Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (22 page)

‘Good night, lovely sister,’ Eva replied,

But Diana didn’t go straight back to sleep. The glow of light inside her solar plexus; the excitement. She had one last tour of her personal worldtual before sleep. It
was constructed to grant her access to data fields, but it lacked the capacity to send or receive messages. This was a matter of protection, of course. In theory, nobody at all was supposed to know
where she and Eva were right now. In fact, as the appearance of Ms Joad made plain, the Ulanovs knew – but it was a fair assumption that the Ulanovs knew everything. The more pressing
question concerned the other MOHfamilies, the lesser organisations (the Gongsi, the militias and cults) and everybody else.
They
could never be allowed to know. The temptation to strike the
mighty Argents in a tender spot would be too great.

Her bId was a complex, secure system. But Diana was more than clever: she was
made
to feel her way around complex systems. She could do what no AI could, and intuit pathways through the
chaos algorithms. The hard part wasn’t cracking the communications blackout; it was cracking it in such a way that nobody knew it had even been cracked.

It took her twenty minutes; that was all. Then she set up a bumper-bumper set of message relays to protect her location and directed her message.

Anna Tonks Yu was asleep, in a Mansion orbiting Mars. But she woke up as the message alert hummed. Anna Tonks Yu: Diana’s rival, her enemy. The great love of her life.

‘Diana!’ Anna cried. ‘Is that you? You foolish and ugly girl, you woke me up!’

‘What did you do to your
hair
?’ returned Diana. ‘It looks terrible. You might as well cut it all off.’

She filled in the delay-time in the conversation by playing a game of Go against the House AI. But the delay did not annoy her; on the contrary, she found it added spice to the conversation.
What is love without anticipation?

‘So you called me just to abuse me!’ cried Anna, throwing her arms wide. ‘It is emotional harm – I shall sue you through every court under Ulanov jurisdiction.’

‘When we are married I shall beat you,’ Diana said. ‘Like an old-fashioned spouse. I shall beat you with a stick.’

The game clogged in the bottom left quarter. Dia cleared it and rebooted it as a three-dimensional game on a toroidal grid.

‘If you beat me, I shall kill you,’ returned Anna. ‘It will be justifiable femicide.’

‘And the last thing I see will be your stupid flat face!’ cried Diana, in an ecstasy, adding, ‘oh I love you, I love you!’

The flare of emotional intensity fizzled and died as she waited for the reply; but it sparked up again as the countdown approached zero.

‘I love you too, Drop-dead-Di. Is that why you called, just to say that? What a risk! You’re not supposed to call. I might work out where you are, and betray you to your enemies.
Only I would never do that, because if I did they would kill you, and only
I
am allowed to kill you.’

They were never going to get married, of course. Their respective MOHfamilies would never allow it. But even if
they
could be persuaded the Ulanovs would regard an alliance between the
Information and the Transit branches of their own structures of power as too great a threat. Anna and Diana both knew that; and Diana knew more – though she wasn’t sure if Anna had as
much insight into human nature – that the intensity of their affection for one another was a
function
of its impossibility. Were all the obstacles between them removed, the love would
surely wither. Not that any of
that
mattered.

Diana gave her the news. ‘I have a
real-life
murder mystery to solve,’ she boasted.

She finished the game, and dismissed the board. As the countdown slid away she prepared herself for Anna’s reaction. It did not disappoint.

Anna made her mouth a perfect O. ‘No wavey
way
!’ she yelled. ‘A real-life one – where? You’re trying to de-arrange my
sanity
!’

‘Right on our doorstep! One of our own handservants, his cranial bones all bashed and dinted and cracked, dead as an iron star.’

The interlude flew past.

‘That’s the most amazing. That’s most amazing. That’s
the
most. Have you solved it?’ asked Anna. ‘Do you need my help to solve it? I’m the best
brain at solving whodunits in the So-so Solar System, you know.’

‘Such delusions!’ said Diana. ‘I have to go now, my love, my life. When I’ve got to the bottom of things here I’ll parcel up the data – the solution in a
different package, of course – and see how
you
do with it.’ The walls of her IP were throbbing, which meant that her network of buffers was about to tumble in on itself. She
disconnected.

7

The Investigation Begins

The next morning Diana began her very own murder investigation: she was Holmes, and she appointed Iago her Dr Watson. ‘It’s quite alright and spot-on,’ she
told him; ‘check your bId and you’ll see Watson was
quite
a bit older than Holmes.’ Iago wrinkled the skin next to his eyes with < and > as he smiled. They were in
the bright morning sunlight, and by
golly
he looked old. ‘And Eva can be Mycroft, since she’s so very clever,’ Dia added.

‘How do we begin?’

‘With the autopsy; but that’s done, and the results are on the bId. Have you checked them?’

‘I assume,’ he said, saluting the scene so as to shade his eyes. There was a gauzy haze over the sea, but the dun-green trees and sand-coloured fields all stood out with hyperreal
vividness; as did the white houses of the distant down. ‘I assume the autopsy confirms that death occurred as a result of cranial damage.’

‘He was bashed. He was dented and dinted and dashed to death. No surprises there.’

They set off towards the scene of the murder, and it ought to have been more exciting. But something was corroding her enjoyment. In fact, several things were. One was Eva. They were hardly the
first sisters in the world whose love for one another waxed and waned; but Diana couldn’t help thinking it was
her
birthday in three weeks – and
she
was the one with the
passion for murder mysteries – and now a real-life murder mystery had happened right on her doorstep and you might think Eva would be more pleased. Especially since last night she had almost
opened up to her; a little intimacy, her strange dream.

But this morning, she had been all stand-offish, had breakfasted alone in her room and then vanished inside the IP for more stroopid-stroopid work on her stroopid-stroopid PhD. She tried not to
care; but her stand-offishness was more than a touch
piss
-offish.

The best analgesic for mental discomfort is work, of course. Dia ran through the surveillance footage of the servants’ house one more time, making sure that nobody
had
gone in or
come out for seven hours prior to the murder. Immediately after the murder, of course, people spilled and staggered from the main entrance, doing their weird contorted grief-dance. This was all
negative data; just like the House AI surveillance record that told her Deño, Jong-il, Berthezene and Iago had all been inside the main building for the whole of the relevant time. Not that
she suspected any of
them
, of course; but it was good officially to (as the phrase so splendidly put it)
eliminate them from the enquiry
. There was no House AI data on Eva, of course;
any more than on Diana herself – they were the daughters of Argent, and beyond surveillance. That was the least they could expect, in their eminence; although there were also practical
advantages in minimising their data profiles. After all protection was the name of the jeu; the name of the jeu was
protection
.

But Diana knew she wasn’t the murderer, and it made no sense to think Eva was.

There was the question, of course, of who was to
serve
them, now that all nineteen of their remaining handservants had been locked up. But they still had Deño, Berthezene and
Jong-il – not to mention solid old Iago – to give them their food, and sort out their needs. And they could dress themselves, if they had to. Other stuff would have to be postponed, or
else go hang. Besides, as soon as Dia worked out who the
real
murderer was, the servants could all be released and things could return to normal. So! So –

The
next
thing to do was to examine the crime scene itself, and then (she slid the palms of her hands across one another, trying to work up a little excitement) interview the suspects.
Interview the suspects! She would Poirot them good and proper. They would be
properly
Poirot’d.

So Dia had put together a message to her sister and sent it into the Worldtuality: saying, only, ‘please be my Mycroft! I’m setting out to solve these FTL-murders (thank you, Ms
Joad) and all help is good help if it’s
your
help. I know you’re working and working and working, and trying for the good of all humanity to explain why that
minimum-fraction-tiny-number of stars blew up, so I won’t ask you to do the crime scene investigation. But shall I come to you with my theories, and shall you help me put all the pieces
together?’

Nothing came back from Eva for a long time, and when something finally did trickle out of the IP it wasn’t even delivered by an Eva-avatar. It was a plain statement of three things:

That put a crimp in Dia’s good spirits, right there. So formal! And although it was rather grimmish to talk about the death of another human being – and so on, and
so forth – there was no reason why it couldn’t be
fun
. Still, hey-ho and hoopsa-girlagirl-hoopsa. Diana tried to keep her spirits up. She finished her breakfast and as she was
spending ten minutes flexing her limbs and getting used to the crawlipers (the gravity was a
little
less oppressive today) another message pinged out of the IP. This one was at least
delivered by an avatar:

But, oddly, that only made Diana more despondent. Eva probably
was
right. It almost certainly
was
nothing. Iago, who was present when the avatar delivered this
message (so was Jong-il), seemed quite struck by it, pushing his wrinkly brow deeper into wrinkles and quite lost in thought. ‘What ho, Tutor,’ she asked him, with a forced jollity.
‘You think there might be a connection between this murder and the explosion of distant supernovae after all?’

He rearranged his face into a proper servantly blandness. ‘It would be hard to see,’ he deadpanned, ‘what the connection between those events could
be
, Miss.’

She wouldn’t let it go. ‘You had a look on your face, just then—’

‘What sort of look?’

‘As if you had suddenly realised something.’

‘Realised?’

‘Exactly,’ said Dia. ‘You had the look of somebody who had just realised something deep and important.’

‘Very shrewd, Miss,’ he said. ‘I had indeed suddenly understood the secret of life, the meaning of the universe and the key that would unlock this particular
mystery.’

So she slappit his arm, and told Iago that he could stop being Jeeves for the day and ordered him instead to have a go at being Doctor Watson. But Diana’s spirits refused to buoy-
themselves up, however much she primped them.

They went out into the sunshine and walked awkwardly down to the servants’ house. It was already very hot, the air blue as cigarette smoke, the heavens taut above them. A scramjet, very
high overhead, cut a white slit in the sky. You could hear its faraway rumble. Otherwise it was perfectly still.

They crossed the crinkly grass: Diana going first, Iago and Jong-il, scanning the scene for possible assailants.

The inside of the servant house was empty (all the servants had been detained in a secure building a kilometre or so away, on the far side of the olivetree forest). Stepping into the gloom from
the brightness of the day, Diana felt a tingle of anticipation in her stomach; but it soon dissipated. There was nothing here. She started going through each of the rooms, one after the other, but
they were all the same: a bed – regular mattress, no gel-beds for the servants of course – and a sphere, unlocked, that contained a few trivial personal possessions. A few datachips
easily scanned by the House AI, and usually containing only religious texts. Odd toys and mascots and trinkets. But she didn’t go into all twenty rooms; she got bored after five. So they went
back into the storeroom.

It seemed both larger and less cluttered than it had done when Diana had visited before. That was one of the things about gravity, of course: when you first got back under the strain of it,
things appeared to constrict about you. No, it was something more; a sense that the excitement of the moment had drawn the space around her, like a shawl. Now it was receding. She knew why. The
truth would be banal, obvious – like Eva said, another servant smacked his head with a hammer, over some petty jealousy or grudge. The day before she had believed that it might be a really
crunchy, chewy mystery; a whodunit as gnarly as any she had ever played in IP. But reality wasn’t like that. This was what they called ‘the cold light of day’. Except that the
light was not cold. It was hot and sunny.