Free Smallworld by Dominic Green

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-Company 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