by Adam Roberts
All the servants were questioned eventually, although Dia rattled through the last five in short order. There was a huge amount of redundancy and noise in the data; and taking it all in, after the manner of the great mystery detectives, did not leave Dia much wiser. About half the servants thought Leron had been a minor devil, a traitor, bully, rapist, revolutionary and thoroughly bad man, and that his death had been well-deserved. About half talked of him as a force for good in the cosmos, a kind-hearted, loyal supporter of both the Argent family (of course) and the Ulanovs, the principle of good justice in human form. The latter tended to believe that the handservant called Sapho had killed him. As to how she had been able to lift a heavy hammer and thwack it down on his head – and as to why Leron hadn’t simply dodged the blow – nobody could say.
‘You’ve questioned everybody,’ Iago noted. ‘Now?’
The two of them were alone in the interrogation room. The policepersons had discreetly withdrawn. Diana lolled in a gel-chair, breathing shallowly.
‘Not everybody,’ she said. ‘I haven’t questioned you.’
‘Me, Miss?’ the Tutor replied, retreating into the evasive formality of his old-world butler manner. ‘I remind you that my whereabouts during the murder have been determined with a certainty that puts me beyond suspicion of the crime.’
‘Not as a suspect, ye-are-goh,’ she drawled. ‘You are silly.’
‘I am happy to answer any questions, Miss, of course,’ he said, frostily.
‘Oh don’t get all crusty-crusty on me, you old satyr. I only want to ask you about politics.’
‘Politics,’ Iago repeated. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I know you like to veil your true importance to this family under a cloud of unknowing,’ she said. ‘But though I’m young and sometimes giddy I’m no fool. What shall we call you – consigliere?’
Iago couldn’t stop a smile! He even snorted a brief puff of air out of his nostrils, which was the closest he came to laughing. ‘I wouldn’t use that particular vocabulary in the hearing of your MOHparents, Miss Diana,’ he advised.
‘Oh?’
‘It’s a mafia term, you know.’
‘So? Mafias are perfectly respectable organisations. They have their place within the structures and hierarchies of power, all beneath the umbrella of the Lex Ulanova.’
‘Quite right,’ said Iago. ‘Trillions of human beings, most of them living in the Sump with nothing to lose – it’s a vast potential for chaos, anarchy and destruction. Order can only be maintained with a large and various body of well-motivated enforcers. Mafiosi have their place in that larger framework of power, as you say. But it is a place several ranks below the Clan Argent. You might just get away with calling me a non-executive director; if only because the language of the Gongsi is less infra dig. But one thing Mrs and Mrs Argent are very particular about . . .’
‘—is our pre-eminence. I know. We’re second only to the Ulanovs themselves. I know. You think I don’t? It will be my family, one day; my Clan. Mine and Eva’s.’
Iago didn’t say anything to this; but he didn’t say anything in a way that somehow implied that this eventuality was far more conditional than Diana’s confidence suggested. She looked at him, through the clear air and the fog of gravity.
‘What?’
But he shook his head, still smiling.
‘It’s a test, I know,’ she said, feeling suddenly tired. She even closed her eyes. But this wasn’t a time to go to sleep. ‘Everything’s a test. I don’t doubt our MOHmies love us both, but everything has to be a test, doesn’t it? To discover whether we’re yet worthy, or if we’ll ever be, or goddess-help-me which one of us will be worthy. It’s such,’ she gulped air, opened her eyes wide and sighed out the contents of her lungs. ‘Bore!’ she concluded. ‘Bore, bore, bore.’
‘You ask me about politics, Miss Diana,’ said Iago. ‘I can tell you this: for somebody like you, an important member of one of the most powerful families in this System of trillions – everything is politics. It’s true as well for Miss Eva, however much she tries to flee into the furthest reaches of deep space with her abstruse astronomical research. Your presence on this island is politics.’
‘You’re expecting an attack on the family?’
‘Yes.’
‘From which direction?’
‘From one of the other MOHfamilies,’ he said.
For a moment Dia felt a pang at her illicit communication with Anna Tonks Yu. But Anna would never betray their love. And anyway, nobody knew about it – not her family, not Anna’s. Not even Iago knew that she had sent the message; so it was unlikely any enemy had been able to break it.
‘Which one?’ she asked.
‘We’re not sure. Maybe the Clan Aparaceido. Maybe the Clan Yu.’
Diana’s heart gave a little shudder at that; like the epileptic shiver that a fly does in between passing from perfect stillness to perfect stillness. The shudder passed, as they always do. Foolish as it was (and she knew it was foolish) the love she and Anna shared was not for here-and-now, but for the ages. It was a love that only came into human affairs once in a hundred years. And they had never even met!
‘I can see why the military might – ,’ she said, looking at the floor to cover the momentary wetness in her eyeballs. ‘I mean: I can see why the Clan Aparaceido might think they could land a blow on us. They have their own information-gathering systems – not as effective as ours, of course, or as deeply integrated into the System population. But at least they have them. But the Yu family?’ (just saying the name made her heart hurry!) ‘How would it benefit the transport clan, savaging our information capacities? They have nothing comparable. Would the Ulanovs even permit it? It’s an inevitably losing play, surely?’
‘A fair analysis, Miss,’ Iago said, tartly. ‘But an analysis deficient in certain respects. For one thing, it is old-fashioned to regard the MOHfamilies as single-skill entities. We are no more limited to information and problem solving than the Clan Aparaceido is to military operations, or the Clan Kwong to taxation.’
‘Do you say we?’ she asked, a little stung by the severity of his response.
In turn she saw something she had literally never seen before. She saw Iago blushing. Or, at least, she saw two Jupiter-spots of red fade into view in each of his cheeks, stay there for several seconds, and then dissolve away again. He looked straight at her, and when he spoke his voice was level, but she could see that she had rattled him.
‘You’re quite right, Miss,’ he said, stiffly. ‘I ought not to talk as if I am part of your MOHfamily. I am not; I am only a servant – a Tutor. Nonetheless, I trust you’ll permit me to add nuance to your analysis. The Ulanovs preside over a hard-fought peace, one they have maintained by the strictest application of the Lex Ulanova. Simply enforcing that law absorbs the lion’s share of their energies. They have no personal attachment to any of the five MOHfamilies, any more than they do to any individual Gongsi lower down, or to any particular militia, police force, mafia, cult, band or religion. Whether these entities preserve good relations amongst themselves or whether they destroy one another is ultimately a matter of indifference to the Ulanovs, I believe, unless such conflict threatens the Lex, and therefore their position. Squabbling, provided it falls short of all-out war, is unlikely to do this. Should it turn into a war, then they have the means to intervene and stamp it out. Indeed, historically, the Ulanovs have feared only one thing.’
‘Popular uprising,’ said Diana, placatingly. She was feeling sheepish at having goaded him; for though he was cranky and awkward and unbelievably old and wrinkled, she did have a soft spot for the old fellow. And you couldn’t fault his loyalty.
‘That’s it. It is the numbers involved that make it potentially an unmanageable eventuality,’ said Iago. ‘But until recently they – the Ulanovs themselves, the MOHfamilies below them, the Gongsi below them, and all the other enforcement organisations – have kept the peace. The Sump is crowded with human life, it is tru
e, but it is an intrinsically disorganised swarm, massively internally variegated. And life in the Sump is precarious; if any region of shanty bubbles shows any overt signs of popular unrest, it is a simple matter to break a representative sample of globes, kill an example-making number of malcontents.’
‘You make it sound so clinical!’
‘What it is,’ Iago replied, blankly, ‘is an actuarial matter: the loss of present life balanced against the much larger loss of life a full-scale revolution would entail. But things have changed.’
‘How have they changed?’
‘Ms Joad herself brought the three letters concerned to your attention yesterday.’
‘FTL?’ said Diana. ‘The impossible FTL?’ And then she laughed out loud. ‘I suppose that explains why the Yu family might be interested. Transport with added FTL would open up a whole new avenue of wealth-creation for them! And the Aparaceido: the military are obviously going to have an interest in making their craft faster. Faster than possible.’ She slapped her own leg. ‘They think we have the secret! They think we have it! We’re information, after all. Is that why they want to destroy us, all-of-a-sudden? Oh, I know they’ve wanted to destroy us for a long while, but this would explain why it is so suddenly a threat.’
‘There are various imponderables, should the technology become reality. Although of course you’re correct that it would potentially generate enormous wealth.’
‘Enough wealth to enable a MOHfamily to challenge the supremacy of the Ulanovs, perhaps?’
‘Miss!’ Iago snapped. ‘To speak those words is to commit a crime of lesser treason under the terms of the Lex Ulanova.’
‘Alright, alright. I’m not advocating revolution. But that would be another of the worries, wouldn’t it? If there were such a technology, and let’s for-the-sake-of-argument say it’s reasonably cheap . . . then the whole game would change. The Polloi would all buzz off to distant star systems, out of the reach of the long arm of the Ulanovs. Far from the remit of the Clan Kwong taxation and revenue capacities.’
Iago gazed steadily at her for several long seconds. Then he said: ‘indeed.’
‘Iago – do we have this FTL technology?’
‘By “we”, Miss, you mean the Clan Argent?’
She clucked at him: ‘alright, touchy-touchy Tutor type. I didn’t mean to make you feel excluded, you know. You’re a vital part of the Clan, too, for all your genetic difference. But you haven’t answered my question: do we have it?’
‘No, Miss.’
‘The actual technology? Or the information leading to the technology?’
‘Neither, Miss.’
‘Of course we don’t!’ she said, triumphantly. ‘Because it is an impossibility according to the laws of Physics. But do people believe we have it?’
‘There are,’ said Iago judiciously, ‘suggestions that the data concerning the building of such a drive might exist somewhere.’
‘In the Sump, of course. It starts to make sense. This was presumably what old Joady was on about – if Jack Glass (we read: revolutionary agitators) got hold of the plans for an FTL engine, it would make red rebellion much more likely, and more likely to succeed. When these twenty handservants landed on the island, did you deal with them?’
‘Deal with them, Miss?’
‘Yes: debrief them, check on them, anything like that?’
‘They fall within my purview, yes. Myself and various other people. I had prior dealing with them, and – yes I did visit the servants’ quarters on the night before the crime.’
‘And?’
Iago looked at her. ‘And what, Miss?’
‘Is there anything you can tell me that will help me solve this ma-ma-mystery, my dear Tutor? Were there tensions? Did you walk in on an argument and somebody threatening to kill somebody, anything like that?’ When Iago shook his head she added: ‘but were they discussing FTL in hushed tones?’ She was watching his reactions, but – after the startling faux-pas of the blush – he was too controlled to give anything away. ‘What about Jack Glass, did they mention him? Was he lurking in the shadows?’
‘This fishing is rather a clumsy strategy, isn’t it, Miss? For someone of your – talents?’
She glowered at him. ‘Oh I think I’ve done enough of questioning people for today, thank you very much.’
8
The Deep Blue Sea of Why
Diana stumped right out of the building under crawliper power, straight past the waiting policepersons. She didn’t reply to their plaintive ‘farewell Ms Argent’ and ‘let us know if I can be of any other assistance.’
The heat and glare of the unremitting sun. A choir of cicadas making the sound of friction.
She got to the car a little ahead of Iago. ‘I want to go for a swim,’ she told him. ‘You know the place.’
It was a short drive to the coast, and then only a few bumps and shakes as the car’s gelwheels deformed to lumpy legs and walked them down the rocky headland. The beach itself was smooth and broad and white; perfectly deserted, of course. When Diana opened the car door boiling air flowed inside. ‘Gracious,’ she said, struggling out. The afternoon was extraordinarily, vastly hot. As Berthezene and Jong-il climbed back up to find the best places on the rocky headland to keep guard, and with Iago waiting on the lunula-shaped arc of white sand with her clothes, she stripped off and lumbered into the little waves. The water was so fresh with cold that it made her scream with laughter.
She lolled, and basked, enjoying the support of the water against the unrelenting gravity. It occurred to Diana (she wasn’t certain of this, rationally; but it felt intuitively correct) that she had all the pieces of data she needed to solve this mystery. But there were a number of different ways she could piece them together, and her brain refused to bring the conceptual mosaic into proper coordination. Vetting the servants. Bashing in somebody’s head. FTL. Revolution. Fins on a spaceship. Fins? What has fins? Fish do.
Why did fins keep reoccurring to her?
She breaststroked further from the shore. The sunlight fell in curling folds and shafts through the water. Such clear water! Ice and blue and Perspex-coloured down to the sandy bottom except where the sunlight struck it, and made something yellower and smoky out of the medium.
But she was easily tired, and soon made her way back to the beach to sprawl on the smartowel Iago had laid out for her. He sat facing away, and for a while she just lay there letting the sun press down upon her flesh. She was very soon dry.
Birdsong was audible, a constant dribble of flute-like noise, rather lovely-on-the-ear, actually. The breeze smelt of sea salt and olive trees and resin and heat. So hot! It was tantalising that she could hear the birdsong so clearly and yet not see the birds. Craning her neck a little, she had a view of the knot of trees at the top of the rocky slope, with their sugary load of blossom. Maybe the birds were in there.
After a while she asked: ‘how old are you, Iago? Very old, aren’t you?’
‘Older than you, certainly Miss,’ he said, without turning around.
‘But how much older?’ She sat up and pulled the towel around her. ‘Turn around for she-heaven’s sake, won’t you? Golly I can’t talk to your back.’
Iago got to his feet – actually stood straight up, as if to attention, and turned to face his charge. ‘It is in your bId, of course.’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘I’m 45 years old, Miss Diana.’
‘Oh that is old! But you look even older, you know.’
‘I’ve spent a good amount of my life upland, and time goes – differently there.’
‘I’ve spent almost all my life upland!’ said Diana, with a little shriek. ‘Oh don’t I know how time drags!’
‘Well, when I say upland,’ Iago replied, with a queer, unreadable little look in his eye. ‘I suppose I mean further up than that.’
But Dia wasn’t particularly interested in that. ‘So you are forty-five, regular, and I’m sixteen. That’s a gap. We could never get mar
ried, with an age chasm like that, could we?’
‘The difference in our ages is certainly a barrier,’ agreed Iago, coolly. ‘In addition, in terms of status, wealth, political influence and every other consideration, we are spectacularly ill-matched. You are beautiful and I am ugly. Your mothers would have me killed if I took any sort of advantage of my position. And quite apart from anything else, you are female and I am male. I believe your mothers have higher hopes for you than that you marry a – man.’
Dia shrugged; for on this matter she had no strong views one way or another. It was as distant from her current life as the universal background radiation. ‘You know I’m only teasing you, Ee, ar, goy? I’m not in the least atom interested in sex or marriage or boys or even girls at the moment, and certainly not in an old relic like you.’
He smiled a chilly smile. ‘Precisely, Miss Diana.’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t tease you. I am a shocking tease, I know,’ she said. ‘But you don’t mind?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘You love it, actually.’
‘Well—’ he started to say.
But before he could contradict her she added: ‘you love me, at any rate?’
‘Naturally I do, Miss,’ he said, in a formal voice.
‘Oh that’s the CRF speaking! If you were a free agent, you’d hate me. And anyway I’ve much more pressing things to worry about than that. I have to solve this murder! A real-life murder!’
Iago didn’t say anything; he didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. But Diana knew him well enough. ‘Don’t take that tone, Iago,’ she said.
‘Indeed not,’ he said, mildly.
‘My MOHmies are counting on me. They know I can solve it. Of course they love Eva, but I’m their clever daughter. I’m their people-canny daughter. They need me to be that. The future of the family depends upon me being that. This is my chance to prove it, really to prove it!’
