Free Smallworld by Dominic Green Page B

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