Smallworld (27 page)

“VISIBLE FRIEND? WHERE ARE YOU?”

“—
up here. I’m damaged bad, cousin Testament…
”

Keeping a watchful eye on the trees around him, Testament peered up into the branches, which were soaked in the same orange ichor.

“Visible Friend… is this your
blood…
?”

“
I think it’s marker dye… I think it’s made to go all over bad folks who cut artificial children up… I bin cut up, Testament. By a mean man.”

Testament dropped his gaze to ground level, realizing he was standing in the middle of an aureole of luminous dye that stained the grass as bright as liquid sunshine. In one direction, a trail of dye led off through the trees.

“MEASURE! GET YOURSELF AWAY FROM THE SOUND OF MY VOICE!”

“
I’m leaking fluid, cousin… get away from here, save yourself… feeling cold…”

He raised the pick and charged off through the branches.

The trail of dye led over the orchard wall and into Ninety East Street, where Magus and Perfect had their town house. The house, like all houses in Third Landing nowadays, was protected by Mr. Trapp’s security devices. He saw the dye trail pad up the front path, up to the front porch, then spatter round the windows away through the untended undergrowth at the side of the house. Luckily, Magus and Perfect were out of town; their garden ran riot every time they left. The Devil tried to keep it under control, but could only clip it in the dead of night when no outsiders were watching.

The dye spoor led away through a hole in the picket fence. Testament had to stoop to pass through it; as he did, he felt a terrific impact at the base of his skull, and the world went tranquil.

He woke up surrounded by concerned family members. His father’s face was talking down out of the ornamental stucco ceiling in the Best Parlour, but no sound was coming out of it. He could hear, however, Doctor Ranjalkar’s voice speaking clearly in his right ear.

“—
in all probability the deafness is temporary. He was not hit very hard. Can you raise your right arm, Testament?”

Not wishing to appear uncooperative, he raised an arm.

“
See, he responds to my voice if he hears it magnified. I don’t want to overuse the amplifier, though; there is potential for injury of the inner ear. If you have any questions either talk softly or write them down—”

“I got knocked out,” he heard himself say. “I’m sorry, papa.”

His father’s face was more lined with worry than he had ever seen it; and his father’s face at the best of times had more cracks than a wet field on a hot day.

“No-one holds you responsible,” said Doctor Ranjalkar. “He hit you from behind and took you unawares while you were running to the assistance of your sister.” He reconsidered the statement. “Albeit your
artificial
sister.”

“I was not,” said Testament, recollection flooding back. “I was running to kill him. Measure,” he remembered suddenly, “is Measure all right?”

“Measure is fine,” said the doctor. “She ran into the Panic Cellar and hid like a good girl.” Alongside the doctor’s voice, he heard an insubstantial whisper of
“an i’ng all wigh’ too, fangs for asking.”

“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 deal 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.”