Jack Glass Read online

  •JACK GLASS•

  A GOLDEN AGE STORY

  •

  ADAM ROBERTS

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  To Merryl Wynne Roberts

  Contents

  I

  In the Box

  II

  The FTL Murders

  III

  The Impossible Gun

  Jack Glass Glossary

  Jack Glass Tales

  This narrative, which I hereby doctorwatson for your benefit, o reader, concerns the greatest mystery of our time. Of course I’m talking about McAuley’s alleged ‘discovery’ of a method of travelling faster than light, and about the murders and betrayals and violence this discovery has occasioned. Because, after all – FTL! We all know it is impossible, we know every one of us that the laws of physics disallow it. But still! And again, this narrative has to do with the greatest mind I have known – the celebrated, or infamous, Jack Glass. The one, the only Jack Glass: detective, teacher, protector and murderer, an individual gifted with extraordinary interpretive powers when it comes to murder because he was so well acquainted with murder. A quantity of blood is spilled in this story, I’m sorry to say; and a good many people die; and there is some politics too. There is danger and fear. Accordingly I have told his tale in the form of a murder mystery; or to be more precise (and at all costs we must be precise) three, connected murder mysteries.

  But I intend to play fair with you, reader, right from the start, or I’m no true Watson. So let me tell everything now, at the beginning, before the story gets going.

  One of these mysteries is a prison story. One is a regular whodunit. One is a locked-room mystery. I can’t promise that they’re necessarily presented to you in that order; but it should be easy for you work out which is which, and to sort them out accordingly. Unless you find that each of them is all three at once, in which case I’m not sure I can help you.

  In each case the murderer is the same individual – of course, Jack Glass himself. How could it be otherwise? Has there ever been a more celebrated murderer?

  That’s fair, I hope?

  Your task is to read these accounts, and solve the mysteries and identify the murderer. Even though I have already told you the solution, the solution will surprise you. If the revelation in each case is anything less than a surprise, then I will have failed.

  I do not like to fail.

  part I

  •

  IN THE BOX

  ‘Hey Liz! What’s in the box?’

  ‘It’s my little voice of self-doubt.’

  Liz Phair, ‘Smoke’

  The prison ship was called Marooner. The name had nothing to do with its colour.

  This was its sixth run, and, as it had done five times before, it began by unloading its kit. The remaining seven prisoners waited in the hold. There were echoes as they coughed, or kicked their heels against the plasmetal wall. Still, it was hard to believe that when they left 8Flora the space had been crammed with more than forty human beings. It was surely not big enough for so many bodies.

  There it was – the growl. The shudder.

  ‘That bump,’ said Gordius, ‘is them unloading the fusion cell. I heard it’s possible to short it – to explode the whole asteroid, which is a way of saying, by way of saying, transforming it into a shell of rapidly expanding dust and—’

  Lwon said: ‘Stop talking.’

  But Gordius couldn’t stop talking. He had watched all the other prisoners being unceremoniously unloaded; each batch to their own prison. Now, finally, he knew his own time had come and his nerves had got the better of him. ‘You know what space is? It is a moat. It is an uncrossable million-mile moat. We’ll never see home again. Eleven years? There’s no way we’ll last it out. And if by some impossible fluke we do, then we will have gone insane and won’t want to go back.’

  Lwon repeated his instruction, with a more ferocious emphasis.

  ‘There!’ said Gordius. The ship was jettisoning its cargo packages into the hollow: a cylindrical scrubber, for the air; a lightpole; a small pack of spores. Finally, and – most important of all – three excavators, cabled together. The momentum of the package, and its Newtonian equal-and-opposition, made the plasmetal structure of Marooner as a whole wobble and chime. Boom, boom, thrum. Outside, as each package flew into the cleft, and collided with the wall, or wedged in at the narrowest point, of course there was no noise at all. But the seven prisoners were inside the ship, listening to the activity. It was the sixth time they had heard it: they all knew what was going to happen next and could not help but be apprehensive. The voices of stevedores could be heard, the content of their shouts muffled by the intervening structure of the ship, leaving only a rhythmic groaning musicality. ‘It’ll be hard enough work,’ said Gordius, ‘digging out, and not only the digging, but the architectural business of designing the – of making the most of – making the most of – but even harder work will be finding a way to live together without killing one another.’

  ‘I’ll kill you right now,’ said Davide, ‘if you don’t shut up.’ And the wall, to which they were all of them strapped, said: grrrmmm, and there were intimations of certain other, unfathomable noises.

  The terms of the sentence were that these seven be deposited in the hollow of the asteroid known as Lamy306 – 200m across, this worldlet, this little-princedom. The hollow was a crescent-shaped valley in the surface of the rock, the residue of some long ago impact (of course), one which had deformed the material of Lamy, twisted it, broken and folded it over, leaving a long, thin, pocket-shaped cave: it stretched some fifteen metres along the surface of Lamy, extended, at its deepest, ten metres into the worldlet. It was no more than a metre wide at any point. Into this irregular-shaped cavity Marooner had deposited all the relevant gear, and there were only two further tasks for it to perform. It deployed its foam hose, and applied a skin of gluey sealant to seal over the long slit-mouth of the declivity. The ship worked from one side to the other. The seal set almost instantly upon being exposed to the vacuum outside.

  The seven all knew what was imminent. Lwon spoke up: ‘Listen everybody,’ he barked. ‘We’ll more likely survive this if we work together. No fighting, no panic – we’ll need to get the light on first, and then the scrubber—’

  Ejection cut him off. Then the cargo hold shuddered and shook and the seven humans inside it felt the startlement of anticipation. All seven hearts pumped suddenly harder. Some of the seven readied themselves, some were too flustered to do so, but it came, irrespective of whether they were ready or not.

  A hatch opened in the hold, and the rail to which all seven were attached came free from the wall. They went in this order: Gordius, three times the weight of any of the others, a near-spherical man; Mo, his mouth set in a line and his eyes tightly closed; Davide, roaring; Lwon, calm, or seemingly so; Marit looking startled; E-de-C waving his heavy fists as if he would fight the very air; and at the end of the line, the feeblest of them all, Jac, with no legs, looking idiotically placid. As if he didn’t quite grasp what had happened to him!

  Then they were sucked out and down, smacked on the front and back by the cold, flexible material of the discharge schute and into the swirling microgravity darkness.

  It was perfectly dark and very, very cold. Jac, sensibly enough, clutched his head with his arms as he shot down the schute, but as soon as he was aware that he had emerged into the cavern itself he put his arms forward. A painful, jarring collision. He caromed from a rocky surface, and was able to quench his speed. Naked skin touched naked asteroid, that mystic Sistine-chapel-ceiling moment of contact: the first person to lay hand upon it since the unpolished globe had formed out of its dust and ice. There was no handhold, of course, and although Jac’s fingers scrabbled
at the rock he could not anchor himself. Lacking legs, it was harder for him than it was for the others. The air inside the pocket was gusting and burlying, yanking him one direction and then another. It was disorienting, monstrously disorienting; the black density of that lightless place, his ears filled with white noise and pain. He flew backwards, collided a glancing blow against some unyielding plane of hardness, smacked frontways and bounced back.

  This is what was happening: the Marooner, having pumped the cavity full of air to a higher-than-sea-level pressure, was now sealing the last gap in the seal. Jac had been inside the cargo hold during the six previous iterations of this procedure, and so he knew what the ship was experiencing right now – linked to the sticky matter of the seal by the tether of the very hose that was laying it down, and buffeted by the venting gases from the (shrinking) hole into the aerated cavity. The seven of them had sat tethered in the same hold, crammed with prisoners, as the Marooner leapt and shook until the conniption motion subsided and the vessel detached and angled itself about and accelerated away. They had sat there with thirty-five others whilst that happened; and then with twenty-eight people, and with twenty-one, and with fourteen, and now it was only them. Now the Marooner’s cargo hold was empty, and when the shimmies and shakes diminished, and the seal was completed, the sloop would turn about and navigate back to 8Flora.

  No spacecraft would come this way again for eleven years.

  When a ship finally did return it would find one of two things. They would be alive and the work done; or they would be dead and the work not done. Perhaps the seven prisoners (or whatever proportion of them survived) would have excavated the interior spaces of the asteroid into a series of habitable chambers – or perhaps they would have hollowed one great chamber and adapted the fusion engine to shine in the midst like a sun; or else they might have carved a beehive of cells and zones; or a thread tangle of tunnels.

  If they – or some of them – were still alive, then the Gongsi would recover them. Mostly, when this happened, the survivors were pathetically grateful, eager to climb back on the prison ship. Very occasionally the survivors would resist; would have gone rock-native, would scatter from the retrieval officers and try to hide – or fight. But in that unlikely eventuality they would not be permitted to stay; for the rocks were most valuable to the Gongsi as vacant possession. Land a touch-up team, put in some windows, tow it into a more advantageous orbit, and sell it. Real estate. And the prisoners? Released, sent back onto the cavernous freedom of the Ulanov System.

  Free.

  But first you had to survive the sentence. And that meant you had to turn a tiny pocket of air filling a declivity no larger than a room, near the surface of a frozen asteroid, into an environment that could support seven human beings for a decade and more. You had to do this yourselves, without external help or guidance, and using as few items of equipment to help you as the Gongsi could, always mindful of its profits, get away with supplying. It was a simple and indeed (that overused corporate term) elegant business model. The Gongsi was one of four working in this field; their name – it happened to be Diyīrén – was hardly important. It had won the contract for handling convicted criminals by agreeing the lowest per capita fee per delinquent. From this baseline they worked to extract the maximum profit from the situation.

  This is the way the worlds work. It’s always been like this.

  Of course, none of this was in the minds of the seven prisoners. The entire, pitiless horizon of their existence was as close to them as the jugular veins in their necks. Everything was swallowed up by the pressing need for immediate survival. There was a mighty rushing sound, and an acrid gunpowder stench, a tingle of sand blown upon the face. Jac coughed, and coughed again. Everything was black. But in the commotion he was thinking: how large is this space? Not large. With seven men breathing it, how long will the breathable air last? Not long.

  Somebody’s voice, muffled by the rushing, in the dark: ‘the light – quickly – light, or we’re dead!’

  Jac bounced again off the wall, cracked the side of his head painfully, and lurched forward. Putting out his arms he scraped rock on both sides, and pushed with all the strength in his shoulders. He wedged himself still, and for a moment all he could do was blink and blink and cough. The darkness was complete; the rock felt killingly cold against his flesh.

  ‘Find the light!’ somebody bellowed, again, his voice distorted. ‘Or else—’

  There was light. A strip of yellow-white, and the whole narrow chamber was illuminated with a gritty, cloudy radiance. It stung Jac’s eyes; or else, the still-swirling dust did that.

  Jac blinked, and blinked. He was able to make out the shapes of his fellow prisoners, some stationary, some still hurtling. It was Davide who had grasped hold of the light pole and turned it on – indeed, Jac could see the ingenious way he had used it as a brace to hold himself steady in the swirling air, wedging it between the angle of two walls. The space they were in was really not very large. A wedge of pitted black-grey rock above and below tapering to a stocky dead-end. And at the formerly open end of the declivity, a new ceiling of red-brown of permaseal, the fabric of which was wobbling slightly in the gusts. Jac thought exactly what everybody else was thinking: we must survive here for eleven years. We must take a pole of light, and a bundle of equipment you could pick up for a couple of thousand credits in any Mart, and with that we must somehow keep seven people alive for four thousand days. It seemed flatly impossible. Of course Jac knew, as they all did, that many prisoners did manage to do it – the Gongsi’s business model depended upon this, in fact. But the Gongsi’s business model also accommodated the death of a proportion of prisoners; for in almost all cases they could retrieve the kit they had supplied, and even in death the fees they took from Ulanov police authority administrations per prisoner more than covered the costs of portage and sundries. If they survived and turned the asteroid into saleable real estate the Gongsi made a lot more money, of course. But there was no incentive for them to offer a helping hand. The question for Jac was: if they did survive, then in what mental state? On the other hand, such questions were a less pressing concern than imminent death.

  Alienated from his bId for the first time in his life, Jac was unable to call up the numbers – how many prisoners, as a whole, died during their sentence? And of that number, how many were instances where the whole group of seven died? And of that number, how many such deaths occurred within the first few hours of being deposited?

  They were all thinking it. Eleven years in the most hostile environment imaginable, entirely dependent on their own resources, with no hope of assistance. A prison made of rock insulated from the rest of humanity by millions of miles of vacuum in every direction. Eleven years! Their only hope was to endure the full eleven-year term and pray that the Gongsi hadn’t forgotten them by the end of it, and was still trading, and had the incentive to come collect the hollowed-out globe.

  Jac had more to fear from the end of that eleven-year period than from the sentence itself. Of course, he didn’t tell the others that.

  ‘Now! Quick!’ Davide was shouting, indistinctly, his mouth caked with dust. ‘Locate the scrubber!’

  Now that the lightstick was on, those who were still being burlied about by the breeze were able to orient themselves a little better, and brake their velocity against the walls or in at the thin end of the wedge. In moments, the only things still moving were the items of kit the Marooner had unloaded into the cavity. Even in tumbling motion, bashing dust from the walls as they bounced, it was easy to see which was which: the largest was the fusion cell, knocking ponderously between wall and wall; only slightly smaller, on account of it being three machines strapped together, was the bundle of excavators – the irregular shape of this package together with its size meant that it had become stuck in the wedge. But the rest of the kit, the tree-trunk-shaped scrubber, the spore pack, a sealed box of biscuits (Lembas brand) so small a child could hide it under her tunic – these things
continued to bash and rattle about the claustric space.

  Jac wiped his face with a dusty hand, leaving it no cleaner than before. To his left, the great globe-shape of Gordius was squashed between the walls, his arms waving, and the fat of his flesh rippling. It was hellishly cold.

  To his right, Jac could see the other five. Marit made a swipe at the scrubber as it flew past him, caught it with one hand and tipped it about in mid-air. But before he could make a second swipe and actually grasp the device, Lwon kicked off with both feet, shot across the space from the far side and scooped the scrubber into his open arms.

  ‘Hey!’ cried a hoarse-voiced Marit. ‘I had it!’

  Indeed, Lwon had put himself at some disadvantage by leaping the way he did. He collided almost at once with the other wall and had to yank his head round to an alarming angle to avoid smashing his skull. He sprawled on the rebound. The scrubber spun about, and he thrashed to steady himself. Finally Lwon managed to get his heel into a kink in the rock and settle himself. But he had achieved his aim: he had the scrubber.

  ‘Listen to me!’ he cried. ‘Heed me! The next few hours are the most dangerous. One false step and we all die. We can’t afford to fight amongst ourselves.’

  ‘Turn the damn scrubber on,’ said Marit, aggrieved. ‘No sermons!’

  ‘That’s no sermon,’ boomed E-d-C. ‘He’s running for office!’ Somebody else booed, or groaned, or perhaps coughed. Through the dusty air, Lwon called: ‘I’m not saying I should be leader,’ though that was obviously exactly what he was saying. ‘I’m not telling anyone what to do. But if we start fighting amongst ourselves, we might just as well wreck this scrubber here and now – choke to death in hours, instead of dragging out the agony for years.’

  ‘I’ll tear your head off,’ growled Davide, although without particular belligerence. After all, he had the light pole.