Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (33 page)

And so it was a new day. I’m still alive, she told herself. That’s something.

The daylight was white-grey; clouded over. She made herself some coffee and ate a little pasta. After that she wandered through the house absent-mindedly. She found Iago sitting in a chair in
the back sitting room, staring through the antique window into nothing.

Rain fell, but without any force. The colour grey had been liquefied and was drifting down upon them in myriad drops.

Diana sat in the chair next to his. Eventually she spoke: ‘you
were
behind it,’ she said.

He looked at her. ‘I’m glad you figured it out. Although of course I expected it of you.’

‘What was it? A birthday present?’

‘It was,’ he said.

She looked at him.

‘Your parents think it was their idea; but it wasn’t,’ he said, shortly. ‘I am the one who planted that idea. I’m the one who knows how passionately you love
murder-mysteries. Solving them is a five-finger exercise to you, but you love it nonetheless. So I thought I’d set one up; a real-life one. For your birthday.’

‘I knew something was odd about the situation,’ Diana said. ‘A servant was brutally killed, only a few metres from where Eva and I slept! In any other circumstances our MOHmies
would have pulled us straight
out
of there. They’re not coy about their paranoia when it comes to keeping the two of us safe. But they seemed so
blithe
about it. Violent murder?
You stay right there, my chickadees.’ She shook her head. ‘It was – uncharacteristic. All that chaff about how CRF in the servants’ bloodstream would keep us
safe?’

‘That
was
one of the failsafes,’ said Iago. ‘And you
were
well guarded. Or at least—’ He winced at the memory of Dominico Deño –
‘so we thought. And the murderer had no grudge against
you
. She had a particular animus against somebody else.’

‘How did you select her?’

‘I went looking for a likely situation. It wasn’t hard to find. Shanty bubbles are claustrophobic spaces. Tensions build up. I chose half a dozen possible groups of servants, from
hundreds of initial possibles, and put them all into gravity training and preparation. When that Petero man – a horrible fellow, really – got killed, I looked into it. That was when I
saw the potential in Sapho. That, really, made the decision for me.’

‘You couldn’t be
sure
she would kill Leron.’

‘No,’ he conceded. ‘But it was very likely. I knew the dynamic in that group. And we had three weeks before your actual birthday, after all. At some point he would press his
attentions and she would not accept it. Or she would act pre-emptively. My main worry was that it would be too cut-and-dried a murder; too obvious for you. But even then, you would still have had
to solve the larger mystery. I expected you to see early on that Sapho was the actual killer; but I wanted to see if you would be able to work out who was really behind it all. Me.’

‘That wasn’t hard,’ she said, sulkily. Then in an outburst of tired wrath: ‘A birthday present? That’s a pretty sick sort of birthday present – don’t
you think? Give a girl, for her sixteenth birthday – a
corpse
.’

‘This,’ he said, turning his hands so that both palms faced her. ‘This is the point of it.’

‘
This
is? My anger?’

‘Yes.’

Her rage flared up inside her, like a flame. ‘You evil man,’ she said. ‘This is the
point
of it? A human being is dead! He wasn’t a saint, maybe – but then,
who is? You’re certainly not! Goddess, are
any
of us? And he is
dead
.’ The more she spoke, the more her rhetoric fed back into her anger. ‘It’s not a
game
. I nearly died!’

Iago shook his head. ‘Joad would never have killed you. You’re too valuable to the Ulanovs alive. Your sister likewise.’

‘Shut up! A killer pointed a
gun
at me and smiled! I’m not even sixteen yet, but I felt death as a proximate thing. That’s not a game. How dare you—’ she was
speaking loudly now, though croakily; a great reservoir of fury and resentment and bitterness inside her was flowing out of her. And she hadn’t even known it was there! ‘How dare you
– play with life and death as a
game
? As a
birthday present
?’

His impassive face. She couldn’t stand it any longer. Getting to her feet in this ridiculous gravity was a struggle, as ever, but she managed it, and she stormed out. Sapho was at the
door, looking through, drawn by the sound of raised voices. But Dia didn’t want to speak to her either (although it was hardly
her
fault) and instead she went through to her room and
wrapped herself in a blanket. It was cold. It was late summer, and yet it was cold. Everything about this place was wrong. Everything in her life had gone wrong.

They were high up. This was the weather of tall mountains.

Look
down
from high places. Her anger flew like an eagle. How
dare
he? Toying with her, using living human beings as chesspieces. Did he really think she would be pleased that her
sixteenth-birthday present was a
corpse
?

One of the curiosities of anger, of course, is that the more you focus it outward, firing it at the injustices of the world, the more it actually parses your own self-pity and resentment. Was
she angry that Iago had treated Leron’s life and death with such existential disrespect? Of course not. A moment’s thought told her that. How could she be moved by a man whom she had
never known, except in the abstract? Anger, after all, is not kindled by abstracts. So: what was so enraging? Her own life. The prison of her existence, guarded by gaolers who called themselves
bodyguards. The lack of anything that might be considered
a free choice
. Perhaps this wasn’t Iago’s fault, except insofar as he was part of the larger structure of control.
Except that it was his fault. And he was the one with whom she was furious.

She thought of the multitude.

Trillions of human beings, wrapped like a fog about their home star. The mind collapsed at the scale and the numbers. But if ethics meant anything at all, it meant not letting the largeness of
the human population overwhelm our moral knowledge that life is lived individually, and that even when agglomerated into billions and trillions individual human beings deserve better than being
used as tools. That the overwhelming majority of this vast mass of humanity was poor, living precarious and subsistence lives in leaky shanty bubbles, eating ghunk and drinking recycled water
– this made this more, not less, true. These were the people least able to help themselves. They should be helped, not exploited.

Now, the patterning genius for which she had been bred and in which she had been trained, her ability to see problems three-dimensionally and by superposing all possibilities into the same
conceptual grid – this same ability immediately challenged her own outrage. It said: what have you done to help the trillions out of their absolute poverty? It said: what
could ever
be
done? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Have you ever, before this moment, spared these trillions even a passing thought? You have not. You have never. Is your outrage here really an ethical reflex, or is
it something simpler and baser and more human – your individual feeling of having been slighted? A wound upon the skin of your pride?

Furious, foetally positioned on the bed, wrapped in her blanket, she fell asleep. Of course she did.

As she had done a thousand times before, she dreamed. She dreamed of: interiors.

Her MOHmies were standing in a large Louis Vingt-Deux hallway, all light brown wood, and chrome curlicues and floor-to-ceiling mirrors on every wall. Large windows let in light as white as a
fresh snowfall, so bright that it hurt the eyes. The light moved with weird, sticky slowness; what Diana first took to be dust motes in the air were actually photons: swollen by some mysterious
physical process and drifting with leisurely insolence. Because light was flowing so slowly, time was all wrong: somehow simultaneously zipping by too quickly
and
passing much too slowly. It
felt nightmarishly carceral. It was disturbing. But her MOHmies were smiling. ‘What is going on?’ she asked.

They answered in so perfect a unison that there was no double-tracking of their respective voices. ‘Your rage has slowed time,’ they said.

‘And is my anger not justified? He had no right to treat me like that!’

‘
You
?’

She felt this as rebuke. ‘No. Not me. The dead man – Leron. How could he treat a person like that? Even a man from the Sump. Even,’ she went on, although her anger was
shrinking inside her, ‘a bad man, like him. It’s not right. A human being is a human being. A human being is not a toy.’

‘We cannot
help
but use the people below us as a resource, my love,’ said her two MOHmies, as one. ‘That is what it means to be in power. Your choice is to relinquish
power forever, or to accept that and use people for good.’

She looked from wall to wall, from mirror to mirror. Mirrors. Her MOHmies were (of course) reflected in them; but Diana did not seem to be. She peered, trying to check whether this was just a
feature of her point of view, or whether, in this dream, she was actually invisible.

‘If we are powerful,’ sang her MOHmies, ‘we can make things better, but we are made unclean by the fact that we have power. If we are powerless we remain clean, but we cannot
make things better.’ Their voices, together, had a weird depth and resonance to them.

‘It’s a false dilemma,’ she said.

‘Precisely!
That
is what he is trying to teach you. That was your birthday present.’

Diana took a step forward. With a sensation of slippage inside her, she realised, belatedly, that there were no mirrors in this bright-lit hall. Every mirror was actually a broad doorway, and
what she had assumed were reflections were actually other figures – her MOHmies, replicated into dozens of versions of themselves. Through every door a new room, and her MOHmies in every
room, and behind them another door and another perspective on her MOHmies. She had the insight that she was seeing an infinite regression of rooms. There were trillions of human beings in the Sump,
but there were an infinite number of her own parents.

And with that insight, she woke up.

She sat up in bed, pulling the blanket more tightly around her shoulders. Is there a more primitive form of technology than a blanket? Something queer about the light: a more metallic whiteness
to it. It took her a moment to realise that it was snowing.

Snow.

She went back through to the sitting room. Iago was still there, and sitting across from him was Sapho. She looked up guiltily as Diana entered, got awkwardly to her feet, nodded and hurried
away. Diana came over and sat in the seat she had recently occupied. It was still warm. ‘Why did she start like a guilty thing?’

‘She overheard what we were saying,’ said Iago, in a level voice. ‘She wanted to know what was going on, and I suppose she’s entitled to know – her, above all. I
was telling her that she was not responsible for killing Leron. Though she struck the blow, I was the one who set it up. I told her that I knew he had been abusing her, and that I used her as the
means by which justice could be done.’

Diana thought about this. ‘She believed you?’

‘Why wouldn’t she? She wept, actually. I think it relieved, to some extent, her feelings of guilt.’

‘Iago,’ said Diana. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper with you.’

He opened his eyes fractionally wider. Then he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re surprised?’

‘Let’s say,’ he replied, ‘that you have reached this place quicker than I anticipated.’

She ignored this. ‘The point was not just a birthday present, was it?’ she said. ‘Which is to say: it was. But it was very specifically a
sixteenth
birthday. It was
about adulthood. Yes?’

Iago replied with characteristic obliqueness. ‘Of course it is not comfortable to think that human beings, who breathe and feel and hope as we do, are a resource we exploit. It is a very
terrible thing. But the alternative is: to live a hermit life. And the stakes are too high for that.’ She took this for:
yes
.

‘So,’ she said. ‘This is what I deduce. Your birthday gift to me was a real-life murder mystery. You expected me to solve this mystery.’

‘Of course.’

‘But that wasn’t the real present, was it? You expected me to solve the mystery, and then you expected me to uncover what was behind it – you expected me to work out your
involvement.’

He was looking at her. Slowly he nodded.

‘You
wanted
me,’ she said, ‘to be angry. You wanted me to feel used, to be outraged at the disposal of a live human being into such a game. You wanted me to feel
that
, so I would confront this fact of power. That to rule means to treat people in that way.’

‘The thing is,’ Iago repeated. ‘The stakes are very high.’

‘Overthrowing the Ulanovs?’

‘Ha!’ His laugh took her by surprise. ‘No, no. That would be power politics – a very desirable outcome I think, overthrowing tyranny; and I genuinely hope we can bring it
about. And what your MOHparents hope, too. But that is the oldest currency in human affairs. Power politics, I mean. It happens, or it doesn’t happen, and
Homo sapiens
carries on. No,
I mean something much more important than that.’

‘What?’ Diana asked. Iago was looking through the window: snowflakes descending. Each was smaller than a fingernail, and thinner, and less durable. But they were coming in greater
and greater numbers. The world outside was turning white. In summer, too!

‘Let’s talk about that,’ he said.

14

The Third Letter of the Alphabet

‘Joad wanted to know where
it
is,’ Iago said. ‘
It
is something unimaginably dangerous, something worth unimaginable sums of money. It
being—’