by Adam Roberts
Insofar as she dipped into political data – and she could hardly avoid doing so, however much she preferred the chillier perfection of physics – things seemed, presently, stable in the System. It had been three decades since the last attempted coup, when the Palmer MOHfamily had tried to eliminate the Ulanovs with one strike and usurp their place. Of course, it was safe to assume the other families, and Gongsi and lower-ranking organisations too, were plotting. Eva assumed her own MOHmies were plotting too. It would be longer-term suicide not to lay-in plans, possible strategies and the like. The Ulanovs would expect as much, however much the Lex Ulanova forbade it. But Eva couldn’t see anything that was likely to lead to upheaval or bloodshed in the immediate future.
Still, it was only sensible to take precautions. The Palmer Clan had been annihilated; and neither MOHfamily nor Gongsi would be so foolish as to attempt a direct assault again. But it was certainly possible than either might attack either; and a strike against the Argents – the information guild, particularly vital to the Ulanovs – could achieve a great deal for an ambitious lower organisation. Indeed, the chances of such an attack increasingly edged from possible into probable as time went on. Dia and Eva were not yet ready to assume the mantle of command. To strike now made more sense than waiting until they consolidated their inheritance.
The iRumours, of course, were all about faster-than-light travel. If you believed the gossipoppers, the Ulanovs were on the verge of discovering, or rediscovering, of uncovering (or something) a technology that permitted FTL. Idiocy. It was impossible, of course. The laws of physics forbade it. But the mere rumour was enough to throw the Data Markets into array. It was as if somebody on the Dutch stock market in the seventeenth-century had announced: ‘tomorrow I shall have an actual, working technology for turning lead into gold!’ The markets tended to go borderline chaotic at the mere idea; and data markets were more volatile than other kinds of markets. But that didn’t mean it was actually going to happen.
As for Eva, well: she had six PhDs in physical sciences, and was about to submit a seventh. She knew perfectly well not only that FTL was impossible, but that its impossibility was of a particularly glaring kind. This Mc-whatever he was called, this fellow who was supposed to have stumbled on the means of breaking the light barrier – he had disappeared, of course. Eva doubted he had ever existed. And if he had, he was only a crank. His ‘discovery’ amounted to somebody saying: I have created a perpetual motion machine, or I have invented a square circle. But she didn’t have to believe the technology existed. She only had to believe that people believed the technology existed. People, being stupid, believed all sorts of things.
If this impossible device were to tumble into the hands of the Ulanovs, it would represent – of course – unimaginable power and wealth. It would consolidate their power in an absolute sense. They would control humanity’s migration to the stars. Of course, people would be prepared to kill for such a thing. To kill on a vast scale. And of course, the Argents, as the Ulanovs’ information clan, would be assumed to be hand-in-hand with any such discovery. All of this, just the idea of it, put them at terrible risk.
But Eva and Diana were well protected; their location a secret close-guarded, their every hour guarded by the best bodyguards money could buy. The island was ringed and littered with defence systems. A landing and assault would have a low probability of success. Of course, a rival MOHfamily or Gongsi – assuming they knew where the girls were staying – could just bomb the entire island from orbit. But that would be an act of war; not a step lightly taken. An assassination attempt would be safer, and whilst that could come at any time it wasn’t terribly likely.
And all of this was a parsec away from one servant clocking another on the head with a hammer. Only an idiot would think that this sordid crime constituted the first of what a crime narrator might call ‘The FTL Murders’.
Eva put the whole thing out of her head. She worked on her anomalous supernova problem, and refined her possible solution from 52% to 55% probability. Then she washed, and ate, and played chess for a half-hour. Then she played with her sister in the IP, and they both chatted remotely to their MOHmies – Dia, of course, excitedly gabbling about this real-life murder mystery, and how she was going to find out which of the nineteen servants was responsible, and their parents smiling indulgently. Eva found herself obscurely angry. But then she slept in a gel tank, and woke the next morning feeling a little better about the gravity. She got on with her research.
The murder was a trivial matter. She carried on thinking so, right up to the moment when Ms Joad arrived.
5
Ms Joad
Ms Joad worked directly for the Ulanovs. It didn’t get more (up! up!) elevated than that! The fact that she had come down to the island to speak to the girls face-to-face threw everything Eva had assumed about this mystery in the incinerator. Pff! Gone. As Diana put it: there was no wavy way the Ulanovs would be interested in this crime if it were truly just one servant killing another.
Ms Joad had the physique of someone for whom the uplands were a habitus: long and loose-limbed, skinny wrists, big hands. Her eyes were large, but not in an animé little-girl way. On the contrary, they were a Shiva-coloured dark purple-black, and capable of an intenser gaze than is usual for the human eye. Her features were never anything other than serene and controlled, and the elements of her face were regular and balanced in a way that ought to have been handsome. But there was some quality about her, some indefinable edge, that parsed her beauty through terror. Whenever Ms Joad turned her bland gaze upon her, Eva could almost see through those eyes into the sandstorm of her mind. She was violent not in a crude, bashing-people-about way. She was violent, as it were, ontologically. She was dangerous as a scorpion. But that was clearly stupid, because she was much much more dangerous than any scorpion!
Because she travelled up and down all the time on Ulanov business she was used to gravity, and took only a couple of hours to acclimatise – enough time for Eva and Dian and all three of their bodyguards to assemble in the mansion’s main hall to meet her. Iago brought Ms Joad through. He came into the room first and she followed him; but the door squealed and shook when she passed through it, as if possessed by the spirits of several devils.
‘My oversight! I forgot,’ she said, in her inky voice. The expression on her face made it clear that she never forgot anything about anything, and that oversight was alien to her nature. Without ostentation, but in a way that made it clear she was performing the action for the benefit of her audience, she pulled a metal firearm from inside her jacket. This she handed to Berthezene, who slipped it in a smartcloth pouch. Then, smiling slightly, she stepped outside and came back in through the door.
It had no complaint to make about her second entry.
She was walking with crawlipers, but she moved easily to her chair and settled herself unfussily. ‘My dear girls,’ she said. ‘My employers have sent me to make sure you are well.’
The girls, seated, didn’t get up (in this g? Are you crazy?). ‘We are both very well,’ said Diana. She looked over at Iago – characteristically, he was very deliberately not sitting in the available chair, but was instead standing with his back to the wall a little way to the left of Jong-il. He did not return her look.
‘Both very well,’ echoed Eva.
Joad looked from one girl to the other. ‘There has been a murder, I hear. On your property. Metres from this house. Isn’t that extraordinary?’
‘Is this what has brought you down here, Ms Joad?’ asked Eva. ‘I can assure you that the Ulanovs need not be concerned with something so trivial.’
‘I am investigating the crime,’ said Diana. ‘Although, of course, Ulanov law is being observed scrupulously; two accredited policepeople,’ – the flicker of her eyelids as she drew their names from her bId – ‘Inspector Halkiopoulou, and Subinspector Zarian, visited yesterday. It’s all in order.’
Joad blinked, forcefully, once. Thus she took on board the nec
essary information. ‘Very good. Of course my employers are anxious to ensure that you are both perfectly safe.’
‘We had all the servants’ CRF levels checked straight away,’ said Diana, rather superfluously. ‘There’s nothing amiss.’
Joad looked at Diana, and then at Eva, and then she smiled. ‘So you are to try your hand at investigating crime, are you, my dear?’ she said. Although she was speaking to Diana she was looking straight through the main window at the garden outside.
‘Yes,’ said Diana. ‘I have a great deal of experience in Worldtuality at . . .’
‘Believe me it’s different in real life,’ Ms Joad interrupted her. ‘I know what it means really to investigate a crime.’
‘The murder is a simple matter,’ said Eva, a little too urgently. ‘One servant killed another, probably for reasons of sexual jealousy, or personal grudge. The killer must be one of a group of nineteen servants. It’s an unfortunate but eminently containable and, eh, indeed, contained event. My sister is looking into which particular servant is responsible. I myself spent some time yesterday ascertaining whether there was any chance the crime was symptomatic of a larger threat to our family – it isn’t.’
‘And you,’ said Ms Joad, smiling amiably but speaking with a voice that could freeze starfire, ‘have six PhDs already!’
‘I,’ said Eva, wrong-footed, ‘I do.’
‘My dear girls. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that the matter is more dangerous than you realise.’
Dia’s heart lolloped in her chest. Was Joad was going to stay? Had the Ulanovs sent her down to monitor the sisters, to spy on them, browbeat them? The thought of this individual contaminating her personal space, her own house, was intolerable.
‘Really?’ she said, in as ingenuous a voice as she could manage.
‘You have played a great many of your whodunit games, in Worldtuality and so on,’ said Joad to Dia, again without looking at her. ‘So tell me. Have you ever heard of Jack Glass?’
Glass! ‘Of course,’ said Diana.
Ms Joad curled her mouth into a smile. ‘I’ve been on his trail, you know,’ she said. Nothing Ms Joad said could be described as offhand, exactly; but the way she imparted this piece of information came close.
And poor foolish Diana was enough of a fangirl in her chosen hobby to squee at this news . ‘No! Really? Seriously and really?’
‘Oh my dear girl,’ said Joad, deadpan, looking through the window again. ‘You have no idea. He’s more dangerous even than his reputation suggests. Do you know what? We had him!’
‘Had him?’ repeated Eva.
‘What – arrested?’ asked Dia.
‘Arrested and imprisoned.’
‘I had no idea!’ gasped Diana. ‘That’s not data available in any of the usual locations.’
‘And I’ll thank you to keep it that way. Leak it, and I’ll trace it back.’
‘Ms Joad!’ said Diana, genuinely affronted.
‘Of course,’ Joad continued, without pause and without altering her murmurous monotone. ‘You are your MOHmies’ daughter. You understand the importance of informational hygiene and secrecy and,’ she lifted her right hand, as if testing the gravity, flipped the hand over, and concluded, ‘all that bag and baggage.’ The hand came down again. ‘I feel confident that I can tell you this, in confidence. We caught him. He was working under an alias of course, and was tried and sentenced for a minor crime – sent out to an asteroid called Lamy306, a long long way away, in a distant orbit. He was supposed to serve eleven years. It took us six months to realise our mistake – a lamentable lag, really. But then we realised what we had – whom we had, I mean – him, in other words, Jack Glass himself. So we hurried on out to Lamy306 in four ships to pick him up. Do you know what we found?’
‘He was dead?’ asked Eva. ‘Suicide?’
Joad moved her head smoothly about on its frictionless neck and directed her gaze upon the sister. ‘Certainly not. He wasn’t. All his fellow prisoners were. Or – traces of them. Mutilated. Carved into,’ and she gave this next word a peculiarly lubricious intonation, as if it chimed with some part of her inner being: ‘chunks.’ She all but licked her lips. ‘Their bodies were gone, but their blood was all over the walls.’
There was a silence. Cicadas tut-tutted distantly in the fields.
‘Bad luck for them,’ said Eva, eventually, trying not to flinch as Joad looked hard at her.
‘Indeed.’
‘At least you recaptured him,’ asked Diana.
Joad swivelled her head back. ‘We did not. He wasn’t there. Somehow he escaped. Alas.’
Both daughters took this in, and a beat later both spoke at the same time, ‘how is that possible?’/‘How could he?’ They stopped. Diana said: ‘He wasn’t there in the first place. Is that it?’
‘It’s a proper locked-room mystery,’ said Joad. ‘How did he escape from one of the best-locked rooms in the entire solar system!’
‘He must have had help,’ said Eva. ‘A friend must have cracked the encryption, worked out where he was serving his sentence, and sent a ship out to pick him up.’
Joad shook her head, a series of short tight shimmers from left to right. ‘The Gongsi in question has AIs surveilling all its many prison asteroids. Naturally, it saves money by surveilling them from a distance, and by AI. That means that, had a ship come to rescue him, they wouldn’t necessarily have been able to do anything to stop it. But they would at least have recorded footage of the rescue, and could have used that as the starting place for investigation and recapture. The footage of Lamy306 is uninterrupted, complete, and a perfect blank. Grainy, and low-res, but complete. The quality is enough to have picked up anything so prominent as a sloop energy drive or any other kind of propulsion exhaust. No ship visited.’ She looked slowly from sister to sister. ‘Quite apart from anything else – how would Glass’s contacts have known which asteroid to visit? Your family’s expertise in data protection ought to tell you that encrypted data is not so easily cracked. And there are hundreds of thousands of possible locations. No. Nobody rescued him.’
‘He never went,’ said Diana. ‘That’s the solution – which is to say, that’s the trick. The trick with locked-room mysteries, at any rate. You – we – are supposed to believe that the murderer either broke into or escaped from an impossible-to-enter-or-exit space. But that’s never what happens.’ She blushed. ‘What I mean is: if it’s impossible for Jack Glass to have escaped from this asteroid, then . . . well, he didn’t escape. That’s what impossible means, after all. And that means, he never went in the first place; somehow the authorities were fooled into thinking that he had gone. He was never there. The other prisoners all murdered one another.’
Joad nodded. ‘But, my dear, his DNA was found in the innards of this asteroid, along with everybody else’s. Oh, he was there. He was inside the impossible-to-escape room for a while and then – suddenly – mysteriously – one might almost say magically, he vanished. Pff! Teleported right out of there.’ Abruptly, Joad laughed, a crow-like sound.
‘He must have had a ship.’
‘There was no ship.’
‘Nobody can just – teleport,’ said Diana. ‘There’s no such thing. That’s magic, not science. There is a rational explanation. Even if we haven’t deduced it, right now, it will be there.’
‘He has no legs,’ said Eva, suddenly.
‘Quite right!’ barked Joad, delighted. ‘Did you pull that out of your bId, my dear?’
Eva shook her head. ‘I don’t want to look into his bId entry. It surely contains horrors and I’m a . . . touch squeamish about such things. I just remembered. That’s one of the things that everybody knows about him,’ She looked at her sister. ‘I prefer the inanimate to the animate. It’s more . . . manageable. Physics, chemistry, iDynamics.’
‘Where you, my dear,’ said Joad, angling her head a little to the side and regarding Diana like a velociraptor. ‘You prefer the human stuff – hmmm? What we hear, up among
st the Ulanovs, is that your MOHmies have high hopes for you when it comes to personnel management. Problem-solving and investigation with a skill-spin in people, yes?’
‘I suppose I prefer the animate to the in,’ said Diana, warily. ‘For Eva it’s the other way about.’
‘So that’s your fascination with whodunits, is it?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Don’t be alarmed, my tender morsel,’ said Ms Joad. ‘The Ulanovs, whom I represent here, have no problem with the Argents training up a next generation of information experts. But you can’t blame us for being curious as to how that training is going. The divide is as neat as MOH sculpting would lead us to expect. A hard-body problem girl in you, Eva, and a soft-body problem girl in you.’
‘How did he lose his legs?’ asked Eva, unable to leave the gruesome image alone.
‘Nobody seems to know for sure. Oh, there are various theories,’ said Joad, airily. ‘Get the better of your squeamishness and pull his details from your bId and you’ll see.’
