Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (48 page)

Diana was gifted a vertiginous sense of future retrospect. She saw a future Joad, gloating:
he led us a merry dance, from world to world, through myriad bubbles – but we caught him. I
caught him. I jabbed him and sealed him away and brought him back; and we were able to extract the formula for FTL from him, before he died. And now the Clan has a bomb with which to blackmail
Ulanovs, and the whole of humanity!
It could lead only to disaster.

‘There’s no glory in this, Ms Joad,’ she said.

‘Glory is a combustion,’ the older woman replied. ‘The rapid interaction of like and unlike, cancelling one another out in fire.’ She smiled a deathly smile, and then she
disappeared from Diana’s constrained point of view. Presumably she went to strap Sapho into her couch. From where she lay, Diana could see only one window, which gave out a view of the green
curve of the main Garland 400 bubble. Bright sunlight fell upon it.

There was nothing to do.

Soon, Diana felt the jar and the pull as the ship disengaged. The green arc slid out of the frame of the window. With a distant sense of motion in her ears and stomach, she watched as a portion
of another ship filled the frame, and then passed out of view again. That was Ms Joad’s own craft, presumably. The hissing of attitudinal jets. The clunk, resonantly audible, as the nose of
the
Rum
connected with the nose of Ms Joad’s one-person sloop.

‘Ms Joad?’ wheezed Iago, from his couch.

‘You
will
try my patience,’ came her voice, from outside Diana’s field of view, ‘if you insist on interrupting me.’ The grumble of the main thrust firing up;
the orientation of the shadows on that portion of the cabin wall that Diana could see. The
nowness
of now. The vivid intensity of being alive. ‘You’d better have something
important to say to me, young man.’

‘I do,’ Iago rasped.

‘What?’

‘I wanted to say,’ said Iago. He sighed, and went on: ‘that I’m ready for you now.’

The next part was a jumble. The lids of the g-couch slammed instantly shut, with a jarring clunk. Diana was aware of being shaken
very
violently – and this despite
the fact that she was cocooned inside a g-couch, strapped down and restrained. Yet she felt as if her limbs were going to be shaken apart from her torso, and as if her eyeballs were being scrambled
inside her head, the shaking was so intense. It lasted for a long time. Eventually the shaking died down, and finally it stopped. All she could do was lie there. The lights inside the couch had
gone out, and her own breathing sounded loud in her ears, and every now and again some piece of debris banged hard against the side of her couch, sending a cacophonous noise through the little
space. Otherwise there was nothing.

It was perfectly dark and very quiet for a long time. The sound of her own breathing, and (as she strained her ears) of her own heartbeat. These two slowly settled into a calmer rhythm. It did
occur to her, although without any particular sensation of alarm, that she might be dead. Possibly her body had died and her consciousness was continuing inside this box because – the notion
was fanciful, but somehow it appealed to her – her soul couldn’t get out. Eventually the box would be opened, she thought, and then maybe that would be an end to it. Her spirit would
fly off to some other realm. Eva had conspired against her, and against their parents. The world had been turned upside down. But it was foolish to say so, because there was no up and down in
space.

In that space her mind kept working. She was bred to solve problems, after all.

The awkward thing was the way the problems kept resolving themselves into opposite pairs of impossibility. The death of Bar-le-duc had been caused by an impossible assailant, or else by an
impossible gun. FTL was an impossibility by the laws of physics; yet the Champagne Supernovae that Eva herself had been studying were candles lit in the impossible distance to the fact that this
technology was not only possibly, but had been – madly, dangerously – invented by a dozen separate alien civilisations.

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 the
4

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 the
4
. 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.’