Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (32 page)

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We will stop soon, and I’ll find a craft suitable for the longer journey.’

‘My mouth is dry,’ she reported. ‘And I need to relieve my bladder.’

‘A contradictory state of affairs, it might be thought.’

‘Does this car not have facilities?’

‘It’s too small for such luxuries, I’m afraid. A short-hop model only. Another ten minutes,’ he added, ‘and I’ll come down.’

They passed over a dun-coloured landscape, sharp-edged escarpments and inky hollows, as the eastern light slowly gathered itself ready for another dawn. It wasn’t clear where Iago was
going until the last minute, when they popped over a ridge and landed in the yard of a large farmhouse. This consisted of a lead-coloured, seven-storey barn, with a star-and-crescent logo painted
upon it. Four agri-pros were parked outside – the place was very evidently fully automated. Nevertheless a human being was standing in the yard waiting for them. ‘How did she know to be
here?’ Diana asked as they touched down.

‘He. And he knew because I called ahead.’

‘Why haven’t you erased your bId? It will be just as compromised as mine.’

‘The system I’m carrying,’ he said, ‘is not bId.’

Iago opened the door. They roused Sapho, and all three clambered stiffly from the car into the cool predawn. Iago went over and spoke to the stranger, as Diana and Sapho stretched their limbs.
‘Where are we, Miss?’ Sapho asked. ‘I’ve no more idea than you, Sapho,’ Dia replied.

Iago returned. ‘My friend has brought a larger craft,’ he said. ‘But we’ve no time to hang about.’

The three of them went round the corner of the barn to find a proper-sized machine; stealth aerials all over it. Iago opened the side and all three climbed in. Diana made first use of the toilet
cubicle, with Sapho going in after. Iago was priming and launching several dozen decoy drones in several directions. Diana explored the small kitchen and dug out some supplies. She drank some
sugarjuice, and ate a strawberry muffin. It was a little stale but took the edge off her hunger. Iago came back, took a long draft of water, and went back up to the cabin. Diana had to chivvy Sapho
into breaking her fast.

Dawn was heating the bar of the eastern horizon red hot by the time they were airborne. They flew straight east and the air clarified and brightened all around them.

Diana had never travelled in quite so primitive a craft before. The engine made a continuous sequence of crunching noises, as if its business was breaking its own innards.
Small shard-puffs of smoke came out of its exhaust. Diana pondered what manner of engine it could possibly be. Something from the bronze age, maybe; something from the time of Homer. Something.

Sunlight the colour and thickness of honey.

From their elevated perspective the landscape approached cartographic simplification: interlocking shapes of light and dark. Innumerable hexagon-fields of wheat. A stumpy range of half-mountains
passed below them, and on the far side of that a wide expanse of ash-coloured crops – edible cotton, she guessed.

They approached an eastern coastline. Northward and southward the sea bunched itself like blue cloth into a great many ruffles and pleats. They overflew the beach and left the land wholly
behind. A great slab of sea lay immobile beneath them.

They flew for a long time over the sea.

The sun was high in the sky by the time the continental coastline appeared beneath them: Turque, and beyond that presumably the realm of Al Anfal Li’llah where they were going. The
mountains came bulging up as they approached; flanks marbled with brown and black, and summits capped in great panes of ash-blonde snow. Diana thought to herself: the sun is always true north,
irrespective of the vagaries of mundane electromagnetic orientations. The sun is always at the bottom of the well. The sun is the one true point in all this uncertainty.

She spent some time gazing at the endlessly renewing sky; and then watching the pattern of shadows the sun inked upon the landscape. The mountains below them were a mode of monotony. Nothing
could grow upon them. Most food came from the uplands, of course, from the innumerable Facs and globes. Some luxury products, and some subsistence crops, were grown below. But a large portion of
the lowlands were lying fallow. Or were giving way to desertification.

She left the sun, white as paper, and the sky, blue as water, and closed her eyes. Sleep didn’t come. Instead the ghostly shapes of her MOHmies loomed alarmingly, and she had to open her
eyes. Here was the cabin. She put her hand on the wall beside her, and she could feel it shivering.

She was crying.

This would never do.

So she sat down and told herself: she had no reason to believe her MOHmies were dead. She had no evidence that Eva was dead, or even that she had been taken into Ulanov custody. She had to show
herself as somebody possessing the character to endure adversity and triumph over it. Crying would not do.

So, to distract herself from her own self-pity, she went and sat next to Iago. The view from the cockpit was the same as the view from the cabin windows: parti-coloured mountains; valleys in
which giant firs loomed minaret-like over the canopies of regular trees. The same sky, the inescapable sun. The sun was grief. Grief was as hot and as unavoidable as the sun. It is what we all
rotate our lives about, whether we realise it or not.

‘So,’ she said. ‘You are Jack Glass.’

He hummed for a while: a tune she did not recognise, four notes the same followed by a downward melody with a trill in the middle. Then he said: ‘some people call me that.’

‘Joad said it wasn’t your real name.’

‘The whole concept of real names,’ Iago said, ‘isn’t a terribly coherent one, I think.’

‘And you have killed people. Thousands of people!’

‘Millions,’ he said, glancing at her. ‘If you believe some stories.’

She thought about this. ‘You haven’t killed millions of people.’

‘No.’

‘Or thousands?’

‘No.’

‘You have killed people, though?’

‘You yourself just witnessed me putting an end to Dominico Deño’s life. That was a shame. I liked him. He and I played Go together.’

‘And I saw you stab Ms Joad. But you didn’t kill her.’

‘I could have done that better, I agree. But nobody’s perfect.’

‘Do my MOHmies know who you are?’

‘They do.’

‘They hired you anyway? You expect me to believe that they were happy to hire you to work in close proximity to their daughters?’

‘They hired me not despite who I was, but because of it. They paid for these legs, and arranged for my face to be surgically reconfigured. They know what I’ve done and why I’ve
done it. The plain fact is the Clan Argent and I share a similar goal; and that protecting you and Eva is part of achieving that goal.’

‘The Ulanovs,’ Diana said.

‘Exactly. Their downfall. And, as for placing me near you and your MOHsister – well, I do have certain skills. As I’ve just demonstrated with Ms Joad and her agent. Though
skills
is a tendentious way of putting it, I suppose. I’d say a skill ought to be something constructive. What I’ve just done is hardly that.’

‘My knees thank you,’ she said. ‘At any rate.’

And he smiled.

‘I can’t believe my MOHmies could have been planning something so – seismic.’

‘You can’t believe it? Or you can’t believe you weren’t in on it?’

Diana stared out of the window. ‘I’m not even sixteen,’ she said.

‘Indeed. But you can see, given the stakes, why your MOHparents found it necessary to accelerate the whole question of settling on a successor. It wasn’t their choice. Events have
forced their hand.’

‘But,’ she said. ‘You are a revolutionary! I can believe my MOHmies might want to topple the Ulanovs – but revolutionaries want to dismantle
all
the structures of
power. Don’t they? All the structures including the MOHfamilies! Why would my MOHmies ally themselves with somebody dedicated to their
own
overthrow?’

‘There are as many different revolutionary creeds as there are religions,’ Iago said. ‘Some want to level the entire System, sure. Others are happy to work with the hierarchies
that exist, to purge them of injustice and the Ulanovian tyranny, and to transition humanity towards stability and prosperity. For myself, I have – personal as well as ideological reasons to
hate the Ulanovs. But it seems to me that any system, even a utopian one, will need efficient civil servants – and that’s what the MOHfamilies are, really.’ He coughed, or
laughed, Diana couldn’t tell which. Then he said: ‘but, of course, there’s a more pressing reason.’

‘What do you mean? Reason for what?’

‘Reason why your MOHparents would take somebody like me into their confidence, make an alliance with me and the forces I represent.’

She felt a tingle in her scalp, a yawing inside her stomach, as if she trembled on the brink of some great revelation. ‘What reason?’

He looked at her. ‘A new threat, large enough to overshadow any notion of political power-plays. Even for individuals such as your parents.’

‘What threat?’

‘The end of humanity.’

She had nothing to say to this. It seemed so improbably overstated, particularly for somebody like Iago, she wondered almost as if it were a joke.

‘How long will we have to stay in this Al Anfal of yours?’ she asked him, shortly.

He looked at her, a long, careful, appraising look. ‘Not forever,’ he said. And she saw that he meant:
a long time
. ‘If the Ulanovs are truly moving against the Clan,
then – well, things are clearly
volatile
at the moment. In the uplands, I mean. And throughout the System. And that means that things are volatile down here, since what is the Earth
but a plughole down which all the shit of the System washes?’

The profanity startled her. ‘Ee-
are
-gow!’ she said. ‘Such language!’

‘I apologise, Diana,’ he said, gravely, turning to look frontward. He didn’t, she noticed, call her
Miss
any more.

It was midday before they came down, Iago guiding the craft into a narrow, precipitously-walled valley somewhere in the midst of Anatolia.

13

Of Multitudes

The house was primitive, but comfortable: two storeys, built close against the rocky west wall of the valley and hidden from all but the most specific searches from above.
Diana had no idea where they were, and she didn’t like the fact that (with no bId access) she couldn’t find out. How close the nearest conurbation was, where their food would come from
when the house supplies ran out – these were mysteries. Water came from a
well
, an actual well, just as in the days of Homer and
Homo erectus
: a shaft drilled through
bronze-coloured rock, its contents pumped up into the house. ‘How do you
know
it is clean?’ she asked; but all Iago said was: ‘it is clean alright.’

He fastened a hollow plastic globe to the bottom of his leg. It was cruder than a foot, but that fact seemed not to incommode him. He walked now with only the slightest of limps. ‘Could
you not,’ Diana asked, still thinking with the assumptions of the very rich, ‘get yourself a proper replacement foot?’ ‘These legs,’ he replied, ‘and indeed this
face, this new face – they were very expensive, specialised pieces of work. I cannot simply replace them at any craft stall. Your MOHparents paid, not only to have the work done, but to keep
it secret. The second element was by far the more expensive.’

Dia sniffed sulkily. ‘I used to wonder,’ she said, ‘why you were so wrinkled. At your age, to be so wrinkled!’

‘We are capable of many amazing things,’ Iago agreed. ‘But scar tissue is a stubborn fact of our corporality. We can fold it away in microwrinkles, but we cannot simply break
and remake skin like putty.’

‘That’s revolting,’ she told him.

Her life moved on into its next phase. She did not, at the beginning, feel the deprivation of her wealth too acutely; that felt like an adventure holiday than actual impoverishment. The lack of
access to her bId was more of an irritation.

The air was thinner and colder here than it had been on the island; but she acclimatised quickly. Another function of a life lived upland.

Sapho cooked for them all, and cleaned up afterwards. She kept herself to herself; slept in the house’s smallest room (although there were larger rooms available for her use) and said
little. Some nights, if Diana put enough pressure on her, she would take her evening meal with them.

For the first full day there Diana did nothing but brood. It was actively dislocating not to have access to her bId. The fact that she was unable to check facts, to satisfy her various
curiosities, was of course an inconvenience; but it dawned on her that in this house there were no other datasifts of
any
kind – not a slate, or a terminal, not so much as an antique
library of bound codices. She was data-naked; an unprecedented and extremely uncomfortable situation. The lack of external access was less of a problem, for she was used to being insulated from the
larger network of contacts and news for security reasons. But in one particular she felt the privation very sharply: she had no idea what was happening to her Clan. She did not know whether her
MOHmies were alive and well, or in Ulanov custody (she wondered: on what charge?) or even dead. She did not know whether Eva was alright; or what was happening to the tens of thousands of Clan
members and affiliates. Iago could tell her little, although he did seem to have some kind of non-bId access to information.

The first night she slept poorly: the house was not furnished with gel-beds and she had to lie on a mattress. More: the walls did not regulate the temperature automatically; so she was too cold
until she got up and dialled more heat from a specific device in the corner of the room. That did make things hotter, and then made them too hot and she had to get up and dial it down. She finally
fell asleep properly just before dawn and despite waking from time to time, she slept until midday.