Jack Glass

by Adam Roberts

‘But it didn’t,’ said Sapho, in tones of dawning realisation.

  ‘Perhaps it just so happened to run out of momentum,’ said Mahyadi Panggabean. ‘As it struck . . . or . . . I feel . . . unwell. I can see two of everything.’

  ‘Come come! Look at what it did to Bar-le-duc,’ said Diana. ‘It didn’t just shoot him, it vaporised him. It was hardly running out of momentum when it hit. And look at the damage to this side of the bubble – and to your ship. See how the fabric is bent outward? These are exit wounds.’ She stopped. ‘Do I mean wounds? I suppose the word is wounds.’

  ‘The conclusion,’ said Iago, is clear enough. ‘This was not a shot fired from outside the sphere to its inside. On the contrary, it was fired from the inside of the sphere to the outside. Which means—’

  ‘Which means whoever fired it is still inside the house. They cannot have got away, and so they are still inside.’

  The presence of five human beings made the main cabin of the Red Rum feel very cramped; but all five looked back through the hatchway with trepidation.

  5

  The Search

  ‘Respectfully, sir, I may say,’ said Sukarno, ‘that we must leave now. We should leave without delay. Close the hatch and cast off this craft, before whosoever is inside your house shoots his weapon again,’ said Sukarno. He had his gun out again, and was pointing it towards the open airlock.

  ‘Out of the question,’ said Iago.

  ‘Please, sir, with respect once again – why not?’

  ‘For one thing, I’m not leaving without that RACdroid. For another, the ship isn’t provisioned. It’s three days at full accel to the nearest friendly house; a week to a proper cluster large enough to resupply us. Look around you, Sukarno. Five of us, four g-couches. If I took your suggestion seriously, I’d have to limit myself to acceleration of little more than a couple of g – it would be weeks before we got anywhere. No.’

  But Sukarno did not give up. ‘There might be discomfort,’ he said. ‘But the individual who killed our master is still inside your house. If we leave now, we trap him, or her, inside. We can notify the authorities to return and arrest the malefactor.’

  ‘There was no ship docked at the door when we arrived, yet the malefactor – as you put it – was already inside. How do you think she managed that?’

  ‘Somebody must have delivered her,’ said Sapho.

  ‘It’s the only logical explanation,’ agreed Diana. ‘Assuming they didn’t just teleport inside. But if somebody dropped them off, then that same somebody could come collect her again. So your idea of trapping them inside doesn’t work.’

  The speech made Diana cough. The odour of blood and sweat and something else, something scorched and foul, was strong in her nostrils.

  ‘How did they drop this individual off?’ said Iago, pulling himself over to the hatch and putting his head through. ‘The locks on my door are manifold, carefully encrypted and they were all unbroken. If somebody dropped off a murderer, they did so without triggering any of my security measures.’

  ‘Somebody clever enough to fool your locks?’ said Diana.

  ‘The locks respond only to me,’ insisted Iago. ‘And I haven’t been here in years.’

  ‘Perhaps they didn’t come through the door?’ Sukarno suggested.

  ‘Then how? Perhaps: when we find this person, whoever she is – well, then we can ask them.’

  ‘You mean search the house?’ said a fearful-sounding Mahyadi Panggabean. His words were slurred.

  ‘Sir,’ said Sukarno. ‘Respectfully, it would be a risk that amounted almost to suicide for us to go back into that enclosed space! To chase a murderous individual armed with what is, evidently, a very powerful gun? You cannot expect it of us!’

  ‘This individual, whoever she is, could easily have killed us already,’ Iago said, peering through the hatch into the interior of his own house. ‘She, or he, did not. Why would she kill us now, if she didn’t before?’

  ‘Again, with respect – sir,’ said Sukarta. ‘We weren’t hunting them before. A person hunted reacts differently.’

  ‘Irregardless,’ said Iago.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Diana, pulling herself across the cabin to float beside Iago. ‘Whoever they are, they could have killed all of us. They didn’t. I don’t believe she acted randomly. I believe she waited until you were about to be taken into custody, Iago. I believe she shot your jailer. I think she has your best interests at heart.’

  ‘Or the best interests of humanity,’ Iago said.

  ‘It’s a bad habit you’ve gotten into,’ said Diana. ‘Assuming that your personal safety and the fate of the whole Solar System are one and the same.’

  ‘I shall meditate upon the difference,’ said Iago. ‘When I’ve a moment.’ Diana looked at him. He looked grim – the blood and dirt wiped smearily away from his face, but still horribly present on the rest of his clothing. And then he smiled. ‘You’re the intuitive problem solver. Who do you think is out there?’

  Diana wasn’t sure where the words came from; but with a sudden tingle of insight she said: ‘Ms Joad. She didn’t want Bar-le-duc taking you – because she wants to arrest you herself. To redeem herself in the eyes of her former masters.’

  ‘How could it possibly be her?’ he asked, absently, peering through the hatch.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then that’s just groundless speculation. You can do better than that. Let’s find the malefactor, and then we can get some answers. Come on.’ He put his foot against the lip of the hatch and kicked off, sailing in a straight line right through the centre of his house. The others hurried to the doorway and looked through. Iago had grabbed onto a guy-rope, and was now hanging, surveying the low scrub directly across from the doorway.

  ‘Well,’ said Diana. ‘Come along, everybody.’

  Mahyadi Panggabean, all agreed, was too poorly to take part. He was positioned near the door and told to keep his eyes open. The RACdroid was moved over there too: quietly and efficiently recording everything; keeping visual lock on the four of them. Iago set it to sound the alarm if a sixth figure moved anywhere inside the house.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Iago.

  It is a feature of a sphere that any place on the interior wall is as good as any other for obtaining a panoptic view of every other point on the wall. The four searchers started from the door and moved methodically at four ninety-degree orthogonal paths. ‘Shouldn’t we be armed?’ Sapho asked, rather nervously, looking across at Sukarno. ‘No,’ Iago replied, in a loud voice, making sure he was audible through the entire sphere. ‘We’re not looking to hurt anybody. We only want to know with whom we are sharing our space – and maybe to talk.’

  There was no reply.

  In fact, it was obvious from the start that the only place the shooter could have been situated – when she fired her shot, that is to say – was a patch of two-metre-high bushy scrub, a couple of hundred square metres in extent, more or less diametrically opposite the doorway. She could have moved since then, of course; and the four of them made their way, hand over hand, along their different trajectories carefully examining all possible hiding places. The fruit tree offered the best cover: Diana climbed into its thickest portion and through every angle and curl of branches. Nobody there. By the time she came out the other side, the others were on the edge of the scrub. She made her way across the backs of the empty vegetable trays until she had joined them.

  ‘She must be in there,’ said Iago, gesturing towards the scrub.

  ‘If she’s anywhere.’

  ‘Unless she has magically teleported out of this space,’ said Diana. Sapho looked at her. ‘There’s no such thing as teleportation,’ she added, feeling foolish for having spoken.

  ‘Come out,’ Sukarno cried into the vegetation. ‘I have a gun!’

  ‘Mr Sukarno,’ said Iago, without looking at him. ‘You are, if you don’t mind me saying, too fond of shouting “I have a gun.” ’

  ‘If they are in there,�
�� said Sapho. ‘This person, this killer, and we encounter them – what should we do?’

  Nobody said anything to this. Then Diana called: ‘whoever you are – we don’t want to hurt you. You’ve done us a favour, saved Iago here from being arrested. We just want to talk!’

  Still no reply. Gobs of blood and debris and loose foliage still swirled lazily through the air.

  Everybody looked at the thicket. ‘I can see some of the way in,’ noted Diana. ‘But not all the way through.’

  ‘We need to go inside to be sure,’ said Iago. ‘Please put your weapon away, Mr Sukarno. You’re likely to shoot one of us with it.’

  Sukarno, fumbling, fitted his gun away into his holster.

  ‘Well,’ said Iago, taking a breath. ‘Let’s look.’ They all moved into the thicket.

  Given how limited it appeared in extent from the outside it surprised Diana how capacious the thicket’s interior was. She scrambled into a maze-like network of holey spaces. The branches and strands of the vegetation were smooth, though stiff; covered with a waxy layer to preserve moisture. The leaves were mostly stiff nubbins, and there were many areas too dense to move through. But nevertheless there were numerous cavities and ways of passage. Dia pulled herself easily through. The vibration of the others’ movements communicated itself to her through the stems as she grasped them. The space was dark and green.

  Movement: a leg, thrusting through and towards her. She lashed out, a clean punch that connected with a solid thwack, pushing her, action-reaction, back against the wall of vegetation. ‘Hey! It’s me,’ Iago called. ‘It’s me – what’s the matter.’

  Diana was breathing hard. ‘I knew it was you,’ she gasped. ‘Your damn tin leg.’

  ‘A bit more expensive than tin,’ he said, pulling himself through the L-shaped cavity.

  Sapho put her head, upside down from Diana’s perspective, into the space. ‘Miss?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Diana said. ‘Iago startled me.’

  They were silent. Then Iago said: ‘there’s nobody here. This thicket is empty.’

  ‘I found a – tube,’ said Sapho, uncertainly. ‘I don’t mean an actual tube. Not a thing. A lack of things.’

  ‘You’re not making sense!’ snapped Iago. ‘What?’

  ‘I mean a pathway,’ said Sapho. ‘Cut through the mass of vegetation. But if you look, you can see. Look through it and it is angled towards the door.’

  ‘Show me,’ said Iago. He wriggled after her. Forcing her breathing into a slower rhythm, Diana came too. She passed about a kind of U-bend and put her head into a bulk-shaped space, large enough to contain both Sapho and Iago. A moment later, Sukarno popped up.

  As Sapho had said, there was a sort of chimney out through the dense vegetation. ‘It could be the trajectory of a projectile,’ Iago was saying, his face to the wall of green. ‘Or it could just be a natural pathway.’

  ‘Its edges seemed – scorched? No?’

  ‘Hard to tell,’ said Iago, laying his fingers along the edges of the hollowed-out space. ‘It’s not hot. Rather the reverse.’

  ‘If this is where the killer sat,’ said Sukarno, ‘then the killer is here no longer.’

  ‘In which case Mahyadi Panggabean would have seen them,’ noted Iago. ‘I can see him, actually, through this tube: by the door. Mahyadi Panggabean!’ he called. ‘Have you seen anybody coming out of the thicket?’

  There was no reply. Wrigglingly extricating themselves from the thicket, and kicking themselves across to him they found that he had fallen asleep. ‘His wound,’ Sukarno said, apologetically. ‘It has made him weary.’

  ‘Is he asleep? Is he unconscious?’ Iago asked. By dint of shaking and slapping they roused him, and he glowered at them. ‘I am tired,’ he said.

  They let him go back to sleep.

  ‘The RACdroid,’ said Sapho. ‘It does not sleep.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at what it saw,’ agreed Iago.

  Getting the machine to replay its visual data was a simple matter. Accessing functionality in anything but view-only format would have been much trickier, of course. And any infraction of the device’s complex nesting of seals would have marked all its data as corrupt. But as it was, they didn’t need to do anything more difficult than press play. The device recognised Sukarno’s DNA as an authorised user, and complied.

  The image that resulted was high-quality, both in terms of its resolution and its temporal slicing. A top-range Droid, evidently; expensive. Sukarno played back the recent files. The bright-printed pattern of light and shade moved with smooth rapidity over the scene, in the wrong direction. They saw themselves disappear backwards into the thicket; and after a period of weird jerky rustling, saw themselves appearing again.

  ‘We didn’t flush anybody out,’ Diana observed. ‘There was nobody in there to flush out.’ Then, with a dawning realisation: ‘there was never anybody in there.’

  ‘Then – who fired the shot?’ asked Sapho. ‘The invisible woman?’

  ‘Whoever did fire the shot has somehow escaped from this house,’ was Sukarno’s opinion. ‘Though I don’t know how. There are no other ships nearby – and we would have seen them.’

  ‘Are the walls intact?’ Diana asked, thinking through the possibilities.

  ‘According to the House AI,’ said Iago, ‘with the exception of the breach by the airlock, the entire house skin is sound and unbreached.’

  ‘This, it seems, is a locked-room mystery and a half,’ Diana said, looking at Iago with a wry expression. ‘Somebody got into the bubble without coming through the only door but also without breaking the walls and without being seen. They hid in the bushes over there, shot Mr Bar-le-duc, and then departed the bubble: again without using the door or breaching the walls. And, once again, without being seen.’

  ‘It is impossible,’ said Sapho.

  ‘The logical inference is that they have not departed,’ was Iago’s opinion.

  ‘Then – where are they?’

  ‘Where didn’t we look?’ Iago asked.

  They went round the house again, opening every container no matter how small or impossible it was in terms of fitting a human being inside. It occurred to Dia that they had not looked inside the still-empty vegetable trays. It was just-about conceivable a person – a very thin person – might have squeezed themselves into one of these narrow pallets; but Sukarno, Iago and she opened every one, and the only thing inside was blackponic pseudosoil.

  Two hours later it was clear that the only people inside the bubble were the five of them.

  ‘Run the RACdroid back further,’ Diana said. ‘It must have recorded the murder itself. It may well have recorded an image of the murderer.’

  Sukarno did so. Images zipped rapidly backwards through a strange scene: human beings – they themselves – disappearing through the front door. The house empty and quiet in their absence. Then they all re-emerged, backwards, and began nipping up-down, back-forth, left-right, apparently taking nets and sponges of bloody rubbish and scattering it at every coordinate in the globe. Then they came together, and separated, floating randomly about the place. Iago leapt away from Mahyadi Panggabean and grasped Diana. Then he leapt to the door, and abruptly the whole scene was furious Brownian-motion and chaos. ‘Slow it down,’ suggested Iago. ‘That’s the blow-out – right there.’

  ‘Sir?’ said Sukarno.

  ‘Run it back to just before the murder, and then play it forward?’

  The image spooled back, and froze. There they all were, motionless: Bar-le-duc in the middle, looking lugubrious and complacent. There was the hint of a smile at the two edges of his long mouth; like serif on a font. His right hand was a little forward, his left hung by his side. He was looking directly at Iago. Behind him, over by the wall, Sapho was clearly visible: arms folded, floating. Diana was close beside Iago. And Iago had his head slightly to one side, a sceptical expression on his face – listening to Bar-le-duc. He had his arms loosely by his side, fingers unclenched, ten centimetres
at least away from his body. And, finally, Bar-le-duc’s four minders were visible, at various places around the sphere. Mahyadi Panggabean was on the side of Sapho; Sukarno on the other side of the globe. And the two other men, whose name Dia had never known, and who she would now never meet, stood nearer the door.

  Sukarno played the scene on. This was the moment of death. Bar-le-duc vanished in a spreading cloud of dark red. It happened instantaneously – no breaking apart, an immediate transition from a solid to a gaseous state. It was bewildering. And everything inside the house was chaos; bodies thrashing and hurtling, leaves and droplets of blood swooshing in every direction.

  ‘Stop,’ said Iago. ‘Run it back. Go through it more slowly.’

  Sukarno did so. He took the image back to the initial conditions; and then ran it forward. Again, Bar-le-duc vanished without intermediary condition into a blast of red mist. ‘He was hit,’ Iago said, ‘with a great deal of force. Or perhaps with a very focused beam of heat. Can we make it slower yet?’

  ‘I’ll slow it as much as the device allows,’ said Sukarno.

  There was something hypnotic in watching events over and over again. The transition from a living, coherent organic being to a disorganised mess. Mortality focused into an interstitial blip.

  The third time through, events took so long to unfold that Diana began to grow bored. Certain things were evident, however. Somebody had fired the shot that caused Bar-le-duc’s violent death, it was none of the seven other people who were clearly visible on the recording – Bar’s four bodyguards, Iago, Diana and Sapho were all in plain view, and doing nothing, as the thing happened. One of the bodyguards did have his weapon out, but it was angled away from Bar-le-duc, and it was clear to see that it had not been discharged.

  They watched, and it happened again. The wall cracked open and simultaneously Bar-le-duc’s torso began to dissolve into red. The image froze.

  ‘High-velocity projectile’, noted Iago. The Iago in the recording was still looking sardonically at the face of Bar-le-duc, entirely unaware that anything was amiss. That is how instantaneously it had happened. Even Bar-le-duc himself – weirdly, horribly – seemed blithely unaware of what was happening to his own midriff. His face was calm, even as his belly was mashed and evaporated, as if his end had overtaken him more quickly than his nerve impulses.