Jack Glass

by Adam Roberts

  She was supposed to be good at solving problems. And now, here she was.

  The whole cosmos had shrunk down to her, in the dark. To her thoughts.

  The dark calmed her. She slept. She dreamt that she was not in a g-couch at all, but the barrel of a gigantic pistol. Iago was there with her. ‘This is the biggest gun,’ she said. ‘Bigger than any other gun.’ ‘Size is a relative concept,’ he replied. ‘We must always ask: big in relation to what?’

  The barrel’s diameter was even bigger than she first thought: a hundred metres across. She stood up, and Iago stood beside her. Bright light was coming in from the mouth of the pistol. Their shadows were as long as totem poles before them, and Diana turned to watch the sun through the perfect circle of the barrel’s mouth. ‘Is it a good idea,’ she asked. ‘To aim this gun at that target?’ ‘How strange it is,’ said Iago, in reply, ‘that the moon has phases and the sun has not!’ His voice was not his own. He was speaking with the voice of Ms Joad. Diana thought to herself: he is doing a surprisingly good vocal impression of Ms Joad! And then, she thought: but how can I know if it is Iago doing an impression of Ms Joad, or Miss Joad doing an impression of Iago? ‘Quite right,’ came a voice in the darkness. The light had gone. Everything was dark. She was waking up. But she heard the voice, nonetheless. ‘A person impersonating another person is exactly halfway between two people. An impossible asymptote!’

  She was awake again. ‘Hello?’ she cried, and was startled by the nearness and loudness of her own voice in that enclosed space.

  There was no way out.

  It was, to put it simply, difficult to tell when she was awake, and when asleep. She thought she heard Sapho saying: ‘you have all the information you need to solve this mystery.’ But that didn’t sound like the sort of thing Sapho would say.

  She must have been asleep, because it looked as if the darkness around her was dissolving into an eye-stinging spread of bright dots: green and cyan, white and yellow, a huge sediment of particles, each one of which was a human life – each of which was many human lives, all clustered together.

  But then she heard Aishwarya’s voice saying: ‘did you make the mistake of underestimating my Jack Glass?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I didn’t.’ But the voice went on: ‘the people here believe in ghosts, or at least in ghost-like spirits they call bhuts. You are not supposed to add to their population without consulting them first!’ ‘I added nothing,’ replied Diana, a little panicky. ‘No,’ said the voice. ‘You’re not the murderer, are you – ‘

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Are?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Ah.’

  And the lights coalesced into a swordblade of brilliance, and then Diana was blinking and wincing in actual light. The g-couch lid had been opened. Somebody was loosening the bonds that held her, and it was Aishwarya herself, large as life and twice as natural. ‘What’s at stake here?’ Diana was saying, or trying to say, but her throat was sore, and the words didn’t come out properly. ‘What’s at stake here?’ ‘There you go, my lovely,’ said Aishwarya, roughly but not unkindly. ‘Come out of there. You’re one lucky rich person, and no mistake.’

  10

  Aboard the4

  People in Garland 400, recovering from their exertions of the day before, asked fewer questions than Diana thought they might. Several had watched with their own eyes as the Rum’s snout exploded, turning several of the smaller craft also docked there into a swirling confetti of spaceship metal. But the explosion had been in keeping with the general debauch, or at least had not impinged on drugged and drunken consciousnesses as anything too unusual. To those who asked, Aishwarya and Diana said it had been a faulty docking connection, and a catastrophic decompression – not much of an explanation, of course, but enough to keep people from pestering them. Naturally, nobody in Garland 400 wanted to get the police involved. Luckily the Rum’s nose had been pointing away from the place when it blew, so no harm had been done.

  ‘Luck having,’ said Iago, ‘nothing to do with it.’

  Sapho was unharmed, although she was very jumpy and prone to tears. Iago, though – the famous Jack Glass himself – was not in a good way. His artificial legs had been annihilated from the knee down and wrecked from the knee up. The sensible thing would have been simply to remove them, but they were plumbed into his nervous system in complicated ways, and Aishwarya did not possess the expertise, even if she had possessed the machinery, to unpick them. Not that he needed legs, of course, in zero g; but it was messy-looking.

  More worryingly, he had suffered some freeze-burns and vacuum exposure around his lower torso, and Aishwarya expressed worry that his kidneys might be damaged. It was hard to know, because the effects of Ms Joad’s neurotoxin still held his muscles motionless.

  Aishwarya kept him in her house – a bare, but comfortable space – and personally put pieces of fruit into his mouth to feed him. It took almost two complete days for the paralysis to recede, and only by the end of the third was he moving around with something of the agility he had once known.

  The RACdroid was undamaged. Iago was pleased about that.

  With the Rum permanently out of commission, they had no way of leaving Garland 400. Aishwarya’s own craft – the one she had used to come out to them and bring them back to Garland – was (she told them, fiercely) not at their disposal. It didn’t matter, Iago said.

  In the end they hitched a ride with an itinerant doctor; a woman called Lydia Zinovieff. Her business was in travelling from house to house, from bubble-cluster to cluster, offering her services. ‘It’s mostly tumours,’ she said. ‘The wealthier can afford the implants, and ward off the worst of it. But in the Sump it’s a different matter. People get all sorts of skin and other cancers in the high radiation, and often the most they can afford is excision. You see all manner of human beings with those egg-shaped or circular patches on their skin – and those are the easy ones! It’s the inner tumours that are the trickiest. They want the best medical treatment of course, but can’t pay for it.’

  Her vessel was called the4. There were no g-couches, because Dr Zinovieff claimed never to travel at more than ‘a g or two’. And indeed, the journey from Garland 400, via two large single bubble houses, and on to a cluster of twelve called The Sun Pole took nearly two weeks. But the sloop was more spacious inside than the Rum had been, and since the good doctor liked to spend most of her time inside a nesting IP, linked to the Corticotopia, Sapho, Diana and Iago had plenty of privacy.

  They took the RACdroid with them.

  Whilst they flew, Iago borrowed some tools and pared down or cut away the more ragged undersides of his severed stump-legs; just (he said) for neatness sake. ‘So, you kept the gun inside there?’ Diana asked him.

  ‘Not that it was a gun, exactly,’ he replied. ‘Which is to say: it was a gun, though it didn’t in the least look like one. A small sphere, conker-sized. And the bullet it fired was very small indeed: no more than a clump of atoms. It wasn’t the bullet itself that caused so much damage. It was the speed at which the bullet travelled.’

  ‘The impossible gun,’ said Diana. ‘Hah! Do my parents know you have it?’

  ‘I don’t have it any more, in point of fact,’ he corrected. ‘It’s smithereens now. But the answer to your question is: no. They knew that I had been friends with McAuley, and they believed that he had confided his secret to me. Which, in a manner of speaking, he did. But they did not know that I possessed an actual functioning machine.’

  ‘You were just carrying it around with you!’ said Diana, admiringly. ‘All this time, I thought the Ulanovs were chasing a spectre, a nonsense. The chimera of FTL. But you had an actual, functioning FTL pistol about your person.’

  ‘Once you go beyond c,’ said Iago, applying a finger-sized auto-file to his right stump and sending a sprig of white-fiery sparks from it away into the cabin, ‘well, physics gets weird. As an object moves more and more rapidly, time appears – from its
point of view, relative to an external observer – to pass more slowly. The closer you approach to the asymptote of absolute speed, the more slowly time passes. For a photon, travelling at the speed of light, time doesn’t pass at all – it seems to us that the light from the Andromeda galaxy takes millions of years to reach us, but to the light itself it is there and it is here with no time passing. So what happens when you go faster than light? Time reverses, of course. At 2c, time travels one second per second backwards, if you see what I mean. It must be this way, in part to preserve general causality. But that has some – odd effects.’

  ‘A bullet shot faster than light moves backwards in time,’ said Diana. ‘It’s kindergarten physics, of course.’

  ‘As to whether human beings could ever travel so fast . . . frankly, I don’t know. McAuley thought they could. But I wonder if forcing a human being backwards in time wouldn’t scramble her consciousness. After all, our minds have evolved with extraordinary finesse to inhabit the medium of forward-moving time.’

  ‘We couldn’t use it to escape the solar system,’ said Diana. ‘But we could still use it to turn our sun into a Champagne Supernova.’

  ‘It is desperately dangerous, yes,’ agreed Iago, bending a protruding strut and tucking it away. ‘It works, as it were, by altering c. It could provoke a catastrophic chain-reaction if it were dropped into the sun. As to whether it could ever transport humanity – maybe it could. I don’t know.’

  Where did you get your impossible gun from?’

  ‘McAuley. Where else?’

  ‘He built it?’

  ‘It’s beyond my skill,’ said Iago. He floated over to a storage drawer put the tools away. ‘Do you know the funny thing? I did not choose to shoot Bar-le-duc. Which is to say, I don’t think I did. Which is to say, I don’t know, I suppose I must have done.’ He scratched his head. ‘I was as surprised as you when he exploded into a cloud of red right beside me. The bubble was breached, and I was knocked back into the foliage on the far side. And then the gun was in my hand. It was in my hand before I knew it. At that point, did it seem I had a choice? I don’t know. The impossible bullet had already been fired. I pulled the trigger, then, but it had already happened.’

  ‘It meant that you evaded capture,’ Diana pointed out. ‘It was in your interest to do it; and you did it. Doesn’t that amount to choice?’

  He frowned, briefly. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter so much as the act itself. Bar is dead, after all.’

  ‘And Ms Joad, too.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He looked blankly at her. ‘That was more – premeditated. I couldn’t be sure what would happen in that situation, actually. That was a wilder chance I took. She paralysed me pretty thoroughly. I suppose she assumed the nerve controls for my legs were plugged into the base of my spine, instead of more directly into my brain. She doesn’t understand modern prosthetics, I suppose. Still, it was tricky, using one foot to press into the cavity in my other leg. The irony is that it was Joad’s fault that my right foot had been knocked off in the first place – without that, I wouldn’t have been able to get to the weapon at all.’

  ‘It could have been that firing the gun inside your leg would have blown you and us and the whole shop to fragments,’ she said.

  ‘It could have been. But I was alive as I squeezed the device with my left toe. Things were lively – we were bouncing around a great deal. But I was still alive. So, you see, I knew we would survive. Because pulling the trigger is the end of the process of firing an FTL pistol, not the beginning.’

  ‘Odd,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly. When I killed Bar-le-duc: the first thing we saw – long minutes before Bar even arrived – was the flash.’

  ‘That’s right!’ said Diana. ‘The flash.’

  ‘That was the impossible bullet falling back into sub-light travel. A sort of photonic boom. By then it was safe: just a very small projectile travelling very fast. If we reconstruct the sequence of events, it runs, from our perspective, backwards. First we saw the flash. Then in very quick succession, the shattering of Bar’s ship, the breach in the side of my house, Bar himself being atomised, and finally – me, in the bushes, pulling the trigger.’

  They stopped talking then, because Dr Zinovieff emerged from her worldtual to fetch herself some tea. She made some for her passengers, and chatted with them. She complimented Iago on the neat job he had done with his stumps. ‘They’re fancy prostheses,’ she observed. ‘Must have cost you a lot.’ ‘A goodly sum,’ Iago agreed.

  Shortly, the good doctor went back to her virtual world.

  ‘Jack – I don’t want this to sound petulant,’ said Diana shortly. ‘Or little-girl-ish. But why didn’t you tell me?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘You need to understand, Diana,’ he said. ‘The RACdroid we are carrying with us is immensely valuable. It is a powerful bargaining tool for guaranteeing your safety. But it only works if the contract it carries is inviolate. If I breach the terms of the agreement, the contract becomes null – useless.’

  ‘And,’ said Diana, nodding, ‘of course you did breach those terms. You resisted arrest.’

  ‘But only you and I know that,’ said Iago, in a low voice. ‘I can’t stress how important it is nobody else learns the truth. As long as nobody knows I killed Bar – well, then the contact is still viable.’

  Diana felt a hundred years old. ‘Iago. Or Jack. Jack, I don’t think I understand you at all,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not so hard to understand,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’

  He was quiet for a long time. When he started speaking again, it was in a low tone, monotonous, but quietly urgent. ‘I have placed my life in the service of one thing. Revolution. Only when the myriad peoples of the Sump have some collective say in their own future will they be lifted out of misery. Only when the prison guards of Ulanov tyranny have been eliminated, and the prison of poverty itself dismantled, can humanity achieve its potential. Then we’ll be ready for the stars – not before! If McAuley’s technology is disseminated now, one faction or other of the endless warring tribes of humanity will use it to destroy us all. But once we are free . . . once we have evolved beyond the old medieval power structures and the medieval internecine violence they create, then we’ll be able to use the technology responsibly. Everything depends on that. Have I killed people? – I have. But only in the service of that higher cause.’

  ‘I still find it hard to believe my MOHmies employed you, knowing you were a revolutionary.’

  ‘Your parents are more flexible than you give them credit,’ said Iago. ‘They know that the Clan Argent couldn’t hold absolute power under the current system; not alone – and they don’t trust any of the other MOHfamilies to go into alliance with them. No, once the Ulanovs go everything changes. Your parents see advantage in that as well as danger. And they see – or more accurately, they foresaw – that the Ulanovs would eventually move against them.’

  He was silent for a while. Then he spoke: ‘years ago, before your MOHparents gave me employment, and a new identity, long before that, I was in the Sump.’

  ‘As Jack Glass?’

  ‘Oh, a completely different pseudonym. Of course. Anyway, I was working on my networks, moving from bubble-cluster to bubble-cluster, laying long-term plans for revolution, planning sedition in a dozen forms. I worked hard to protect my anonymity. But nonetheless I was betrayed, somehow . . . I’ve never worked out how. The police arrived in seven cruisers. I was in a place called “God’s Prepuce”, a single bubble of antinomians, a religious community, devotees of Shiva Christ the Terror. Dedicated anti-Ulanovians, of course; but not so deep in the Sump that they could afford to be blatant about it. Nonetheless, the police came and arrested the entire population of the place: eight hundred and ninety people. They came because somebody had tipped them off that Jack Glass was one of that eight hundred and ninety. And I was. You know who commanded that force?’

  ‘Bar-le-duc?’

  ‘The very same. They came
in large numbers: pierced the bubble with lances and pumped stultant gas into the space. They surprised us. We couldn’t fight them. They melted boarding-doors through the walls and swarmed in, wearing masks. Everyone was arrested and threatened with summary execution – unless the celebrated Jack Glass identified himself and allowed himself to be taken into custody. A man called Chag Sameach put his hand up. I hadn’t discussed this with him, or with anybody there. But they all knew I could not afford to be taken into custody, knowing what I know. So I let him do it, his I-am-Spartacus performance, and Bar-le-duc took him away in his personal sloop.’

  ‘Didn’t they DNA him?’

  ‘They DNAd all of us, of course, but no database had Jack Glass’s code. Not back then, at any rate. And Chag had no legs – that’s not uncommon in the uplands, of course. So they were persuaded. As for the rest of us: well, we were all sentenced, on the spot, to eleven years each, for political agitation and sedition. Every single one of us. We were loaded into carriers. A Gongsi called 344 Diyīrén bought our prisoner rights, and shipped us uphill to carve lucrative des-reses out of orbiting rocks. Three hard months in an acceleration couch, hauling out to the asteroid field; holding at a facility called 8Flora. The prisoners were all randomly mixed, of course, to minimise the dangers of association. And finally I was dumped with six other men, in a cavity in the side of a tiny asteroid called Lamy306 – a couple-hundred metres across, and me in there with six violent men.’

  ‘But surely they realised they didn’t have Jack Glass pretty quickly?’ Diana asked. ‘Wouldn’t they realise as soon as it was clear this Chag Sameach couldn’t tell them anything?’