Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (18 page)

These
servants, the Argent daughters’ personal handservants, had been uplifted out of that morass. By virtue of taking on Argent livery they were automatically wealthier than
anybody else they had hitherto known. It was actually low-level stuff, of course; a pittance. But it was a lot
to them
. Why would they want more? Indeed, since their contracts were all-time,
it wasn’t as if they would ever have the leisure to spend extra credits. So, although Eva couldn’t rule out the possibility that the crime had been committed for reasons of material
gain, it seemed unlikely. By far the most probable explanation was personal grudge. You might delve deeper into circumstances and uncover exactly what the grudge was, but why would you bother? Here
was an explanation any professional information artist would be happy with. At least: anyone who worked in the sciences.

And that only left the third question: did the crime constitute a present threat to the sisters? Cursory thought might imagine it did. Somebody capable of murderous violence was in physical
proximity to the girls. But the girls were surrounded by expert bodyguards; the nineteen suspects had been confined pending investigation, and – above all – the girls themselves could
never have been the target. All the Argent servants were dosed with high levels of CRF, geared to generate not just feelings of loyalty but, actively, of self-sacrificing love, the real thing,
towards the core members of the MOHfamily. Quite literally, they would sooner chop off their own limbs than hurt either Eva or Diana.

The clincher, as far as Eva was concerned, was the way her MOHmies had reacted. If they had the slightest fear their daughters were in actual danger, they would have pulled them straight back up
into orbit. But not only had they not done so, they were actively encouraging Diana to indulge her hobby and investigate the crime – on site. Evidently the crime posed
no
direct threat
to the girls.

Not that the two girls were ever
safe
, of course. On the contrary, danger was a constant part of Eva and Diana’s lives. They were the chosen key daughters of the Argent Clan. Their
family was one of five MOHfamilies that were, collectively, second only to the Ulanovs in the Solar System’s hierarchies of power. Below them, thousands of Gongsi corporations, of varying
size and aggressiveness, jockeyed for position. Any one of them, or (of course) any of the other four MOHfamilies, might have good reason to want to hurt the Argents. But none of that had anything
to do with one servant bashing another servant on the head with a hammer! Most servants had only the vaguest sense of the structured hierarchy of power’s upper echelons – beyond the
sense that the Ulanovs had won the war all those years ago and gifted order and law to the System. The MOHfamilies, and below them the Gongsi, and below them the myriad bands, police, civvies,
conventional genetic families, cults and mafias, and below
them
the Polloi, the hundreds of billions of ordinary citizens – all arranged in concentric circles around the Ulanovs, like
medieval species of angels around the throne of God. And below the Polloi, only the sub people, the
Sump
, the dregs – the trillions. One less, whether dispatched by natural causes or
by a hammer to the skull, hardly mattered.

Insofar as she dipped into political data – and she could hardly avoid doing so, however much she preferred the chillier perfection of physics – things seemed, presently, stable in
the System. It had been three decades since the last attempted coup, when the Palmer MOHfamily had tried to eliminate the Ulanovs with one strike and usurp their place. Of course, it was safe to
assume the other families, and Gongsi and lower-ranking organisations too, were
plotting
. Eva assumed her own MOHmies were plotting too. It would be longer-term suicide not to lay-in plans,
possible strategies and the like. The Ulanovs would expect as much, however much the Lex Ulanova forbade it. But Eva couldn’t see anything that was likely to lead to upheaval or bloodshed in
the immediate future.

Still, it was only sensible to take precautions. The Palmer Clan had been annihilated; and neither MOHfamily nor Gongsi would be so foolish as to attempt a direct assault again. But it was
certainly possible than either might attack either; and a strike against the Argents – the information guild, particularly vital to the Ulanovs – could achieve a great deal for an
ambitious lower organisation. Indeed, the chances of such an attack increasingly edged from possible into probable as time went on. Dia and Eva were not yet ready to assume the mantle of command.
To strike now made more sense than waiting until they consolidated their inheritance.

The iRumours, of course, were all about faster-than-light travel. If you believed the gossipoppers, the Ulanovs were on the verge of discovering, or rediscovering, of uncovering (or something)
a technology that permitted FTL
. Idiocy. It was impossible, of course. The laws of physics forbade it. But the mere rumour was enough to throw the Data Markets into array. It was as if
somebody on the Dutch stock market in the seventeenth-century had announced: ‘tomorrow I shall have an actual, working technology for turning lead into gold!’ The markets tended to go
borderline chaotic at the mere
idea
; and data markets were more volatile than other kinds of markets. But that didn’t mean it was actually going to happen.

As for Eva, well: she had six PhDs in physical sciences, and was about to submit a seventh. She knew perfectly well not only that FTL was impossible, but that its impossibility was of a
particularly glaring kind. This Mc-whatever he was called, this fellow who was supposed to have stumbled on the means of breaking the light barrier – he had disappeared, of course. Eva
doubted he had ever existed. And if he had, he was only a crank. His ‘discovery’ amounted to somebody saying:
I have created a perpetual motion machine
, or
I have invented a
square circle
. But she didn’t have to believe the technology existed. She only had to believe that
people believed
the technology existed. People, being stupid, believed all sorts
of things.

If
this impossible device were to tumble into the hands of the Ulanovs, it would represent – of course – unimaginable power and wealth. It would consolidate their power in an
absolute sense. They would control humanity’s migration to the stars. Of course, people would be prepared to kill for such a thing. To kill on a vast scale. And of course, the Argents, as the
Ulanovs’ information clan, would be assumed to be hand-in-hand with any such discovery. All of this, just the idea of it, put them at terrible risk.

But Eva and Diana were well protected; their location a secret close-guarded, their every hour guarded by the best bodyguards money could buy. The island was ringed and littered with defence
systems. A landing and assault would have a low probability of success. Of course, a rival MOHfamily or Gongsi – assuming they knew where the girls were staying – could just bomb the
entire island from orbit. But that would be an act of war; not a step lightly taken. An assassination attempt would be safer, and whilst that could come at any time it wasn’t terribly
likely.

And all of this was a
parsec
away from one servant clocking another on the head with a hammer. Only an idiot would think that this sordid crime constituted the first of what a crime
narrator might call ‘The FTL Murders’.

Eva put the whole thing out of her head. She worked on her anomalous supernova problem, and refined her possible solution from 52% to 55% probability. Then she washed, and ate, and played chess
for a half-hour. Then she played with her sister in the IP, and they both chatted remotely to their MOHmies – Dia, of course, excitedly gabbling about this
real-life murder mystery
,
and how she was going to find out which of the nineteen servants was responsible, and their parents smiling indulgently. Eva found herself obscurely angry. But then she slept in a gel tank, and
woke the next morning feeling a little better about the gravity. She got on with her research.

The murder was a trivial matter. She carried on thinking so, right up to the moment when Ms Joad arrived.

5

Ms Joad

Ms Joad worked directly for the Ulanovs. It didn’t
get
more (
up
!
up
!) elevated than that! The fact that she had come down to the island to speak to
the girls face-to-face threw everything Eva had assumed about this mystery
in the incinerator
. Pff! Gone. As Diana put it: there was no wavy
way
the Ulanovs would be interested in
this crime if it were truly just one servant killing another.

Ms Joad had the physique of someone for whom the uplands were a habitus: long and loose-limbed, skinny wrists, big hands. Her eyes were large, but not in an animé little-girl way. On the
contrary, they were a Shiva-coloured dark purple-black, and capable of an intenser gaze than is usual for the human eye. Her features were never anything other than serene and controlled, and the
elements of her face were regular and balanced in a way that ought to have been handsome. But there was some quality about her, some indefinable edge, that parsed her beauty through
terror
.
Whenever Ms Joad turned her bland gaze upon her, Eva could almost see through those eyes into the sandstorm of her mind. She was violent not in a crude, bashing-people-about way. She was violent,
as it were, ontologically. She was dangerous as a scorpion. But that was clearly stupid, because she was much much more dangerous than any scorpion!

Because she travelled up and down all the time on Ulanov business she was used to gravity, and took only a couple of hours to acclimatise – enough time for Eva and Dian and all three of
their bodyguards to assemble in the mansion’s main hall to meet her. Iago brought Ms Joad through. He came into the room first and she followed him; but the door squealed and shook when
she
passed through it, as if possessed by the spirits of several devils.

‘My oversight! I forgot,’ she said, in her inky voice. The expression on her face made it clear that she never forgot anything about anything, and that oversight was alien to her
nature. Without ostentation, but in a way that made it clear she was performing the action for the benefit of her audience, she pulled a metal firearm from inside her jacket. This she handed to
Berthezene, who slipped it in a smartcloth pouch. Then, smiling slightly, she stepped outside and came back in through the door.

It had no complaint to make about her second entry.

She was walking with crawlipers, but she moved easily to her chair and settled herself unfussily. ‘My dear girls,’ she said. ‘My employers have sent me to make sure you are
well
.’

The girls, seated, didn’t get up (in this g? Are you crazy?). ‘We are both
very
well,’ said Diana. She looked over at Iago – characteristically, he was very
deliberately
not
sitting in the available chair, but was instead standing with his back to the wall a little way to the left of Jong-il. He did not return her look.

‘Both very well,’ echoed Eva.

Joad looked from one girl to the other. ‘There has been a murder, I hear. On your property. Metres from this house. Isn’t that extraordinary?’

‘Is this what has brought you down here, Ms Joad?’ asked Eva. ‘I can assure you that the Ulanovs need not be concerned with something so trivial.’

‘
I
am investigating the crime,’ said Diana. ‘Although, of course, Ulanov law is being observed scrupulously; two accredited policepeople,’ – the flicker of
her eyelids as she drew their names from her bId – ‘Inspector Halkiopoulou, and Subinspector Zarian, visited yesterday. It’s all in order.’

Joad blinked, forcefully, once. Thus she took on board the necessary information. ‘Very good. Of course my employers are anxious to ensure that you are both perfectly safe.’

‘We had all the servants’ CRF levels checked straight away,’ said Diana, rather superfluously. ‘There’s nothing amiss.’

Joad looked at Diana, and then at Eva, and then she smiled. ‘So you are to try your hand at investigating crime, are you, my dear?’ she said. Although she was speaking to Diana she
was looking straight through the main window at the garden outside.

‘Yes,’ said Diana. ‘I have a great deal of experience in Worldtuality at . . .’

‘Believe me it’s different in real life,’ Ms Joad interrupted her. ‘I know what it means really to investigate a crime.’

‘The murder
is
a simple matter,’ said Eva, a little too urgently. ‘One servant killed another, probably for reasons of sexual jealousy, or personal grudge. The killer
must be one of a group of nineteen servants. It’s an unfortunate but eminently containable and, eh, indeed,
contained
event. My sister is looking into which particular servant is
responsible. I myself spent some time yesterday ascertaining whether there was any chance the crime was symptomatic of a larger threat to our family – it isn’t.’

‘And you,’ said Ms Joad, smiling amiably but speaking with a voice that could freeze starfire, ‘have six PhDs already!’

‘I,’ said Eva, wrong-footed, ‘I do.’

‘My
dear
girls. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that the matter is more dangerous than you realise.’

Dia’s heart lolloped in her chest. Was Joad was going to
stay
? Had the Ulanovs sent her down to
monitor
the sisters, to spy on them, browbeat them? The thought of this
individual contaminating her personal space, her own house,
was
intolerable.

‘Really?’ she said, in as ingenuous a voice as she could manage.

‘You have played a great many of your whodunit games, in Worldtuality and so on,’ said Joad to Dia, again without looking at her. ‘So tell me.
Have
you ever heard of
Jack Glass?’

Glass! ‘Of course,’ said Diana.

Ms Joad curled her mouth into a smile. ‘I’ve been on his trail, you know,’ she said. Nothing Ms Joad said could be described as offhand, exactly; but the way she imparted this
piece of information came close.