Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (21 page)

‘So,’ said Diana, not really paying attention, and drifting away. ‘
Would
it make sense to send a ninja assassin inside the house to put a sword through my heart and cut
Eva’s head off?’ But she was mumbling now. Bowing awkwardly on his trembling legs, Iago left the room and sealed the door.

Diana slept.

She dreamt about trees. A baobab tree filled the entire solar system, which, according to the logic of dreams, had become a human-scale space, like a medieval cathedral vault or a sport’s
venue from the Martian Olympics. The tree was as tall as Saturn’s orbit, and the detail of its trillion leaves would baffle any engraver who wished to illustrate it via ink on paper. In this
tree lived all of humanity who mattered; the great folk, the MOHfamilies, the Gongsi and their executives, police, army, engineers. You could see them easily enough, in amongst the branches,
perched like birds. But then, in her dream, Dia looked again and saw that every single leaf was a woman or a man dressed in a curious green costume; a dark green tubular outfit around their torso
and legs, and a paler green cape that wrapped all about. There were trillions of such individuals, clinging desperately to their stems and twigs. And at that point Dia noticed that there was a
great breeze blowing through the branches, and that they were rocking and shaking, and that the myriad greenclad members of the System Sumpolloi were all of them in danger of being blown off. That
was why they clung so desperately. Of course Diana knew that there is only one wind in the System, and that it is the solar wind. So she looked down the main trunk of the tree towards its base. The
great tree had its roots planted in the sun, coiling about and interpenetrating the material of the burning star. Of course, Diana thought to herself: how could it be otherwise? The sun was still
shining as fiercely as ever it did, though clogged and tangled with roots that were as fat as a hundred Jupiters. The solar wind still came blasting up at her. But as she watched a change came over
the substance of the sun. Its luminescence began to fade, and it turned the colour of blood, the colour of a dark red-chilli pepper, and molten and roiling. Somebody was there. She looked again,
narrowing her eyes against the blast of the solar wind, and looked, and looked. It was a man, a giant, an impossibly huge man. She knew who it was. None other than Jack Glass himself; and he was
holding an antique book, clasping it to his chest. He stopped and looked up at her, as she hid amongst the high branches, and spoke directly to her. He didn’t shout, or bellow, and pure
vacuum intervened – yet she heard him very well. ‘The sun is become a sea of blood mixed with glass,’ he said. ‘The roots of this tree are sucking the life out of the
sun.’ ‘What is the tree?’ she called back. But he did not reply, and the dark red colour darkened further to black-brown. It solidified and cooled to the colour lava assumes when
it is chilled by the ocean into new and ruffled granite. ‘When it has sucked the life out of the sun,’ Jack Glass boomed, suddenly loud, ‘the sun will die, and so the sun will
die. It’s happening right now!’ ‘The tree can’t die,’ she said. ‘Vital information is encoded in its branches. Secret information is hidden in its matter.’
‘Too late,’ said Jack Glass. The black roots of the tree were now indistinguishable from the black matter of the sun; and Diana knew that death was passing up the tubercles and passages
of the tree, and that soon the entire arboreal growth would wither and turn to flakes of iron and clumps of soot. Jack Glass was still visible, in amongst the tangle of the tree’s roots; but
visible from the back, like God in the Garden of Eden. She wanted to cry down to him: who are you? And: why do you want to kill me? And she wanted above all to ask him: what is in your book? But
she knew that the book contained, written on pages of treated and bleached animal skin, the entire and copious secret of
faster-than-light travel
. And that the book contained the answer to
the other two questions as well. So instead, as the leaves began decaying in great scatters from the branches all around her, she yelled: ‘what
is
the tree?’

Then she woke up. As she opened her eyes, somebody inside the room with her – invisible, just to the left of her field of vision, or maybe just to the right of it, whispered:
‘
you
are the tree.’

She squealed, and struggled to sit up and look about; but the gel made it harder than it might otherwise be. She called the lights, and looked left and looked right.

There was nobody in the room.

And now the doorpanel brightened, and a representation of Deño (hooded, to signify his modest respectfulness) asked her if she was alright, and did she need any assistance?

Her heart was trembling like a leaf in a breeze. ‘It’s alright,’ she replied. ‘I’m alright. But I see now how Jack Glass can creep into my room, despite all the
security in the world, and without need of teleportation.’

‘Shall I stay in, Miss?’

‘No,’ said Diana, speaking the lights down again and slinking back into her bed. ‘It’s a dream, only a dream.’

Eva also dreamed.

She didn’t go to sleep straight away. After the meal, and the prayers, and after Jong-il had checked her room, she found she wasn’t particularly sleepy. The day had been an eventful
one; and perhaps the visit of Ms Joad had unsettled her. Or the mere fact of an unsolved problem, and the lack of sufficient data to address it, bothered her. That a human being had died did not
distress her. Had it been somebody she
knew
it would have upset her; she wasn’t a monster. Had it been somebody she cared about. But it was nobody she knew, and it would have been
disingenuous to pretend that the death of somebody she didn’t know affected her on an emotional level. What bothered her was the problematic; the lack of resolution to the dilemma. This in
turn fed into the incompleteness of her current research.

So she went into her worldtual for an hour or so, and did some more work on anomalous supernovae. Her main supposition had to do with the Pauli principle, and the hypothesis that, under very
unlikely and therefore very rare – but possible – physical circumstances, the degeneracy pressure of certain states of relatively low-gravity matter could undergo catastrophic shear.
She played with some creative equations for a while, and borrowed a good proportion of the house computionality (it was night; it was being underused anyway) to crunch some millions of regular
equations. The heart of the neutron-dedensification would – assuming it happened this way – be an inequivalence governed by a particular set of criteria; but she was starting to think
that standard inequivalence theory did not provide the sort of range of solutions her problems required. She trawled through some of the indexically recognised Speculative notions, but none looked
useful. And by this stage she discovered – with that strange belatedness that often characterises the experience of those absorbed in research – that she
was
tired, actually. She
came out of her IP, and got into bed. For a while she did nothing but concentrate on settling her breathing in this choking gravity. She was missing something. What was she missing?

Something was niggling her about this stupid murder. She didn’t need to go back into the Worldtuality; it was enough to call the data up on her bId. She checked quickly through the
relative locations of people. After the servants were all billeted, on arrival, nobody had gone into or come out of the servants’ house all day. All the bodyguards, and Iago, were tagged to
one another, so that they could call on one another’s assistance in an emergency, and the datahistory of the tags showed that they had been in the main house the whole time. Nobody had
crossed the perimeters of the estate. The murderer had to be (a trivial logical deduction) one of the servants inside the servants’ house. There was no other explanation. No Jack Glass had
levitated down and slipped through the interstices of matter so as to penetrate the roof.

Joad had been messing with their heads. Nothing more. Even if she meant ‘Jack Glass’ not in the specific sense of the actual human being who bore that name, and was using it instead
in a sort of generic sense to mean ‘any dangerous murderer’, it was not possible for this individual to have done what he did.

She put it all from her mind, and readied herself for sleep. At first sleep was shy and teased her; but it didn’t stay away for long.

She dreamed.

The neurones inside her head made patterns of electrochemical discharge curl and fold across the material of her brain, as a breeze rummages through the leaves on an ash tree.

She was in her MOHmies house, in space. But she was not alone, and neither was she with her MOHsister. She was with a male stranger. She didn’t know his name. ‘I have invented a new
way of transporting people from a planet’s surface into space! Surely you can see that plasmaser descent-ascent is cumbrous and infrastructure heavy; and free ballistic flight is wasteful and
expensive and dangerous.’ ‘What is your new way?’ Eva wanted to know. ‘What’s it to you?’ the stranger said. Eva was trying to work out if his skin was as dark
as it looked, or whether this was simply a function of the darkgreen light in that place.
Did
she know him? She thought she knew him. ‘What’s it to me? Astrophysics is my special
expertise, I have six PhDs,’ she told the stranger. He chuckled. ‘Of course you do: but that’s all to do with distant stars. Stars that explode even though they shouldn’t!
I’m
talking about a technology that is much more down to earth!’

‘Tell me,’ she pressed.

‘Oh, it is a question of spacetime origami, that’s all. If this place is tucked
into
that place, then that place is also tucked into
this
place. It’s because the
universe is infinite. Regular geometry no longer applies in such a manifold.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Eva.

The stranger gestured. She saw then that his hands were red. She looked again, and saw that the skin had been peeled away, as a glove is drawn off, and that the workings of muscle and sinew
beneath were visible, slick with blood. ‘Step through that door, and see what I mean.’

It was a door made out of light. With no sense of apprehension, Eva pulled herself along a guy-rope and passed effortlessly through the door. On the far side was darkness, and gravity, and she
stepped down onto a flat floor. Where am I? she wondered, but she knew where she was: the darkness around her was crowded with lumber, tools and machines. It was the storeroom in which the
handservant had been killed. Somebody was here.

‘Who is it?’ she said aloud.

‘Leron,’ said the voice. Eva went, instinctively, to her bId to locate the name, but in her dream she had no bId – indeed she had, weirdly, never even been fitted with one. Not
that it mattered: she could remember the name. Leron was the servant who had been killed.

‘I can’t see you,’ she said.

‘Nobody can see the dead,’ he replied. But, despite this, a foggy kind of illumination was starting up about his head. She could see his features. His face was shining, like an
angel’s.

‘How are you
doing
that?’ she asked him.

‘You are the expert on stars,’ he replied. ‘Not I.’

The glow was beginning to bring into vision the indistinct shapes of all the objects in the space around her: two garden robots, silent and static, loomed to her right. All about her were stacks
and containers and globes; strange shapes and geometries. Mysterious fins and vanes on the wall. Prongs and poles from the ceiling.

‘I must warn you,’ she said. She was conscious then of a tremendous sense of urgency, a need to communicate to Leron the danger he was in. ‘Somebody is coming here to kill you!
You must vacate this place. We don’t know why, or who, although it may be the infamous murderer Jack Glass.’

Leron shook his shining head. He gleamed brighter and brighter. Shadows shrank and spooled-in amongst all the objects about him. It was so bright as to hurt her eyes.

‘Go!’ Eva called.

‘There is no
go
,’ he said.

The hammerhead appeared in space beside him. It was in ballistic flight, guided by no-one, and moving towards him; sweeping up over and down in a parabolic arc. What she saw then was the
collision between a lozenge-shaped chunk of iron (the matter out of which black dwarf stars might be constituted) and Leron’s shining head. The skull collapsed under the impact, pieces of
shell breaking in; she caught a momentary glimpse of the magma-red innards, the grotesque distortions of face. But the pressure down – she knew how this worked as well as any person alive
– generated its subatomic counterforce. In flawless silence, the head bloomed outward and every direction spilled with searing white brightness. Eva could see nothing now. She was standing in
a tempest of light, blowing back her hair and rushing whisperingly past her. Everything was white.

She woke.

Somehow she sensed that her sister was awake, in her room. She ticticked Diana’s bId and received an immediate answer. ‘I have just had a dream,’ she said.

‘So have I,’ said Diana. ‘I dreamed that I met Jack Glass. What about you?’

‘I was talking to the murdered servant. His head went supernova. It happened right in front of me! I almost
never
have dreams like this,’ said Eva. ‘But it has left me
with a sure conviction.’

‘A conviction of what?’

‘This murder,’ said Eva, speaking slowly, amazed at her own words, ‘
is
connected to my research. The two
go together
.’

Dia waited before she replied. Then she said: ‘my lovely sister, it’s a little
hard
to see what the two have in common. A servant gets his skull bashed in on Korkura. A star
millions of light years away explodes. How could they possibly be connected?’

‘It’s an intuition I have,’ said Eva. ‘Intuition makes me uncomfortable, of course it does. This is not how I
work
. Nonetheless. There it is. I feel sure of
it.’

‘Good night, lovely sister,’ said Diana, through the bId.