by Adam Roberts
‘Music to my ears,’ said Davide.
Jac figured that the top three would dig themselves chambers, and possibly that they would let Mo and Marit dig themselves rooms as well; but that some other plan would come to play before he and Gordius got a room of their own. But eleven years is a long time. He figured he’d be able to make himself a cubby hole at some point.
In the meantime he gathered glass. When he was digging through silicate-rich areas, little beads and minuscule lumps of the stuff would be shed from the drilling point. He turned off the waste schute, and spent time picking these out from the general chaff. They were never very big – ten could fit in the space of a fingernail – but they were the real thing, actual glass.
So he tried an experiment: he carved out a shallow depression, gathered as many of the tiny marbles as could be persuaded to float inside it, and then covered them with the drill. It took a number of attempts, but he ended up with a larger lump of irregularly shaped glass, fused by the excavator from the smaller pieces. When he held this, it sat neatly in the middle of his hand.
Davide mocked him for it. ‘Some window! That’s barely enough for a monocle!’
‘A glazier has to start somewhere,’ said Jac, mildly.
‘Never mind glassmaking,’ Davide snarled, displeased by this reply. ‘You keep digging. I want a room of my own. You hear?’
‘Dig your own room,’ Jac said, slipping the lump of glass inside his tunic.
‘What?’ roared Davide.
‘I’m digging your own room,’ Jac clarified. ‘Is what I said. I’m doing it now.’ He turned on the waste hose again and began once more grinding away at the rock.
After his shift was over, and after he had eaten a little ghunk and drunk from the scrubber’s spigot, Jac took out his lump of glass and examined it. It was opaque on the outside, and shaped with as many bulges and prongs as an amoeba. Taking a piece of abrasive rock he began to rub away at the outside. He fell into an easy-enough rhythm, and the action helped keep him a little warmer. But the others only mocked him.
‘Hey – what you doing?’
‘What you rubbing there, Leggy?’
Jac smiled, and shook his head. ‘What is it?’ E-d-C demanded.
‘It’s his chunk of glass,’ said Gordius, eagerly. ‘Hey, are you grinding the glass?’
‘Is that your window, cripple boy?’ said Marit, with an unfriendly laugh. ‘Window big enough for a cockroach, maybe?’
‘I think he’s going to make a microscope,’ said Mo. ‘And then what? With your microscope you’ll – what? Look for your legs?’ Everybody laughed at that.
Jac kept grinding. After a while, Davide said: ‘how did you lose your legs, anyway, Jac-my-lad?’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Jac.
‘Oh,’ said Marit. ‘You think maybe we won’t have enough time to hear it?’ He laughed, without warmth. ‘Tell the story, cripple boy.’
Jac stopped rubbing. All eyes were on him. ‘Well, Marit,’ he said. ‘What happened was: I was pleasuring your mother and she got so excited she snapped them both off with her muscular thighs.’
There was the briefest pause when it looked as though Marit might launch straight for him, strangling-hands first; but then everybody laughed, and the fury receded back deeper into Marit’s eyes.
Later, with Mo, Marit and Lwon on the drills, Gordius came over and asked: ‘how did you lose your legs, friend?’
‘It’s neither a long nor a boring story,’ said Jac. ‘But I’d rather not go into it here.’
‘Oh,’ said Gordius, disappointed. ‘I thought you were brave, talking back to Marit. He’s a violent soul. My father used to say: one thing about being a god is that you can see into the souls of men and women. You can see the gravity that keeps their spirit together, and perceive whether it be evil or good. He has a violent soul, I think, does Marit.’
‘You think?’ Jac asked, drily.
‘Oh! Yes!’ said Gordius, ingenuously. ‘Davide is,’ he looked around, lowered his voice, ‘Davide is angry too, but it’s a regular sort of anger. Marit is different. He is cruel. He likes to pass the time by flicking chips of rock as hard as possible at me. He likes to aim for my face when I’m not expecting it. I think he wants to get one of my eyes out. I think, if he managed to knock one of my eyes out, he’d laugh!’ Gordius shuddered. He had not maintained his original bulk, what with the limited diet of ghunk and the hard work of drilling; he had shrunk, and his skin lay in folds about his frame, like drapery.
‘We’d best keep our eye on him,’ Jac said.
You and me together, friend!’ said Gordius, with a catch in his voice.
Day followed day. Jac kept his eye on them all. Marit had a cruel streak, no question; but Jac figured Davide was more immediately dangerous, for his frustration was working alchemically upon his rage. Although for the time being the laboriousness of the work and the exhaustion of rest soaked up his rage, there was no knowing how long that would last. Lwon and E-d-C were too focused on manoeuvring for position in the group as a whole to divert energy towards persecuting Gordius or Jac. No: Mo and Marit were the most immediate threat. Already Jac could see that even the incessancy of the tasks needful for immediate survival was not enough completely to distract them from their own dissatisfaction. They were bored, resentful, and although their surly gazes mostly followed the three alphas, Jac knew that it was only a matter of time before they kicked downward. Sooner or later they were going to take out their bitterness on either Gordius or him. That would be at the least painful, and at the most fatal.
Eleven years: he would never last that long. Neither would Gordius. They had to get out. Or at any rate: he had to.
For the time being, though, the three alphas and two alpha-betas spent a good deal of their energy upon dominance games. ‘I was the number one thorn in the Ulanovs’ side,’ claimed Davide. ‘You know who arrested me? Bar-le-duc himself! In person!’ Jac’s attention was snagged by that. ‘You that important, are you?’ asked Marit, sourly, ‘that the Ulanovs’ top arrest agent came personally for you?’
‘Bar-le-duc!’ repeated Davide.
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said E-d-C. ‘I reckon a lowranking policeman snagged you up, same as the rest of us.’
‘Well that shows what you know!’ said Davide. ‘Bar-le-duc, the famous Bar-le-duc, took me personally in hand. I had cost the Ulanovs billions of credits. I was Solar System enemy number one.’
‘In the old days,’ said Marit, ‘they used to put delusional lunatics in hospital, not in a prison like this! I’ll tell you what, though; true fact, not fantasy like Davide’s boasting. They made a movie about me! I’m the metrical Jesse James. I’m famous in a hundred communities.’
‘Shanty bubbles, maybe’ said Davide.
Lwon refrained from boasting, but the others indulged themselves freely. And Jac watched as Gordius, childlike, strained to join in. One day, unable to keep his secret to himself, and hoping to ingratiate himself with Lwon, Gordius indulged in a bit of boasting of his own: he revealed that he had been a god to his own people. This was a mistake. Lwon relayed the information directly to everyone, and Gordius held his knees to his chest and rotated slowly in the air, his skin flushing with embarrassment, as E-d-C, Marit and Mo brayingly mocked him. ‘So you’re the God my preacher told me about!’ ‘Hey, God, why don’t you perform a miracle and get us out of here! Go on – jaunt us clear and free, take me to . . . someplace warm.’ ‘His magic only works,’ said Mo, sarcastically, as if explaining an important theological crux to everyone, ‘after we crucify him. Once we’ve tortured him to death, then he comes back, and then he can do the magic.’
‘You don’t understand the revealed truth of cosmic religion,’ blurted Gordius, goaded beyond caution. ‘I’m not the spiritual god. She is Omni – I’m but the material god, englobed in flesh. Or,’ he faltered. ‘I was. I was, but. Now I’m nothing.’ He started crying, tears coining from the corners of his eyes as little silver glo
bes and floating way. ‘Now I’m nothing at all, less than nothing!’ he wailed. ‘I have lost everything! You might as well kill me now and get it out of the way!’
‘Stop your noise,’ snapped E-d-C, crossly. He was close enough to be able to kick out, and he caught Gordius in the middle of his loose-skinned stomach. The big man mooed like a heifer in pain, and bent double as he slid backwards through space and pranged against the far wall. Jac watched carefully. Everybody was laughing. E-d-C had a severe grin on his face as he slid back away from his blow; Lwon and Mo were laughing, but it was Marit who was laughing the hardest. Jac thought to himself: maybe he is the one nearest to cracking, after all.
It would either be him, or Davide, he was sure of that.
‘Bar-le-duc, bar-le-duc,’ sang E-d-C, tunelessly. ‘Nabbed us all, nabbed us all – except for god-boy who was betrayed by Ju-u-das.’
There was no escaping their labour, though. When the others took their turn on the diggers, Jac worked at polishing his lump of glass. It was slow work, and after several days it all came to nothing: a carelessly too-forceful thrust to try and erase a small protuberance caused the whole piece to crack into three pieces. Jac breathed deeply, and breathed out. Then he bundled the pieces together, gathered some more miniature marbles, and spent a portion of his next session at the digger pressing them into a new lump. Davide saw what he was doing, and for a while the whole group – Gordius amongst them – gathered around Jac to mock him for his self-appointed Sisyphean task. But Jac was placid, and non-confrontational, and eventually they grew bored and left him to it. After a good deal of careful effort, he managed to produce a slightly larger, flatter lump.
Then, after his stint on the diggers: back to scraping and abrading.
‘You’re just doing that to pass the time,’ said Davide, dismissively.
‘Just to pass the time,’ agreed Jac . ‘Though I suppose time will pass, in any case, regardless of what I do.’
Work continued. The three diggers were diversely employed, each excavating a chamber. Lwon himself struck lucky one day, discovering a second vein of ice, bigger than the first. He turned the extractor off, and used the drill to whack chunks of it out. The others stopped whatever they were doing, or not doing, to grab these and pass them back. ‘We can grow a lot more of that delicious ghunk now,’ cried Davide. ‘Can any man boast a greater joy in his heart than I?’
‘I’m so sick of your voice,’ said Marit. Then, looking around, and to make clear that he wasn’t picking a fight with Davide, he added, ‘I’m so sick of all your voices.’
‘Well,’ said Lwon. ‘We’ve got eleven years. You’d better get used to them.’
‘How can it still be eleven years?’ Marit growled. ‘Surely we’ve been here a year already!’
This, of course, was a real issue. How were they going to keep track of time, in the longer term? Should they even bother trying? Lwon finished pulling the ice from its seam, or all the ice he could reach. This left an overhang of rock that was easily broken and chipped away by the digger. It felt like a day on which something had been achieved, actual structure added to the interior space; so everybody stopped work and ate some ghunk and drank a little, and lay about the walls or the ceiling. ‘Ice is easier to mine than rock,’ said Davide, as if uttering a profound and original truth. ‘A few more veins like that, and we’ll very soon have a room each.’
E-d-C broke wind, and everybody yelled in mock-protest and spoke disrespectfully of his fundament.
‘You know what?’ said Mo. ‘I think it is a little warmer.’
‘Barely,’ said Marit, shivering. But it was true: the worst of the arctic chill had gone out of the air. ‘We should hold on to the memory of this cold,’ said Lwon. ‘Soon enough, it’ll get hot in here, and then our problem will be finding a way of disposing of the heat. Then we’ll look back on these days with fondness.’
‘Better be too hot than too cold,’ said Mo, earnestly.
The thought that they would one day look back on these times – that there might actually be a future for them – mellowed the group as a whole. It made them meditative. ‘There must be ways to dump the excess heat,’ said E-d-C. ‘Thousands of prisoners survive their term. The majority, I reckon. They find a way, and so will we. There’s no problem this rock can throw at us that we won’t be able to solve.’
Jac held his peace.
Mo started speaking about his time on Earth, working hauling luggage for a wealthy fretman. ‘That full gravity,’ he said, ‘it’s tiring, sure, like they say. It tires you because it’s there even when you’re sleeping, so you never sleep quite right. But my god and lord how it tones your musculature! It was just hauling bags, not even specially big ones, but my arm muscles got big as boulders.’ He displayed his arms. ‘Not so bulky now,’ he conceded, sadly.
Gordius farted. ‘Hey!’ Davide objected, loudly; and then, as the stench penetrated even over and above the foul smells in which they habitually lived, everybody groaned and spoke threatening words. Gordius started giggling. ‘Sorry, guys,’ he said, but he didn’t stop giggling. The giggles made the folds and curtain-drapes of his flesh wriggle and flap like a flag in a strong wind. His laughter acquired that hysterical edge, that grating edge. ‘Sorry! Sorry!’
Marit roused himself, and floated over to Gordius. He reached out and slapped him in the face. The sound of a wet cloth on a riverside stone. Gordius’s head turned quickly to the right, but the laughter didn’t stop. Marit drew back his arm again, folded his open hand into a fist. Then he thrust it hard against Gordius’s cheek. The giggling stopped. The sound of a bat hitting a ball. The sound of butcher’s cosh hitting flesh. Marit’s arm was back out, and down again: punch, punch, again in the face. Gordius was making a high-pitched warbling noise, and wriggling to get free; his own arms stretching and trying to push Marit off. Another wet thwacking sound, this one right in the eye. Marit had hold of Gordius’s long hair with his left hand, and was holding it tight. Again, another blow, on the nose, and an adder-shaped strand of dark fluid leapt out into the air. Gordius’s struggles meant that the two of them were rotating, their feet coming up to where their heads had been a moment before, but all of Marit’s attention was on where his blows handed: his fist sank into cheek, his fist hammered into the eye socket a second time, Gordius’s cries increased in volume. Finally Marit’s fist made a booming noise as it cracked against forehead bone, and Marit released his grip. He floated back, nursing his right hand. ‘You hurt my fist!’ he snarled. ‘You’ve done something to my knuckles – you bag of blubber.’
Gordius was foetally clutching himself, sobbing, his great bulk rotating slowly. Trails of sticky-looking bloody mucus extended and curled oddly in the zerogravity.
Lwon said, ‘are you OK, god-boy?’ But got no reply.
Marit came back over to the new bundle of ice, where it floated, and tried to apply some to his reddened knuckles. ‘You smelt what he did?’ he demanded, of nobody in particular. ‘We got to breathe all that? No way. Not me.’
Jac went over to the big fellow and tried to soothe him. It took a long time before he could coax him to take his hands from his face, and when he did he saw what a mess it was. Seaweedy extrusions of blackened blood hung from his nose and his left eye was swollen and sealed shut. There were many contusions, and the bruises were already showing, knuckle-shaped fairy stepping stones across the expanse of white cheek. Jac fetched some of the new ice, made Gordius suck on a piece to try and reduce swelling inside the mouth, and scraped the worst of the blood away. ‘It’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘Though your eye is going to be swelled shut for a few days.’
‘Why didn’t Lwon stop it?’ Gordius sobbed, indistinctly, his mouth full of ice. ‘Marit just went on and on. Why didn’t Lwon intervene, and stop it?’
‘Why would he risk antagonising Marit? For you? Not worth it. On the contrary,’ said Jac. ‘He’d rather Marit blew off steam thwacking you than – you know. Attacking him.’
Gordius’s batte
red face acquired a sulky look. ‘Isn’t he supposed to be in charge? He ought to act like he is.’
‘I’m not sure you grasp what being in charge in this place, with these people, means,’ said Jac. ‘Anyway, I don’t think your nose is broken.’
For some reason, this news made Gordius start to weep. ‘Here,’ said Jac, uncertainly. ‘Have some more ice.’
‘We’re never going to survive here, you and I!’ Gord said, through his sobs. ‘They’re picking on me now, but it’ll be you tomorrow. Every time they get a little annoyed, they’ll take it out on us two. We’ll be beaten to death. Literally to death. And the worst thing is – there’s nothing we can do!’
‘We need to get off the rock,’ said Jac, looking over his shoulder.
Behind him the sound of the drills had started up, in their respective chambers. Davide, E-d-C and Mo had resumed digging; Lwon was watching them, Marit was nursing his hand.
‘There’s no way off this rock,’ moaned Gordius. But he peered at Jac with his one good eye. ‘Is there?’
‘You tell me, god-boy,’ returned Jac.
‘You’re planning something. What? What will you do?’
‘To begin with,’ said Jac, wiping his bloodied hands on Gordius’s tunic. ‘I’m going to finish making my piece of glass.’
‘Is that the key to it?’ He explored his own bashed face, gingerly, with his fingers-ends, wincing. ‘Is that it? But your window would only be the size of a hand – maybe smaller – what good is that?’
‘Nothing,’ agreed Jac. ‘No good at all.’
He was about to push off, when Gordius grabbed his elbow. ‘Take me with you.’
Jac looked over at Marit again. Then he looked back at the big fellow.
‘I’ll keep it to myself!’ Gordius said. ‘I promise! I won’t tell them. And anyway, I can’t give away what you’re planning, because I don’t know what you’re planning. I just know you’re planning something. And when you do it, whatever it is. And when you,’ He coughed on the blood coming down his throat from the inside of his nose. He gulped. ‘And when you do – take me with you. If you don’t, I’ll die here. The others, they can simply serve their time. They won’t miss us.’