“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 cross-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.
“We have some very nice text readers,” he said, “all the world’s works of literature from Milton’s Social Harmony Lost through Orwell’s Two Legs Better to The Great Work of Truth.”
“I have never heard of the latter title,” said the girl.
“It’s what they’re calling the Bible, Koran and Torah nowadays,” said Mr. Mountbanks. “I haven’t read it in the new version.” Know your customer; these are backwoods hicks who, for all you know, might still worship an invisible god whose holy book still starts with In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth rather than In the first second, subatomic particles were formed.
“What are these?” said the girl, her attention moving almost accidentally on to the personality analogues.
“Why, they’re personality analogues,” said Mr. Mountbanks. “Very popular. Increasingly so in our modern enlightened times. These are the blanks, which allow you to make a recording of your loved one if, heaven forbid, you are apart for an extended or indefinite period. Over here, meanwhile, we have the more expensive extrapolator models—if a member of your family dies, and you have no personality imprint to remember them by, you can build one up by educating the extrapolator with base data. Of course, the longer you educate, the more accurate the analogue. We even have here a number of sample historical models, all suitable for tiny tots and vetted for political accuracy; the religious novelist Dan Brown, the noted Victorian censor Dr. Thomas Bowdler; the celebrated Roman Consul, Marcus Porcius Cato...”
“Why not Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, or Marie Curie?” said the girl critically.
“Because it would violate the laws on machine intelligence,” explained Mr. Mountbanks patiently.
“We will take,” said the girl, “five blank recordings.”
“For ten I will throw in Paris Hilton, Salome, Helen, and Delilah for free,” said Mr. Mountbanks. “They all fit onto this one bijou recording. Much of the underlying subroutines are common.”
The girl nodded. “We will take the additional novelty personalities.”
“Are you interested, perhaps, in the works of First Citizen Vos? I have them here in compressed format. Parts of them now form a good d
eal of the revised state baccalaureate curriculum.”
“Can we get First Citizen Vos as an extrapolated analogue?” said the girl, holding a potato up and biting into it.
“As I explained previously,” said Mr. Mountbanks as he handed over the goods, “the creation of personality analogues of greater than or equal to human intelligence is forbidden by the Supplantation of Humanity laws.”
“So, First Citizen Vos is of greater than or equal to human intelligence,” said the girl, chewing indolently on her potato.
Mr. Mountbanks became exasperated. “Of course! The woman is a goddess! Don’t you ever read newsfeeds?”
“But I thought,” said the girl, “that First Citizen Vos stated in her Year Zero address to the Inner Cabinet that No Citizen Should Raise Himself Up Above Another?”
“Not pridefully, no, I’ll grant you,” said Mr. Mountbanks defensively. “But is it to her own personal detriment if a citizen’s superhuman talents are recognized by those about her?” He actually looked around him for the security camera. Of course, he would never have noticed one if one had been there.
The girl’s credit came up good on the reader. Extremely good. Authorisation was made. Goods were handed over.
“You seem greatly enamoured of our First Citizen,” said the girl. “Perhaps, then, given her supernormal qualities, we should save her genetic material and use it to better the next generation of humankind.”
Mr. Mountbanks was sweating. “Yes! But, ah, alas, no, not insofar as that would align me with Made supremacists. An artificial human is an abomination against good government.”
“Is it?” said the girl. “Why?”
Mr. Mountbanks pressed the STOW button angrily; his entire shop front collapsed inwards, folding itself back like a leatherette collapsar into his briefcase. One of the youths jumped back with a yelp as the closing surfaces bit and electrified his finger simultaneously.
Mr. Mountbanks slammed his briefcase shut, set his hat straight on his head, and raised it wordlessly.
“Leaving so soon?” said the girl. But Mr. Mountbanks did not reply, preferring instead to strike off in a huff into the distance. There was an emergency shelter at the landing field. By state regulation, it had to be stocked with food and water, and its insides had to be warm, dry and breathable.
“Those offworlders sure are funny,” sniggered one of the boys.
“I wouldn’t want to be an offworlder,” said one of the girls.
“Not for all the Real Tea in Madagascar,” said the second boy.
“There’s no tea in Madagascar,” said the lead girl. “Nor T in China and India neither. We have what we came for. It’s home time.”
“You’re no fun, Beguiled.”
“We could make crazy play with him before he gets to the shelter. I reckon that hat of his would go twenty metres if I threw it right.”
“Rights of hospitality,” said the dark-haired girl. “Duties of the host.”
The other girl stamped her feet. “But that’s a thing mom tells us!”
“And we agreed it was one of the truths we were happy believing. Like the Ten Commandments. It’s home time, Only-Begotten.”
“Not fair,” muttered Only-Begotten, and stamped her feet. “Not FAIR!”
But when the dark-haired girl turned and began walking back in the direction of Third Landing, Only-Begotten followed her without question, and even tried to skirt past the others to walk alongside her.
“Easy, now! We don’t want to compound the damage. Lift her up here, over the Bot Inspection Pit.”
“She’s leaking fluid...uh, what does the blue fluid do?”
“Her oxygen transport system, like our blood. Is it shooting out under pressure?”
“Not really. Is that bad?”
“No, good. Means her deep-level lines haven’t been cut. She can lose a lot of it too, these units usually have a deal of redundancy in the system. And her skin grows back too. That’s one thing at least—she’s designed to grow repeatedly—”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus looked up at Unity.
“But they don’t make parts for her any more.”
Unity’s eyes brimmed with tears. Her best floral mood-sensitive dress had filled with patterns of yew and hyacinth. “Then we take her to a bot chop shop! We’ve had her for a whole kilodia! She’s Beguiled’s little sister!”
From her position hanging from four hoist points at pelvis and scapula, Visible Friend fluttered her eyes weakly open and said “shwee’ of you to shay” before shivering into motionlessness again.
Mr. Suau, a walrus-moustached gentleman with a skin that had learned to tan from ice-white to burnt sienna depending on the star it was shown each week, patted Unity on the shoulder. “It’s okay, child. Everyone who’s ever owned a unit suffers from it. They’re designed to look human. It’s only reasonable to be conned into thinking they have a soul and feel pain...”
Visible Friend’s eyes flickered open unobserved and glared down at Mr. Suau, then shuddered shut again.
“This is a respiration-powered unit,” said Mr. Suau. “Also one designed to teach childcare to young girls by actually suffering heartbreaking personal injury if maltreated. The prognosis is not good. If she loses enough blue stuff she could shut down and die. She’d come back again, of course, but the original model’s memories and learned algorithms would be wiped. Effectively, all that made it would be gone.”
Unity stared up at the hanging automaton and began to sob. On her dress, the hyacinths bowed their heads and wilted.
“What about the anti-paedo dye?” said Testament. “He was covered in it. Couldn’t we use it to track him?”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus shook his head. “We tracked him as far as the uraninite decontam shed. He’d stood in the dipping trough and turned the hose on himself. It would have removed the dye, though it probably took the top layer of his skin with it. Lord knows the goats squeal when we hit them with it, though it’s their fault for straying into yellowcake patches. We didn’t find any more tracks, at least.”
Testament blinked uncomprehendingly. “He’d be a walking dead man. The goats are engineered for easy cleaning in a radioactive environment. No man could stand the pain.”
“Aye,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “If he is a man.”
A cold lizard of doubt slithered down Testament’s spine. Unity, too, was looking at her father in alarm. “What do you mean by that, pops?”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus shrugged. “Nothing.” He rose to his feet, and stood in the doorway with his back to the others. “But no human being I know would turn a decontaminant hose on his own skin.”
“Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, all my automated personnel are accounted for,” reproved Mr. Suau. “And apart from Visible Friend here and your domestic white goods and field tractor—all of which, just between us, would probably have displayed a markedly different modus operandi—they’re the only bots on Ararat.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “I’m sure you’re right.” And left.
“Wash a pershon,” came a soft voice from above.
Testament and Unity looked up.
“Wash a pershon,” repeated the voice. “Woulg ha’ shenshed anovver got’s transkonder.”
“Transponders can be removed,” said Mr. Suau.
“Looked like a pershon,” insisted the voice.
“In any case,” said Mr. Suau, “we’re going to make you better. As better,” he qualified ominously, “as humanly possible. I’m going to rig you up an airtight bot coffin and fill it with pure oxygen.” He looked at Unity and Testament severely. “It’ll be a fire hazard, now.”
“We can leave it in the Panic Cellar. There’s an oxygen feed down there.”
“Fang you Mishter Shuau.”
“Not junked a good bot yet,” said Mr. Suau. But Unity noticed that he had his fingers crossed.
A door banged elsewhere in the house.
“That’ll be Beguiled, Uncleanness, and Sodom,” said Unity. “They’ve been ou
t towards the South Field.”
Testament looked up sharply, still nursing the lump on his head. “Why didn’t Beguiled take Visible Friend with her?”
“Testament, it’s no fault of Beguiled that Friend got attacked,” said Unity reprovingly.
“Vey woulgn’let me go wiv’em,” came a soft voice from the ceiling.
Unity, Testament and Mr. Suau turned round to the robot.
“What did you say, Friend?” said Unity. Her dress was breaking out in angry red poppies.
“I coulgn’go,” repeated the voice. “Vey woulgn’let me shee wa’ vey were doing.”
“Why not?” said Testament.
“I don’g know. Beguile’saig i’ wash a shecret.”
The door to the Bot Bay banged open.
“Unity! Testament!”
“Apostle met us at the edge of town with a gun! A real gun!”
“What’s happened to Visible Friend?”
Unity turned to Beguiled, who had entered with her côterie. “She was caught on her own, without any of her brothers and sisters to protect her.”
Unity left the room in a flurry of Flanders red.
Beguiled blinked. “What’s the matter with her?”
Testament shrugged weakly.
“Ah, Visible Friend has been quite badly damaged,” said Mr. Suau, clearing his throat. “By an unknown assailant who probably mistook her for a real girl, hence Apostle’s gun.”
Beguiled looked up at the bleeding android.
“Ah well,” she said. “She was only a robot, after all.”
She turned on her very-latest-fashion variable-height heels and departed. The fibre optic invisibility was wearing out on the shoes’ arches; from an oblique angle, they looked like an old pair of farmers’ boots.
“Why woulg’she shay tha’?” said the voice from the ceiling mournfully.
“Best shut down,” said Mr. Suau, patting Visible Friend’s head tenderly. “Don’t make me go Kill Minus Nine on your ass, now.”
The robot went limp. Mr. Suau looked across to the knot of concerned children and winked.
“Look away now. The main power converter access is in that place mommy told you to scream if a bad man ever touched you.”
II. two turtle doves
Pastor Mulchrone looked sternly over the Best Parlour table at Mr. and Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus.
Smallworld: A Science Fiction Adventure Comedy Page 21