by Adam Roberts
‘You’re right,’ she said, settling inside her gel-bed. It was a delicious sensation: for the gel took the edge off her gravity-fatigue. ‘Is Iago outside?’
‘Of course, Miss.’
‘Send him in. I want to say goodnight to him.’
Deño left, and Iago came in. He stood, as if to attention, beside the bed. ‘Oh sit down, Iago,’ Dia chided him. ‘You only stand up to try and impress me – and I’m not impressed.’
‘I prefer to stand, Miss,’ he replied. But little dots of sweat were evident on his forehead, and the muscles in his thighs were visibly trembling under the effort of keeping him upright. Pride, Dia decided. That’s all it was. Well: she wasn’t going to insist.
‘Eye-arrr-go,’ she drawled. ‘Do you think the solar system’s most infamous murderer is going to materialise in my bedroom out of thin air and kill me?’
‘No,’ he said, levelly.
‘Oh, come, come, Iago. You heard what Ms Joad said. You were right there.’
‘Nevertheless, I’m still not sure I understand who this gentleman is supposed to be. A myth, is my guess.’
She smiled. ‘You’re right, of course. It’s all politics, isn’t it? It’s all jockeying for position amongst the MOHfamilies and the Gongsi, isn’t it? We are intimidatable, I suppose. Killing Eva and killing me would harm the Argent family, and would benefit our rivals, I suppose. And by the same logic, even just scaring us has some small benefit. But, goddess! – if they wanted us dead, wouldn’t they just blast the whole island from orbit?’
‘That,’ said Iago, shifting his weight slightly from his left to his right leg, ‘would be an act of war.’
‘But maybe war is where this is going?’ She said this languorously, sliding deeper into her gel-bed. It was a real enough worry, she supposed; but a point is reached, as sleep comes over a body, when even the most acute worries lose their sting.
‘The Clan’s power and influence is based on influence,’ said Iago. ‘Any of your rivals, any organisation who wants to supplant you in the hierarchy below the Ulanovs – well, they need to do more than just wipe you out. They need to take your place, and that means they need your information. Without it they wouldn’t be able to consolidate their power.’
‘Indeed,’ said Diana. Sleep was coming. Hello sleep!
‘My understanding, Miss,’ he went on, in a pleasant-enough lullaby-y drone, ‘and of course I don’t know the specifics – but my understanding is that there are caches of extremely valuable information encoded into the fabric of this house. To destroy it would be to destroy that information.’
‘So,’ said Diana, not really paying attention, and drifting away. ‘Would it make sense to send a ninja assassin inside the house to put a sword through my heart and cut Eva’s head off?’ But she was mumbling now. Bowing awkwardly on his trembling legs, Iago left the room and sealed the door.
Diana slept.
She dreamt about trees. A baobab tree filled the entire solar system, which, according to the logic of dreams, had become a human-scale space, like a medieval cathedral vault or a sport’s venue from the Martian Olympics. The tree was as tall as Saturn’s orbit, and the detail of its trillion leaves would baffle any engraver who wished to illustrate it via ink on paper. In this tree lived all of humanity who mattered; the great folk, the MOHfamilies, the Gongsi and their executives, police, army, engineers. You could see them easily enough, in amongst the branches, perched like birds. But then, in her dream, Dia looked again and saw that every single leaf was a woman or a man dressed in a curious green costume; a dark green tubular outfit around their torso and legs, and a paler green cape that wrapped all about. There were trillions of such individuals, clinging desperately to their stems and twigs. And at that point Dia noticed that there was a great breeze blowing through the branches, and that they were rocking and shaking, and that the myriad greenclad members of the System Sumpolloi were all of them in danger of being blown off. That was why they clung so desperately. Of course Diana knew that there is only one wind in the System, and that it is the solar wind. So she looked down the main trunk of the tree towards its base. The great tree had its roots planted in the sun, coiling about and interpenetrating the material of the burning star. Of course, Diana thought to herself: how could it be otherwise? The sun was still shining as fiercely as ever it did, though clogged and tangled with roots that were as fat as a hundred Jupiters. The solar wind still came blasting up at her. But as she watched a change came over the substance of the sun. Its luminescence began to fade, and it turned the colour of blood, the colour of a dark red-chilli pepper, and molten and roiling. Somebody was there. She looked again, narrowing her eyes against the blast of the solar wind, and looked, and looked. It was a man, a giant, an impossibly huge man. She knew who it was. None other than Jack Glass himself; and he was holding an antique book, clasping it to his chest. He stopped and looked up at her, as she hid amongst the high branches, and spoke directly to her. He didn’t shout, or bellow, and pure vacuum intervened – yet she heard him very well. ‘The sun is become a sea of blood mixed with glass,’ he said. ‘The roots of this tree are sucking the life out of the sun.’ ‘What is the tree?’ she called back. But he did not reply, and the dark red colour darkened further to black-brown. It solidified and cooled to the colour lava assumes when it is chilled by the ocean into new and ruffled granite. ‘When it has sucked the life out of the sun,’ Jack Glass boomed, suddenly loud, ‘the sun will die, and so the sun will die. It’s happening right now!’ ‘The tree can’t die,’ she said. ‘Vital information is encoded in its branches. Secret information is hidden in its matter.’ ‘Too late,’ said Jack Glass. The black roots of the tree were now indistinguishable from the black matter of the sun; and Diana knew that death was passing up the tubercles and passages of the tree, and that soon the entire arboreal growth would wither and turn to flakes of iron and clumps of soot. Jack Glass was still visible, in amongst the tangle of the tree’s roots; but visible from the back, like God in the Garden of Eden. She wanted to cry down to him: who are you? And: why do you want to kill me? And she wanted above all to ask him: what is in your book? But she knew that the book contained, written on pages of treated and bleached animal skin, the entire and copious secret of faster-than-light travel. And that the book contained the answer to the other two questions as well. So instead, as the leaves began decaying in great scatters from the branches all around her, she yelled: ‘what is the tree?’
Then she woke up. As she opened her eyes, somebody inside the room with her – invisible, just to the left of her field of vision, or maybe just to the right of it, whispered: ‘you are the tree.’
She squealed, and struggled to sit up and look about; but the gel made it harder than it might otherwise be. She called the lights, and looked left and looked right.
There was nobody in the room.
And now the doorpanel brightened, and a representation of Deño (hooded, to signify his modest respectfulness) asked her if she was alright, and did she need any assistance?
Her heart was trembling like a leaf in a breeze. ‘It’s alright,’ she replied. ‘I’m alright. But I see now how Jack Glass can creep into my room, despite all the security in the world, and without need of teleportation.’
‘Shall I stay in, Miss?’
‘No,’ said Diana, speaking the lights down again and slinking back into her bed. ‘It’s a dream, only a dream.’
Eva also dreamed.
She didn’t go to sleep straight away. After the meal, and the prayers, and after Jong-il had checked her room, she found she wasn’t particularly sleepy. The day had been an eventful one; and perhaps the visit of Ms Joad had unsettled her. Or the mere fact of an unsolved problem, and the lack of sufficient data to address it, bothered her. That a human being had died did not distress her. Had it been somebody she knew it would have upset her; she wasn’t a monster. Had it been somebody she cared about. But it was nobody she knew, and it would have been disingenuous to pretend that t
he death of somebody she didn’t know affected her on an emotional level. What bothered her was the problematic; the lack of resolution to the dilemma. This in turn fed into the incompleteness of her current research.
So she went into her worldtual for an hour or so, and did some more work on anomalous supernovae. Her main supposition had to do with the Pauli principle, and the hypothesis that, under very unlikely and therefore very rare – but possible – physical circumstances, the degeneracy pressure of certain states of relatively low-gravity matter could undergo catastrophic shear. She played with some creative equations for a while, and borrowed a good proportion of the house computionality (it was night; it was being underused anyway) to crunch some millions of regular equations. The heart of the neutron-dedensification would – assuming it happened this way – be an inequivalence governed by a particular set of criteria; but she was starting to think that standard inequivalence theory did not provide the sort of range of solutions her problems required. She trawled through some of the indexically recognised Speculative notions, but none looked useful. And by this stage she discovered – with that strange belatedness that often characterises the experience of those absorbed in research – that she was tired, actually. She came out of her IP, and got into bed. For a while she did nothing but concentrate on settling her breathing in this choking gravity. She was missing something. What was she missing?
Something was niggling her about this stupid murder. She didn’t need to go back into the Worldtuality; it was enough to call the data up on her bId. She checked quickly through the relative locations of people. After the servants were all billeted, on arrival, nobody had gone into or come out of the servants’ house all day. All the bodyguards, and Iago, were tagged to one another, so that they could call on one another’s assistance in an emergency, and the datahistory of the tags showed that they had been in the main house the whole time. Nobody had crossed the perimeters of the estate. The murderer had to be (a trivial logical deduction) one of the servants inside the servants’ house. There was no other explanation. No Jack Glass had levitated down and slipped through the interstices of matter so as to penetrate the roof.
Joad had been messing with their heads. Nothing more. Even if she meant ‘Jack Glass’ not in the specific sense of the actual human being who bore that name, and was using it instead in a sort of generic sense to mean ‘any dangerous murderer’, it was not possible for this individual to have done what he did.
She put it all from her mind, and readied herself for sleep. At first sleep was shy and teased her; but it didn’t stay away for long.
She dreamed.
The neurones inside her head made patterns of electrochemical discharge curl and fold across the material of her brain, as a breeze rummages through the leaves on an ash tree.
She was in her MOHmies house, in space. But she was not alone, and neither was she with her MOHsister. She was with a male stranger. She didn’t know his name. ‘I have invented a new way of transporting people from a planet’s surface into space! Surely you can see that plasmaser descent-ascent is cumbrous and infrastructure heavy; and free ballistic flight is wasteful and expensive and dangerous.’ ‘What is your new way?’ Eva wanted to know. ‘What’s it to you?’ the stranger said. Eva was trying to work out if his skin was as dark as it looked, or whether this was simply a function of the darkgreen light in that place. Did she know him? She thought she knew him. ‘What’s it to me? Astrophysics is my special expertise, I have six PhDs,’ she told the stranger. He chuckled. ‘Of course you do: but that’s all to do with distant stars. Stars that explode even though they shouldn’t! I’m talking about a technology that is much more down to earth!’
‘Tell me,’ she pressed.
‘Oh, it is a question of spacetime origami, that’s all. If this place is tucked into that place, then that place is also tucked into this place. It’s because the universe is infinite. Regular geometry no longer applies in such a manifold.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Eva.
The stranger gestured. She saw then that his hands were red. She looked again, and saw that the skin had been peeled away, as a glove is drawn off, and that the workings of muscle and sinew beneath were visible, slick with blood. ‘Step through that door, and see what I mean.’
It was a door made out of light. With no sense of apprehension, Eva pulled herself along a guy-rope and passed effortlessly through the door. On the far side was darkness, and gravity, and she stepped down onto a flat floor. Where am I? she wondered, but she knew where she was: the darkness around her was crowded with lumber, tools and machines. It was the storeroom in which the handservant had been killed. Somebody was here.
‘Who is it?’ she said aloud.
‘Leron,’ said the voice. Eva went, instinctively, to her bId to locate the name, but in her dream she had no bId – indeed she had, weirdly, never even been fitted with one. Not that it mattered: she could remember the name. Leron was the servant who had been killed.
‘I can’t see you,’ she said.
‘Nobody can see the dead,’ he replied. But, despite this, a foggy kind of illumination was starting up about his head. She could see his features. His face was shining, like an angel’s.
‘How are you doing that?’ she asked him.
‘You are the expert on stars,’ he replied. ‘Not I.’
The glow was beginning to bring into vision the indistinct shapes of all the objects in the space around her: two garden robots, silent and static, loomed to her right. All about her were stacks and containers and globes; strange shapes and geometries. Mysterious fins and vanes on the wall. Prongs and poles from the ceiling.
‘I must warn you,’ she said. She was conscious then of a tremendous sense of urgency, a need to communicate to Leron the danger he was in. ‘Somebody is coming here to kill you! You must vacate this place. We don’t know why, or who, although it may be the infamous murderer Jack Glass.’
Leron shook his shining head. He gleamed brighter and brighter. Shadows shrank and spooled-in amongst all the objects about him. It was so bright as to hurt her eyes.
‘Go!’ Eva called.
‘There is no go,’ he said.
The hammerhead appeared in space beside him. It was in ballistic flight, guided by no-one, and moving towards him; sweeping up over and down in a parabolic arc. What she saw then was the collision between a lozenge-shaped chunk of iron (the matter out of which black dwarf stars might be constituted) and Leron’s shining head. The skull collapsed under the impact, pieces of shell breaking in; she caught a momentary glimpse of the magma-red innards, the grotesque distortions of face. But the pressure down – she knew how this worked as well as any person alive – generated its subatomic counterforce. In flawless silence, the head bloomed outward and every direction spilled with searing white brightness. Eva could see nothing now. She was standing in a tempest of light, blowing back her hair and rushing whisperingly past her. Everything was white.
She woke.
Somehow she sensed that her sister was awake, in her room. She ticticked Diana’s bId and received an immediate answer. ‘I have just had a dream,’ she said.
‘So have I,’ said Diana. ‘I dreamed that I met Jack Glass. What about you?’
‘I was talking to the murdered servant. His head went supernova. It happened right in front of me! I almost never have dreams like this,’ said Eva. ‘But it has left me with a sure conviction.’
‘A conviction of what?’
‘This murder,’ said Eva, speaking slowly, amazed at her own words, ‘is connected to my research. The two go together.’
Dia waited before she replied. Then she said: ‘my lovely sister, it’s a little hard to see what the two have in common. A servant gets his skull bashed in on Korkura. A star millions of light years away explodes. How could they possibly be connected?’
‘It’s an intuition I have,’ said Eva. ‘Intuition makes me uncomfortable, of course it does. This is not how I work. Nonetheless. T
here it is. I feel sure of it.’
‘Good night, lovely sister,’ said Diana, through the bId.
‘Good night, lovely sister,’ Eva replied,
But Diana didn’t go straight back to sleep. The glow of light inside her solar plexus; the excitement. She had one last tour of her personal worldtual before sleep. It was constructed to grant her access to data fields, but it lacked the capacity to send or receive messages. This was a matter of protection, of course. In theory, nobody at all was supposed to know where she and Eva were right now. In fact, as the appearance of Ms Joad made plain, the Ulanovs knew – but it was a fair assumption that the Ulanovs knew everything. The more pressing question concerned the other MOHfamilies, the lesser organisations (the Gongsi, the militias and cults) and everybody else. They could never be allowed to know. The temptation to strike the mighty Argents in a tender spot would be too great.
Her bId was a complex, secure system. But Diana was more than clever: she was made to feel her way around complex systems. She could do what no AI could, and intuit pathways through the chaos algorithms. The hard part wasn’t cracking the communications blackout; it was cracking it in such a way that nobody knew it had even been cracked.
It took her twenty minutes; that was all. Then she set up a bumper-bumper set of message relays to protect her location and directed her message.
Anna Tonks Yu was asleep, in a Mansion orbiting Mars. But she woke up as the message alert hummed. Anna Tonks Yu: Diana’s rival, her enemy. The great love of her life.
‘Diana!’ Anna cried. ‘Is that you? You foolish and ugly girl, you woke me up!’
‘What did you do to your hair?’ returned Diana. ‘It looks terrible. You might as well cut it all off.’
She filled in the delay-time in the conversation by playing a game of Go against the House AI. But the delay did not annoy her; on the contrary, she found it added spice to the conversation. What is love without anticipation?
‘So you called me just to abuse me!’ cried Anna, throwing her arms wide. ‘It is emotional harm – I shall sue you through every court under Ulanov jurisdiction.’