by Adam Roberts
‘They’ll tear themselves apart,’ said Jac.
Gordius chuckled, but it turned into another cough. ‘Look,’ he said, when he regained his breath. ‘It’s true I’m no longer a god, but my people are rich – they pay tax at 22%! The Ulanovs classify them as a special contributory community! It would be to your profit, helping me. And – and – and anyway, to leave me behind would be murder.’ Gordius turned his now-misshapen, bruised head from side to side. ‘What are you going to do, though? What are you planning? Why do you need a window?’
Jac looked at him. ‘I would like,’ he said, enunciating clearly in a low voice, ‘to be able to see outside.’
‘You’re going to summon a ship,’ said Gordius, in an excited-little-boy voice. He put up his hand. ‘It’s OK! I won’t tell them! Globe, I don’t even know how you’re going to do it! There are no ships out here, and a window the size of a button isn’t going to enable you to – no, never mind. I don’t need to know how. I just need to know that you’ll take me with you.’
Jac directed a steady gaze at him.
‘Jac,’ Gordius pleaded, whisperingly. ‘Look what Marit did to me! For no reason! These are violent men. These are murderous men. We’re not – I’m here on account of my piety, and you’re a political. We’re different. But these men are like – tigers. We can’t stay here for very much longer. Not if we want to stay alive.’
‘Tigers,’ said Jac, meditatively. It was as if the word reminded him of something. Then, returning from some distant realm of thought, he said: ‘you should have some more ice.’
‘This ice is all dusty,’ said Gordius, sulkily. Then he hissed: ‘say you’ll take me with you. Please! Please! My people will make you rich. Just say you’ll take me with you! Promise it!’
Jac held his thumb up, and pressed it lightly against Gordius’s bruised lips. ‘I promise,’ he said. ‘I will take you with me.’ There was something in his voice that sounded like tenderness. And maybe it was.
Jac did his best to work on the lump of glass when nobody was paying him any attention, but in such close quarters it wasn’t easy. He was grinding with a more careful, laborious motion, taking pains not to crack the piece. It took a long time.
The first chamber having been completed, there was a general agreement that the digger in question would best be used in carving out a corridor into the heart of the stroid. New chambers could be budded off this central line. And so the interminable labour continued.
Jac finished his turn with the digger, excavating this new tunnel. He was sweating, and floated to the spigot. ‘Yours,’ he gasped to Marit.
‘My hand is still sore where Buddha-boy there hurt it,’ said Marit. ‘You take another turn.’
Jac was far too tired to do anything but sleep. He made his way over to the scrubber. He didn’t say anything; all he did was shake his head, wearily. But then as he bent to put his lips to the spigot he felt a sharp pressure on the back of his head. His mouth slammed against the tap, and his front tooth clicked back like a switch. The circulation inside his head made a sudden loud noise and he pulled his head back in. His vision had become ruddy with pure fury. He looked around. Pain sang its terrible song inside his mouth and at the back of his head simultaneously. Everybody was laughing at him, although the cacophony of his own pulse sprinting round his veins and arteries dampened all other sound. Marit had thrown a large chunk of stone at the back of Jac’s head: the impact had smashed his mouth onto the unyielding substance of the spigot. He put a hand to the place where the skull overhangs the back of the neck. His hair was stickily wet. He looked from face to face. The lightpole was gleaming Hadean rouge; the faces looked demonic and red as sunset. He took a deep breath. Now?
He released the breath. No, no, no.
The colour drained from his vision, and the sound returned to normal. He breathed in. Breathed out.
‘Your expression!’ laughed Marit, seemingly well-pleased by what he had done. ‘You should have seen it.’
Looking left. Jac felt his front tooth; it had been knocked more than forty-five degrees from true; and the gum raged with a resentful pain. Looking right – there was the missile, still rotating and moving slowly away from its own recoil; a chunk almost as big as Jac’s own skull.
‘It’s OK, little legless man,’ said Marit. ‘You know what? I’m feeling the chill. I’ll work after all, to spare you the labour. No, to warm myself.’ He went through to the barely-started new tunnel and, still chuckling to himself, started up the drill.
Jac looked from face to face. Lwon, E-d-C and Mo were bored now; their attention had moved on to other things. Davide was laughing, though, and – away to the right – so was Gordius, his bruised face twisted into as much of a smile as the swelling and soreness allowed: a freaky-looking half-smile. He caught Jac’s eye, and the half-smile wilted.
But Jac needed a drink now, more than ever. He needed to wash the blood from his mouth. Leaving the spigot alone he took a piece of ice and fitted it between his lips, past the raw, bent tooth. The back of his head stung fiercely. He felt the cut in his scalp with his fingers. It did not seem too deep. But the tiny space had an aura of unreality to it now; as if he had been jolted out of a particularly cheap virtuality. He went to the wall and tucked his heel into an anchoring declivity. Then he surprised himself again: he fell fast and instantly asleep.
With every waking Jac made a careful examination of his environment, as if looking for something about it that had changed. Of course nothing had: the same rock, black as squid ink; the same ashen taste in the mouth; the same weary shine of the lightpole, the same unappetising strips of ghunk.
Two more chambers were finished, and the other two diggers were moved to join the first excavating the central tunnel. The aim was to make this as wide as possible, and to run it ten or twenty metres straight in before adding any more rooms to it. Lwon, Davide and E-d-C took up residence in the three chambers that had been made, of course; and whilst Jac was glad of the extra elbow-room in the original cavity – miraculously, their absence made the tiny space seem cavernous – the others were less content. ‘Twenty metres of tunnel?’ roared Mo. ‘I want a room now! Concentrate all three diggers, and you can scoop me out a room quick as mustard.’
‘I’m in front of you in the queue,’ said Marit, knocking his two fists against one another.
‘You ladies can fight for it later,’ said Davide. ‘We need to dig some tunnel before we can make your chambers.’
‘Not twenty metres of tunnel, though!’
‘No,’ said Lwon. ‘Just enough as we need.’
So the new task was tunnelling. The bruises on Gordius’s face thinned and went brown and yellow, and his swollen eye slowly returned to normal. But Marit continued his idle persecution of him, with an irregular regimen of random slaps, pinches and punches. One day he announced that he’d decided they needed to increase their growth of ghunk, and that Gordius’s tunic was the ideal growing medium. At first the fat man took this for a jest, but it quickly became apparent that Marit was in earnest.
‘Sure,’ agreed Davide. ‘Why not?’
‘I’ll freeze!’ complained Gordius.
‘Oh, it’s much warmer than it was when we arrived,’ said Marit. This was true, although the slight increase in warmth did not change the fact that the main cavity was still refrigerator-cold. The individual rooms were more comfortable: each of the three alphas had taken turns with the fusion cell in each chamber, leaving it there whilst they slept: the smaller space had warmed nicely, with some of the chill taken out of the walls. The fusion cell was back in the main cavity now, but only because Mo and Marit had complained so loudly. ‘Come on,’ Marit pressed, with sadistic glee. ‘Take your tunic off! I’m doing you a favour – you’ve lost weight, my boy. I’ll grow more ghunk, you can eat a little more heartily and you can put a bit more fat on your bones.’
The others were smiling, and Gordius looked with mounting panic from face to face. Then he made a mistake. ‘Lwon,’ h
e said, appealing directly to him. ‘Don’t let them do this . . .’
‘What are you begging him for?’ roared Marit. ‘You should be begging me, you slug!’ In a moment he was on him, slapping him – open-handedly this time – on his face and about his ample torso, tugging at his tunic and screaming ‘off with it! Get it off!’ directly into Gordius’s face. Whimperingly the victim complied, and soon enough he was clutching his naked chest and shivering visibly. ‘I’ll freeze to death!’ he wailed. ‘I mean it – I’ll die of the cold!’
‘All that seal fat?’ said Marit, pinning the tunic to the wall near the lightpole with stone chips. ‘You’d be warmer naked than any of us fully clothed.’
‘You’re god, ain’t you?’ said Mo. ‘Miracle up some heat for yourself.’
Mo and Davide helped Marit rub beads and pearls of water over the fabric, and then they applied some of the black spores. When they were finished, Marit looked well satisfied with what he had done.
More digging. E-d-C found a prize, buried in the core of the rock: a piece of metal. It was black as space, and palpably denser than the rock around it. ‘Meteorite iron,’ said E-d-C proudly. ‘Actual metal! All that anxious talk about how we were going to smelt metal – there’s no need! Here’s an actual piece of the early solar system, embedded in this stroid!’
‘We still need to think of a way of working it,’ said Lwon. ‘It’s harder than the rock.’
So they all gave up tunnel-digging for a while, and instead clustered around, proposing various strategies for working the iron. Davide tried grinding it with the business end of a drill, in the hope that friction might heat it and make it malleable; but it only shattered the lump into two. Everybody screeched, as if the chunk were a complex machine that had been broken irreparably. Then, at Mo’s suggestion, they tied it to the fusion cell’s heated plate. It warmed, a little, but become no more workable. Then they started a lengthy debate about whether it could be beaten into malleability. Davide’s idea was: put it to the wall, and use the scrubber as a blacksmith’s hammer; but everybody else thought this a terrible idea. ‘If we damage the scrubber we will all die in hours,’ Lwon said. There were similar objections to using the fusion cell. They took turns with the densest chunk of rock they could find, smashing first one then the other piece against the wall; but it made no difference whatsoever to the material.
Still, the iron was a prize. E-d-C took the larger of the two pieces, and Lwon took the other.
Another day, when Mo, Marit and Lwon were on the diggers, and E-d-C and Davide sleeping, Gordius shuffled over to Jac. ‘I was thinking about what your plan might be,’ he whispered, excitedly. As Jac started to say something he added, ‘I know! I know! But I won’t tell them. I know it has something to do with the window you’re making.’ He pointed at the spot under Jac’s own tunic where he had the piece of glass tucked. ‘I think I have it figured. You make your glass transparent, and fit it in the side of the stroid. I thought: it can’t be that; it won’t be big enough to look out of. But then I thought: ok, logically then, you’re not doing it in order to see outside. So I thought about it, and I figured it out.’ Gordius chafed his own arms, and rubbed his palms over his ample, loose-skinned front, to warm himself a little. ‘See, I thought: if it’s not for you to see out, it must be for others to see in. Am I right? I don’t mean, putting their eyes to the keyhole, of course. But I mean . . . I mean, if I were piloting a spaceship, checking stroids for my compadre Jac the Legless. I know he’s inside one of them, but there are tens of millions of steroids! How can I know which one Jac is in? Well – maybe the one with a little light shining out of it?’
The grin on his face made Jac’s heart wince with pity.
‘Doesn’t sound entirely plausible to me, Gordius,’ he replied, as gently as he could. ‘You’d have to be pretty close to exactly the right stroid even to see a light so feeble as our lightpole shining through a piece of glass no bigger than a hand. And there are plenty of random lights on inhabited stroids, some of them no bigger than this one. Also – how am I supposed to fit a window to this place without decompressing all our air into space?’
‘Oh I haven’t got all the details worked out yet,’ Gordius agreed eagerly. ‘But I’m on the right lines – aren’t I?’
‘Did you consider,’ suggested Jac, gently, ‘that I’m making the glass just to keep myself busy, to use up some of the four thousand days we’re stuck here?’
‘Oh it’s more than a pastime,’ said Gordius, with a certainty born, Jac knew, of desperation. ‘It’s part of your plan. Are you a pirate? Do you have a crew?’
‘No,’ said Jac, a little sadly. ‘And no. I’m alone.’
This took a little of the wind from Gordius’s metaphorical sails. But he still said: ‘remember your promise. You’re going to take me with you.’
‘Rest assured, Gordius,’ said Jac. ‘I won’t be leaving you behind.’
He was inside a box: the box was made of stone, and it was passing around the sun at a distance of many hundreds of millions of miles. Its path was a perverted circle. He was inside the box, with no possibility of help, with men who would kill him soon enough – out of sheer boredom if nothing else.
And as the digging part of their waking hours became more habitual, boredom became an increasing problem. ‘Almost,’ E-d-C said, one day, ‘I preferred the first few days of our time here. Almost.’
‘Are you crazy?’ said Davide, working his way through his beard, pulling each strand of hair straight, one by one. After he had finished this he would go back through, braiding strands together, and then platting the braids. ‘Don’t you remember how cold it was? I hope I never experience that level of cold again, long as I live.’
‘That’s true, Mr Arrested-by-the-famous-Bar-le-duc. But we were at least busy,’ said E-d-C. ‘We were occupied. It was cold, sure. But I hardly noticed it – because I was so busy just keeping alive.’
‘I’d rather be warm and bored,’ said Davide, ‘than busy and . . . and so cold.’
It had grown noticeably warmer inside Lamy306. Not yet body temperature, of course; and the main space was notable chillier than the three new rooms occupied by the alphas. But even the main chamber was much less severely frozen than before. Of course Gordius, naked from the waist up, complained continually that he was cold. And, truly, he shivered like a man with Parkinson’s disease. From time to time, Marit would bellow ‘you’re cold? I’ll soon warm you up, god-boy!’ and he’d launch himself at Gordius, slapping and hitting. When this occurred, as it did frequently, the victim would shriek and curl himself, as best he could, into a ball. Usually Marit quickly grew bored, and floated away.
Boredom was not a problem for Jac. He watched, and watched. He was inside the box. He was the box. What was inside him? He knew, of course, and you know too. But even the little voice of self-doubt has its moment of catastrophic certainty.
He couldn’t get out of the box, that was a certainty. How could he get out of the box? Putting it like that constituted a practical reframing of the situation, but that only snapped open all the possible trajectories of the future. If he got out of the box – the conditional mode. But the idiom of the conditional is possibility and possibility is just another name for uncertainty, and there it was: doubt. His one point of certainty, his dubiety. The material out of which his personal box was built.
‘You really think they are coming back?’ asked Mo, one day. It happened to be a time when all three alphas were digging. The other four were floating idly in the main space together.
‘Sure,’ said Jac. ‘Eleven years? It’s not so long. In the larger scheme of things.’
‘Why should they bother, though?’
‘Because,’ said Marit, evidently irritated by this question, ‘they need to recover their investment. That’s all this is, you understand? It’s not punishment. They’re certainly not interested in rehabilitating us. Everything in space is expensive. Everyone’s margins are filament-thin. They spent money porti
ng us here, and money on the devil-scum equipment with which they supplied us – those diggers, that scrubber, even the tiny handbag of gutrot spores. Cost credits, all of it. It’s credits, credits, creditto. They get that money back with profit. We make their profit, by turning this rock into a saleable real estate. That’s all. That’s all it is.’ He was making himself angrier with each sentence he spoke.
‘Sure,’ said Mo. ‘They’ll swing by and collect Lamy306 at some point, and fix a buttonthruster, and push it into a saleable orbit. Sure. But why should they do so in the eleventh year?’
‘That’s our sentence,’ stammered Gordius. His shivering had affected his ability to speak; his words stuttered and blurred. ‘They have to come back – once our sentence is served, and we’ve paid our debt to solar society.’
‘God has spoken,’ spat Marit, and threw a stone at him.
‘The Gongsi aren’t primarily in real estate, though,’ said Jac. ‘Their primary profit comes from taking prisoners from law enforcement and processing them, for a fee, in accordance with the sentences handed down by law.’
‘Sure. But no company lasts long with only one profit stream. The Gongsi diversifies. And profit means cutting all overheads as far as possible. Our sentence? If they come when our sentence is finished, they got to come with a large ship, put us in a pressurised hold, feed and water us, take us back to 8Flora, process us – that all costs,’ Mo said. ‘Let’s say they come back in fifteen years. Or a hundred.’
‘That would be a long-term investment,’ said Jac.
‘These Gongsi think long term!’ said Mo. ‘That’s my whole point. If they come back in a quarter century, we’re all dead. They don’t have to do anything other than chuck us spaceside. That would be cheaper for them. And cheaper means more profit.’