by Adam Roberts
‘Your MOHparents have good evidence to that effect.’
‘Is it,’ Eva said, trying for a flush of humour, ‘what Joad said? Is the legendary Jack Glass coming down to kill us?’
‘Personally I do not believe that the legendary Jack Glass is coming down to kill us,’ said Iago in a level voice.
Eva sighed. ‘Sit down, Iago,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’d better sit down. Is the attack imminent? Do we have to move again right now?’
Iago lowered himself, creakily, into a chair. ‘Not right now. Probably next week; maybe in a fortnight. Certainly before your MOHsister’s birthday. Both the Mrs Argents are agreed, though, that an attack is likely. They suspect the Clan Yu, but, speaking personally, I wonder if it will come from another direction.’
‘Is that why Joad came down?’
Iago put his head a little to one side. As a general policy, he considered it was better not to answer questions the sisters put to him. Answering questions was their purpose in life after all. It was what they were made for.
‘Politics,’ said Eva, eventually. Then, surprisingly, she launched into an unexpected tangent: ‘are my MOHmies disappointed in me, do you think?’
Iago considered. ‘You could ask them.’
But Eva lifted her left arm, and let it fall under the influence of gravity. ‘Even if they were disappointed, they wouldn’t tell me. Not because they’d want to spare my feelings, of course; but because, like Dia, I am what they made me. To be disappointed in me would be for them to be disappointed in themselves. And though they are brilliant in many ways, my dear MOHmies are not good at honest self-criticism. The deep dark truthful mirror.’
For a moment they were both silent. Through the window, endless light fell upon the prone land; the ancient Earth yellow and brown and exhausted green beneath its holy blue sky. A figure went hurrying past in the middle distance, from left to right, plunging through the longer grass beneath the olive trees. Such strenuous exercise in the heat of the day! The motion of boots in the grass threw up a cloud of butterflies, winking taupe and brilliant green-blue in variegated motion as they scattered into the air between the trees.
Eventually Iago drew breath and spoke. ‘Diana says she has solved the mystery of Leron’s death.’
Eva’s eyes flickered as her bId prompted her memory. ‘The dead servant. I solved that yesterday, I believe. One of the other servants did it.’
Iago didn’t reply, so Eva went on: ‘has she? Solved it, I mean?’
‘She hasn’t told me the solution,’ said Iago. ‘And she claimed there were a few details she needed to slot into place, she said. But, I think – yes, she has.’
‘One of the other handservants,’ said Eva. ‘Unless you believe Ms Joad, and it was the magically teleporting Jack Glass. One of the two.’ She looked straight into Iago’s eyes. ‘Why did Joad tell us that Hen-and-Cow story?’
Iago waited.
Eva’s eyelids sank a little. ‘Why do I get the feeling this is a test? This whole thing? Choosing between one or other solution, it hardly matters. It’s only one dead servant.’
‘A fully grown human being,’ said Iago, in a sad voice. ‘With all the emotional and intellectual and practical capacity that entails.’
‘There are trillions of human beings just like him in the Sump,’ said Eva. ‘But that’s not it, is it? We both know that’s not it. The test – is it her or me?’
‘My understanding is that your parents earnestly desire the two of you to work together,’ said Iago. ‘That sounds like a platitude, I daresay. But they mean it. They really do.’
‘That’s just a long-winded way of saying that she passes the test and I don’t,’ said Eva, sulkily.
‘You—’ Iago began. But Eva cut across him. ‘Don’t condescend to me, Iago. I really won’t bear that.’
He dipped his head.
Eva looked again through the viewing wall. The cypresses looked unnaturally upright and stiff against the sky, like dog’s ears, perked and ready for bad news. But Eva knew the moment had already passed, the tide had rushed in between herself and Diana, and she had been stranded on the wrong side. The odd thing was that she experienced that realisation, in the moment, as a mode of relief. Presumably this was relief that the more acute pain associated with the moment of crisis was already behind her. But oceanic disappointment and gloom were poised, too, to wash over her. That, of course, would come.
‘What was it?’ she asked eventually. ‘Was it the politics?’
‘It’s always politics,’ said Iago. ‘Politics is everything. The status of the Argent Clan depends upon riding the turbulence of politics, every hour of every day.’
‘I can understand politics,’ said Eva, unable to keep a tone of pleading from her voice. ‘As a system I do. I don’t meant to sound plaintive, but I can do it! Oh, maybe I don’t have the empathetic instincts she does. I wasn’t made that way. But my capacity for probabilistic solutioneering is . . .’ She stopped. There was no point in berating Iago. He was only the messenger, after all. ‘I’ll finish this PhD,’ she added, sulkily. ‘I don’t care what you say.’
‘I know you will.’
‘What is it with you and my MOHmies, anyway? You’re old-school loyal to them, aren’t you?’
‘I owe them a great deal,’ said Iago. ‘They took me in. Plus, of course, we are working for the same thing. The stakes are enormously high.’
‘Really? Isn’t that just your usual political boilerplate claptrap?’
‘No,’ said Iago, looking very serious. ‘It’s the cold truth. It’s the truth of the grave. The stakes are higher than they have ever been. The risk is greater than humanity has ever faced before.’
‘I don’t want to know,’ said Eva. To her credit, she really didn’t.
‘You feel nothing for Leron, dead on the floor,’ said Iago. ‘And why should you? You never knew him. You see him as one atom in a quasi-gaseous accumulation of – as you say – trillions of human beings. And for Diana, the problem has precisely been coming round to your point of view. It’s seeing those trillions as a resource, and not as a congregation of humanity.’
‘You’ve delivered your message,’ said Eva. ‘I’d like you to leave me now, so I can get back to my research.’
Iago got awkwardly to his feet, his kneecaps popping. ‘Diana will probably want to explain the solution to the mystery to you after she wakes up. She’s proud of herself for figuring it out.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Eva. ‘We can all gather in the library and learn precisely how the butler did it – or the doctor. Was it the doctor? I seem to remember that it’s always the doctor who is the murderer in these stories.’
He got to the door of her room before she called after him. ‘Having failed the test,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’m entitled to know. Was the FTL thing a red herring?’
‘It wasn’t,’ said Iago. ‘I’m sorry to say.’
Eva sniffed, dismissively. ‘The FTL murders!’ she declared. ‘And the murderer. Was it one of the handservants, like I said? Or was it Jack Glass, as Ms Joad insisted? I don’t doubt that my little MOHsis picked the right one. But I can’t shake the feeling that if I’d chosen either of them, I would have been wrong.’
Iago nodded.
‘I knew it!’ said Eva. ‘It’s neither of them!’
‘Or both,’ said Iago. ‘Good afternoon, Miss.’
Eva retreated to her IP. She was disappointed; there was no point in pretending otherwise. It is always galling to fail a test, and it was made much more galling by realising only belatedly that it had been a test. Of course, she wouldn’t be expelled from the inner sanctum of the Clan. Her wiser angel tried to suggest she see it as a blessing – for it would leave her more time to pursue her properly astroscientific research. And she could not begrudge her MOHsister her triumph (did Dia even realise that she had triumphed?). The disaffection she felt was, she decided, something else.
She tried to settle to her Champagne Supernova work, but the id
iot word ‘politics’ kept yapping through her mind. ‘Politics’! In the absolution of cold and distance politics meant nothing at all. The object of her study was further removed from politics than anything had ever been.
She went into her IP, and, steeling herself, went (as it were) through a door. It was no ordinary virtuality door; it was, on the contrary, a carefully concealed portal at the rear of the IP. A person couldn’t wait, passively, forever. Sometimes action is required.
Eva acted.
The man running through the olive grove, a little while earlier, when the day was hottest and exercise hardest. Why was he in such a hurry?
Diana was in her room. She made a small window in her wall for a while; a porthole looking up at the plastic immensity of blue sky (blue! . . . such a strange colour for sky, when you came to think of it – such a weirdly thin dilution of the natural black). She widened the porthole, made it a wider picture window, and turned the sound up. It was late afternoon now. Korkura heat-haze and stillness possessed the scene. The only sounds were the distant breath-sounds of surf on an unseen beach, and the languid fizzle of cicadas hidden in the grass. Nothing moved. The sky looked like a screen. Two chopsticks of white were drawn upon it, converging towards the apex as two scramjets flew towards the same point, or at least appeared to do, from Dia’s perspective. Even in the climate-balanced calm of her room she somehow felt the heat.
She deleted the window and settled into her gel-bed.
Sleep came straight away.
She dreamed of Iago. This was an odd thing: she rarely dreamt of any of the servants. She was standing on a small green hill: Earth, to judge by the gravity, but a colder and rainier latitude than Korkura’s. The grass was trimmed neat, but the stalks had enough movement left in their abbreviated bodies to respond to the invisible pressure of the wind. All around were green fields, and to the left a wide expanse of blue-green woodland, like a cloud nestling flat against the ground. It was cold. The sky was white and grey, and the air in her nostrils smelt of rain. She knew, somehow, that this hill had once sported a tall tower, now ruinous. When she looked down Dia could see the stumps of granite brick only partly buried in the turf: the remnants of what had once been a mighty structure.
Iago was standing a few metres from her. ‘Where am I?’ she asked him; and then, without waiting for his reply she asked: ‘what are you doing here? I never dream of you.’
‘Asking the dream to interpret the dream is liable to lead to a short circuit,’ he replied, in his croaky old voice.
Beside him was a RACdroid, its metal body gleaming dully in the winter light. ‘Why have you brought a RACdroid? Are we going to witness a contract, you and I?’
‘You passed the test. Your sister didn’t. You are to be sworn in as the official heir of the Clan Argent.’
‘You haven’t even heard my solution!’ she said. Then: ‘it’s a shame for my sister.’
‘We must hope she accepts her shame,’ Iago said, mysteriously.
‘I didn’t mean shame in that sense!’ Then: ‘ruins. Here – and you. Why am I dreaming about ruins?’
‘It’s all in the way a question is phrased, isn’t it?’
She tried again. ‘Alright. What is ruined, that I should dream about it?’
‘That’s better!’ he said, and she experienced a mild shock of annoyance at his condescending manner.
She looked up. The sky was filling with storm clouds: imperial purple, darkest blue and black. They were great chunks of cloud, moving like solid objects, like portions of architectural masonry. They moved in with more-than-natural speed.
Then Iago said something unexpected. ‘The stars are ruined. There is no warning, they are rent in pieces and hurtle out faster than the light they shed.’ What a strange thing to say! The storm-clouds wholly filled the sky now. The quality of light changed.
‘Their own light,’ she said. Raindrops began to plummet, heavy as metal. The turf generated a surroundsound drumming noise. Dia had a flash of insight: the raindrops were, each of them, little hammerheads; and every strand of grass was a human being; and – ¡ flash! – what was that? Lightning! So it came again – ¡ flash! – and Diana looked across to Iago. Her face was wet and her flesh was shivering with cold. Soaked! She could hardly see him through the semiopacity of the rainfall. A lightning flash, its brillianting fishbone structure visible for a microsecond, but living on spectrally on the retinas. Each flash was the inexplicable death of a star.
‘What is ruined?’ Iago was saying, shaking his head as the rainfall bounced off his pate and droplets swarmed down about him like a mist. ‘We are.’
You must understand: Dia was not used to having this kind of dream. Frankly it unnerved her. What made things worse is that she was forcibly woken in the middle of it by somebody else – and this was an unprecedented invasion of her privacy. She came out of sleep snarling, wheeling her arms in an attempt at fighting off this monster, this violator. But gravity was too debilitating, and her blows bounced feebly off the chest of whoever was rousing her.
‘Miss! Miss Diana!’
‘How dare you,’ she gasped, her mouth dry. ‘Interrupt my dreaming! I need my dreams to process my data—’
‘Miss, we have to go.’
It was Jong-il. Even as her fury buzzed in her head she knew that something must be very wrong. ‘Jong-il,’ she croaked. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s not safe for you here, Miss,’ said the bodyguard, helping her out of the gel-bed. ‘We have to leave now.’
Her rage drained away. ‘Do I have time for a wash,’ she snapped, ‘—or must I run away with specks of gel sticking to me?’
‘Please, Miss, Miss, be quick,’ Jong-il urged.
She was: the wash took only moments, and fitting the crawlipers moments more. ‘Are we actually under attack?’ she asked, as she followed Jong-il out of her bedroom. Iago was in the hall outside, looking (despite the absence of rain) distractingly like her dream version of him.
‘I’m afraid so, Miss Diana,’ he said. ‘I apologise for waking you, but it is imperative we leave Korkura right away.’
‘Who is it?’
‘That’s a little unclear: either Clan Aparaceido, or perhaps Clan Yu, using Aparaceido ordnance.’
‘Is it war?’
Iago shook his head. ‘I doubt that. It may be, of course; but I believe it’s much more likely to be an opportunistic strike. They chanced upon information that identified you and your sister as being here, on this island. They’re acting on it in the hope that they can take you both out. That would inconvenience your parents greatly.’
‘It would inconvenience me more,’ Diana retorted, drily. ‘Is it certain? Is it happening now?’
‘Not now. But our intelligence says it will happen within the next twelve hours.’
‘Odds?’
‘Our best intelligence is: point five seven.’
She nodded. It was certainly good enough reason to evacuate the island. ‘Where’s Eva?’ she asked.
‘You and she will leave separately,’ said Iago. ‘Your parents are adamant about that. They can’t risk you both in one craft at the same time.’
It made sense. ‘Then let me say goodbye to her, and let’s get on with it,’ she said.
The three of them went along to Eva’s room, and the two sisters embraced. Both were wearing the same expression: sober, but focused. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be Hastings to your Holmes,’ said Eva. ‘It was petulant of me.’
‘It hardly matters,’ said Diana. ‘And it’s Mycroft. Hastings goes with Poirot.’
‘So you worked out who actually killed the handservant?’ Eva asked.
‘You were right,’ said Diana. ‘It was another one of the hand-servants. Who else would it be?’
‘Hah!’ Eva laughed. ‘So did I pass the test after all? A touch ironic, in the circumstances.’
‘It’s more complex than that,’ said Diana. And then: ‘what do you mean?’
‘Nothing. Only, maybe I sho
uld do more of these murder mystery thingies? I could challenge you for your crown. You and that girl you have that crush on, the one you’re so secretive about, who also plays them. What’s her name?’
Diana winced, and looked away, and Eva suddenly understood. ‘Never mind,’ she said, wanting genuinely to console her MOHsister. ‘Danger is good for us. It’s like gravity – if you live your life wholly without it, you grow feeble. We’ll be alright.’
But Diana was blushing. ‘Will you permit me to apologise to you?’
Eva considered this gravely for a while. ‘Alright.’
They embraced again. ‘Love makes you do reckless things,’ said Dia. ‘I know,’ said Eva.
‘We must leave, Miss,’ said Jong-il, leaning in. ‘I am miserably sorry, but it must be.’
‘We have ballistic craft here on the island, of course,’ murmured Iago. ‘But a direct launch – given that the enemy probably knows where we are – would be too dangerous. We have half a dozen plasmaser installations on the Mediterranean coast, and it would be safer to go up in a car. Miss Eva and Jong-il will go down to Tobruk, and ride up from there. Miss Diana, Deño and I will ride up on an Italian plasmaser a little later.’
‘I don’t see that a plasmaser car is any harder to shoot down than a ballistic craft,’ said Eva.
‘It isn’t.’ Iago nodded once to acknowledge the correctness of Eva’s observation. ‘Indeed,’ he added, ‘it is larger, and travels more slowly, making it quite a lot easier to shoot, actually. But the car will be full of valuable cargo and also of many other people, so shooting it would be unambiguously an act of war. Shooting a private ballistic transport would be a different matter. More deniable; easier to explain away if need be. We do not believe the aggressors here – whichever Clan it is – wish actually to declare war.’
And Eva had no more questions. She left immediately with Jong-il.
10
Gravity or Guilt?
Diana was anxious to go; but she accepted that she had to wait until her sister was well away. So she went outside and sat in a recliner on the main lawn, whilst Berthezene took up a discrete position twenty metres away, with his gun out. She felt impatient, but she didn’t feel afraid. Had being under constant guard blunted her capacity for feeling fear? She regarded the future blithely enough, certainly.
