Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (14 page)

There was a hissing sound, which meant air escaping. But Jac located the leak and sealed it with his putty, working the stuff first with his fingers to loosen it up.

There was Lamy306 swinging down through his line of sight and disappearing. It looked bizarrely tiny, as if a fairy had shrunk it away. So, so. It came back in at the top of his line of sight,
and moved down again and vanished out the bottom. With some more angling of the fusion cell, and more application of ice to the heated vent, he settled into a less hectic axial rotation. Then, with
a final struggle against the stiffness of his suit, he put out enough blasts of gas to still even this.

He was hanging in deep space. He got his bearings: sun, stars. Then he waited. He was shivering, but happy. He waited, and watched, and he was good at both things. The scrubber thrummed in the
leg, so he had air. He breathed in and breathed out.

It took several hours, but his patience was rewarded. He saw a blinking light; one of the other asteroids, at who-knew-how-many million miles distance. That would do. He fed his fusion cell vent
with ice, and slowly began to accelerate himself through space. It was slow, but the nature of acceleration is that it becomes steadily less slow. Keeping the blinking light in his eyepiece, and
working as a stoker to generate gas, he accelerated slowly at first. But there was nothing to stop him, and he kept applying small amounts of thrust. It would take a while, but he had plenty of
time. Not all the time in the world, it was true; but enough. Enough. Or too much!

part II

THE FTL MURDERS

1

The Mystery of the Hammered Handservant

A month before she turned sixteen Diana got involved in a reallife murder mystery. It was was was
too
exciting.

So, she and Eva came down to Korkura for a spell of gravity – which is to say, so as to spend a month before the birthday party getting used to Earth again. And whenever she thought about
this trip afterwards she associated her legal majority with mystery and the death of a servant. A problem to be solved! And who was better at solving problems than her? (Nobody!
Her
problem-solving is second-to-none: intuitive, human, chaologic – it’s what she
was
bred and raised to). Eva told her to be careful; said it might be dangerous, was best left to
the authorities, all that manner of chaff. But Eva was a fuss; and Dia had her bodyguards to look after everything, and had Iago to help her too, and anyway. It was her birthday. It
was
almost her birthday.

The trip down was yet another springy plasmaser descent, yet another sicky feeling in the gut, and the added horror of increasing
density
for lord’s sake. When she was older, she
decided, she was going to travel up and down
in a sloop
, and watch the reëntry burn colours of lit stained-glass glow outside her porthole. Sloops rocket up, and when they want to come
in again they just fall straight down; and something about the thought of
freefalling
through the hot, vacant ocean of air excited her. But for now it was the plasmaser capsule again, and
the slow elevator descent, and not even the satisfaction of seeing the counterthrust capsule going
up
, for at the relevant moment of crossover the window was blanked with hazy cloud.

Anyway: they came down somewhere in Turque, and then there was a tedious shuffling short-hop flight to the island. The MOHmies had more-or-less owned Korkura since before the sisters had been
born; and Diana and Eva often spent time there. As ever, this was holiday and relaxation time, of course, and the build-up to Dia’s sixteenth birthday, but
at
the same time MOHmie put
a rather tiresome emphasis upon the benefits of a spell of gravity, don’t you know. In fact, both MOHmies were cross, for neither of the girls had been doing their exercises. ‘Three
hours of centrifuge a day is a minimum,’ they said, several trillion times every
hour
.
‘Five
hours a day would be better. But it doesn’t seem to matter how we scold,
you won’t even do
three
. Your bones will wither! You’ll become permanent uplanders! Cripples!’ Such
nagging
. You wouldn’t believe it. And anyway, they had a
whole month of actual Earth gravity now – down they went: riding the plasmaser. In their car: Diana and Sisterissima Evissima, and the twelve people whose business it was to look after
them.

The ones whom Dia actually knew were the bodyguards, of course. Necessarily they had the closest relationship with their personal guardians: Dominico Deño and Jong-il (of course), and the
new one, Berthezene.
He
seemed alright, actually. She also knew Iago, of course – Iago with his old-world manner and his immaculate clothes. Iago, though, wasn’t a bodyguard. He
was something else; halfway between a servant and an actual person. Dia pronounced his name
eye-ah-go
, and
Eva ee-goo
and he smiled and declined to say which pronunciation was
correct. Perhaps neither. Then there were the others, whose names had to be prompted to Dia’s mind by her bId: Faber, Mantolini, Oldorando and Poon-si, Sapho, Sun-kil, Tapanat and Tigris.
Eight handservants, all of them dosed with so much CRF they could not help themselves loving Dia and Eva more than anything else in the whole solar-windy, asteroid-rainy System.

The remaining servants came in a second car, the to-be-murder-victim amongst them. That meant (afterwards, Dia shivered with grisly delight to think of it) that Leron – the victim’s
name – had
sat
there, in the company of the eleven other house-servants, waiting patiently all the way down to the ground. How strange a thought that was! He’d sat there strapped
in his seat whilst the car fell down and his stomach registered the plummetous motion, but actually he was hurrying towards his own death. Down to his last few breaths of air. His last hours alive.
But he didn’t know!

None of us
will
know, of course. The weird grammar of death. You die, he or she dies, they die but there is no genuine form for ‘I’. Not really. All know
that
, none
know
when
.

Anyway, the car came to a halt on the ground, and the full weight of gravity chomped on Diana’s limbs and stomach and chest, and made her head loll and strained her neck. She regretted not
putting in her three-hours-a-day
now
, of course; and she had to be physically carried (hu-mi-li-
ating
!) to the short-hop runner and fitted into the seat with the high back cradling
her head. Eva, on the other hand, was unrepentant. ‘We could have spent five hours,’ she gasped, and drew a breath. ‘Centrifuge’s isn’t the same as,’ gasp, gasp,
breathe, ‘actual gravity.’ Gasp. Pause.

The short-hop flier buzzed and did its salmon leap into the air, and caught itself up there and flew on.

There is nothing to
do
with the misery of gravity but endure it and get used to it, and
gradually
overcome it. But Eva felt a momentary fury as the flier ascended and gravity got
even worse than one g
for a few seconds. Lady, that was hard! But then the craft settled into flight, and she turned her head a little, and watched the landscape slide past her porthole. It
was a stupendous sight, really it was, stupendouser even than orbital vistas, because it was so
much
more varied and brightly lit. The sky down here was not one colour, as space is: it was
rather a smooth gradation from smoke blue and pale in the dome to flowerpetal purple nearer the deckle-edged horizon. Mustard-coloured hills and peaks, green-yellow scrub and grass, polygon shapes
of human habitation. The flier passed west over the coastline, and land drew back as though on a rail, and there was nothing but sea, which possessed the hard-faceted look of a solid, though she
knew it was trillions of tonnes of
water
, get that, just sloshing and lying in a huge geographical basin, against all the promptings of common sense.

Soon enough they passed another coastline, and almost immediately landed at the house. The girls were deplaned and carried inside, and they both fell asleep straight away, because the gravity
was so exhausting. But sleep was an uneasy business, and Diana kept waking herself up with the pain of lifting her own ribcage to draw breath, or with the strenuous effort of turning herself from
her left side to her right. Come evening, they had a long bath. The handservants laid actual candles all around the pool as they wallowed and swam – candles! Like they’d descended not
just down the gravity well but down the time well too, to
ancient
Greece or something like that.

There was other stuff too, of course; but Dia could remember none of it afterwards. It was retrospectively overshadowed by the events of the following day. Murder, the immense fact of it,
blotting out all earlier memories – that’s not a surprise, surely.
Presumably
the two girls spoke to their MOHmies, and I guess they slept. The sun must have come up, because it
always does. They probably didn’t have the energy for much by way of games or fun. The solar flare of memory illuminates only that afternoon. Murder – and, maybe
revolution
!
Faster than light.

This is how it happened:

Diana and Eva were in the main house, of course, and doing nothing more than lying about, exhausted. Most of the servants were in the servant house, similarly worn-out. Eva was asleep, although
Diana couldn’t get to sleep, or couldn’t stay asleep, because of the goddessdamn asthmatic sense of
constriction
in her lungs that came from just
breathing
, for
out-loud-crying. She’d unblanked the walls, and was staring listlessly out across the estate. A hot, bright Mediterranean day. She was pondering things. For instance: she wondered at the
merit in bringing servants down with them, rather than just hiring Earthly servants who were already used to the gravity. Of course there
were
many native servants here; they maintained the
estate when nobody was in residence and so on and so
forth
. But to come down was to bring your own people with you from zero-g, and that seemed egregious to Dia.

The lawn was olive-green, sun-heated. The grass was bristly as a man’s beard hair. Plane trees nodded indulgently in her direction. The sky was the colour and thickness of a
bluebird’s eggshell. Away to her right was an orchard of olive trees, its foliage a mass of hyacinth blue against the white air. Dia sighed. The sun was very bright and white and throwing
dark purple shadows from anything vertical. It seemed off that the sun could be brighter at the bottom of the Earth’s gravity well than it was in space, when they were actually closer
to
it for lord’s sake. The servant house was a single-storey structure away to the left with black solar convertor peat on the roof in which red and yellow flowers bloomed. But the
best part of the view was the way the garden ended, and the prospect dropped away down to the sea. Such colour! You look down upon the Med from orbit and it looks blue like any ordinary blue; but
then you lie on a couch on the actual shore and it looks
completely
different. One thing invisible from the uplands is the way the
shuffling
of its surface shakes two dozen different
shades of marine from the sheet of colour. Gorgeous.

Across the bay was the town – Kouloura, 55% owned by Dia’s MOHmies, and, like,
totally
dedicated to her. All the people there; they revered the MOHmies, they really did.
Hundreds of white-painted houses, like teeth, filling the jaw-shaped cove. Dia shifted her position and took a gasping breath. Deño coughed, quietly. He was on duty in the corner, sitting in
a chair with his weapon in his lap. Dia’s bId told her he had another hour, and then Jong-il would take over.

She watched, and before the moment everything changed it was as banal and ordinary as ever it had been. She watched. Everything changed, as she watched. Her life would never be the same
again.

She saw a strange thing. Servants came running out of the servant house. They were just as afflicted by the gravity as she was, of course; more so, if anything, since their duties meant they
generally didn’t get the time or facilities to do their exercises. But something had
really
spooked them, because they all came out through the main entrance, limbs ropey, lurching and
staggering and tumbling like newly-born calves, the lot of them. Arms akimbo, legs refusing to bear their weight, falling over and picking themselves up. It was a little comical, until she
understood the reason for it. Dia even started laughing, although that only reinforced the sense of constriction in her chest, so she stopped.

But she saw soon enough that something was amiss. Reedy, plaintive cries became audible, across the lawn. Some of the servants were pulling at their hair, faces like tragic masks (her bId pulled
up a dozen examples, so she could see the appropriateness of the comparison). Their howls were
clearly
audible through the wall. ‘What’s going on?’ Dia asked. She checked
her bId, but all it could report was that the house systems were reporting everything AOK. So it wasn’t the house. If not the house itself, then – something in the house?