by Adam Roberts
‘When we are married I shall beat you,’ Diana said. ‘Like an old-fashioned spouse. I shall beat you with a stick.’
The game clogged in the bottom left quarter. Dia cleared it and rebooted it as a three-dimensional game on a toroidal grid.
‘If you beat me, I shall kill you,’ returned Anna. ‘It will be justifiable femicide.’
‘And the last thing I see will be your stupid flat face!’ cried Diana, in an ecstasy, adding, ‘oh I love you, I love you!’
The flare of emotional intensity fizzled and died as she waited for the reply; but it sparked up again as the countdown approached zero.
‘I love you too, Drop-dead-Di. Is that why you called, just to say that? What a risk! You’re not supposed to call. I might work out where you are, and betray you to your enemies. Only I would never do that, because if I did they would kill you, and only I am allowed to kill you.’
They were never going to get married, of course. Their respective MOHfamilies would never allow it. But even if they could be persuaded the Ulanovs would regard an alliance between the Information and the Transit branches of their own structures of power as too great a threat. Anna and Diana both knew that; and Diana knew more – though she wasn’t sure if Anna had as much insight into human nature – that the intensity of their affection for one another was a function of its impossibility. Were all the obstacles between them removed, the love would surely wither. Not that any of that mattered.
Diana gave her the news. ‘I have a real-life murder mystery to solve,’ she boasted.
She finished the game, and dismissed the board. As the countdown slid away she prepared herself for Anna’s reaction. It did not disappoint.
Anna made her mouth a perfect O. ‘No wavey way!’ she yelled. ‘A real-life one – where? You’re trying to de-arrange my sanity!’
‘Right on our doorstep! One of our own handservants, his cranial bones all bashed and dinted and cracked, dead as an iron star.’
The interlude flew past.
‘That’s the most amazing. That’s most amazing. That’s the most. Have you solved it?’ asked Anna. ‘Do you need my help to solve it? I’m the best brain at solving whodunits in the So-so Solar System, you know.’
‘Such delusions!’ said Diana. ‘I have to go now, my love, my life. When I’ve got to the bottom of things here I’ll parcel up the data – the solution in a different package, of course – and see how you do with it.’ The walls of her IP were throbbing, which meant that her network of buffers was about to tumble in on itself. She disconnected.
7
The Investigation Begins
The next morning Diana began her very own murder investigation: she was Holmes, and she appointed Iago her Dr Watson. ‘It’s quite alright and spot-on,’ she told him; ‘check your bId and you’ll see Watson was quite a bit older than Holmes.’ Iago wrinkled the skin next to his eyes with < and > as he smiled. They were in the bright morning sunlight, and by golly he looked old. ‘And Eva can be Mycroft, since she’s so very clever,’ Dia added.
‘How do we begin?’
‘With the autopsy; but that’s done, and the results are on the bId. Have you checked them?’
‘I assume,’ he said, saluting the scene so as to shade his eyes. There was a gauzy haze over the sea, but the dun-green trees and sand-coloured fields all stood out with hyperreal vividness; as did the white houses of the distant down. ‘I assume the autopsy confirms that death occurred as a result of cranial damage.’
‘He was bashed. He was dented and dinted and dashed to death. No surprises there.’
They set off towards the scene of the murder, and it ought to have been more exciting. But something was corroding her enjoyment. In fact, several things were. One was Eva. They were hardly the first sisters in the world whose love for one another waxed and waned; but Diana couldn’t help thinking it was her birthday in three weeks – and she was the one with the passion for murder mysteries – and now a real-life murder mystery had happened right on her doorstep and you might think Eva would be more pleased. Especially since last night she had almost opened up to her; a little intimacy, her strange dream.
But this morning, she had been all stand-offish, had breakfasted alone in her room and then vanished inside the IP for more stroopid-stroopid work on her stroopid-stroopid PhD. She tried not to care; but her stand-offishness was more than a touch piss-offish.
The best analgesic for mental discomfort is work, of course. Dia ran through the surveillance footage of the servants’ house one more time, making sure that nobody had gone in or come out for seven hours prior to the murder. Immediately after the murder, of course, people spilled and staggered from the main entrance, doing their weird contorted grief-dance. This was all negative data; just like the House AI surveillance record that told her Deño, Jong-il, Berthezene and Iago had all been inside the main building for the whole of the relevant time. Not that she suspected any of them, of course; but it was good officially to (as the phrase so splendidly put it) eliminate them from the enquiry. There was no House AI data on Eva, of course; any more than on Diana herself – they were the daughters of Argent, and beyond surveillance. That was the least they could expect, in their eminence; although there were also practical advantages in minimising their data profiles. After all protection was the name of the jeu; the name of the jeu was protection.
But Diana knew she wasn’t the murderer, and it made no sense to think Eva was.
There was the question, of course, of who was to serve them, now that all nineteen of their remaining handservants had been locked up. But they still had Deño, Berthezene and Jong-il – not to mention solid old Iago – to give them their food, and sort out their needs. And they could dress themselves, if they had to. Other stuff would have to be postponed, or else go hang. Besides, as soon as Dia worked out who the real murderer was, the servants could all be released and things could return to normal. So! So –
The next thing to do was to examine the crime scene itself, and then (she slid the palms of her hands across one another, trying to work up a little excitement) interview the suspects. Interview the suspects! She would Poirot them good and proper. They would be properly Poirot’d.
So Dia had put together a message to her sister and sent it into the Worldtuality: saying, only, ‘please be my Mycroft! I’m setting out to solve these FTL-murders (thank you, Ms Joad) and all help is good help if it’s your help. I know you’re working and working and working, and trying for the good of all humanity to explain why that minimum-fraction-tiny-number of stars blew up, so I won’t ask you to do the crime scene investigation. But shall I come to you with my theories, and shall you help me put all the pieces together?’
Nothing came back from Eva for a long time, and when something finally did trickle out of the IP it wasn’t even delivered by an Eva-avatar. It was a plain statement of three things:
One. Ms Joad was trying to unnerve us, either for the hell of it, because the Ulanovs benefit by sowing confusion and dissension amongst the MOHclans, or possibly as some small play in part of a larger specific strategy. It doesn’t matter. Ignore her. The fabled Jack Glass has probably never been to Earth, and is certainly not involved in all this. She mentioned him as a nurse talks about Boojie-monsters to little children, and for no other reason.
Two. Talk of ‘the FTL murders’ is folly, folly and nothing else. Nobody can go faster than c. Saying ‘FTL murders’ is just another way of saying ‘the impossible fairy-story murders’.
Three. One of the other servants murdered Leron, probably for reasons of some personal grudge. That’s all there is to this regrettable business.
That put a crimp in Dia’s good spirits, right there. So formal! And although it was rather grimmish to talk about the death of another human being – and so on, and so forth – there was no reason why it couldn’t be fun. Still, hey-ho and hoopsa-girlagirl-hoopsa. Diana tried to keep her spirits up. She finished her breakfast and as she was spending ten minutes flexing her limb
s and getting used to the crawlipers (the gravity was a little less oppressive today) another message pinged out of the IP. This one was at least delivered by an avatar:
Sis: I’m sorry I woke you last night. My dream was mental rubble from the day, randomly arranged. You were right. How could there be any actual connection between unexplained supernovae millions of light years distant and the sordid murder of one servant by another here on Earth? Ignore me, and enjoy yourself. Love, Eva.
But, oddly, that only made Diana more despondent. Eva probably was right. It almost certainly was nothing. Iago, who was present when the avatar delivered this message (so was Jong-il), seemed quite struck by it, pushing his wrinkly brow deeper into wrinkles and quite lost in thought. ‘What ho, Tutor,’ she asked him, with a forced jollity. ‘You think there might be a connection between this murder and the explosion of distant supernovae after all?’
He rearranged his face into a proper servantly blandness. ‘It would be hard to see,’ he deadpanned, ‘what the connection between those events could be, Miss.’
She wouldn’t let it go. ‘You had a look on your face, just then—’
‘What sort of look?’
‘As if you had suddenly realised something.’
‘Realised?’
‘Exactly,’ said Dia. ‘You had the look of somebody who had just realised something deep and important.’
‘Very shrewd, Miss,’ he said. ‘I had indeed suddenly understood the secret of life, the meaning of the universe and the key that would unlock this particular mystery.’
So she slappit his arm, and told Iago that he could stop being Jeeves for the day and ordered him instead to have a go at being Doctor Watson. But Diana’s spirits refused to buoy- themselves up, however much she primped them.
They went out into the sunshine and walked awkwardly down to the servants’ house. It was already very hot, the air blue as cigarette smoke, the heavens taut above them. A scramjet, very high overhead, cut a white slit in the sky. You could hear its faraway rumble. Otherwise it was perfectly still.
They crossed the crinkly grass: Diana going first, Iago and Jong-il, scanning the scene for possible assailants.
The inside of the servant house was empty (all the servants had been detained in a secure building a kilometre or so away, on the far side of the olivetree forest). Stepping into the gloom from the brightness of the day, Diana felt a tingle of anticipation in her stomach; but it soon dissipated. There was nothing here. She started going through each of the rooms, one after the other, but they were all the same: a bed – regular mattress, no gel-beds for the servants of course – and a sphere, unlocked, that contained a few trivial personal possessions. A few datachips easily scanned by the House AI, and usually containing only religious texts. Odd toys and mascots and trinkets. But she didn’t go into all twenty rooms; she got bored after five. So they went back into the storeroom.
It seemed both larger and less cluttered than it had done when Diana had visited before. That was one of the things about gravity, of course: when you first got back under the strain of it, things appeared to constrict about you. No, it was something more; a sense that the excitement of the moment had drawn the space around her, like a shawl. Now it was receding. She knew why. The truth would be banal, obvious – like Eva said, another servant smacked his head with a hammer, over some petty jealousy or grudge. The day before she had believed that it might be a really crunchy, chewy mystery; a whodunit as gnarly as any she had ever played in IP. But reality wasn’t like that. This was what they called ‘the cold light of day’. Except that the light was not cold. It was hot and sunny.
She took an inventory: storage boxes and spheres; bags, implements for tilling and turning, trimming and toiling. Her bId tagged each of these items with their name and the chance to find out more if she happened to be interested. But she wasn’t interested. The hammer was gone. //Where’s the weapon?//
//?? – A weapon is a device for causing harm, or defending one’s . . .//
She had meant to ask that out loud. She turned to Iago. He was wrinkling his nose up; his face like an ancient turtle’s. ‘Where is the weapon?’
‘The police removed it, Miss. It is evidence, and there are legal requirements.’
‘I wanted to see how heavy it was.’
‘It was a hammer, for banging in pegs and posts and the like. There’s another over there just like it.’ He pointed.
Without the bId tagging everything, the storage room had reacquired a little of its former, estranging tang. Incomprehensible grids stacked six-deep leant against the wall; weird wide horizontal fins embedded into the wall itself; a pendule with curious attachments hanging from the ceiling. She located the hammer and grasped the handle. The shaft moved towards her, like a lever being pulled, but there was no way she could move the dense metal head up from the floor. It was simply too heavy.
‘This is too heavy for me to lift.’
‘It is solid metal,’ Iago agreed.
‘I don’t believe any of the servants, decanted from a zero-g environment directly into one full g, could lift such a hammer.’
‘Somebody did,’ Iago noted.
‘Ah, but I have a theory.’
‘Miss?’
She gestured towards the garden robot in the corner. ‘I was thinking: of course, normally a servant wouldn’t have clearance to operate something as expensive as a robot. But that one is specifically for garden work, isn’t it? And many of these servants must have been here pour cultiver le jardin! Maybe one of them took advantage of the fact that they could manipulate this heavy-duty ordnance to kill the victim.’
Iago made a moue with his wrinkly old mouth.
‘Oh don’t be like that ee-arrr-gow,’ she said. ‘It’s a neat theory, no?’
‘I was only thinking, Miss,’ he said, not meeting her eye. ‘Why get the robot to pick up a hammer and hit the victim? Why not just use the robot to strike the victim directly?’
‘You’re just hole-picking. You hole-picker. These robots are – there was something about them that caught my eye. When we were here before, I mean. Something.’
They went over to the hulking great machines. ‘This,’ said Diana, excitedly, drawing an open-brackets in the floor with her toe. ‘Do you know what this is?’
‘The floor, Miss?’
‘Dust! I read about it – tiny particles of matter. Usually it just floats in a suspension of air; but under gravity, like here, it settles . . . accumulates. Look.’ She was proud of herself for knowing about the action of dust in gravity. Details like that could be important. ‘The dust is on the floor, and the implements. But look here.’ She gestured to a patch on the robot’s inert arm, and another on its shoulder and head. ‘The dust has been disturbed! It snagged my attention without my even realising it. I’ll tell you, Iago: I dreamt that night of the whole solar system seen from a long way out, with all the billions of home globes in orbit. At the time I thought it looked like foam; but now I know what my dream-mind was trying to tell me. Dust!’
‘It has been disturbed,’ admitted Iago, examining the robot. ‘But I’m not sure I see what that means. Or whether it necessarily means anything.’
‘It means the robot is the one who lifted the hammer and brained poor Leron. Which means the murderer is the person who controlled the robot.’
‘Miss, we can easily check the machine’s record of work.’
Of course they could. ‘I expect it to confirm my theory,’ said Dia. They had to call up the House AI in order to access the robot’s CV: it hadn’t been so much as switched-on in over six months.
‘Six months?’ cried Diana. ‘I don’t believe it!’
‘I’m afraid it’s undeniable. And look, the dust forms an unbroken skin over the device’s feet and the floor. This robot hasn’t moved in a long time.’
‘This stupid great machine, just standing here in the corner of this storeroom?’ Dia snapped, angry that her theory had so summarily been disproved. ‘What’s th
e point in that?’
‘Robots are expensive, Miss,’ Iago pointed out. ‘People are cheaper. Apart from very specific jobs – large-scale construction, or the use of RACdroids in contract work – it’s almost never cost-effective to use a robot.’
‘Then why have the brute at all?’
‘It’s anomalous, I suppose. A piece of old junk. It was probably bought for some specific, larger job, and then mothballed afterwards.’
Diana took a deep breath. Ghastly gravity, making breathing so hard. ‘So that’s not it. Never mind,’ she said. ‘But somebody lifted that hammer and smashed it down on Leron’s head.’
‘That’s the position we started from.’
‘Never mind that, Wats-loon,’ she said, angrily. ‘I want to ask the suspects some questions now!’
Iago said: ‘I’ll order a car.’
They came back outside, and waited a minute or so in the hot sun until the car buzzed over. ‘Roof down, I think,’ Dia announced, settling into the seat. Jong-il sat close beside her, his weapon out, and Iago opposite her. Then the platform buzzed away – a little shakily over the grass until it found a road, where it could pick up speed.
They soon left the main compound far behind. To Diana’s right the Mediterranean buzzed blue and white with light; the morning sun still fairly low in the sky. There was a breeze too: clean and salt-cool. Then they turned inland, and passed at speed alongside a straight row of cypresses. Sunlight epilected between trees. Dust blowzed over the road in spectral tan-coloured folds. Diana watched the landscape in motion. Her mind wandered.
‘Here, Miss,’ Iago announced.
They were at a squat white-flanked building without windows. Jong-il went first; then Diana climbed awkwardly out and stood for a moment. The grassy odour of olive oil. The sound of the cypresses hushing her. Beside the building was a swimming pool, ten metres across, filled, it appeared, with green tea. The shadow from the building printed a trapezoid over the dry grass, and dipped its apex into the water.
