Jack Glass

by Adam Roberts

  Carna

  D’Arch

  Faber

  Leron

  Mantolini

  Oldorando

  Poon-si

  Sapho

  Sun-kil

  Tapanat

  Tigris and nine others

  Personal handservants to Miss Diana and Miss Eva

  Police Inspector Halkiopoulou

  Police Subinspector Zarian

  Local police, investigating the murder

  Miss Joad

  Personal agent of the Ulanovs

  Jack Glass

  The notorious criminal

  1

  The Mystery of the Hammered Handservant

  A month before she turned sixteen Diana got involved in a reallife murder mystery. It was was was too exciting.

  So, she and Eva came down to Korkura for a spell of gravity – which is to say, so as to spend a month before the birthday party getting used to Earth again. And whenever she thought about this trip afterwards she associated her legal majority with mystery and the death of a servant. A problem to be solved! And who was better at solving problems than her? (Nobody! Her problem-solving is second-to-none: intuitive, human, chaologic – it’s what she was bred and raised to). Eva told her to be careful; said it might be dangerous, was best left to the authorities, all that manner of chaff. But Eva was a fuss; and Dia had her bodyguards to look after everything, and had Iago to help her too, and anyway. It was her birthday. It was almost her birthday.

  The trip down was yet another springy plasmaser descent, yet another sicky feeling in the gut, and the added horror of increasing density for lord’s sake. When she was older, she decided, she was going to travel up and down in a sloop, and watch the reëntry burn colours of lit stained-glass glow outside her porthole. Sloops rocket up, and when they want to come in again they just fall straight down; and something about the thought of freefalling through the hot, vacant ocean of air excited her. But for now it was the plasmaser capsule again, and the slow elevator descent, and not even the satisfaction of seeing the counterthrust capsule going up, for at the relevant moment of crossover the window was blanked with hazy cloud.

  Anyway: they came down somewhere in Turque, and then there was a tedious shuffling short-hop flight to the island. The MOHmies had more-or-less owned Korkura since before the sisters had been born; and Diana and Eva often spent time there. As ever, this was holiday and relaxation time, of course, and the build-up to Dia’s sixteenth birthday, but at the same time MOHmie put a rather tiresome emphasis upon the benefits of a spell of gravity, don’t you know. In fact, both MOHmies were cross, for neither of the girls had been doing their exercises. ‘Three hours of centrifuge a day is a minimum,’ they said, several trillion times every hour. ‘Five hours a day would be better. But it doesn’t seem to matter how we scold, you won’t even do three. Your bones will wither! You’ll become permanent uplanders! Cripples!’ Such nagging. You wouldn’t believe it. And anyway, they had a whole month of actual Earth gravity now – down they went: riding the plasmaser. In their car: Diana and Sisterissima Evissima, and the twelve people whose business it was to look after them.

  The ones whom Dia actually knew were the bodyguards, of course. Necessarily they had the closest relationship with their personal guardians: Dominico Deño and Jong-il (of course), and the new one, Berthezene. He seemed alright, actually. She also knew Iago, of course – Iago with his old-world manner and his immaculate clothes. Iago, though, wasn’t a bodyguard. He was something else; halfway between a servant and an actual person. Dia pronounced his name eye-ah-go, and Eva ee-goo and he smiled and declined to say which pronunciation was correct. Perhaps neither. Then there were the others, whose names had to be prompted to Dia’s mind by her bId: Faber, Mantolini, Oldorando and Poon-si, Sapho, Sun-kil, Tapanat and Tigris. Eight handservants, all of them dosed with so much CRF they could not help themselves loving Dia and Eva more than anything else in the whole solar-windy, asteroid-rainy System.

  The remaining servants came in a second car, the to-be-murder-victim amongst them. That meant (afterwards, Dia shivered with grisly delight to think of it) that Leron – the victim’s name – had sat there, in the company of the eleven other house-servants, waiting patiently all the way down to the ground. How strange a thought that was! He’d sat there strapped in his seat whilst the car fell down and his stomach registered the plummetous motion, but actually he was hurrying towards his own death. Down to his last few breaths of air. His last hours alive. But he didn’t know!

  None of us will know, of course. The weird grammar of death. You die, he or she dies, they die but there is no genuine form for ‘I’. Not really. All know that, none know when.

  Anyway, the car came to a halt on the ground, and the full weight of gravity chomped on Diana’s limbs and stomach and chest, and made her head loll and strained her neck. She regretted not putting in her three-hours-a-day now, of course; and she had to be physically carried (hu-mi-li-ating!) to the short-hop runner and fitted into the seat with the high back cradling her head. Eva, on the other hand, was unrepentant. ‘We could have spent five hours,’ she gasped, and drew a breath. ‘Centrifuge’s isn’t the same as,’ gasp, gasp, breathe, ‘actual gravity.’ Gasp. Pause.

  The short-hop flier buzzed and did its salmon leap into the air, and caught itself up there and flew on.

  There is nothing to do with the misery of gravity but endure it and get used to it, and gradually overcome it. But Eva felt a momentary fury as the flier ascended and gravity got even worse than one g for a few seconds. Lady, that was hard! But then the craft settled into flight, and she turned her head a little, and watched the landscape slide past her porthole. It was a stupendous sight, really it was, stupendouser even than orbital vistas, because it was so much more varied and brightly lit. The sky down here was not one colour, as space is: it was rather a smooth gradation from smoke blue and pale in the dome to flowerpetal purple nearer the deckle-edged horizon. Mustard-coloured hills and peaks, green-yellow scrub and grass, polygon shapes of human habitation. The flier passed west over the coastline, and land drew back as though on a rail, and there was nothing but sea, which possessed the hard-faceted look of a solid, though she knew it was trillions of tonnes of water, get that, just sloshing and lying in a huge geographical basin, against all the promptings of common sense.

  Soon enough they passed another coastline, and almost immediately landed at the house. The girls were deplaned and carried inside, and they both fell asleep straight away, because the gravity was so exhausting. But sleep was an uneasy business, and Diana kept waking herself up with the pain of lifting her own ribcage to draw breath, or with the strenuous effort of turning herself from her left side to her right. Come evening, they had a long bath. The handservants laid actual candles all around the pool as they wallowed and swam – candles! Like they’d descended not just down the gravity well but down the time well too, to ancient Greece or something like that.

  There was other stuff too, of course; but Dia could remember none of it afterwards. It was retrospectively overshadowed by the events of the following day. Murder, the immense fact of it, blotting out all earlier memories – that’s not a surprise, surely. Presumably the two girls spoke to their MOHmies, and I guess they slept. The sun must have come up, because it always does. They probably didn’t have the energy for much by way of games or fun. The solar flare of memory illuminates only that afternoon. Murder – and, maybe revolution! Faster than light.

  This is how it happened:

  Diana and Eva were in the main house, of course, and doing nothing more than lying about, exhausted. Most of the servants were in the servant house, similarly worn-out. Eva was asleep, although Diana couldn’t get to sleep, or couldn’t stay asleep, because of the goddessdamn asthmatic sense of constriction in her lungs that came from just breathing, for out-loud-crying. She’d unblanked the walls, and was staring listlessly out across the estate. A hot, bright Mediterranean day. She was pondering things. For instanc
e: she wondered at the merit in bringing servants down with them, rather than just hiring Earthly servants who were already used to the gravity. Of course there were many native servants here; they maintained the estate when nobody was in residence and so on and so forth. But to come down was to bring your own people with you from zero-g, and that seemed egregious to Dia.

  The lawn was olive-green, sun-heated. The grass was bristly as a man’s beard hair. Plane trees nodded indulgently in her direction. The sky was the colour and thickness of a bluebird’s eggshell. Away to her right was an orchard of olive trees, its foliage a mass of hyacinth blue against the white air. Dia sighed. The sun was very bright and white and throwing dark purple shadows from anything vertical. It seemed off that the sun could be brighter at the bottom of the Earth’s gravity well than it was in space, when they were actually closer to it for lord’s sake. The servant house was a single-storey structure away to the left with black solar convertor peat on the roof in which red and yellow flowers bloomed. But the best part of the view was the way the garden ended, and the prospect dropped away down to the sea. Such colour! You look down upon the Med from orbit and it looks blue like any ordinary blue; but then you lie on a couch on the actual shore and it looks completely different. One thing invisible from the uplands is the way the shuffling of its surface shakes two dozen different shades of marine from the sheet of colour. Gorgeous.

  Across the bay was the town – Kouloura, 55% owned by Dia’s MOHmies, and, like, totally dedicated to her. All the people there; they revered the MOHmies, they really did. Hundreds of white-painted houses, like teeth, filling the jaw-shaped cove. Dia shifted her position and took a gasping breath. Deño coughed, quietly. He was on duty in the corner, sitting in a chair with his weapon in his lap. Dia’s bId told her he had another hour, and then Jong-il would take over.

  She watched, and before the moment everything changed it was as banal and ordinary as ever it had been. She watched. Everything changed, as she watched. Her life would never be the same again.

  She saw a strange thing. Servants came running out of the servant house. They were just as afflicted by the gravity as she was, of course; more so, if anything, since their duties meant they generally didn’t get the time or facilities to do their exercises. But something had really spooked them, because they all came out through the main entrance, limbs ropey, lurching and staggering and tumbling like newly-born calves, the lot of them. Arms akimbo, legs refusing to bear their weight, falling over and picking themselves up. It was a little comical, until she understood the reason for it. Dia even started laughing, although that only reinforced the sense of constriction in her chest, so she stopped.

  But she saw soon enough that something was amiss. Reedy, plaintive cries became audible, across the lawn. Some of the servants were pulling at their hair, faces like tragic masks (her bId pulled up a dozen examples, so she could see the appropriateness of the comparison). Their howls were clearly audible through the wall. ‘What’s going on?’ Dia asked. She checked her bId, but all it could report was that the house systems were reporting everything AOK. So it wasn’t the house. If not the house itself, then – something in the house?

  She made the couch sit her up. ‘Dominico,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

  But Deño had already risen, slightly unsteadily, to his feet. ‘Berthezene is checking,’ he said. And it was true: for there, through the wallglass, Berthezene could be seen, stalking awkwardly over the dry grass towards the servant house. He and Jong-il and Deño, who had a professional reason to keep up their upland exercises, did five or six hours every day. Still, even they found the first couple of days back under the haul of gravity a strain (of all her personal staff, only Iago seemed to shrug it off); but this was a serious matter.

  Dia hopped into the security channel via her bId, which meant that she heard the news as soon as anybody – as soon as either of her MOHmies, back up in space. The news was that one of the servants was dead. And then, almost at once, the news updated: name Leron, murdered, actually murdered.

  ‘This,’ she gasped, ‘I have got to see!’

  It took Dia moments to fit her crawlipers, and then she was away, plocking out through the door and across the grass. The fragrance of lavender and brine. Sunlight striking down like the wand of Apollo, bright and hot. The low, flowery roof of the servant house lurched closer with each step, rocking a seesaw boat-like motion as her braces moved her towards it, and then she was at the entrance. A servant (Dia’s bId pulled up his name: Tigris) was lying on his back gasping; another (Sapho, the name) was crouched on the stoop, weeping. Dia didn’t have time for them! She had to get inside! She wanted to see the body.

  Deño was at her side. ‘Miss,’ he said, laying a hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you quite sure you want to go inside? Are you sure you want to see—?’ ‘Are you joking, Dominico?’ she replied. Murder mysteries were her passion! And here was a real-life one! Miss out on this?

  No. Wavey. Way.

  She stalked inside: a moment for her eyes to adjust, with the bId display gleaming distractedly bright. Then she got her bearings. The hall, the central corridor, individual rooms coming off left and right. The ceiling was tuned to a low light. She could smell that food had been cooked: cheap and spicy. There was some other odour, too: metal, or fear, or excitement, or – Deño touched her shoulder again. ‘Permit me to go first, Miss,’ he said. She thought about brushing him aside, and dashing down the corridor herself. But that would have been reckless. She was excited, but not stupid. Deño’s brow had that /— shaped crease running over his eyebrows and down the sides of his face. He only got that when he was really concentrating. It probably meant something was really amiss.

  He held his weapon out in front of him, walking slowly down the corridor, and she crept after him. He looked in each of the open doors, one after the other, and all the cubicles inside were empty. Dia kept checking her bId, but it was reporting the whole building Normal. They reached the far end; and there was only the storeroom left, and Diana was pretty worn-out, let me tell you, with all the excitement and the walking and this was despite the crawlipers. But Deño ordered the door open, and it melted away to reveal – the murder scene.

  Leron was the victim’s name. A mature male originally from (her bId told her) a large shanty bubble called Smirr. Recruited as a houseservant along with seven others not one month before. And now he was dead!

  He was flat on the ground, pressed against the stuff of the floor by the remorseless Earth gravity. His chest was not moving up or down. The flesh of his head had been pulled aside and the serrated join of his skull plates unzipped, and a copious amount of blood had come out – a beachball’s worth of blood. The weirdest thing about the scene was the way the blood was pressed flat and spread wide, adhering close to the concrete floor. The fatal wound was near the top of his crown, and it had yanked the expression on the face into a bizarre mask. Both eyes were open, although the left one had been inked black.

  Eew.

  Diana turned to see Jong-il and Berthezene lumbering up the corridor towards her. ‘Miss! Be careful!’ And behind them came Iago; walking smoothly and without apparent effort, as he always did. The suavest of the suave. ‘Miss! Miss!’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she called back, annoyed at the interruption. They loved her, she knew; but it could be a drag-drag-drag sometimes.

  ‘Come out, back to the house, Miss,’ said Jong-il. Berthezene was pointing his gun into each room in turn, standing beside each opening with his weapon vertical near his chest, and leaping out to level it at possible assailants, over and again. The gun’s barrel: vertical – horizontal. Vertical – horizontal. ‘The servants are all outside,’ Dia called, peering at the corpse. ‘There’s nobody in here! You worry-warts!’

  ‘Death is never a safe environment, Miss,’ said Iago.

  ‘Please be careful, Miss!’ cried Jong-il. ‘The police have been notified!’

  She ignored all this nanny-nonsense, and turned back to the
victim. If she had to describe her immediate reaction to seeing this dead human body – the first she had ever seen – she would say: disappointment. It was not just that it looked disconcertingly like a live body in repose (although it did, the dent in its head notwithstanding). It was that it lacked any other qualities at all. She supposed she had been expecting something profound and existentially jarring; some objective correlative to death itself. Personal extinction, the unthinkable asymptote of life. Perhaps she had even been craving such a conceptual shock. Not that she wanted to die, of course; but that she expected there to be more of a buzz, more startlement, more thrill. But whatever this was, it wasn’t that. She adjusted her crawlipers to crouch beside the body, and then reached out with her right hand to touch the inertness of the corpse’s right hand, like God on the Sistine Ceiling. Nothing.

  And here was Iago, lifting her up again. ‘Better leave well alone, Miss Diana,’ he said. Of all the servants, only he used her first name.

  ‘I was just,’ Dia began to say, but she didn’t know what she was going to just. With an enhanced iQ, and some of the best data access algorithms in the whole Ulanov protectorate, she ought to be able to work it out. Presumably the ‘just’ had to do with the imminence of . . . something. All of us are only a moment away from death. There will come a moment which will be the last one we experience, the last moment before we lose everything. It ought to be something to cast the delicious, ghastly shiver through the soul. But Dia didn’t feel anything like that.

  So she stood there, next to her Tutor, and looked at the corpse on the floor, whilst her three bodyguards arranged themselves about her and aimed their weapons at imaginary foes. Until she decided to leave that place there was nothing else for them to do.

  ‘His skin-tone is surprisingly light,’ Iago noted, shortly.

  It was true: dead Leron’s colour, under the ceiling lights, was somewhere between mud-brown and amber. His spilt blood was much darker than he was. She posed the question to her bId, but it had very little to say on the topic, the sparseness of the data presumably reflecting the fact that the life he had lived had been sparse. Name, Leron: one of the Greenbelt poor, born in a certain shanty bubble, unofficial name Smirr, with such-and-such official designation – like trillions of System poor, raised on unrefined ghunk and 80%-recycled water. There was a data-trail as to how the Argent family had hired him, but it was absolutely and depressingly and boringly unexceptional. He had been put forward from his home globe to a broker, on account of his better-than-average looks, and better-than-average iQ, and better-than-average reflexes; and passed from that broker to another, and then through the long trail of good service to a variety of positions until he came to the attention of one of the Argent factotums. An important family like theirs was always on the lookout for good servants. From his point of view, Dia reflected, it must have been winning the golden ticket. The bId noted that Iago himself was involved in the vetting process, this being one of his duties for the family. What then for Leron? Initiation in the family Lagrange, and beefing up the bones ready for 1G service, and dosing with CRF and all that. But he had barely started his service He hadn’t even started! This was the first time Dia had ever laid eyes upon him, and he was a corpse! To go through all that, and finally get the big break, and to come down to Earth . . . only to be killed straight away! There might be something poignant about it, if it weren’t so absolutely ordinary and boring and regular. At least, Dia thought, at least he got to put foot on Earth before he died – how many of the trillions of shanty-bubble-poor could claim such a thing? At least he had stood on the homeworld. But then she thought to herself: he’s only been down a day. There’s a good chance he hadn’t yet acclimatised to enough to place the soles of his feet against the ground. And that thought made her a little sad.