Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (45 page)

Then she thought: two things exploded: Bar-le-duc and the skin of the globe. What if the latter were not a side effect of the man’s death – but
its cause
? She tried to imagine
a weapon embedded in the fabric of the house; firing with asymmetric force, just enough inward trajectory to blow Bar-le-duc to pieces; and with much greater outward force, enough to tear his ship
in half. Was that possible?

Was it plausible?

It felt wrong, somehow, as a solution; incomplete, or orthogonal to a more elegant answer. But not
wholly
wrong, she thought. Something about it was right. One thing Diana had always been
good at was intuiting the general rightness or otherwise of a solution, even before she had the supporting details in place.

This line of thought carried one rather significant correlative, of course. Who would have placed such a weapon in the wall of the house?

Who else but its owner?

Iago floated over to hang beside her. ‘I’ll be sorry to lose this house,’ he said. ‘Since I suppose I can never return here.

‘That’s a pity,’ she said, tight-lipped.

‘We shall have to,’ he said, an uncharacteristic note of hesitation in his voice, ‘travel from place to place for a while. Diana, I apologise if that makes you angry with
me.’

She glanced at him, and then looked outside again. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said, angrily. ‘Why should that make me angry?
I’m
not angry.’

‘You heard what Mahyadi Panggabean said earlier?’

At this she felt only tiredness and boredom, and turned her face away. ‘Bar-le-duc was being authorised by my own Clan. Yes I heard. It’s not that surprising, though, is it? Power
abhors the vacuum. The Ulanovs would hardly dismantle the entire structure of the Clan. They’ve put some puppet in the pilot’s seat – or else, some enterprising Clan member has
seized power, and made a deal with the Ulanovs. As long as my parents are OK, and my sister, I can’t care too much.’

‘Diana,’ he started to say.

‘I’d prefer to be alone now, Iago,’ she snapped.

He didn’t force the issue: let her be, and went back to packing the
Rum
.

The last thing to be loaded was the RACdroid, and then – with a brisk farewell to the Mahyadi Panggabean and Sukarno, he, Sapho and a sulky Diana went on board and shut the main door
behind them.

Departure was delayed, however, by the difficulty they had in jettisoning Bar-le-duc’s ruined craft. This had docked straightforwardly at the
Rum
’s rear hatch, but whatever
had wrecked the craft had deformed the link, bent the whole assemblage of door and door five degrees or so away from true. It took a half-hour, and a power wrench, to force the resilient spaceship
metal back towards its original configuration. It proved impossible to line it up as it had been before, but at least they got it back to an arrangement in which the mechanism could at least be
disengaged. Iago layered sheets of sealant over the whole portal, and finally they pulled away from Dunronin and accelerated at one third g into blankness.

7

To Garland 400

It was a three-day journey straight to Garland 400, the cluster of Antinomian bubbles in which lived (Iago promised) a RACdroid expert who could determine, once and for all,
whether their machine was rogue or not. Iago decided to start the voyage by flying a decoy trajectory for six hours, at full burn; so the early stage of the flight was a very uncomfortable period
inside the g-couches. Then there was an hour of weightless flight, which gave them time for a little food. And then, to make up the time, another four-hour full-burn stint in the g-couches. Diana
was miserable, halfway between awake and asleep, in unyielding discomfort. Her thoughts were trapped in a loop: Bar-le-duc was dead, Bar-le-duc wasn’t dead, Bar-le-duc was dead, Bar-le-duc
couldn’t be dead.
Feathers or lead?
she thought.
Feathers or lead? Feathers or lead?
Had Bar been exploded by the weapon, or had he exploded the weapon? It had to be one or the
other. Did it have to be one or the other? Even the question as to whether it had to be one or the other
had to be one or the other
! Feathers or lead? Feathers or lead?

By the time they were set in their actual trajectory, and the g-force melted away, Diana was cranky and exhausted. She took a light supper; watched a book by herself, trying to ignore Iago and
Sapho’s conversation. Sapho wanted to learn how to fly a ship of this type; Iago was talking her through the interface, discussing its cranks and hiccoughs, discussing the fuel-to-ice ratio
and so on.

Finally Diana hooked herself to the side and went to sleep. Iago dimmed the interior lights, and went to sleep himself. Sapho too.

But Diana slept only fitfully, waking at odd moments, hanging there doing nothing more than watching the motionless cabin: the bone-pale dashboard glow; hearing the hum. She slept again, woke
uneasily, and slept again.

Now she dreamt. It was a complicated series of interlocking set-piece dream-stories, gothically ornate and grisly – but she remembered almost none of the details, only that it was so
complicated. This in itself was a disturbing thing. She
always
remembered her dreams. Remembering her dreams was a necessary part of her problem-solving. But on this occasion the only bit of
the dream she could recall afterwards was the very last portion. There were three of them: Diana and Ms Joad and a third person, behind her, whom she could not see or name. They were all standing
on the shore of a red sea, bright red, tomato red, artificially red. It was blood, this sea, a great pool of blood under the influence of gravity. Little waves broke on the shore at her feet, with
horrid, slurpy, chuckling sounds. The sand was hard and compacted. ‘With a little heat,’ Ms Joad was saying, ‘you know what this sand will turn into? With a little atomic blast?
We’ll detonate, we’ll detonate.’ ‘But first we must have time to get away,’ said Diana, feeling anxious, worried that if they were being reckless, then disaster must
follow. ‘
Under
the waves, my dear,’ said Ms Joad. ‘That’s where we’ll go! You must learn to breathe it. It was what you did in your maternal womb, wasn’t
it? You breathed the life-fluid of your mother then – it is simply a question of
going back to that time
. You. Will. Remember.’ ‘No,’ Diana cried; but the red fluid
rose up in front of her in a red wave, and then it was all about her; she was kicking her limbs in an epilepsy of panic, and the stuff went in at her mouth.

She woke sweating, gasping. Her heart was hammering. Sleep was out of the question; so she unfastened herself and floated through the cabin. She drank a little water; and then – because
she thought it might help her skittering thoughts and fearful heart – she drank a little rice vodka. But that only made her feel sick. The view through the main windows had that eerie
motionless quality spacetravel almost always presents to its travellers. However many thousand kilometres a second you are actually travelling, it always looks as if you are perfectly motionless.
Diana thought to herself: I breathed vaporised Bar-le-duc into my lungs. We all did. I absorbed him. Unconscious cannibalism. That’s what I was dreaming about.

She began to cry.

It felt as if she would never control her sobs; but eventually she stopped crying. Of course she did. She floated back over to her perch, hooked herself on again and lay still. The hours moved
in their mysterious, unmeasurable way.

The next day passed in a daze. The next night she was so exhausted she slept eleven hours, and upon waking was conscious of no dreams at all.

8

The Wrath of Diana

To go from the enforced stillness and low-key daily interactions of the
Rum
’s cabin into the crazy, drunken revels of the first of Garland 400’s bubbles was
something of a shock. They left Sapho on the ship, and made their way past the chanting, boozing, copulating crowds; through into the adjacent bubble and then again into the one after that. Here
Iago introduced her to Aishwarya; and the old lady checked the RACdroid’s seals carefully and pronounced it whole and kosher, and not a rogue at all.

Which meant that its data was to be trusted.

The four of them each drank a globe of cold, dark coca; and Diana felt the stimulant buzzing inside her veins. ‘So the shot that killed Bar-le-duc must have come from outside the bubble
after all,’ said Iago.

‘That flash,’ Sapho reminded him. ‘We saw the flash. That must have been part of it.’

‘Maybe,’ said Iago. ‘Although the flash happened a good while before the impact.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Aishwarya, ‘the flash was wholly unconnected with Monsieur Bar-le-duc’s death. A quantum fluctuation. A piece of ice hit by a micrometeorite. It could be
any one of a dozen things. Experience has taught me that we much more often see connection where there is only random copresence. Pattern-seeking consciousness, you know. Great plains ape, you
know.’

‘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.’