Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (46 page)

‘Sapho!’ cried Diana, shocked. ‘You’re rude.’

Sapho’s dark face darkened further, and her hands trembled. ‘He understands justice,’ she said. ‘You do not. You don’t understand him at all.’

‘Good goddess, Sapho – is this some reaction to going cold-turkey on your CRFs?’

‘Your goddess is a sham,’ Sapho retorted. ‘Ra’allah will burn her to ashes with the light of His majesty.’ And then, because the pharmakon was not entirely
metabolised out of her system, and because acting in so insubordinate a way to a member of the Clan Argent went against all her training, Sapho burst into tears. ‘Miss! I’m sorry
– I’m sorry. I’m sorry!’

‘Really, Sapho!’ said Diana, her eyes wide. ‘You’re not yourself!’

‘It’s true. It’s the truth. I’m sorry Miss – I’m sorry. I’m going back to the
Rum
. I’m going back to the
Rum
until I have taken a
hold of myself. Until I have recovered my courtesy, Miss.’ And with a strong kick-out of her legs Sapho shot through the doorway out of the bubble.

Diana was left jangled by this encounter – servants did not speak in such a way to their mistresses. Everybody dosed their staff with CRFs, of course; but nobody liked to think that the
pharmakon was the only reason for loyalty.

Iago floated across. ‘Was that Sapho, I saw, leaving the bubble?’ he asked. ‘Where’s she going?’

Diana snapped. ‘You want to know why I am angry with you?’ she said.

He looked rather surprised at this, but nodded.

‘It’s not that you have a guardian angel,’ she said. ‘Having a guardian angel, keeping you out of prison, disposing of your enemies – that’s obviously a
terribly
useful thing to have. It’s not that.’

‘Dia – what’s the matter?’

‘It’s the way you insist on seeing things from a perspective of angelic
elevation
. It’s inhuman.’

‘You are going to have to, uh, unpack that for me a little,’ Iago said, cautiously.

‘Am I? Listen: on Korkura, you gave me the birthday present of a real-life murder mystery. You knew I liked whodunits. More than that. You knew I had a
passion
for murder mysteries.
So you gave me the death of a human being.’

Her brusqueness began to apply heat to Iago’s own temper. ‘What did I do? I arranged for a rapist to be put in the way of one of his victims. I set things up so that the victim was
able to pay him back. You’re telling me that was wrong.’

‘I’m not pretending that he—’ She reached, an automatic mental gesture, into her bId to supply the missing name, but of course she was unplugged from all that. So instead
she stalled, losing the momentum of her fury as she rifled her memory for . . . ‘Leron. Leron, him, I’m not pretending that
he
was some kind of innocent martyr. But
you
didn’t have to arrange for his death! What made it
your
business? There
is
such a thing as the Lex Ulanova, and rape is one of the crimes it covers. You could have alerted the
proper authorities.’

‘Really, Diana?’ he replied. ‘You think the Ulanov law is interested in petty infractions in the depths of the Sump?’

‘Rape is hardly a petty infraction!’

‘Be realistic, Diana! You know what the bulk of prosecutions under the Lex are for? Commercial fraud. Lesser corporations and gangs and occasionally lone traders evading trading duties and
sales taxes. In the Sump, where barter is common and policing stretched thin, they concern themselves with the more egregious infractions of the 70% rule. Every now and again they mount big raids
and arrest people who show any disparity between material wealth and monies declared and passed through legitimate accounts. Other crimes only tend to get punished if they are committed in
respectable locations. You
really
think the police would be interested in the distress of an individual like Sapho?’

‘You gave that man’s death to me
as a gift
! A sixteen-year-old girl! You thought that was
appropriate
?’

Iago was losing his composure. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t
love
murder mysteries? You’ve immersed yourself in thousands. Murder is your
passion
.’

‘For the puzzle of it,’ she said, in a too-loud voice. ‘Not for the
death
. I’m not morbid, Iago. I like to solve the puzzle! Solving puzzles is how I’m
made.’

‘If that were true,’ he growled, ‘you’d spend your time solving the mystery of the stolen Imperial Diamond, or the mystery of the kidnapped heiress. You’d be like
Eva, and try to solve purely intellectual mysteries, like the Champagne Supernovae. But you don’t. You come back, again and again, to this one particular kind of mystery. Sure, you like the
puzzle element – but you know it’s more than that. It’s death that fascinates you. By puzzling out individual deaths you come closer to trying to plumb the biggest puzzle of all
– mortality itself.’

She looked at him, her anger deflated, and said, in a slow, unconvinced voice: ‘No.’

‘Come along, Diana! Can you
honestly
say to me that you would find the same
satisfaction
in solving the crime story to do with theft or embezzlement? When you heard that
Leron had been killed, what did you think? Did you grieve, for no woman is an island and every human death diminishes you? Or were you
excited
?’

‘No wavy
way
. You gave me a
death
for my sixteenth birthday,’ Diana said again. ‘Can’t you see how grotesque that is?’

‘Your outrage is a purely intellectual response,’ Iago said. ‘You feel no in-the-gut revulsion. Bar-le-duc said that death is my medium. It’s never been my choice, but
maybe he was right. Well I shall tell you something: it’s yours, too.’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘No. Wavy.
Way
.’

‘We’re the same. It doesn’t make you a psychopath. You don’t
seek out
the death of others. But you are the heir to a wealthy and powerful Clan, and death is the
currency of power. If you were too squeamish to deal with that, on an emotional level, then . . .’

‘Then what? I shouldn’t take charge of the MOHclan?’ Diana shook her head. ‘When has that ever been a choice, for me?’

Iago’s own fury had drained away too. He put his left hand on the top of his head; and with his right he took hold of his chin. It was an odd gesture, contemplative in an ape-like kind of
way. ‘There are lots of hiding holes in the System, I suppose,’ he said. ‘But it would be exile. An evasion. Individually speaking, death is always a rupture, a violence. But
taking a total view, death is the bell curve upon which the cosmos is balanced. Without it, nothing would work, everything would collapse, clogged and stagnant. Death is
flow
. It is the
necessary lubrication of universal motion. It is, in itself, neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy.’

‘Death is always individual, though,’ she objected, in a low voice. ‘To the person dying.’

‘You’re right,’ he agreed. Now he clasped his hands before him, zipping all his fingers into one another. ‘We do need to be able to see it on both scales, you’re
right. If you could only see the large-scale aspect of death you’d be some kind of monster. But by the same token: if all you can see is the
personal
, then politics, on the scale of
the human trillions that inhabit this system, will be opacity to you.’

‘Ruthless,’ Diana said.

‘Nobody can overthrow the fascist dictator by being nicer than him. The reason for this is: by definition everybody is always already nicer than the fascist dictator.’

‘I’m too young to lead a revolution,’ said Diana.

‘Hah!’ said Iago, smiling. ‘Your
age
isn’t the issue. Your state of
mind
is the issue. It’s a matter of . . . toughness, of course. So, I have some
news for you, and I think you will take it well. But I cannot be sure.’

‘What news?’

Iago didn’t reply at first. He looked around the bubble. Aishwarya, or perhaps the other inhabitants, had arranged a great many prisms and transparent balls around the walls in strings and
constellations. As the whole structure turned, and the sunlight came through the windows these crystals squeezed out a succession of rainbow strips and patches of brightness, blood-red through to
yellow and green up to the indigo of which the vacuum of space was but a more intense distillation. These splotches and grills of colour played unpredictably upon the various greens of the inner
foliage.

‘Bar-le-duc came straight to my house,’ Iago said. ‘He arrived pretty much as soon as we docked and unloaded. He
knew
we were there. How could he know? I didn’t
tell him, and Sapho
couldn’t
have told him. She didn’t have access to the means to communicate with him even if she had wanted to.’

‘Well
I
didn’t tell him!’ Diana objected.

‘Yes you did, though,’ said Iago. ‘You didn’t
mean
to. But you spoke to Eva. She used that conversation to plant a tracker in the ship AI. A ferociously clever
piece of kit, actually. Which is to say: I was expecting her to do it, and I put in play a code-chaser, one of the best there is. The virus shrapnelled into something like eight million separate
prions, and it ran
everywhere
. An amazingly difficult code to cleanse. I thought I’d got it all out, but in the event – obviously – I did not. ’

Diana was staring intently at him. ‘This is a counterfactual, or joke, or some other kind of – is it?’

‘It’s as real as it gets.’

‘We’re talking about my sister.’

‘I’m—’ Iago looked about him, at the various buildings and struts and ropes, at the hundred shades of green, and the bright, arc-edged trapezoid of illumination coming
through the main window as the structure turned slowly. ‘I am sorry,’ he finished, eventually.

‘Is the trace still active?’

‘No. I mean, I hope not. I mean, I sincerely don’t think so. It was piggybacking on
Red Rum
’s standard datasift peg. I usually keep that running because – well,
because it looks more suspicious for a ship to be
un
plugged than connected to the general datasift like the majority. But I rooted out the trace, and I’ve unplugged the
Rum
, so
I don’t think we can be traced now.’

‘Eva,’ said Diana, speaking slowly and distinctly, as if there were some danger that Iago might not follow, ‘is my sister, and more than my sister. Why would she do this?
If
she did this?’

‘The conditional tense,’ noted Iago. ‘And, you see,
that’s
what I’m talking about. The System is brutal and unforgiving. If you refuse to accept it on its
own terms it will destroy you. So the question is: how quickly can your mind adapt to the brutality? That was the real nature of my gift to you, for your last birthday. To see what happened to your
data-assimilation and problem-solving abilities when the
if
turned to
is
. When the fiction of one possible murder-mystery in one-of-a-trillion possible worlds turned into an actual corpse,
on your doorstep.’

‘Why would Eva do this?’ Diana repeated, in a level voice. ‘My
sister
.
My
sister.’

‘Why? Power, I suppose. After all. The idea that the Ulanovs would blow up the Tobruk Plasmaser station just to stop Eva getting into space – that never
fitted
. Why not just
arrest her? It was a smokescreen. Screens make me suspicious.’

‘You’ve suspected her all this time?’

He nodded. ‘I think you have too, although you may not have permitted yourself to realise it, consciously.’

Diana said: ‘but she’s my sister.’

‘And you were hers. And
she
was facing the prospect of being your number two when your parents stepped down.’

‘Eva is perfectly content with her academic research,’ said Diana. ‘She just isn’t interested in power. As I say those sentences,’ she added, clasping her knees to
her chest, ‘I can tell they’re both wrong. Aren’t they? Of course she’s interested in power.’

‘She’s a human being,’ agreed Iago.

‘Of course she is not content to be nothing more than her research,’ Diana said. ‘So. What did she do?’

‘I assume she made a deal with the Ulanovs. It would suit them rather better, I think, if they could keep the Clan Argent in place in its subordinate tier. But they no longer trust your
parents, and they don’t trust you either. Eva, of course, would be a better bet than an outsider, or quisling. I suppose the Ulanovs think she is more straightforward, easier to parse,
politically than her parents, or you. She must have agreed to give them you, and your parents – I can’t believe the Ulanovs would have agreed otherwise. She probably contracted to more
stringent tithes, increased access to Argent data stores. In return they have told her she can lead the Clan.’

Diana was feeling a vague swirling sensation, somewhere in her solar plexus. It was not pleasant, though neither was it especially debilitating.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. But of course she did. She grokked its rightness right away. So, always punctilious in such matters, she amended: ‘or perhaps, I suppose I
do
believe it. But I don’t see that . . .’ She couldn’t go on. The truth of it was that she did see. She saw the game laid out, entire.

Iago finished her sentence: ‘you don’t see that she would do you any harm? I’m sure she’d
prefer
not to, if circumstance permits it. But I don’t see how she
can leave you at liberty.’

Diana’s anger had sublimed, now, into a solid pressure of tears inside her chest. With an action of will she elected not to cry. Instead she opened her mouth, and said: ‘my whole
life has been upended and eviscerated.’ She was on the edge of crying, but fought it down. ‘And for what? Tectonic realignment of the blocs of power? Clan Onbekend are on the rise, Clan
Argent on the decline? The
randomness
of it is the most infuriating part.’

‘FTL was the catalyst – or, the rumour of FTL,’ said Iago. ‘The prospect of a weapon that could destroy the sun. The thought of being able to flee to the stars. How could
it not shake up the status quo?’

‘But it’s not
real
!’ said Diana, her anger flaring back up and replacing the desire to cry with the urge to punch somebody. ‘It is not theoretically possible, and
it’s certainly not
actual
! They’re chasing you because they think you have McAuley’s blueprints inside your mind . . . And you don’t! Do you?’