Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (35 page)

‘Death,’ said Iago. The snow outside had stopped falling. A snake of white slept on the outside windowsill, and the bare yard beyond had been softened and blanched.

‘Oh don’t be absurd!’ she cried. ‘It would be death to
stay
. In the long run – it will be stagnation and death to stay here!’ She paused.
‘McAuley must have shared his invention with somebody. He refused to tell his interrogators, alright. But friends? Colleagues?’

‘No,’ said Iago. ‘The thing you need to understand about McAuley is that he was a genius. He had his madness, his religious mania. But that enabled rather than interfered with
his capacity for invention. A friend of mine once said: McAuley had the finest mind since Newton. That’s right, I think.’

‘So he makes this extraordinary thing. He invents the key that will unlock mankind’s prison cell. And then he prefers to
die
rather than tell people about it?’

‘I suppose,’ said Iago, ‘that when the idea occurred to him, perhaps he felt a wave of euphoria. Maybe he did dream a brilliant future for humanity, spread throughout every
star in the cosmos – all the things you have just said. The lid off, and so on. Maybe that lifted him up, spiritually, as he worked out the details. But then very soon he changed his mind. He
decided that, were his work to become known, it would be a disaster. So he destroyed the data.’

‘But,’ said Diana. ‘Why?’

‘Well, actually he didn’t destroy all copies. And, really, that’s a better question. Why
didn’t
he? He eradicated all traces except one: the datachip, which he
fixed to the body of his friend Mkoko and kicked out into space. I suppose,’ Iago went on, ‘that he was making an offering to chance. The God he believed in would be the final arbiter
as to whether the corpse is ever discovered. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to completely destroy what was – obviously – his greatest achievement. Something humanity has dreamt
about for hundreds of years. He had enough pride left to want to leave one copy surviving.’

‘No,’ said Diana. ‘I’d still say my question is the right one. Why did he want to deprive humanity of this gift? Was it money? – because surely he could have sold
the technology for any price he cared to set!’

‘It wasn’t money. He came from a wealthy family. He walked away from his inheritance – he was working as second engineer on a clapped-out sloop, after all. He disdained money.
That was another part of the logic of his religion.’

‘Then why?’ Diana said. She slumped back in her chair. ‘This is insane. A moment ago I had no idea that such a thing was even possible! FTL! Good grief.’

‘You’re not thinking it through,’ said Iago, mildly.

This stung. ‘Alright, I’ll think it through – professor. I’ll run through the possible negatives. But do you know what? I
know
, I know
in advance
that they
are all massively outweighed by the advantages of opening up the whole universe to human settlement. So.’ She laid a thumb in at the cleft of her chin. ‘I suppose, a technology like
this would be fought over. There might be struggles. Wars, even. The Lex Ulanova has preserved order in the system for so long we’ve forgotten what full-scale war is like, I don’t
doubt. Is it that?’ But before Iago could reply, she answered herself. ‘But, no, that’s crazy. Who’s going to fight over it? Disseminate the data everywhere, place copies
all over the IP, copy it a trillion times. Set it free and there’s nothing to fight over. So what else? Is it – is it that the drive is very polluting?’

‘Not so far as I know,’ replied Iago.

‘Then
what
? What is the downside of letting humanity spread through the stars? Are you worried about alien encounter?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Then I
don’t
understand. There! I said it.’

Iago was looking through the window. ‘It’s snowing again,’ he said. And so it was: thinner flakes this time, and fewer. A few knocked themselves like cold moths against the
window. Iago and Dia watched for a while. Then Iago said: ‘that last act of McAuley, his hymn, has become something of a myth. A story. Amongst those that know, I mean. Which is a select
group. What precisely
was
he singing, with his terminal breath?’

‘How can we know?’

‘Exactly,’ said Iago. ‘Exactly. But people speculate, nonetheless. One person I know has a whole elaborate theory – wrote it as a story. He thinks that McAuley was racked
by the belief that his pride was sinful; that God had set the speed of light as a constant and that to exceed it was blasphemous.’

‘Really?’ said Dia. ‘That doesn’t sound very plausible.’

‘You say so because you don’t share the particular religious beliefs McAuley did. But, actually, yes, I agree with you. Perhaps it played a part. But it’s speculation. And we
don’t need speculation. We don’t need to attribute his reluctance to disseminate his FTL technology to his religion. Because I don’t share his religious belief; but I
do
share his reluctance.’

‘
You
do?’ Dia was flabbergasted. ‘Why?’

‘You’re not thinking it through,’ he said again, gravely.

‘I don’t see it,’ she agreed. ‘I don’t see the downside.’

‘We’re going to have to leave soon,’ said Iago. Then he said: ‘you learned about Einstein at kindergarten, of course. But as with lots of kindergarten stuff, we tend to
forget what it means, in the fullest sense. We take it for granted.’

‘Forget what
what
means?’

‘Forget what it means to say “the speed of light is the fastest we can travel”. It’s not an arbitrary limit, like a speed limit on a road. Rather it’s an expression
of the fundamental geometry of the universe.’

‘You sound like Eva,’ said Diana. ‘She always insisted vehemently on the impossibility of FTL.’

‘And why was that?’

‘If I had my bId, I’d recite all the relevant . . .’ Diana started to say. Then she said. ‘Not that I need it! OK, I’ll play along. All the vectors in spacetime are
aspects of
the same
vector: an arrow that sums the total of your motion through the eight aspects – west/east, north/south, up/down, forward-in-time/backwards-in-time – those
eight coordinates that altogether constitute spacetime. If you were completely motionless in space, the arrow would point directly along the axis forward-in-time, because you are travelling, one
hour per hour, as “fast” forward in time as it is possible to go. If you start to move eastward, accelerating faster and faster towards the east, then the arrow swings a little towards
the east axis, and the vector of your forward-in-timeness reduces a little. This is the time-dilation effect Einstein discovered. Move faster in an eastward direction and the arrow swings further
that way, and accordingly you move less precipitously forward in the direction of forward-in-time. Eventually the arrow will be pointing directly ‘east’, and you will be travelling at c
in that direction, and not moving forward in time at all. In order to travel “faster than light” you would somehow have to rotate the arrow
more horizontally than horizontal
.
It’s easy to see how stupid
that
is. Saying “faster than light” is like saying “more straight than perfectly straight”. Looking for it is like looking for the
fourth side of a triangle. Looking for it means that
you haven’t understood what a triangle is
. This is, as you said, kindergarten stuff.’

‘What follows?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I’m asking you to think through the implications.’

‘Of FTL? You mean – hypothetically? I suppose that to travel faster than light would mean generating a new, localised spacetime geometry.’

Iago waved that aside with a condescending gesture. ‘Obviously that. I don’t mean that.’

‘Alright,’ said Dia, crossly. ‘What
do
you mean?’

‘You can’t exceed c, any more than you can rotate through more than three-sixty-degrees. So the only alternative is: to change c. And that means . . .’ She was about to say
‘freedom’ when the truth of it clattered, shockingly, into her mind. ‘Oh,’ she said, her face falling. ‘Oh!’

He nodded. ‘You make your McAuley machine. OK. Then what? You might make it into a spaceship and travel to Orion. Or you might make it into—’

‘A bomb,’ she breathed.

She understood, finally, the stakes for which they had been playing.

‘Drop it in the sun,’ he agreed. ‘Think about
E=mc
²
. Say your McAuley machine resets c a million times higher – the sort of ratio you’d need to cover interstellar space in a reasonable time: 120 light years is a million light-hours, after all.
So you reset c a million times higher. Feed that into Einstein’s equation. Think what it would do to the energy output of our star.’

‘A bomb,’ she said again.

‘The biggest bomb there’s ever been. Such ordnance is the
necessary
correlative of FTL. It’s an inevitable feature of the technology.’

‘Good goddess,’ said Diana, in a low voice.

‘You can see what I mean when I say that the stakes are high. You can see why the loss of one life, or even dozens of individual lives, might be a price worth paying – to save
trillions.’

Diana shivered.

‘I believe that when McAuley developed his technology he was thinking in terms of unlocking the prison door, and letting humanity out into the cosmos. Like you said. Maybe that thought
blinded him. But he was no fool. I’ll tell you what he actually invented. He had invented a way of increasing c. Of course that meant he had invented a way of turning
E=mc
²
into a
species-killing
weapon.’

‘Nobody would use it,’ said Diana. ‘You would have to be insane! Nobody would
be
so mad.’

‘Is it a chance we can take?’ said Iago. ‘You think it would be a good idea for this technology to fall into Ulanov hands? Or – anybody else’s?’

‘Oh Lady of the Cosmos.’

The question dominated the afternoon, hanging in the air, buzzing at Dia’s mind even though, or perhaps because, its answer was so obviously
no
.

She located a cache of woollen and plasfabric sweaters, coats, hats and scarves under the stairs, dressed herself in them (though they were rather too short for her upland-lengthened limbs) and
went outside for a walk. Sharply cold. Hers was a slow, cumbrous procession; the ground uneven beneath her feet. When the path went up it was enormously strenuous work ascending it, and left her
gasping in pseudo-asthmatic panic. And when the path went down it was perhaps even harder, although in a different way: her passage always on the alarming edge of tripping and tumbling towards a
painful fall and probably a broken bone. The air seemed something the opposite of a clean and penetrable medium: cold to an almost gelid degree, spotted with drifting ice-flakes falling languidly
towards the beige ground. On the other hand, being
in amongst
the mountains, rather than seeing them from her usual perspective of high above, gave her some insight into why mountains had,
historically speaking, so obsessed humanity. Their prodigious size and mass had a sort of divine
indifference
about it. They had the appearance of a kind of
absolute
solidity.
Impossible to imagine them ever passing away. And yet – she reminded herself, not only the mountains but the entirety of the Earth, and its moon, and Mars, and the trillions upon trillions of
people living in their various mansions and houses and shanty bubbles orbiting the sun – all of it could be wiped out in moments, if what Iago said was true.

Frost on a boulder looked like scales. On she went, struggling against her own limitations. It didn’t bear thinking about, but she couldn’t stop thinking, and that meant she
couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Eventually, panting like a dog, she reached the edge of the estate: a brick wall twice her height, and an old iron gate – brown metal speckled all over with tomato-coloured rust. She sat
on an old stone stump and got her breath back, wondering if it was a portion of some ancient Greek temple column, or a piece of modern masonry, or perhaps just a chunk of rock shaped by random
action into a cylinder. No way to tell. Through the bars of the gate she saw the road going down into a shallow valley of cold, dry stones.

She got back to the house in time for supper. ‘Good,’ she said in a hearty voice, as Sapho put bowls on the table. ‘I
have
worked up an appetite.’

But all three were in a sombre mood that evening. In the darkness of its mountainous location, the interior of the house illuminated only by a couple of light poles, it felt terribly remote.

‘I realised something,’ said Diana. ‘When I was out walking.’ Iago and Sapho looked at her, patiently, expectantly, and she thought: this is what I do. This is what they
expect of me. Seeing through the tangle to the heart of the mystery. Her whole torso tingled. ‘I realised that Eva was
right
.’

‘Right?’ repeated Iago.

‘She had a dream in which she learned that the solution to the murder mystery was directly connected to her own research. Her latest PhD on those “Champagne Supernovae”, those
instances of stars that explode with supernova brightness even though they lack the necessary mass?’

‘Yes,’ said Iago, nodding his head very slowly. An ocean tide was turning about in his gaze. ‘Yes,’ he said again, putting a hand to the side of his face. ‘Of
course.’

He looked, in the polelight, very old.

Diana said: ‘She refused to believe it herself, but she was right! Every Champagne Supernova, every single one – is the funeral pyre of an alien civilisation. Each one marks a
life-form that advanced to the point where they discovered whatever it was that McAuley discovered. And then, and
then
, by accident or by deliberate act of war, by malice or through
misguided religious beliefs, the technology was turned on the life-form’s own home star. Its energy output increased instantly by a million times: just as you said! Goddess have
mercy.’

For a long time they were silent. Then Iago said, with a wry smile: ‘I have to say,
that
had not occurred to me.’