Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (12 page)

‘What?’ He glanced over E-d-C’s shoulder again. Marit had his hand inside his tunic again; and his eyes had narrowed. Jac could see that his breathing had become more shallow.
From the other end of the tunnel, the sound of the diggers, working the seam of ice, buzzing and purring.

Cold, cold, cold.

‘You know how Lwon said he knew me from before – you
know
how he knew me?’

‘No,’ said Jac.

‘I used to be in the Civvies. I wasn’t some low-grade grunt, either. I was a
marshal
in the civilian-military force. When the Ulanovs took over, all those years ago, they kept
the structure of the Civvies pretty much as it had been. New top brass, or course; and some new rules. But basically the same. And I was a marshal! I say that, so that you can understand. You can
understand that I
know
small-group dynamics. I have a lot of experience in running them, keeping them going, keeping order. I know that without good order we have nothing.’

Jac nodded. Behind E-d-C, Marit had half-brought-out the black phallus of the iron club from his tunic. But then he stopped, spooked by some real or imaginary danger, and tucked it hurriedly
away again.

They were all losing their minds. Jac realised it, then. Paranoia and anger and self-pity and suffering and the toxic proximity of other human beings.

‘One of my duties,’ said E-d-C, ‘was to carry out executions. I didn’t like doing it; but it had to be done. Follow orders, that was my world. There was this one cadet,
and he assaulted a senior officer. The officer had had sex with his girl, or something – or made a pass at her, it didn’t matter what. The cadet had no business attacking him. No matter
what the provocation, a junior officer cannot just punch a senior officer! They went drinking together. Cadet got the lieutenant drunk, and then broke his legs with a tungsten spar. Afterwards the
officer was full of remorse – believe that? Said he’d been wrong to go after the other boy’s girl. But it didn’t matter. The cadet had to be punished. He took it well, too;
he knew the rules. And that’s what I mean! We don’t have to
like
one another, or to like the situation here. But we do have to endure it, and that means we got to have a code.
Lwon understands that. Davide too, though his temper
is
awkward. But he understands it at least. Marit – is a more difficult problem.’

‘So,’ said Jac. ‘You didn’t say how you ended up here.’

E-d-C smiled thinly. ‘I executed the cadet,’ he said. ‘He struck a superior officer. Broke his legs! The rules were clear, so I OK’d the order, and he was executed. Only
afterwards did it turn out he’d
previously
applied for discharge from the Civvies. His discharge had been granted, too, although the notification had got delayed in a spamstorm. I
didn’t know! How could I know? That didn’t save me. I’d been the one who killed him, thinking him subject to civilian-military discipline. But it turned out that at the time I
performed the execution he wasn’t civilian-military, he was an ordinary civilian. I pled ignorance. The court said it took my plea under advisement, but the fact remained. I killed a citizen.
So here I am.’

The drills stopped their noise, one after the other. In a moment, Davide, Mo and Lwon would come through. Then, Jac thought, it would happen.

‘Jac,’ E-d-C was saying. ‘I think you’re hearing what I’m saying. Am I right? I was talking with Gordius a while back, and he told me you were sentenced for
political crimes. That’s what we all thought, of course. Yes? So – I just want to say: I understand the urge to oppose the Ulanovs. Of course I do! I respect the desire to oppose
authority. All I’m saying is, not here. Yeah? Not now. I know Marit’s been stirring things up, but you need to listen to me. Survive this, get back out into the wider System, then you
can carry on with your political, er, agitation to your heart’s content – yeah?’

‘Get back out into the wider System,’ echoed Jac. ‘I hope to.’

E-d-C was about to say something encouraging, when he finally saw that Jac’s eyeline was not on him, but over his shoulder. He turned. Lwon was emerging from the entrance to the tunnel.
Davide was just behind him. E-d-C looked straight at Marit, with his hand down inside his tunic. The latter froze.

Jac read the situation. He reached out with both hands, touched the two walls, and drew himself closer into the corner of the space.

There was a hitch in the passage of time. Time held the second for a moment. Then it let it go.

It was Davide who acted. He saw at once that Marit had frozen, and that there was panic evident on his face. Davide’s own face distorted with anger and frustration. He roared. It was a
shattering sound in the enclosed space, a great bellowing bull-like noise. Because he was still half in the tunnel, Jac didn’t see Davide bring out the second chunk of iron. But it was in his
hand, and it struck Lwon audibly across the back of his skull.

E-d-C called ‘no!’ and launched himself through the intervening space. Lwon’s head had gone floppy, and his body was moving towards the far wall. As E-d-C hurtled towards him,
Davide just had time to bring the black cosh up and sweep it down a second time. A baseball professional could not have timed the blow better. It caught E-d-C in the centre of his forehead, whipped
his head back and to the side, and sent a spur of blood out into the air, a tumble of beads and slugs of red. E-d-C’s momentum carried his body forward, colliding with Davide, and the two men
tumbled against the wall together.

With an eerie chimpanzee screech, Marit leapt at Lwon’s unconscious body. He brought his own metal club down twice in quick succession, on the side and the back of his head. Then,
clumsily, but with increasing regularity, he began pounding Lwon’s responseless form. Some of the blows missed, or glanced away, but others dinted the skullbone or pulled divots of flesh from
the scalp. Very quickly a debris cloud of red dabs and dots and droplets filled the air around his head.

‘Marit!’ Davide cried. ‘Enough!’

And, as abruptly as he had begun it, Marit broke off his assault. Jac caught a glimpse of his face as he pulled away. It was acned and spattered with myriad red dots. The features were drawn up
in an expression of pure ecstasy.

The coup was effected as simply as that. For a while nobody said anything. Gordius was no longer muttering to himself and was instead staring open-mouthed at the mess: two
corpses floating, trailing blood from their wounds in myriad beads and lumps and dots. Indeed, as their prison itself slowly rotated the blood-field was slowly folded over on itself, wrapping into
incrementally appearing patterns of twist and helix.

In the immediate aftermath, Davide and Marit brandished their iron clubs, and Mo whooped and cheered and applauded them. Gordius and Jac were silent.

Eventually Davide made a speech: ‘re-birth,’ he said. Then, more loudly: ‘
re
naissance! Things are going to be
better
from now on. Nobody elected Lwon boss! Nobody
voted for him! He was a tyrant and a bully. We’re all in this together.’

They weren’t, though. As the adrenaline from the attack faded from their bloodstreams, the two assassins became grumpy and peevish. ‘You two!’ Marit ordered Gordius and Jac.
‘Clear this mess up!’ Gordius didn’t respond at first, but when Marit rushed at him brandishing his club the fat man squealed and scrambled to the side.

‘I said clear up the
mess
,’ bellowed Marit. And Mo, eager not to find himself falling on the wrong side of the divide in this new dispensation, added his support to
Marit’s new authority: ‘you two do as you’re told, or I’ll break your bones!’

‘How do you suggest we clean it?’ asked Jac, mildly enough. Mo snatched a smallish rock from the air and threw it at his head. It was slowed by passing through the sticky matter in
the way and Jac was able to duck out of the way.

‘Strip the bodies,’ said Davide, in a deep voice. ‘Use the clothing to net some of this stuff out of the air – and wipe the walls down with some crushed ice.’

Jac and Gordius did as they were told. ‘O brave new world,’ whispered Gordius as they worked, the first thing Jac had heard him say in a long while. ‘We’ll be next, you
know,’ he told Jac. It won’t be long now.’

Jac thought: it won’t be long now.

Gordius got E-d-C’s tunic off first; it had less blood on it than the other, and he wrapped it around his own torso like a cape – it had been a long time since he had had his own
upper body clothing. Then he and Jac got E-d-C’s trousers off, and then Lwon’s tunic and trows. Then Gordius took Lwon’s corpse, and Jac took E-d-C’s; they crammed them into
one of the rooms off the corridor. It was a waste of one of the rooms, but better that than have to live in the open space with two dead bodies.

When they came back through they were covered in blood; but then so were the other three – there was no way to avoid it in that confined space.

It was a tricky business sweeping the blood out of the air, and wiping the walls just tended to smear the stuff about. After a great deal of labour they had cleared some of the air, and they
went back into the corridor, and stuffed the bloodied clothes in at the mouth of the chamber, packing the bodies in.

Back in the main chamber, Davide and Marit still looked a little stunned by their victory. ‘This rock will support five more easily than it could ever have supported seven,’ said Mo.
‘I’m not sure seven could have lived here the full eleven years anyway.’ This wasn’t true, of course, but nobody challenged him. ‘It was, it was a
long
-term
solution to the, to the, the
problem
,’ he said.

‘It’ll certainly be less crowded around here now,’ said Marit.

That wasn’t right, though. Though there were fewer people now, the space felt paradoxically more crowded. It was impossible to put out of one’s mind the fact that two human corpses
were stuffed into the chamber on the left as you passed down the tunnel. They loomed larger in death than they had done in life. But there was nothing anybody could do about that. Worse, the
spectre of murderous violence had been summoned from its interstitial reality; and that’s a ghost that makes very uncomfortable cohabitation.

Over the next few days, Davide instructed Gordius and Jac that they, now, would do all the digging – that, indeed, he and his two friends were
sick
of digging. But it didn’t
take long for that to change. The truth was, digging, though tiresome, was at least a distraction. Within two days, everyone was taking turns at the diggers again, as before.

Davide took Jac’s piece of glass too. ‘I deserve some kind of medal,’ he said. ‘And this will have to do.’ Jac surrendered it without protest. It hardly mattered.
‘You were never going to fit it as a window, were you,’ sneered Marit. ‘You won’t miss it. You can make yourself another one!’

Jac didn’t reply. He had no new lump of unworked glass; all he had were the various chips and shards he had picked up along the way, and which he kept about his body tangled in with his
body hair. When he had an unobserved moment, he might bring one of these out and polish it. But he was content not to work any more on the larger lump.

The shift in the power seemed to bring little satisfaction to the top three. Conversation was sparse. The seam of ice was excavated, ghunk grown, and work begun making the three alpha chambers
bigger. The truth of their circumstance was:
waiting
. There was, in essence, nothing else for them to do. Davide in particular sank into what looked very like depression.

‘What will you tell the rescue crew when they come in a decade?’ Jac asked Davide one day. ‘We’ll tell them
you
killed them!’ crowed Marit, overhearing.
‘You and fat-boy! Or – we’ll say, they killed one another! Who’ll contradict

‘Nobody,’ conceded Jac.

The one positive result, if it could be phrased that way, was that events had shaken Gordius out of his fugue. He no longer muttered to himself, and as the ambient temperature crept marginally
up, he was shivering less. From his newly acquired tunic he ripped a strip of cloth and tied it around his dead eye like a pirate. Otherwise he began to revert, although intermittently, to his
earlier garrulousness.

‘They’re quiet now,’ he told Jac, in a low voice. ‘You know why? They’ve vented their frustration. But it’ll build up again, and next time the victims will be
– you and me.’

‘Very likely,’ Jac agreed.

‘So your escape plan?’ Gordius hissed. ‘Can you bring it forward?’

‘If you like,’ said Jac, in a tired voice.

Gordius peered at him, to try and see if he was joking or not. ‘Seriously? Because, I tell you: we’ve
got
to get out of here. The others have gone over the edge! We’ll
be next! Don’t you need your window, though? Your piece of glass?’

Jac shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. All he felt, now, was sadness. And sadness, like the horrible physical discomfort he had experienced when the oxygen levels
had dropped to dangerously low levels, was not something from which his soul could withdraw itself.

‘It was a
red
herring, all that glass polishing?’ Gordius pressed. ‘Distraction? Clever! Throw them off the scent. So what is your plan? If ever there was a time to tell
me, it’s now, surely!’

‘It’s all distraction, Gord,’ Jac told him. ‘There is no escape plan. There never was one. How could anybody possibly escape from this prison? It was all about filling
the time until the Gongsi send a ship along, in ten years, or whenever they decide to swing by.’

Gordius stared at him, and then decided not to believe him. ‘Sure!’ he said. ‘Sure!’

‘I’m not here for political crimes,’ Jac told him. ‘I know you think I am; you jumped to that conclusion. I never said I was. And it’s not the case. I’m here
because the authorities misidentified me. They will have realised their mistake by now; and if they haven’t they soon will. They want me for something much worse than regular political
crimes. Much worse. When they come back for the rest of you, it will be mindwipe for me.’

‘Are you innocent?’ breathed Gordius, wide-eyed.