by Adam Roberts
‘So,’ she said. ‘This is what I deduce. Your birthday gift to me was a real-life murder mystery. You expected me to solve this mystery.’
‘Of course.’
‘But that wasn’t the real present, was it? You expected me to solve the mystery, and then you expected me to uncover what was behind it – you expected me to work out your involvement.’
He was looking at her. Slowly he nodded.
‘You wanted me,’ she said, ‘to be angry. You wanted me to feel used, to be outraged at the disposal of a live human being into such a game. You wanted me to feel that, so I would confront this fact of power. That to rule means to treat people in that way.’
‘The thing is,’ Iago repeated. ‘The stakes are very high.’
‘Overthrowing the Ulanovs?’
‘Ha!’ His laugh took her by surprise. ‘No, no. That would be power politics – a very desirable outcome I think, overthrowing tyranny; and I genuinely hope we can bring it about. And what your MOHparents hope, too. But that is the oldest currency in human affairs. Power politics, I mean. It happens, or it doesn’t happen, and Homo sapiens carries on. No, I mean something much more important than that.’
‘What?’ Diana asked. Iago was looking through the window: snowflakes descending. Each was smaller than a fingernail, and thinner, and less durable. But they were coming in greater and greater numbers. The world outside was turning white. In summer, too!
‘Let’s talk about that,’ he said.
14
The Third Letter of the Alphabet
‘Joad wanted to know where it is,’ Iago said. ‘It is something unimaginably dangerous, something worth unimaginable sums of money. It being—’
‘FTL,’ she said.
He hummed assent. ‘More to the point, it is a particular thing, hidden in plain view. It’s floating in space. Joad is searching for a single fish in that immeasurable ocean.’ He looked at his fingernails, compared the row of left to right. Then he said: ‘no – it’s more difficult to find than that. Space is inconceivably bigger than any ocean.’
‘Space is big. How big is this object, thing – whatever it is we’re looking for?’
‘The size of a human being. Exactly that size. Do you know what? – this interests me, actually. Do you know that the median point between the mass of a proton and the mass of the entire universe is the mass of an average human female? Had you heard that fact? That factoid?’
‘Is it a human female?’ Diana asked him. There was a strange kerfuffle in her chest, her heart scurrying. And there was something else. Her head felt as if it were simultaneously swelling and shrinking, an odd hallucinatory effect. The smell of baked bread was somewhere about. She wondered what all this sudden excitement in her body was about, but at the same time she didn’t need to wonder because she knew – she knew what the secret voice was uttering in the gravity well hidden in the centre of her weightless mind. It was saying: you, you, it’s you. It was saying: this thing they have been looking for, this artefact that is worth killing so many people for, this unimaginable precious thing, this unimaginably dangerous thing – it’s you. ‘A human female,’ she said again, with a shimmer in her voice.
‘What?’ Iago said, looking at her.
‘I know I’m not an ordinary human female,’ she said, in a rapid voice. ‘Of course I’ve read up about the possibilities enabled by MOH-conception. And, I’ll tell you – and I’ve always had the sense of . . . don’t laugh, but I’ve always had the sense of a special destiny associated with my life—’
‘A man,’ said Iago.
‘No, not that . Oh, I don’t mean to choose celibacy, and I’ve no objection to dialling my sexuality that way. But men are nothing, less than nothing really.’ She pulled herself up short, for it occurred suddenly to her that this might be an insensitive thing to say to Iago. ‘All I mean to say,’ she added, by way of qualification, ‘is that the old Romantic Love dream is – well, that’s a man’s dream. It’s a way of locking the female principle into limits that—’
He interrupted her then, but gently. ‘I’m not being clear,’ he said. ‘A dead man.’
‘A dead man,’ she repeated. Then, in the tone of belated comprehension. ‘A dead human male? That’s what Joad is looking for?’
‘That’s what we’re all looking for. His corpse, floating somewhere in all this immensity of space.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh I feel foolish!’
‘There’s no need to,’ said Iago with a wry smile.
‘I jumped to conclusions.’
She looked through the window to the barren ground outside. Breathing, in and out, the hiss of silk-on-silk. No matter how long you stayed downbelow, no matter how acclimatised you thought you had become, the truth was that drawing breath was a blur of effort and residual pain. She wanted to go home. She wanted very much to go back up. Human beings really did not belong in this laborious place. Snow. This is frozen water fluffed into popcorn-sized white cinders by the meteorological processes of the Earthen atmosphere. A sparse down-procession of flakes drifting mazily down on the far side of the glass, and then suddenly there was a great swarm of them. They moved in an insulting half-hearted imitation of weightlessness, sometimes buoying up only to fall slowly again.
The quality of light in the room had changed from yellow-white to a silver oxide, to an argent vividness and chill. Iago spoke to bring up the interior lighting, but Diana spoke it back off again. She liked the quality of cold dusk at midday. She liked it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I said human female only because that’s the way the maths comes out – slightly smaller than the average human male.’
‘Average is a nonsense. How do we even know the average when the population is counted in trillions, and the majority are scattered through billions of reclusive bubbles?’ But that sounded rather more hostile than she felt, so she said: ‘I’m a bit of an egotist, I’m afraid. It’s foolish of me to react like this. Foolish to be disappointed to hear that I’m – not – after all – the messiah.’ She chuckled at the vainglory of the thought, now that she had actually uttered it
Iago smiled. Then he said. ‘I would say that you’re remarkably un-egotistical.’ But, then, the barb: ‘for one of the rich, I mean.’
Suddenly the grey light all around her seemed monstrous, as if the whole room had been plunged below the surface of an Earthen ocean. That’s what it was. She was sick of being low, of being cast into the profound depths of the shaft of the planet’s gravity – and the last thing she wanted was to sink further still.
She spoke the lights in the room up, bright and on they came, tart as fresh lemon juice. And then she sat herself up straighter, and drew a long, breath.
‘Tell me about this deceased male human,’ she said. ‘The stakes are so very high, you say? How can one person’s corpse mean so much?’
‘He is called Mkoko,’ said Iago. ‘Was called that, I mean, when alive.’
‘And who was he?’
‘He was a crewperson on a sloop called Hesperus. Strictly it was called Hesperus 33a10, there being a large number of spaceships with that name. Engineers are not a very imaginative bunch when it comes to names.’
‘And how came he to be floating dead in space?’
‘There was a shipboard fire and he was killed. Burnt to death, unfortunately for him. The surviving crew buried him at space.’
‘Buried him at space,’ Diana repeated. ‘Sounds like a waste of good carbon.’
‘Well, yes. But I’ll tell you something else about engineers. They’re almost all religious. Often religious in old-school ways, such that – an outsider might think – their religious beliefs must bring them into conflict with their own scientific and technical knowledge-bases. But there’s something in the sort of god-obsessed imagination that excels at engineering. I don’t know what it is. And the various fleets wouldn’t run without them, of course; so they have latitude when it comes to religious freedoms and practices.’ He cleared his thr
oat. Diana looked at him. With his face lit brightly from above she saw again how old he was. Lines on his white face like the cracks on Callisto’s round white surface.
‘So this Mkoko got killed on some sloop and his body was chucked into vacuum,’ said Diana. ‘Alright: now tell me why he is so important.’
Iago said: ‘he’s not important.’
‘Eye-ah-go,’ she rebuked him. ‘You’re being evasive, and it’s tiresome.’
‘I don’t know very much about Mkoko, actually,’ Iago said. ‘It’s not him. It’s something he has about his person. His corpse. You see, also serving on the ship was another engineer, called McAuley. Now he – well, he was something else.’
‘Who? Wait.’ She tried to remember. ‘The name rings a bell. If I still had access to my bId I could check. Do I know him? Have I ever heard of him?’
‘Perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. He invented something, that’s all. And then he thought better of it.’
‘He invented something, and then changed his mind?’
‘Exactly.’
‘What did he invent?’
‘He wouldn’t say.’
‘People asked him?’
At this Iago suddenly laughed. It was such a strange, uncharacteristic noise to come out of his mouth that Dia flinched. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, controlling himself. ‘I’m sorry. But yes – people asked him. People asked him over and over again. They kept asking him. They pressed him hard on the matter. So hard that he died.’
‘Oh,’ said Diana, understanding.
‘It was . . . clumsy and stupid of them, quite apart from being,’ and he looked into the corner of the ceiling and spoke the word as if trying it out: ‘immoral. But now McAuley is dead, and he can tell us nothing more about his invention.’
‘He revealed nothing at all about it under . . . interrogation?’
‘He was much more stubborn than his interrogators realised. Religious faith, you see. Old school. They weren’t ready for it. He decided that he truly would rather die than say. Do you know what vacuumboarding is?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘You expose a person’s face to the vacuum of space – the whole face. You have a special little porthole in your – interrogation cabin. It’s very unpleasant. Obviously, you can’t breathe, and that is scary; and it’s cold in ways you cannot easily imagine. And very painful, as blood vessels burst and your eyes bulge and your lips freeze solid. The – subject – usually struggles, clenches her eyes shut, holds her breath. Then after a while you pull them back in. They’ll often tell you what you want to know then, especially if they’ve been prepped with the right Oxys first. Your trick is to get the information out of them quickly, because soon after that their bruises will start to swell their face and they quickly become incoherent. Often, depending on how long you vacuumboard them for, the flesh of their lips dies, necroses, blackens with frostbite and comes away. They tend to lose the sight in one or both eyes.’
‘I am not going to ask,’ she said, ‘how you know all this.’
‘Oh I’ve never been an interrogator,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had the stomach for that.’
‘You!’ she said, with a brief laugh, although saying that one syllable, you, made her scalp shiver and the hairs thrill on the back of her neck.
He smiled. ‘Iago Glass,’ he said. ‘Iago, Jago, Jac – I know. I have killed, yes.’ As he spoke, she listened carefully, but his voice sounded no more hollow than it usually did. ‘It is one of the lamentable truths of my nature that I am good at killing people. But I take no pleasure in hurting people. Killing is clean, but torture is messy, and I deplore mess. Killing is enclosure, a shutting down. But hurting people is a ghastly form of disclosure, an opening up – often in a literal sense. That is . . . anathema to me.’ He looked at her. ‘I don’t say this to try and endear myself to you. I am what I am.’
‘A equals A,’ she said. ‘I assume you don’t care what I think, anyway.’
‘Oh I do!’ he said, earnestly. ‘Truly I do. I don’t want you to shun me.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ she said. ‘You’re dosed with the finest CRFs my MOHmies could afford.’
‘I’ve never taken CRFs,’ he said. ‘Your parents trust me absolutely; and with good cause. All the other servants are, of course, dosed up; but giving me those drugs would be a mistake. You need my initiative and, ah, distinctiveness.’
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘A equals A. Quite right,’ he said. ‘Yes, I have killed people, but I have tried to do it as cleanly as possible. I take no pride in what I do, because pride is the flipside of guilt, and that particular emotional matrix is alien to my nature.’ He put his hands together, palm to palm, a Namaste. ‘Nobody – by which I mean, nobody who knew who I really was – would employ me as a torturer. Regular interrogators were hired to question McAuley. And they didn’t understand him. He was – a remarkable man. So they dosed him with exactly the Oxys you would expect, being predictable sorts; it did them no good. So they thought: pain, and the terror of death, will get him to speak – there’s no way to prepare a conscious human body with countermeasures to those quantities, after all. They tortured him, and he held out. They vacuumboarded him, and instead of struggling he expelled all the air in his lungs. He was singing, I think.’
‘Singing?’
‘Singing a hymn to the glory of God, at the top of his voice, into the perfectly muffling medium of outer space. A silent hymn sung with all the volume he could muster. They didn’t realise. Subjects don’t usually react that way. And it must have hurt like – hell. It must have felt as if the devil’s own frozen hand were reaching down his windpipe into his lungs and ripping the flesh free.’ Iago shook his head, and folded his arms. ‘But he had – willpower. By the time they realised what he was doing and drew him back in, he was two-thirds brain dead.’
‘And his secret died with him?’
‘Ah. That brings us back to Mkoko. You see, it seems that McAuley loaded the details of his invention onto a datachip, and hid it about the body of Mkoko before ditching him overboard.’
‘Why?’
Iago made a little o with his lips and shook his head. ‘He had his reasons, I suppose.’
‘So the secret is out there – if we can only find the corpse?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And the secret is FTL?’
‘I said we don’t know the details, the ins-and-outs, the specifics. We don’t know how McAuley solved the problems that stood in his way. But, yes. His invention was a blueprint for a new kind of spaceship drive. Faster-than-light travel.’
‘So it’s true,’ said Dia, the hairs tingling on the back of her neck. ‘That’s amazing. I mean if it’s really true. But it can’t be true, can it?’
‘Why not?’
‘What I mean is: is there a way to travel faster than light?’
‘McAuley found a way.’
‘But that’s wonderful news!’ said Diana, in a loud voice. Her heart was quickening within her. Quickening means coming alive. ‘That’s – incredible news!’
‘Wonderful,’ said Iago, in a neutral voice. ‘No, no, I don’t think so.’
‘You wouldn’t call it wonderful?’
‘I would call it terrifying.’
‘But this is the ticket to the rest of the universe! This takes the lid off the solar system! The teeming trillions can spread to every star! They can escape the rule of the Ulanovs, they can slip the leash. Terrifying? On the contrary, this is the start of a new golden age!’
Iago was looking closely at her. ‘You are excited,’ he observed.
‘Of course I am! To discover that it’s possible after all? It’s freedom! It’s the ultimate freedom!’
‘Death,’ said Iago. The snow outside had stopped falling. A snake of white slept on the outside windowsill, and the bare yard beyond had been softened and blanched.
‘Oh don’t be absurd!’ she cried. ‘It would be death to stay. In the long run – it will be
stagnation and death to stay here!’ She paused. ‘McAuley must have shared his invention with somebody. He refused to tell his interrogators, alright. But friends? Colleagues?’
‘No,’ said Iago. ‘The thing you need to understand about McAuley is that he was a genius. He had his madness, his religious mania. But that enabled rather than interfered with his capacity for invention. A friend of mine once said: McAuley had the finest mind since Newton. That’s right, I think.’
‘So he makes this extraordinary thing. He invents the key that will unlock mankind’s prison cell. And then he prefers to die rather than tell people about it?’
‘I suppose,’ said Iago, ‘that when the idea occurred to him, perhaps he felt a wave of euphoria. Maybe he did dream a brilliant future for humanity, spread throughout every star in the cosmos – all the things you have just said. The lid off, and so on. Maybe that lifted him up, spiritually, as he worked out the details. But then very soon he changed his mind. He decided that, were his work to become known, it would be a disaster. So he destroyed the data.’
‘But,’ said Diana. ‘Why?’
‘Well, actually he didn’t destroy all copies. And, really, that’s a better question. Why didn’t he? He eradicated all traces except one: the datachip, which he fixed to the body of his friend Mkoko and kicked out into space. I suppose,’ Iago went on, ‘that he was making an offering to chance. The God he believed in would be the final arbiter as to whether the corpse is ever discovered. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to completely destroy what was – obviously – his greatest achievement. Something humanity has dreamt about for hundreds of years. He had enough pride left to want to leave one copy surviving.’
‘No,’ said Diana. ‘I’d still say my question is the right one. Why did he want to deprive humanity of this gift? Was it money? – because surely he could have sold the technology for any price he cared to set!’