The machine was a squat cuboid of metal resting on three broad feet. A variety of ports, probes and weapons ringed the squat turret head that topped it off, giving it the appearance of a device that had been crowned King of Kitchen Appliances.
“Are you a warder from the Penitentiary?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Show me your authorization to search.”
The machine projected a facsimile of a signed paper document lousy with government insignia onto a nearby wall. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded and stood aside. The machine trundled into the house. A probe extended and sampled the air.
“GENETIC MATERIAL OF MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISONER JOHANNES MARIA TRAPP DETECTED,” it announced. “IT IS AN OFFENCE TO HARBOUR FUGITIVES,” it repeated darkly.
“You may take him with my blessing,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, trying to appear as if he just happened to be carrying the digging blade in his left hand by the sheerest coincidence. “He gave his real name to us. He is in the third house down the street.”
“YOUR COOPERATION IS APPRECIATED,” said the machine, and wheeled on the ground effect pads in its feet to leave.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus gripped the haft of his digging tool nervously.
“What was Mr. Trapp’s crime?” he asked.
“GRAND FRAUD,” said the machine, “FIVE COUNTS. GENETIC IDENTITY THEFT, NINE COUNTS. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO PRIVATE SYSTEMS, FIFTEEN COUNTS. ESCAPING FROM A GOVERNMENT PENAL ESTABLISHMENT, TWENTY-SEVEN COUNTS.”
“And the number of convictions for crimes of violence, or against children?” said Shun-Company, who had noiselessly materialized behind her husband.
“ZERO,” said the machine, and motored out into the dark, stars mirrored in its brightly polished chassis.
“He is a thief,” comforted Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, patting his wife’s arm.
“That machine is the barely the size of our church,” said Shun-Company. “No mere thief deserves to be confined in such a way.”
At that point, the screams began in the street outside; and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus took up his digging tool unashamedly and ran.
*
Sixty seconds earlier, the stars had been shining from slightly different quarters, and the scarlet shimmering scimitar of Naphil’s A ring had shone a constellation’s width broader overhead as Mount Ararat hurtled towards intersection. The goats were asleep in their shelter; the Penitentiary was as yet quiet, not yet realizing one of its inmates was absent.
The communications tower stood out at one corner of the Third Landing village square, a metal tree of dishes, whip aerials and communications lasers. No tree had been planted near it; cables burrowed down from it into the dirt and resurfaced by the Reborn-in-Jesus residence. Halfway up it, accessible via a maintenance ladder, was a manual access panel, which lay open. Inside, mysterious user-unfriendly readouts and schematics marched across a durable plastic screen.
A voice called from the bottom of the tower. “Are you done yet, Mr. Trapp?”
A voice answered from up by the maintenance panel. “I’ve located a ship insystem. Her captain says he’s braking into your gas giant’s atmosphere to collect helium-3 and slow himself down to meet another trader and swap mail loads in the inner system. Says he can take both of us on to Twenty. Be landing a kilometre from here in an hour’s time.”
“So long as he hurries up,” said the voice from the tower’s base. “If anyone finds me out here, no-one’ll talk to me from now till Christmas. I’ll be on goat-leading duty for certain.”
The panel slammed shut and was screwed home by a man with fastidious attention to detail, who then slid down the maintenance ladder with a spring in his step.
“Do you really think I have it in me to become a top-rate courtesan?”
“My dear, you are the image of Ishtar herself. I have contacts at all the best-regarded agencies on Old Earth, in Bangkok, Teheran, Emporium, Pennsylvania, and many other exotic locations.” Mr. Trapp began untying the tether connecting Carries-the-Saviour to the great shelter.
“I can’t get my legs behind my head. Does that matter?”
The conversation was suddenly interrupted by a klaxon loud enough to kill a man and wake him afterwards. Trapp began working more quickly, feverishly, looking up in the direction of the Series Three like Damocles at his ceiling decoration.
“What is that, Mr. Trapp? What’s that sound?”
A man-sized alcove of light opened in the side of the Penitentiary, and a stubby, three-legged machine emerged, rotated to take in its surroundings, and took off towards the largest house in Main Street. For the first time, Mr. Trapp blessed the fact that he was standing behind a warm dyspeptic ass—Carries-the-Saviour’s extravagant heat signature had masked Trapp’s own.
“It seems,” said Mr. Trapp, “we still have one more detail to take care of. Please be so good as to follow me.”
He raised the Reborn-in-Jesus family kitchen knife that he’d used to open the maintenance panel,, so old and oversharpened that its blade was a mere steel sliver. ’The A ring reflected from it, red as blood.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus skidded round the corner, implement in hand, to be confronted by an empty tranquil pond and a silent, featureless Penitentiary.
The Warden’s tracks returned to the wall of the unit, and went no further. However, they were also accompanied by human footprints, small human footprints spaced erratically, as if their creator were being dragged unwillingly. There was blood in the footprints. A great deal of blood. Close by, a set of shod hooves had left town along the hundred-eighty meridian, apparently at the closest an ass could get to a gallop.
Unity Reborn-in-Jesus, who had been following her parents closely, went pale and put her hand over her mouth.
“I’ll call roll,” she said.
“I do not understand,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. He reversed his digging implement and banged on the penitentiary metal with it. “HEY! WARDEN! YOU IN THERE!”
In synchronicitous answer, a bright star rose from the Hundred-Eighty Field, burning contrails into the eyes. The star resolved itself into four main lift jets, blazing fit to roast Mount Ararat’s entire planetary cabbage crop. A type three trader, landing and taking off on Reborn-in-Jesus land on maximum burn without permission—
“Testament!”
“Here!”
“Gus!”
“Here!”
“Postle!”
“Present!”
“Only-God-is-Perfect... Only-God-is-Perfect? Perfect? PERFECT??”
“The landing beacon’s activated,” said sharp-eyed Magus, squinting up at the comms tower. “The dish is moving to track a ship. Uh, that ship.”
“I think Only-God-is-Perfect’s missing,” reported Unity.
At that point, Shun-Company screamed. She had found the knife.
Out of the sun he came, casting a long shadow. Wearing a beard he had never been known to cut, sandals on his feet, a lightweight gamma-reflective cloak, and underwear donned only out of deference to the presence of children, the Anchorite was the oldest inhabitant of Ararat. No evidence existed to suggest he had not been here when the fiery degenerate-matter meteor had first torn into the heart of the planetoid and given it gravity, when Ararat had been formed by the clashing together of two mutually orbiting mountains. He had been observed to eat, drink, and defecate just like a real person, so it could only be assumed that he was human. The sheer size of the beard and the weatherbeaten nature of his physique, however, prevented accurate speculation as to his age. He lived in a cave out on the edge of the South End Chasm, a hermit without any discernible religion.
When he arrived, Shun-Company was sitting in her skirts in the main street weeping, along with her entire retinue of daughters and god-daughters, and many of the younger boys. Only Unity, Magus, Apostle, and Reborn-in-Jesus senior were standing, looking sternly into the sky where the glowing teardrop of a starship’s plasmadrive seemed to have been activated.
“Dear me,” said the Anchorite, “what a lot of fuss”.Whereupon Shun-Com
pany proceeded to turn on him and subject him to a lengthy vituperative lecture on failure to protect her children, the emptiness of his promise that her children would never be harmed, and the fact that he might as well strike her down as well as harm her little girl who was the fruit of her womb and apple of her eye.
“I don’t recall promising not to harm anybody,” said the Anchorite pointedly. “I also believe that Only-God-is-Perfect is your god-daughter, and hence has never passed through the parts you mention.”
Shun-Company threw a tear-sodden handkerchief at the Anchorite and was led away sobbing by her daughters.
“I must apologize,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, “for the behaviour of my wife; she is distraught.”
“I see.” The Anchorite was examining the footprints in the dust outside the Penitentiary. “Left in that, I suppose, did he?” He pointed a finger that resembled a dry stalactite up at the sky.
“We imagine so,” said Magus. “They must have been confederates of his, called up once he escaped the Penitentiary.”
“Or Slavers,” said Unity, distraught. “He mentioned Slavers.”
“The most notorious slaver of recent years, Arne Skilling, the Terror of Linehead, kidnapped over one hundred families from small towns across the New Earth Prairie,” said Day-of-Creation, who had recently been given Leader Vos’s Every Watchful Boy’s Wanted Criminal Databank by his brothers as an unwise thirteenth birthday present. “He went into hiding and was never caught—”
“Skilling was almost certainly killed by a microparticle hit that cracked the drive shielding on his flagship,” said the Anchorite. “He was dispatched on the orders of the Dictator himself, and a thorough job was made of it. Though the flagship escaped by overloading her time distort function, her crew experienced ten years of radioisotope exposure in ten minutes. Almost certainly this would have killed him. No, no, I really don’t think the crew of that vessel were confederates or Slavers or anything more sinister than good Samaritans. After all, if a ship is called down to pick up passengers and a man all covered in his own blood runs over the horizon and insists he’s being pursued by folks who’d take his life, what would any conscientious captain do?”
“But he wasn’t being pursued by folk who’d take his life,” objected Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.
The Anchorite cast a disbelieving eye at Reborn-in-Jesus’s digging implement. “So? I imagine you’re out hoeing a field while the soil’s still frozen solid just before dawn, then?”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus lowered his eyes guiltily, and wrung his hands round the hoe-haft.
“But it wasn’t his own blood,” said Unity, “it was poor Perfect’s.”
“I beg to differ.” The Anchorite bent to examine the ass tracks. “See here, the blood continues to drip and flow for upwards of twenty metres. That is unlikely, unless he’d taken a bath in the poor girl’s O Positive.”
Shun-Company, still within earshot, heard this and set to wailing like a siren. The Anchorite ignored her. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but your foster-sister is still very much alive.” He jerked a thumb behind him at the Series Three. “In there.”
“In there?” Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus pointed at the unforgiving metal dumbly.
“Of course. I’m afraid penitentiary units are really not that bright, and their designers tend to over-rely on the efficiency of DNA testing. If a person has the DNA of a convicted criminal, they reason, why, he or she must be that criminal, regardless of all other physical evidence. So if a criminal escapes and wishes not to be pursued by the penitentiary’s warden, why, all he has to do is kidnap some poor girl and cover her in his DNA.”
“His own blood,” marvelled Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, simultaneously impressed and repulsed.
“Yes. Hence the ass. He probably couldn’t have walked to out to the ship unassisted having bled that heavily.”
“So,” said Reborn-in-Jesus,working through the logic, “all we have to do is get her out of there.”
The Anchorite shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not possible. Series Threes are very well constructed. Even if we had anything on Ararat that could cut into it without killing Perfect, it would protect itself, and it can do so both defensively and offensively. It’s probably monitoring our conversation at this very moment, checking for phrases such as ‘easy with the plastique, Mr. Fingers’ and ‘hand me that fluorine cutter’. It can also send out a cry for help over up to thirty light years. Any government enforcement vessels in that radius would be duty bound to investigate.”
“So what do we do?” said Reborn-in-Jesus. “You can go in there. You understand this manner of thing. I am only a farmer.”
“I am not,” said the Anchorite defiantly, “going anywhere near that thing’s DNA scanners. They might figure out who I’m made of. And that would do us no good in any case. Those devices are virtually escape-proof. I only ever heard of one man who could get out of one.”
“And that was?” said Reborn-in-Jesus.
The Anchorite shaded his eyes against plasmaglare and stared up into the sky. “I believe he’s just left.” He dropped his gaze back to earth. “Which means we have to convince him to come back.”
Magus Reborn-in-Jesus put his father in his left ear and the Anchorite in his right.
Personality-analogues were handed out wholesale by traders on the wild frontier who knew their clientèle well. Deaths in families were common in the outworlds, whether by disease, malnutrition, poor radiation shielding, or simply forgetting to start a seized tractor in reverse. For that reason, in order to give themselves the ability to pass on valuable advice to their children after they had gone where the puppies went, colonial parents encoded their essences into dinky plastic talismans that could, so the traders assured them, accurately encompass their entire personalities in a handful of HCRAM chips connected to a mono speaker. To which Grandpa Santos’s reply had been if that darn jigger contains all of me, why don’t it go down the state benefit office, collect my dole, and get me my meds on the way home? The devices, frequently worked into cheap and nasty costume jewellery decorated with hearts and angels, were despised by most, lifelines to some.
Magus Reborn-in-Jesus’s father and Uncle Anchorite were not dead. However, they were currently over ten New Light Years away. Reborn-in-Jesus senior had fields to tend and a family of fifteen to feed, and was not about to leave his wife and elder children in charge of such important things as growing potatoes. The Anchorite, meanwhile, had flatly refused to leave Ararat and travel anywhere in Civilization.
For this reason, both men were accompanying Magus as analogues. The old lady on the seat opposite Magus smiled pityingly as their transport dropped through the quicksand-thick clouds of Colony World Twenty, formerly Buttonia, now Anadyomene. The young man was wearing two personality analogues. He had lost both his father and his mother.
“Where are you now?” said his father.
“Approaching the city of Smith,” reported Magus.
“Population around a hundred thousand,” interjected the Anchorite. “The only reference I can find to it is in the New Anadyomene Company Savers’ Prospectus, which describes the planet as ‘a worldly paradise of opportunity where green pastures will spring from the barren rock’.”
Magus gazed down on kilometres and kilometres and kilometres of barren rock.
“When is the prospectus dated?” he said.
“Last year,” said the Anchorite. “The prices for owning a plot of green pasture are all in company currency, which is never a good sign. The price quoted is one hundred Company doubloons per hectare.”
The SSTO ferry swept down a long, flashing-light-lined cavity like a sperm cautiously entering a urethra. Giant magnetic arms reached out to grab it. There was a long, long pause while the pressures on either side of the airlock equalized.
“I believe,” said Magus, “we have arrived.”
“That’s a Made,” said the New Anadyomene Company customs official, unbuttoning his holster as he said so.
; “This is my travelling companion,” said Magus. “He suffered a horrific steel-pouring accident. I assure you he is not a robot. His organic components now consist only of his central nervous system—which you can understandably not DNA-sample, as it is both delicate and contained well within this armoured exoskeleton. He does, however, carry around a token of his DNA, which I hereby present to you.” He handed a flap of skin the size of a smart card through the hole in the bulletproof, bombproof, charged-particle-beam-proof screen. The Devil tipped its travelling hat at the customs man politely.
The border controller looked the skin flap over solemnly and skimmed it into a manual sampler. He looked at his colleague.
“Human,” he said. He looked back at Magus.
“Your kid brother, huh? Tough break.”
Seconds later, with a fresh and poorly-dressed sample cut itching on his arm, Magus was loose in the upper corridors of Smith. The entire city, poorly rendered information screens at the SSTO terminal informed him, was of necessity currently temporarily underground, protected by antacid coffer dams, overpressure, and a well-maintained system of alkali sprinklers from the roaring lava-thick, magma-hot atmosphere outside. Having an atmosphere one could hurt one’s head on meant that the air in the city of Smith had to be maintained at a slightly greater pressure. A ball of particularly dense and moist atmosphere was rolling down the passageway toward him, clearly visible. Breathing was a laborious exercise. Coughing, he imagined, might do damage to his lungs.
He was hungry. There were prices for what he imagined passed locally for food flashing dully from booths on either side of the terminal escalator. He noticed that a ham-simulant burger cost one thousand company doubloons.
“The trader said he set Trapp down on Anadyomene,” said the Anchorite.
“The trader was under some pressure at the time,” cautioned Magus.
“The unit was the soul of gentility,” said the Anchorite. “It barely nicked his flesh.”