Smallworld: A Science Fiction Adventure Comedy

by Dominic Green

  Magus grinned thinly. He looked at the back of his hand, tanned as a razor strop.

  “I believe,” he said, “our settlement could do with a tractor. A Terrawatt Altrak Percheron 500, with self-magnetizing fusion torus, lead glass cabin and backhoe attachment. Possibly,” he said, “two, one for operational use and one as a cold standby.”

  “Done,” grinned the Prosecutor. “And now I believe the Gate staff are getting impatient. My dear, it is time for us to go where there is sky again.”

  He squeezed his wife’s hand affectionately; she squeezed his in return.

  The sound of the tramp trader Insert Sweetheart’s Name Here lifting off behind them rumbled through the rock and made the sand dance to the height of a man’s waist. Magus had already tied his scarf into a turban to keep out the stinging dust, but Trapp was coughing like a consumptive. It was an hour before North End sunrise. There was a chance that the relatively gentle landing and takeoff of a small ship might only make the family roll over in their sleep, but it made sense to approach down the Dry Rille until they were as close to the Penitentiary as possible. The Penitentiary had better eyes and ears.

  “This is insane,” complained his father’s analogue in his left ear. “You are committing the most outrageous folly. I demand that you insert my jack into the Devil’s master socket immediately, so that I may take control of the situation.”

  “You will leave the Devil’s master socket alone,” said the Anchorite. “I do not approve of this course of action, but I do not want an atomic-powered bulletproof automaton capable of trimming a man’s head from his shoulders in the hands of a peon.”

  “I,” said Magus sharply, “am a peon.”

  The Series Three loomed large, its metal surface glinting in the dawn. Mr. Trapp’s hands had begun to shake.

  “Easy,” said Magus. “I am with you.”

  “You,” said Trapp, “are dead weight. Getting both of us out will be twice as difficult.” He took a deep breath and strode up to the wall.

  “Where is the entrance?” said Magus.

  “Anywhere on the wall it wants one,” said Trapp. “It will create one only if it needs one. Unfortunately, it does not feel it needs one right now. It knows it has a full complement of prisoners.”

  “But my sister does not have your DNA,” said Magus.

  “She did when she went in. She might not now, but the machine will cleverly realize this is a cunning subterfuge on the part of the prisoner in an attempt to escape. It may possibly be punishing her for this repeated escape attempt even as we speak.”

  Magus felt a cold blade of adrenalin turn in a wound in his heart. “Punishing her for having incorrect DNA?”

  “It’s the way it thinks, or rather, doesn’t. If I were you, I’d be glad she’s being punished. She’ll never be that much of a fool again.”

  “Fool enough to trust you,” muttered Magus.

  “We get in,” announced Trapp, “by convincing the machine that it needs to open up for maintenance. It needs to think it is malfunctioning. It needs to feel in need of a big strong maintenance man inside it.” He nodded to the Devil. “Set the first package we bought on Beltane down over there, gently.”

  “What is it?” said Magus.

  “A logical extension of the basic workings of a starship’s FTL drive,” said Trapp. “Any FTL drive is by definition also a time machine, and hence this wonderful device, the bane of any time lock.” He opened the lid of the casket and began to flick switches. “Take the emitter coil over there and clamp it to the hull, if it’ll clamp.”

  Magus shook his head. “Clamp it yourself.”

  Trapp sighed in disappointment, walked over to the hull with a medusa of superconducting cables, and attached them to the metal.

  “Can’t say I blame you,” he said. “If I’d flicked the switch here while you’d been over there, you’d have aged a year in a minute. You’d have suffocated in under a second, used up all the air in your time bubble. If,” he said, raising his finger, “I were a violent man. But I was never in here for being a violent man. I was in here because I’d escaped from everywhere else.”

  A sphere of air around the nest of cables began to glow like a miniature sun.

  “Trapped heat,” said Trapp. “The normal oscillation of molecules. Normally it would dissipate, but it can’t escape quickly enough across the barrier.” He flicked a switch, and the light died. “Now the machine thinks its hull processors are returning a different universal time to its CPU. Messages from the one end to the other can’t be routed. It suspects it’s being interfered with, that its messages are being intercepted. But it knows it hasn’t been cut into. It knows it’s still in one piece. So it sends out a maintenance request—”

  The top of the machine slid back, extruding a communications array which turned slowly until it found the constellation Tridens in the sky, then pulsed briefly three times, physically shaking with the expenditure of energy. Then the machine reabsorbed its communicator and settled down to wait.

  “It requests,” continued Trapp, “an authorized engineer. Unfortunately, travel times being what they are, it will take weeks for him to arrive...” Trapp wandered over to the cables, rearranged them to fit on another part of the surface, then walked back to his console “...which he will do around... now.” The light flared once again, then died. Trapp pulled out a machine-gun feed of authorization cards from an inside pocket. “Now, let me see—authorized Moral Reclamation Authority engineer—”

  He slid a card glittering with smartness into an orifice that opened in the section of hull he’d warped time on as if slit by an invisible knife. A square of hull skin slid aside, revealing a control screen, which Trapp manipulated expertly.

  “Let me see—bringing in a second engineer, on training.” A metal tentacle snaked out of the hull, swaying from side to side as if seeking an opening.

  “Biosampler,” said Trapp. “You’re supposed to stand still.” He pulled back the sleeve on his own left arm; the sampler’s binocular eye-turrets swivelled to focus on it, then the machine struck like a serpent. When Magus had finished blinking, Trapp had the sampler in his right hand, held behind its sampling fangs, with a reflective sheet of foil held over its ocular barbettes. Carefully, with his left hand, he took out a miniscule via of red liquid and held it to the fangs, which pierced the top on the vial and drank greedily.

  “In case you’re wondering,” said Trapp, “I took the blood from him while he was sleeping peacefully. This is the blood of one Punchinello Llewellyn-Sforza, grade three RB engineer. And this,” he said, producing another vial, “is the blood of Alun Fitzakerly, grade four. The machine will shortly foolishly imagine we are both state-sanctioned and will do it no harm.”

  After another lunge from the sampling appendage, a mansized section of hull swung back, revealing a narrow corridor leading into the machine. Trapp inhaled deeply and swallowed hard, then stepped back into prison.

  Magus followed; the hull closed behind him again with the speed of a camera shutter. It was dark, but his eyes gradually became accustomed to the gloom. All sound from the outside world had been snuffed like a candle flame.

  “What do we do now?” said Magus.

  “Find out which cell she’s in,” said Trapp. “There are normally seven cells in one of these things, arranged in a two-by-two-by-two matrix. The empty cell—which we are currently in—allows the other cells to move slowly over time, so slowly that the occupant normally doesn’t notice. It gives you a fifty-fifty chance, if you somehow do find a way to tunnel out, of tunnelling further into the structure.”

  “How did you figure out where you were?” said Magus.

  “Have you ever seen one of the really old Earth devices for measuring earthquakes?” said Trapp. “Quite ornate, a circle of brass frogs with balls in their mouths, precisely balanced. When something disturbs the frogs, their balls drop out along an axis directly intersecting with the epicentre. My frogs were similar, made of origami, and you really
don’t want to know what I made the balls out of, but it was the same principle—aha!”

  A touchscreen on the wall lit up with a list of seven names. Magus leaned past Trapp to read them.

  TRAPP, JOHANNES MARIA

  VLAAMINCK, DR. ANTONINUS

  BOLABAS, CITIZEN PADRAIG

  DEVIL, THE

  CARNEIRO PAVE, CITIZEN YELENA

  SPINK, ANESTIS

  CHRISTMAS, FATHER

  Trapp typed out a few more comments, then swore under his breath.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The information on the cells’ current position is encrypted. I can’t figure out which cell is which.”

  Magus cast a troubled eye at the side wall. “Mr. Trapp, is this wall moving?”

  “Yes, it will do that. That’s why you never get into the empty cell if you’re escaping. It doesn’t stay empty for long.”

  The wall was still moving. “Uh, are we in any danger?”

  “I hope not. The machine knows we’re in here, after all.”

  “I mean, it’s not moving very quickly, but—”

  “Of course, we have screwed around with its innards...tarnation, I hope I don’t have to do any real engineering. In any case,” he said, bouncing a finger down the list of names, “we have access to the internal command prompt. I can send out messages to various cell addresses, and once we find out which one is your sister—”

  “Stepsister,” corrected Magus.

  “Aha, figured out who you can and can’t breed with on this rock already, I see,” said Trapp. Magus reddened. “Well, don’t worry, we’ll have her out in a jiffy... I hope...” he typed out several lines of command syntax, and the screen cleared to a single number in binary:

  001

  The screen was silent for long seconds, during which the wall crept a full millimetre closer. Then, the prompt scrawled back:

  IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?

  Jamming his lip into the corner of his mouth, Trapp typed back:

  MORAL RECLAM BUREAU MAINT ENGINEER

  Magus leaned over Trapp’s shoulder. “What are you doing? Just ask her if she’s my sister.”

  Trapp frowned and shook his head. “Six of these cells are filled with people far, far worse than I will ever be. You want to be very, very sure who it is you’re letting out.”

  The screen cleared, and came back:

  YOU MUST LET ME OUT. THIS IS A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY

  Trapp sucked in his lips, contemplated, and tapped back:

  WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

  The screen replied instantly:

  I’M JUST A LITTLE GIRL

  “It must be her,” said Magus. “Ask her who her father is.”

  Trapp shrugged, and tapped the question in.

  The screen cleared.

  I HAVE NO FATHER

  “That’s perfectly true,” said Magus. “He died in the, uh, plague in the fourth year of colonization.

  “True of a lot of little girls,” said Trapp. He thought awhile, and keyed:

  WHY DO YOU HAVE NO FATHER?

  The screen cleared, and came back:

  I HAVE NO FATHER BECAUSE HE HURLED ME OUT OF HEAVEN *I* AM THE FATHER THE FATHER OF LIES DESPITE MY INCARCERATION HERE MY LEGIONS WAIT READY TO REND THE FLESH OF MAN DID I SAY HE HURLED I *CHOSE* TO BE HURLED I AM THE STRONGER IN HERE I LURK GNAWING EVER ON THE LIVER OF PROMETHEUS AND THE BONES OF JUDAS I AM ASMODEUS SATAN THE SERPENT IN THE GARDEN APOLLYON AND LEGION

  As the reply continued in the same vein, Trapp tapped in another sequence of commands, and the screen cleared to

  010

  “I think it is safe to assume,” said Trapp, “that that was not your sister.”

  Magus gawped at the screen, his face pale.

  “He can’t get into her cell at all, can he?”

  “Not at all. The cell walls are everything-proof.”

  “Then how did you get out?”

  “Everything-but-me-proof.”

  HELLO? IS THAT A HOUSEKEEPING PROGRAM, OR ANOTHER HUMAN BEING?

  “Doesn’t sound like her,” said Magus. “Too wordy.”

  WHO ARE YOU?

  typed Trapp.

  THAT DOES NOT MATTER. WHAT DOES MATTER IS THAT THE SECRET OF ETERNAL LIFE REACHES THE OUTSIDE WORLD. THE SECRET IS—

  The screen cleared, and nothing Trapp could do would clear it.

  “There must be a watch program on that cell’s communications, shutting it down if it types certain phrases.”

  “No matter, it didn’t sound like Perfect,” said Magus. “Erm, the wall is getting closer.”

  “Fear not,” said Trapp, and cleared the screen again so that it came up:

  011

  The screen stayed silent for many, many seconds.

  “She could be asleep,” said Magus. Trapp shook his head. “An incoming message for the block administrator causes an Appell in the cell. She’ll have heard it. Unless she’s comatose or dead. Which is really unlikely,” he added hastily.

  Suddenly, the screen typed back, very slowly:

  IS THIS A KEYBOARD?

  “That’s her,” said Magus quickly—but, just to make sure, leaned around Trapp and typed in:

  WHO WAS UR FATHER?

  The screen cleared and replied with painful, single-fingered slowness:

  TAKE-EAT-THIS-IS-MY-BODY OGUNDERE

  Frantically, Magus typed back:

  WHO HAS EVER SEEN U NEKKID

  The screen responded:

  IS THAT U GUS?

  Tongue in the corner of his mouth, Magus stabbed out furiously:

  WE R GETTING U OUT

  Trapp stared at the screen fatalistically. “I’d like to know how, exactly.”

  “What?”

  “All the cells are full. I was about to invoke administrator privileges and order a cell-to-cell transfer, but that’s not possible. And these cells won’t do double occupancy. The inmates are too dangerous. It’s hardwired into the design.”

  Magus eyed the wall, now a full half metre closer, nervously. “Isn’t there a LET ALL THE PRISONERS GO command?”

  “Thankfully, no. I’m afraid we really have only one option.” He pulled out a gun-shaped device from an inside pocket and slotted a gas cannister into its handgrip, then pointed the gun at the outside wall.

  “Look away”

  “But won’t we be suffocated by the exhaust?”

  Trapp shook his head. “It’s only a noble gas compound laser. It puts out xenon and oxygen. If I ran it for too long you might catch fire. Look away.”

  The light from the gun filled the chamber, even when Magus looked away.

  “But you’re cutting into the outside wall! We don’t need to cut out, we need to cut further in!”

  “We’re not cutting out,” said Trapp sadly. “Only an idiot would try to cut out of one of these rigs.” He looked at the wall screen, which had changed font size and colour and begun to print coded messages at a speed almost too fast for the human eye to follow.

  “She’s got a spider inside her,” grinned Trapp, switching off the gun. “Now, you and I know she swallowed us spiders to catch the fly, but all she sees is spider. She thinks someone’s trying to tunnel out of her.” He tapped the hot metal with a fingernail. “Ow! But see how the metal’s bunching up around the cut, like a bruise round a wound? The wall’s getting thicker at twice the rate I’m cutting.”

  The walls began to hiss around them. “That’ll be the gas,” said Trapp. “Should take no longer than the end of this sent—”

  “WAKE UP, GUS! WAKE UP!”

  Magus woke up. His head was lying in the lap of someone who stank of potatoes. His brothers and sister were gathered all around him, and they also reeked of potatoes. Their breaths smelt of potatoes when they yelled “HE’S MOVING! HE’S ALIVE!” and “WAKE UP, PERFECT! PERFECT, WAKE UP!” He had not realized his world smelt so badly of tubers before.

  He was sitting in the shade of the Penitentiary Unit. No portal or aperture was visible in it a
nywhere. He could still smell the urine stench of the gas. He felt like vomiting, but did not want to do it in what he realized was God’s-Wound’s lap.

  “SHE’S ALIVE! SHE’S ALIVE!” All around him, step-brothers and step-sisters were dancing. A goat was licking his face with a tongue like a rasp. The goat stank of goat.

  The Anchorite, his mother, and his father were looking down at him.

  “Are you feeling okay?” said his father.

  He nodded groggily.

  “Trapp,” he said.

  The Anchorite shook his head. “Read what’s in your top pocket.”

  He felt in the pocket of his utility vest, and found a neatly-folded square of paper with the heading of the Anadyomene Company, on which were even more neatly printed block capitals.

  HAVE CONVINCED MACHINE AM ATTEMPTING TO TUNNEL OUT. MACHINE KNOWS THERE ARE TWO ENGINEERS INSIDE IT. ONCE IT CHECKS OUT MY DNA, SHOULD SPIT BOTH ENGINEERS OUT AND KEEP THE ESCAPEE. WISH IT COULD HAVE GONE ANOTHER WAY; WILL BE OUT AGAIN SHORTLY. KEEP A CANDLE IN THE WINDOW.

  X

  J.M. TRAPP

  Magus stared through the letters as if they weren’t there.

  “He did the right thing,” he said.

  “Sure,” said Shun-Company contemptuously. “In the end.” He yelped suddenly as the Personality Analogue in his pocket became abruptly, unaccountably hot. It was all he could do to rip it from his clothing and dump it in the dust before it collapsed into a hissing cloud of molten plastic and femtocircuitry. He looked up. The Devil was now standing to stiff robotic attention above him. Formerly, it had been slouching like a disgruntled hermit.

  “Self destruct,” said the Anchorite. “I couldn’t have had two of me running around. Especially when the one of me that wasn’t me laughed cruelly at gunfire. It could have led to some awful me-on-me violence.” He helped Magus unsteadily to his feet.

  “I promised Trapp we’d get him offworld when he got out again,” said Magus.

  Shun-Company regarded her offspring severely. “What a stupid thing to promise. You were in no position to promise such a thing.”

  “I was in a perfect position to,” said Magus. “and I will keep a light in the window.” He leaned up against the lamellar bark of a genetically-modified palm. The dates it bore ate cancers. “You didn’t check my inside pocket.” He pulled out a sheaf of bearer bonds of the largest denominations in circulation, the new imprints bearing geometrical designs where the head of the Secretary General or the Dictator, would formerly have been.