Smallworld (21 page)

Apostle crested the rise—although he could still leap up and slap the cave roof, he was standing on the edge of a bubbling waterfall, trickling out of holes in the rocks down ten metres into a clear green pool in which God’s-Wound was paddling her feet.

“Uh, there are no animals here, are there?” he said, eyeing the water nervously.

“None whatsoever. All the plant life was grown from emergency supplies. For that reason, most of it’s also useful. I have hemp, rubber, plantain, sage, tapioca, and sundry more species, all of which grow all year round.”

“What do you use for power?” said Apostle. “The power for all of this has to come from somewhere.” He reached out to lean on the back of a nearby tree, only to find the hermit’s hand clamped round his wrist like a vice.

“West Indian lilac,” said the Anchorite. “Every serviceman’s emergency kit used to have a set of seeds for it. It makes a very useful barrier against hungry animal life. It can kill even by contact. Like Adam’s garden, not every tree here is safe. Touch only what I touch. And I will show you,” he said, “what I use for power. You will be
very
interested—”

He tapped the lens over his right eye suddenly. “I’m afraid Unity may be in danger.”

Apostle felt his muscles coiling into angry knots, despite himself. “Then you have to do something.
We
have to do something.”

The Anchorite continued to stare into his lens for some time.

“Have the tax pirates got her?” said Beguiled.

“No,” said the Anchorite, without deactivating his lens. “Someone potentially worse. I think we should all stay down here in the basement for a little while. Um, even me.”

“That’s coward talk,” said Apostle.

“Believe me,” said the Anchorite nervously, “if you were up there, it would do neither you nor Unity any good at all.”

“Send the Devil, then,” said God’s-Wound. “Send it to protect her.”

“I find myself unable to divert the Devil. Down by the South End Saddle, someone is planning to detonate an atomic bomb. I am afraid I am faced with an embarrassment of targets.” His expression changed to one of suspicion. “Most extraordinary. Unity is still alive.”

“Hooray!” cheered Beguiled.

The eyepiece flared white suddenly, then went black. The Anchorite jerked his head back involuntarily and blinked.

“What just happened?” said Apostle.

“I’m afraid,” said the Anchorite, beginning to breathe again, “that our man is aware of our surveillance system.”

“It’s a man, then,” said Apostle.

The Anchorite frowned sourly. “A subspecies of
homo sapiens,”
he agreed. “He could probably breed with humans. As I recall, it was a matter of some argument, at his trial, whether he could still be called a man. Certain relatives of his victims hired tame anthropologists to argue he constituted a new species and should be judged by the same yardstick as the Made, exterminated as a dangerous animal.”

“He’s not
breeding
with Unity, is he?” said Beguiled in a mixture of horror and fascination.

“Thankfully not,” said the Anchorite. “Right now he thinks he’s headed here. But he won’t find the way we came in. That entrance is buried under several tonnes of debris right now. I wonder if he can read our minds from here?” He tapped the lens again; it flared into life. He cycled through several images. “Raise your hand, Mr. Voight, if you can read my mind from here.” He examined the lens intently, then concluded:

“Well, of course, he could be bluffing.”

“Aha, I have him again on unit three. If I tail him at a greater distance…Unity still appears to be safe. He’s still moving away from her.”

“You must send the Devil to help her,” urged Measure pleadingly.

The hermit stood staring at horrors only he could see, diminished only by the fact that he was only seeing them through his right eye.

“Hmm. Nuclear weapon, Voight, Voight, nuclear weapon. Which is the greater evil?”

He came to a decision.

“We will deal with Mr. Voight first. I will so direct the Devil.”

*

Asteroid gravel crunched beneath the Devil’s feet as he walked through the smouldering crops toward the spot the girl Unity had been convinced led to his enemy. Somewhere at the point this tractor track ended, at the feature called Dispater Crater, was the Anchorite’s back door. Frustratingly, she had not known what form the back door took, or how to get into it. She believed the Anchorite lived at the centre of this world. All well and good; the world was asteroid-sized. The centre could not be too far away.

The Anchorite intrigued the Devil. He intrigued him because he intrigued Unity, and Unity’s mind was as quick and sharp as she thought herself big and cumbersome. The Devil was of the opinion that he knew who the Anchorite was, and wished to confirm his suspicions before killing him.

The crops he was now moving through had been squashed flat, as if a giant animal had turned round and round on top of them before settling down to sleep. The sides of the stalks facing towards the end of the road were also blackened and blast-charred. As he walked further, the stalks had simply been ripped clean from the earth as if by a white-hot scythe. At the very end of the road itself, he found the crater. It was not either of the two craters Unity remembered—neither a shallow, disk-shaped depression, nor a rather larger ragged shell-hole. Instead, it was now an amphitheatre-sized gouge in the earth with walls where rock and soil had fused to glass. The majority of the energy of the blast seemed to have been expended in a massive, instantaneous localized burst of heat. The Devil wondered what manner of explosive could have produced such an effect. The Anchorite became more interesting by the second.

There was, of course, nothing resembling an entrance in the crater, and nothing resembling an intelligent mind scurrying in the rock and soil beneath it. There might well be a way in here, but he could find no clue to it at present.

He heard a rustle in the bushes behind him, and did not bother to turn round.

“Aha, blasphemy; I wondered how long it would be before your master sent you.”

An imperfectly rendered facsimile of a human voice spoke behind him.
“This is no blasphemy. The men who designed this unit believed in nothing but the superior chassis strength nine millimetre whisker reinforced titanium laminate can provide. They did not believe in devils, and for the record neither do I.”

“Then you are forgiven; I am gracious. If you do not believe in me, however, why do you still continue to address me?”

“
Because you are no devil, but a very powerful man, as I was once. I know the feeling. But a man who believes himself to be a god is setting himself up for a fall. I know that feeling too.”

The Devil smiled, turned, and raised the pistol he had been holding behind his back. “I found this on a dead man. It is one of the quaint devices men use to kill each other. I am not personally familiar with it, but I believe it will turn your head into a cloud of vapour.”

“
It will have no effect on this unit, which is designed on a heavy assault chassis. A small volcano could go off underneath it without scuffing the finish.”

The pistol did not waver from the centre of the Anchorite’s Devil’s featureless face as it stood before him on the edge of the burned corn. “It is odd to talk by making cords vibrate in my throat like an animal, and to have to listen back for the same. It is like talking to that accursed machine I was recently set free of. It used to talk to me at great length in an attempt to convince me to become a useful member of society. I would prefer to talk to you face to, uh, face.”

“
You and I both know that isn’t going to happen.”

“Very well. Then I am afraid I must attempt to destroy your servant.”

The Devil attempted to squeeze the trigger of the gun. It would not budge. He jerked his forefinger back in panic. The trigger remained jammed. In front of him, the blasphemy blurred and was on him almost before his brain had registered the movement.

He was almost certain one of his teeth was broken. He could taste blood, his own blood, in his own mouth. There was no air in his lungs, and none would come no matter how he tried to make his ribs expand. He was bent over with his mouth in the earth, with his gun hand twisted round behind his back. This he already knew to be possible; the body he was inhabiting was human and imperfect. It had been hurt before.

In front of him, the gun dropped to the earth. An emerald insect wriggled in the space behind its trigger, preventing the gun from firing.

“You will be punished for this,” he said, submitting to being bundled along towards a pressure door hidden in the grass.

“
On the contrary,”
said the machine’s speaker,
“you will thank me for it. I am not returning you to the Penitentiary.”

“Where, then, are you taking me? Why must we be enemies? Release me!”

“
I am taking you to more spacious quarters. You will still be a prisoner, but I have a thousand uses for someone of your calibre. My hell has room for more than one devil.”

“Blasphemy! I knew it! When I get out of this pit of uneternal damnation, I shall
so
smite you! You are
so
smitten!”

“
Quite so, I am sure. Duck your head, we are going underground. Please do not fight the unit, it is very bad at field surgery, and any injuries it inflicts on you can only be repaired by it. We have a long climb ahead of us.”
He was pushed down a long earth tunnel, then into a concrete chamber containing a ladder going down. Handcuffs snapped tight around his wrists; he was hauled up one-handed and draped around the robot’s neck like a living amulet. Then the machine set a foot on the ladder and began trudging downward. He heard a sound like a speaker powering down. Evidently the Anchorite had tired of taunting him personally, and left his automaton to continue its work alone.

The Anchorite, who had disappeared into the trees, returned at some speed. Measure, Beguiled and God’s-Wound were splashing each other in the stream, whilst Day-of-Creation was climbing a tree and Apostle was sternly ensuring that nobody touched one of the seven trees the Anchorite had identified as deadly poisonous. Other children were scattered throughout the undergrowth, playing Devils and Prospectors, Devils and Mades, and Devils and Tax Accountants.

“Come now! We must leave immediately!”

There was an immediate chorus of disappointment.

“Why do we have to leave, Uncle Anchorite?”

“Because a very bad man is on his way down here. Besides, we have another bad man to deal with, one who has an atomic bomb.” The hermit was now carrying a hand laser, which he slotted a gas cartridge into gingerly.

“Who is the bad man, Uncle Anchorite? I thought you lived on your own.”

“The first bad man is the one I feared was going to hurt Unity. Don’t worry, he is under control now; the Devil is bringing him here. But the
other
bad man is not yet under control, and we must deal with him, and you must help me.”

“Is that Mr. Armitage?” said Measure.

“It is,” nodded the Anchorite. “Now, come this way, through the trees, through the ornamental arbour. Hurry, we have no time to smell the roses. There is another door at the end of this path, leading to another ladder upward.”

Measure unwisely looked out at the green horizon. “Aiiee! The floor curves downwards!”

“Yes it does, which is why so many agribiz crewmen collapse gibbering and refuse to step off the boarding ramp of their ship when they arrive on your planet, ragged urchin. You are now experiencing what they experience. We are closer to the planetary core, so the curvature of our world is far greater.” The hermit parted a curtain of overhanging leaves to reveal another pressure door set in the wall. Apostle’s heart sank. The Anchorite, noticing his expression, said:

“We must go up. If we do not, not only will whoever remains eventually die, they will also, in what life remains to them, become an unwitting agent of the deaths of their brothers and sisters. So come, up! Climb!” He threw the door open and indicated a ladder.

Expelled from a very brief taste of paradise, the children disconsolately filed into the ladder chamber.

“Can we come back?” said Measure, wistfully gazing back into the greenery.

“If you are very good,” said the Anchorite.

Regretfully, she laid her hands to the rungs.

“Ouch! My arms ache! I cannot feel my fingers!”

The robot hoisted the Devil off its shoulders and dropped him nonchalantly. His heart twisted in his chest as if in an attempt to escape the cage of his ribs, but his fear was not necessary; a concrete floor slammed into him very quickly. Unprepared to meet it, his legs collapsed under him and he rolled, cracking his head on the ladder.

“Is this the bottom of the last shaft?” said the passenger. “Please say there is not another.” His shoulder ached as if injected with molten lead. The release of tension was welcome, but the anticipation of it possibly returning was unbearable.

The machine did not reply, but instead opened a pressure door at the base of the shaft and hoisted the Devil up under its arm with a grip stronger than a fallen angel’s. The Devil felt himself, after all, to be in a good position to judge this.

“You cannot reply,” said the Devil. “Your human master is doing something else, perhaps, and cannot attend to me. He has to let his device handle me itself for a little while. Is that it?”

The machine patted the Devil on the head in a curiously human gesture, then turned to face the doorway it had opened.

“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. Beelzebub.”