Jack Glass

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I have lots of old friends,’ said Iago; ‘and they’re well scattered.’

  ‘And now he’s dead,’ said Aishwarya. ‘Truly, death follows where you travel, Jack Glass.’

  ‘Oh, but Jack didn’t kill him,’ said Diana. ‘He was standing right next to me when it happened. The RACdroid was there too: you can see, in the datapool, the three of us standing together. We were both sprayed with his blood. Whoever fired the fatal shot must have had all of us in her sights. But she chose to kill only Bar-le-duc.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Or he, of course.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Diana. ‘And we don’t know who she or he was – or for whom they were working. Naturally, we analysed the open RACdroid’s datapool, hoping it would provide us with clues. But it only made things more confusing. Specifically, its data seems to be corrupted. But how can its data be corrupted if its seals are kosher? Could it be a production flaw?’

  ‘If its seals are kosher,’ said Iago, ‘then at least its testimony will stand up in court. At least the contract will still hold. Although I suppose the court may be confused by what it says.’

  ‘After what fashion is its data corrupt?’ asked Aishwarya.

  ‘It gets the order of things . . . wrong,’ said Iago.

  ‘You mean its records disagree with what you recall?’ said Aishwarya. ‘In that case, I’d respectfully suggest it is your memory that is at fault.’

  ‘Its records disagree with the laws of physics and causality,’ said Iago. ‘But that’s the least of it, really. The whole thing is an imposs-i-bility. Bar-le-duc died inside a sealed bubble, a small home-sphere – in fact, my own house. Whoever killed him must have been inside that sphere when they committed the crime. There was no way they could have got out of the sphere after the crime. It’s a small bubble, with only one airlock. The RACdroid had it in view the whole time, and nobody left through it. There are no other exits from the house, and the skin of the bubble remains intact. Accordingly, whoever killed Bar-le-duc must still have been there after the crime. But we searched that bubble very thoroughly, and there was nobody there. It’s like the murderer vanished into thin air.’

  ‘A locked-room mystery,’ said Aishwarya, nodding. She frowned deeply, and then smiled brightly. ‘Oh I’m sorry for old Bar-le-duc! Though I remind myself that he devoted his life to working for the Ulanovs! And that fact makes me a little bit less sorry, and a little bit more glad. Still, it would be good to know who killed him.’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Iago. ‘It is a particularly puzzling mystery. More puzzling still if the data of this RACdroid is to be believed.’

  ‘This RACdroid is no rogue,’ said Aishwarya. ‘I’ll double-check the seals, of course, but I’m telling you now, it’s a kosher machine. We can review the data together, if you like. Diana Argent, upon my soul! Here in my very own front yard. So sweetpea: Jack Glass once called me the cleverest woman in the System, and now he says that you’re cleverer. Well: don’t you think between us we can get to the bottom of this?’

  2

  The Nightmare at Gideon

  We have to go backwards in order to understand how we got here. To trace the line from the death to death: from Leron, Berthezene and Deño ending their days down at the bottom of Earth’s gravity-hole, to the explosive death of Bar-le-duc, out in freefall space. We can join the dots.

  This is what happened. Pay attention. Diana and Iago had passed through a hundred islands, from grand asteroid-carved mansions to strings of shanty bubbles and even to solitary globes thousands of kilometres from anywhere else. Sapho went with them; praying to her God, Ra’allah, to preserve them all. For the time being, at least, those prayers seemed to be working.

  In most of these places Iago had at least one friend. The longer Diana spent in his company, the more she was struck by how little she really knew him. He was a different man in each environment, and none of these personas had anything in common with the deferential servant who had been so constant a presence in Dia’s former life.

  Her former life. She thought about it, often, of course. Six months had passed since everything she knew had been turned upside down, but already that former life had acquired a distant, almost an historical patina. Had she really lived so sheltered an existence? The least glance in the mirror naturally reminded her of her sister – or, adding a few imaginary lines, her parents. Yet she was conscious in herself only of a kind of hermetic detachment. ‘Should I not miss them more?’ she asked Iago, one day, as they waited out another two-day flight from bubble to bubble. ‘You’ll see them again,’ he had replied. Only later, as she wrapped herself in a blanket and tied herself by a belt to the wall, readying herself for sleep, did it occur to her that his answer had not addressed her question at all.

  She thought, too, of the sudden explosion of violence that had happened on Korkura. It also seemed unreal, in her memory; virtual rather than actual.

  Then she had her first nightmare.

  The first of them happened in a cluster of bubbles called Gideon. This was a mixed community of several thousand, the majority of whom worshipped a deity they called The Temporal Christ. Iago docked to buy supplies, and Diana and Sapho were both of them glad to escape the confinement of Red Rum 2020.

  The bubbles’ theology was explicated at length by a very elderly woman, dressed modestly in a blue scarf and long-sleeved top from the waist up, but with nothing but skimpy hot-pants below. The oval and circular marks of removed tumours were visible at several places on her legs. Her name, improbably enough, was Delphinium Junceum; and she had evidently known Iago a long time. Certainly she chatted happily with them as they shared a meal of treated ghunk and bubble-grown fruit. ‘Our belief,’ she said, ‘is not that time is an illusion – whatever our enemies say!’ ‘I certainly never thought so,’ Diana assured her, gravely; although she had heard of this sect for the first time only half an hour before. ‘No!’ Delphinium, insisted. ‘We do not believe that time is an illusion! Rather, we believe that time only existed for thirty-three years, when God himself fell into the temporal element. Time ended when he ascended to heaven.’

  ‘It didn’t exist before?’

  ‘No – when Christ was born in Bethlehem, so too was the whole world. His birth was the creation. Of course, the cosmos was created with the traces of its imagined past: fossils were created inside the rocks at that moment; the memories of past time, archaeological records and books – like the Talmud. But none of this actually happened. It was all just an imaginary backstory, embedded within the world when it was created.’

  Delphinium explained the iconography of her brooch: a cross contained within a circle. ‘The circle is the female physical aperture through which Christ came into the cosmos, the cross the instrument upon which he was crucified and so departed from the cosmos. Together they are the clock face. In Christ it is always noon and three and six and nine o’clock, just as it is always quarter past these hours, and half past, and quarter to. It is all time, all the time, in Christ.’

  ‘I see,’ said Diana. Without her bId, she was compelled to dredge her memory for such knowledge as she possessed about antique clock face arrangements.

  They drank soursweet local wine together, and Diana became a little tipsy. Other inhabitants of Gideon floated over and joined the discussion. It appeared there was doctrinal dissension on the topic of what had happened to time after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Some claimed that time had indeed stopped, but that it had recently started again – once more, with the illusory backstory of the preceding two and a half millennia embedded in it – which they took to be evidence that the second coming of Christ was underway. Others insisted that time had not started again, that we were indeed living in a timeless cosmos, and that the appearance of the passage of time was merely an illusion, a sort of distant echo of the rich plenitude of actual Christ-time, which had set up some kind of standing wave in the medium of existence. Diana discovered that she
enjoyed teasing out the arcane implications of these conflicting theologies, exploring the limits of a self-supporting, unfalsifiable but of course illusory conceptual structure. It was a kind of problem-solving. Afterwards they sang songs, and played human pinball amongst the branching baobab branches. When she finally tied herself to a branch and settled to sleep, Diana was smiling.

  Having a nightmare was, accordingly, unexpected. She was standing back in the oppressive gravity of Earth, upon the marble floor of the Korkura house. Ms Joad was there, and beside her an indistinct entity who was – somehow Diana knew – also Ms Joad, although she appeared to share none of her physical particularities. Iago was dead on the floor, his own blood crawling across the floor in a hideous, monstrous, simulacrum of life. It was like a giant flatworm, glistening and red-black. Then, horribly, it turned back and crawled over Iago’s corpse. It seemed to be devouring him. It was inexpressibly repulsive to watch. Diana looked about her, and saw that she was not after all in the Korkura house. It scared her to think that she didn’t know where she was. Ms Joad spoke, and as she did so little sparks and licks of flame played about the corners of her mouth. ‘Feathers or lead?’ she asked. ‘You must choose my dear. Feathers or lead?’ Diana knew that either answer would bring a terrible consequence upon her. ‘Oh, please,’ she cried, in a terror of anticipation, tears bubbling from her eyes, ‘please may I avoid the question altogether?’ But Joad only repeated: ‘feathers or lead?’ And she had in her hand a knife, fashioned of rough unpolished glass, which she held close to Diana’s face. Somewhere, behind her, a great roar was building, like the sound of a descending elevator air-braking, the noise growing louder and louder and more and more terrible, and Diana thought: I cannot avoid answering this question, and either answer is as likely to be wrong as right. So, although it is alien to everything I am and everything I can do, I must guess. I must simply guess. She opened her mouth to answer the impossible question, and at precisely that moment she understood what the roaring was. It was the sound of her own death, which she was somehow hearing out of time, perceiving the afterwards of the event before the event. And the blood slug leapt with a whipcrack sound from Iago’s corpse and sealed over her face and crammed into her mouth.

  She woke coughing, and screaming hoarsely in broken breaths between coughs. Her lungs were on fire. Sapho was beside her. ‘What wrong, Miss? What is it?’

  But the terror had pierced Diana’s soul, and she was not in charge of herself. For a long time all she could say was: ‘blood! Blood! Blood!’ – punctuating the raspy utterance with coughs. The repetition alarmed Sapho enough to make her wake Iago up. He brought her a globe of coke-water, which helped her calm her coughing. ‘What was it?’ he asked. ‘A nightmare?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Only a nightmare,’ he said, in what perhaps was intended as a soothing voice. ‘Not real!’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she gasped. ‘Dreams are a crucial part of how I . . . how I do what I do. A dream like this . . . it is death! It is death, it is destruction coming.’ She was crying a little as she said this, but putting it into words helped clarify her thoughts. The memory of Joad’s cruel face; of the strange inchoate creature of black blood, of the feeling of suffocation, was very vivid in her mind. ‘I never have nightmares,’ she said. ‘I never have them! Dreams are my workspace.’

  The interior of the globe was as bright as day; though almost all the population were asleep.

  ‘Too much soursweet wine,’ was Iago’s opinion.

  Sapho tied herself to Diana’s branch and the two embraced, which did manage to calm Dia a little. Soon enough Sapho went back to sleep, and Diana did not. Presently she began to find the other girl’s presence constricting. She disentangled herself from Sapho’s limbs, and moved herself along the branch. Eventually, after a long, fretful interlude, she went back to sleep.

  In the morning Iago spent an hour in close conference with a dozen Gideonites. Diana and Sapho explored the walls of the world in Delphinium’s company. Dia was unhappy at the previous night’s dream, still jangled and unnerved. ‘It means death,’ she said to Sapho. ‘It means death is coming.’

  ‘Death is always coming, Miss’ said Sapho. ‘Ra’allah permits us to know as much. All he withholds is the when.’

  ‘The when,’ said Diana, in a small voice, ‘is: soon.’

  When Iago emerged from the sphere’s main yurt he looked vaguely troubled. ‘What was that about?’ Diana asked. ‘Revolution,’ he replied. ‘They want it to happen now. They don’t want to hear the time’s not right.’

  ‘They’re looking to you to initiate it?’ Sapho asked, disbelievingly.

  They left Gideon that afternoon, after haggling over the price of a block of fuel. The haggling was, of course, a constant of life in the Sump. It was usually undertaken vocally, with great vehemence and passion. In Gideon, though, Iago’s offers were met with choral chanting of the bubble’s counter-offers. It was rather charming; although the negotiation was no less forceful for its musical delivery.

  Time to go. They all strapped into to their g-couches, and hauled away again on a snail-shell-shape spiral. After the initial burn, Diana made her way to the porthole and stared at the vacancy outside. It ought to be possible to see the burn-signatures of ships, freighters and sloops. To see the scattered glory of billions of bubbles. But all she saw was a blackness insufficiently alleviated with stars.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked Iago.

  ‘To visit some good friends of mine,’ Iago said. But after a day and a half’s travel they arrived to find their destination deserted, and no hint as to where the occupants had gone. It was a string of four bubbles, of which three were breached and empty. Light strips still beamed in the innards, but vegetation was freeze-dried and detritus swirled very slowly in the vacuum. ‘What happened here?’ Dia asked, as the Red Rum drifted past this wreckage. ‘Police,’ Iago replied. ‘I suppose.’ The fourth bubble was still intact, and lit within; but when they docked and opened the door they found a space choked with unmannerly vegetation, and without human habitation. The air was heady, over-oxygenated. ‘I suppose the police breached the other three globes to herd the population into this one,’ said Iago. ‘When your globe bursts, as they sometimes do, you scurry like rats through the escape schutes, and into the next one. The police just need to pop them in sequence to corral all the population in one place. Then they could arrest them, ship them off.’ ‘Why?’ asked Diana, putting her palm over her nose. The stink of the plants was surprisingly intense, and, oddly, more animal than vegetable. Some genetically modified bulb or fruit, she supposed, designed to supplement the dreary diet of ghunk. ‘I mean – what for?’

  ‘Who knows? The legal rubric was probably political dissent. Although maybe it was trade fraud. There’s a huge amount of barter in the Sump, and since barter is, strictly speaking, illegal, it gives the police a pretext at any time they need one.’

  ‘But why bother?’

  ‘They may have had a specific reason. Or they may just have needed to hit targets, for prison labour, or indenture service. Speak to regular policepeople, and they’ll complain about how their lives are ridden by quotas. Plus, confiscating stuff from houses is sometimes lucrative. Though it’s usually not. People out here are too poor to own anything particularly valuable.’

  Iago put a slow quarter-burn on to move them into open space. For a while they all just lay, enduring the drag of acceleration. Eventually the burn ended, and they were able to dismount their g-couches. ‘I’ve picked up some news,’ Iago announced. ‘Well, gossip. Or perhaps it’s the same thing?’

  ‘What news?’ asked Diana.

  ‘First, your parents are well. I deduce this from the fact that they are still undetected by the authorities, despite some furious activity. Secondly, Miss Joad – you recall her?’

  Diana smiled mirthlessly

  ‘Well,’ said Iago. ‘She has been punished for her failure to apprehend us. The Ulanovs were not happy with
her.’

  Diana felt joy flush through her chest at this news. ‘Really? Did they execute her?’

  ‘Not that. But she has been demoted a long way down the hierarchy.’

  The nightmares still came, though. That very night Diana woke from dreams of blood and death, orchestrated by her subconsciousness’s eidolon of Miss Joad. She was less debilitated by this one than her first, but it was still intensely unpleasant.

  It was two days’ flight to their next destination: a Fac. Not, Iago assured them, an illegal operation, though it was remote enough from the usual trajectories of police sloops to be, he said, one shade of grey. But in fact the crew largely maintained a legal operation.

  The Fac was a linked series of pressurised ovals, inside of which meat was being grown in semisentient slabs. Iago greeted the human crew – a dozen men, no women, all with the sunblast sigil of Ra’allah tattooed onto their foreheads. Sapho greeted them with smiles, and they sang a solar chant together. Then they all drank bovrilcohol, played mahjong together, and there was a great deal of laughter and singing.

  ‘The seventy-percent rule has hurt us badly,’ said Samm, one of the more animated of the farmers.

  ‘The seventy-percent rule?’

  ‘The Lex Ulanova assumes that thirty percent of all transactions in the Sump are fraudulent,’ explained a man called Chilli, whose paper-white skin was marked with multiple circles and ovals of pale pink scarflesh where tumours had been removed. ‘It’s a concession of reality, I suppose, but also it’s an arbitrary figure – deeper in the Sump and pretty much all the trade is fraudulent: if you can call growing figs and tomatoes and swapping them with neighbours for roasted beetle or powdered urea illegal. But for most of the Sump life is subsistence; ghunk, sunlight, there’s no surplus there for trade. On the other hand, out here, nearer Earth-moon – well, if we could get away with thirty percent black trade, we’d be happy. We can’t, though. Pretty much all the meat we grow is sold in bulk contracts, and the money passes through kosher accounts, and all tariffs and duties are deducted automatically by AI. We’re almost entirely legal, I’m sorry to say.’