(at this point a siren klaxoned so loudly that Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had to clap his hands over his ears).
Then the viewscreen blanked out apart from the words:
THANK YOU FOR YOUR MANDATORY COOPERATION
There was an ominous, thunderous rumble down the length of the cuboid, and it shuddered impossibly into the air. Reborn-in-Jesus dropped to his knees and squinted at its underside, and could see legions of heavy, fluted legs powering the structure’s immense weight up from the ground. The earth shook as it rose onto a thousand feet and began to march away in the direction of the South End Saddle, Third Landing, and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus’ house.
“It’s not just my house I fear for, it’s the integrity of the planetary core. Mount Ararat is made of two asteroids pressed together in light contact, and have you any idea what that thing must weigh?”
The voice that replied from the other end of the radio was that of the Anchorite, sitting at the family Reborn-in-Jesus’s planetary communicator suite, which occupied mysterious pride of place in their Best Parlour. The voice intended to calm, but was not having the desired effect. “It should take pains to avoid inhabited structures. It is aware of its weight. It must have a reason for making for town, and we should simply sit tight to see what that reason is.”
Carries-the-Saviour had long since tired, and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was walking alongside his animal, watching the trundling behemoth crawl slowly and unstoppably towards the one and only high street of Third Landing. Upon being faced with a line of houses, however, regardless of the fact that ten of the houses were uninhabited, the machine took a sharp detour, skirting around the buildings until a gap allowed it to angle in from the desert again. The open side of the settlement was full of fields of growing crops; these, again, it avoided, prowling the town perimeter until it had convinced itself that penetrating to the centre of town must involve either butting through walls or trampling fields. It came to a rest at the junction of two fields, extruding a variety of sensory tentacles from previously unsuspected openings in its upper hull. Finally, given a choice between steam-rollering a field of harvest-ready potatoes and one of newly planted seed, it went for the seed, slowing down as it negotiated the furrows like a mother dinosaur walking among her own eggs. Finally, it fetched up alongside the town reservoir—not close enough to its edge to cause the shoreline structural damage—and extruded from the intelligent metal of its side a massive, clublike proboscis, bedecked with pseudopodia like a starfish’s foot, which crawled on those pseudopodia down towards the waterline before disappearing below the surface with a satisfied hiss.
Having seen all this from afar, Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus entered town to be confronted by ten of his children and godchildren, who ran up to him with shouts of “Look out at the big machine, papa! It stuck its peepee in the Pond.”
“A heat sink,” said the Anchorite knowledgeably as Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus approached. “It’s powered by an internal fusion reactor. It needs somewhere to dump its waste heat.” He mused a moment. “You see how the water in the Pond is circulating now? You could put a waterwheel on that and generate power. Many colonial traders do quite reasonable kits. You really shouldn’t worry about the integrity of the unit, you know. The Series Threes are really quite escape-proof.”
“And I suppose you would know,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, throwing a sour glare at the Anchorite, who was known to have a chequered past. The Anchorite blushed guiltily.
“It’s circulating and bubbling,” said Unity Reborn-in-Jesus in alarm, staring at the surface of the Pond.
“Build a free public health spa,” shrugged the Anchorite. “Aquae Araratis Montis, the relief of weary travellers. Look on this as an opportunity.” Already, children were paddling and splashing in the warming water, and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus had to shout at those who were paddling and splashing close to the clearly boiling area by the penitentiary’s heat sink. It would have to be marked out, he thought, with a string of buoys. Did Blom’s Interstellar Travelling Emporium do buoys? Whether they did or not, it would probably be politic to ask them in a text message rather than verbally.
His back, feet and head hurting, he led his ass back down the High Street to her stable, which had once been Mr. Raffaele’s house before the Devil Plague had taken him. Once again, Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was going to have to adapt to a change in his environment.
In the eighth kilodia since the Enlargement of the People, somebody escaped from the Series Three.
The unit had by now become an accepted feature of town. Its walls had been used to train tomatoes and beans in their solar gamma shadows where the plants were less prone to mutation. An ambitious mural of Arcadian landscapes had been started on the wall facing towards the pond by Shun-Company Reborn-in-Jesus and her genetic and adopted daughters. The Anchorite’s bath house had not materialized, but a bathing stage had been created which visiting tramp trader crews took full advantage of. The area around the pond had been artistically planted with date palms strung with UV fibre like tropical Christmas trees, and real live goats grazed around the water’s edge, cropping the black grass.
The goats—Faith, Hope, Charity, and Shub-Niggurath, the last goat having been named by the Anchorite—were led, once a day, out to the green pastures of the Crater of Tares close by the settlement, where thorns and thistles grew in mouth-watering profusion. The goats would gaze longingly through the goat-proof fences on either side at the family Reborn-in-Jesus’s genetically jury-rigged potato fields. They would, however, be led firmly and inexorably to their feeding grounds at the Crater, into which a little water was allowed to trickle from the Ninety West Drain. At the end of every day, the beasts would be led back to drink and sleep in a reinforced concrete radiation shelter on the meridian shore of the warm waters of the Pond. Leading the goats was a task given to the youngest responsible Reborn-in-Jesus child, and currently allocated to little Beguiled-of-the-Serpent Raffaele. Having concluded the day’s goat-leading activities, Beguiled-of-the-Serpent was sitting on the bathing stage indolently dangling her toes in the water when, quite unexpectedly, the outline of a door appeared in the side of the Penitentiary and rapidly became a door in very truth, which then popped out of the side of the unit and dropped into the cactus underneath an unkempt middle-aged man using the door panel as a shield to protect himself from cactus spines. He squirmed free of the succulents, apparently uncaring whether they cut him or not, then, once at a safe distance from the Series Three, turned and whooped and punched the air, yelling “YES! YES! I DID IT! I DID IT!”
Beguiled-of-the-Serpent had led too sheltered a life to be scared. Instead, she looked up at the man and said, round-eyed:
“Are you an Escapee?”
The man sucked out his chest, drew himself up to his full unimpressive height, clapped himself on the breastbone and said:
“I am the Escapee. The only man to have escaped from a Series Three government prison, ever. I, Johannes Trapp, the finest of the fine, the flyest of the fly.”
Beguiled-of-the-Serpent considered this, and said:
“My god-daddy says another man escaped from a Series Three over in Pyramidis sector. He fears for our safety as a consequence.”
The Escapee narrowed his eyes at the little girl.
“Escaped how?” he said.
Beguiled-of-the-Serpent searched her memory. “Daddy said an Atom Bomb was used by the man’s Evil Confederates, which lightly scorched the surface of the unit and tripped the Mercy System that allows inmates to be rescued from a unit damaged by war or cataclysm. This deactivated all its relocking facilities and allowed the despicable gang to cut into it in under seven hours. Both escapee and gang died of radiation poisoning several hours later, but it was a technically successful escape.”
“HA!” The Escapee leapt about on one leg and kissed the earth, kissed a palm tree, kissed a highly alarmed goat. “In your FACE, technically successful escapee. I damaged nothing, I forced nothing, I cut into nothing. I am as a GOD.”
At th
is point, the Escape was interrupted by Shun-Company Reborn-in-Jesus, who had left the house to pick fresh onions for the evening meal, and was surprised to see a strange man in bright flashing fatigues talking to her step-daughter.
“I’m sorry,” said Shun-Company, switching the basket to her left hand and the onion knife to her right, which was the stronger, “I’m afraid I didn’t hear your ship land.”
The Escapee grinned. “It landed some time ago. I’m very much afraid it took off again without me.”
Little Beguiled-of-the-Serpent pursed her lips indignantly. “It did not! He came out of the Series Three! He is a Successful Escapee, and two minutes ago was quite content to tell the universe as much!” She turned to point at the open hole in the side of the machine, only to see clean, smooth hullmetal. The wound had closed itself.
“You are a wicked child,” said Shun-Company, cuffing Beguiled-of-the-Serpent lightly round the head, “for telling tales.” She nodded to the Escapee. “I am sorry to hear of your predicament, Mr.—?”
“Trapp. Johannes Trapp. Security expert extraordinaire. I’m afraid I must fall on your mercy until another vessel arrives to remove me. If you have any locks or encrypted communications devices about your home, I would be pleased to greatly improve them as payment for your charity...”
Shun-Company shook her head politely. “There are no locks on Mount Ararat, Mr. Trapp. We do not require them. And our charity is free of charge.” She called out to an older daughter who was throwing out slops for the goats. “God’s-Wound, lay another place for dinner. I hope you like potato, Mr. Trapp.”
Trapp licked his lips. “I have not tasted potato in, in, oh, a long, long time.”
“Good. Every time the Agribiz ship arrives, my husband seems to obtain a new species. We have a potato for every occasion.”
The meal had been awkward. The table was huge, made up of a single piece of construction metal cut into an ellipse. There were places for Mr. and Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus at either end, and no fewer than fifteen places in between for children of a bewildering variety of ages and sizes, the older children grown old early, keeping the younger ones in line with savage slaps to the head whenever they dared reach for the cruet without asking. There were exactly as many chairs as had been necessary for the meal, including Mr. Trapp, who had been seated in what he assumed was a place of honour directly between the gentleman and lady of the house. He had been informed that this was because the extra chair belonged to a gentleman who normally dined with the family on Sundays. Mr. Trapp’s prisonwear was still flashing alarmingly.
“You have so many children,” said Mr. Trapp politely, attempting to smile over a miniscule bowl of what seemed to be potato-flavoured ice cream. The children, who had not received such bowls, craned their necks in his direction, as close to actually drooling as they could be without impoliteness.
“They are not all ours,” mumbled Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus into his dessert bowl.
“Yet they are,” corrected Shun-Company severely.
“Early in the establishment of the colony, Mr. Trapp,” said Unity Reborn-in-Jesus, swan-necked, sylphlike, utterly unaware of the terrible effect she would shortly have on human beings from outside her immediate gene pool, “there were difficulties.”
“Deaths,” corrected Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
Mr. Trapp’s attention turned toward his dessert respectfully. He essayed a spoonful of it. As he had expected, it was vile rubber food that bounced off the bottom of the gut and shot back up for a second ingestion. He gritted his teeth against gagging, attempting to turn the gesture into a friendly smile at the children. The children, evidently considering this to be a victorious sneer at the fact that he had dessert and they didn’t, looked away in disgust.
“Which ship did you come in on, Mr. Trapp?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, as if the matter were completely inconsequential.
“Uh, she didn’t have a name,” said Trapp. “Rather a number, which escapes me for the moment. A tramp trader I’d unwisely secured a passage on out to Alpha Gladii.”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus looked on with a face of murderous disbelief. “You’re a long way from Alpha Gladii, Mr. Trapp. Like one whole constellation. This is the 23 Kranii system. Alpha G. is thirty New Light Years away.”
Mr. Trapp swallowed hard. “So far? Oh my. Oh my.” He covered his head with his hands in mock dismay. “I must apologize for any distraction. This is terrible news. The passenger cabins had no windows. By the sound of it I was lucky I slipped out of the ship to stretch my legs. The ship landed near to here, the Captain said to take compressed air and water—”
“Water?” Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus was actually scandalized. “Do people think there’s that little water here?”
“I fear,” finished Mr. Trapp, “I might have been aboard a Slaver ship.”
Horrified intakes of breath chorussed all round the table. Since the end of the War Against the Made, human beings no longer created machines as intelligent as themselves to do their bidding. A certain type of rich man, particularly this far out on the frontier, found this injurious to his lifestyle; a trade in human slaves, unthinkable for centuries, had evolved to fill this niche.
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Trapp, “I must be alone. Did you say I could sleep in the—?”
“Third house along,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, licking the last flecks of dessert off his spoon. “Still has a bed in it that the blood’s been washed out of.”
Mr. Trapp smiled a fragile crystalline smile.
Suddenly, Only-God-Is-Perfect Ogundere, who had been watching Mr. Trapp’s pulsating kitchen fatigues throughout the meal, piped up unbidden.
“Is what you’re wearing the very latest fashion where you come from, Mr. Trapp?”
Trapp had been prepared for this one. “It is indeed, young lady. But it is dancewear, intended only for festivals. We had been holding a party in steerage. I was hot, and had gleaned that we were on a habitable world with a breathable atmosphere, so I left the vessel to cool down.”
“Quite a risk to take,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Habitable covers dioxide monsoons, sulphuric acid rain, and temperatures both above boiling and below freezing.”
“Maybe,” smiled Mr. Trapp, “I suspected subconsciously what was about to happen to me.”
“Maybe,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Third house along,” he repeated.
Mr. Trapp smiled again, nodded curtly, and left in a hurry.
“What do you think?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, as the children were clearing away the dishes.
“I think,” said Shun-Company, “that he is either from inside the Penitentiary or an advance scout for a Slaver ship in his own right. It is just possible a vessel could approach Ararat without our detecting it, but such a thing would have had to have been deliberate. It is not my place to criticize my husband, but you could have been less open about your disbelief in his story. If he is an escapee, we have no idea what his criminal specialty might be. He might be a serial killer, or a child murderer, or—heaven forfend!—a serial child murderer.”
Reborn-in-Jesus ground his teeth in his head. “The Devil would not allow him to harm us.”
A metallic green beetle buzzed in lazy figures-of-eight around the room’s modest chandelier. Shun-Company looked up at it. “The Devil is no God Almighty, to be considered capable of solving all our problems. Even God insists men address their own difficulties.”
Reborn-in-Jesus looked up at the beetle. “Do you hear that, Beëlzebub? Have your eyes and ears heard all that has gone on in this house today?”
The fly buzzed straight up and down in the air before returning to its eternal figure-of-eight.
“Should we fear this new visitor?”
The fly buzzed up and down again.
“Will you pay a visit to us in the morning?”
Again, the up and down movement.
Shun-Company leaned forward close to the fly. “Is your servant close enough to watch over us at this moment?”
&n
bsp; The fly wavered from side to side.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus raised a finger. “It is checking the South End for recent signs of a Slaver starship landing, am I right?”
The fly rose up and down in the air once more.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded.
“Your concern for our welfare is much appreciated, Hermit,” he said to the fly. “I’ll be pleased to see you in the Ninety East Field at sunup.” He nodded to Shun-Company. “Wife: tell Beguiled-of-the-Serpent she is a good girl who tells truth and shall have a new dress when the next trader so equipped arrives. And tell all the others they are to stay indoors and not admit our visitor without permission. I shall sleep with my back to the door tonight equipped with a suitable agricultural implement.”
The fly bounced up and down in the air, then vanished up into the chandelier in a myriad tinkling, twinkling emerald images.
*
“OPEN UP.”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus’s sleep was interrupted by what felt like repeated blows to the head with a dinner gong. However, once he had pulled himself upright and taken stock of the situation, he could see that it was simply the metal alloy door being pummelled fit to rock on its hinges by someone titanically strong on the step outside—someone either too polite or too stupid to acknowledge that the door had no lock. There was also the sound of a siren loud enough to wake the whole South End.
He opened the door, warily. It was not yet sunup.
“OPEN UP,” said the person on the threshold redundantly. It was difficult for Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus to consider it a person, in fact, as it was not only artificial, but also not designed, as many artificial creatures were, to comfortingly resemble a human being in any way. Instead, it looked designed to fulfil its intended function with an efficiency as grim and terrible as possible. It was probably also, being a government automaton, designed to be safely stupid; the government liked to set a good example to its citizenry in this regard.
“IT IS AN OFFENCE TO HARBOUR FUGITIVES,” said the machine—unsettlingly, in the same voice as Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus’s intelligent rotary goat-milking unit. Perhaps the same minor celebrity had allowed his voice to be sampled on two separate occasions. “THESE PREMISES WILL SUBMIT THEMSELVES TO SEARCH.”