Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (6 page)

‘The Ulanov enforcers didn’t see it that way, I suppose,’ said Jac. ‘You poor man. No! You poor – god, I suppose. How are your people managing, whilst their god is
in jail?’

‘The congregation has my sister,’ said Gordius. ‘She is much less perfectly globular than I, but at least she
is
of the divine cell-line.’

‘There’s no chance,’ said Jac, a tone of calculation entering his voice, ‘that your people would seek you out? Perhaps bribe the Gongsi to find out where they have stuck
us? Send a ship to rescue you?’ He was thinking: what
wouldn’t
a people do to save their god? He was thinking: perhaps befriending this man would be the
politic
as well as
the humane thing to do – for a friend might permit him to come along when his people rescued him. But Gordius answered: ‘I’m not a god any more. I
was
a god, but I’m
not one any more. I’m nothing to the Faithful of the Spheres any more. It is exactly as if I am already dead. They could never locate me, anyway; and they never would try. What – vex
the Ulanovs? They would risk the destruction of their whole settlement. One Forward Cruiser could punch holes in the fabric of their bubble from a hundred thousand clicks away.’ He shook his
large head. ‘So you see what my problem is? You talk about my past – what have I got to remember except exile? And what have I got to look forward to? – even assuming I survive
eleven years in this hellish place. I could never go home. I have no home. I was a god once, and deapotheosis leaves not a man but a . . . nothing.’ He started crying again.

Jac was surprised how disappointed he was to discover the unlikelihood of rescue from this quarter. Perhaps his willpower was not the tightly focused thing it had once been. He scratched an itch
in his stump. But then something occurred to him and he smiled broadly.

‘You’re smiling,’ Gordius noted, in a flat, disappointed voice. But at least he had stopped crying.

‘I’m sorry. I can’t help it. Those others are here for their various crimes, and they all think you’re as mild as a kitten. But you’re the murderer! You’re
the one with the actual violence in your past! They don’t know the half of it.’

‘Don’t tell them,’ Gordius begged, in a panicked voice.

‘Of course I won’t,’ said Jac. ‘You and I – we’re in this together, aren’t we? I just think it’s funny. What people don’t know generally
makes me laugh; especially if they’re simply too dense to see it when it’s right in front of their eyes.’

It was pitiful to see how much emotional sustenance Gordius took, immediately, from that mere statement of mutual misery:
we’re in this together, aren’t we?
He pushed his
wrists into his eyes, and grinned, and nodded. ‘And what did
you
do?’ he asked, in a thick-as-thieves voice. ‘To end up here, I mean?’

‘What I did,’ said Jac, smiling again. ‘You mean – what was I sentenced for? Well, I I I was not sentenced for the right thing.’

‘I knew it,’ gasped Gordius. ‘Like me – you’re an innocent, unjustly convicted!’

‘No,’ said Jac, in a neutral voice. ‘That’s not what I mean. I deserve to be here. There’s no question. It’s just that I was not guilty of the specific thing
for which I was sentenced. And,’ he added, deciding that it was only fair, all things considered, to take the big fellow into his confidence: ‘and that’s my dilemma. Eleven years.
Long before the sentence comes to an end the Ulanovs will discover what I
really
did. And the punishment for that is . . . well, rather more severe than eleven years inside an
asteroid.’ Gordius was making round eyes at him now. ‘So, I am in a particularly difficult situation,’ Jac said. ‘I cannot say that I am enjoying my present lodgings. But
however horrible they are, they are better than what will happen to me when the Gongsi ship finally docks to retrieve us. I cannot look forward to
that
.’

‘What will you do?’ whispered Gordius.

‘I,’ said Jac, looking around him, gauging whether he had told Gordius too much, or just enough to bind them together in the friendship of victimhood, ‘I shall make
glass.’

Gordius blinked, blinked, and then grinned. Suddenly he clasped Jac to his bosom in a wobbly embrace. ‘You and your window!’ he cried, joyfully. ‘Don’t ever stop dreaming
of your window, Jac! Keep your dream alive!’

Disengaging himself, Jac said: ‘well, yes. A window would be a useful thing. Even a small one. With a window you can . . . see the outside world.’

The group discussed their situation, talking round and round the topic, but really there was nothing to discuss. The one thing they all wanted was privacy. So the only
conceivable course of action was to excavate a series of separate chambers, and link them together with tunnels. That was the most pressing goal. ‘Seven chambers first off,’ Lwon said.
‘One each. And then we can warm the air in each, and it will in turn warm the rock, and instead of stripping that warm rock away it will act as insulation and we might start feeling something
like comfortable.’

‘Music to my ears,’ said Davide.

Jac figured that the top three would dig themselves chambers, and possibly that they would let Mo and Marit dig themselves rooms as well; but that some other plan would come to play before he
and Gordius got a room of their own. But eleven years is a long time. He figured he’d be able to make himself a cubby hole at some point.

In the meantime he gathered glass. When he was digging through silicate-rich areas, little beads and minuscule lumps of the stuff would be shed from the drilling point. He turned off the waste
schute, and spent time picking these out from the general chaff. They were never very big – ten could fit in the space of a fingernail – but they were the real thing, actual glass.

So he tried an experiment: he carved out a shallow depression, gathered as many of the tiny marbles as could be persuaded to float inside it, and then covered them with the drill. It took a
number of attempts, but he ended up with a larger lump of irregularly shaped glass, fused by the excavator from the smaller pieces. When he held this, it sat neatly in the middle of his hand.

Davide mocked him for it. ‘Some window! That’s barely enough for a monocle!’

‘A glazier has to start somewhere,’ said Jac, mildly.

‘Never mind glassmaking,’ Davide snarled, displeased by this reply. ‘You keep digging. I want a room of my own. You hear?’

‘Dig your own room,’ Jac said, slipping the lump of glass inside his tunic.

‘What?’ roared Davide.

‘I’m
digging
your own room,’ Jac clarified. ‘Is what I said. I’m doing it
now
.’ He turned on the waste hose again and began once more grinding
away at the rock.

After his shift was over, and after he had eaten a little ghunk and drunk from the scrubber’s spigot, Jac took out his lump of glass and examined it. It was opaque on the
outside, and shaped with as many bulges and prongs as an amoeba. Taking a piece of abrasive rock he began to rub away at the outside. He fell into an easy-enough rhythm, and the action helped keep
him a little warmer. But the others only mocked him.

‘Hey – what you doing?’

‘What you rubbing there, Leggy?’

Jac smiled, and shook his head. ‘What is it?’ E-d-C demanded.

‘It’s his chunk of glass,’ said Gordius, eagerly. ‘Hey, are you
grinding
the glass?’

‘Is that your window, cripple boy?’ said Marit, with an unfriendly laugh. ‘Window big enough for a cockroach, maybe?’

‘I think he’s going to make a microscope,’ said Mo. ‘And then what? With your microscope you’ll – what? Look for your legs?’ Everybody laughed at
that.

Jac kept grinding. After a while, Davide said: ‘how did you
lose
your legs, anyway, Jac-my-lad?’

‘It’s a long story,’ said Jac.

‘Oh,’ said Marit. ‘You think maybe we won’t have enough
time
to hear it?’ He laughed, without warmth. ‘Tell the story, cripple boy.’

Jac stopped rubbing. All eyes were on him. ‘Well, Marit,’ he said. ‘What happened was: I was pleasuring your mother and she got so excited she snapped them both off with her
muscular thighs.’

There was the briefest pause when it looked as though Marit might launch straight for him, strangling-hands first; but then everybody laughed, and the fury receded back deeper into Marit’s
eyes.

Later, with Mo, Marit and Lwon on the drills, Gordius came over and asked: ‘how
did
you lose your legs, friend?’

‘It’s neither a long nor a boring story,’ said Jac. ‘But I’d rather not go into it here.’

‘Oh,’ said Gordius, disappointed. ‘I thought you were brave, talking back to Marit. He’s a violent soul. My father used to say: one thing about being a god is that you
can see into the souls of men and women. You can see the gravity that keeps their spirit together, and perceive whether it be evil or good. He has a violent soul, I think, does Marit.’

‘You think?’ Jac asked, drily.

‘Oh! Yes!’ said Gordius, ingenuously. ‘Davide is,’ he looked around, lowered his voice, ‘Davide is angry too, but it’s a
regular
sort of anger. Marit
is different. He is cruel. He likes to pass the time by flicking chips of rock as hard as possible at me. He likes to aim for my face when I’m not expecting it. I think he wants to get one of
my eyes out. I think, if he managed to knock one of my eyes out, he’d laugh!’ Gordius shuddered. He had not maintained his original bulk, what with the limited diet of ghunk and the
hard work of drilling; he had shrunk, and his skin lay in folds about his frame, like drapery.

‘We’d best keep our eye on him,’ Jac said.

You and me together, friend!’ said Gordius, with a catch in his voice.

Day followed day. Jac kept his eye on them all. Marit had a cruel streak, no question; but Jac figured Davide was more immediately dangerous, for his frustration was working alchemically upon
his rage. Although for the time being the laboriousness of the work and the exhaustion of rest soaked up his rage, there was no knowing how long that would last. Lwon and E-d-C were too focused on
manoeuvring for position in the group as a whole to divert energy towards persecuting Gordius or Jac. No: Mo and Marit were the most immediate threat. Already Jac could see that even the incessancy
of the tasks needful for immediate survival was not enough completely to distract them from their own dissatisfaction. They were bored, resentful, and although their surly gazes mostly followed the
three alphas, Jac knew that it was only a matter of time before they kicked downward. Sooner or later they were going to take out their bitterness on either Gordius or him. That would be at the
least painful, and at the most fatal.

Eleven years: he would never last that long. Neither would Gordius. They had to get out. Or at any rate: he had to.

For the time being, though, the three alphas and two alpha-betas spent a good deal of their energy upon dominance games. ‘I was the number one thorn in the Ulanovs’ side,’
claimed Davide. ‘You know who arrested me? Bar-le-duc himself! In person!’ Jac’s attention was snagged by that. ‘You
that
important, are you?’ asked Marit,
sourly, ‘that the Ulanovs’ top arrest agent came personally for you?’

‘Bar-le-duc!’ repeated Davide.

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said E-d-C. ‘I reckon a lowranking policeman snagged you up, same as the rest of us.’

‘Well that shows what
you
know!’ said Davide. ‘Bar-le-duc, the famous Bar-le-duc, took me
personally
in hand. I had cost the Ulanovs billions of credits. I was
Solar System enemy number one.’

‘In the old days,’ said Marit, ‘they used to put delusional lunatics in hospital, not in a prison like this! I’ll tell you what, though; true fact, not fantasy like
Davide’s boasting. They made a
movie
about me!
I’m
the metrical Jesse James. I’m famous in a hundred communities.’

‘Shanty bubbles, maybe’ said Davide.

Lwon refrained from boasting, but the others indulged themselves freely. And Jac watched as Gordius, childlike, strained to join in. One day, unable to keep his secret to himself, and hoping to
ingratiate himself with Lwon, Gordius indulged in a bit of boasting of his own: he revealed that he had been a god to his own people. This was a mistake. Lwon relayed the information directly to
everyone, and Gordius held his knees to his chest and rotated slowly in the air, his skin flushing with embarrassment, as E-d-C, Marit and Mo brayingly mocked him. ‘So you’re the
God
my preacher told me about!’ ‘Hey, God, why don’t you perform a miracle and get us out of here! Go on – jaunt us clear and free, take me to . . . someplace
warm.’ ‘His magic only works,’ said Mo, sarcastically, as if explaining an important theological crux to everyone, ‘after we crucify him. Once we’ve tortured him to
death,
then
he comes back, and
then
he can do the magic.’

‘You don’t understand the revealed truth of cosmic religion,’ blurted Gordius, goaded beyond caution. ‘I’m not the
spiritual
god.
She
is Omni –
I’m but the material god, englobed in flesh. Or,’ he faltered. ‘I was. I was, but. Now I’m nothing.’ He started crying, tears coining from the corners of his eyes as
little silver globes and floating way. ‘Now I’m nothing at all, less than nothing!’ he wailed. ‘I have lost everything! You might as well kill me now and get it out of the
way!’

‘Stop your noise,’ snapped E-d-C, crossly. He was close enough to be able to kick out, and he caught Gordius in the middle of his loose-skinned stomach. The big man mooed like a
heifer in pain, and bent double as he slid backwards through space and pranged against the far wall. Jac watched carefully. Everybody was laughing. E-d-C had a severe grin on his face as he slid
back away from his blow; Lwon and Mo were laughing, but it was Marit who was laughing the hardest. Jac thought to himself: maybe he
is
the one nearest to cracking, after all.

It would either be him, or Davide, he was sure of that.

‘Bar-le-duc, bar-le-duc,’ sang E-d-C, tunelessly. ‘Nabbed us all, nabbed us all – except for god-boy who was betrayed by Ju-u-das.’