by Adam Roberts
Diana’s anger had sublimed, now, into a solid pressure of tears inside her chest. With an action of will she elected not to cry. Instead she opened her mouth, and said: ‘my whole life has been upended and eviscerated.’ She was on the edge of crying, but fought it down. ‘And for what? Tectonic realignment of the blocs of power? Clan Onbekend are on the rise, Clan Argent on the decline? The randomness of it is the most infuriating part.’
‘FTL was the catalyst – or, the rumour of FTL,’ said Iago. ‘The prospect of a weapon that could destroy the sun. The thought of being able to flee to the stars. How could it not shake up the status quo?’
‘But it’s not real!’ said Diana, her anger flaring back up and replacing the desire to cry with the urge to punch somebody. ‘It is not theoretically possible, and it’s certainly not actual! They’re chasing you because they think you have McAuley’s blueprints inside your mind . . . And you don’t! Do you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’
‘The Ulanovs have grown so used to policing the Lex Ulanova in terms of its infractions, that they think the laws of physics are similarly friable. It’s so – provoking!’
She caught sight of the way he was looking at her, and, from nowhere, she began to laugh. ‘I know!’ she said, putting a hand in front of her mouth. ‘That they believe it – that’s what matters. Not the truth of it. But to be chased and ruined and threatened over a rumour. It’s so absurd.’
She laughed, and he smiled; and in that moment she felt no anger at all. She and Iago hugged.
‘Of course, it’s a question of the stakes involved,’ said Iago. ‘Not that it is practicable; but if it is. If is a potent realpolitik pivot.’ He stretched his legs in mid-air, and yawned. ‘I’m going to go back to the Rum for a bit. I’m going to check up on Sapho, see if her prayers to Ra’allah are over. Make sure the revellers in that bubble aren’t causing her any annoyance. Will you come?’
Diana took stock. She did feel a little lighter inside, though she couldn’t exactly fathom why. But at least the anger and the weepiness had withdrawn inside her, as a snail’s horns are retracted. ‘I’ll come later,’ she said. ‘I’m going to stay here for a while.’
‘Very good, Miss,’ said Iago, in imitation of his old manner.
‘After all,’ she said. ‘Somebody killed Bar-le-duc. I can’t see how it was done, let along who did it. And that irks me.’
‘Ah, Miss Diana of the Clan Argent, bred to solve problems – if you can’t solve it, nobody can. Shall I leave the RACdroid with you?’
‘Yes. I want to look again at the recording.’
‘Bring it back to the Rum when you have finished, will you? I’d rather keep it locked away and secure. According to Aishwarya there’s every chance the revellers next door will try and steal it as soon as they get sober enough to think it might be valuable.’
He left her alone.
9
Solving the Mystery
A sharp-edged block of sunlight slid very slowly over the leaves and the mossy turf. Ducks, invisible in the foliage, played their kazoos. She breathed in the oxygen. Things might look bleak, but as long as she could still solve problems she would be alright. What else was the future, but a series of as yet unsolved problems?
On the other hand, not every mystery has a solution.
The pattern refused to coalesce in her mind. Something was getting in the way. Her recovered good mood started to sag again.
She went over the data in the RACdroid one more time. Insofar as she could tell there was nobody in the undergrowth. The shot that killed Bar-le-duc couldn’t have come from there. None of Bar’s henchmen fired it, any more than did Iago, Sapho or Diana herself. So much was clear. But no matter how she manipulated the data she could not tell whether the fatal shot had come from outside the bubble, or from the wall itself.
Aishwarya floated over to see what she was doing. ‘Going over the last moments of the life of Bar-le-duc, I see.’
‘I’m trying to work out what happened,’ Diana said. ‘Whoever killed him can’t have been inside the house. It must have been a shot from outside. It was a blow powerful enough to break apart an entire spaceship, to rip through the side of the side of the house and turn Bar-le-duc into red mist. So why didn’t it just shoot straight through the opposite wall?
Aishwarya shrugged. ‘You think that’s the interesting question?’
‘It’s,’ Diana replied, cautiously, ‘a question, certainly. Where did the projectile go?’
‘Maybe it caught a lucky rebound and shot back out the way it came,’ said Aishwarya. ‘Maybe it was some special kind of bolt keyed to dissolve when it struck flesh.’
‘Are there such bullets?’ Diana asked, wide-eyed.
‘Well I don’t know!’ said Aishwarya. ‘I’m no armourer! That kind of tech-chatter bores me to ice. Things aren’t as compelling as people.’
‘Alright,’ said Diana. ‘I’ll go along with you. The timing of the killing is interesting. Bar-le-duc was just about to take Iago – Jack, I mean – away. Now, either the timing of this killing is perfectly coincidental; or else the killer chose her moment precisely to stop that eventuality coming to pass.’
‘But who would want to keep Jack Glass out of prison?’ asked Aishwarya. ‘Prison is where he belongs.’
‘Who indeed?’ asked Diana. She felt that tingling in her scalp, and down the back of her neck, that suggested she was close to something important. ‘His friends? Fellow revolutionaries?’
‘Why keep it secret, though, if it’s them? Assume an antinomian sloop just happened to be passing, saw – Christ-the-Hindu knows how, but let’s assume it – saw that Jack was about to be apprehended by the Ulanovs’ most famous policeman. So they fired their magic bullet from their impossible gun, and killed the arresting officer. Wouldn’t they make themselves known, afterwards? “Hey, Jack, we saved your life . . .”?’
‘That scenario,’ said Diana, feeling the tingling sensation recede, ‘doesn’t feel right. Doesn’t feel plausible.’
Aishwarya shrugged again. ‘Doubtless not. It’s a hypothetical, though. Yes? Bar-le-duc and Jack were friends, you know. A long, long time ago. But Bar had been working for the Ulanovs a long time.’
Something lay, just out of reach of her conscious mind, on the fringes of her thought. She had almost had it. Almost! But it was gone, now. The impossible gun, she thought. The impossible bullet. She was missing something. Bar-le-duc was dead. She knew that because – because what?
How did she know that?
‘There is still some of his blood in Iago’s hair,’ she said aloud.
‘What’s that?’ asked Aishwarya.
‘I’ve been assuming that Bar-le-duc is dead. It certainly looks as though he is. But only a fool trusts assumptions. Tell me, Miss Aishwarya: could you analyse DNA from dried blood?’
‘I could, if I had the equipment,’ Aishwarya replied. ‘But the hooligans in these damn shanty-bubbles stole all my valuable kit a long time ago. You know who you should go visit? Northface. She’s a friend of mine. You go speak to her – two days’ flight at 1g, not far. Her bubble is called “Penny Lane”. Approach her carefully, though; she’s not fond of Jack. But she’ll run your DNA. Very reasonable rates.’
‘Thank you,’ said Diana.
Diana took hold of the RACdroid and manoeuvred it through the gate into the adjacent bubble, and from there into the main sphere, where the party was still ongoing. The revellers had got past the stage of speechifying by now. Many were floating blind-drunk, their arms and legs spread, their faces stupid in unconsciousness. A few other couples were having sex, though not so many as before. There were fewer clusters of people grasping one another like frogs in spawn. Diana navigated past all this with the droid, and into the docking hallway.
The hatch to the Rum was shut, which was presumably Sapho being understandably cautious. She smacked her palm on the curve of spaceship metal, and heard her knock echoing inside.
The mechanis
m snapped free. The door opened.
Sapho was there. She was crying: her face crumpled and red. That should have alerted Diana straight away, of course; but emotions had been running so high that day it didn’t really seem that out of place. ‘Sapho,’ she said. ‘Could you put this RAC-droid in storage please?’
Diana pushed the droid through, and followed after. Inside the Rum, Iago was reaching for something. Or else some oddity in the angle of her perception made his body look longer than it was. But this impression lasted barely a second, and she saw that it wasn’t Iago at all, as Sapho shut the hatch and bundled herself against her. ‘Oh mistress,’ the girl cried, clasping her.
The figure in the cabin was Ms Joad. ‘Hello, my dear,’ she said.
‘How are you here?’ asked Diana.
‘Naturally it counts as loyalty,’ said Ms Joad. ‘After all, I am now working for your sister. And Sapho, here, would sooner die than betray the Clan! But your Jack Glass is not a member of that family – is he?’
‘You’re working for Eva,’ said Diana, processing the new information. ‘What have you done with Iago?’
‘Jack? Anxious about him, are you? Well I haven’t killed him, at any rate. Not yet. No. I stung him with a little jabber I carry about me; muscular paralysis. It’s selective; I forget the specific vertebrae it targets, but he can still breathe – and talk. I’ve stowed him in one of the g-couches. For safe keeping.’
Diana turned, pulling herself round on a wall handle: and there indeed was Iago, laid out in the g-couch for all the world like a corpse in a coffin.
‘I shall tell you straight here and now that I don’t believe in wasting time,’ said Ms Joad. ‘It was a near-thing – young Sapho here, bless her loyalty, explained how close that horrible Bar-le-duc came to snatching Jack. He was working for Eva, you know. Your own MOHsister! Of course, I am too. I’m just retracing his steps. Making assurance doubly sure.’
‘I can’t believe Eva has employed you!’
‘You hurt my feelings, dear girl! True, after my performance on Korkura I was demoted. The truth of it is: I was going to be sent to the belt, some low-grade diplomatic work. No thank you! But I had been highly enough placed to see what was going on. I took the opportunity to leap before I was pushed. I approached your sister, and was taken into her employ. She’s a canny woman, Eva Argent. She knows, for instance, how precarious her position is at present. But – ah, if she can lay her hands on the recipe for FTL . . . that would strengthen her hand immeasurably.’
‘Iago doesn’t have the secret to FTL.’
‘Of course he does! He knew McAuley personally, after all. He must have told you so? No? Perhaps he didn’t trust you. People who are themselves untrustworthy often find it hard to trust others.’
Diana felt the tumbling, various data falling through her. ‘It would not have served your purposes for Bar-le-duc to capture Jack,’ she said, to Ms Joad. ‘Would it? You wanted to be the one to bring Iago back to my sister. To consolidate your position.’
‘You should thank me, my dear,’ said Ms Joad, favouring Diana with her superbly chilly smile. ‘Better your family gets the FTL than the Ulanovs, surely? Even if you won’t be running the Clan, after all. Still, I’m sure exile won’t be too incommoding for you. Some prisons are quite comfortable.’
Diana said: ‘you killed Bar-le-duc. Bar-le-duc was coming for us, and you were following him. That flash, outside the house: that was you! You had some . . . what? Targeted projectile, and blew him to pieces. And then you followed our sloop here. But you took a risk, didn’t you? What if your weapon had split the whole house? What if we hadn’t been able to control the decompression? We could all have died – and you wouldn’t have had Iago as a bargaining chip. But perhaps that was a risk worth taking?’
‘My dear,’ said Ms Joad, looking bored. ‘I honestly have no idea what you’re chattering about. Now, will you come freely? Or must I jab you too? Either way, you’re going into a g-couch, and we’re going to fly as fast as we can. I shall piggyback my ship on Jack’s one, until we use up all of his fuel. We have a long way to go – all the way to Mars! – and we need to move quickly. You look dismayed, my dear! But perhaps your sister will show you mercy. True, she’ll lock you up. At least for a few years, until her grip on power has been more firmly established. But it is probably in her interest not simply to kill you.’
‘Never underestimate the bond between MOHsisters,’ said Iago, in a creaky voice, behind her.
Diana was at the side of the g-couch in moments. Inside, with straps across his chest, and an ill-looking, bluish sheen to his skin, was Jack Glass. She could see that he was paralysed, trapped, caught like a bug in a spider’s web, cocooned and restrained past all hope of escape. Even if she got the straps off him, his muscles were clenched and nerveless, unmoveable. ‘I’m still alive,’ said Iago, moving his mouth with difficulty. There were straps across his neck and forehead too.
‘I can’t believe it ends like this,’ Diana cried.
Ms Joad chuckled, coldly. ‘Get in the g-couch, my dear,’ she said. ‘You too, Miss Sapho.’
‘Do as she says,’ rasped Iago.
‘Yes. Take his advice, my dear, and do as I say.’
‘She’ll jab you if you don’t,’ breathed Iago. ‘Believe me: it’s not pleasant. It . . . burns as well as paralyses. I need you in a g-couch. I need her to move the ship.’
‘You need?’ repeated Ms Joad, who had floated over to the g-couch, and was holding a pen-shaped object in her right hand. ‘By all means let us consult your needs! So long as they overlap precisely with my needs, I’m sure we can accommodate them.’
There was no helping it. Diana pulled herself over to a free couch. As she manoeuvred herself inside, her mind moved everything about, and tried to connect every datum with every other one. But it was impossible. It was impossible that Iago could escape from this situation. Paralysed with a neurotoxin that would keep his muscles frozen for days. Strapped in a g-couch. Flown to an unknown destination, where agents of her own family waited.
She laid herself flat in the couch. Ms Joad loomed over her at the lid. With a few swift, precise gestures she fixed the straps about Diana’s torso and tied her arms down. She tied her left leg, and then her right. She looped a strap about Diana’s neck, and another over her forehead.
‘Hush now,’ said Ms Joad. For an instant their eyes locked, and Diana experienced a weird fluxion in her own thought patterns. How old was this woman? How long had she been alive?
Diana was gifted a vertiginous sense of future retrospect. She saw a future Joad, gloating: he led us a merry dance, from world to world, through myriad bubbles – but we caught him. I caught him. I jabbed him and sealed him away and brought him back; and we were able to extract the formula for FTL from him, before he died. And now the Clan has a bomb with which to blackmail Ulanovs, and the whole of humanity! It could lead only to disaster.
‘There’s no glory in this, Ms Joad,’ she said.
‘Glory is a combustion,’ the older woman replied. ‘The rapid interaction of like and unlike, cancelling one another out in fire.’ She smiled a deathly smile, and then she disappeared from Diana’s constrained point of view. Presumably she went to strap Sapho into her couch. From where she lay, Diana could see only one window, which gave out a view of the green curve of the main Garland 400 bubble. Bright sunlight fell upon it.
There was nothing to do.
Soon, Diana felt the jar and the pull as the ship disengaged. The green arc slid out of the frame of the window. With a distant sense of motion in her ears and stomach, she watched as a portion of another ship filled the frame, and then passed out of view again. That was Ms Joad’s own craft, presumably. The hissing of attitudinal jets. The clunk, resonantly audible, as the nose of the Rum connected with the nose of Ms Joad’s one-person sloop.
‘Ms Joad?’ wheezed Iago, from his couch.
‘You will try my patience,’ came her voice, from outside Diana’s field of view, �
�if you insist on interrupting me.’ The grumble of the main thrust firing up; the orientation of the shadows on that portion of the cabin wall that Diana could see. The nowness of now. The vivid intensity of being alive. ‘You’d better have something important to say to me, young man.’
‘I do,’ Iago rasped.
‘What?’
‘I wanted to say,’ said Iago. He sighed, and went on: ‘that I’m ready for you now.’
The next part was a jumble. The lids of the g-couch slammed instantly shut, with a jarring clunk. Diana was aware of being shaken very violently – and this despite the fact that she was cocooned inside a g-couch, strapped down and restrained. Yet she felt as if her limbs were going to be shaken apart from her torso, and as if her eyeballs were being scrambled inside her head, the shaking was so intense. It lasted for a long time. Eventually the shaking died down, and finally it stopped. All she could do was lie there. The lights inside the couch had gone out, and her own breathing sounded loud in her ears, and every now and again some piece of debris banged hard against the side of her couch, sending a cacophonous noise through the little space. Otherwise there was nothing.
It was perfectly dark and very quiet for a long time. The sound of her own breathing, and (as she strained her ears) of her own heartbeat. These two slowly settled into a calmer rhythm. It did occur to her, although without any particular sensation of alarm, that she might be dead. Possibly her body had died and her consciousness was continuing inside this box because – the notion was fanciful, but somehow it appealed to her – her soul couldn’t get out. Eventually the box would be opened, she thought, and then maybe that would be an end to it. Her spirit would fly off to some other realm. Eva had conspired against her, and against their parents. The world had been turned upside down. But it was foolish to say so, because there was no up and down in space.
In that space her mind kept working. She was bred to solve problems, after all.
The awkward thing was the way the problems kept resolving themselves into opposite pairs of impossibility. The death of Bar-le-duc had been caused by an impossible assailant, or else by an impossible gun. FTL was an impossibility by the laws of physics; yet the Champagne Supernovae that Eva herself had been studying were candles lit in the impossible distance to the fact that this technology was not only possibly, but had been – madly, dangerously – invented by a dozen separate alien civilisations.