Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (15 page)

She made the couch sit her up. ‘Dominico,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

But Deño had already risen, slightly unsteadily, to his feet. ‘Berthezene is checking,’ he said. And it was true: for there, through the wallglass, Berthezene could be seen,
stalking awkwardly over the dry grass towards the servant house. He and Jong-il and Deño, who had a professional reason to keep up their upland exercises, did five or six hours every day.
Still, even they found the first couple of days back under the haul of gravity a strain (of all her personal staff, only Iago seemed to shrug it off); but this was a serious matter.

Dia hopped into the security channel via her bId, which meant that she heard the news as soon as anybody – as soon as either of her MOHmies, back up in space. The news was that one of the
servants was dead. And then, almost at once, the news updated: name Leron, murdered, actually murdered.

‘This,’ she gasped, ‘I have
got
to see!’

It took Dia moments to fit her crawlipers, and then she was away, plocking out through the door and across the grass. The fragrance of lavender and brine. Sunlight striking down like the wand of
Apollo, bright and hot. The low, flowery roof of the servant house lurched closer with each step, rocking a seesaw boat-like motion as her braces moved her towards it, and then she was at the
entrance. A servant (Dia’s bId pulled up his name: Tigris) was lying on his back gasping; another (Sapho, the name) was crouched on the stoop, weeping. Dia didn’t have time for
them
! She had to get inside! She wanted to see the body.

Deño was at her side. ‘Miss,’ he said, laying a hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you quite sure you want to go inside? Are you sure you want to see—?’ ‘Are
you
joking
, Dominico?’ she replied. Murder mysteries were her
passion
! And here was a
real-life
one! Miss out on this?

No. Wavey. Way.

She stalked inside: a moment for her eyes to adjust, with the bId display gleaming distractedly bright. Then she got her bearings. The hall, the central corridor, individual rooms coming off
left and right. The ceiling was tuned to a low light. She could smell that food had been cooked: cheap and spicy. There was some other odour, too: metal, or fear, or excitement, or –
Deño touched her shoulder again. ‘Permit me to go first, Miss,’ he said. She thought about brushing him aside, and dashing down the corridor herself. But that
would
have
been reckless. She was excited, but not stupid. Deño’s brow had that /—\ shaped crease running over his eyebrows and down the sides of his face. He only got that when he was
really concentrating. It probably meant something was really amiss.

He held his weapon out in front of him, walking slowly down the corridor, and she crept after him. He looked in each of the open doors, one after the other, and all the cubicles inside were
empty. Dia kept checking her bId, but it was reporting the whole building Normal. They reached the far end; and there was only the storeroom left, and Diana was pretty worn-out, let me tell you,
with all the excitement and the walking and this was
despite
the crawlipers. But Deño ordered the door open, and it melted away to reveal – the murder scene.

Leron was the victim’s name. A mature male originally from (her bId told her) a large shanty bubble called Smirr. Recruited as a houseservant along with seven others not one month before.
And now he was dead!

He was flat on the ground, pressed against the stuff of the floor by the remorseless Earth gravity. His chest was not moving up or down. The flesh of his head had been pulled aside and the
serrated join of his skull plates unzipped, and a copious amount of blood had come out – a beachball’s worth of blood. The weirdest thing about the scene was the way the blood was
pressed flat and spread wide, adhering close to the concrete floor. The fatal wound was near the top of his crown, and it had yanked the expression on the face into a bizarre mask. Both eyes were
open, although the left one had been inked black.

Eew.

Diana turned to see Jong-il and Berthezene lumbering up the corridor towards her. ‘Miss! Be careful!’ And behind them came Iago; walking smoothly and without apparent effort, as he
always did. The suavest of the suave. ‘Miss! Miss!’

‘I’m fine,’ she called back, annoyed at the interruption. They loved her, she knew; but it could be a drag-drag-drag sometimes.

‘Come out, back to the house, Miss,’ said Jong-il. Berthezene was pointing his gun into each room in turn, standing beside each opening with his weapon vertical near his chest, and
leaping out to level it at possible assailants, over and again. The gun’s barrel: vertical – horizontal. Vertical – horizontal. ‘The servants are all outside,’ Dia
called, peering at the corpse. ‘There’s nobody
in
here! You worry-warts!’

‘Death is never a safe environment, Miss,’ said Iago.

‘
Please
be careful, Miss!’ cried Jong-il. ‘The police have been notified!’

She ignored all this nanny-nonsense, and turned back to the victim. If she had to describe her immediate reaction to seeing this dead human body – the first she had ever seen – she
would say: disappointment. It was not just that it looked disconcertingly like a live body in repose (although it did, the dent in its head notwithstanding). It was that it lacked any other
qualities at all. She supposed she had been expecting something profound and existentially jarring; some objective correlative to death itself. Personal extinction, the unthinkable asymptote of
life. Perhaps she had even been
craving
such a conceptual shock. Not that she wanted to die, of course; but that she expected there to be more of a buzz, more startlement, more
thrill
. But whatever this was, it wasn’t that. She adjusted her crawlipers to crouch beside the body, and then reached out with her right hand to touch the inertness of the
corpse’s right hand, like God on the Sistine Ceiling. Nothing.

And here was Iago, lifting her up again. ‘Better leave well alone, Miss Diana,’ he said. Of all the servants, only he used her first name.

‘I was just,’ Dia began to say, but she didn’t know what she was going to
just
. With an enhanced iQ, and some of the best data access algorithms in the whole Ulanov
protectorate, she
ought
to be able to work it out. Presumably the ‘just’ had to do with the imminence of . . . something. All of us are only a moment away from death. There will
come a moment which will be the last one we experience, the last moment before we lose everything. It ought to be something to cast the delicious, ghastly shiver through the soul. But Dia
didn’t feel anything like that.

So she stood there, next to her Tutor, and looked at the corpse on the floor, whilst her three bodyguards arranged themselves about her and aimed their weapons at imaginary foes. Until she
decided to leave that place there was nothing else for them to do.

‘His skin-tone is surprisingly light,’ Iago noted, shortly.

It was true: dead Leron’s colour, under the ceiling lights, was somewhere between mud-brown and amber. His spilt blood was much darker than he was. She posed the question to her bId, but
it had very little to say on the topic, the sparseness of the data presumably reflecting the fact that the life he had lived had
been
sparse. Name, Leron: one of the Greenbelt poor, born in
a certain shanty bubble, unofficial name Smirr, with such-and-such official designation – like trillions of System poor, raised on unrefined ghunk and 80%-recycled water. There was a
data-trail as to how the Argent family had hired him, but it was absolutely and depressingly and boringly unexceptional. He had been put forward from his home globe to a broker, on account of his
better-than-average looks, and better-than-average iQ, and better-than-average reflexes; and passed from that broker to another, and then through the long trail of good service to a variety of
positions until he came to the attention of one of the Argent factotums. An important family like theirs was always on the lookout for good servants. From his point of view, Dia reflected, it must
have been winning the golden ticket. The bId noted that Iago himself was involved in the vetting process, this being one of his duties for the family. What then for Leron? Initiation in the family
Lagrange, and beefing up the bones ready for 1G service, and dosing with CRF and all that. But he had barely started his service He hadn’t
even
started! This was the first time Dia had
ever laid eyes upon him, and he was a corpse! To go through all that, and finally get the big break, and to come down to Earth . . . only to be killed straight away! There might be something
poignant about it, if it weren’t so absolutely ordinary and boring and regular. At least, Dia thought, at least he got to put foot on Earth before he died – how many of the trillions of
shanty-bubble-poor could claim such a thing? At least he had stood on the homeworld. But then she thought to herself: he’s only been down a day. There’s a good chance he hadn’t
yet acclimatised to enough to place the soles of his feet against the ground. And that thought made her a little sad.

//Why is his skin colour the shade it is?// she asked.

//Human beings born to live in upland environments must deal with much higher than Earth-standard ambient radiation. Dark skin pigmentation is both a common augmentation and is strongly selected
for in brevet-evolutionary terms.// quoth the bId.

Tch! Tch and
tuch
you ask a
specific
question and the Biolink iData gives you a
general
answer. Useless, useless.

‘That there’s the weapon, I’d guess,’ said Iago, nodding. And there it was, the modern Club of Herakles, a great plasmetal hammer; plasmetal, or conceivably solid metal.
It was lying on the ground beside the victim. ‘It would require somebody of great strength to lift such a thing,’ was Deño’s opinion. ‘Even assuming they were
acclimatized to the gravity.’

This was self-evidently true. So do you know what Diana thought? She thought: since that suggests the murderer is a person of great physical strength, the murderer will
actually
be a very
weak individual. A fellow with a small physique! That was her
first
thought. Diana knew murder mysteries, you see. She had played a thousand Ideal Palace whodunits. A thousand, at least! Oh,
she wasn’t a fool. She knew this was different – that this was life, not a story. But she had spent as much time solving real-life historical crimes as she had solving made-up puzzle
stories. And the unexpected was as much key to real crime as to made-up!

She looked about, to get a sense of the immediate environment of the crime. The room was full of
stuff
. The hammer on the floor, with the blood on its metal snout, was only one of a whole
series of implements for bashing and digging and all the other incomprehensible business required for tending gardens. In the corner of the room a robot sat motionless. On the far wall a chainweave
sheet hung; and in front of it a stack of plastic barrels and boxes. There were odd-looking fins sticking out from the wall, like the heat-radiator panels of an upland house although for some
reason here fitted to the
inside
of the building. What was the point in that? To her left were myriad pots of paint and plasmetal lacquer, and long tubes of some description, and who knows
what else.

‘Lots of possible weapons here,’ she observed.

‘Yet the murderer chose a heavy hammer’ said Iago.

‘Or made it
look
as though he did,’ Diana said.

‘Miss Argent,’ urged Deño, at her side. ‘Please! Let us leave this place. I am not happy here. This space does not permit me to maximise the security
coverage.’

‘Sure,’ she said, absently, running her eye round the variety of stores. There was nothing else to see here. And she
was
feeling tired again. This gravity is a crushing thing;
an unrelenting thing. And so they went out.

It was slow work coming back across the dry lawn.

Back in the house, and Eva hadn’t moved so much as a centimetre. Diana stripped off her crawlipers, and made it back to her couch, supported part of the way by Iago’s gentlemanly
arm. She saw that her sister was plugged into Ideal Palace.

‘Eva!’ she hooted. ‘Evissima!’ But she didn’t have the energy even to wave her arm, and certainly didn’t have the oomph to get up and go over to her. So she
left Eva idling in her worldtual, and slipped into an uneasy doze.

2

The Police

She was woken by Iago. ‘The police want to have a word, Miss Diana.’

She stared at his old face, as creased as any druid’s His short hair; his muscular torso, his long legs. He was leaning over her, but he made even this look as though he was bowing. She
said: ‘You love me, don’t you, Eye-ah-go?’

‘Of course I do, Miss Diana.’

‘What I mean is: it’s not just that you’re dosed up with CRF?’

‘All the family servants are so dosed, Miss.’

‘But it’s not
just
that?’

‘It’s not just that.’

‘Would you love me even if you had no CRF in your system at all?’

‘Of course I would, Miss.’

She smiled. ‘
You
want to have penetrative sexual intercourse with me,’ she said.

His reaction was priceless! ‘No!’ he replied. ‘Certainly not, Miss Diana!’ His eyes were round as coins, startlement and wounded pride. ‘The very idea! My love for
you is pure as Plato.’

And she laughed out loud. ‘I’m only teasing you,’ she said, making the couch sit her up a little. As if that needed saying! Iago was old enough to be her
mother
. He was
old as a druid. He was ancient as chaos and old night. ‘Come on then, let’s have these police in. I shall answer their questions.’

‘Do you want me to stay?’ Iago asked.

But his question only annoyed her. ‘You think I can’t answer some police questions without your chaperoning me? Go away, you hideous, lined, wrinkled, mottled
old
fellow.’