by Adam Roberts
‘No,’ said Mo. ‘I mean – what did each of us do, to get an eleven year sentence. I’m thinking: not murder, or we wouldn’t have got off so . . .’ He rolled his eyes around their coldroom confinement space: ‘lightly. So what?’
‘I bet I can guess,’ said Davide.
Everybody looked at him. ‘Go on, then,’ prompted Lwon. ‘Guess.’
‘Well, well,’ said Davide, stretching. ‘So: you and E-d-C know one another. You said that, during our first day here. I reckon you’re part of the same criminal milieu. Which suggests organisations, which in turns suggests illicit portage about the System. Or maybe trespass. Contraband, smuggling, hocked-ships, taking-and-flying-away. Which?’
E-d-C nodded. ‘Something like that,’ he said, with some peculiar, unreadable tone to his voice. ‘It’s true I do know Mr Lwon, a little,’ he added. ‘Though only in a business capacity.’
‘And then there’s Leggy here,’ said Davide, turning to look at Jac. ‘You can tell a lot about a person from observing the things their mind gets hooked up on. For you, it’s making a window for this place. Eh? Yeah. You want to have a view out. It’s like an obsession. What does that tell me? Well, combined with the fact that you’re not built for violence,’ – Davide gestured at the place below Jac’s pelvis where his legs ought to have been ‘—makes me believe that you’re a political prisoner. A dreamer, an idealist, somebody who hasn’t come to terms with the fact that the Ulanovs run things now. Am I right?’
‘Not built for violence,’ repeated Jac, meditatively. ‘Doesn’t that depend upon what you mean by violence?’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Davide, dismissively. ‘The oppressive state is inherently violent, we can all agree. Property is violence, trade is violence, I’m sure you’re capable of all sorts of revolutionary action – planting dangerous software that does horribly violent things to accountancy programmes and bId access, for instance. Sure. But, for all that, I look at Marit and I know he’s capable of tearing a man’s throat out with knives, and I look at you and I see you’re not.’ He favoured Jac with a lowering wolfish grin, just to show that he was capable of the more physical forms of aggressions. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of, being a political prisoner. Just so long as you don’t forget your place in the pecking order.’ Then he turned his attention to Marit and Mo. ‘You two,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, but you don’t strike me as management-level criminals. Hired muscle, enforcers, something along those lines.’
‘Go take a swim in space,’ snarled Mo.
‘Which only leaves our fat friend, here. You’re the odd one out, aren’t you, Gordius? Odd odd-one-out. What did you do to get yourself mixed up with such noxious company, my pally?’
A tomato-red flush was spreading over Gordius’s ample neck and chins. The diamond-shaped scar on his forehead had healed to a pinker colour than the surrounding flesh, and it went livid as he blushed. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he muttered.
‘Sure we do,’ grinned Davide. ‘Don’t we?’
‘I’ve been unjustly imprisoned,’ he said. ‘I was only doing what my religion required.’
‘Hoho!’ boomed Mo. ‘You a religious maniac? What did you do, big boy?’
But an impermeable membrane had snapped into place around Gordius’s mind. Though the four alphas (Lwon only excepted) teased and provoked him for a long time, he would not listen, and nothing could entice him to speak. He folded his limbs around his large frame and put his face to the wall. Jac watched him. He knew this for what it was: a retreat into a profound misery, the prison of melancholy that had memory written on its door. Soon enough the others grew tired of taunting him, and with food in their bellies they disposed their bodies as best they could, floating in proximity to make the most of mutual body heat, and fell asleep.
Jac remained awake for a long time. He was thinking of glass.
It took them a great many more days – or what passed for days in that clockless place – to get a proper rhythm of ghunk growing right. First of all, individual crops grew out of sync. They had groups of days when there was too much of the slop to eat, and groups of days when none of it was green at all and they had to go hungry. But trial and error meant that they eventually arrived at a situation where there was food every day, even if not necessarily enough to completely satisfy everyone’s hunger. Familiarity did nothing to endear them to the stuff. It was the texture of it, as much as the taste. Glop.
They decided to expand their growing space. It took Jac and Gordius a couple of hours to dig out a trench, and adjust the position of the lightpole a little so as to shine into it. A soaked rag was pinned to the bottom of this with stone-chips, a smear of spores scratched up by fingernails from underneath the edible green bloom, and the marginally more sheltered growing environment meant that the ghunk grew not only quicker but seemed – everybody agreed – even to taste a little less noisome. But it was hardly food. It never fully satisfied hunger. It lay slimily in the stomach; it emerged unsatisfactorily from the other end of the digestive tract. This was also a problem, of course, in that enclosed space. They debated what to do with their bodily waste. Urine, soaked into rags, helped the ghunk grow even better; but they could find no useful function for faeces. Although everybody assumed that it would be somehow useful when it came to growing the food, in fact the ghunk was perfectly indifferent to it: as happy to grow on bare rock as on a frozen turd. So over two days E-d-C and Jac between them dug a cul-de-sac shaft, into which such waste could be disposed.
Otherwise the main activity of any given day was digging. As the cavity space expanded, they used the fusion cell to break oxygen out of the ice – indeed this, rather than heating, was the reason the Gongsi had gone to the expense of providing it. The scrubber was fine at refreshing air; but new space needed new atmosphere to fill it. The cell worked efficiently enough, and the seam of ice seemed big enough to supply both drinking water and new air. Their voices slipped up the register, a semitone higher, a tone. Some of them spoke more squeakily hilariously than others – the hydrogen, of course. Lwon grew worried about fire: should any of the diggers strike a spark from some nugget of meteorite iron, or something. His worry was contagious, but day followed day and the level of hydrogen in the air stabilised. It seemed that the scrubber, for all that it was an antique model, was as well suited to the task of processing the hydrogen out of the air and into carbon. From time to time they discussed, more or less idly, how it was doing this. Methane was one possibility – just as flammable, of course. Nobody could tell if the air smelt any worse than it had before. ‘It smells absolutely bad already,’ was Davide’s opinion. ‘It could hardly smell any worse.’ Maybe the gas was being processed into some more complex hydrocarbon chain. The scrubber’s filters did need scraping out from time to time. They took it turns to clear its tube of blackened powdery residue, making sure to do so near the digger so that the clogging stuff could be passed through the exhaust hoses. ‘All our lives depend on this machine,’ said Gordius, uncharacteristically minatory.
The scar over the cut on his forehead looked like an unpolished ruby set into his flesh.
Life inside Lamy306 had settled into a routine. It was dull: physically uncomfortable (especially the cold) and monotonous. But it was bearable. There was food and water, and there was work to occupy at least some of the time. They were still alive. A stratification in their respective relations had very quickly established itself. At the top were the alphas: Lwon, Davide and E-d-C, the latter not conceding Lwon anything so dignifying as ‘leader’ status, but neither challenging it outright. Then came Mo and Marit. Finally, at the bottom, were Gordius and Legless Jac. The hierarchy was made most manifest in the group’s sexual arrangements. Gordius got the worst of this, unluckily for him, with everyone but Jac taking humiliating advantage of his body in various ways. To begin with he wept openly at his cruel usage, complained, begged them to leave him be. But after a while he seemed to become habituated to it, in a glum sort of way. The other men would often discuss him as a sexual object,
combining many taunts at his obesity with more admiring observations that his extra weight at least gave him a feminine quality, at least from certain angles. With respect to Jac their comments were more dismissive: his deformity was, all agreed, a repulsive thing. It meant that they left his rear-end alone, although all five of them did insist upon other ways in which he could gratify them. Jac seemed to take these indignities with a quiet stoicism; but then it was hard to tell what he was really thinking. He kept his thoughts to himself.
In a way, Mo and Marit had a more troublesome time. Sometimes they were treated as de facto alphas, and the five men would laugh and joke together. But sometimes, without warning, the top three would treat Marit and Mo as betas, almost on a par with Gordius and Jac. This was mostly a question of penetrative sex, which quite apart from causing them physical discomfort provoked a more grievous psychological hurt. Mo suffered from this latter to a greater degree than did Marit. When it became apparent that Mo found his treatment peculiarly oppressive, Davide took a particular delight in singling him out for his sexual attentions. In the aftermath of such encounters, Mo would become surly, and would strike out at Jac, but more often at Gordius, in unpredictable ways.
That said, the group’s sexual interactions were neither frequent nor prolonged. The environment was too public, too draining, above all too cold for any of them to maintain prolonged erotic appetite. Sex, when it happened, tended to be a rapid and more-or-less brutal process of masculine discharge.
For Jac it was one more discomfort to put on the same level as the constant cold, the unsatisfactory food and the general monotony. He did not dwell on it. But he could certainly see it was gnawing away at Gordius’s peace of mind. ‘You need to think about something else,’ he advised the big fellow. ‘Don’t let it fester in your thoughts.’ Gordius glowered at him, and Jac thought he was going to turn away and sulk. But instead he burst into tears. ‘I can’t bear it! What else is there to think of? I’m always cold, and always hungry! The others show me no mercy! What else is there to think of?’
Marit, Mo and Davide were on the drills; the noise of their action against the rock, now as absolutely familiar to all seven of them as the sound of their own blood pulsing in their ears, droned in the background.
Jac wasn’t sure what to suggest. ‘Put your mind outside the rock,’ he suggested.
‘How? If I look to the future, it just seems an impossible long period of time! And if I look to the past – oh! The past!’
‘Do you know where the past and the present intersect?’ Jac asked him.
‘Where?’
‘In your mind, only. It’s the only point. Otherwise, the past is further away than the furthest galaxy. We know it, intuitively, because we understand the irrevocability of past action, and sometimes that makes us sad.’ He looked into Gordius’s face, trying to read his expression, but the fellow wouldn’t make eye-contact with him. ‘But it ought not to make us sad. Another name for that irrevocable gap between past and present is – freedom. Only our minds hold us back.’
‘Freedom,’ said Gordius. ‘Oh, you’re speaking ironically! Look where we are! There’s no freedom here.’
‘Oh there’s always a way out,’ said Jac. As he said it, abruptly, his heart started thrashing in his chest. It felt as if it wanted to kick its way out. Fibrillations, and the sweat rising shudderingly upon his skin. Had he said too much? But Gordius, of course, was too caught up in his own misery to take the words further. He said: ‘I killed my father.’
Jac took a moment to calm his own thrum-thrumming core. Then he said: ‘is that why you are here?’
Gordius seemed cast into the most profound glumness. He nodded, and his chins took up the motion.
‘Eleven years for murder?’ said Jac. ‘That seems rather . . . lenient?’
‘There was mitigation,’ mumbled Gordius.
‘For murder?’
Gordius seemed to hiccough, or cough, and a shudder passed through his frame. Then it all came out: ‘I come from a sunward settlement,’ he said. ‘A thousand people in a near Venus bubble, all of whom share a religious faith. And believe it or not, and of course you wouldn’t believe it, seeing the degradation to which I am presently reduced – I am a, am a – a very important man in my community. I was a god-child, a globe-being.’ He started sobbing, and the little muscular spasms that crying entailed caused his body to shudder and begin to rotate in space. ‘I am the sun!’ he said, bitterly, or else he said ‘I am the son’, Jac couldn’t tell. And then it occurred to him, perhaps that was precisely the point. ‘I have been fed and oiled since before I can remember. All through the cosmos God-the-All-Around has shaped His Will into globes: suns and planets and even little planetesimals, such as this, even this benighted worldlet where we are incarcerated. And we worship Him by . . .’ But tears overtook him: slow, regular, low-volume sobs.
After a little while, Jac said: ‘killing your father was by way of . . . a religious rite?’
‘A sacrifice,’ gasped Gordius, his face in his hands.
‘Your father a willing victim?’
‘Of course! It is the greatest honour . . . no greater honour is imaginable. When my time comes I will accept the destiny with . . .’ But the sobbing got the better of the words once again. ‘Oh but my time will never come, now!’
‘The Ulanov enforcers didn’t see it that way, I suppose,’ said Jac. ‘You poor man. No! You poor – god, I suppose. How are your people managing, whilst their god is in jail?’
‘The congregation has my sister,’ said Gordius. ‘She is much less perfectly globular than I, but at least she is of the divine cell-line.’
‘There’s no chance,’ said Jac, a tone of calculation entering his voice, ‘that your people would seek you out? Perhaps bribe the Gongsi to find out where they have stuck us? Send a ship to rescue you?’ He was thinking: what wouldn’t a people do to save their god? He was thinking: perhaps befriending this man would be the politic as well as the humane thing to do – for a friend might permit him to come along when his people rescued him. But Gordius answered: ‘I’m not a god any more. I was a god, but I’m not one any more. I’m nothing to the Faithful of the Spheres any more. It is exactly as if I am already dead. They could never locate me, anyway; and they never would try. What – vex the Ulanovs? They would risk the destruction of their whole settlement. One Forward Cruiser could punch holes in the fabric of their bubble from a hundred thousand clicks away.’ He shook his large head. ‘So you see what my problem is? You talk about my past – what have I got to remember except exile? And what have I got to look forward to? – even assuming I survive eleven years in this hellish place. I could never go home. I have no home. I was a god once, and deapotheosis leaves not a man but a . . . nothing.’ He started crying again.
Jac was surprised how disappointed he was to discover the unlikelihood of rescue from this quarter. Perhaps his willpower was not the tightly focused thing it had once been. He scratched an itch in his stump. But then something occurred to him and he smiled broadly.
‘You’re smiling,’ Gordius noted, in a flat, disappointed voice. But at least he had stopped crying.
‘I’m sorry. I can’t help it. Those others are here for their various crimes, and they all think you’re as mild as a kitten. But you’re the murderer! You’re the one with the actual violence in your past! They don’t know the half of it.’
‘Don’t tell them,’ Gordius begged, in a panicked voice.
‘Of course I won’t,’ said Jac. ‘You and I – we’re in this together, aren’t we? I just think it’s funny. What people don’t know generally makes me laugh; especially if they’re simply too dense to see it when it’s right in front of their eyes.’
It was pitiful to see how much emotional sustenance Gordius took, immediately, from that mere statement of mutual misery: we’re in this together, aren’t we? He pushed his wrists into his eyes, and grinned, and nodded. ‘And what did you do?’ he asked, in a thick-as-thieves voice. ‘To end up
here, I mean?’
‘What I did,’ said Jac, smiling again. ‘You mean – what was I sentenced for? Well, I I I was not sentenced for the right thing.’
‘I knew it,’ gasped Gordius. ‘Like me – you’re an innocent, unjustly convicted!’
‘No,’ said Jac, in a neutral voice. ‘That’s not what I mean. I deserve to be here. There’s no question. It’s just that I was not guilty of the specific thing for which I was sentenced. And,’ he added, deciding that it was only fair, all things considered, to take the big fellow into his confidence: ‘and that’s my dilemma. Eleven years. Long before the sentence comes to an end the Ulanovs will discover what I really did. And the punishment for that is . . . well, rather more severe than eleven years inside an asteroid.’ Gordius was making round eyes at him now. ‘So, I am in a particularly difficult situation,’ Jac said. ‘I cannot say that I am enjoying my present lodgings. But however horrible they are, they are better than what will happen to me when the Gongsi ship finally docks to retrieve us. I cannot look forward to that.’
‘What will you do?’ whispered Gordius.
‘I,’ said Jac, looking around him, gauging whether he had told Gordius too much, or just enough to bind them together in the friendship of victimhood, ‘I shall make glass.’
Gordius blinked, blinked, and then grinned. Suddenly he clasped Jac to his bosom in a wobbly embrace. ‘You and your window!’ he cried, joyfully. ‘Don’t ever stop dreaming of your window, Jac! Keep your dream alive!’
Disengaging himself, Jac said: ‘well, yes. A window would be a useful thing. Even a small one. With a window you can . . . see the outside world.’
The group discussed their situation, talking round and round the topic, but really there was nothing to discuss. The one thing they all wanted was privacy. So the only conceivable course of action was to excavate a series of separate chambers, and link them together with tunnels. That was the most pressing goal. ‘Seven chambers first off,’ Lwon said. ‘One each. And then we can warm the air in each, and it will in turn warm the rock, and instead of stripping that warm rock away it will act as insulation and we might start feeling something like comfortable.’
