersons stood suited on her threshold and said nothing. This was because the Tetsushuri Mining Company procedure for EVA on worldlets less than one hundred kilometres in diameter specified vacuum suits were to be worn at all times, and vacuum suits did not have external speakers. Who, by definition, would hear the sound in a vacuum? Communication, the procedure clearly stated, should be either by radio or, in an emergency, by touching helmets. Removing one’s EVA suit was unthinkable.
Shun-Company, meanwhile, who communicated by yelling at her seven small children at the top of her voice, and whose house contained neither radio nor thinking machine nor electric vacuum cleaner by edict of the blessed First Arkarch, simply stared obediently at the floor, and said nothing, as was only right and proper with strange heathen male visitors
Eventually, after the entire Reborn-in-Jesus family had gathered behind Shun-Company, gazing goggle-eyed at the golden-faced newcomers, the team leader plucked up sufficient courage to remove his helmet, revealing a thoroughly anticlimactic human face beneath it.
“Good day,” he said. “I represent the Tetsushuri Mining Company, without prejudice.” He had no idea what the phrase meant; it was simply in the procedure to say it. He nodded to his team; uncertainly, they removed their own helmets and sniffed the alien air.
Shun-Company curtseyed, an archaism which nonplussed the EVA team, fifty per cent of whom were female and twenty five per cent homosexual, in line with demographics.
“Good day,” she said. “The master of the house is currently absent. We have real tea. Would you care for some?”
Senior Planetometrist Wong sipped his Real Tea thoughtfully. He had now had every single junior member of the Reborn-in-Jesus family squirm all over his meteorite-resistant knees, and was doubtful whether the rickety Genuine Old World Wood armchair he was sitting in would continue to take the weight of himself and his suit combined. His mission on this new world was fact-finding; he had so far learned that Shun-Company had feared that her first child, Unity, would be her first and only due to the high level of ionizing radiation on Mount Ararat, hence the name. Hence, when her second child, Testament, had been born, she had felt the need to commemorate the birth by bestowing a name which referred to a divine entity which came in two parts. The same logic had led, as God had blessed the family with five more children, to the naming of Magus, Apostle, God’s-Wound, Measure-of-Barley, and Day-of-Creation. Planetometrist Wong, who had been brought up to regard families having more than two children as morally perverted, was currently feeling the skin crawl on the back of his neck. How did these people imagine such a rate of population growth was sustainable on a planetoid not twenty kilometres long?
A gigantic fly, its wings whirring like engines, buzzed in through an open window and lowered itself onto the saucer of Wong’s teacup. The fly was shiny and metallic in lustre, green as burning copper. Wong watched it in horror. It was unthinkable for insects to exist in space; he could only speculate as to the insanitary condition of the ship that had brought the settlers here. How many diseases might one fly carry? Did flies sting, or was that bees or locusts? He attempted bravely to ignore it.
The Master of the House, he was informed, was out searching for the family’s only goat, which had last been seen perilously close to the South End Chasm. The EVA party themselves had travelled here in their rover across what Planetometrist Wong learned was called the South End Saddle, the only safe way to cross the chasm and visit the Cemetery. The Chasm surrounded the South End on three sides, was a kilometre deep, and was populated only by rock hyraxes and magpies, two of the only species to have survived First Arkarch Duke’s beneficent release of genera when the colony vessel Utanapishtim had arrived on Mount Ararat three kilodia ago. Planetometrist Wong reflected, as he sipped his tea and watched little God’s-Wound Reborn-in-Jesus crawl inside the EVA suit of Junior Gravitographer Shankar, that this explained the bleached and magpie-picked skeletons of two Himalayan yaks and one honest-to-God elephant that the team had passed on its way here.
Planetometrist Wong expressed great interest in the geology of the Chasm. Was Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus aware that it represented a tectonic bo
undary between what had once been two entirely separate planetoids loosely cemented together by their own weak gravity? Now that those worlds had been slammed rudely together by a massive and anomalous increase in planetary mass, the Chasm was the only remaining sign that they had once been distinct worldlets. Shun-Company replied that yes, she had heard that this had once been the case. The Anchorite had told her children so. And was Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus aware, continued Planetometrist Wong, of the reason for that sudden mass increase? No, she was not aware. There was no cause for her, as a woman, to be learned in astronomical matters. However, she had heard her husband speak of a Mononeutronic Sphere Which Encompassed the Centre of Gravity And Was Probably Surrounded By A Shell of Electron Degeneracy, which lay buried at the bottom of the Chasm. The Anchorite would of course know more about the subject, having once been an educated man. However, the Anchorite would see nobody, preferring to keep to his cave on the upper slopes of the Chasm, and spoke only to those who confined the length of their conversation to ‘Good day, Mr. Anchorite, sir’, or who had genuine reason to speak to him. The Anchorite’s definition of ‘genuine reason’ was, she added, set by the Anchorite himself. He would, however, speak at great length to children.
All this information was delivered by Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus with her head respectfully lowered, gazing at the unadorned alloy floor plates. The Planetometrist noticed with minor disquiet that the home-made cup he was drinking out of was decorated with a zoetrope of grinning devils, despite the fact that the parlour was also hung with enough crosses to crucify an entire congregation of very small Christians.
The EVA Team made their excuses and rose to leave. They were growing hot inside their suits with the helmets removed: the suits’ environmental controls would not work with the helmet seals unlocked. One of the team, Asahara, had removed her suit entirely. Planetometrist Wong glared at her severely as he gave the order to re-seal helmets and depart.
When the team returned here, he reflected, it would be neighbourly of it to bring back some of PLD38227’s own supplies, not least for his own sanity. The Real Tea had been brutal in its reality. He suspected that the family only took it out whenever visitors from space happened to alight on their worldlet, and that visitors from space had not alit for a very long time.
The rover’s electric motor cut in, and the wheels ground coarse-grained regolith that admitted water like a colander. How these people managed to farm such soil, Planetometrist Wong had no idea. The team set off back to their ship, which was cramped, crowded, reeking of anti-odorants, but nevertheless, after an hour spent in the Reborn-in-Jesus household, home away from home.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was a man whom a lifetime of hard struggle against gravity, radioactivity and a sun that gave off little but heat, had toughened until he resembled an unsmiling, two-metre callus. What passed for fields on Mount Ararat were, as fields always were on red star planets, strung with lines of cheap UV lighting filament, powered by solar arrays at the end of each furrow. The furrows were seeded with genetically-modified crops, usually a variant of the omnicompetent potato, which cost a farmer a good deal of his annual yield every time he purchased a new batch from his local Agribiz ship. The UV filaments were a sop to technological necessity; without them, no crops could grow here. But from the rusted iron implements, pocked by cosmic ray trails, sitting in the fields, it looked as though everything apart from the UV in Mount Ararat’s sere fields was powered by the human hand.
Captain Adeti of the Tetsushuri Mining Fleet, Kranion Sector, had once prided herself on being able to run further, faster, than Phidippides. She had been born in gravity; she had been weakened by kilodia of living in free fall. She had sacrificed fine muscles and an Amazonian physique for her career. Currently, despite the fact that the man facing her had been burned out like a spent venturi by the heat of plough-pushing, seed-planting, stone-clearing, and ditch-digging, Captain Adeti was uncomfortably conscious of the fluid still puddled by overlong exposure to microgravity in her once powerful ankles. Her ankles, despite being supported by elastic stockings, were painful now that an unaccustomed six-newton gravitational field was pulling on them. A promotion from field grade would buy her a posting back in gravity, perhaps even back on New Earth, New New Earth, or Earth; but to earn a promotion, she had to make quota. The centre of mineral exploitation and exploration, now that Earth had been mined out, was now New Earth, and exploration therefore proceeded accordingly to the constellations that could be seen in that planet’s sky. The constellation Kranion had so far proven to be an unmitigated prospecting disaster. The PLD38227 held nothing in her specimen tanks but gold and diamonds, the former of which could be extracted cheaply from seawater on Earth, the latter of which could be made out of coal by the tonne using the Popol Process. Here on Planetoid 23 Kranii 3X, however, she believed she had discovered a thing which would make her quota ten times over and put her behind a desk within constant spying distance of her untrustworthy husband in Kibera on Earth, for life.
“Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus—figuratively, you have a mine of, uh, substances greater in value than weapons grade uranium beneath your feet.”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded politely without anything resembling a mad look of greed seizing his features. He tapped a paperweight, horribly radioactive uraninite ore encased in lead glass, that sat on his writing desk beside the table. “We are aware that there are radioactives on our world. We conducted a survey when we first arrived.” He reached behind himself to the lightswitch and dialled the light downwards. The mineral sample in the lead glass fluoresced evilly.
“Uranium oxide,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “But we cannot mine it out. There’s only a few cubic kilometres of it, and to remove it would be to unbalance our little world’s centre of gravity. Mr. Battista assured us this would happen.”
“Mr. Battista?”
“The Anchorite. Lives in the South End Chasm. Keeps himself to himself,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. The Captain was left wondering whether there was an unspoken implication that the Tetsushuri Mining Company should do likewise.
“It’s, ah, not the radioactives we’re interested in,” said the Captain. She set her devil-handled cup down on an occasional table—the house had furniture for every function—and pulled on her business face. “Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, have you never wondered how a planetoid only twenty kilometres across can have an atmosphere?”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus frowned. “Well,” he said, “old Arkarch Duke always claimed it was down to the Providence of the Lord. But on account of how I have an honours degree in Natural Science, I tend more towards the ‘there is a nugget of degenerate matter two thousand million million tonnes in mass ten kilometres beneath my feet’ explanation. There was once a companion star to 23 Kranii, a stellar-sized object Mr. Battista refers to as Easy Pink, and it was knocked out of orbit by a hypothetical object passing through our system, which Mr. Battista is fond of calling the Q Ball. We can infer this from the specks of hypermassive debris hereabouts which occasionally collide with agribiz ships and cut them in half.”
“The oxygen fires are pretty when the ships get cut,” said little Apostle Reborn-in-Jesus, with an acetylene light in his eyes.
“Who is this Arkarch Duke?” said the Captain, nervous that this unremarkable rock was proving to contain far more people than she had anticipated.
“Our leader,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “The man who brought us here to Mount Ararat, Lord rest him.”
“What sort of a name is Arkarch?”
“Not a name,a title. The Arkarch used to claim it was an old Earth title meaning ‘master of the ship’, though I suspect he made it up. He took my family out of a seventy-cubic-metre tenement in the Selvas Favela in Manaus and gave us the stars. Now, alas, he is dead. He died four years after landing.”
“A lot of people,” said Captain Adeti, “seem to have died four years after landing.”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus shrugged. “It was hard adjusting ourselves to the ways of this place.”
/> “Are you not concerned that your crops might fail, that a solar flare might drive background radiation even higher than current levels, that there might be a meteor impact or a flash oxygen imbalance caused by a bacterial mutation? Your family could still all die.”
The dirt monkey shook his head. “We have adjusted.”
To be true, this appeared to be the case. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was the same colour as the regolith he farmed, like a clay model of a man baked from Ararat sand in a red solar furnace.
“Mr. uh, Reborn-in-Jesus, we believe that the centre of your world could contain a neutronium mote equal to one half-millionth the planetary mass of Old Earth. It might be as big as a beach ball, the largest commercially exploitable neutronium chunk yet discovered. The value of such a find would be incalculable. Neutronium is induplicable on a financially viable scale, and essential in nanomedicine, femtoelectronics, and weapons manufacture. A share of the profits of mote extraction, if you moved your family offworld, would easily pay for a far larger, more fertile plot of land on a developed colony planet—”
“We do not want a developed colony planet,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “God led us here.”
Captain Adeti fidgeted in the unfamiliar wooden chair. “Have you considered another possibility? The collision with, uh, Q Ball might have been enough to compress certain components of Easy Pink below their Schwarzschild radius. The mote inside Mount Ararat might be a collapsar, steadily growing. You and your family might be sitting on a time bomb. Now that we are drilling in the South End Chasm, we will be able to provide an answer to that question.”
“Which I never asked,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “How long have you been drilling in the South End Chasm?”
The Captain had no need to consult a watch; the time came up on her retinal HUD on command. “Around five hours now. Did you get your goat?”
“No. I suspect the Devil has taken her. It will be expensive. I’d only recently had her impregnated.”
Smallworld: A Science Fiction Adventure Comedy Page 1