Jack Glass

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Proof,’ said Iago, neutrally.

  ‘So,’ she said, sitting up straighter. Gravity was slightly less of an oppressive horror today. A few days more and she’d be gambolling about like a fawn. She hated to agree with her MOHmies, but they were right. A few daily hours in a centrifuge wasn’t a patch on the total immersion of Earthly gravitational life. ‘So – what do you think?’

  ‘What do I think, Miss?’

  ‘Go on – sit down. You’re always standing about! It’s a kind of showing-off you know. The rest of us have to sit down. You should too.’

  ‘Should I be blamed for having unusually strong and healthy legs?’ said Iago, with a twinkle in his eye. But he sat himself down nonetheless: cross-legged, on the sand. It brought him down to her level, which was better.

  ‘The police believe the murderer to be one of the other servants,’ Dia said. ‘So do you.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Of course you do! It’s the most obvious and plausible inference. But maybe who isn’t so interesting as why. And there are various whys. For example: why should the murderer be the most obvious person? We might as well say the butler did it.’

  ‘Indeed, Miss.’

  ‘No – I say, no: it is something more unexpected than that. Believe me, I know how these things work. Who knows them better than I? And don’t say Anna Tonks Yu, of the famous family Yu, who is my rival and my deadly and bitter enemy. Don’t say her!’

  ‘Her name shall never pass my lips, Miss. I only meant to point out that we’re not in the Ideal Palace now.’

  ‘You think the solution is banal and obvious, do you?’ she asked.

  ‘I only think that real life may not be as . . . narratively satisfying as a mystery written specifically for the IP. By a process of elimination, and since nobody else went into the house – discounting the theory that Jack Glass teleported magically into the storeroom – the murderer must have been somebody already inside. There were twenty servants in the house, and nobody else. Practically, it would have been an easy thing. One of them invites Leron into the storeroom at the back of the house. On some pretext – let’s say, to fetch a piece of equipment.’

  ‘Or offering him sexual intercourse,’ said Diana. She loved being able to startle Iago with little improprieties like this. He was so stuffy and proper!

  ‘Possibly that,’ said Iago, with a frown. He cleared his throat. ‘At any rate, we can imagine him going into the room, the murder scene. But straight away there are problems. The hammerblow that killed him was delivered from the front.’ Iago touched a point on his own tall brow, near the hairline. ‘The business-end of the hammerhead struck him right in the middle. As you’ll know from the autopsy, on your bId, a splinter from the tree-wood handle was found in his nose.’

  ‘Ow, ow, ow,’ she drawled, in a bored voice.

  ‘Of course splinters of tree wood in his nose,’ said Iago, ‘was the last thing on his mind. Indeed, by the time of the follow-through of the blow, which is what we’re talking about here . . . well, at that point he no longer had a mind to have a last thing on. If you see what I mean.’

  ‘If you’re trying to shock me with the grisly descriptions of vioh-lence,’ Diana told him, ‘then you’ll have to try harder than that.’

  ‘My point is this: the hammer is heavy. Leron was facing his murderer, looking straight at his killer. He did this, whilst they lifted a massy hammer all the way up and brought it crashing down into his face. Why? Why didn’t he duck out of the way? Or try to wrestle his assailant? Or do anything except what he did do – just stand there, gawmping.’

  ‘Is that even a word?’ Diana said. ‘Alright – that is a puzzle, I grant you. And there’s another difficulty. Which again, clog-clever Iago, you raised before.’

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘All nineteen suspects came down at the same time as Eva and me. Before that, most of them had never set foot on Earth in their lives! You saw what they were like when they all came spilling out of the servant house – staggering and tumbling, barely able to walk. Not a one had even begun to acclimatize to a full g. How could any of them so much as lift that heavy hammer? Let alone bring it down with the force and precision to smash poor old Leroy’s brains in.’

  ‘Leron,’ said Iago. ‘You think this fact alone proves the innocence of all the servants?’

  ‘Leron, that’s right. Yes, I think that. It’s their physical incapacity, and the fact that they were all vetted, for crying out as loud as you like! These were hand-picked handservants; they went through more layers of vetting and psychological profiling and checking than anyone else in the whole system. How could a murderer slip through that net? I mean it literally and actually and honestly: how could somebody with a history of violence, or with murder in their heart, end up as the personal handservant of Eva or myself?’

  ‘Hard to see how,’ Iago agreed.

  ‘Never mind dosing our servants with high levels of loyalty drug. We check them rigorously physically and psychologically. You told me you were involved yourself. My MOHmies sign off on our handservants personally don’t they? – I mean, the handservants assigned to Eva and myself?’

  ‘Certainly they do,’ said Iago. ‘I personally liaised between the vetting teams and your parents, Miss.’

  ‘You personally did – and yet you still think that one of them is a murderer!’

  Iago looked at her, and then dropped his gaze.

  Dia pressed on: ‘None of those servants could lift that weight, Iago! And you saw for yourself, the gardening robot hadn’t been activated in years. But an Earth native could lift the hammer. As for why Leron didn’t fight him, or try a silly-old-runaway. Maybe he was too crushed and discombobulated and disoriented by the heavy gravity – eh? He’d never been downbelow before either, after all.’

  ‘No native Earthling emerged from the house, Miss,’ Iago pointed out. ‘And the house was searched thoroughly after the murder happened: no native Earthling was found.’

  ‘Doesn’t that just suggest our murderer had a really good hiding place inside? Maybe he waited there all day – until the moment was auspicious for him to slip away?’

  ‘How could he do so, without alerting the House AI?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Iago pondered. ‘And why would a native Earthling want to smash in the head of a servant who’d never even set foot here before?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah,’ said Diana, knowingly. ‘Motive! I’ll come to that. But first, here’s a thing: why choose a hammer? I mean: think of all the ways our murderer could have killed her-or-his victim. Why a hammer?’

  ‘We can’t argue with its effectiveness,’ Iago noted. ‘It proved more than capable of ending Leron.’

  ‘You’re not taking the force of my observation. Why choose such a big heavy hammer – if not to give the impression that the murderer must be a big heavy person? A strong person, acclimatized to Earth gravity? You can’t deny that’s the impression it gives.’

  Iago said nothing.

  ‘I had a dream, the night after the murder,’ Diana went on, meditatively. ‘I dreamt I was a spaceship, about to fall like a hammer into the sun itself – and the sun was Leron’s skull. I was the hammer.’ She thought about this. ‘The odd thing is, I was covered with fins. Wings in space. Vanes and fins and wings.’

  ‘Curious,’ said Iago, neutrally.

  ‘Anyway, I was called FTL,’ said Diana absently. ‘Fins and vanes and wings,’ she added, as if it were a charm. ‘Fins. And Wings. I need to sleep, Iago.’

  ‘Here, Miss?’

  ‘No. Take me back to the house. This killing gravity. I can only get a proper dream-sleep in a gel-bed.’

  ‘Very well, Miss.’

  As Jong-il and Berthezene came down from the rocks, she said to Iago: ‘could a servant hide murder in their hearts and pass unnoticed through our selection processes?’

  ‘No, Miss,’ said Iago. ‘They couldn’t.’

  ‘You’re sure? The human heart is a myste
rious chamber, after all.’

  ‘They couldn’t do it. We have the most rigorous selection processes in the whole system. You really think your MOHmies could put you at any risk? Of course not. I personally assure you.’

  ‘Well,’ said Dia, sinking into the seat of the car. ‘That rather suggests my theory is correct – don’t you think?’

  ‘You are the information problem solver, Miss,’ said Iago, smoothly. ‘Not I.’

  She looked at the sky. Blue, and blue, and blue.

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said. She was feeling sleepy. Some dreaming would help her sort through her theories and come to some conclusion.

  She couldn’t be bothered to strap her crawlipers back to her legs, so made her way back to the car by leaning on Iago’s shoulder. For an old man, the muscles of his arm and shoulders were certainly pretty toned.

  When everybody was inside, the car climbed gingerly back up the rocky slope and settled itself back on the road. Acceleration tugged in her gravity-weary torso like a blanket settling over her. Her eyelids felt deliciously honeyed and heavy.

  On the way home they drove past a procession: a dozen or more people, the woman at the front carrying an iCon of the Virgin – the local goddess. Hymns were being sung. Diana could hear nothing, of course, through the perfect seal of the car windows; but she could see their mouths working. And they walked with a slow, deliberate step, on their way to, or perhaps on their way from, a church, and a service, and prayers. The iCon of the Virgin was fashioned, of course, in the likeness of Dia’s MOHmies. Which is to say, in the likeness of Diana herself. It was only moderately uncanny to see her image there. They weren’t worshipping her, of course. They were worshipping the Platonic form of her, the embodied goddess. Still.

  The car swept past, and away.

  ‘I’m getting the impression,’ Iago prompted, gently. ‘That you have already solved this mystery.’

  ‘You think you know me,’ Diana replied, frowning. ‘You don’t really know me.’ In her head, the mantra: fins and vanes and wings.

  ‘Of course,’ said Iago.

  ‘It’s a lot of contradictory data,’ Diana replied, sulkily. ‘And I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say: it’s what is supposed to make me special, my ability to see a straight path through the sorts of data self-contradiction and iChaos that baffle AIs. But AIs don’t have to sleep.’

  ‘The Model-F ones do,’ put in Berthezene, irrelevantly.

  ‘A man is murdered,’ said Diana, her eyes closed, her head jiggling gently from side to side in time to the motion of the car. ‘The facts aren’t the problem. The interlocking contexts are the problem.’

  ‘Contexts?’ prompted Iago.

  She was on the event horizon of sleep; but held herself, just, on the waking side. ‘Interlocking and incompatible contexts. Situating the murder in the context – let’s say – of servant life; of the attitudes and mores of shanty globe existence; of larger Solar System politics up-to-and-including treachery against the Ulanovs themselves, and planning revolution and so on . . . and Ms Joad didn’t come all the way down here for the hell of it, after all.’ In her head the nursery-chant of it went round and round:

  Fins and vanes and wings

  Fins and vanes and wings

  Fins and vanes and wings

  She should see that Iago believed her to be asleep. So she spoke up again, just to surprise him. ‘But there are the other contexts of Argent MOHfamily dynamics, and our relationship to the Ulanovs. But also the contexts of faster-than-light travel, of all the random things. And, for all I know, the context of Eva’s champagnely exploding supernovae too – though it’s hard to see how they have anything to do with it. Doodly-oh. But, I guess, the context of physics, yes. Not to mention Jack Glass. Not all of these contexts can be relevant to the solution of the mystery. Not all of them. The challenge is knowing which ones to discard.’

  ‘So – you have an answer?’ said Iago.

  Diana opened one eye, and looked at him. ‘Of course I do,’ she said, sourly. ‘How do you think I got my reputation as the Solar System’s number one mystery and whodunit solver?’

  Iago did his one-eyebrow-raising thing again. ‘And?’

  ‘My dear Iago, the information is all there, and you’ve seen all the clues I have. You ought to be able to solve this murder just as I have done.’

  ‘My skills, Miss Diana,’ said Iago, going all Jeeves-formal. ‘Lie elsewhere.’ His silly-old feelings were hurt, maybe, so Diana pulled herself more upright in the seat and said: ‘don’t be like that, ee-aa-oo, please don’t! You are an invaluable member of the team, you really are. When I’m running the family I shall keep you on as a functionary or gardener or potboy or something. But I am the one bred by my MOHmies to solve mysteries. Aren’t I?’

  ‘You’ve solved the how and the why?’

  ‘Why,’ she replied, meditatively. ‘Yes. Indeed, yes. Let us both bathe in the deep blue sea of why.’

  ‘We’re here,’ said Jong-il. The car pulled up at the main compound, and Iago helped her inside.

  She went through first; Berthezene and Jong-il followed behind, making the front door squeal with outrage at the metal guns they both carried. Jong-il stayed there, running their security clearance once again through the purview of the suspicious House AI, so as to permit them to carry their weapons indoors. Berthezene took up a post in the corridor outside Diana’s room, and Iago helped her through and onto the gel-bed.

  Klang, klang, klang. Noisy old door.

  ‘An afternoon nap,’ she murmured. ‘Just a little sleep.’

  She closed her eyes, and then she opened them again. ‘When I wake up, I want to start planning my party,’ she said. ‘You understand? It will need a lot of planning.’

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ said Iago.

  ‘And what do you mean by that?’

  ‘Only what you know very well, that we cannot invite anybody, either in person or in virtual form, without compromising the secrecy of your being here.’

  This annoyed Diana just enough to lift her up over the tug of sleep, if only for a moment. ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Not-sense, no-sense, un-sense. Any information agent could squirrel out the information.’

  ‘I doubt that, Miss. We go to great lengths to keep you and your MOHsister safe.’

  Diana wrinkled her nose. ‘It ever occur to you I don’t need your help? Did you ever think I’m the one keeping you safe?’

  ‘In the sense that my safety depends upon the strength of the Argent family, and its proximity to the centres of power in the system – that is, of course, true. Nonetheless, we cannot compromise your safety. Nobody must know exactly where you are.’

  ‘That foul Ms Joad knew where I was,’ grumbled Dia, closing her eyes again.

  ‘A personal agent of the Ulanovs is a different matter, of course.’

  ‘I’m asleep,’ said Diana.

  ‘Very good, Miss.’

  ‘I really am. Go away, you horrible, crack-skinned, ancient old relic.’

  ‘Since you are asleep—’ said Iago, moving towards the door.

  ‘I am!’

  ‘—then you won’t hear me saying that we intercepted a message from Anna Tonks Yu.’

  Diana opened one eye. ‘That minx,’ she said. ‘What has she to say for herself?’

  ‘We did not access the content of the message, naturally; in case it contained a seeker virus that would track back through the relays and reveal your location.’

  Diana’s heart was lolloping a little faster. ‘You scanned it? Is there one?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Iago, gently, from his position by the door. ‘And you know it. Miss Diana, you are clever – cleverer than anybody on this island with the possible exception of your sister. You don’t need to prove that fact to anybody.’

  Diana closed her eyes very tightly. ‘Don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Smuggling a message out to a member of a rival family – a real danger, potentially
an immense danger. This is not Romeo and Juliet.’

  ‘I’m asleep,’ repeated Diana, with her eyes very tightly closed. ‘I’m not even going to check the bId for the meaning of that reference.’

  ‘You understand me very well, Miss. All I’m saying is – please, take this circumstance seriously. Danger surrounds us all the time. If any of the other MOHfamilies could get to you – or any organisation from a lower tier of power, any Gongsi or mafia or militia – it would be . . .’

  ‘I’m asleep!’ she snapped. ‘Can’t you see it? Don’t you know what sleep looks like?’

  ‘You’re asleep,’ said Iago. He left the room.

  9

  Eva Acts

  Iago made his way – a little stiffly, for the gravity was oppressive – across to Eva’s room. He lodged a request at the door of her IP, and, a little grumpily, she came out and into the real world. Iago went into her room. Sitting in her gel-couch, she opened her eyes, and wrath flashed in them.

  ‘What is it?’ she demanded. ‘Shouldn’t you be lurking about my sister?’

  ‘I’m Tutor to the both of you,’ he pointed out, mildly.

  ‘Tutor,’ Eva scoffed. ‘What nonsense, Iago.’

  At this Iago smiled. ‘Would you prefer – flunkey?’

  ‘Jeeves,’ said Eva, scornfully. ‘Of course I’m not privy to everything my MOHmies do. But neither am I a kid to be patronised, like . . .’ She stopped, abruptly. ‘What do you want, anyway? I’m in the middle of something. I have a PhD to finish.’

  ‘Diana will be sixteen in a few weeks,’ said Iago.

  ‘She’ll still be a kid. She’ll be a kid at sixty-one. She has kid all the way through her, like a seam of silver running through an asteroid.’

  ‘Let’s hope,’ said Iago, leaning himself back against the wall to take some of the crushing gravitational pressure off his legs, ‘that we all survive long enough to enjoy her birthday party.’

  ‘Sure we could all die at any time,’ snapped Eva. ‘Which only makes it more imperative that I get back to my research. I’d hate to leave it loose-endy.’ But she stopped. ‘You mean something more specific, don’t you? You mean an actual threat?’