Jack Glass

by Adam Roberts

  Subinspector Zarian was waiting for them in the block’s main doorway, out of the sun. ‘Good morning Miss Argent,’ he said. ‘With regard to these nineteen suspects – do you wish me to be present when you question them?’

  ‘No,’ said Diana, irritably.

  Diana’s legs were aching, but it was nice to get out of the heat into the cool entrance hall. Two black-uniformed functionaries – policepersons too, according to her bId – stood to attention. ‘Is this, then, a police facility?’ she asked Zarian. Her bId knew the answer, of course. But she wanted to remind the officer who was really in charge.

  ‘No, Miss,’ Zarian replied. ‘This facility belongs to the Argent family – to yourself.’

  ‘Do you have a chief suspect?’

  ‘Initial enquiries suggest that a twenty-year-old female called Sapho may have been responsible.’

  ‘Has she confessed?’

  ‘She has not. But she had a grudge against the deceased.’

  That unlovely clenching sensation inside Diana’s chest was incipient disappointment. The danger here was that the mystery might be so cut-and-dried – so banal – that it was already solved. ‘Don’t tell me any more,’ she said. ‘I want to speak to Sapho myself.’

  They all went through to a well-furnished room, with one small window in the wall. There was no other light. Dia wondered if murk were better for interrogation than brightness; but decided that the plain light of day would be her ally in illuminating the truth. So she talked to the wall and widened the window until a great fall of light shone into every corner.

  With a sigh, Diana settled onto a soft gel-filled couch. Jong-il took up a position next to her, and Iago leaned, standing against the wall. Zarian set a chair in the middle of the room and one of the other functionaries (Officer first-class Avraam Kawa, said the bId) brought Sapho through.

  She was a typical shanty-globe girl: long trembling limbs, some difficulty holding her head upright, sweat on her face from the effort of everything. She had to be helped to the chair by the Officer, and she didn’t so much sit as coil loosely onto the seat. Her hair was close-trimmed, and her skin a patchy brown-black all over. She looked ancient, but was probably not much older than Diana herself, the gravity tugging her face into all the shapes of old age. ‘Hello Sapho,’ said Diana. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  Sapho, oh she looked corpse-tired, she really did: sagging parti-coloured skin and deep bags below her bovril-coloured eyes. Yet, it occurred to Dia, there was something pretty about the girl too, despite her gravity exhaustion. A directness in her gaze, a good line along her long nose, a strong chevron-shaped chin with a neat point at the end. An attractive girl. She blinked. Panic, or exhaustion, possessed her.

  She repeated her question. ‘Know who I am, Sapho?’

  Sapho nodded, fractionally, and then began to cry. ‘Oh Miss,’ she said. ‘Oh Miss.’

  This, Dia knew, was the CRF acting on heightened emotions. It was one of the awkwardnesses of dosing one’s servants with the treatment. It did make them loyal, of course; and it didn’t interfere with most of their functions – but it made them much more emotionally volatile, and oh my lord it robbed them of initiative and agency.

  ‘You knew Leron, Sapho?’

  ‘Yes, Miss.’

  ‘Somebody killed him. Somebody cracked his head open like a revolutionary shanty globe!’

  Sob, sob, sob.

  ‘Who killed him, Sapho?’

  More staccato sobbing. ‘No, Miss. Don’t know, Miss. I’m scared, I’m only young, I’m scared, and I don’t want – I cannot – oh Miss, oh Miss!’

  ‘A little difficult to see,’ Iago murmured, his arms folded, ‘how she could lift that heavy hammer, in this gravity. She can barely keep her own head up on her neck.’

  ‘Sapho,’ said Diana. ‘They are saying that you killed him. Why would they say that?’

  ‘They are saying hateful things about me, Miss, because I love the Argents, and I love the Ulanovs.’

  ‘They tell me you hated him. Leron. Did you?’

  ‘Leron was from my globe, Miss. He was a bad man. And when we were being made ready to come down here and serve you, he would put his – I cannot say the word to you Miss, it is too vile, into my – I cannot say the word to you Miss, it is too vile. Oh Miss!’ She started sobbing again. ‘I love you so heartily, Miss! Please do not be disappointed!’

  This was surprising news, and it took Diana a moment to digest it. ‘Which globe do you come from, Sapho?’

  She reined in her weeping. ‘It is called Smirr, Miss.’

  ‘And you’re accusing the murdered man of being a rapist?’

  ‘He was a bad man, a bad man.’

  ‘Do you know who killed him?’

  But Sapho only wept and shook her head. ‘He was a bad man, Miss! I love you – and I love the Ulanovs! But he – didn’t have the same love in his heart.’

  ‘Didn’t love us?’ Diana was startled to hear this. From her reaction, so was Sapho. ‘No Miss! Of course he loved you. He had as much CRF inside him as any of us! But CRF of course,’ she made a mucus-thrummy noise behind her nose, coughed, and resumed, ‘but CRF means you are loyal to one group, not two. And he hated the Ulanovs! He was a terrible man, a bad man, a terrorist and an anarchist and an antinomian – he used to say he wanted to break the Lex Ulanova into pieces.’

  ‘Was that was why he was killed?’

  Sapho blinked, and blinked. ‘He was a terrible human being, Miss,’ she said again, in a low voice. Then she resumed sobbing.

  Diana was interrupted by a message alert through her bId. But when she checked, there was no message. Wait up. What? She brought her attention out into the world, and heard the drone of the alert again. It only took her a moment to locate the source of this buzzing. A wasp! A real live creature, butting its head against the plain section of wall, as if it could break through and escape. Dia watched, fascinated. Nothing discouraged the beast: it went back and back at the window. Dia leaned over and used her bId to zoom the creature in. It was striped like a cartoon tiger; an anvil-shaped head and those little tight half-globes of black-bubblewrap for eyes. Its wings were smoky blurs. Even setting the bId to its maximum slow-down setting didn’t resolve them into discernible organs in motion. She moved the bId focus to its wasp head: curled antenna like ram’s horns. Anvil-shaped cranium. A monster.

  ‘They sting, Miss,’ said Iago, from the other side of the room. ‘You don’t want to get too close.’

  Diana glowered at him. ‘Sapho – Sapho – tell me: who murdered Leron?’

  ‘I think it was justice, not murder, Miss. I think he was a bad man. I say he deserved it.’

  ‘The policepersons – they are saying you killed him. Did you kill him Sapho?’

  But her only reply to this was disbelieving, self-pitying tears, and a series of gaspy incomprehensible words. Diana was bored with this display. She sent Sapho away: Officer first-class Avraam Kawa led her out.

  ‘She seemed pretty happy to see him dead and gone,’ Diana observed. ‘What do you think, Iago?’

  ‘I think, Miss,’ said the Tutor-who-was-no-tutor, ‘that I personally vetted all twenty of these servants. I did so in direct, personal consultations with Ms and Ms Argent. These were to be personal handservants to yourself, Miss, and to Eva as well. We took no chances, in terms of their moral character.’

  ‘You don’t think a revolutionary and a murderer could slip past such a vetting process?’

  Iago made his right eyebrow go from – to ^. Just his right one! His left stayed where it was. Such a clever trick. He did it from time to time, but no matter how much Diana practised in front of the mirror she had never been able to emulate it.

  ‘Alright,’ she conceded. ‘But if he’s not a revolutionary, why does Sapho call him one? Why baa-baa blacken his name? No, don’t bother answering the . . . don’t bother answering. Bring me another servant to question, and I shall proceed with the questioning.’

  ‘Shall I kill
the wasp, first?’ asked Jong-il.

  But the truth was, questioning servants was a bore. It was a well-bore; a gravity-bore; a boffo bore. Many tears were shed, by men and women both, boys and girls, all weeping as if weeping had just come into fashion, goddess-love-it. And there were lots of tediously repeated assurances of their undying loyalty to and love for the Argent family, prompted by the heightened mood and the fear and above all by the CRF. There was very little actual informational content.

  What Dia gleaned, by this increasingly frustrating and tedious sifting of emotional blurting, fell into one of two categories. On the one hand, some servants – the bId gave her names, and personal details, the skill quotients and coordinations, the birthmarks and disease actuarial of all them – thought that Leron was a bad man. When pressed for specifics they all said the same thing: he was a terrorist and an anarchist and an antinomian, and he hated the Ulanovs and all that was legal and right and ordered in the System. Some (Mantolini, Tapanat and Faber) also alleged that he was a sexual bully, and forced both females and males into unwanted sexual congress.

  But on the other hand, other servants – Poon-si, Tigris and Oldorando most forcefully – put forward a completely different version of events. According to them Leron was a thoroughly good man, almost a space-saint. So far from being a terrorist, or plotting from his lowly position to bring down the Ulanovs, he was dedicated to the System-wide rule of law, and moreover he worked to expose disloyalty in others. According to these people, this fact explained his demise. ‘He was killed before he could reveal that she is a traitor and a revolutionary,’ said a servant called D’Arch.

  ‘She?’

  ‘Sapho! You have spoken to her? She is a traitor to the very bone! Look in her eyes and you can see it!’

  ‘A traitor to the Argents?’

  Again, at the merest suggestion of such a thing, the servant looked genuinely shocked. ‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘Who could be disloyal to you, Miss?’ And then the gusty tears came. ‘Never that, Miss! The thought hurts my heart, just the thought of it!’

  ‘Then you mean – a traitor to the Ulanovs themselves?’

  But it took a long time for the weeping to settle to the level where meaningful communication could continue. ‘Yes! Yes! She is the serpent in the globe of Eden, she is the spider. She hates law and good and right and order and everything that has made the Solar System habitable and free of war. She is a killer!’

  ‘And – Leron was about to report her, was he?’

  ‘Yes! Yes! So she killed him. She tried to do it before, but now she was able.’

  ‘But,’ she had to check the bId again to remember this one’s name; the servants were all more or less indistinguishable from one another, ‘but D’Arch, why hadn’t he already reported her? He had many weeks when he could have done so, before you all came down here.’

  The confusion in D’Arch’s eyes was unmistakeable. ‘But he was a good man,’ she said. ‘The killer is Sapho. I told the police already!’

  From his position near the door, Iago interpolated a question: ‘have you heard of Jack Glass?’

  This had an immediate effect. D’Arch’s eyes went wide, and colour dimmed in her dark face. She stared at Iago as if he were the devil made flesh. ‘Jack Glass?’ she repeated. ‘He is – the father of lawlessness.’

  ‘Did he ever visit your globe, D’Arch?’

  ‘No, never! Yes, he is everywhere! But I never met him – not I. They say he can kill anybody in the entire System, and that he is dedicated to bringing down the lawful, harmonious rule of the Ulanovs!’

  ‘If he can kill anybody in the system,’ said Diana, reasonably enough, ‘then why doesn’t he just kill the Ulanovs and be done with it?’

  This was, she realised as soon as she had said it, a shocking thing to voice aloud. If D’Arch had looked shocked at the name of Jack Glass, she looked flabbergasted that anybody could say such a thing aloud. Kill the Ulanovs – just putting the words together like that was probably a legally actionable thing.

  ‘Never that!’ gasped D’Arch. ‘Nobody could do that!’

  Officer first-class Avraam Kawa took her away and brought in another handservant: this one called Carna. Diana’s bId sketched her in terms of basic data, but didn’t explain how her gristly hair had turned such an antique shade of grey at the age of only twenty-one; or what had caused the old, chevron-shaped scar over her right eye, like a corporal’s stripe. As to this latter, Diana got the sense quickly enough of a combative personality only imperfectly controlled beneath the more appropriate veneer of handservant deference. She met Diana’s eye without flinching, and unlike most of the other interrogates she did not cry. But she also had definite ideas about who had killed Leron.

  ‘She did it.’

  ‘Who? Sapho?’

  ‘That’s right. She tried it once before, in the dizzy dummies you know.’

  ‘The what?’ Dia asked.

  ‘The,’ said the woman, enunciating more clearly, ‘dizzy dummies, Miss.’ Dia’s bId popped up with: //large scale centrifugal devices in which simulated gravity is used to bulk up bone and muscle prior to transferring a servant from zero to fractional g//. Intrigued she scratched up a little more data. These were not like any machines with which Dia was familiar, except in underlying principle. They were, for instance, much larger and without any of the more civilised trimmings. It seemed that servants would spend whole days inside fast-spun cages. The system had a grille and sluice, since the speed was rapid and continuous, not like the machines Dia was used to. Accordingly vomiting was common, as likely (statistically) at the end of the procedure as the beginning. Fatalities in the .07 to .15 range, depending on the make of the device. Stress fractures in subjects’ bones occurring in the .35 to .45 range, but most of these being relatively easily fixed.

  Dia asked: ‘how did she try to kill him?’

  ‘Miss, have you ever seen the dizzies?’

  Dia laughed. ‘I’d never even heard of them until now!’

  ‘Oh, Miss, there are lots of ways to harm someone in there. It was in there that Petero was killed.’ Her complexion was an even dun-colour, but the skin on the inside of her eyelids – the little ledge of flesh visible between the eyeball itself and the outer skin of the face – was black, like natural mascara. It made her look almost soulful.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Petero was Leron’s best buddy. They were oh-ho friends from years back. But Petero broke his neck in the dizzy dummies, learning this gravity. It’s a hard lesson.’

  ‘So – Leron’s best friend was killed before he even came down here?’

  ‘He died, yes.’

  Diana looked over at Iago. ‘Is that true?’

  Iago checked his own bId, or he didn’t and just pulled the fact from his memory, it was impossible to tell with his impassive face. ‘Broke his neck, yes.’

  ‘Was it an accident?’

  ‘Accidents do occur in these gravitational acclimatization devices, Miss,’ Iago said. ‘And sometimes such accidents are fatal.’

  ‘But did somebody kill – eh, him?’

  ‘Petero Grenadine, of the shanty globe Smirr?’

  ‘Him, yes.’

  Iago pursed his lips, noncommittally. ‘It was investigated, of course. There was nothing to suggest it was murder. The worst you could say is that it wasn’t reported very promptly. If they – the other servants in the device, I mean – if they had raised the alarm straight away, he might have been saved. But by the time he was noticed, he had expired. Brain dead.’

  ‘Why didn’t they immediately sound the alert?’ Diana wanted to know. ‘Good goddess, a man’s life could be saved!’

  ‘Perhaps he wasn’t popular,’ Iago suggested, vaguely.

  ‘He was plenty pop-u-lar!’ snorted Carna, scowling at Iago. But then she looked back towards Diana, and winced, and her eyes went moist. ‘I mean, Miss,’ she said. ‘Not to be contradictory – but he was a fine man. And Leron was too. They neither of them deserv
ed to die.’

  ‘Did you,’ asked Diana, feeling the transgressive nature of the question as a warm gleam in her chest and the buzz of adrenaline – she was the investigator! She could ask anything no matter how outrageous! – ‘did you have sexual relations with Petero?’

  Carna looked horrified, and then immediately abashed, and finally she looked at the floor. ‘Oh, Miss,’ she said, in a shamed voice. ‘Such a question from a young Miss!’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Miss, you must understand how the world works, when you grow up in a shanty globe – the high morals and purity and the goodness and the order of your life, of the blessed Argents, is hard to maintain in such a place. The Argents shine silver with the light of Ra’allah Himself! But in the globes . . .’ She trailed off.

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Diana stated, elated at having (as she thought) touched on an important point. Not only important but properly grown-up! But then, she was going to be sixteen in a fortnight. ‘And Leron too?’

  Carna didn’t say anything.

  ‘I see,’ Dia said, sternly; although her external performance of disapproval didn’t reflect her inner glee. This was something key – wasn’t it? She tried another stab in the dark. ‘Now, he was also having sexual relations with Sapho, wasn’t he? Leron?’

  Carna’s looked back at her, open-eyed. The expression was either one of astonishment at such a wrongheaded assertion, or else astonishment at Diana’s perspicacity. Dia wasn’t sure which was more likely. She pressed on:

  ‘Was that it? Was it sexual jealousy – did you kill Leron because he was having sexual relations with another person?’

  ‘No,’ gasped Carna, her brow creasing. She looked baffled. Or furious. Was it fury? And if so was she furious at being found out? Or furious at being unjustly accused?

  ‘Leron and . . .’ But the name had gone out of her memory; Dia cycled quickly through the day’s order on the bId, ‘Leron and Sapho went into the storeroom to have sexual relations. You followed and killed him.’

  ‘No!’ snapped Carna. ‘I am no killer. And besides you are suggesting I – did – did – the physical activity I am too embarrassed to name – that? In this gravity?’ And Diana finally recognised the expression on her face for what it was: incredulousness.