by Adam Roberts
‘But this, this, this – I mean, the RACdroid’s recording – is data. Inarguable,’ said Iago. ‘We can’t argue with it. The shot was fired from outside.’
‘Indeed,’ agreed Aishwarya.
‘So what happened to the bullet?’ Iago pressed. ‘It was forceful enough to tear an entire police sloop into shreds of spaceship metal, to punch through half a metre of house plastic, and to atomise Bar-le-duc. But then, instead of snapping through the other side of the bubble it . . . vanishes? How do you explain that?’
They sipped, and chewed, and were silent for a while.
‘Shall I tell you what I think is interesting?’ said Diana. ‘The timing of it. Bar-le-duc’s sloop has managed to evade your early warning systems, and is about to land, burn through your walls and take us all by surprise. Then a mysterious flash – quantum foam, sure; a random asteroid burn, whatever it was – but it just happens to burst like the Star of Bethlehem, to warn us.’
‘Happenstance,’ suggested Iago. ‘As my good friend, here . . .’
Dia ignored him. ‘And then Bar-le-duc boards us, with his thugs, and the best you can do by way of bargaining leverage is to negotiate a legal amnesty for me.’
‘Nothing I could have said would have induced Bar to give me up,’ said Iago. ‘He’d been chasing me for many years. I was the great prize of his career.’
‘Could you not have fought him?’ Aishwarya asked. ‘You surely haven’t forgotten how to fight?’
‘If I had fought him, we would all have died,’ Iago said. ‘That is certainly what would have happened. When he came aboard he was accompanied by four of his hired guns. And besides: the deal I struck with him – immunity from prosecution for Ms Argent, here – was dependent upon my not resisting arrest. The deal was important. Accordingly, I didn’t resist arrest.’
‘Exactly my point,’ said Diana. ‘The timing of it must be significant! You were just about to go off with him – and at precisely that moment an unknown individual flies past the house and blows him into a mist of blood and matter. Ms Aishwarya here believes in coincidence, and I am content to respect her superior experience of life. But it looks to me too well timed to be chance.’
‘Chance,’ said Iago, in a blank voice.
‘You’re holding something back, Jack,’ Diana said.
‘Am I?’ he said. ‘I usually find that a good strategy.’
‘Oh I know you didn’t kill him,’ she said. ‘I was hanging right beside you – the RACdroid confirms it. But if you didn’t actually shoot him, I still wonder if you’re not behind it somehow.’
‘Miss Diana!’ objected Sapho, surprisingly. ‘How can you say such a thing?’
But Iago only laughed, once again. ‘You were there, Diana. You’re my alibi! If even my alibi thinks I’m guilty, then what chance—’
‘The RACdroid too,’ put in Aishwarya.
‘What?’
‘It is also your alibi.’
‘That too. An infallible alibi, too. Ah, but this is an immensely valuable machine,’ Iago said, reaching across and patting its metallic surface. ‘You see: quite apart from anything – if I killed Bar it would constitute resisting arrest, and as such would invalidate the contract. Your immunity would no longer be valid.’
‘My immunity!’ repeated Diana, scornfully.
‘Believe me,’ he said, earnestly. ‘I would do anything to avoid invalidating your legal immunity.’
She had been able to contain her annoyance up to this point, but this was too much. This was the final straw. Diana had had enough of this chaff, pushed off hard with both legs and floated away, without saying goodbye. It was rude, of course. But she no longer cared.
Iago had the sense to leave Diana to herself for a while. She explored all across the curving walls of that greenspace. Then she spent half an hour staring out into space. Natives stared at her, from their branches, or on the variously angled porches and windows, and this spooked her. Nobody approached her, much less offered her any violence, but their mute surveillance struck Diana as oppressive. ‘Miss Diana?’ It was Sapho.
‘He infuriates me,’ she said. ‘He just infuriates me.’
‘Jack? Surely he wants the best for you.’
‘How can you defend him?’ she snapped at the other girl. ‘He set up that situation, on Korkura. He put you in the closed room with the man who raped you. It was a game to him!’
‘It was justice,’ Sapho retorted, with dignity.
At another time these words, and the way Sapho delivered them, might have brought Diana up short. But she was being carried along on the juggernaut of her own anger. ‘Justice? It was horrible – it has given me nightmares! Blood, death and mutilation. Horrible.’
‘You think it wasn’t horrible for me?’ said Sapho, flushing. ‘I was the one who pushed the hammer onto his skull. It was horrible for me too. But I come from a world where people are not insulated from horrors the way the rich are.’
‘Sapho!’ cried Diana, shocked. ‘You’re rude.’
Sapho’s dark face darkened further, and her hands trembled. ‘He understands justice,’ she said. ‘You do not. You don’t understand him at all.’
‘Good goddess, Sapho – is this some reaction to going cold-turkey on your CRFs?’
‘Your goddess is a sham,’ Sapho retorted. ‘Ra’allah will burn her to ashes with the light of His majesty.’ And then, because the pharmakon was not entirely metabolised out of her system, and because acting in so insubordinate a way to a member of the Clan Argent went against all her training, Sapho burst into tears. ‘Miss! I’m sorry – I’m sorry. I’m sorry!’
‘Really, Sapho!’ said Diana, her eyes wide. ‘You’re not yourself!’
‘It’s true. It’s the truth. I’m sorry Miss – I’m sorry. I’m going back to the Rum. I’m going back to the Rum until I have taken a hold of myself. Until I have recovered my courtesy, Miss.’ And with a strong kick-out of her legs Sapho shot through the doorway out of the bubble.
Diana was left jangled by this encounter – servants did not speak in such a way to their mistresses. Everybody dosed their staff with CRFs, of course; but nobody liked to think that the pharmakon was the only reason for loyalty.
Iago floated across. ‘Was that Sapho, I saw, leaving the bubble?’ he asked. ‘Where’s she going?’
Diana snapped. ‘You want to know why I am angry with you?’ she said.
He looked rather surprised at this, but nodded.
‘It’s not that you have a guardian angel,’ she said. ‘Having a guardian angel, keeping you out of prison, disposing of your enemies – that’s obviously a terribly useful thing to have. It’s not that.’
‘Dia – what’s the matter?’
‘It’s the way you insist on seeing things from a perspective of angelic elevation. It’s inhuman.’
‘You are going to have to, uh, unpack that for me a little,’ Iago said, cautiously.
‘Am I? Listen: on Korkura, you gave me the birthday present of a real-life murder mystery. You knew I liked whodunits. More than that. You knew I had a passion for murder mysteries. So you gave me the death of a human being.’
Her brusqueness began to apply heat to Iago’s own temper. ‘What did I do? I arranged for a rapist to be put in the way of one of his victims. I set things up so that the victim was able to pay him back. You’re telling me that was wrong.’
‘I’m not pretending that he—’ She reached, an automatic mental gesture, into her bId to supply the missing name, but of course she was unplugged from all that. So instead she stalled, losing the momentum of her fury as she rifled her memory for . . . ‘Leron. Leron, him, I’m not pretending that he was some kind of innocent martyr. But you didn’t have to arrange for his death! What made it your business? There is such a thing as the Lex Ulanova, and rape is one of the crimes it covers. You could have alerted the proper authorities.’
‘Really, Diana?’ he replied. ‘You think the Ulanov law is interested in petty infractions in the dep
ths of the Sump?’
‘Rape is hardly a petty infraction!’
‘Be realistic, Diana! You know what the bulk of prosecutions under the Lex are for? Commercial fraud. Lesser corporations and gangs and occasionally lone traders evading trading duties and sales taxes. In the Sump, where barter is common and policing stretched thin, they concern themselves with the more egregious infractions of the 70% rule. Every now and again they mount big raids and arrest people who show any disparity between material wealth and monies declared and passed through legitimate accounts. Other crimes only tend to get punished if they are committed in respectable locations. You really think the police would be interested in the distress of an individual like Sapho?’
‘You gave that man’s death to me as a gift! A sixteen-year-old girl! You thought that was appropriate?’
Iago was losing his composure. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t love murder mysteries? You’ve immersed yourself in thousands. Murder is your passion.’
‘For the puzzle of it,’ she said, in a too-loud voice. ‘Not for the death. I’m not morbid, Iago. I like to solve the puzzle! Solving puzzles is how I’m made.’
‘If that were true,’ he growled, ‘you’d spend your time solving the mystery of the stolen Imperial Diamond, or the mystery of the kidnapped heiress. You’d be like Eva, and try to solve purely intellectual mysteries, like the Champagne Supernovae. But you don’t. You come back, again and again, to this one particular kind of mystery. Sure, you like the puzzle element – but you know it’s more than that. It’s death that fascinates you. By puzzling out individual deaths you come closer to trying to plumb the biggest puzzle of all – mortality itself.’
She looked at him, her anger deflated, and said, in a slow, unconvinced voice: ‘No.’
‘Come along, Diana! Can you honestly say to me that you would find the same satisfaction in solving the crime story to do with theft or embezzlement? When you heard that Leron had been killed, what did you think? Did you grieve, for no woman is an island and every human death diminishes you? Or were you excited?’
‘No wavy way. You gave me a death for my sixteenth birthday,’ Diana said again. ‘Can’t you see how grotesque that is?’
‘Your outrage is a purely intellectual response,’ Iago said. ‘You feel no in-the-gut revulsion. Bar-le-duc said that death is my medium. It’s never been my choice, but maybe he was right. Well I shall tell you something: it’s yours, too.’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘No. Wavy. Way.’
‘We’re the same. It doesn’t make you a psychopath. You don’t seek out the death of others. But you are the heir to a wealthy and powerful Clan, and death is the currency of power. If you were too squeamish to deal with that, on an emotional level, then . . .’
‘Then what? I shouldn’t take charge of the MOHclan?’ Diana shook her head. ‘When has that ever been a choice, for me?’
Iago’s own fury had drained away too. He put his left hand on the top of his head; and with his right he took hold of his chin. It was an odd gesture, contemplative in an ape-like kind of way. ‘There are lots of hiding holes in the System, I suppose,’ he said. ‘But it would be exile. An evasion. Individually speaking, death is always a rupture, a violence. But taking a total view, death is the bell curve upon which the cosmos is balanced. Without it, nothing would work, everything would collapse, clogged and stagnant. Death is flow. It is the necessary lubrication of universal motion. It is, in itself, neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy.’
‘Death is always individual, though,’ she objected, in a low voice. ‘To the person dying.’
‘You’re right,’ he agreed. Now he clasped his hands before him, zipping all his fingers into one another. ‘We do need to be able to see it on both scales, you’re right. If you could only see the large-scale aspect of death you’d be some kind of monster. But by the same token: if all you can see is the personal, then politics, on the scale of the human trillions that inhabit this system, will be opacity to you.’
‘Ruthless,’ Diana said.
‘Nobody can overthrow the fascist dictator by being nicer than him. The reason for this is: by definition everybody is always already nicer than the fascist dictator.’
‘I’m too young to lead a revolution,’ said Diana.
‘Hah!’ said Iago, smiling. ‘Your age isn’t the issue. Your state of mind is the issue. It’s a matter of . . . toughness, of course. So, I have some news for you, and I think you will take it well. But I cannot be sure.’
‘What news?’
Iago didn’t reply at first. He looked around the bubble. Aishwarya, or perhaps the other inhabitants, had arranged a great many prisms and transparent balls around the walls in strings and constellations. As the whole structure turned, and the sunlight came through the windows these crystals squeezed out a succession of rainbow strips and patches of brightness, blood-red through to yellow and green up to the indigo of which the vacuum of space was but a more intense distillation. These splotches and grills of colour played unpredictably upon the various greens of the inner foliage.
‘Bar-le-duc came straight to my house,’ Iago said. ‘He arrived pretty much as soon as we docked and unloaded. He knew we were there. How could he know? I didn’t tell him, and Sapho couldn’t have told him. She didn’t have access to the means to communicate with him even if she had wanted to.’
‘Well I didn’t tell him!’ Diana objected.
‘Yes you did, though,’ said Iago. ‘You didn’t mean to. But you spoke to Eva. She used that conversation to plant a tracker in the ship AI. A ferociously clever piece of kit, actually. Which is to say: I was expecting her to do it, and I put in play a code-chaser, one of the best there is. The virus shrapnelled into something like eight million separate prions, and it ran everywhere. An amazingly difficult code to cleanse. I thought I’d got it all out, but in the event – obviously – I did not. ’
Diana was staring intently at him. ‘This is a counterfactual, or joke, or some other kind of – is it?’
‘It’s as real as it gets.’
‘We’re talking about my sister.’
‘I’m—’ Iago looked about him, at the various buildings and struts and ropes, at the hundred shades of green, and the bright, arc-edged trapezoid of illumination coming through the main window as the structure turned slowly. ‘I am sorry,’ he finished, eventually.
‘Is the trace still active?’
‘No. I mean, I hope not. I mean, I sincerely don’t think so. It was piggybacking on Red Rum’s standard datasift peg. I usually keep that running because – well, because it looks more suspicious for a ship to be unplugged than connected to the general datasift like the majority. But I rooted out the trace, and I’ve unplugged the Rum, so I don’t think we can be traced now.’
‘Eva,’ said Diana, speaking slowly and distinctly, as if there were some danger that Iago might not follow, ‘is my sister, and more than my sister. Why would she do this? If she did this?’
‘The conditional tense,’ noted Iago. ‘And, you see, that’s what I’m talking about. The System is brutal and unforgiving. If you refuse to accept it on its own terms it will destroy you. So the question is: how quickly can your mind adapt to the brutality? That was the real nature of my gift to you, for your last birthday. To see what happened to your data-assimilation and problem-solving abilities when the if turned to is. When the fiction of one possible murder-mystery in one-of-a-trillion possible worlds turned into an actual corpse, on your doorstep.’
‘Why would Eva do this?’ Diana repeated, in a level voice. ‘My sister. My sister.’
‘Why? Power, I suppose. After all. The idea that the Ulanovs would blow up the Tobruk Plasmaser station just to stop Eva getting into space – that never fitted. Why not just arrest her? It was a smokescreen. Screens make me suspicious.’
‘You’ve suspected her all this time?’
He nodded. ‘I think you have too, although you may not have permitted yourself to realise it, consciously.’
> Diana said: ‘but she’s my sister.’
‘And you were hers. And she was facing the prospect of being your number two when your parents stepped down.’
‘Eva is perfectly content with her academic research,’ said Diana. ‘She just isn’t interested in power. As I say those sentences,’ she added, clasping her knees to her chest, ‘I can tell they’re both wrong. Aren’t they? Of course she’s interested in power.’
‘She’s a human being,’ agreed Iago.
‘Of course she is not content to be nothing more than her research,’ Diana said. ‘So. What did she do?’
‘I assume she made a deal with the Ulanovs. It would suit them rather better, I think, if they could keep the Clan Argent in place in its subordinate tier. But they no longer trust your parents, and they don’t trust you either. Eva, of course, would be a better bet than an outsider, or quisling. I suppose the Ulanovs think she is more straightforward, easier to parse, politically than her parents, or you. She must have agreed to give them you, and your parents – I can’t believe the Ulanovs would have agreed otherwise. She probably contracted to more stringent tithes, increased access to Argent data stores. In return they have told her she can lead the Clan.’
Diana was feeling a vague swirling sensation, somewhere in her solar plexus. It was not pleasant, though neither was it especially debilitating.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. But of course she did. She grokked its rightness right away. So, always punctilious in such matters, she amended: ‘or perhaps, I suppose I do believe it. But I don’t see that . . .’ She couldn’t go on. The truth of it was that she did see. She saw the game laid out, entire.
Iago finished her sentence: ‘you don’t see that she would do you any harm? I’m sure she’d prefer not to, if circumstance permits it. But I don’t see how she can leave you at liberty.’
