Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (11 page)

So they dug, wearily and inefficiently. They fell into narcoleptic sleeps whilst still operating the machinery.

Day followed day.

Davide, fretfully, blamed E-d-C for this infelicitous turn of events. ‘Why did you think the
seal
would be a good material to put the schute through, man?’ he said. ‘You
can see the schute’s designed for rock.’

‘Shut up,’ gasped E-d-C.

‘
You
shut up! Your stupidity is choking us all!’

E-d-C growled, plucked a rock from the air, drew his arm back. Davide flinched, visibly, but didn’t back down. ‘Go on then,’ he snarled.

E-d-C’s eyebrows went up. You could see the muscles in his neck tense as he readied himself.

‘Hey!’ yelled Lwon.

Both men snapped their gazes round.

‘Let it go, Ennemi,’ said Lwon, speaking clearly.

Everybody looked from Lwon to E-d-C. ‘I
asked
,’ he said. ‘I asked everybody. I said, shall I try it? Everybody said, yes. You all said so.’

‘None of us said
not
to,’ said Davide. ‘That’s not the same thing.’

E-d-C’s eyes widened; he glared at Davide, as at a betrayer. ‘This
little
man doesn’t get to rebuke
me
.’ He held the rock up, and drew his arm back.

‘Let it go,’ said Lwon, enunciating each word with precision.

E-d-C turned his eyes on Lwon. His face had fallen. Nobody in the space could mistake the look of hurt in his eyes.

Lwon returned his gaze, levelly.

Jac watched with interest.

‘Let it go,’ Lwon said again.

E-d-C unwrapped his fingers from around the rock, and left it hanging in mid-air. ‘The celebrated arresting officer Bar-le-duc never came within one AU of
you
,’ he said. Then
he pushed himself, wearily, away and went back into the tunnel. Shortly the sound of a digger started up.

Jac went back to polishing his glass. The piece was pretty much there. Rough at the rim, but that didn’t matter. He looked up. Marit was having an animated conversation with Davide. Jac
was struck by the scene: Davide happened to be floating in the same orientation as Jac. Marit’s body, however, was one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees turned about, his mouth near Davide’s
ear. The oddity of the orientation, and the almost but not quite audible murmuring, gave the scene a diabolic quality. Perhaps the paucity of oxygen in the air that added the shimmery, hellfreeze
atmosphere to it.

Time moved on. The black walls darkened in hue. They became essence of black, a perfectly scorched black. They burned, they gleamed, they shined with black. The colour was the truth about the
universe. This cosmos that had gleamed for some hundreds of thousands of years with Big Bang light, and now existed in the scorched carbon of the afterburn.

The lid on his box rattled and bulged.

There was nothing to do but hope for water, or they would all die there. Jac considered: there were worse things that could happen than him dying. Of course, there were much better things
too.

He tucked the piece of glass away under his tunic. If they didn’t find ice soon, it wouldn’t matter, and none of it would matter, and nothing would matter ever again. That thought
was almost restful. The thought hardly disaffected him at all; although it did disaffect him a tiny bit, in the Will at the heart of his being. And he wanted at least to have finished his window.
His miniature window. Tiny little window.

Any of them could rip the temporary seal away from the hole in the wall, the rock with its faecal cement, and kill everybody. It would be a simple matter.

He dozed. He dreamed an incoherent dream. Some of the Ulanov deputies dream lucid dreams in which they solve problems, deduce mysteries, uncover conspiracies, get to the bottom
of crimes. Such clarity of dreaming was beyond Jac.

Mo shook him awake: it was his time on the drill. His head felt too small for the high-pressure lava his brain-matter had become. Headache, headache. It was very unpleasant, and in a grimly
fascinating way; for he could not remove himself from the discomfort, the way he could with conventional pain. He withdrew his mind from the carapace of his nerves and muscles, but the exhaustion
and ache was still with him. Its misery had stained his soul grey.

Nothing but dry stone. Slow process. Jac turned his schute off, churned the rock with the digger’s business end, and then sifted through the floating rubble. Black crumbly carbon, or cold
igneous chunks hard as sin, or silicates – but no ice. Then Jac turned the schute on and worked the same area, drawing the debris away and clearing away at least some of the rubble.

He fell into an uneasy, unrestful sleep; but he was still at the digger, and he woke to the punches and slaps of a wearily furious Lwon. ‘Leggy! Leggy – wake!’

He had chanced upon ice, but the schute was drawing it away and depositing it into space.

The next hour passed in a delirious, agonised fog. They brought all three diggers to bear on the seam – a deep reach of blue-black ice – and carved out big pieces; and they carried
it through and fed it into the scrubber. Ice! At last! The device’s onboard fusion cell worked, and the water was processed and, slowly, the oxygen levels began to rise. It took a long time
for the worst of Jac’s physical misery to recede.

Replenishment.

Nobody did anything for a long while, except suck some of the renewed supply of ice and munch some ghunk. Everybody was intensely relieved at the find.

The alphas lurked in their chambers, the rest floated in the main space. They had their own rooms now, all save Gordius; but the rooms were cold and lonely, and they preferred to float together.
Gordius, who had acquired permanently blue lips and a thousand-metre stare, and whose shivers appeared to have fallen into odd regularised patterns and echoes, was muttering something to himself
under his breath, over and over.

Marit had put his head in at Davide’s room and was whispering something – fomenting rebellion presumably. Jac was too drained and worn-through to care.

Dust and debris in the air, everywhere, slowly and inevitably drawn into helices and whorls by the stately rotation of Lamy306. Their world, and prison, turning over on itself in space, like a
restless sleeper.

Jac dozed, woke, dozed, woke.

The box was sealed. It felt as if it had been locked beyond the ability of mortals to undo. Only the very faintest noises from inside to indicate that there had ever
been
anything there
at all.

Buzz, buzz.

He took out his piece of glass and began working over it, polishing and smoothing. Nearly there. But he worked slowly, and without panache. Nearly was the asymptote of eternal existential
disappointment. This was the geometry of the cosmos. Black and lady grey and blue and purple and –

‘Leggy!’ said Marit. He had floated across to him, and his reeking mouth was close by Jac’s face. Only exhaustion prevented Jac from starting in surprise, or shrieking.
‘Marit,’ he croaked.

‘You finished that window, then?’

He looked at the other man. He almost said:
you’re
a window, so transparent is your scheming. But there was nothing to be gained in Marit knowing how much Jac knew.
‘What?’

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, for a long time,’ said Marit, keeping his head where it was but pulling his body closer to Jac’s. ‘How
did
you lose your legs?
Or were you born that way?’

Jac put his thumb to the middle of his chin, and pressed hard. He drew himself, inwardly, and readied his spirit. ‘One of the two, certainly’ he replied.

Marit wasn’t really interested in that, of course. ‘E-d-C’s been
watching
you work on your glass, you know. Watching you! He told me he’s going to take it, when
you finish it. What for, I said? But that doesn’t matter. He doesn’t want it
for
anything. He just wants it. He’s a bully.’

Jac cocked his head. ‘You planning something?’

Marit’s eyes shimmered, left-right, left-right. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Things can’t go on the way they have. We almost choked to death! E-d-C is a
liability
, man.
Surely you see it? It’s a matter of self-preservation. Davide understands that. And I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re canny enough to see it too.’

‘So, my support and loyalty to – you, Marit? And in return?’

Marit stretched a ghastly smile out of his blue lips. ‘You get straight to the point, don’t you Leggy? That’s good. I like that. OK, straight to the point. Davide and Mo are
with me. You saw how Lwon feels about his so-called
deputy
. E-d-C is isolated, out on a limb. What do you get in
return
for your support? You get a better situation inside our little
prison. You move
up
in the world.’ His eyes shimmered, left-right, left-right. Jac almost chuckled: he could do the maths, as well as anybody. Not that it mattered.

‘How?’ Jac asked. ‘E-d-C is a big man, a strong man. Hit him with a rock, you might not kill him.’

‘I’ve something denser than rock,’ said Marit, with another disagreeable smile. ‘Don’t you worry about
that
. I’m not asking you to – get your
hands dirty. All I’m asking for is: your support. And . . . talk to him. Davide won’t, and he doesn’t trust Mo or myself. Talk to him, distract him.’

Jac almost laughed. ‘And?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘What about Gordius?’

This, clearly, had not factored into Marit’s calculations at all. He glanced at the fat man, and back again. ‘What about him?’

‘You don’t think . . .’ Jac began, but Marit spoke over him.

‘He’s neither here nor there. Him?’

‘He’s losing it,’ said Jac. ‘His mind – you see the way he’s muttering to himself, over and over?’

Marit curled has lip, scornfully. ‘So?’

‘You don’t know which way he might jump. He was sentenced for killing a man, after all. He’s killed before. What if he does it again? What if the violence freaks him
out?’

Marit nodded, slowly. ‘You think he might freak-freak out? You know him better than me. OK, OK. I’ll have Davide watch him. Good! You see! – when we work together, things get
sorted. Don’t they? Don’t they, though?’

‘Sure,’ said Jac. Maybe there was more oxygen in the air. He was starting to feel the tightness and misery go out of his soul a little.

Jac observed. He marvelled that E-d-C couldn’t tell that Marit and Davide were plotting something, so theatrically obvious did their behaviour seem. But maybe it was the still-too-thin
air, or maybe the tipping point had been reached and E-d-C was giving up, on a subconscious level. Giving up was a worry for all of them. Jac couldn’t stay in this stone box for eleven years.
He couldn’t stay in it for much longer. It didn’t matter, except that it mattered. It was important, it was unimportant.

In the end, he didn’t need to engage E-d-C in conversation. E-d-C engaged
him
. Presumably he could sense that something was up, without necessarily being able to put his finger on
what it was.

‘I was talking to Lwon,’ he said, out of the blue one day. ‘And we had a disagreement. He said, because you’ve less blood in your body – because you don’t
have the legs – you feel the cold
more
, since it’s our warm blood keeps us warm. But I said, less; since you don’t lose heat through the extremities, the legs I mean, the
way the rest of us do. Which is it?’

‘Having no-one else’s experience to compare mine to,’ Jac replied, ‘I couldn’t say.’

E-d-C nodded at this, as if it were wise. But his attention was not on this. Then he said: ‘the new seam of ice looks like it’ll give us both water and air for years. Really years! I
was chatting with Mo. I said to him: you really think the Gongsi would maroon us on a rock without
surveying
it first? Of course they checked to make sure it had the necessaries to support
life. He said he wouldn’t put it past them. But they’re not psychopaths! Maybe they are cruel, yes. Inhumane, all that. But not
insane
. Now that we’ve unlocked this seam,
we are guaranteed water, air and food for years. We can concentrate on making this place a nicer environment to live in. Am I right? A room for everybody! Warmed throughout!’

‘Sure,’ said Jac, distractedly.

‘I’m not trying to gloss over the hardships we’ve suffered. I’ve suffered them too! It
has
been hard, hasn’t it?’

‘On balance I’d have to agree,’ said Jac.

E-d-C sucked his teeth for a while. ‘We’ve only one chance, you know.’

Behind him, Jac could see Marit putting his hand inside his tunic. ‘Only one chance?’ he repeated.

‘Good order. It’s our only chance. If we keep a lid on our tempers, and keep good order, then we can last the time – last all eleven years, and come out of the other end free
men, with our dignity intact. But if we give way to anarchy we’ll all be dead in a week. Die like beasts, or survive as men? Is that really even a
choice
?’

‘Die like beasts,’ repeated Jac. ‘Or?’ He kept flicking his glance over to where Marit floated, on the other side of the main space. He had removed his hand from his
tunic, empty. As if he had been scratching an itch. But he hadn’t. Jac knew he had the meteorite-iron cosh in there. He was readying himself, psychologically, to use it. He was checking where
everybody else was. Davide was in the tunnel, digging, and so were Lwon and Mo. Should he go fetch his ally? Should he wait until the shift ended? It was as if his inward thoughts were projected
across the screen of his face for all to read.

Do it now?

Jac forced his eyes back to E-d-C’s face, met his gaze. He was listening to what the man was saying, but all the time he kept thinking: eyeballs are very fragile, the skull can be so
easily cracked open. Blood yearns to free itself from the body. ‘Sure,’ he said.

‘Shall I tell you how I ended up here?’

‘Alright.’

‘I killed a man.’

‘Really?’ said Jac.

‘Oh I know what you’re thinking: there must have been mitigation, or they would have done worse than just lock me in a box for eleven years. And, yes, there was. There was
mitigation. But – do you know what I used to do?’