Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (24 page)

‘Alright,’ she conceded. ‘But if he’s not a revolutionary, why does Sapho call him one? Why baa-baa
blacken
his name? No, don’t bother answering the . . .
don’t bother answering. Bring me another servant to question, and I shall proceed with the questioning.’

‘Shall I kill the wasp, first?’ asked Jong-il.

But the truth was, questioning servants was a
bore
. It was a well-bore; a gravity-bore; a boffo bore. Many tears were shed, by men and women both, boys and girls, all
weeping as if weeping had just come into
fashion
, goddess-love-it. And there were lots of tediously repeated assurances of their undying loyalty to and love for the Argent family, prompted
by the heightened mood and the fear and above all by the CRF. There was very little actual informational content.

What Dia gleaned, by this increasingly frustrating and tedious sifting of emotional blurting, fell into one of two categories. On the one hand, some servants – the bId gave her names, and
personal details, the skill quotients and coordinations, the birthmarks and disease actuarial of all them – thought that Leron was a bad man. When pressed for specifics they all said the same
thing: he was a terrorist and an anarchist and an antinomian, and he hated the Ulanovs and all that was legal and right and ordered in the System. Some (Mantolini, Tapanat and Faber) also alleged
that he was a sexual bully, and forced both females and males into unwanted sexual congress.

But on the other hand, other servants – Poon-si, Tigris and Oldorando most forcefully – put forward a completely different version of events. According to them Leron was a thoroughly
good man, almost a space-saint. So far from being a terrorist, or plotting from his lowly position to bring down the Ulanovs, he was dedicated to the System-wide rule of law, and moreover he worked
to expose disloyalty in others. According to these people, this fact explained his demise. ‘He was killed before he could reveal that
she
is a traitor and a revolutionary,’ said
a servant called D’Arch.

‘She?’

‘Sapho! You have spoken to her? She is a traitor to the very bone! Look in her eyes and you can see it!’

‘A traitor to the Argents?’

Again, at the merest suggestion of such a thing, the servant looked genuinely shocked. ‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘Who could be disloyal to
you
, Miss?’ And then the
gusty tears came. ‘Never that, Miss! The thought hurts my heart, just the
thought
of it!’

‘Then you mean – a traitor to the Ulanovs themselves?’

But it took a long time for the weeping to settle to the level where meaningful communication could continue. ‘Yes! Yes! She is the serpent in the globe of Eden, she is the spider. She
hates law and good and right and order and everything that has made the Solar System habitable and free of war. She is a killer!’

‘And – Leron was about to report her, was he?’

‘Yes! Yes! So she killed him. She tried to do it before, but now she was able.’

‘But,’ she had to check the bId again to remember this one’s name; the servants were all more or less indistinguishable from one another, ‘but D’Arch, why
hadn’t he
already
reported her? He had many weeks when he could have done so, before you all came down here.’

The confusion in D’Arch’s eyes was unmistakeable. ‘But he was a good man,’ she said. ‘The killer is Sapho. I told the police already!’

From his position near the door, Iago interpolated a question: ‘have you heard of Jack Glass?’

This had an immediate effect. D’Arch’s eyes went wide, and colour dimmed in her dark face. She stared at Iago as if he were the devil made flesh. ‘Jack Glass?’ she
repeated. ‘He is – the father of lawlessness.’

‘Did he ever visit your globe, D’Arch?’

‘No, never! Yes, he is everywhere! But
I
never met him – not I. They say he can kill anybody in the entire System, and that he is dedicated to bringing down the lawful,
harmonious rule of the Ulanovs!’

‘If he can kill anybody in the system,’ said Diana, reasonably enough, ‘then why doesn’t he just kill the Ulanovs and be done with it?’

This was, she realised as soon as she had said it, a shocking thing to voice aloud. If D’Arch had looked shocked at the name of Jack Glass, she looked flabbergasted that anybody could say
such a thing aloud.
Kill the Ulanovs
– just putting the words together like that was probably a legally actionable thing.

‘Never that!’ gasped D’Arch. ‘Nobody could do that!’

Officer first-class Avraam Kawa took her away and brought in another handservant: this one called Carna. Diana’s bId sketched her in terms of basic data, but didn’t explain how her
gristly hair had turned such an antique shade of grey at the age of only twenty-one; or what had caused the old, chevron-shaped scar over her right eye, like a corporal’s stripe. As to this
latter, Diana got the sense quickly enough of a combative personality only imperfectly controlled beneath the more appropriate veneer of handservant deference. She met Diana’s eye without
flinching, and unlike most of the other interrogates she did not cry. But she also had definite ideas about who had killed Leron.

‘
She
did it.’

‘Who? Sapho?’

‘That’s right. She tried it once before, in the dizzy dummies you know.’

‘The what?’ Dia asked.

‘The,’ said the woman, enunciating more clearly, ‘
dizzy
dummies, Miss.’ Dia’s bId popped up with: //
large scale centrifugal devices in which simulated
gravity is used to bulk up bone and muscle prior to transferring a servant from zero to fractional g
//. Intrigued she scratched up a little more data. These were not like any machines with
which Dia was familiar, except in underlying principle. They were, for instance, much larger and without any of the more civilised trimmings. It seemed that servants would spend
whole days
inside fast-spun cages. The system had a grille and sluice, since the speed was rapid and continuous, not like the machines Dia was used to. Accordingly vomiting was common, as likely
(statistically) at the end of the procedure as the beginning. Fatalities in the .07 to .15 range, depending on the make of the device. Stress fractures in subjects’ bones occurring in the .35
to .45 range, but most of these being relatively easily fixed.

Dia asked: ‘
how
did she try to kill him?’

‘Miss, have you ever seen the dizzies?’

Dia laughed. ‘I’d never even heard of them until now!’

‘Oh, Miss, there are lots of ways to harm someone in there. It was in there that Petero was killed.’ Her complexion was an even dun-colour, but the skin on the inside of her eyelids
– the little ledge of flesh visible between the eyeball itself and the outer skin of the face – was black, like natural mascara. It made her look almost soulful.

‘Who?’

‘Petero was Leron’s
best
buddy. They were oh-ho
friends
from years back. But Petero broke his neck in the dizzy dummies, learning this gravity. It’s a hard
lesson.’

‘So – Leron’s best friend was killed before he even came down here?’

‘He died, yes.’

Diana looked over at Iago. ‘Is that true?’

Iago checked his own bId, or he didn’t and just pulled the fact from his memory, it was impossible to tell with his impassive face. ‘Broke his neck, yes.’

‘Was it an accident?’

‘Accidents do occur in these gravitational acclimatization devices, Miss,’ Iago said. ‘And sometimes such accidents are fatal.’

‘But did somebody
kill
– eh, him?’

‘Petero Grenadine, of the shanty globe Smirr?’

‘Him, yes.’

Iago pursed his lips, noncommittally. ‘It was investigated, of course. There was nothing to suggest it was murder. The worst you could say is that it wasn’t reported very promptly.
If they – the other servants in the device, I mean – if they had raised the alarm straight away, he might have been saved. But by the time he was noticed, he had expired. Brain
dead.’

‘Why
didn’t
they immediately sound the alert?’ Diana wanted to know. ‘Good goddess, a man’s life could be saved!’

‘Perhaps he wasn’t popular,’ Iago suggested, vaguely.

‘He was plenty pop-u-lar!’ snorted Carna, scowling at Iago. But then she looked back towards Diana, and winced, and her eyes went moist. ‘I mean, Miss,’ she said.
‘Not to be contradictory – but he was a fine man. And Leron was too. They neither of them deserved to die.’

‘Did you,’ asked Diana, feeling the transgressive nature of the question as a warm gleam in her chest and the buzz of adrenaline – she was the investigator! She could ask
anything no matter how outrageous! – ‘did you have sexual relations with Petero?’

Carna looked horrified, and then immediately abashed, and finally she looked at the floor. ‘Oh, Miss,’ she said, in a shamed voice. ‘Such a question from a young
Miss!’

‘Did you?’

‘Miss, you must understand how the world works, when you grow up in a shanty globe – the high morals and purity and the goodness and the order of
your
life, of the blessed
Argents, is hard to maintain in
such
a place. The Argents shine silver with the light of Ra’allah Himself! But in the globes . . .’ She trailed off.

‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Diana stated, elated at having (as she thought) touched on an important point. Not only important but properly grown-up! But then, she
was
going to be sixteen in a fortnight. ‘And Leron too?’

Carna didn’t say anything.

‘I see,’ Dia said, sternly; although her external performance of disapproval didn’t reflect her inner glee. This was something key – wasn’t it? She tried another
stab in the dark. ‘Now, he was also having sexual relations with Sapho, wasn’t he? Leron?’

Carna’s looked back at her, open-eyed. The expression was either one of astonishment at such a wrongheaded assertion, or else astonishment at Diana’s perspicacity. Dia wasn’t
sure which was more likely. She pressed on:

‘Was that
it
? Was it sexual jealousy – did
you
kill Leron because he was having sexual relations with another person?’

‘No,’ gasped Carna, her brow creasing. She looked baffled. Or furious. Was it fury? And if so was she furious at being found out? Or furious at being unjustly accused?

‘Leron and . . .’ But the name had gone out of her memory; Dia cycled quickly through the day’s order on the bId, ‘Leron and
Sapho
went into the storeroom to have
sexual relations. You followed and killed him.’

‘No!’ snapped Carna. ‘I am no killer. And besides you are suggesting I – did – did – the physical activity I am too embarrassed to name –
that
?
In
this gravity
?’ And Diana finally recognised the expression on her face for what it was: incredulousness.

All the servants were questioned eventually, although Dia rattled through the last five in short order. There was a huge amount of redundancy and noise in the data; and taking
it all in, after the manner of the great mystery detectives, did not leave Dia much wiser. About half the servants thought Leron had been a minor devil, a traitor, bully, rapist, revolutionary and
thoroughly bad man, and that his death had been well-deserved. About half talked of him as a force for good in the cosmos, a kind-hearted, loyal supporter of both the Argent family (of course) and
the Ulanovs, the principle of good justice in human form. The latter tended to believe that the handservant called Sapho had killed him. As to how she had been able to lift a heavy hammer and
thwack it down on his head – and as to why Leron hadn’t simply dodged the blow – nobody could say.

‘You’ve questioned everybody,’ Iago noted. ‘Now?’

The two of them were alone in the interrogation room. The policepersons had discreetly withdrawn. Diana lolled in a gel-chair, breathing shallowly.

‘Not everybody,’ she said. ‘I haven’t questioned
you
.’

‘Me, Miss?’ the Tutor replied, retreating into the evasive formality of his old-world butler manner. ‘I remind you that my whereabouts during the murder have been determined
with a certainty that puts me beyond suspicion of the crime.’

‘Not as a
suspect
, ye-are-goh,’ she drawled. ‘You
are
silly.’

‘I am happy to answer any questions, Miss, of course,’ he said, frostily.

‘Oh don’t get all crusty-crusty on me, you old satyr. I only want to ask you about politics.’

‘Politics,’ Iago repeated. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I know you like to
veil
your true importance to this family under a cloud of unknowing,’ she said. ‘But though I’m young and
sometimes
giddy I’m no
fool. What shall we call you – consigliere?’

Iago couldn’t stop a smile! He even snorted a brief puff of air out of his nostrils, which was the closest he came to laughing. ‘I wouldn’t use that particular vocabulary in
the hearing of your MOHparents, Miss Diana,’ he advised.

‘Oh?’

‘It’s a mafia term, you know.’

‘So? Mafias are perfectly respectable organisations. They have their place within the structures and hierarchies of power, all beneath the umbrella of the Lex Ulanova.’

‘Quite right,’ said Iago. ‘Trillions of human beings, most of them living in the Sump with nothing to lose – it’s a vast potential for chaos, anarchy and
destruction. Order can only be maintained with a large and various body of well-motivated enforcers. Mafiosi have their place in that larger framework of power, as you say. But it is a place
several ranks below
the Clan Argent. You might just get away with calling me a non-executive director; if only because the language of the Gongsi is less
infra dig
. But one thing Mrs
and Mrs Argent are very particular about . . .’

‘—is our pre-eminence. I know. We’re second only to the Ulanovs themselves. I know. You think I don’t? It will be my family, one day; my
Clan
. Mine and
Eva’s.’

Iago didn’t say anything to this; but he didn’t say anything in a way that somehow implied that this eventuality was far more conditional than Diana’s confidence suggested. She
looked at him, through the clear air and the fog of gravity.