“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. Beëlzebub.”
The Anchorite’s face was unreadable. “Oh, really? What does Mr. Beëlzebub 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. Arkarch 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—”
“Many of them were not humans,” said the robot, “but Made. Entirely separate and new species, violently opposed to ours—”
“I would imagine,” said the Devil, “that they felt pain just as effectively. I certainly consider myself a separate species. Are you sure you wouldn’t like dissect me?”
“Natural evolution,” said the Devil, “may have produced, in you, a species that can beat the Made. You have abilities human science doesn’t as yet even comprehend. Keeping you here presents a danger, but so did keeping uranium piles in the first days of atomic research. Make no mistake, we won’t have beaten the Made until they’re comprehensively exterminated, and we didn’t accomplish that by any means. Many of them escaped into the outer dark, and the overthrow of the Dictator rendered our government too soft to order pursuit. They will breed out there, and grow strong. And they’ll return.”
“And they call me mad,” said the Devil.
“Stand back from the door,” said the robot. The Devil stood back; the code was entered on the keypad again. The second pressure door began cranking down again at the turret’s far end, a black terminator erasing the Devil from existence.
The whole right side of the Anchorite’s head suddenly stung as if slapped with a paddle. He could not see out of his right eye. His ears rang. His one working eye now made out a world whose familiar rocks and boulders, along with his right arm and the right side of his chest, had suddenly, unaccountably, become bright blue.
“THE MISSING MAN, I PRESUME.”
The voice was shouting from some way over towards the Saddle, but that provided little comfort. He’d been hit by a dye cannister intended not to kill him, but to provide assurance that whoever had fired the round certainly could kill him at any time they chose. And he had no proof the shouter was the same man as the shooter.
“ARE YOU MR. REBORN-IN-JESUS, I WONDER? OR ARE YOU MAGUS, TESTAMENT, OR OUR MYSTERIOUS EXTRA MISSING DNA TRACE? CERTAINLY YOU SEEM TO BE EX-MILITARY. CIVILIANS HIT BY A DYE SHELL OFTEN KEEP MOVING AND HAVE TO HAVE THE POINT RAMMED HOME TO THEM WITH A LIGHT ANTIPERSONNEL TO THE LEG.”
He craned his neck back around the boulder. The engineers surrounding the rover had stopped work, and were staring out into the barrens all around them, no doubt as curious as he was as to where the voice was coming from. One of them caught sight of the Anchorite’s protruding head, and pointed for the edification of his colleagues.
“THAT’S IT. KEEP EVER SO STILL, WE NEED TO HAVE A WORD WITH YOU. KEEP THOSE HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM.”
Two parts of the landscape rose up and became men; men wearing chromatophore cloaks. The cloaks rippled and changed both colour and texture as their wearers advanced, changing from mottled and uneven to sleek and star-strewn as the optic sensors in their backs registered sky behind them and sent messages to the chameleon skins on their fronts to replicate the pattern. It was like being advanced on by two constellations, one of which was holding a multiple Anchorite-seeking munition launcher.
The Anchorite raised his hands. The cloaks came closer. One of them cast off its hood.
“Mr. Skilling,” said the Anchorite.
“You recognize me?”
“Your physical description is widely circulated by law enforcement authorities.”
The other man was dressed in the more expensive parts of what looked like three military uniforms. He was formidably tall, and possessed a formidable quantity of teeth, which he now used to good smiling effect. “Aha, I see you relax. You are not going to die right now, you are dealing with slavers, slavers do not kill people, you will somehow cunningly escape our clutches and deal with us later. Well, I’m afraid I feel obliged to poke holes in your argument, as well as, possibly, your integument.” The other man sat down on a rock and mopped his brow while his associate continued to cover the Anchorite. “Firstly, we slavers operate a stringent system of quality control. We do not go large on the sort of slave who is likely to cunningly escape our clutches. Secondly, we have been ensuring slaves do not cunningly escape us for quite some time, and we are very good at it. You are, I am afraid, used to the kind of custody exercised by policemen and jailers, who have to adhere to tiresome REGULATIONS. We do not have any such constraints.” He clicked long-nailed fingers, and the Anchorite watched his own foot blow off.
The wave of panic, the Anchorite told himself, was solely due to sudden fluid loss. There was no need for fear to twist in his chest like a knife, no need for his heart to beat as if in orgasm.
“You see, we have shockingly little regard for nicety. If a prisoner runs away, we cut off his legs. If he returns again to the fold of good and honest sheep, we may give him new ones.” He looked up at the man who had shot the Anchorite’s foot off. “Didier—the legs.”
Didier grinned with considerably fewer teeth than Mr. Skilling, put his weapon down, dropped his hands to his knees, and pulled up his trouser legs. From the knees down, his legs were skeletal metal and plastic.
“Didier came to us when he wa
s only a child,” said Skilling. “We recognized in him early on a natural aptitude for firearms handling. however, the necessities of business had forced us to eliminate his parents and adult relatives, who had defended the vile burg he came from with their liveS. they would have been uneconomical to repair, and would no longer have made good slaves in any case. this, HOWEVER, went ill with him. There were numerous attempts at escape and suicide; hence the removal of the legs. Over time, however, Didier came to know loyalty and, dare i say, love for his new family, and won his legs back. I trust him with a loaded weapon at my back. That is how effective our readjustment facilities are on the processing planets.”
“How old was he?” said the Anchorite.
“Ten,” said Skilling. “ONLY A LITTLE YOUNGER THAN MANY of the juvenile inhabitants of this place, in fact.” He smiled and looked at the Anchorite’s stump critically. “You know, you really should get that looked at. It’s bleeding quite badly.” He picked up the severed foot and held it up demonstratively. “A virgin forest,” he quipped, “is a place where the hand of man has never set foot.”
The Anchorite looked back dispassionately.
“You are an odd one,” said Skilling. “Normally men groan at the sight of their own severed limbs being toyed with. It’s peculiarly violating. But you show no reaction. A torturer is a puppet master whose strings are his victim’s nervous system, But you,” he said, pointing at the Anchorite with the latter’s own big toe, “can see those strings. you were a torturer in a previous life. or an interrogator. or one who supervised interrogations.”
The Anchorite breathed in heavily, and shrugged nonchalantly on the outbreath. An emerald insect settled onto the boulder at Skilling’s elbow; he watched it with interest.
“These devices are quite fascinating. We did not notice their presence until quite late in the game.,” he said. “As soon as we’d swatted one and taken it apart, though, we knew we were being watched. After that it was just a matter of triangulating their control signals, and there you were.” He examined the condition of the Anchorite’s severed toenails with distaste. “now, do you have any doubt at all that the consequences of not answering my next question absolutely truthfully would be very, very bad? Good. I need to know how many people like you there still are on this goddamned rock, what they’re armed with, and how I can get them to surrender.”
Smallworld: A Science Fiction Adventure Comedy Page 17