by Adam Roberts
‘Nobody,’ conceded Jac.
The one positive result, if it could be phrased that way, was that events had shaken Gordius out of his fugue. He no longer muttered to himself, and as the ambient temperature crept marginally up, he was shivering less. From his newly acquired tunic he ripped a strip of cloth and tied it around his dead eye like a pirate. Otherwise he began to revert, although intermittently, to his earlier garrulousness.
‘They’re quiet now,’ he told Jac, in a low voice. ‘You know why? They’ve vented their frustration. But it’ll build up again, and next time the victims will be – you and me.’
‘Very likely,’ Jac agreed.
‘So your escape plan?’ Gordius hissed. ‘Can you bring it forward?’
‘If you like,’ said Jac, in a tired voice.
Gordius peered at him, to try and see if he was joking or not. ‘Seriously? Because, I tell you: we’ve got to get out of here. The others have gone over the edge! We’ll be next! Don’t you need your window, though? Your piece of glass?’
Jac shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. All he felt, now, was sadness. And sadness, like the horrible physical discomfort he had experienced when the oxygen levels had dropped to dangerously low levels, was not something from which his soul could withdraw itself.
‘It was a red herring, all that glass polishing?’ Gordius pressed. ‘Distraction? Clever! Throw them off the scent. So what is your plan? If ever there was a time to tell me, it’s now, surely!’
‘It’s all distraction, Gord,’ Jac told him. ‘There is no escape plan. There never was one. How could anybody possibly escape from this prison? It was all about filling the time until the Gongsi send a ship along, in ten years, or whenever they decide to swing by.’
Gordius stared at him, and then decided not to believe him. ‘Sure!’ he said. ‘Sure!’
‘I’m not here for political crimes,’ Jac told him. ‘I know you think I am; you jumped to that conclusion. I never said I was. And it’s not the case. I’m here because the authorities misidentified me. They will have realised their mistake by now; and if they haven’t they soon will. They want me for something much worse than regular political crimes. Much worse. When they come back for the rest of you, it will be mindwipe for me.’
‘Are you innocent?’ breathed Gordius, wide-eyed.
‘By no means,’ said Jac. ‘In fact, I’m guilty of things far worse than even the authorities know. They’ll work out who I am. And when that happens, I believe they’ll send a ship over here immediately to retrieve me – this is no bravura on my part; this is a simple statement of fact. I’ve no idea what that would mean for you – maybe they’d reseal you back in, and leave you all to complete your sentences. Maybe they’d bring you back with them, bail you, who knows. I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to care; because as soon as they come back for me, whether it’s in the near future or at the end of the sentence, things are going to be much worse for me even than now. And even more than that – well, there are other reasons why the authorities must never apprehend me. When they put me here, they didn’t realise what they had. So – here I am. But I won’t be so lucky again. I can’t permit it to happen.’
Gordius looked very serious now. ‘I’ve been a fool,’ he said, in a low, thrumming voice. ‘All this time, you said you had to get away. But you didn’t mean literally get away, did you! You meant – escape. You mean . . . suicide. Self-murder, and you the murderer!’
Jac looked into his big, baggy face. ‘According to you,’ he said, ‘neither of us will have to bother with suicide. You say those three will kill us anyway.’
Gordius started to laugh at this, stopped, and then looked terribly sad. ‘I feel a double-fool for not seeing what you meant,’ he said, in a doleful voice. ‘I guess I was so hopeful about getting out of this box, I was prepared to believe anything at all.’
Jac smiled. ‘Endure the sentence,’ he said, ‘and the Gongsi will ship you away from here forever. At least you have that prospect to hope for!’
Mostly Lamy306 was cold enough to keep the spilled blood from rotting; but near the Fusion Cell and around the light the stuff curdled. It went bad and began to reek. Marit ordered Gordius and Jac to clean the foul material away, but they couldn’t get rid of the smell.
It was almost time, and it was almost time, and Jac got used to living in that on-the-cusp state of mind. Almost. Funny, that the word should include the totalising all and the majoritarian most and yet signify the state of neither.
But then, with a natural rightness, it was time. It came, unforced, unhurried, like a machine’s component slotting into place. Like a puzzle coming together and revealing its solution in one glorious moment of coherence.
To everything, its time.
Davide and Marit were drilling, at the far end of the corridor. Mo was in his room; Jac and Gordius in the main space. When Mo emerged, Jac could tell from his expression that he wanted sex. ‘Come’n, Leggy,’ he ordered. ‘In my chamber. I don’t want god-boy watching.’
Something inside Jac’s spirit snagged, or snapped; some final-straw-like sensation. But it wasn’t a breakage. It was only the component slotting into place. He had waited a long time, after all. Not eleven years, true, but a goodly time. As he floated through after Mo, into his rock-hewn cell, he fiddled one of his glass shards free from his hair. His own hair, under his fingers, was clogged and matted, as oily and repellent as tentacles.
What’s inside the box?
Doubt is there.
What’s another name for doubt?
Death is another name for doubt. Death is what inflects the immortal certainty of the universe’s process with uncertainty.
When they were both inside the smaller space, Mo said: ‘I’m going to shut my eyes and pretend you’re my wife. Don’t say anything to spoil the mood, and keep your snaggle teeth out of the way, OK?’
‘OK,’ said Jac.
The box-lid swung wide. There was no longer a box. It was all gone, and dissolved in a heat and a light. Everything clarified for Jac. Light is a form of heat. Everything in motion is a form of heat. Even the massless drive of protons.
Jac’s blood flowed swift and smooth, after many months of moving more sluggishly.
He took Mo’s member in his left hand. Then he rose up along the other man’s body, and brought his face close to the other’s face. ‘My love,’ he whispered, and kissed him.
Mo reacted badly. He said, angrily, ‘what are you doing?’ But Jac was a good kisser, a strong kisser, and he forced his mouth upon the other man’s, and muffled the words.
Cand waited until the stifled scream came to an end. Mo, writhing and bucking, sucked in a breath to scream again. Then, finally disengaging from the kiss, Jac stuffed the severed item into Mo’s open mouth, crammed it hard in. The second scream never emerged, although
Mo bucked and struggled and thrashed about. But there was hardly any space inside the chamber, so there was no way of throwing his assailant off.
Jac held him until he had bled out. Felt his whole body weaken under his grasp and eventually stop moving. The whole chamber was filled with blood, Jac himself completely covered in it. He cut himself a stretch of cloth from Mo’s tunic, and tied it around his own mouth to filter out the blood, to stop himself choking on it. He was warm, now, and inside his skull he felt brightness. He attended to his own heart. It was still stepping through the moves of its four-part pavane, no quicker than before. He centred himself. He could keep it that way. Neither panic nor elation. Calm. Calm.
Jac slipped into the tunnel, and slid along the wall towards the far end, where the two men were digging. Marit was further along, at the extreme limit of the tunnel, excavating its end. Davide was widening the passage closer to, and had his back to Jac. The noise of two drills; the double vibration. Jac’s hands felt the thrum in the body of the stone. The shine from the main chamber was a long way behind them, and only the headlights on the individual diggers gave out any illumination. It was
a confusion of dust and small debris, and black shadows in jiggling motion cast back from the excavation. Jac slid through the murk easily enough, as if it was his natural medium. He appeared, as if from nowhere, all his skin bright red and slick, and forced two shards into Davide’s neck from behind, one at four o’clock, one at eight. They went in easily enough, although the pressure required to ram them home cut Jac’s own palms. His hands were wet as he pulled Davide’s bucking body out of the way, and grasped the controls of the digger. Marit only realised something was happening right at the end, when the endlessly hungry mouth of the excavating machine reared up at him.
Placuit.
Afterwards, Jac floated in the tunnel, reassuring himself of his calmness. He looked inside himself. There was his heart, still moving regularly on. It was alright. He had to wipe his mouth-guard, his strip of cloth, free of blood from in front of his mouth. But it was still possible to breathe. And then, from the light at the end, where the main chamber was, he heard Gordius’s voice, wheedling and anxious. ‘Guys? Guys! What’s going on? I heard screaming.’
‘It’s alright, Gordius,’ he called back, his voice strong and clear and audible. ‘I’m ready for you now.’
He started back towards the brightness.
Afterwards, he brought the drills out of the tunnel and back into the main cavity. He laid out the necessaries.
The hardest part was holding the shards of glass in his bloodied hands. Without a handle the blades were too slippy, and of course they tended to cut his own palms. But everything was nothing except a problem to be solved, so he applied his practical reasoning and solved it. Bone made a good handle, and his victims had plenty of that.
There was no hurry.
He worked carefully, methodically, cutting open Gordius’s corpse with as few and as small incisions as he could manage. He removed a great quantity of the innards. The skull came out once he had severed the spine and optical nerves, and felt his way in around the cavity with his slippery fingers and long nails. ‘What can I tell you?’ he told him, as he worked. ‘This is the truth on which space settlement is founded. Energy is valuable, and raw materials are precious, but human beings are mere resources to be exploited.’ He had learned the lessons of his time in prison.
He kept the ribs, embedded in their leathery tough membranes and the medium of their subcutaneous fat. But the spine came out, the arm bones and muscles, the tibia and fibula, yellow and red in the incessant brightness of the light pole. The pelvis was harder to extricate, but he got it out eventually.
He slept when he was tired, ate as much ghunk as he could, and then he turned his attention to the legs. The glass went blunt, of course, and he kept having to sharpen it. But he was patient, and careful, and he was used to working with the material.
Soon enough he had finished.
He contemplated his next move. He knew, of course, that the excessive cold would be a problem for a while, and that after that excessive heat would become the problem. He didn’t have the resources to manufacture a heat-transfer or radiative solution to this latter; the best he could hope for was to endure it, and to get where he was going before it became fatal. Ice would help.
So he focused on solving the practical problems. He made a chunky sewing needle from bone, and fitted the large gash at the base of Gordius’s back with laces made from tendons. Mostly deboned, Gordius’s large frame was now as floppy and foldy in the zero-g as an un-put-up tent.
Next Jac packed ice into one of Gordius’s hollowed-out arms. Then he did the same with one of the legs – forcing it in until it looked from the outside as if it suffered from elephantiasis. Into the other leg he packed the foot and lower section with ice, and then carefully manoeuvred the scrubber in, entire. The skin of the leg stretched to receive it, like a boa constrictor swallowing its lunch.
Almost time to go.
He sewed the fusion cell to the shoulder blades, like a backpack. The heat vent was on the lower side, within easy reach of Gordius’s boneless hand, had that hand been capable of reacting any more to the volition of reaching.
Three more things.
He took the clothes from the various bodies, and tied them together into a carryall. Into this he placed all the remaining free ice. There was no need to excavate more ice from the seam. The sack, when finished, was full. Jac sewed two edges of it crudely to the skin of Gordius’s belly.
He went to Davide’s body and retrieved his piece of glass. Davide, dead, surrendered it without objection. Now Jac began the fiddliest and most crucial part of the whole undertaking. The eyelid over Gordius’s damaged eye was sealed pretty effectively shut, it seemed to Jac; but he took the eyeball out and filled the cavity with a putty made of fat, water and waste. The other eyeball came out too, of course. Jac trusted himself (working by touch, with very limited tools) to be able to fit the glass circle inside in such a way as to guarantee a seal against the outside. Fiddly, fiddly. Finally it was done, and he cleaned it as well as he could.
Almost finished. He positioned a digger, mouth-first, against the stretch of artificial membrane, the stuff that had originally sealed them in. It seemed like a long time ago.
Finally, he pulled the corpses of Lwon and E-d-C out of their temporary mausoleum, and left them in the main chamber. When he broke through the membrane and vented this space, they would join their former cellmates in deep space. The authorities, returning, would find the prison empty. He couldn’t rid the place of all traces, of course; there was a lot of blood, on the walls and in the tunnel, and it would be a simple matter for the Police to DNA it and determine from whom it had come. But it was as much misdirection as Jac could manage.
Jac was smeared and covered in blood; his hair was solidified with the gel of human offal. He thought to cut it off, but his glass scalpels – all save one – were all now irretrievably blunted and broken, and he had no time to dig out more. He kept his one, unblunted glass scalpel; and one of the iron clubs, and stowed them inside his new suit. Then he readied himself. Even in microgravity it was a tricky business pulling himself inside the new suit; and the last bit of sewing, using a sheet of pleural membrane to ensure the seal, took him a long time. More sealing work with his makeshift putty.
It was cold inside; the ambient temperature plus all the ice in the leg and the arm, of course, but nothing he couldn’t endure.
At least he was ready. He slid his right arm inside its new sleeve, and turned the digger on. A moment of nothing – external sound was completely muffled – and the view through his one glass porthole took some getting used to. Then he felt a lurch and a pull, and the chamber filled with glittery rubbish. The digger plunged through the opening it had itself made, and Jac was pulled through as well.
He was outside.
The first thing that happened was that Jac’s new suit swelled prodigiously, like a balloon pumped hard past its capacity. He had expected this, although there was always the chance that his seams would burst, and everything would end before it had even begun. But this didn’t happen. The suit became perhaps twice as spacious inside, which was a good thing. The bad thing was that, fitting his arm inside the right sleeve, he could no longer manoeuvre fingers or even bring the arm down to the side. This was a real, and pressing problem; for if he couldn’t move the arm at all he would be condemned to simply drifting through space until he died. But Jac discovered that by swivelling himself about and putting both his arms into the right sleeve he just about had enough muscular strength to overcome the high-pressure stiffness, to move the arm and clench the puffed-fingers.
He was spinning round and round. Beyond even the chill of this ice-packed suit, Jac could feel the outside cold: an intense, primal, terrifying thing – an absolute chill. Its name was Death. Death had many names. It was an environment to which no human was suited. It was implacably, monstrously opposed to every spark that animated the living body. But there was the sun, a bright coin of light that moved smoothly from top right to bottom left of his little eyeglass windo
w. With some effort, and some misfires, Jac fed ice in at the warm vent of the fusion cell, and used the resulting thrust to take the more ragged edges off his tumble.
There was a hissing sound, which meant air escaping. But Jac located the leak and sealed it with his putty, working the stuff first with his fingers to loosen it up.
There was Lamy306 swinging down through his line of sight and disappearing. It looked bizarrely tiny, as if a fairy had shrunk it away. So, so. It came back in at the top of his line of sight, and moved down again and vanished out the bottom. With some more angling of the fusion cell, and more application of ice to the heated vent, he settled into a less hectic axial rotation. Then, with a final struggle against the stiffness of his suit, he put out enough blasts of gas to still even this.
He was hanging in deep space. He got his bearings: sun, stars. Then he waited. He was shivering, but happy. He waited, and watched, and he was good at both things. The scrubber thrummed in the leg, so he had air. He breathed in and breathed out.
It took several hours, but his patience was rewarded. He saw a blinking light; one of the other asteroids, at who-knew-how-many million miles distance. That would do. He fed his fusion cell vent with ice, and slowly began to accelerate himself through space. It was slow, but the nature of acceleration is that it becomes steadily less slow. Keeping the blinking light in his eyepiece, and working as a stoker to generate gas, he accelerated slowly at first. But there was nothing to stop him, and he kept applying small amounts of thrust. It would take a while, but he had plenty of time. Not all the time in the world, it was true; but enough. Enough. Or too much!
part II
•
THE FTL MURDERS
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Diana Argent
Eva Argent
Our heroines
Iago
Their Tutor
Berthezene
Dominico Deño
Jong-il
Their bodyguards