Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (49 page)

‘Once you go beyond c,’ said Iago, applying a finger-sized auto-file to his right stump and sending a sprig of white-fiery sparks from it away into the cabin, ‘well, physics
gets weird. As an object moves more and more rapidly, time appears – from its point of view, relative to an external observer – to pass more slowly. The closer you approach to the
asymptote of absolute speed, the more slowly time passes. For a photon, travelling at the speed of light, time doesn’t pass at all – it seems to us that the light from the Andromeda
galaxy takes millions of years to reach us, but to the light itself it is there and it is here with no time passing. So what happens when you go
faster
than light? Time reverses, of course.
At 2c, time travels one second per second
backwards
, if you see what I mean. It must be this way, in part to preserve general causality. But that has some – odd effects.’

‘A bullet shot faster than light moves backwards in time,’ said Diana. ‘It’s kindergarten physics, of course.’

‘As to whether
human beings
could ever travel so fast . . . frankly, I don’t know. McAuley thought they could. But I wonder if forcing a human being backwards in time
wouldn’t scramble her consciousness. After all, our minds have evolved with extraordinary finesse to inhabit the medium of
forward
-moving time.’

‘We couldn’t use it to escape the solar system,’ said Diana. ‘But we could still use it to turn our sun into a Champagne Supernova.’

‘It is desperately dangerous, yes,’ agreed Iago, bending a protruding strut and tucking it away. ‘It works, as it were, by altering c. It could provoke a catastrophic
chain-reaction if it were dropped into the sun. As to whether it could ever transport humanity – maybe it could. I don’t know.’

Where did you get your impossible gun from?’

‘McAuley. Where else?’

‘He built it?’

‘It’s beyond my skill,’ said Iago. He floated over to a storage drawer put the tools away. ‘Do you know the funny thing? I did not
choose
to shoot Bar-le-duc.
Which is to say, I don’t
think
I did. Which is to say, I don’t know, I suppose I must have done.’ He scratched his head. ‘I was as surprised as you when he exploded
into a cloud of red right beside me. The bubble was breached, and I was knocked back into the foliage on the far side. And then the gun was in my hand. It was in my hand before I knew it. At that
point, did it seem I had a choice? I don’t know. The impossible bullet had already been fired. I pulled the trigger, then, but it had already happened.’

‘It meant that you evaded capture,’ Diana pointed out. ‘It was in your interest to do it; and you did it. Doesn’t that amount to choice?’

He frowned, briefly. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter so much as the act itself. Bar
is
dead, after all.’

‘And Ms Joad, too.’

‘Hmm.’ He looked blankly at her. ‘That was more – premeditated. I couldn’t be sure what would happen in that situation, actually. That was a wilder chance I took.
She paralysed me pretty thoroughly. I suppose she assumed the nerve controls for my legs were plugged into the base of my spine, instead of more directly into my brain. She doesn’t understand
modern prosthetics, I suppose. Still, it was tricky, using one foot to press into the cavity in my other leg. The irony is that it was Joad’s fault that my right foot had been knocked off in
the first place – without that, I wouldn’t have been able to get to the weapon at all.’

‘It could have been that firing the gun inside your leg would have blown you and us and the whole shop to fragments,’ she said.

‘It could have been. But I was alive as I squeezed the device with my left toe. Things were lively – we were bouncing around a great deal. But I was still alive. So, you see, I knew
we would survive. Because pulling the trigger is the end of the process of firing an FTL pistol, not the beginning.’

‘Odd,’ she said.

‘Exactly. When I killed Bar-le-duc: the first thing we saw – long minutes before Bar even arrived – was the flash.’

‘That’s right!’ said Diana. ‘The
flash
.’

‘That was the impossible bullet falling
back
into sub-light travel. A sort of photonic boom. By then it was safe: just a very small projectile travelling very fast. If we
reconstruct the sequence of events, it runs, from our perspective, backwards. First we saw the flash. Then in very quick succession, the shattering of Bar’s ship, the breach in the side of my
house, Bar himself being atomised, and finally – me, in the bushes, pulling the trigger.’

They stopped talking then, because Dr Zinovieff emerged from her worldtual to fetch herself some tea. She made some for her passengers, and chatted with them. She complimented Iago on the neat
job he had done with his stumps. ‘They’re fancy prostheses,’ she observed. ‘Must have cost you a lot.’ ‘A goodly sum,’ Iago agreed.

Shortly, the good doctor went back to her virtual world.

‘Jack – I don’t want this to sound petulant,’ said Diana shortly. ‘Or little-girl-ish. But why didn’t you
tell
me?’

He took a deep breath. ‘You need to understand, Diana,’ he said. ‘The RACdroid we are carrying with us is
immensely valuable
. It is a powerful bargaining tool for
guaranteeing your safety. But it only works if the contract it carries is
inviolate
. If I breach the terms of the agreement, the contract becomes null – useless.’

‘And,’ said Diana, nodding, ‘of course you
did
breach those terms. You resisted arrest.’

‘But only you and I know that,’ said Iago, in a low voice. ‘I can’t stress how important it is nobody
else
learns the truth. As long as nobody knows I killed Bar
– well, then the contact is still viable.’

Diana felt a hundred years old. ‘Iago. Or Jack. Jack, I don’t think I understand you at
all
,’ she said.

‘I’m not so hard to understand,’ he said.

‘Really?’

He was quiet for a long time. When he started speaking again, it was in a low tone, monotonous, but quietly urgent. ‘I have placed my life in the service of one thing. Revolution. Only
when the myriad peoples of the Sump have some
collective
say in their own future will they be lifted out of misery. Only when the prison guards of Ulanov tyranny have been eliminated, and
the prison of poverty itself dismantled, can humanity achieve its potential.
Then
we’ll be ready for the stars – not before! If McAuley’s technology is disseminated now,
one faction or other of the endless warring tribes of humanity will use it to destroy us all. But once we are free . . . once we have evolved beyond the old medieval power structures and the
medieval internecine violence they create,
then
we’ll be able to use the technology responsibly. Everything depends on that. Have I killed people? – I have. But only in the
service of that higher cause.’

‘I still find it hard to believe my MOHmies employed you, knowing you were a revolutionary.’

‘Your parents are more flexible than you give them credit,’ said Iago. ‘They know that the Clan Argent couldn’t hold absolute power under the current system; not alone
– and they don’t trust any of the other MOHfamilies to go into alliance with them. No, once the Ulanovs go everything changes. Your parents see advantage in that as well as danger. And
they see – or more accurately, they foresaw – that the Ulanovs would eventually move against them.’

He was silent for a while. Then he spoke: ‘years ago, before your MOHparents gave me employment, and a new identity, long before that, I was in the Sump.’

‘As Jack Glass?’

‘Oh, a completely different pseudonym. Of course. Anyway, I was working on my networks, moving from bubble-cluster to bubble-cluster, laying long-term plans for revolution, planning
sedition in a dozen forms. I worked hard to protect my anonymity. But nonetheless I was betrayed, somehow . . . I’ve never worked out how. The police arrived in seven cruisers. I was in a
place called “God’s Prepuce”, a single bubble of antinomians, a religious community, devotees of Shiva Christ the Terror. Dedicated anti-Ulanovians, of course; but not so deep in
the Sump that they could afford to be blatant about it. Nonetheless, the police came and arrested the entire population of the place: eight hundred and ninety people. They came because somebody had
tipped them off that Jack Glass was one of that eight hundred and ninety. And I was. You know who commanded that force?’

‘Bar-le-duc?’

‘The very same. They came in large numbers: pierced the bubble with lances and pumped stultant gas into the space. They surprised us. We couldn’t fight them. They melted
boarding-doors through the walls and swarmed in, wearing masks. Everyone was arrested and threatened with summary execution – unless the celebrated Jack Glass identified himself and allowed
himself to be taken into custody. A man called Chag Sameach put his hand up. I hadn’t discussed this with him, or with anybody there. But they all knew I could not afford to be taken into
custody, knowing what I know. So I let him do it, his I-am-Spartacus performance, and Bar-le-duc took him away in his personal sloop.’

‘Didn’t they DNA him?’

‘They DNAd all of us, of course, but no database had Jack Glass’s code. Not back then, at any rate. And Chag had no legs – that’s not uncommon in the uplands, of course.
So they were persuaded. As for the rest of us: well, we were all sentenced, on the spot, to eleven years each, for political agitation and sedition. Every single one of us. We were loaded into
carriers. A Gongsi called 344 Diy
ī
rén bought our prisoner rights, and shipped us uphill to carve lucrative des-reses out of orbiting rocks. Three hard months in
an acceleration couch, hauling out to the asteroid field; holding at a facility called 8Flora. The prisoners were all randomly mixed, of course, to minimise the dangers of association. And finally
I was dumped with six other men, in a cavity in the side of a tiny asteroid called Lamy306 – a couple-hundred metres across, and me in there with six violent men.’

‘But surely they realised they didn’t have Jack Glass pretty quickly?’ Diana asked. ‘Wouldn’t they realise as soon as it was clear this Chag Sameach couldn’t
tell them anything?’

‘Of course. By then I was in prison, burrowing rooms out of the rock of Lamy306. And all the time I was thinking precisely that: they would soon discover that Chag was an imposter. Then
their
next
move would be to go through the other 889 prisoners they had seized in God’s P. They wouldn’t need to hurry it – for after all, we weren’t going anywhere.
But neither would they stint. The Gongsi has records of every rock to which that batch of prisoners had been distributed; and eventually they would get round to my one. Once they took me it was all
over. They would have me, and then they would have applied irresistible pressures to my mind, and the story of humanity would enter its closing straight. I had to get out.’

‘Joad mentioned it, that time on Korkura,’ said Diana, in a low voice. ‘The breakout that so baffled the authorities.’

‘That’s what she was talking about. I worked as quickly as I could, but it took time. And eventually I had to kill my fellow prisoners, in order to be able to make good my escape. I
wasn’t happy about it.’

‘Six men. You killed them all?’

‘No,’ he said, a little too quickly. Then: ‘Some of them were already dead. There was . . . fighting within the little group. Some of them killed some others of them. But
afterwards I killed the remainder. I took no pleasure in it. I did it only because it was perfectly unavoidable. If I had stayed, if I had decided just to serve out my sentence, then the Ulanovs
would have got hold of me. And then things would have gone very badly for the whole human species.’

‘Because you had the gun?’

‘I didn’t have it about my person, not then. But I knew where it was cached. And they would have got that information out of me.’

‘But, wait a minute,’ she said. Her brain was lining up all the elements in the story, and snagging on those that didn’t fit. ‘When Bar-le-duc caught up with you again,
in your own dome, you were willing to go along with him. The danger was the same: it was worse, because you had the actual gun about your person. The danger for the entire species. Wouldn’t
you destroy yourself rather than fall into his hands?’

In all the years Diana had known Iago she had never seen him do what he did next. He blushed. His cheeks darkened, red, and his eyeline moved away from her. ‘That was different,’ he
said.

‘Different.’

‘As I told Aishwarya, fighting him would have meant not only killing me; but killing you too.’

‘So? What do you mean, different?
How
was it different? You killed those other men in prison quick enough. The future of the whole species was at stake, you say! So, how was it any
less at stake when Bar-le-duc pitched up at your house? How could your individual life, or mine, or Sapho’s possibly weigh in the balance against
that
outcome?’

‘The agreement I made with Bar-le-duc was
the contract recorded in that RACdroid
. That guarantees your safety. That was paramount.’

‘Goddess, why? Why was
that
worth giving yourself up for?’ she pressed. ‘Are you saying that stupid contract was worth putting the entire System at risk? The lives of
trillions
?’

He made as if to speak, but swallowed the words. Then he ran the palm of his hand over his bristly hair, and closed his eyes. Finally he said: ‘yes.’

‘Have you lost your mind? The entire population of humanity – the whole
System
? Trillions of lives, in exchange for my safety?’

Iago said: ‘because I love you.’

It made her feel angry to hear him say this. She wanted to counter immediately with ‘don’t be absurd’ or ‘idiot!’ or something of that nature. But looking at him
she found she couldn’t simply rebuke him. A sword was sheathed, suddenly, in her heart; but it was pity, not love. Oh, it was uncomfortable, and acute, and worst of all
unfitting
. She
thought to herself: I’m only sixteen! He’s a
generation
older than me. He’s the one who ought to know better, not me. And in an attempt to move the exchange into less
emotionally dangerous territory, but knowing as she did so that it would make no difference, she said: ‘your loyalty to my family is a commendable thing, Iago. But
nonetheless—’