Jack Glass

by Adam Roberts

  ‘That’s good, though, isn’t it?’ asked Diana. ‘I mean, at least you’re clear of the attentions of the police?’

  Samm scowled. ‘The seventy percent rule is enshrinéd in law,’ he said, with a trisyllabic flourish on enshrined. ‘That’s the thing about the Lex – it even regulates the bounds of illegality. So: we are taxed not from 100% of our gross, but from 143%. To take into account our supposed involvement in the black market. It means our tax burden is much higher than it would otherwise be.’

  ‘You still clear a profit, though?’

  ‘Barely,’ said Chilli. ‘I’m part-owner here; I ought to be swanning about in a luxury O with other captains of industry, drinking and taking soma. Instead I live over the shop, and eat ghunk, and send all my surplus to my wife and daughter on Mars. She’s in the Arean Academy, you know. The fees are – but, look, enough of my troubles.’

  ‘The truth is,’ said Samm, ‘if the police wanted to roll us over, they could. It’s just that they’ve no reason to, we’re too small for them to bother about. We just need to hang on.’

  ‘Until?’

  ‘Until I have enough for my own house,’ said Samm.

  ‘When I hit my target, I’ll sell, and move to a more respectable orbit,’ agreed Chilli. ‘But that’s years away.’

  Eventually the crew of the Fac gave Iago three bales of preserved meat and other foodstuffs, and in return he gave them a metre-square tablet of mysterious provenance and functionality. Barter, the oldest mode of human trade; now – since all actual money was tagged so it could be taxed as it passed through bank accounts, or suchlike databases – more common than ever before. Back aboard Red Rum 2010 Diana discovered that Iago had also traded, or begged, or otherwise obtained a hefty chunk of ice, cabled to the exterior of the boat. ‘We’re going somewhere for a long while,’ Diana deduced. ‘I say so because – well, that’s a lot of ice.’

  ‘The genius of deduction,’ beamed Iago.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Sapho asked. ‘Are we just going to drift from bubble to bubble?’

  ‘I’m taking you to my house,’ said Iago. ‘Nobody has ever been there before. Except me, I mean. It’s the most private place I know. But first – I want to use this Fac’s datasift to piggyback a message.’

  ‘A message?’ asked Diana.

  ‘I’ve located your sister.’

  Diana’s heart leapt up. ‘Is she safe? Where is she?’

  ‘She’s on Mars – or at least, she’s on her way there. It’s been months since she set off; she’ll nearly be there now. And yes, she’s safe. She’s taking care to stay on the move, and so must we. It’ll be a while before I can reunite you two physically, I’m afraid. Your parents prepared the way pretty carefully, and a good proportion of the strength of your Clan managed to slip through the Ulanov net. But things are very uncomfortable right now: the other Clans jockeying for position, the Ulanovs putting enormous resources into suppressing Clan Argent – really, quite staggering amounts of money.’

  ‘Can I speak with her?’

  Iago scratched his head. ‘There is a risk,’ he said, cautiously, ‘when it comes to setting up a line of communication, of course. If we tip off the authorities, they will bend space itself to get to us. If they could seize your sister they would have an advantage; but if they could seize both of you the game would be over.’

  ‘Is that yes? Or no?’

  ‘It is yes. Your bId was contaminated, and I assume hers is too; but we can use my network – it’s nonstandard, unique to me, and I’m scrupulous about keeping it clean. Plus we’ll piggyback upon the system here, aboard this Fac. And we’re well-enough placed to sever the connection and nip away if there’s any sign that things have been compromised.’

  Diana spent an hour online, from which she obtained a few minutes of old-style face-to-face talk. The communication lag was fifteen minutes there-and-back, which was frustrating because time was so short. It was not a properly worldtual encounter, either, so she couldn’t even hug her MOHsister. But she could see her, and speak to her, and that was enough to get both of them weeping and grinning. Eva filled her in on her adventures: arriving at the Tobruk Plasmaser, and almost immediately finding herself in the middle of a firefight. ‘Luckily we were able to get away, south. I eventually rode an old ballistic vessel into orbit from Ivoire.’ ‘It’s precarious, isn’t it?’ said Diana, smiling through her tears. ‘Iago and I were shot from a g-cannon on Mount Abora! When the engines on the boat kicked in I thought we were literally going to shake to pieces!’ ‘I’m so relieved you’re alright, my love!’ Eva said. ‘We both need to hide until things have blown over a little. MOHmies are both fine – I’ve seen them, in the flesh, and they’re fine. But they’re hiding, and so will I and so must you. I won’t ask where you will hide, because it’s better you don’t tell anybody, not even me – though I love you more than I can say.’ Diana wiped her eyes with a fold of her tunic. ‘I will. I’ll be safe until—’

  A sandstorm of interference froze the image of Eva’s face, and scratched hundreds of straggly neon lines across it. ‘That’s it,’ said Iago. ‘The connection is broken.’

  3

  Dunronin

  So they climbed into the narrow g-couches of the Red Rum cabin (there was room for four, although even with only three the space felt crowded) and shot away. Diana, grimacing under acceleration’s squeeze and squash, wept again with happiness to think that her sister was safe. Presently, she dozed – too flattened by the forces to sleep properly. She was in the hinterland of sleep, a dusk of the mind, and a flash of light gleamed suddenly. She thought: perhaps it is a Champagne Supernova a thousand light years distant, or perhaps it is a tiny will-wisp flicker a metre away, and I could reach out my hand and touch it. But how can I know? The muscles in her arm flexed and bulged, but it was impossible to raise the limb against the haul of the g-force. Then she heard the grumbling noise she heard in her nightmares, and its slow accumulation of volume made her very afraid. It was the sound of a massive explosion, but played backwards, so that it grew and gathered towards a climactic cacophony rather than falling away from it. There were things in the darkness that wished her ill. The flash might have been light glinting on the cutting edge of a blade, aimed at her eyes. Abruptly the noise was very loud, and tremors were shaking her, and she was straining every sinew to scream, but no sound emerged from her mouth. She woke, still squashed and squeezed by acceleration. Or else she was still asleep, and this was part of her nightmare.

  But then the g-force went soggy, and then dissipated altogether. She opened her eyes and discovered that she was gasping the word ‘hurt’ over and over.

  Sapho helped her out of the couch. The Red Rum was coasting now, gravity-free and quiet. ‘Three days until we get to where we’re going,’ Iago said, hanging upside down from the ceiling like a bat. ‘Did you have another nightmare?’

  ‘I wasn’t properly asleep,’ gasped Diana. But she was sweaty all over her skin; and since sweat dissipates poorly in zero-g she felt uncomfortably hot. Her face was red. ‘I don’t understand it. I’ve never had nightmares before, in all my life.’

  ‘All your long life,’ said Iago, smiling.

  ‘But I saw – I don’t know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Death. Doubles. Pain.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Sapho, ‘a sedative? To help you sleep?’

  ‘I can’t take any sedative,’ said Diana, reflexly. ‘Dreams are one of the key ways I process and problem-solve. I can’t tinker with my sleep. I can’t smother my dreams in opiates.’

  ‘There are no problems to be solved over the next three days,’ said Iago. ‘We’re just biding time until we arrive at my house.’

  ‘Oh Iago,’ she said, with the patronising tone unique to teenagers rebuking their elders. ‘There are always problems to solve!’

  The nightmares did not recur during the flight, provided they were travelling in zero-g. As they coasted, she slept very peacefully. But on the oc
casions when they had to get into the g-couches in order to put a prudent zig or a zag into their trajectory the sensation of weight in her bones and on her chest made her aware again of her fear. And the final deceleration was a nerve-jangling half-hour; claustrophobic (she had never experienced claustrophobia before!), panicky, horrible. It had, in other words, something to do with gravity. Or perhaps it was merely a question of bad associations between Earth’s ground-level pull and sudden, alarming violence.

  Otherwise the voyage was as uneventful as the dozen that preceded it. At one point Iago thought they were being followed, but after poring over the input data he decided it was simply a sensor-echo. ‘It can’t be a police ship,’ he said. ‘Not just because they can’t know where we are; but because the reading suggests the trailing ship is exactly like us. I mean – exactly. Like a doppelganger. It’s a blip.’

  After six hours the blip vanished from the sensors, which tended to confirm Iago’s theory.

  Finally they arrived. They docked at the single doorway to a small bubble, glinting green in the black sky.

  ‘Diana, Sapho,’ Iago announced. ‘This is my house. This, in point of fact, is my retreat. You are the first human beings, apart from myself, to come here. It is, I hope, a safe place to stay, at least for the time being. The Ulanovs have some high-powered AIs monitoring all the billions of objects in solar orbit, of course; but I have worked hard and spent a lot of money to ensure that Dunronin looks just like any of a billion Sump smallholdings. As far as the authorities are concerned, this place is home to perfectly unexceptional folk, just like a trillion other ordinary people, living on ghunk and sunlight, growing what vegetables they can to supplement their diet, worshipping whatever strange gods they worship. We shall hide in the crowd.’

  ‘ “Dunronin”?’ asked Diana.

  ‘That’s what I call it. A kind of joke. I suppose it is. Anyway; the house isn’t large – but it’s a damn sight bigger than the cabin of the Red Rum 2020, so let’s get out of this racehorse belly and stretch our legs.’

  It was small, inside: a one-hundred-metre diameter, the walls given over either to low-maintenance scrub or transparent panels. They were close enough to the orbit of Venus for the sun to be markedly larger and brighter, and shadows moved with ink-block distinctness over the interior as the globe went through its slow rotation. There were vegetable beds, but these were home to nothing but weeds. ‘I haven’t been here in many years,’ Iago noted. ‘But we can get trays cleaned out and growing pretty quickly, I think. We’ll bring some of the ice in here. And look at the fruit tree! I bought it in part because of its slow-grow gene tweak, since I’m not often here to prune it. But even with the tweak, it must have quadrupled its size since I last saw it!’

  Diana would not have recognised the briar-patch tangle of black branches ending in tongue-sized, rubbery white blossom petals as a fruit tree. ‘There’s no fruit on it,’ she complained, ‘for one thing.’

  ‘I can turn the fruiting gene on, now that we’re here,’ said Iago. ‘There’s a phial of the needful in one of the storage cases by the door. Sprinkle it in at the roots. We’ll have fresh fruit in a matter of weeks.’

  They unloaded the Red Rum, which didn’t take long. After that Diana explored the new space. For structure and ease of locomotion there were eight guy-ropes, none of which passed through the central space of the sphere. A hundred-metre diameter gave the house a surface area – the inside of its curving walls – of over 30,000 m2. Some people might consider that big enough; and it took her a while to check out all the different features, patches of vegetation, and shelters: the bedrooms, the toilet closets, the various stores, the exercise grids.

  ‘I know you’re used to larger mansions,’ Iago said, floating over towards her.

  ‘This is plenty large enough,’ she said. ‘By which I mean – I’ll get used to it. To be honest, Iago, I’m more worried about getting bored bored bored.’

  ‘Without your bId, bId, bId,’ Iago replied. ‘I understand. There are books in storage; and some old-fashioned sealed-world IP environments. But I’m afraid we are going to be doing a fair amount of simply hanging about. I find the best thing is to spend time cultivating the garden. There’s no need to hurry it; and three hectares of ground can absorb a lot of work, even when the plants are designed to be low-maintenance. It’ll take us a week to tidy up, for instance; before we even think about reseeding, or turfing, or new crops or anything like that.’

  ‘I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,’ she said, wriggling herself through the air to give him a hug. ‘I’m still getting used to being, you know. Off the grid. I’ll adjust.’

  ‘There’s plenty of time,’ said Iago.

  He was wrong, though. In the event, there was very little time. They had a day and a night, both equally bright, and that was all. They spent the time tidying, eating stores and chatting, playing games. But it was early on the second day when the authorities caught up with them.

  You spend six months fleeing, keeping out of the way of the Law. Finally you arrive at a safe place, and that is when the Law catches you.

  It is frustrating.

  The first Diana, Sapho and Iago knew was a flash, visible very clearly through the house walls. They were weeding, and all three stopped what they were doing and looked. ‘What was that?’ Diana asked. She had that sudden tingling intimation that things were about to change.

  Iago checked the House AI. ‘Very close. Between twenty and thirty thousand kilometres away – no more,’ he said. ‘That’s not good news.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Something’s not right,’ said Diana.

  ‘Could it be the exhaust of a ship accelerating?’ asked Sapho.

  ‘Rather bright for that,’ said Iago, looking troubled. He peered into the palms of his hands, as if the answer were written there. ‘Also much too close – too close for comfort.’

  ‘Was it something blowing up?’ Diana suggested.

  Iago ran a more detailed check on space in that direction. The AI was slow, relatively, but it turned up the ship quickly enough.

  ‘A sloop,’ said Iago. He sighed. ‘A police sloop, and coming towards us. It’s pretty well chameleonised; but when you look straight at it you can make it out. And it’s definitely coming this way.’

  ‘How?’ Diana squealed. ‘You said this place was—’

  ‘It is!’ Pride gave his voice sudden ferocity.

  ‘Then how have they found us?’

  ‘I don’t know how. But they’re definitely coming. If it weren’t for the flash, I wouldn’t have noticed the approach.’

  ‘Why would they give themselves away like that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Thirty thousand kilometres, you said,’ Diana pressed. ‘Does that give us time to evacuate? Into the Red Rum – can they outrun us, if we make a sprint for it?’

  ‘They’d catch us easily,’ said Iago. ‘And anyway, they’re almost here! This ship isn’t connected with the flash. At least I don’t think so – a different direction.’ He cursed. ‘We don’t have time even to try and get away.’

  ‘But then what is the flash? The two things must be connected.’

  ‘It would be an improbable coincidence otherwise,’ said Iago. ‘Although it’s hard to see what could connect them.’

  ‘Was it a . . . flare, perhaps?’

  ‘Police sloops are not in the habit of alerting their prey by firing flares,’ said Iago.

  ‘Well then – some other ship, some friendly individual is trying to warn us – to help us. Is there another ship out there?’

  ‘No,’ said Iago, checking the House AI again. ‘Nothing else out there. Just the police sloop.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I feel very old,’ he said. ‘This is terrible news. We cannot fall into the hands of the Ulanovs. It would be a disaster for your family if you do, Diana. And if I do – well, it would be a disaster for all humanity.’

  ‘Not,’ said Diana,
drily, ‘to overstate it.’

  ‘No!’ said Iago, with sudden vehemence. ‘For years I have gone to extreme lengths to avoid falling into the hands of the Ulanovs. I have done some genuinely terrible things. And I have done so not to save my own skin – what does my own skin, matter, after all? I have done so because the entire future of the human race is at stake! It has not been a personal matter. It has been a species imperative. I have never found anything I could, in conscience, put before that imperative. Not,’ he added, looking around at his own bubble, ‘not until now.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Our options,’ Iago said, in a low voice, ‘are limited. We can’t fight them. We can’t run away.’

  ‘We’re caught!’ cried Sapho.

  Iago stretched himself in mid-air. ‘We need,’ he said. ‘We need more information.’

  But he did nothing more active than floating to a spigot, washing his hands, rubbing them in a cluster of pearl-bright beads of water and drying them. Dia and Sapho followed suit. Then Iago kicked off from the guy-rope and flew to the door to set up such defences as the house possessed. ‘It’s not much,’ he said. ‘I have two rail-guns, but they aren’t going to trouble something as large as a police sloop.’

  Then, as Sapho and Diana floated beside him, he dialled a line through to the ship.

  A face appeared: long-featured and lugubrious-looking. ‘Jack Glass as I live and breathe,’ said the face, in an unsurprised voice.

  ‘Bar-le-duc,’ replied Iago. ‘It is you!’ He sounded so energised by the sight of him that Diana, momentarily, thought this newcomer might not be a threat after all. This impression did not last long, however.

  ‘I was going to say it’s been a long time, Jack,’ Bar-le-duc replied, slowly. ‘But time is a slippery concept, where you’re concerned – isn’t it?’