by Adam Roberts
The recording moved on, and the red cloud ate up the whole of Bar-le-duc. A moment later and the facial expressions of Iago and Diana changed, both together, to startled disgust. Diana watched Iago’s: there was no faking that flinch; he was as surprised by this horrible event as she had been herself.
‘Check the thicket,’ Iago suggested. ‘We ought at least to be able to see a muzzleflash.’
‘I can’t see anything in the bushes,’ said Sapho. ‘Movement, or muzzleflash, or anything like that.’
‘Me neither,’ confirmed Sukarno.
Diana’s scalp was tingling. Something was amiss. ‘Go back,’ she told Sukarno.
He pulled the image back in time, slowly, slowly; and the cloud of red shrank down to reveal Bar-le-duc’s head and feet; and then his arms and hips. ‘Try to stop it at the exact moment the projectile hits him,’ she said.
Moving the image a little further back, the cloud of red shrank further, tightening, and focusing on one point just below his diaphragm. This red shrank away, and at the very moment Sukarno halted the image.
‘There,’ said Diana.
‘But,’ said Sukarno, looking. ‘How can that be?’
They were looking at a recorded image of Bar-le-duc the tiniest possible fraction of a second before he had been shot. Nobody was visible in the bushes on the far side of the globe. The other seven human beings present were all hanging in space, doing nothing. Bar-le-duc had not yet been shot. He was on the very verge of being shot, like Zeno’s hare at the limit point of overtaking the tortoise. Yet, clearly visible – a faint red line linking his solar plexus to the wall beside the door. And that wall already breached.
‘That’s why we found nobody in the thicket,’ said Diana. ‘Bar-le-duc was shot from outside after all. There’s the trajectory of the projectile.’
‘It looks like a focused energy beam,’ said Sukarno.
Iago looked at the image. ‘But how?’ he asked.
‘Somebody followed you – a ship. Who knows the location of this house?’ Dia asked.
‘I do,’ Iago insisted. ‘I’m the only one.’
‘Then you followed yourself,’ said Sapho.
Diana shook her head. ‘Bar-le-duc found you. If he did, somebody else could. A ship, standing sentinel, outside. It saw you were in danger, and acted to remove that threat – by killing Bar-le-duc.’
But Iago was shaking his head. ‘But that doesn’t explain how did the damage outside end up bent the wrong way? The rips in the plasmetal of that spaceship bend out, not in. And – why didn’t the bullet punch straight through the far side of my house? What happened to it?’
‘How to explain the disappearing bullet,’ said Diana. ‘That is a challenge, yes.’
6
The Disappearing Bullet
Iago had decided they all should eat. ‘A problem is rarely solved on an empty stomach,’ he announced, opening a storebox and heating some vegetables. ‘There’s some wine somewhere,’ he said, to Sapho. ‘And you can use the showerbag fully clothed or naked – if the former, it will clean your clothes too, although it won’t get you quite so clean. There’s only one bag, though, and using it on all of us will overload it, I suppose. This is supposed to be a one-person house.’
‘So none of us gets perfectly clean,’ said Sapho. ‘So what?’
Sapho folded the bag around Mahyadi Panggabean up to his neck. This left the bandages undisturbed whilst it cleaned his body. Then the four others took turns in the bag. Iago went last, when the device was dirtiest and partially clogged, so he wasn’t washed very efficiently. But everybody looked better afterwards than they had done before.
Mahyadi Panggabean drank an entire globe of juice. Everybody else sipped wine and ate packets of heated noodles.
It was Sapho who broke the silence: ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means our searching through the shrubbery was a wild comet chase,’ said Diana. She sighed. ‘The shooter was never inside this house to begin with. The image shows the trajectory of the bullet between the wall and Bar-le-duc’s body before it hits him – that blurred dark-orange line. The shot came from outside.’
‘To repeat myself: if that’s true,’ noted Iago, ‘then how are the ripped edges of the wall bent outwards? Why was Bar-le-duc’s ship forced away from the house by the projectile that destroyed it? And most of all – what happened to the bullet? You saw the force with which it vaporised poor old Bar.’
‘Maybe it was a miracle,’ said Sapho, in a small voice. ‘Ra’allah sometimes intervenes to punish the wicked.’
‘Let us put miracles to one side,’ suggested Iago. ‘By way of explanation. A projectile capable of ripping an entire sloop into rags of spaceship metal; and turning a human body into red steam – such a projectile fired from outside the bubble into its interior could not vanish into thin air. It must have continued through, punched a second hole in the opposite side of the globe and gone on its way. This did not happen.’
‘I can’t explain it,’ conceded Diana, looking unhappy. ‘But look at it this way: we have to choose between a disappearing bullet – or an entire disappearing human being.’
‘Entire human being?’
‘The person we were searching the thicket for!’ said Diana. ‘Theory A is a disappearing bullet. Theory B is Person Unknown killed Bar and then themself vanished into thin air. Ockham’s razor suggests the former is less of an affront to logic than the latter.’
‘Ockham’s razor,’ scoffed Iago. ‘The most ridiculous use of metaphorical steel in the history of thought.’
Diana shook her head. ‘Oh we mustn’t let go of logic. Logic is all we have. The RACdroid shows that none of us killed Bar-le-duc. We’re all hanging right there, doing nothing, as he gets blown apart before our eyes. There is nobody else inside the sphere. We’ve searched it thoroughly. The only logical conclusion is that the murderer was never inside this globe.’
Iago looked steadily at her. ‘There’s another possible explanation you’re not considering,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘What if the recording is in error?’ he said. ‘I believed Bar-le-duc when he said this RACdroid was kosher. What if it isn’t? What if it is some kind of rogue? Perhaps its data has been falsified entirely, or more likely some algorithm inside the droid has distorted its data somehow. In that case . . . well, in that case, the contract I agreed with Bar-le-duc, just before his death, would have no legal force.’
Diana sniffed dismissively. ‘I’d forgotten about the silly contract,’ she said.
‘You should not forget about it, Miss Diana,’ said Iago, sternly. ‘It is the legal guarantee of your continuing freedom. You should not be so quick to rubbish it.’
There was a silence.
‘Surely it should be easy to tell,’ Sapho put it, wiping her mouth on a rectangle of smartcloth, ‘whether the RACdroid is a rogue or not?’
‘It looks kosher,’ said Iago. ‘But I’m no expert. On the other hand, I know somebody who is.’ He stretched his spine, lengthening his legs and arms. Then he rubbed his face. ‘We have to leave this place anyway,’ he went on. ‘It is no longer secure. We have to go – Diana, and Sapho.’
‘I won’t be sorry to leave this place,’ said Diana. ‘I would sleep easier without the reek of blood in my nostrils.’
Iago grunted agreement.
‘Sir?’ said Sukarno, looking mournful. ‘I concede that it is the large amount of CRF in my system that prompts me to this – but I beg of you to consider taking Mahyadi Panggabean and myself with you as well.’
‘No,’ said Iago. ‘We cannot. You must stay here, until you are retrieved. I will inform the authorities of your location. But if things are they way I suspect them to be – well, the authorities will soon be here anyway.’
‘I understand sir,’ said Sukarno, his eyes shiny. Away to the left, Mahyadi Panggabean began to sob quietly.
Sapho and Iago loaded the Rum with various supplies. Diana did not help. She parted some of the
vegetation and looked out through the transparency. All that black; the luxurious mess of stars. Then the bubble turned and the sun appeared and the stars withdrew their horns into their black shells.
Watching the sun move sideways across the sky, she tried to let her mind tune in to the hidden rhythms of the problem. The sunlight was bright yellow-white, except for the central belt where there was the vague hint of a very pale green. The blackness all about. The nourishing void, the devouring void.
Concentrate, she told herself. But the problem seemed trapped between two impossibilities – the disappearing murderer on the one hand, the disappearing bullet on the other. A true solution would have to dissolve one or other impossibility, but it wasn’t obvious which was the more tractable. She let her mind drift. The suddenness of Bar-le-duc’s demise. The misty, fine red line. How might one make something disappear?
Explode it. Atomise it.
They hadn’t searched for Bar because they’d been convinced he’d been turned into droplets.
She felt the tingle in her gut. This was – something. The little hairs on the back of her neck shivered.
What if the two problems – the disappearing person, the disappearing weapon – cancelled one another out? It was not clear to her how this might be; but she had that sense that the solution to the mystery lay along this line . . . somehow.
Then she thought: two things exploded: Bar-le-duc and the skin of the globe. What if the latter were not a side effect of the man’s death – but its cause? She tried to imagine a weapon embedded in the fabric of the house; firing with asymmetric force, just enough inward trajectory to blow Bar-le-duc to pieces; and with much greater outward force, enough to tear his ship in half. Was that possible?
Was it plausible?
It felt wrong, somehow, as a solution; incomplete, or orthogonal to a more elegant answer. But not wholly wrong, she thought. Something about it was right. One thing Diana had always been good at was intuiting the general rightness or otherwise of a solution, even before she had the supporting details in place.
This line of thought carried one rather significant correlative, of course. Who would have placed such a weapon in the wall of the house?
Who else but its owner?
Iago floated over to hang beside her. ‘I’ll be sorry to lose this house,’ he said. ‘Since I suppose I can never return here.
‘That’s a pity,’ she said, tight-lipped.
‘We shall have to,’ he said, an uncharacteristic note of hesitation in his voice, ‘travel from place to place for a while. Diana, I apologise if that makes you angry with me.’
She glanced at him, and then looked outside again. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said, angrily. ‘Why should that make me angry? I’m not angry.’
‘You heard what Mahyadi Panggabean said earlier?’
At this she felt only tiredness and boredom, and turned her face away. ‘Bar-le-duc was being authorised by my own Clan. Yes I heard. It’s not that surprising, though, is it? Power abhors the vacuum. The Ulanovs would hardly dismantle the entire structure of the Clan. They’ve put some puppet in the pilot’s seat – or else, some enterprising Clan member has seized power, and made a deal with the Ulanovs. As long as my parents are OK, and my sister, I can’t care too much.’
‘Diana,’ he started to say.
‘I’d prefer to be alone now, Iago,’ she snapped.
He didn’t force the issue: let her be, and went back to packing the Rum.
The last thing to be loaded was the RACdroid, and then – with a brisk farewell to the Mahyadi Panggabean and Sukarno, he, Sapho and a sulky Diana went on board and shut the main door behind them.
Departure was delayed, however, by the difficulty they had in jettisoning Bar-le-duc’s ruined craft. This had docked straightforwardly at the Rum’s rear hatch, but whatever had wrecked the craft had deformed the link, bent the whole assemblage of door and door five degrees or so away from true. It took a half-hour, and a power wrench, to force the resilient spaceship metal back towards its original configuration. It proved impossible to line it up as it had been before, but at least they got it back to an arrangement in which the mechanism could at least be disengaged. Iago layered sheets of sealant over the whole portal, and finally they pulled away from Dunronin and accelerated at one third g into blankness.
7
To Garland 400
It was a three-day journey straight to Garland 400, the cluster of Antinomian bubbles in which lived (Iago promised) a RACdroid expert who could determine, once and for all, whether their machine was rogue or not. Iago decided to start the voyage by flying a decoy trajectory for six hours, at full burn; so the early stage of the flight was a very uncomfortable period inside the g-couches. Then there was an hour of weightless flight, which gave them time for a little food. And then, to make up the time, another four-hour full-burn stint in the g-couches. Diana was miserable, halfway between awake and asleep, in unyielding discomfort. Her thoughts were trapped in a loop: Bar-le-duc was dead, Bar-le-duc wasn’t dead, Bar-le-duc was dead, Bar-le-duc couldn’t be dead. Feathers or lead? she thought. Feathers or lead? Feathers or lead? Had Bar been exploded by the weapon, or had he exploded the weapon? It had to be one or the other. Did it have to be one or the other? Even the question as to whether it had to be one or the other had to be one or the other! Feathers or lead? Feathers or lead?
By the time they were set in their actual trajectory, and the g-force melted away, Diana was cranky and exhausted. She took a light supper; watched a book by herself, trying to ignore Iago and Sapho’s conversation. Sapho wanted to learn how to fly a ship of this type; Iago was talking her through the interface, discussing its cranks and hiccoughs, discussing the fuel-to-ice ratio and so on.
Finally Diana hooked herself to the side and went to sleep. Iago dimmed the interior lights, and went to sleep himself. Sapho too.
But Diana slept only fitfully, waking at odd moments, hanging there doing nothing more than watching the motionless cabin: the bone-pale dashboard glow; hearing the hum. She slept again, woke uneasily, and slept again.
Now she dreamt. It was a complicated series of interlocking set-piece dream-stories, gothically ornate and grisly – but she remembered almost none of the details, only that it was so complicated. This in itself was a disturbing thing. She always remembered her dreams. Remembering her dreams was a necessary part of her problem-solving. But on this occasion the only bit of the dream she could recall afterwards was the very last portion. There were three of them: Diana and Ms Joad and a third person, behind her, whom she could not see or name. They were all standing on the shore of a red sea, bright red, tomato red, artificially red. It was blood, this sea, a great pool of blood under the influence of gravity. Little waves broke on the shore at her feet, with horrid, slurpy, chuckling sounds. The sand was hard and compacted. ‘With a little heat,’ Ms Joad was saying, ‘you know what this sand will turn into? With a little atomic blast? We’ll detonate, we’ll detonate.’ ‘But first we must have time to get away,’ said Diana, feeling anxious, worried that if they were being reckless, then disaster must follow. ‘Under the waves, my dear,’ said Ms Joad. ‘That’s where we’ll go! You must learn to breathe it. It was what you did in your maternal womb, wasn’t it? You breathed the life-fluid of your mother then – it is simply a question of going back to that time. You. Will. Remember.’ ‘No,’ Diana cried; but the red fluid rose up in front of her in a red wave, and then it was all about her; she was kicking her limbs in an epilepsy of panic, and the stuff went in at her mouth.
She woke sweating, gasping. Her heart was hammering. Sleep was out of the question; so she unfastened herself and floated through the cabin. She drank a little water; and then – because she thought it might help her skittering thoughts and fearful heart – she drank a little rice vodka. But that only made her feel sick. The view through the main windows had that eerie motionless quality spacetravel almost always presents to its travellers. However many thousand kilometres a second you are
actually travelling, it always looks as if you are perfectly motionless. Diana thought to herself: I breathed vaporised Bar-le-duc into my lungs. We all did. I absorbed him. Unconscious cannibalism. That’s what I was dreaming about.
She began to cry.
It felt as if she would never control her sobs; but eventually she stopped crying. Of course she did. She floated back over to her perch, hooked herself on again and lay still. The hours moved in their mysterious, unmeasurable way.
The next day passed in a daze. The next night she was so exhausted she slept eleven hours, and upon waking was conscious of no dreams at all.
8
The Wrath of Diana
To go from the enforced stillness and low-key daily interactions of the Rum’s cabin into the crazy, drunken revels of the first of Garland 400’s bubbles was something of a shock. They left Sapho on the ship, and made their way past the chanting, boozing, copulating crowds; through into the adjacent bubble and then again into the one after that. Here Iago introduced her to Aishwarya; and the old lady checked the RACdroid’s seals carefully and pronounced it whole and kosher, and not a rogue at all.
Which meant that its data was to be trusted.
The four of them each drank a globe of cold, dark coca; and Diana felt the stimulant buzzing inside her veins. ‘So the shot that killed Bar-le-duc must have come from outside the bubble after all,’ said Iago.
‘That flash,’ Sapho reminded him. ‘We saw the flash. That must have been part of it.’
‘Maybe,’ said Iago. ‘Although the flash happened a good while before the impact.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Aishwarya, ‘the flash was wholly unconnected with Monsieur Bar-le-duc’s death. A quantum fluctuation. A piece of ice hit by a micrometeorite. It could be any one of a dozen things. Experience has taught me that we much more often see connection where there is only random copresence. Pattern-seeking consciousness, you know. Great plains ape, you know.’